"Patrick Pursley emerged from the Winnebago County Justice Center this afternoon free on bond after being imprisoned for 23 years for the shooting death of Andy Ascher. Pursley, 51, will live with his fiance, Michelle Carr, in an apartment in Rockford as a condition of his bond while he awaits an appeal made by prosecutors and a new trial granted in March by Judge Joseph McGraw. Pursley was serving a life sentence at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet."
http://www.rrstar.com/news/
See related (December 13, 2016) story at the link below: "A forensic scientist, during a hearing today before
Winnebago County Chief Judge Joseph McGraw, backed off testimony from
1994 credited with convicting a Rockford man on charges of first-degree
murder. Daniel Gunnell, now an assistant director of the
Illinois State Police Joliet Forensic Science Laboratory, worked as a
state crime lab firearms and toolmark scientist at the time of the
murder trial. Gunnell concluded that bullets and two spent shell casings
found at the crime scene had come from a Taurus 9 mm semiautomatic
pistol recovered from the apartment of Patrick A. Pursley — a man
sentenced to life in prison but who has for years proclaimed his
innocence. Gunnell testified at the time that microscopic markings on
the recovered bullets and shell casings, compared with test-fired
bullets and casings, showed they had been fired by Pursley’s Taurus
handgun “to the exclusion of all others.” New tests have called Gunnell’s 1994 testimony into question. Gunnell
today said he had revisited the evidence himself in 2012. He still
maintains the shell casings were more than likely fired by that
particular gun. But his new review of the bullets — which is consistent
with the conclusions of a new court-ordered examination of the evidence
by the state crime lab — were inconclusive. Gunnell
now says there is not enough evidence to prove conclusively that the
Taurus fired the bullets, but neither could the gun be eliminated as the
weapon that fired them. And Gunnell said that even if he
had reached the same conclusions as he did in 1994, he would no longer
describe the evidence the way he did then because of changing industry
standards. Instead, he would tell jurors that his tests had concluded
the bullets matched to a “reasonable degree of scientific certainty.” The
testimony was so strongly worded in 1994 that it denied Pursley a fair
trial and “turned a weak and collapsing case based on circumstantial
evidence into a case purportedly built upon a solid forensic
foundation,” Pursley’s lawyers, Steven Drizin and Andrew Vail, told
McGraw in their written post-conviction petition. Pursley
insists he is innocent in the slaying of 22-year-old Andrew Ascher, who
was shot and killed during an attempted armed robbery."
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/
