STORY: "In U.S. court, man exonerated after 27 years alleges D.C. police framed him," by reporter Spencer Hsu, published by the Washington Post on November 17, 2015.
PHOTO CAPTION: "
Donald
Gates was exonerated in 2009 through DNA testing after serving 27 years
in prison."
GIST: A
man who served 27 years in prison for a rape and murder he didn’t
commit accused D.C. police of framing him, in the first federal civil
rights claim for damages involving a wrongful conviction in the
District. All sides agree that Donald E. Gates, 64, is
“stone-cold innocent,” as his attorneys put it, of the June 1981 murder
of Catherine T. Schilling, a 21-year-old Georgetown University student
assaulted and killed in Rock Creek Park after leaving the Watergate
office building where she worked as a paralegal. But they disagree about
whether police actions violated Gates’s constitutional right to a fair
trial. During a two-week trial, Gates’s allegation that two D.C.
police homicide detectives and a lieutenant fabricated and withheld
evidence has presented an emotional, legal and financial tangle to
jurors, who began deliberations Tuesday. Over days of testimony
about regrets and missed chances, the panel has revisited the trauma of
the crime and weighed police liability for Gates’s subsequent conviction
while facing the prospect of deciding what value to place on lost
decades of freedom. The stakes for Gates and the District are
high, although the court has barred any discussion of damages or amounts
to the jury so far. Police “had a hunch — a good
hunch — that Donald Gates was good for the Schilling murder,” his
attorney, Peter Neufeld, argued to jurors in the courtroom of Chief U.S.
District Judge Richard W. Roberts. “The problem is, when the
detectives had that good hunch, they did the wrong thing. They crossed
the line,” feeding Gates’s name and other incriminating details to a
paid police informer who later testified, Neufeld alleged..........Gates
was exonerated in 2009 through DNA testing. He filed suit the next
year, later learning that federal prosecutors found the real killer in
2012 after tracing genetic evidence at the scene to a convicted offender
and temporary janitor at the Watergate who had died in 2011. Although
it was not part of this month’s trial, Gates’s innocence triggered
investigations that led to exonerations of four additional men in the
District who had served up to 30 years for rape or murder since the
1980s based on flawed FBI forensic testimony about hairs. The FBI
in April acknowledged that for more than 20 years before 2000, nearly
every member of an elite FBI forensic unit overreached by testifying to
the near-certainty of hair matches without a scientific basis. Defendants are now being notified. However
beneficial Gates’s exoneration has been to others, he would not have
been prosecuted if not for the police informer’s account, according to
testimony last week from the original prosecutor, J. Brooks Harrington..........According to Gates’s attorneys, police seized
on Gates as a prime suspect within days of Schilling’s murder. They
presented evidence that included a 1982 government legal brief and June
1981 arrest warrant that said police knew about Gates because he had
been caught during a drunken purse-snatching attempt on a towpath near
the Schilling crime scene on June 3 — three weeks before Schilling’s
killing. Detectives said the first time that they heard Gates’s
name was June 30, when they met with Gerald “Bear” Smith, an informer
who was paid $1,300 by police after they said he named Gates as a
drinking companion who confessed to robbing, raping and then killing a
young woman. Both sides clashed over whether it was more likely
that Smith knew Gates and concocted the false confession himself or had
been fed Gates’s name and investigators’ theory of the case by police. “I never saw that man in my life,” Gates said about the informer. “Never saw him. Never spoke to him.” The
police defendants denied in court that they gave the informer Gates’s
name, although they gave conflicting accounts of their dealings with
him."
The entire story can be found at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/in-us-court-man-exonerated-after-27-years-charges-dc-police-framed-him/2015/11/17/8f4d09d0-8c80-11e5-baf4-bdf37355da0c_story.html
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/charlessmith
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.
Harold Levy; Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog
