QUOTE OF THE DAY: “This is all part of the criminal justice system’s increasing acknowledgement that there are things that have gone wrong and having a willingness, whether they’re ordered by a court or they do it on their own through these conviction integrity units, to right these wrongs,” said Maurice Possley, senior researcher for the National Registry of Exonerations. “For a district attorney it’s a win-win situation because it shows you really do care, not just about convicting people and locking them up, but making sure that the right person is the person who you’re convicting and locking up.”
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Pursley’s lawyers say his conviction was the result of misleading evidence, a false accusation and misconduct. His then-girlfriend, who was pregnant at the time, was coerced into giving Pursley up during a police interrogation in which authorities threatened to take her children away if she didn’t implicate him, she said during the initial trial. There was also was testimony from a man who was paid $2,650 through Crime Stoppers for his statement. But key to Pursley’s conviction was obsolete ballistics testing that pinned the murder weapon on him. Pursley would have died in prison if not for an improbable series of events. Roughly five years after he was convicted, a new and more accurate method of ballistics testing emerged called the Integrated Ballistic Identification System. Pursley was confident it would prove his innocence. Acting as his own lawyer from prison, he tried multiple times to get the evidence in his case retested and overturned. But Illinois law didn’t allow for retesting cases based on IBIS. Then, one of Pursley’s letters found an audience. It was picked up by a man named Bill Ryan, an advocate who worked for the state Department of Children and Family Services. Ryan published Pursley’s letter in a widely circulated newsletter read by state lawmakers, among many others. “I had a table full of letters. I reached down and grabbed one letter, you asked me to give it to the senators and I did,” Ryan told Pursley, Pursley said in an interview on the Wrongful Conviction Podcast. State Rep. Arthur Turner Sr. of Chicago sponsored legislation that allowed for such testing, and it was signed into law by then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Oct. 27, 2007. The new analysis revealed that the marks on the bullets and shell casings found at the crime scene didn’t match the weapon prosecutors used at trial. Pursley was granted a new trial in March 2017 and freed on bond. On Jan. 16, 2019, he was acquitted after a retrial."
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STORY: "Candidates for top prosecutor in Winnebago County take aim at wrongful convictions," by Staff Writer Kevin Haas, published by The Journal Standard on March 6, 2020.
GIST: "From inside his cell at Stateville prison, Patrick Pursley wrote stacks of letters to anyone who might listen to his claim of innocence. He stuffed the letters inside handmade envelopes and sent them to lawyers across the state. He wrote so many that his makeshift envelopes clogged the prison’s stamp machine. The letters that did filter out of prison were often ignored. Pursley was convicted of first-degree murder here in 1994. It took more than 23 years, and a push by the imprisoned Pursey himself to change state law, before his conviction was overturned and he was freed. Sheer persistence kept him from dying in prison. His case underscores how hard it is for claims of innocence to be heard — even when physical evidence exists that could overturn a conviction. Now, large prosecutors’ offices across the country are working to prevent the missteps that lead to wrongful convictions, establishing specialized teams called conviction integrity units to review problematic cases. Nearly 60 such units exist across the country. Altogether, they have recorded nearly 400 exonerations, according to The National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the University of California-Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Society, University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law.February 1, 2020. The three candidates now running for Winnebago County state’s attorney all support creation of a conviction integrity unit here, although they differ over how it would operate. While all prosecutors’ offices have a process for post-conviction appeals, these units are a commitment to a fact-based investigation of plausible claims of innocence. “This is all part of the criminal justice system’s increasing acknowledgement that there are things that have gone wrong and having a willingness, whether they’re ordered by a court or they do it on their own through these conviction integrity units, to right these wrongs,” said Maurice Possley, senior researcher for the National Registry of Exonerations. “For a district attorney it’s a win-win situation because it shows you really do care, not just about convicting people and locking them up, but making sure that the right person is the person who you’re convicting and locking up.”
Pursley’s persistence
Pursley’s lawyers say his conviction was the result of misleading evidence, a false accusation and misconduct. His then-girlfriend, who was pregnant at the time, was coerced into giving Pursley up during a police interrogation in which authorities threatened to take her children away if she didn’t implicate him, she said during the initial trial. There was also was testimony from a man who was paid $2,650 through Crime Stoppers for his statement. But key to Pursley’s conviction was obsolete ballistics testing that pinned the murder weapon on him. Pursley would have died in prison if not for an improbable series of events. Roughly five years after he was convicted, a new and more accurate method of ballistics testing emerged called the Integrated Ballistic Identification System.‘I’m not a rarity'
John Horton of Rockford was a 17-year-old high school student when, in 1993, he walked into a police station after learning he was wanted for questioning. He was interrogated for roughly nine hours before he falsely confessed to a killing he didn’t commit. Horton was charged even though in his confession the clothes he said he was wearing didn’t match witnesses’ description.Horton’s cousin Clifton “Buddy” English repeatedly confessed to the crime while Horton spent 23 years in prison before his conviction was overturned in February 2017. He was granted a certificate of innocence in December 2018. “Unfortunately, I’m not a rarity,” said Horton, 44, who lives in Rockford and works at Costco. “I’ve seen innocent men laying dead in their cell that never had the opportunity that I was given — that is, to get my freedom, my name back and an opportunity to live.”
Horton was sentenced to life in prison without parole. “That is a troubling, troubling thing for a 17-year-old boy to spend 23 years in prison serving a life sentence for something that he didn’t do,” said Josh Tepfer, an attorney with the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School. Tepfer was affiliated with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern when he began reviewing Horton’s case in 2012. “In that particular case, there (were) just telltale signs for years and years of the fact that they had the wrong person and no one was doing anything about it,” Tepfer said. “In that case, a properly run conviction integrity unit could have mitigated the damage.”
Cost of justice
It can be expensive to create a review unit, but so can the consequences of a wrongful conviction, as the city of Rockford learned this week. On Monday, the city agreed to pay $11 million to three men convicted of the 2002 murder of an 8-year-old boy after police coerced witnesses and fabricated evidence against them. Lawyers who represent the men also have questioned how many other convictions were based on the work of former officer Doug Palmer, who admitted framing the men.Pursley and Horton also have filed lawsuits against the city and certain officers over their wrongful convictions. “If you want to do it under the best practices, it’s going to take some dough. That means getting a commitment from your county commissioners or your county board or whoever controls the purse strings,” Possley said. “A skeptical person might say this is a way of continuing to circle the wagon and keep us from being sued.” What matters, however, is determining whether a wrongful conviction occurred. “All the other stuff is extraneous to what the pursuit of justice is supposed to be about,” Possley said. The candidates for Winnebago County state’s attorney acknowledge that it will be difficult to create a conviction integrity team inside a department that’s already understaffed. To that end, Paul Carpenter suggests prosecutors from around the region form a joint review unit to share the costs. Carpenter, a Democrat running for state’s attorney, said involving other jurisdictions would also help provide the independence demanded of the unit. Carpenter also is keen on the idea pitched a year ago by Bill Clutter, a private investigator who helped create the Illinois Innocence Project. Clutter proposed that the Illinois attorney general create a conviction integrity unit to review innocence claims. That approach is similar to one in place in North Carolina, which has an Innocence Inquiry Commission. Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office is evaluating best practices in other states and the resources needed to implement a statewide unit, a spokesperson said. “It’s really hard to justify using county resources — assigning an attorney or two and an investigator or two — that we could be using to prosecute crimes that are happening now,” Carpenter said. “From a balancing standpoint, the crimes that are happening now need to be prosecuted and the county resources need to be going toward public safety.” J. Hanley, a Republican candidate for state’s attorney, envisions a panel of three to five people, likely retired judges, prosecutors or defense attorneys, to work on the unit along with someone from the state’s attorney’s office. He said the panel could be composed of volunteers, but he would also pursue grant funding. “Sometimes the right thing costs money, takes time and takes effort,” Hanley said. “All things being considered it is a tiny percentage of the cases, but in order for justice to be done you’ve got to right those mistakes. “If your goal, your mandate, your mission is always to seek justice, it doesn’t just end when that person goes to the Department of Corrections. It doesn’t end when something is five or 10 years old. As difficult as that is, and as inefficient as that is, it just doesn’t matter.” David Gill, who is seeking the Republican nomination for state’s attorney, also likes the idea of building a volunteer panel of experienced criminal justice professionals. He would dedicate at least two assistant state’s attorneys to the unit and serve on it himself. “You need the people (on the conviction integrity unit) that are willing to take that leap and to have the integrity to make that leap that no one — no one including the detectives or the prosecutors that handled that case — are above the law,” Gill said.
Independence is key
As a law student at Northern Illinois University, Gill studied the case of Alan Beaman, a Rockford man who spent 13 years in prison for a killing he didn’t commit. Beaman is trying to persuade the Illinois Supreme Court to clear the way for him to pursue a lawsuit against the town of Normal and the officers he says framed him for the crime. Beaman said every large community should have a conviction integrity unit, especially because “we’ve had so many exonerations at this point.” However, he cautions against using only retired judges, police officers and prosecutors because, he said, someone with a history in the community could have a connection to someone involved in the prosecution. He said the panel needs a diversity of experiences and disciplines and should involved people with a record of conviction integrity experience. “These cases are inconvenient and political,” Beaman said. “A CIU has to have the transparency to publish observations on what causes wrongful convictions. It needs the autonomy to expose misconduct. It needs the authority to influence policy.” Excluding those with connections to a case under review is one key to maintaining independence, wrote John Hollway of the University of Pennsylvania Law School in a 2016 national study of conviction review units. Independence, he wrote, is often the difference between a successful unit and what he labeled a CRINO, or Conviction Review In Name Only. Skepticism about integrity units, he wrote, is fueled by teams that lack “independence, flexibility and transparency.” There isn’t any one “best practice” that distinguishes a good unit from a CRINO, but good ones have several things in common, such as clear written policies, training on “cold case” investigative techniques, sufficient resources, and safeguards against confirmation bias, including the use of external criminal defense experts. The units should never reject pleas of actual innocence based on procedural technicalities.Pursley, Beaman and Horton recognize that a conviction review unit can be the difference between freedom and dying in prison. “I know that even if you’re innocent freedom isn’t guaranteed,” Horton said. “If you find one wrong conviction, that makes the integrity unit worth its weight in gold.""
The entire story can be read at:
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Read National Registry of Exonerations entry by Maurice Possley in its entirety at the link below: At about 10 p.m. on April 2, 1993, 22-year-old Andrew Ascher and his girlfriend, Becky George, were sitting in a parked car in front of George’s brother’s apartment on Silent Road in Rockford, Illinois when a masked gunman yanked open the driver’s side front door and announced a stickup.
As Ascher dug for his wallet, George offered $60 from her purse, but the robber did not take it. Instead, George heard two gunshots and Ascher slumped down. The robber fled on foot. George ran to her brother’s apartment and called police.
George said the robber was wearing dark clothing, a blue ski mask, and a hoodie with a zipper. She said the man was black, but could not otherwise identify him.
Ascher was shot twice in the head. Police recovered one of the bullets from the dashboard of the car. Another bullet was recovered during the autopsy. Two shell casings were recovered as well.
On June 8, 1993, Marvin Windham called Crime Stoppers and said that the day after the shooting, 28-year-old Patrick Pursley admitted that he killed Asher.
On June 10, 1993, Rockford police set up surveillance of an apartment Pursley shared with Samantha Crabtree. At 1:25 p.m., Pursley and Crabtree left the apartment and drove off with Crabtree behind the wheel. While the officers were following in an unmarked van, Crabtree stopped suddenly and Pursley jumped out and eluded the officers.
The police said Crabtree voluntarily agreed to go to the police station.
On the way to the station, the police stopped and searched Crabtree's apartment with a warrant they had already obtained. They recovered a nine-millimeter pistol, a pull-over-style black hooded sweatshirt, black jeans, and a document from the Illinois Department of Employment Security with Pursley’s name on it.
Police later said that Crabtree told them that Pursley told her that if she ever said anything to the police he would kill her. Police said that Crabtree admitted that on the night of the murder, she and Pursley were driving around looking for a house to rob. She said Pursley was wearing black combat boots, black jeans, a black hooded sweatshirt, and was carrying a navy blue ski mask.
Crabtree said Pursley told her to pull over to the side of Silent Road and wait, but to keep the car running. Pursley got out and walked toward some apartment buildings. Two or three minutes later, she heard gunshots and then Pursley returned to the car carrying her nine-millimeter gun. She said that while she was driving home, she made several wrong turns because she was nervous and that Pursley threatened several times to kill her.
In the statement, Crabtree said that when they got back to her apartment, Pursley took what looked like about $100 from his pocket. She said that later that night, she and Pursley saw a television news report of Ascher’s murder and Pursley told her not to say anything to anyone.
On June 12, 1993, Windham called Crime Stoppers again and gave a statement to police.
On June 16, 1993, in response to a notification from Crime Stoppers that said Pursley was at the Fairgrounds Valley low income housing project, police spotted him hiding under a ramp of an abandoned building and arrested him.
In April 1994, Pursley went to trial in Winnebago County Circuit Court. Windham testified that in April 1993, Pursley showed him a newspaper clipping about the murder and admitted that he had robbed and killed Ascher. On cross-examination, Windham admitted he had received $2,650 in reward money for his information. He said he called Crime Stoppers two months later because Pursley threatened him. Windham also admitted that he had two criminal charges pending against him.
Crabtree testified and recanted her statement to police as well as her testimony to the grand jury that mirrored the statement. She said that in fact Pursley was home with her on the night of the murder.
She told the jury that police had threatened to take away her three children unless she implicated Pursley. She said she was two months pregnant at the time, and was feeling sick and scared. The detectives kept yelling at her, she said, and one officer declared, “I can make it so you don’t see your children until they are 40.”
Crabtree finally relented and agreed to make a statement implicating Pursley. “I would have said anything to make them stop yelling at me so I could go home and be with my kids,” she testified.
The prosecution was allowed to impeach her testimony with her police statement and her grand jury testimony. In that testimony, she said the gun seized during the search of her apartment was hers and that Pursley used it to shoot Ascher.
The detectives testified that they did not threaten or mistreat Crabtree.
Daniel Gunnell, a crime lab analyst for the Illinois State Police, testified that he examined the gun seized from Crabtree’s apartment and the two recovered bullets. He told the jury that he had compared test-fired bullets to the recovered bullets, as well as the casings recovered at the scene to casings from the test-fired bullets. He said that the gun, a Taurus nine-millimeter pistol, was the murder weapon “to the exclusion of all others.”
The defense called several witnesses, including Myra Foster, the grandmother of Pursley's nine-year-old son, and Tracy Foster, the boy’s mother. They testified that on the day of the murder, Pursley was in Rockford with his son and Myra’s seven-year-old son. However, during cross-examination they admitted that two weeks earlier, they told the police that they were not sure that Pursley came to Myra's home on April 2.
Penny Bunnell, testified that on April 2, 1993, she was visiting Myra Foster when Pursley came and picked up the two boys around 5:30 p.m. The boys testified that Pursley took them to his residence the night of April 2, and that they all played with a chemistry set until 11 p.m. On cross-examination, however, they both admitted that they told the police two weeks before their testimony that Pursley had picked them up in the afternoon, not at night.
Sixteen-year-old David Bodell, who lived in the neighborhood where Ascher was killed, testified that he heard three gunshots and a woman scream. Shortly after, he said he walked outside and saw a man crouched down in front of a dumpster that was about 30 feet away. Bodell testified that the man began running toward an open field when police sirens could be heard. The man was about 6 feet 3 inches tall—about five inches taller than Pursley.
The defense presented a ballistics expert, David Boese, who testified that he was unable to make a conclusive identification that the bullets from the scene were fired from Crabtree's gun. He testified that the crime scene bullets were probably fired from a Taurus gun, but not the Taurus seized by police. He could not conclusively exclude the gun, either, saying there were insufficient markings to make a determination.
On April 28, 1994, the jury convicted Pursley of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In 1996, the Illinois Appellate Court upheld Pursley’s conviction. In 1997, Pursley, acting as his own lawyer, filed a post-conviction petition seeking a new trial. The petition was dismissed without a hearing and the dismissal was upheld by the Illinois Appellate Court. In 1999, Pursley filed another petition, but that was dismissed as well without a hearing.
Pursley then filed a request with the trial court asking for ballistics testing under the Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS), a ballistics database that can be used to compare casings and bullets. That motion was denied when the trial judge ruled that the Illinois statute allowing for post-conviction testing only applied to fingerprint comparison and DNA testing.
In 2007, prompted in part by Pursley’s advocacy from prison, the Illinois legislature amended the statute to allow for ballistics testing and comparison.
In April 2008, Pursley, still acting as his own lawyer, filed a motion for ballistics testing. In October 2008, Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions and lawyers from the law firm of Jenner & Block appeared in court to represent Pursley. In January 2009, they filed an amended motion for testing, which was denied in July 2009.
Judge Joseph McGraw agreed that the new legislation authorized the testing and that the testing was not available at the time of the trial. However, he ruled that even if IBIS testing were used, any potential match would still require hands-on comparison and testing by a ballistics expert.
McGraw decided that IBIS testing was not comparable to DNA testing because it provided “a course or gross collection of specimens for purposes of later refined testing by a well-qualified expert using stereomicroscopy.” He concluded that IBIS testing did not supersede the comparisons performed by ballistics experts, and that at Pursley’s trial, “all the ballistics evidence was tested by firearms experts and nothing was left out.”
McGraw ruled that IBIS testing would not provide a reasonable likelihood of more accurate results, and the evidence would not be relevant to Pursley’s claim of innocence.
In 2011, the Illinois Appellate Court reversed that ruling and ordered that Pursley be given a hearing. The court held that the statute authorized a defendant to petition for testing and that tests be done. Because an IBIS analysis might result in a different weapon being implicated, the court ruled that the hands-on analysis cited by Judge McGraw “would not be the same hands-on analysis that was already performed.”
The ruling was the first in the United States allowing post-conviction ballistics testing.
Ultimately, a hearing was held in December 2016. Gunnell testified that he had re-examined the evidence in 2013 and that while he still believed it was more than likely that the Taurus filed the bullets, he now said his examination was “inconclusive.” Pursley’s lawyers presented evidence from two ballistics experts who said that new testing excluded the Taurus seized in Crabtree’s apartment as the murder weapon.
In March 2017, Judge McGraw granted the petition for a new trial and vacated Pursley’s conviction. The judge concluded that the new ballistics evidence would “likely change the result on retrial.” On April 27, 2017, Pursley was released on bond.
The prosecution appealed the ruling, and in April 2018, the Illinois Appellate Court upheld the grant of a new trial.
In November 2018, Pursley’s lawyers filed a motion seeking dismissal of the case. The motion said that the prosecution had recently revealed a statement made 18 months earlier by Lois Ascher, the victim’s mother. In the statement, she said that not long after Pursley was convicted in 1994, a detective told her that the actual murder weapon couldn’t be found, so officers planted the gun that was said to be the murder weapon.
Lois Ascher’s statement was made in April 2017. The prosecutor claimed he did not consider the statement credible at the time, so he did not disclose it.
At a hearing in December 2018, Lois Ascher told a different story. She testified that police never told her that the gun was planted, but that her husband, who had since passed away, told her that he had been so informed by detectives.
Five former Rockford police officers, who were on the force back in 1993, testified that they never spoke with Lois Ascher or her husband about a planted gun. The five also said they never made such statements to anyone.
On December 28, 2018, Judge McGraw denied the motion to dismiss the case. Although the judge found that the prosecution had acted “with gross negligence,” he said that the evidence was “uncorroborated hearsay.”
Pursley went to trial a second time in January 2019, and asked that Judge McGraw hear the case without a jury. The prosecution again called Gunnell as well as another Illinois State Police ballistics analyst. However, both said that their comparisons of the crime scene bullets and casings were inconclusive. The defense presented ballistics experts who testified that the Taurus was not the murder weapon.
On January 16, 2019, Judge McGraw announced his decision. He noted that the “evidence in 1993 was scant by today’s standards, and when you start with scant evidence you’re not in a good position to reevaluate it years later.” Judge McGraw said the defense ballistics experts demonstrated conclusively that the cartridge cases were not fired from the gun attributed to Pursley.
McGraw acquitted Pursley saying, “No one id’d the bullets recovered from the scene as fired from the Taurus.”
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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/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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