STORY: "Kutska's new trial request in judge's hands," by reporter Paul Srubas, published by the Press-Gazette Media on October 9, 2015.
SUB-HEADING: "Kutska’s lawyers: Bad police work, bad legal strategy all stemmed from bad autopsy."
PHOTO CAPTION: "One of five men still in prison for their involvement in the death
of Tom Monfils, Keith Kutska talks from Columbia Correctional Institute
in this 2009 interview."
Bayorgeon, who heard the original case in 1995, now has all the evidence and arguments in hand to consider whether Kutska, 64, deserves a new trial. Bayorgeon is operating on no one’s time schedule but his own, but is likely to make a decision in coming weeks. Kutska and four other men have been in prison for 20 years for conspiracy to commit murder. Monfils, 35, was found dead the day after Kutska and others confronted him about reporting that Kutska had stolen several feet of electrical wire from the mill. Kutska got a police recording of Monfils snitching on him and played it for others at the mill. Police and prosecutors say Kutska and the others surrounded Monfils, roughed him up, then tied a 49-pound weight to his neck and threw him into a paper pulp vat, where he drowned. Kutska has admitted being angry and playing the recording around the mill, but his defense has always been that someone else must have been involved in roughing up Monfils. Now, Kutska’s new defense team is taking a different approach. Nobody roughed up Monfils; he tied the weight to his own neck and threw himself into the vat, they say. Forensic pathologist Dr. Helen Young got it wrong from the start, they argue, prompting Det. Randy Winkler to bullying false statements from people and luring lawyers into taking a weak strategy in laying out Kutska’s defense.... Key to the new defense strategy is testimony from expert witness Dr. Mary Ann Sens, a pathology professor at the University of North Dakota. Sens testified this summer that the science of forensic pathology has come a long way since Young did the autopsy in 1992. Medical experts today would never be as certain as Young was about determining which of the injuries on Monfils body happened before he died and which happened after, Sens said. The timing matters. If the wound to Monfils’ skull happened before he died, as Young claimed, someone probably hit him, but if it happened after, as Sens suggests, it likely happened from the propeller rotating in the bottom of the pulp vat. That, according to Kutska’s defense team, opens the door to the possibility that Monfils put himself into the vat. It also dovetails with statements from Monfils’ coworkers that Monfils, a former Coast Guard rescue worker, had a morbid fascination with suicidal drownings, and that he was despondent over a troubled marriage and newly troubled relationship with coworkers at the mill. It also dovetails, the defense team claims, with statements from Monfils’ brother, Cal, that Monfils’ widow immediately suspected suicide when he died and he had hidden mysterious, possibly suicidal notes in the the couple’s bedroom ceiling....The weight tied around Monfils’ neck was tied with double half-hitch knots in classic Coast Guard fashion, the defense team pointed out. Yet Young definitively declared Monfils’ death a murder, and that shaped the entire police investigation, the defense team claims. It caused now-retired detective Winkler to invent a scenario involving a confrontation between workers and Monfils and then to bully people into testifying that such a thing happened, the defense team claims. Most notably, Winkler bullied millworker Brian Kellner, who, out of fear that Winkler would somehow take Kellner’s kids from him, concocted a story that supported Winkler’s theory, the defense team claims. Kellner testified in court that Kutska laid out the whole murder scene for him, implicating himself and the other defendants. But Kellner later claimed he had lied, that Kutska had done no such thing. Others supported that claim. Still other state witnesses claimed they lied on the witness stand. Defense lawyers at the time of trial and in long-past appeal processes all made the same mistake of taking Young’s findings as gospel and failing to get their own expert witnesses to look at autopsy results, the new defense team claims. That locked them into a stupid, sure-to-fail strategy that the new defense team contemptuously calls “the SODDI defense,” with the letters “SODDI” standing for “Some Other Dude Did It.” The trouble is, Young and Kellner both now are dead, and just about every other part of the new defense strategy is based on inadmissible hearsay, Brown County District Attorney David Lasee says... Cases can be retried when new evidence comes up, but the new defense team brings up nothing new — that’s the main thrust of the prosecution’s case. If Bayorgeon ultimately agrees with the defense’s claims, he could order a new trial, though whether prosecutors decide to reissue the charge against Kutska would be up to Lasee. It would be tough case, given the deaths of Young and Kellner, so it isn’t inconceivable that Lasee would decide not to do it. And that would have a huge impact on the future of Kutska’s co-defendants, Michael Hirn, Michael Johnson, Rey Moore and Dale Basten, who probably would attempt post-conviction relief on the same grounds. Things won’t likely come to a halt, though, if Bayorgeon disagrees with the defense’s claim. That likely would launch another round of appeals of his latest decision."
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and myself get more out of the site.
The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-charles-smith-award-presented-to_28.html
I look forward to hearing from readers at:
hlevy15@gmail.com;
The entire story can be found at:
