PUBLISHER'S NOTE: You may have noticed that there have been numerous posts on bite mark case over the years, in which the defendants have been cleared because of modern scientific recognition that "bite-mark" evidence is 'junk science.' However, as in Crystal Dawn Reimer's case, many of these innocent people have had to spend years behind bars before being exonerated and freed - often because judge's refused to exercise their gate-keeper function. In Crystal Dawn's case, a judge has given her the green light to proceed with a civil suit against the county and its police officers. That's a good thing. Prosecutor's fearing such civil suits - and their impact on municipal budgets - may stop laying charges based on this sham testimony, and judges may finally stop accepting this pseudo-evidence.
Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
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BACKGROUND: (Pennsylvania Innocence Project): "On the night of Jan. 26, 2001, Curtis Haith, 21, attended a party in Uniontown, just an hour’s drive south of Pittsburgh, at the home of Crystal Weimer’s older sister, Carla.
When Haith wanted to leave the party around 10 o’clock, Crystal, 23, and her cousin drove him to his home in Connellsville. After being dropped off, Haith went to a cafe with some friends until closing. The group then went back to Haith’s house, and his friends left just after 4 a.m.
When Haith wanted to leave the party around 10 o’clock, Crystal, 23, and her cousin drove him to his home in Connellsville. After being dropped off, Haith went to a cafe with some friends until closing. The group then went back to Haith’s house, and his friends left just after 4 a.m.
Soon after, Haith’s neighbors heard a gunshot and cries for help. The neighbors called police, and when they arrived, the officers found Haith dead — he had been beaten and shot.
Haith died from blunt force trauma to the head. He also had a bite mark on his arm that would later become central in the case.
Police questioned Crystal the same day Haith was found, and did DNA testing on her clothing, which was stained with mud and blood. None of the blood matched Haith’s, but instead belonged to Crystal’s boyfriend.
Crystal said she and her boyfriend had gotten into a fight at her sister’s party around 4 a.m., the same time as the murder at Haith’s home in Connellsville. Others corroborated Crystal’s alibi, saying they remembered seeing the couple fighting at the party.
Police did not look to Crystal again as a suspect until 2002 when her ex-boyfriend, Thomas Beal — who was being arrested on a separate charge — told police that Crystal and her current boyfriend both had killed Haith.
When her boyfriend was subsequently questioned, he told police he wasn’t involved in the murder; but also mentioned Crystal had gotten into a physical altercation with Haith the day before the murder.
Additionally, a year later in 2003, an inmate gave detectives a letter allegedly written by a fellow inmate named Joseph Stenger, claiming it was actually Beal and Crystal who killed Haith. Stenger later claimed he himself was at the scene when Haith was killed, but denied being the shooter. Stenger’s story would later change more than a dozen times.
Following these events, Crystal was arrested in January 2004 on charges of third-degree murder, two counts of conspiracy and two counts of aggravated assault.
Soon after similar charges were brought against Stenger and he changed his story again, claiming Beal wasn’t present at the murder scene, and instead, that two Black men were with him and Crystal. The two Black men allegedly beat Haith with a baseball bat and crowbar.
The prosecution’s theory was that Haith had previously beaten up Crystal and she was seeking retaliation.
But in April 2004, the charges were dropped because Beal recanted his statement implicating Crystal. However, in September of the same year, Crystal was again arrested and charged when Stenger agreed to testify against her in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Crystal went to trial in 2006 and was wrongfully convicted of third-degree murder and conspiracy to commit homicide.
An influential piece of evidence in Crystal’s conviction was the expert testimony of Dr. Constantine Karazulas, who claimed the bite mark on Haith’s arm definitively belonged to Crystal.
At the time of the investigation, Crystal had agreed to get dental molds done. These molds were sent to a periodontist who compared them to photos of the bite mark on Haith’s arm; but the periodontist couldn’t reach any conclusions.
Photos of the molds and the bite mark were then sent to Dr. Karazulas, the chief forensic odontologist for the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Lab. He claimed the bite marks were made within a half hour of the murder — although his exact estimate changed throughout the case — and that they were a perfect match to Crystal’s mold.
Dr. Karazulas’s testimony relied on junk science, including an instance in which he bit himself to show the jury the healing process of a bite mark. Years later, Dr. Karazula even recanted his own testimony.
At trial, there were also jailhouse informants who claimed Crystal had told them she was involved in the murder. The informants confused facts and timelines throughout their testimonies. It was later discovered that the informants wrote letters to the prosecution asking for favorable treatment; if these letters were available to the defense at the original trial they could have been used to show the informant testimonies were false.
Crystal would remain wrongfully imprisoned for 11 years based on false statements like these several people — from ex-boyfriends to jailhouse informants to supposed experts.
Crystal's Release
Crystal tried to clear her name throughout her imprisonment. In 2007, when the state Superior Court upheld her convictions, she filed several motions for post-conviction relief. But all of these motions were denied.
In December 2014, Stenger admitted to Crystal’s lawyers that his testimony was false; he said police coached him through his story, and he made up the two Black men who he had said helped in the attack.
In February 2015, the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, which was later joined by Jones Day Law Firm, filed a motion for a new trial for Crystal, citing the recantations of Stenger and Dr. Karazula, as well as the evidence showing the bite mark science was invalid. The team had also uncovered the informant letters to the prosecution asking for favorable treatment.
On October 1, 2015, a new trial was ordered and Weimer was released on bond. Then in December of that year, Crystal’s legal team filed a motion to dismiss the charges altogether because Stenger refused to testify at the new trial, asserting his 5th Amendment right to avoid incriminating himself.
Bedford County Senior Judge Daniel Lee Howsare would not allow the prosecution to use Stenger’s 2006 testimony at the retrial because Stenger could not be cross-examined about his recantation. This left insufficient evidence for the state to continue with its prosecution of Crystal.
In June 2016, the charges were dropped against Crystal. And in September 2017, Crystal filed a civil rights lawsuit against the county and police officers involved in her case."
BLOOMBERG REPORT: Before the contents of the report was restricted to paying customers, I gleaned that, "DA must face claims on wrongful conviction," and that the case evolves around the expert and his earlier opinion that the bite marks on Haith were Weimer's were based on 'junk science.'
For further background read the National Registry of Exonerations entry by Maurice Possley at the link below: Shortly after 4 a.m. on January 27, 2001, police found the body of 21-year-old Curtis Haith outside his residence in Connellsville, Pennsylvania. He had been shot and beaten.
Police quickly determined that the evening before, Haith had attended a party in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. At about 10 p.m., 23-year-old Crystal Weimer, whose sisters hosted the party, and Doug Giles gave Haith a ride to his home. Witnesses told police that Haith later went to the Arch Café. After it closed, a group of friends accompanied him back to his home. The last of the guests left about 4 a.m.
Shortly thereafter, a neighbor called 911 after hearing a gunshot and a voice calling for help. An autopsy determined the gunshot wound was not fatal and that Haith died of blunt force trauma to his head.
The police focused on Crystal Weimer as a suspect and questioned her the same day. She gave the officers the clothing she was wearing the night before which were stained with mud and blood, but denied any involvement in the murder.
Tests showed that DNA recovered from a bandana and a sweatshirt found near Haith’s body came from the same person, but subsequent testing excluded Weimer as the source of that DNA, and failed to identify the person who left it. In addition, Haith’s DNA was not found on Weimer’s clothing.
Nearly two years later, in October 2002, police arrested Thomas Beal on an unrelated charge and he told police that Weimer—his former girlfriend—had admitted that she and a man named Michael Gibson had killed Haith. Police questioned Gibson, who denied any knowledge of Haith’s murder, but said he and Weimer had been in a fight the day before the murder and that Crystal bit his thumb. DNA tests confirmed that the blood on Weimer’s clothing came from Gibson.
A month later, in November 2002, Pennsylvania State Police Corporal Beverly Ashton joined the Connellsville police in the investigation. During a review of the autopsy photographs, Ashton noticed a mark on Haith’s hand, which she suspected was a bitemark, although no mention of a bitemark was contained in the autopsy report.
In August 2003, nearly a year later, Conrad Blair, an inmate in the Fayette County Jail, contacted detectives and gave them a statement that Blair claimed had been written by a fellow prisoner, Joseph Stenger, who had been arrested for a series of robberies. In the written statement, Stenger purportedly claimed that he, Beal and Weimer were involved in Haith’s murder.
Police contacted Stenger’s attorney, who said that Stenger denied writing the statement.
Police then obtained a warrant to search Stenger’s cell for a handwriting sample and to obtain a blood sample. The warrant, which was read to Stenger, contained details of the investigation, including that Haith had been beaten and shot and that a bandana and a sweatshirt were recovered at the scene. While police were in the cell, Stenger said he had been present when Haith was killed, but he was not the shooter. It was the first of what ultimately would be 15 different accounts of the killing offered by Stenger.
DNA tests were performed on Stenger’s blood and on a sample obtained from Beal and neither profile matched the profile obtained from the bandana and sweatshirt.
Weimer was arrested on January 21, 2004 on charges of third-degree murder and two counts each of conspiracy and aggravated assault. The following month, Stenger was similarly charged. Stenger then gave a much different statement to the police. In this version, Stenger no longer said Beal was involved, but that he and Weimer were present and that two black men beat Haith with clubs and that one of them shot Haith. Stenger worked with a state trooper to generate composite sketches of the two black men.
A preliminary hearing was held in March 2004 during which a detective testified that forensic testing showed that one of the soil samples collected from Haith’s yard was “consistent in color with the dark-colored soil smear” on Weimer’s coat and “with the light-colored soil smear” on Weimer’s jeans. Corporal Ashton testified that a forensic odontologist would testify that Weimer’s teeth caused the bitemark on Haith’s hand. Beal refused to testify and asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
After a judge found that the prosecution had presented sufficient evidence to go forward, Weimer’s attorney filed a motion to dismiss the case. In April 2004, at a hearing on the motion, Beal recanted his statement that implicated Weimer. As a result, the judge dismissed the charges, saying, “You could never expect a jury to convict her.” Weimer was released from jail.
In September 2004, Stenger pled guilty to conspiracy to commit homicide and agreed to testify against Weimer in return for a sentence of 9 to 18 years to be served concurrently with a sentence of 57 months to 9½ years in his unrelated robbery cases. The prosecution dismissed Stenger’s murder charges. In his latest version of events, Stenger said he fired the shot that wounded Haith, but claimed he was trying to stop the black men from beating Haith to death.
Based on Stenger’s cooperation, the prosecution again filed charges against Weimer and on September 27, 2004, she was arrested again.
Weimer went to trial in the Fayette County Court of Common Pleas on April 3, 2006. Stenger testified that he had known Weimer since childhood and that sometime after midnight on January 27, 2001, he was walking on the street when he saw Weimer drive by and she picked him up. He said she was angry because she had been in a fight. “I think I remember her saying Curt (Haith) hit her,” Stenger told the jury.
He said he rode with Weimer to Uniontown where they picked up two black men, then drove to Weimer’s father’s trailer in Dunbar, Pennsylvania, where he waited in the car while the black men and Weimer retrieved a baseball bat and a crowbar.
Stenger testified that they drove to Haith’s apartment between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. There, the black men hid outside and he waited in the car holding a gun, while Weimer knocked on the door. When Haith answered, he said the black men attacked him and that Weimer was kicking at Haith. Stenger said he got out of the car and fired a shot at Haith because he wanted to “stop everything. Get it over with.”
Stenger said they left and he was dropped off and went home where he hid the gun. He said he met Weimer at her home the next day (although he was unable to tell police where it was) and together they took her clothes and the gun and tossed them into the South Connellsville River. Stenger admitted that his prior statements were false. “It’s all lies,” he testified.
A police officer testified that during the investigation, dental molds of the teeth of Weimer and Gibson were obtained and sent to a local periodontist to compare them to the autopsy photograph. When the periodontist couldn’t reach any conclusion, photographs of the molds and the autopsy photograph were sent to Dr. Constantine Karazulas, the chief forensic odontologist for the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory.
Karazulas testified that he was a “certified fellow” of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and a member of the American Society of Forensic Odontology. He said he had been an “oral surgeon” for 47 years and that he had examined more than 5,000 bitemarks. He told the jury that no two individuals have identical teeth shape and formation.
Karazulas said that he concluded that Weimer “made that bitemark.” Asked by the prosecution if it was a “definite match,” Karazulas replied, “Yes.” He also said the bitemark was made 7 to 10 minutes prior to Haith’s death, although he admitted that previously he had reported to the prosecution on one occasion that the bite was made 20 minutes prior to death and on another occasion he said it was made 12 to 15 minutes prior to death. He told the jury he was able to make such a determination because, in his experience, the redness on the skin dissipates 15 to 20 minutes after a bite. He said his “experience” consisted of biting himself using teeth molds to observe the healing process.
Police officers testified that Weimer had given inconsistent explanations of how she had been injured.
Three jail inmates – Linda Reynolds, Carol Harris, and Robert Mackey - testified that Weimer had admitted to them that she was involved. Reynolds testified that Weimer spoke of a man’s death and that she “never meant for it go that far” because she “only wanted him to know what it felt like to get beat up.”
Harris testified that Weimer told her that she was “there” or “involved.” Mackey testified that Weimer told him that she “was with a guy (named Curt) and he was beating her all of the time, so she got a couple of other guys to get rid of him…They went to where he was staying, and her and the other guys, they beat him.” Mackey also testified that Weimer and Haith dated each other in 2003, even though Haith was killed in 2001.
John Evans, a state police forensic scientist, testified that his soil analysis, which involved inspecting the color of the soil and the particle size, showed that of seven soil samples taken from Haith’s yard, one had material that was “similar or consistent with soil that was detected” on Weimer’s clothing.
Weimer testified that her cousin, Doug Giles, asked her to accompany him to take Haith home from the party at Weimer’s sisters’ apartment and that after they dropped Haith off, they returned directly to the party. She said that upon her return, she got into a fight with Gibson, whom she was then dating, and that during the fracas, she bit his thumb and he hit her in the eye. Gibson and Peggy Hadley, who was present at the party, corroborated Weimer’s account of the evening.
The defense also called Dr. Michael Sobel, a forensic odontologist, who said that he was unable to eliminate or include either Weimer or Gibson as the source of the bitemark because the autopsy photograph was not clear enough to make a valid comparison. Sobel also testified that he doubted Karazulas’s claim of examining more than 5,000 bitemarks because he didn’t believe that the whole American Board of Forensic Odontology had collectively seen 5,000 bitemarks. Sobel also said that Karazulas’s use of a computer program to make bitemark comparisons had not been scientifically validated.
During closing argument, the prosecution told the jury that the jailhouse informants had not asked for any leniency on their own cases in return for their testimony. “These are people that have asked for nothing from the Commonwealth,” the prosecutor declared. Years later, Weimer’s defense attorneys discovered that in fact two of the informants—Reynolds and Mackey—had written letters to the prosecution requesting favorable treatment, but those letters were never disclosed to Weimer’s trial defense lawyer. The existence of the letters showed that the informants had testified falsely at trial when they denied they sought deals for their testimony.
On April 7, 2006, the jury convicted Weimer of third-degree murder and conspiracy to commit homicide. She was sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison.
In 2007, the Pennsylvania Superior Court upheld her convictions. Subsequently, Weimer filed motions for post-conviction relief, but all were denied. In 2014, a federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus was filed on her behalf.
In December 2014, Stenger admitted to Weimer’s lawyers and an investigator that his testimony at her trial was false. He said he never saw Weimer on the night of Haith’s death. He said that police walked him through his story, suggesting how things happened and where they happened. He said police drove him to Haith’s home because he didn’t know where it was.
Stenger said he concocted the story about two black men because where he was from, whenever something bad happened, people would blame it on black men. He said the composite sketches were a joke and that police would never find anyone who matched the sketches because they didn’t exist.
Weimer’s lawyers determined that Karazulas had falsely stated he was certified and that he was an oral surgeon when his practice was a general practice. Because he had made the same claim in another case, he had been subjected to an ethics investigation by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and ultimately had resigned from the Academy.
In early 2015, Karazulas disavowed the use of bitemark comparison and his method of making comparisons of teeth molds and photographs of bitemarks. He said that one of the methods he used in the Weimer case was “garbage.” In addition, an independent forensic odontologist concluded that Karazulas’s opinions about the bitemark on Haith’s hand were “inflammatory pseudoscience.”
In February 2015, Weimer, represented by the Pennsylvania Innocence Project (and later, the law firm of Jones Day), filed a motion for a new trial, citing the recantations of Stenger and Karazulas as well as the evidence debunking Karazulas. The defense lawyers had also discovered that the prosecution had failed to disclose to Weimer’s trial counsel that the jailhouse witnesses had requested favorable treatment on their cases in return for their testimony against Weimer.
On October 1, 2015, the motion was granted and a new trial was ordered. Weimer was released on bond the same day.
In December 2015, the defense filed a motion to dismiss the charges. On June 27, 2016, at a hearing on the motion, Stenger testified that if called as a witness at the retrial, he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The defense then argued that the prosecution should not be allowed to introduce Stenger’s testimony from the 2006 trial because he could not be cross-examined about his recantation. Bedford County Senior Judge Daniel Lee Howsare, who had been appointed to preside over the retrial after all of the judges in the Fayette County Court of Common Pleas recused themselves, agreed and barred the state from using Stenger’s testimony from the 2006 trial.
As a result, Fayette County District Attorney Rich Bower said the prosecution had insufficient evidence to proceed. Judge Howsare then granted the defense motion to dismiss the charges with prejudice.
In September 2017, Weimer filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the county and police officers involved in her case."
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=4927
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The tiny bits of the Bloomberg story can be read without payment at:
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The Pennsylvania Innocence Project backgrounder can be read at:
https://www.innocenceprojectpa.org/crystalweimer?locale=en
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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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