STORY:
"Is it murder if there's no homicide? The strange case of a convicted
killer whose "victim" probably died of her own drug overdose," by Andrew
Cohen, published by The Marshall Project on April 24, 2017.
GIST: "Last week in Florida a man named Randal Wagoner was released from jail after spending 1,140 days in confinement for murder. He was about to go to trial when prosecutors admitted their case against him was “weak.” Why? Because a medical examiner concluded after some deliberation (and the hiring of defense experts) that the victim’s death may not have been a homicide after all. And if there is no homicide there cannot, by law and logic, be a murder case or a resulting conviction. Now consider the case of Jessie McKim, a man who is serving a life sentence without parole in Missouri after he was convicted in 1999 of strangling a woman named Wendy Wagnon. There are a handful of legal reasons to doubt the justice of the verdict against him — allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, disreputable witnesses and ineffective assistance of counsel, for example — but what distinguishes his story is the fact that there now is little reason to believe that Wagnon was murdered at all. There is, instead, a consensus from several veteran forensic pathologists, doctors with thousands of cases as expert witnesses behind them, that Wagnon died from a self-administered overdose of methamphetamine after a weekend binge of drug use. If this is true, the prosecution’s original trial theory cannot be true. And that theory, as prosecutors and their medical examiner had told jurors in 1999, is that Wagnon died after being suffocated by McKim or his co-defendant, his uncle, a man named James Peavler. No homicide, no murder case, no possible conviction, right? Wrong. No state or federal court has been willing to grant McKim relief despite what the doctors now say. In 2013, a local judge conducted a three-day hearing on the issue and concluded that Wagnon did, indeed, die of a meth overdose; that the medical examiner had gotten his cause-of-death wrong. But that judge denied McKim’s request for relief anyway, concluding that there were procedural reasons for barring his claims and, alternatively, that McKim had not conclusively proven his innocence because of a new theory state attorneys offered to explain the crime. Having been foiled in court, McKim and the advocates on his behalf have asked Missouri Governor Eric Greitens for mercy. There is a new clemency request, an update on an older effort, from a Missouri attorney who says the facts of McKim’s case “stopped me dead in my tracks” when she first heard about them. The story starts on April 13, 1997, when Wagnon was found dead on the side of the road in Kirksville, Missouri... (Read on. HL);
GIST: "Last week in Florida a man named Randal Wagoner was released from jail after spending 1,140 days in confinement for murder. He was about to go to trial when prosecutors admitted their case against him was “weak.” Why? Because a medical examiner concluded after some deliberation (and the hiring of defense experts) that the victim’s death may not have been a homicide after all. And if there is no homicide there cannot, by law and logic, be a murder case or a resulting conviction. Now consider the case of Jessie McKim, a man who is serving a life sentence without parole in Missouri after he was convicted in 1999 of strangling a woman named Wendy Wagnon. There are a handful of legal reasons to doubt the justice of the verdict against him — allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, disreputable witnesses and ineffective assistance of counsel, for example — but what distinguishes his story is the fact that there now is little reason to believe that Wagnon was murdered at all. There is, instead, a consensus from several veteran forensic pathologists, doctors with thousands of cases as expert witnesses behind them, that Wagnon died from a self-administered overdose of methamphetamine after a weekend binge of drug use. If this is true, the prosecution’s original trial theory cannot be true. And that theory, as prosecutors and their medical examiner had told jurors in 1999, is that Wagnon died after being suffocated by McKim or his co-defendant, his uncle, a man named James Peavler. No homicide, no murder case, no possible conviction, right? Wrong. No state or federal court has been willing to grant McKim relief despite what the doctors now say. In 2013, a local judge conducted a three-day hearing on the issue and concluded that Wagnon did, indeed, die of a meth overdose; that the medical examiner had gotten his cause-of-death wrong. But that judge denied McKim’s request for relief anyway, concluding that there were procedural reasons for barring his claims and, alternatively, that McKim had not conclusively proven his innocence because of a new theory state attorneys offered to explain the crime. Having been foiled in court, McKim and the advocates on his behalf have asked Missouri Governor Eric Greitens for mercy. There is a new clemency request, an update on an older effort, from a Missouri attorney who says the facts of McKim’s case “stopped me dead in my tracks” when she first heard about them. The story starts on April 13, 1997, when Wagnon was found dead on the side of the road in Kirksville, Missouri... (Read on. HL);
The entire story can be found at:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/04/24/is-it-murder-if-there-s-no-homicide#.CPq8X17KE
By Andrew Cohen
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. 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/
