PUBLISHER'S NOTE: For years I have followed Kristine Bunch's battle for exoneration with the utmost respect. She went through the horrifying ordeal of losing a 3-year-old son in a terrible fire and then being charged with murdering him. Her experience paralleled many of the victims of Charles Smith , loving parents and caregivers who found themselves treated as criminals when they were, in fact, the innocent victims of crimes that only existed in the disgraced pathologist's mind. In spite of her personal loss and subsequent ordeal in America's criminal justice system, Kristine Bunch has devoted much of her life to advocating for other exonerated prisoners in America. She is obviously an extraordinary woman who deserves to be recognized - as does her cause - on International Women's Day.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The state provides parolees and people on probation with such things as help with job placement, housing, résumé training, Medicaid, food stamps and bus passes.” But what does Indiana do to help someone like Bunch, erroneously accused and convicted and finally exonerated, who re-enters society after 17 years behind bars? “They're walking out with nothing,” Bunch said in an interview last week. “I didn't even have a toothbrush when I walked out. If I didn't have family, I would have been homeless.”No one even apologized, she said."
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "House Bill 1150 would pay those who served time before being exonerated by a court $50,000 a year for the time they spent behind bars. The bill, which passed the House 96-0, awaits a hearing in the Senate's Corrections and Criminal Law Committee. According to Elizabeth Powers, state policy advocate for the Innocence Project, 33 states and the District of Columbia have compensation statutes. Indiana is one of 17 that does not. Occasionally, exonerated prisoners who are able to raise constitutional issues or show official misconduct have received large sums as compensation for the time they spent behind bars. A well-known Indiana example was Chris Parish, who was erroneously convicted for a robbery/shooting in Elkhart and eventually won $4.9 million in a federal court settlement. But there's another, more common outcome. Keith Cooper, who was also wrongly convicted and was pardoned by Gov. Eric Holcomb two years ago, has so far received nothing. “Anyone who wins a civil award is in the minority,” said Bunch, who now heads an advocacy group for exonerated Indiana prisoners and who told her story during a House hearing on Steuerwald's bill."
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EDITORIAL: "The cost of justice: " Bill would compensate the wrongly convicted," published by The Journal Gazette on March 5,
The entire editorial can be read at:
http://www.journalgazette.net/opinion/columns/20190305/the-cost-of-justice
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For background read Mother Jones story (July/August 2015) on the Kristine Bunch case by Molly Redden, under the heading 'Why is it so hard for wrongfully convicted women to get justice?" at the link below. (This lengthy article deserves to be read in its entirety. Foe now, here is some of the content related to Kristine Bunch): "In the early morning hours of June 30, 1995, a fire sparked to life in Kristine Bunch’s mobile home. It fanned out across the floor and climbed up the walls, then formed an impassable barrier across the middle of the trailer. Bunch, 21, snapped awake in the living room. Her three-year-old son, Tony, shrieked for her on the other side of the flames. Bunch staggered outside and howled for a neighbor. She bashed Tony’s window with a tricycle. As the flames lashed 30 feet into the dawn sky, a fire engine tore up to the house. A firefighter, crawling on his belly, found Tony’s charred body in the bedroom. Bunch told police she had no idea what caused the fire. Soon, though, arson investigators determined that a liquid accelerant such as kerosene or lighter fluid had been poured in Tony’s bedroom and the living room. Police arrested Bunch on charges of arson and felony murder. Eight months later, Bunch went on trial. By then, she was 22 and unexpectedly pregnant with a second child. The evidence against her seemed overwhelming. Two arson investigators gave compelling testimony for the prosecution, and the jury took only a few hours to convict her on both counts. At sentencing, Bunch recalled, the judge sneered down at her belly. “I understand that you have arranged to have yourself impregnated,” he said. “You thought it would work to your advantage somehow in this process. It will not. You will not raise that child.” The judge gave her the maximum sentence: 60 years.................. In the case of Kristine Bunch, the prosecutor said he didn’t think the blaze burned Bunch badly enough. Wouldn’t a mother walk through fire to save her child? He offered evidence that Bunch was a bad mother, telling the jury in his closing argument that she had asked a friend to take custody of Tony, even though the friend had denied this rumor in her testimony. Not to mention the judge’s comments about Bunch’s pregnancy. These sorts of narratives have “nothing to do with whether the evidence shows that a person did what they’re being accused of,” said Andrea Louise Lewis, an attorney who works for Royal and Daniel. “And these women get wrongfully convicted in these cases where nothing happened. Nothing criminal happened at all.” After Kristine Bunch gave birth to her second son, correctional officers put her in an ankle chain just long enough for her to reach the toilet in her hospital room. It had been three months since she went to prison. Bunch held her baby for a fleeting moment before her parents took him home with them. Then she made it her single-minded mission to find someone to help reopen her case. “I realized, I’m going to have to fight,” Bunch recalled. She sent out hundreds of letters and received hundreds of rejections. Daniel and Royal have come to believe that in many cases sexist stereotypes had been used to conjure up a motive. While Bunch despaired in prison, new research emerged showing that the signatures of an accidental fire are easy to confuse with signs of arson; as a result, many old arson cases have been called into question. In a similar vein, child abuse investigators once took it as gospel that a baby with brain swelling and certain forms of internal bleeding had been violently shaken within the past several hours. But a new body of evidence suggests that infections, infant strokes, and accidental falls can also cause the telltale symptoms of shaken-baby syndrome (SBS). Meanwhile, child abuse researchers now believe that a symptom like brain bleeding can take days—not hours—to cause serious problems. If a child has several caregivers—a babysitter, relatives, and immediate family members—it can be impossible to say with certainty who abused her. But it’s prosecutors who decide whether to file charges or fight appeals, and not all of them buy the new science..................It was only when Bunch connected with an Indianapolis attorney named Hilary Bowe Ricks, and scraped together a modest fee using her $1.30-a-day prison earnings, that she learned that new arson science could cast her conviction into doubt. In 2006, Ricks convinced the Northwestern center to join the case, and the team, which by then included Daniel, soon found a bevy of problems with the conviction. Bunch’s original defense attorney had argued that one of the trailer home’s many electrical problems probably caused the fire. Any accelerant, he insisted, was likely from a kerosene heater the family sometimes ran in the living room. However, state investigators working on-site (using now-questionable science) observed burn patterns in Tony’s bedroom that fire experts at the time saw as undisputed evidence of arson. And a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives chemist who examined 10 samples sent to his Washington, DC, lab testified at Bunch’s original trial that the floor of both the living room and the bedroom tested positive for liquid accelerant. Bunch’s new legal team obtained the raw data that the ATF chemist had analyzed. According to lawsuits her attorneys have since filed against the investigators for withholding evidence, someone had altered the result for the sample in Tony’s bedroom, which was negative for accelerant, making Bunch seem guilty. It appeared to Ricks as though investigators hadn’t found accelerant anywhere in the trailer home, except in the living room, where the heater stood. The fire that had taken Tony’s life now looked like an accident. (The state investigators have denied any wrongdoing, and an ATF spokeswoman declined to comment.)
Bunch’s legal team brought this undisclosed evidence to the Indiana Court of Appeals. On March 21, 2012, a three-judge panel reversed Bunch’s conviction. The state Supreme Court affirmed the ruling in August, and she walked out of prison, a free woman for the first time in more than 16 years. By Christmas, prosecutors quietly declined to retry her. “When you walk out, you’re exonerated, and you’re free and clear. But that hurt, that humiliation, that shame—it doesn’t go away.” A few months after Bunch was released, Daniel and Royal launched Northwestern’s Women’s Project, an exoneration effort focused exclusively on freeing wrongly convicted women."
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/wrongfully-convicted-women-exonerations-innocence-project/
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When I told my daughter Kyra, a singer/composer about Kristine's life - and the resistance Kristine is still running into on her civil suit by the authorities responsible for her ordeal - I was reminded of the music video 'Wonder Woman" created by Kyra and husband Nico (on the sitar) years ago when they had a band in St. Lucia called Psycho Key. The lyrics describe women (featuring the women of Kyra's tiny fishing village (Anse La Raye) who are strong, resilient, persistent, stubborn, dignified, positive and determined, in spite of the 'hard knocks' not to allow others to push them off the path they set for themselves. Wonder Woman? It sounded like Kristine Bunch to me. See for yourself!
You can access the video at the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs-KJlOOu9Q
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.
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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/
