Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Justin Plummer: UK: Major Development: British Criminal Cases Review Commission assails evidence given by two prosecution experts (one of whom was a dentist and bite mark expert) as it sends the murder conviction to The Court of Appeal..."Following a detailed review, the CCRC has decided to refer Mr Plummer’s conviction to the Court of Appeal because new evidence now suggests that the expert footwear mark evidence at Mr Plummer’s trial was fundamentally flawed and the jury were misled. In particular: Two of the prosecution experts who gave evidence (one of whom was a dentist and bite marks expert) did not meet the industry standards required to conduct reliable footwear marks comparison. These experts gave subjective opinions, in persuasive terms, with the appearance of expertise they did not, in fact, possess. In the CCRC’s view, neither expert should have been permitted to give evidence at the trial."


PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Two of the prosecution experts who gave evidence (one of whom was a dentist and bite marks expert) did not meet the industry standards required to conduct reliable footwear marks comparison. These experts gave subjective opinions, in persuasive terms, with the appearance of expertise they did not, in fact, possess. In the CCRC’s view, neither expert should have been permitted to give evidence at the trial."

RELEASE: "Commission refers the murder conviction of Justin Plummer to The Court of Appeal,  published by The Criminal Cases Review Commission (‘CCRC’) on February 18, 2902.

GIST: The Criminal Cases Review Commission (‘CCRC’) has referred the 1998 murder conviction of Justin Plummer to the Court of Appeal.

On 16 December 1998, following a trial at St Albans Crown Court, Justin Plummer was convicted of the murder of Janice Cartwright-Gilbert. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 16 years, and remains in prison.

Ms Cartwright-Gilbert was found dead inside the mobile home she shared with her partner on 28 February 1997. She had been stabbed multiple times and the mobile home had been set on fire. Her body had bruising to the head consistent with stamping.

Mr Plummer was a prolific burglar who had committed a string of burglaries in the local area during January and February 1997. The prosecution case was that Mr Plummer murdered Ms Cartwright-Gilbert during a burglary, attacking her when she disturbed him. The key issue at trial was whether Mr Plummer’s right shoe could be attributed to marks found on Ms Cartwright-Gilbert’s face.

On 17 January 2000, the Court of Appeal rejected an appeal made on Mr Plummer’s behalf. Mr Plummer applied to the CCRC in March 2000 and, in January 2001, the CCRC decided that there was no real possibility that the Court of Appeal would quash his conviction. Mr Plummer re-applied to the CCRC in November 2017.

Following a detailed review, the CCRC has decided to refer Mr Plummer’s conviction to the Court of Appeal because new evidence now suggests that the expert footwear mark evidence at Mr Plummer’s trial was fundamentally flawed and the jury were misled. In particular:

  • Two of the prosecution experts who gave evidence (one of whom was a dentist and bite marks expert) did not meet the industry standards required to conduct reliable footwear marks comparison. These experts gave subjective opinions, in persuasive terms, with the appearance of expertise they did not, in fact, possess. In the CCRC’s view, neither expert should have been permitted to give evidence at the trial.
  • New expert evidence obtained by the CCRC has highlighted errors in the evidence that was given at trial and led the CCRC to conclude that the strength of the expert evidence which can now be relied upon is weaker than it was both at trial and in December 1997 when the CPS advised that the case against Mr Plummer should be dropped.

This referral relies, at least in part, on the work of the Forensic Science Regulator (a post created in 2007), developments in the Criminal Practice Direction on expert evidence and a body of case law that primarily post-dates both Mr Plummer’s trial and the CCRC’s first review.

Mr Plummer is represented by Scanlans Solicitors, 23 John Street, Sunderland SR1 1JG.

The entire release can be read at:

 https://ccrc.gov.uk/commission-refers-the-murder-conviction-of-justin-plummer-to-the-court-of-appeal/

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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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they’ve exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;

Rose-Anne and Kent McLellan. (Nathaniel's parents): Ontario): 200-page document released to the family through provincial freedom-of-information laws, following 400 pages of documents released earlier, providing window into the police investigation...Question of the Day: "Nathaniel's McLellan's mother aced a lie detector test. Children's Aid and doctors cleared the parents. Why did the family only learn this now?" asked by Chief Investigative Reporter Kevin Donovan in the Toronto Star on June 30, 2021..."Rose-Anne McLellan passed her OPP lie-detector test with “flying colours.” So did her husband, Kent. This according to newly released case files kept by a provincial agency that looked into the 2015 death of their son Nathaniel. Also, the regional coroner in London, Ont., a top child abuse doctor, and a team of child protection workers cleared the parents in the death of 15-month-old Nathaniel years ago, according to statements in the case files. It took until this week for the McLellan family, which has been under a cloud of suspicion, to see most of this information, five and a half years after Nathaniel collapsed at a home daycare."


PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "“Mom had lie detector and she passed with flying colours,” London child abuse specialist Dr. David Warren is quoted as saying in a February 2018 note in the CAS case files. Warren had frequent contact with the police detectives at different parts of the investigation, the documents reveal. Reading this, Rose-Anne commented. “It was good to see it in the document. I just wish that had been given to us back then.” Warren is also quoted as telling a CAS worker in late 2015 that Nathaniel’s injury “Couldn’t have happened Monday night, people would have noticed significant difference Tues a.m.” The significance of that comment is that at one point there was a police suspicion that Nathaniel was hurt the night before while in his parents’ care. The night before Nathaniel was rushed to hospital after collapsing at the daycare he was bumped by a door and fell backwards onto the floor."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Another comment in the CAS case notes comes from Dr. Rick Mann, the regional coroner in the London area. This was late December 2015 (two months after Nathaniel was rushed to hospital). Mann is quoted as saying: “He then said that neuropathological analysis has indicated a more precise window of time where the injury to Nathaniel must have happened. This rules out the previous day entirely. This also rules out the ‘behind the door’ possibility of causation for two reasons: the time is wrong (it happened the day before) and the mechanism does not match the likely mechanism of the fatal injury.”

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STORY: "Nathaniel McLellan's mother aced a lie detector test.  Children's Aid and doctors cleared the parents. Why did the parents only learn about this now?" by Chief Investigative Reporter Kevin Donovan, published by The Toronto Star on June 30, 2021.

SUB-HEADING: "Nathaniel McLellan's family not informed of findings in 2015 death until this week."

GIST: "Rose-Anne McLellan passed her OPP lie-detector test with “flying colours.” So did her husband, Kent. This according to newly released case files kept by a provincial agency that looked into the 2015 death of their son Nathaniel.

Also, the regional coroner in London, Ont., a top child abuse doctor, and a team of child protection workers cleared the parents in the death of 15-month-old Nathaniel years ago, according to statements in the case files.

It took until this week for the McLellan family, which has been under a cloud of suspicion, to see most of this information, five and a half years after Nathaniel collapsed at a home daycare. A 200-page document was released to the family through provincial freedom-of-information laws, following 400 pages of documents released earlier.

Meanwhile, the 42-year-old Strathroy woman who ran the unlicensed daycare that was looking after Nathaniel when he collapsed in October 2015 was arrested by OPP detectives and charged with manslaughter last week. The charges have not been tested in court, and Meggin Van Hoof, the home daycare owner, has declined through her lawyer, Kevin Egan, to speak about the case. Van Hoof appears in court in London on July 15.

The new information in this story comes from about 600 pages of “case notes” kept by the Children’s Aid Society of London and Middlesex. This agency was involved in the background of the Nathaniel investigation from the start, called in by a doctor at the Strathroy hospital who initially treated Nathaniel. Agency workers sat in on one series of police interviews (of the McLellan children in the early days) and conducted a home visit of the McLellans, remarking in their notes on finding a Christmas tree, and a happy home, though a grieving one. CAS workers never looked into the home daycare, their documents show, though the McLellan family asked them to. 

“There is no evidence (Nathaniel) was injured by his parents,” a senior CAS caseworker writes in December 2015, six weeks after Nathaniel was rushed to hospital. 

What the new documents do provide is a window into the police investigation, because the CAS case workers frequently sought and recorded in their notes updates from police detectives and doctors. One update dealt with the lie-detector tests of the McLellans.

Most people’s knowledge of a polygraph machine, also known as a lie detector, comes from FBI movies on late-night television. This century-old method uses a machine that detects changes in a person’s stress level as questions are asked. The instrument, through probes attached to a person’s fingertips and chest, detects increase in perspiration, respiration, blood pressure and pulse rate. The theory behind this controversial test is that all of these reactions increase when you lie.

As the Star detailed in Death in a Small Town, a five-part series, Nathaniel collapsed at 11:30 a.m. on Oct. 27, 2015. Van Hoof, the home daycare owner, at 11:50 a.m. called the school where Rose-Anne taught, told her Nathaniel was unwell, and Rose-Anne rushed to get her son to Strathroy hospital, arriving at 12:04 p.m. Rose-Anne had dropped Nathaniel at the daycare owner’s home near her school at 8:30 a.m. and she later told police he was completely fine. At the London hospital where Nathaniel was later transported it was discovered that he had a bruise on his left temple and a nine-to-10-centimetre fracture at the back of his skull. He died several days later.

Strathroy-Caradoc police and the OPP focused their investigation on Rose-Anne and Kent, police documents show. As part of their joint investigation they asked Rose-Anne and Kent, and the home daycare provider, to submit to polygraphs. As the Star previously reported, Van Hoof did not undergo a lie-detector test.

The McLellans’ polygraphs took place at the London OPP detachment on Exeter Road in 2016. (They would have been earlier but Rose-Anne was pregnant and it was felt a polygraph would provide too much stress.) Police documents related to the polygraphs have not been released, but there are references to them in the new documents, and both Rose-Anne and Kent made notes of their polygraphs and provided them to the Star. The family, as part of their search for justice, kept detailed notes of their various experiences with the medical and legal system.

Rose-Anne recalls a “small interrogation room, all cinder block walls, no windows, bare bones room, one desk, two chairs.” The polygraph expert asked her a number of questions at the start in an attempt, it was explained to her, to get a baseline for the tougher questions. He began with questions like what is her middle name. He also asked, at one point during a preliminary chat (though he said he ultimately only wanted yes and no answers) when she had her last drink. Rose-Anne said she almost never drinks but when they visit a friend who owns a hotel in Kingston every year or so he makes her a daiquiri.

Kent says his early questions included, “What was the happiest day of my life,” and “what was the worst day of my life.” At one point, the examiner showed them a card trick. Kent was to keep his eyes open during the polygraph; Rose-Anne was to keep hers closed. No explanation for any of this was provided.

These “getting-to-know-you questions” concluded, and with the sensors attached, Rose-Anne said the examiner started in on the real questions.

She and Kent recall they were all different ways of asking “if we had anything to do with the death of Nathaniel.” Each time, they answered in the negative. The examiner provided them with no official written proof of how they did. He did say, Rose-Anne recalls, that they passed, but it was in the manner of a hospital technician telling a patient that things seemed fine.

On Tuesday, the most recent batch of CAS documents arrived in Rose-Anne’s inbox. She had asked for these in January 2020, when a new provincial law brought children’s aid societies under the freedom-of-information law.

“Mom had lie detector and she passed with flying colours,” London child abuse specialist Dr. David Warren is quoted as saying in a February 2018 note in the CAS case files. Warren had frequent contact with the police detectives at different parts of the investigation, the documents reveal.

Reading this, Rose-Anne commented. “It was good to see it in the document. I just wish that had been given to us back then.”

Warren is also quoted as telling a CAS worker in late 2015 that Nathaniel’s injury “Couldn’t have happened Monday night, people would have noticed significant difference Tues a.m.” The significance of that comment is that at one point there was a police suspicion that Nathaniel was hurt the night before while in his parents’ care. The night before Nathaniel was rushed to hospital after collapsing at the daycare he was bumped by a door and fell backwards onto the floor.

Another comment in the CAS case notes comes from Dr. Rick Mann, the regional coroner in the London area. This was late December 2015 (two months after Nathaniel was rushed to hospital). Mann is quoted as saying:

“He then said that neuropathological analysis has indicated a more precise window of time where the injury to Nathaniel must have happened. This rules out the previous day entirely. This also rules out the ‘behind the door’ possibility of causation for two reasons: the time is wrong (it happened the day before) and the mechanism does not match the likely mechanism of the fatal injury.”

Neither Warren or Mann would reply to questions from the Star.

The McLellans provided the documents to the Star because, they said, they wanted to shine light on the their family’s probe by children’s aid, and their experiences with police and doctors involved in the case.

Neither the Strathroy-Caradoc police nor the OPP will respond to questions about the case. "

The entire story can be read at:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGkXwNcdCHmcrVkKNGtGjxrglSC

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;
—————————————————————————————————
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they’ve exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;


Kevin Strickland: Missouri: Governor Mike Parsons comes a target of (abundantly justified HL) righteous rage hurled by staff of the Riverfront Times... "For a former sheriff, Parson should be embarrassed. He not only insults the prosecutors who have sought to correct the injustice, but to then essentially admit that doesn't have evidence to back up his reticence? That he just doesn't feel like taking a risk on freeing an innocent man? It would be laughable if it wasn't so monstrous. "


BACKGROUND: "The case against Strickland, who was 18 when he was arrested, was “thin from its inception” and relied almost entirely on the testimony of a traumatized woman who was shot during the murders, prosecutors now say. They began reviewing Strickland’s conviction in November after speaking with his lawyers and reviewing a Star investigation into his innocence claimFor decades, two men who pleaded guilty in the April 25, 1978, murders at 6934 S. Benton Ave. swore Strickland was not with them and two other accomplices during the shooting. The lone eyewitness also recanted and wanted Strickland released. A third suspect, who was never charged, said in 2019 that he knew there “couldn’t be a more innocent person than” Strickland, according to a Midwest Innocence Project investigator."
“M.O. Supreme Court declines to hear Kevin Strickland’s case. Prosecutors say he’s innocent,” by Reporter Luke Nozicka, published by The Kansas City Star on June 1, 2021. 

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: ""Just No Mercy: "Wrongfully charged." "Tainted." "A profound error we must correct now." Those are some of the ways prosecutors in Jackson County have described the conviction of Kevin Strickland for a 1978 triple murder — but that's not how Gov. Mike Parson sees it. Earlier this month, he described calls to pardon Strickland, who has spent 41 years in prison, as "not a priority." Then, on June 23, he told KSHB-TV he is "not convinced" of Strickland's innocence and suggested that the decision to free the inmate would "put other people at risk" if it turned out to be wrong.

WEEKLY ROUND-UP  OF RIGHTOUS RAGE: Entry, by staff of the Riverfront Times on this really neat ranting space, is headed 'Just No Mercy.'...Published on June 29, 2021. (The Riverfront Times (RFT) is described on Wikipedia as a  free progressive weekly newspaper in St. Louis, in the U.S. state of Missouri.)

GIST: "Just No Mercy: "Wrongfully charged." "Tainted." "A profound error we must correct now." Those are some of the ways prosecutors in Jackson County have described the conviction of Kevin Strickland for a 1978 triple murder — but that's not how Gov. Mike Parson sees it. Earlier this month, he described calls to pardon Strickland, who has spent 41 years in prison, as "not a priority." Then, on June 23, he told KSHB-TV he is "not convinced" of Strickland's innocence and suggested that the decision to free the inmate would "put other people at risk" if it turned out to be wrong. For a former sheriff, Parson should be embarrassed. He not only insults the prosecutors who have sought to correct the injustice, but to then essentially admit that (he) doesn't have evidence to back up his reticence? That he just doesn't feel like taking a risk on freeing an innocent man? It would be laughable if it wasn't so monstrous. Parson is now embroiled in fighting his own party's anti-abortion extremists to save the state budget, but he can't be bothered to listen to law enforcement standing up for Strickland — it's clear where Parson's priorities lie."

The entire rant can be read at:

https://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2021/06/29/the-big-mad-simone-biles-imos-advantage-and-anti-abortion-sore-losers

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;
—————————————————————————————————
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they’ve exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

Tammy Marquardt: Ontario: Peter Edwards, my colleague and esteemed partner on many above-the-fold Toronto Star stories gets to the heart of Tammy's heart-breaking story, in a feature headed, "She got life in prison for killing her two-year-old son, Kenneth. There was no murder."..."Over time, the truth started to seep out, as Dr. Charles Smith, the key Crown witness against her, was repudiated in a series of cases and a commission. Bad science put her in prison. Good science eventually got her freed. There was also plenty of help from lawyer James Lockyer and the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted (now Innocence Canada), which challenged Smith with reports from six internationally recognized forensic experts. They said there was no murder and that Kenneth died of natural causes. Eventually, complaints about Smith’s work brought about a public inquiry. At its conclusion in 2008, Justice Stephen Goudge declared that Smith had “actively misled” the courts and his superiors. In 2011, the College of Physicians and Surgeons cancelled Smith’s licence and publicly rebuked him for a series of botched investigations into the deaths of children. That year, the Court of Appeal set aside Tammy’s murder conviction and ordered a new trial, but the Crown withdrew charges against her."


PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  Toronto Star scribe Peter Edwards manages to capture the raw pain experienced by Tammy Marquardt  over many years after  now discredited pathologist Charles Smith came into her life and turned  her first-born child Kenneth's tragic but natural death, into murder -  as Smith was often wont to do with far too many other loving parents and caregivers.  Although there were other factors that contributed to Tammy Marquardt's wrongful conviction, as Innocent Canada points out in a synopsis of  the case on its web page which can be accessed at the link below, "If not for Charles Smith, it is unlikely that Tammy would have spent almost 14 years in prison for a “crime” that never happened..."Most people cannot imagine the pain not only of losing a child, but also of having that pain unbearably compounded by an arrest, trial and wrongful conviction for his murder. Tammy experienced it all and spent 13 years in prison for a crime that did not happen," the synopsis continues. "Though nothing can bring Kenneth back or restore the years that Tammy lost, AIDWYC fought for Tammy – as it does for all its clients – and the truth of her innocence was revealed."

Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Sometimes, she thought back to Smith and how his testimony crashed into her life.“It didn’t help that people treated him like a God,” she said, adding: “I do not blame just Smith.” “He had help … I want him to sit down and truly think in the deepest recesses of his soul, ‘Why?’ That’s it.”

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PASSAGE  OF THE DAY: "Her son Eric was taken from her immediately after she gave birth, while she was starting her prison term. He was made a Crown ward, just like her other son Keith had been two years earlier. Tammy was now truly alone. She kept maintaining that she didn’t kill Kenneth but plenty of other inmates believed she was a baby killer. Even at its best, the now-closed Prison for Women was a harsh place. Nine separate commissions recommended it be closed and a 1977 government report called it “unfit for bears, much less women.” For Tammy, prison life meant the daily craziness of taunting, name calling, and death threats. There were deep bouts of depression, anger and bitterness. “I went to bed each night wondering whether my sons were in good and loving homes,” she later said. “Were they healthy, happy and doing well in school? I starved for news of them. But none came.” Tammy, who’s a little over five-foot-one and slender, was placed in protective custody for her own safety. At one point, Tammy tried to kill herself with pills."

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STORY: "She got life in prison for killing her two-year-old son, Kenneth. There was no murder," by Staff Reporter Peter Edwards, published by The Toronto Star on June27, 2021.
 

GIST: "Tammy Marquardt was pregnant and 23 years old when she was admitted into the Kingston Prison for Women. A guard quickly offered her some advice.

He told her to lie to other inmates and say that she murdered her husband.

That way, Tammy would have some status in prison and the child inside her might be safer.


“I was all by myself,” she recalled. “I had the baby inside me. That was all of my support.”

The truth was that Marquardt was sentenced to life in prison in 1995 after she was wrongly convicted of first-degree murder in the death of her 2 ½ year old son, Kenneth.


Marquardt had rejected a prosecution offer of five years in prison in exchange for a manslaughter plea. It would be another 15 years before a court finally acknowledged she was victim of miscarriage of justice.


By then, her other sons had grown up without her.

Sometimes, Marquardt, 49, marvels that she’s still alive to tell her story.


“How in the hell did I survive?” Marquardt said in a recent, rare interview. “What was so special about me that I was able to survive this?”


Her son Eric was taken from her immediately after she gave birth, while she was starting her prison term. He was made a Crown ward, just like her other son Keith had been two years earlier.


Tammy was now truly alone. She kept maintaining that she didn’t kill Kenneth but plenty of other inmates believed she was a baby killer.


Even at its best, the now-closed Prison for Women was a harsh place. Nine separate commissions recommended it be closed and a 1977 government report called it “unfit for bears, much less women.”


For Tammy, prison life meant the daily craziness of taunting, name calling, and death threats. There were deep bouts of depression, anger and bitterness. “I went to bed each night wondering whether my sons were in good and loving homes,” she later said. “Were they healthy, happy and doing well in school? I starved for news of them. But none came.”


Tammy, who’s a little over five-foot-one and slender, was placed in protective custody for her own safety.

At one point, Tammy tried to kill herself with pills.


She gravitated toward Native healing circles in custody.

Her background’s Oji-Cree, as well as Scottish, Irish and English.

She traces one of her grandmothers to the Manitoulin Island area but grew up in the GTA, raised by a single mother. Her homes included a Metro Toronto housing complex on Lawrence Avenue East and then shelters and friends’ homes after sexual advances from a male in her mother’s home.

In prison, she found herself feeling more at home with Indigenous inmates.


“Throughout childhood, I was forced against my native heritage,” she said. “I always wanted to know … I was forced to deny it.”

“It was like the Native community was more caring, more embracing, more compassionate. The other people were more strict, more judgmental ... Let’s be honest. Nobody likes to feel judged.”


Over time, the truth started to seep out, as Dr. Charles Smith, the key Crown witness against her, was repudiated in a series of cases and a commission.

Bad science put her in prison.

Good science eventually got her freed.


There was also plenty of help from lawyer James Lockyer and the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted (now Innocence Canada), which challenged Smith with reports from six internationally recognized forensic experts. They said there was no murder and that Kenneth died of natural causes.


Eventually, complaints about Smith’s work brought about a public inquiry. At its conclusion in 2008, Justice Stephen Goudge declared that Smith had “actively misled” the courts and his superiors.


In 2011, the College of Physicians and Surgeons cancelled Smith’s licence and publicly rebuked him for a series of botched investigations into the deaths of children.

That year, the Court of Appeal set aside Tammy’s murder conviction and ordered a new trial, but the Crown withdrew charges against her.


Smith could not be reached for comment despite approaches by the Star to lawyers who have represented him, a friend, and a missionary group to which he has been connected.


For Tammy, freedom is far better than prison but her boys had grown up apart from her.

The world was also a different place. She recalled asking someone a question shortly after her release from prison and being told, “Just Google it.”

“What’s a Google?” she asked.

“I got laughed at so hard,” she said. “It’s totally foreign to me. When I went in we didn’t have no internet … It’s very overwhelming at times.”


She turned to drugs, including cocaine, for a time.

“I did go down a very dark road for a very long time after I got out,” she said.

She moved far from the city and what she called “a lot of the nonsense of the concrete world.”

She sometimes wrote poetry.


One of her works is called “Darkest of Times,” which she started writing when she was pregnant with Kenneth. It reads:

“Feelings are too high to get over

Too deep to get under

Too big to go around

But most of all, feelings are too hard to go through alone

So the best thing to do is to bring a friend along to lend a helping hand.”


She received counselling, and speaks highly of the help given by 2-Spirited People of the 1st Nations. It helped her work through major bouts of depression and nightmares.


Sometimes, she felt like her life was flashing before her eyes in slow motion as she struggled to understand things she couldn’t control.

“It’s OK to have these feelings,” she said. “It’s the way we react to them.

“It’s like ... sometimes you have to be hard like ice and sometimes you have to flow with the stream. You’re never just locked in one box.”

“You can’t control a flashback,” she said. “You can’t control a body memory.”


Sometimes, she thought back to Smith and how his testimony crashed into her life.“It didn’t help that people treated him like a God,” she said, adding: “I do not blame just Smith.”

“He had help … I want him to sit down and truly think in the deepest recesses of his soul, ‘Why?’ That’s it.”


Sometimes she just cried.

She got off medication, except for medical marijuana, saying she had been “basically a medicating zombie.”

“This is as clean as my brain has ever been in my entire life.”


She got a dog she named Chewbacca who’s the ginger-haired runt of the litter of a bullmastiff and lab.

Chewbacca accompanies her during long walks in the woods and just stares when she does the occasional primal scream.

“I highly recommend to anyone with PTSD — get a dog,” she said.


Sometimes, Chewbacca watches as Tammy takes off her shoes in the woods.

“I love dancing in the rain. I love walking barefoot in the woods. There’s a lot to learn when you embrace nature.”

She limits her contact with people and considers Chewbacca a usually solid judge of human character.


Sometimes, she works part-time serving ice cream.

Other times, she works in a laundry, which she prefers. It’s less “peopley.”

The end of the pandemic promises her more freedom.


Recently, she bought a pickup truck and she’s now trying to get a test for her driver’s license.

Pandemic restrictions have made examination appointments harder to book but she says she’s determined.


“I don’t want to be at the mercy of other people anymore. I want my independence.""


The entire story can be read at: 


https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/06/27/she-got-life-in-prison-for-killing-her-two-year-old-son-kenneth-there-was-no-murder.html

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;
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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;
—————————————————————————————————
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they’ve exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: 

False Confessions: (Part Three): Leon Brown and Henry McCollum: 'Scalawag' provides a 'Southern' perspective' on police claims of 'qualified immunity'' the context of the brother's case, in a story headed, "How 'ordinary police work' tramples civil rights"..Foundational to our criminal justice system is an obvious truth: State authority trumps civil rights. Law enforcement testimony is accepted against the word of the accused, no matter what takes place behind closed doors. I know this because I have been incarcerated for nearly 24 years as a consequence of such conduct." (Lyle C. May.).

PUBLISHER'S NOTE This Blog is interested in false confessions because of the disturbing number of exonerations in the USA, Canada and multiple other jurisdictions throughout the world, where, in the absence of incriminating forensic evidence the conviction is based on self-incrimination – and because of the growing body of  scientific research showing how vulnerable suspects (especially young suspects)  are to widely used interrogation methods  such as  the notorious ‘Reid Technique.’ As  all too many of this Blog's post have shown, I also recognize that pressure for false confessions can take many forms, up to and including inducement. deception (read ‘outright lies’) physical violence,  and even physical and mental torture.


Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog:

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: The Third Degree: "At the age of 19, homeless and suffering from mental illness, law enforcement detained me in the early morning hours of July 10, 1997, as a suspect in a double homicide. The officer who took me into custody did not read me my Miranda rights, stating only that I was wanted for questioning. Heavily intoxicated on Valium, alcohol, and a psychotropic medication prescribed during a recent hospital stay, I was held and isolated while, in another room, detectives interviewed a "witness" to the crime. An attendant officer kept prodding me awake until 6 a.m. When the detectives finally interrogated me, I was sleep-deprived, intoxicated, and mentally ill—all at an age when cognitive reasoning is not fully developed. During my interrogation, I was incapable of comprehending what the detectives were saying or asking of me. I was not cognizant of the fact that they were feeding me information about a crime I did not commit, obtained from another suspect—their sole "witness." In my case, officers used what's called the Reid Technique, which relies on psychological tactics to overcome a person's will during an interrogation. Law enforcement officers will isolate a suspect in a room, falsely claim overwhelming evidence or cooperation from a nonexistent witness, and then cajole, bully, threaten, yell, and lie about a lesser punishment for cooperation. Interrogators also feed the person information about the crime, details known only to law enforcement and the perpetrator, and use the suspect's memory of those facts in the course of a confession as proof of its validity." The Reid Technique increases the chances of false confessions and wrongful convictions. In a 2004 Northwestern University study, researchers identified at least 125 cases in which false confessions were obtained using the Reid Technique, including high-profile cases in which convictions were eventually overturned, like the Norfolk Four, Central Park Five, and Beatrice Six."


---------------------------------------------------



STORY: "Qualified immunity: How 'ordinary police work' tramples civil rights,: by Lyle C. May, published by 'Scalawag'  on June 23, 2021.Lyle C. May is  described as: "a prison journalist, abolitionist, Ohio university alum, and member of the Alpha Sigma Lambda honor society. As he pursues every legal avenue to overturn his wrongful conviction and death sentence, Lyle advocates for greater access to higher education in prison. His fight is that of millions, and while the opposition is strong, his desire for equal justice is stronger."  (Wikipedia describes 'Scalawag' as a nonprofit print and digital magazine focused on Southern politics and culture.Its works have been cited  in many books, journals and news outlets, including 'Longreads', PEN America, and the New York Times.)


SUB-HEADING: "Why law enforcement wilfully ignores wrongful convictions for decades."


GIST: "On September 28, 1983, 15-year-old Leon Brown and his 19-year-old half brother Henry McCollum were detained for interrogation about the gruesome assault, rape, and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie in Red Springs, North Carolina. 


For hours, Robeson County Sheriff's deputies simultaneously cajoled, bullied, threatened, yelled, and lied to the two Black, intellectually disabled teenagers while feeding them information about a crime they didn't commit.


Police told them that they could go home if they signed a piece of paper.

Wanting it to be over, and not understanding that they were being coerced, the two teenagers signed false confessions.


But Henry and Leon didn't go home for 31 years.


Only after they signed the fabricated documents did the deputies read them their Miranda rights. A year later, they were sentenced to death.


The same night as the brothers' detainment, police ran into a man named Roscoe Artis, who just weeks later would lead police to the scene of another identical rape-murder he confessed to committing—in the same soybean field, in the town of 4,000 people. Artis lived a block away from where Buie's body was found.


Investigators didn't bother to run a background check on Artis the night of the murder. If they had, they would have seen his history of committing violent sexual attacks dating back to 1957, and the active warrant for his arrest in yet another rape-murder in which the victim was asphyxiated and left wearing only a bra—just as Buie was. 


My own coerced confession to a crime I did not commit was a routine matter for interrogators.

But Artis was never mentioned in relation to the Buie case. In the decades to follow, as all three sat on death row, he repeatedly told attorneys that Henry and Leon had nothing to do with the murder, expressed guilt for Buie's death, and revealed new details about the crime. 


Artis wasn't listed as a suspect in the case until 2014, when the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, a neutral state agency, developed exculpatory DNA evidence indicating Artis, and not the brothers—as all signs should have from the start.


Still, Sheriff Kenneth Sealy, deputy Joel Locklear, and State Bureau of Investigation agents Leroy Allen and Kenneth Snead, ignored him as a suspect—both on the night of the brothers' detainment, and for the next 31 years.


In 2015, in response to petitions and advocacy on the outside, Republican Governor Pat McCrory pardoned the brothers following an additional nine-month personal review of the case. 


Henry and Leon filed a federal civil suit against the Town of Red Springs, the SBI, and the Robeson County Sheriff's Department for their wrongful imprisonment. Red Springs settled with the brothers out-of-court after their release, but law enforcement held out.


The SBI and the sheriff's department, represented by the Attorney General's' office, claimed that what happened to Henry and Leon was a product of "ordinary police work," and that the doctrine of qualified immunity kept the officers from liability. 


Qualified immunity, based on the assumption that the officers were working in "good faith" and integrity throughout the investigation, protects law enforcement officers' rights above those whose lives they ruin. "Good faith" is what sustains wrongful convictions like Henry and Leon's—to the exclusion of facts, exculpatory evidence, or any other due diligence reasonable law enforcement officers are supposedly obligated to perform during the investigation of a crime.2 "Good faith" put the innocent teenagers behind bars, and allowed a rapist to murder again.


Last month, a jury in Raleigh determined that SBI agents Allen and Snead violated Henry and Leon's constitutional rights by coercing them into confessing to the crime they did not commit. Henry and Leon were awarded $31 million each in compensatory damages—$1 million for each year they spent wrongfully imprisoned—plus a total of $13 million in punitive damages. The payout represents the largest combined settlement in a wrongful conviction case in U.S. history.


This is the precedent-setting case for people who experience police brutality behind closed doors. But the fact remains that it took more than three decades to correctly assign guilt and prove the obvious—that these teenagers were not involved in this crime. 


Hard-fought exonerations like these are not a sign that the system works, but a snapshot of who it works against: Racial minorities, the impoverished, and those people society is willing to throw away. It's just as much a measure of who it works for: The ruling class and the law enforcement charged with upholding power.


Foundational to our criminal justice system is an obvious truth: State authority trumps civil rights.  Law enforcement testimony is accepted against the word of the accused, no matter what takes place behind closed doors.


I know this because I have been incarcerated for nearly 24 years as a consequence of such conduct.


The Third Degree

At the age of 19, homeless and suffering from mental illness, law enforcement detained me in the early morning hours of July 10, 1997, as a suspect in a double homicide. The officer who took me into custody did not read me my Miranda rights, stating only that I was wanted for questioning. Heavily intoxicated on Valium, alcohol, and a psychotropic medication prescribed during a recent hospital stay, I was held and isolated while, in another room, detectives interviewed a "witness" to the crime. An attendant officer kept prodding me awake until 6 a.m. When the detectives finally interrogated me, I was sleep-deprived, intoxicated, and mentally ill—all at an age when cognitive reasoning is not fully developed. During my interrogation, I was incapable of comprehending what the detectives were saying or asking of me. I was not cognizant of the fact that they were feeding me information about a crime I did not commit, obtained from another suspect—their sole "witness." In my case, officers used what's called the Reid Technique, which relies on psychological tactics to overcome a person's will during an interrogation. Law enforcement officers will isolate a suspect in a room, falsely claim overwhelming evidence or cooperation from a nonexistent witness, and then cajole, bully, threaten, yell, and lie about a lesser punishment for cooperation. Interrogators also feed the person information about the crime, details known only to law enforcement and the perpetrator, and use the suspect's memory of those facts in the course of a confession as proof of its validity."


The Reid Technique increases the chances of false confessions and wrongful convictions. In a 2004 Northwestern University study, researchers identified at least 125 cases in which false confessions were obtained using the Reid Technique, including high-profile cases in which convictions were eventually overturned, like the Norfolk Four, Central Park Five, and Beatrice Six.


This high likelihood of producing false confessions with the Reid Technique even prompted North Carolina to become the sixth state to pass a law in 2007 requiring the complete electronic recording of interrogations in homicide cases that happen behind closed doors—although the law is not retroactive, and even audio-video recordings can fail to prevent false confessions.

In the absence of any electronic recording of my own interrogation, proving that it was a false confession may be difficult, but not impossible.

Still, my own coerced confession to a crime I did not commit was a routine matter for interrogators.


Law enforcement officers have a long history of physically torturing suspects, applying what is colloquially called the "third degree" to grant a confession. Fists or phone books, burning cigarettes or wielding batons, these examinations are not about whether the person subjected to their brutality provides accurate information. The goal has always been to score a conviction.



In a just world, the state would hold law enforcement to a higher standard than ordinary citizens, not a lower one.


This was true during the infamous Burge torture cases in Chicago, which showed that between 1972 and 1991, Police Commander Jon Burge and fellow officers beat, suffocated, electrocuted, and generally tortured over 118 African American citizens, coercing them into false confessions and wrongful imprisonment for decades.10 The press, political class, and most of the public were largely apathetic about Burge's "house of screams" until an FBI investigation revealed the allegations of torture were true.


Jon Burge was prosecuted in 2010 and received a laughable three years on house arrest. Legislation for a Reparations Fund for Burge Torture Victims passed in 2015.12

But investigations like these are the exception rather than the rule. Besides, modern interrogations involve more subtle coercion than that of the third degree, the nuances of which seldom become public knowledge. Last year, at the height of anti-police brutality protests, the FBI launched a national database on law enforcement's use of force. Only 40 percent of police participated.


'Good faith':

Qualified immunity, on principle, severely undermines Section 1983 of The Civil Rights Act of 1871 (42 U.S. Code § 1983), which allows for the right to file a lawsuit against public officials, including in cases of excessive police force. Passage of the section came by way of the Reconstruction Congress as part of the Ku Klux Klan act, a piece of legislation designed to help combat lawlessness and civil rights violators in the postwar South.13Intended to protect Black voters, it was enacted a few years after the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to "give teeth to the promise of liberty and equality enshrined in the amendment's provisions."


Nearly a century later, in reaction to civil rights legislation, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Pierson v. Ray (1967), developed the doctrine of qualified immunity to limit the impact of liability to state actors who violate someone's federally protected rights "in good faith.”


In 1982, the court made that standard even harder to prove. With the addition of the standard of "clearly established law" in Harlow v. Fitzgerald, plaintiffs also had to demonstrate a case with "functionally identical facts" to their own mistreatment, for a shot to prove if their civil rights were indeed violated.


In so doing, the court created the ultimate Catch-22, making it all the more unlikely that law enforcement would be held accountable for civil rights violations. To even get before a jury, civil rights plaintiffs must essentially first win two prior cases in a row—once before the district court, and again before the court of appeals. This precedent continues to govern qualified immunity today.


For Henry and Leon, coerced just a year after the Harlow v. Fitzgerald decision, this meant that their case required proof that RCS deputies and SBI agents violated both standards during their investigation. Since Brady v. Maryland requires the release of exculpatory evidence—and because no reasonable law enforcement officer would have ignored Roscoe Artis as a suspect—one would assume that an easy point to prove.


But the letter of the law is not that simple. The brothers were tasked with more than just proving their innocence: They not only had to demonstrate an instance in which law enforcement withheld exculpatory evidence, coerced innocent defendants into confessing, and lied to cover it all up, but one in which the officers were held liable for it. The list of law enforcement's self-preserving internal protections only piles against them from there.


'Why didn't somebody figure this thing out?'

In 2005, the Center for Death Penalty Litigation had a cigarette butt from the 1983 Buie crime scene tested for DNA. It excluded Henry and Leon as a match. Not until 2014 did the state crime lab finally upload the DNA profile into its database, when they found that it matched Roscoe Artis. When the results reached Robeson County D.A. Johnson Britt, he said: "Oh my god, the same [rape-murder], a mile apart… Why didn't somebody figure this thing out?"


The question was disingenuous, asked by a career prosecutor who benefits from absolute immunity just like his predecessor, Joe Freeman Britt, who maliciously prosecuted the teens. It's a question as disingenuous as the answer is obvious: There is little to no accountability behind the closed doors of police work.


It was later revealed that other evidence sat buried for decades too. After Artis' conviction, the Red Springs Police Department asked the SBI to test fingerprints on a beer from the crime scene for a match, three days before Henry and Leon's 1984 trial. That detail alone should have raised suspicion for the district attorney, but the test went unchecked.


But prosecutors often accept shoddy work, tenuous theories, falsified evidence, or maintain the same biases and tunnel vision as the officers they oversee. Moreover, bad actors rely on the institutionalized cronyism of police unions to protect them. Those unions, in turn, campaign against reformist agendas that attempt to remove barriers to greater scrutiny and accountability of law enforcement officers. As a result, police crime and misconduct take on a protected status.


Official misconduct, which includes law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and other government officials who abuse their power, is the primary reason why wrongful convictions stand for as long as they do. According to the University of Michigan Law School's National Registry of Exonerations, between 1989 and 2015, nearly half (47 percent) of 1,740 noncapital exonerations were due to official misconduct. Of the 116 recorded death row exonerations, 76 percent were due to official misconduct.


This small sampling does not include those people who had a conviction or sentence overturned but were not exonerated, nor does it include the many people in prison who struggle to get their cases heard. There is no database that tracks official misconduct in the criminal legal system. We only know it happens because older cases sometimes make it through innocence projects like the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, which has exposed corruption in the case of nearly every person it helped exonerate.


Punitive damages in an unjust world:

Maybe the worst of it all, the insult to injury, is how law enforcement and prosecutors typically continue to view exonerees as criminals who escaped punishment. By law, exonerees are not viewed as crime victims. This is reflected in the state's refusal to publicly acknowledge wrongful convictions, and manifests in their disqualification from state victims' services.


An understanding of the racist, classist, and sexist roots of the U.S. police system help to show how—and why—the current structures work to keep certain people out of society more than they work to enforce justice or fairness.


While reading this article, consider the following questions:

How has the system been set up to reinforce "innocence" as a measure of racial and socio-economic status?
What historic events have influenced why qualified immunity works to protect who it protects?


In a just world, state agencies would discipline or fire bad actors for misconduct—and improve transparency during investigation of a crime. In a just world, the state would hold law enforcement to a higher standard than ordinary citizens, not a lower one. In a just world, "accountability" in the mouths of the oppressed would not be a curse against public officials, or a hammer in the hands of the state. Transparency throughout the criminal legal system would be a good thing that enables justice for all, not a thing resisted by public officials trying to control the narrative and hide their own crimes.


In a just world, Henry and Leon's precedent-setting case would not be a rarity, nor would it be ignored by the legislators that continue to support half-measures that don't even scratch the surface of what is offered by task forces seeking to retroactively overturn false convictions.

In a just world, the courts would see the burden put on the brothers as motivation to do better. 


Henry and Leon may have received millions, but other exonerees don't even qualify for reentry programs post-prison. After release, some are lucky to get $45 for a bus ticket. Not all exonerees—or even most of them—receive compensation from the state, which in North Carolina is capped at $750,000 no matter how many decades are spent wrongfully imprisoned.


"Fair? What's fair?" Recent exoneree Ronnie Long said when asked if he thought $750,000 was adequate compensation after spending 44 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, the third-longest imprisonment in U.S. history for an exonerated defendant. "Ask yourself that question when these people took away your 20s, your 30s, your 40s, your 50s, and they started on your 60s."


Equal protection means everyone is accountable to the same laws in the same ways, that no special treatment or punishment is affected because of status, class, or race. That was the intended design behind the 1871 laws—to work toward a more just world.


But much like the numerous Confederate monuments erected in the wake of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, qualified immunity is a memorial to division and injustice in the face of past progress. And just like those monuments, as long as qualified immunity stands, there can be no real justice.  Pull it down.""


The entire story can be read at:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGkXwGgQxfzvpVnnPXtSqQPRrhS


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;
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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;
—————————————————————————————————
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they’ve exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project.