PUBLISHER'S NOTE: "Reading the devastating story of Emmanuel Scott and Tiffany Woods, (The Marshall Project and collaborators) - subject of this post - I couldn't help but think about Rodricus Crawford's death row ordeal in Caddo Parrish, Louisiana. As the U.S. National Registry of Exonerations informs us (Author Maurice Possley), "On the morning of February 16, 2012, 22-year-old Rodricus Crawford awoke to find his one-year-old son, Roderius, not breathing. The boy, who had been suffering from what appeared to be a cold, had been sleeping with Crawford without incident during the prior two nights in Shreveport, Louisiana. Family members attempted CPR, but the boy did not respond and paramedics determined he was dead. They concluded almost immediately that the boy was the victim of a homicide based on a split lip and what appeared to a bruise on his buttocks and the side of his head. Crawford was taken in for questioning by police and repeatedly denied harming the child. He was nevertheless charged with first-degree murder after a pathologist conducted an autopsy and concluded the boy was smothered to death." Convicted and sentenced to death, Rodricus was freed three years later after three years on death row after his death penalty lawyers amassed overwhelming scientific evidence that Roderius died of sepsis trigged by an underlying pneumonia - and not trauma as the local coroner and his forensic pathologist suggested. Rodricus's case fascinated me because it resembled many of the Charles Smith cases in which the death was tragic but natural, and the crime was in the mind of the flawed pathologist, or coroner, all too often supported by police and prosecutors only too willing to close the case and quell public pressure. I therefore been wondering how did this innocent young black grieving father Black man (yes, 'colour' is very relevant to the story) get convicted and placed on death row when no crime had occurred. My conclusions:
A: A badly bungled medical investigation: (As described by writer Rachel Aviv in her article "Revenge Killing; race and the death penalty in a Louisiana Parrish) published in The New Yorker in the July 6&13 2015 issue: "A week before Crawford’s trial, in November, 2013, (Defence Lawyer) Gold asked Cox to dismiss the case. He had just received a report from his medical expert, Daniel Spitz, a forensic pathologist from Michigan, who co-authored a pathology textbook that is widely used in medical schools. Spitz found that Roderius’s blood had tested positive for sepsis, and he concluded that he had died of pneumonia. Spitz told me that after reviewing the case he thought that there “wasn’t enough evidence to even put this before a jury. You didn’t have anybody who thought this guy committed murder except for one pathologist who decided that it was homicide on what seemed like a whim.” Cox told me that the new medical report “gave me pause.” But after meeting again with the first pathologist, James Traylor, he felt confident about the theory of smothering. In court, Traylor testified as cross-sections of the baby’s bruised bottom were displayed for the jury. Traylor said that the baby’s pneumonia couldn’t have been severe, because family members hadn’t reported a fever or rapid heartbeat. “I’m the guy that did the autopsy,” Traylor told the jury. “There is no one else that can speak for the victim other than myself.” Traylor said that his finding of suffocation was based entirely on the bruises on Roderius’s lips, but he never sampled the tissue to date the injury, a basic test that would have revealed whether the bruises came from the earlier fall in the bathroom, an explanation that he ignored. He misstated medical science, telling the jury that Roderius’s brain had swelled as a result of suffocation. Swelling does not occur in cases of smothering, because the person dies rapidly, and the brain can’t swell if blood has stopped circulating. The brain can swell, though, in cases of pneumonia with sepsis. When Spitz testified, he explained that sepsis in young children can be fatal within a few hours, with early symptoms passing unnoticed. But his testimony was eclipsed by a cross-examination that lasted twice as long as the direct testimony. Cox interrogated him about a mistake he’d made in an autopsy in Michigan, where he had overlooked a bullet wound in a decomposed body. “You are overextended,” Cox told him. “You are overworked.” The judge later wrote of Spitz that “any veracity that he had was destroyed.” Crawford’s mother, Abbie, felt uneasy as soon as the jury, composed of nine white people and three black ones, returned to the courtroom. “All I remember hearing is ‘Guilty, guilty, guilty,’ ” she told me. “Rodricus looked at me, and I looked at him, and I just tried to hold it all in." (Spitz's opinion was later backed up - and the Coroner's flawed opinion rejected - by an extraordinary slate of medical/science experts.)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/06/revenge-killing
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
B: A discriminatory jury selection process - the actual ground Louisiana's Supreme Court advanced for overturning the conviction and ordering a new trial. (Prosecutor Dale Cox may as well have been waving a placard that read - 'no blacks wanted on this panel - or at least as few as possible'. HL). Prosecutor Dale Cox used five of seven peremptory challenges to dismiss black jurors from the jury. This in itself was not shocking to me as I was aware of other U.S. cases where prosecutors had been found to have abused procedures meant to ensure that Blacks and other minorities would have fair trials by securing a jury of their peers.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C: After obtaining the conviction (not surprisingly), the prosecutor telling the jurors that Jesus Christ commanded that death be the punishment in the case. As the National Registry of Exonerations described it more fully: "On November 12, 2013, the jury convicted Crawford of first-degree murder. The penalty phase then commenced and during closing argument, Caddo Parish prosecutor Dale Cox argued that Jesus Christ had commanded that death be the punishment in the case. He cited Jesus as saying, “To the adult, who would harm one of these, (referring to children) woe be unto you, who would harm one of these. Now, this is Jesus Christ of the New Testament. It would be better if though you were never born. You shall have a millstone cast around your neck and you will be thrown into the sea . . .the thing about Christ…He reached a just verdict which is what the law asks you to reach in this case: A just verdict...And that's why I think that we should not lightly disregard His words when He talks about what He would do to someone who hurt one of these...what He would do.” Not surprisingly, the next day the tainted jury unanimously voted to impose the death penalty - and the state was now free to kill the innocent young Black man.
D: The sheer hatred which tainted the prosecution is illustrated by a statement released by The 'Equal Justice Initiative' under the heading 'Rodricus Crawford exoneration highlights racial bias.'... "A month later, Cox wrote a memo to the state’s probation department: “I am sorry that Louisiana has adopted lethal injection as the form of implementing the death penalty,” he wrote. “Mr. Crawford deserves as much physical suffering as it is humanly possible to endure before he dies.
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=5123
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To sum up: When all is said and done, apart from pursuing a death penalty prosecution based on a clearly specious inadequate medical investigation, Cox went out of his way to get a jury that was more likely to convict Rodricus, he used his rhetoric to get the jurors to allow the state to kill Rodricus, and he then did the best he could to ensure that Rodricus would die a terrible death.
Little wonder Rodricus Crawford, an innocent young man, was convicted and came so terribly close to death.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
So that's why I am so angry to read the Marshall Project, Times-Picayune/Advocate story about Tiffany Woods and Emmanuel Scott, these two hapless souls who, like Rodricus Crawford, are suffering from 'Caddo Parrish Louisiana Justice', and desperately need attention to their plight. I am grateful to these publications and their reporters (Cary Aspeenwall, Lee Skene, and Ilica Mahajan), for bringing this disturbing case to our attention - and I hope that their commitment to real justice will help trigger a very necessary reinvestigation of the case. I will be on the lookout for developments:
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
GIST: Shreveport, La. "The night before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, Tiffany Woods and Emmanuel Scott fled the city, driving 320 miles northwest with their four small children. The youngest was two months old: Little Emmanuel. A New Orleans hospital discharged the premature infant about three weeks before Katrina struck. He had tested positive at birth for a genetic abnormality, but crucial follow-up testing hadn’t happened before the hurricane hit. The family stayed in a shelter here, feeding the baby formula they bought with government vouchers. Baby Emmanuel was extremely sleepy and had trouble feeding, according to both hospital records and his young parents. In October, they ran out of formula vouchers, so they bought organic cow’s milk for the baby instead, they later told police, hoping he might tolerate it better. Within weeks, Emmanuel died of malnutrition, according to an autopsy. Prosecutors decided his death was murder in the second degree — which doesn’t require proof that anyone intended to harm him. A judge found the baby’s parents guilty, and in 2008 sentenced them to spend the rest of their lives in prison, with no hope of parole. Scott was 18 years old when Emmanuel died; Woods was 25."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Louisiana sentences people to life without parole at one of the highest rates in the nation, data shows. Nearly 4,200 men and women are serving lifetime sentences in the state, for crimes that range from homicide and rape to rarer cases of repeat purse snatchings and child neglect, an investigation by The Marshall Project and The Times-Picayune | The Advocate found.
Second-degree murder charges, like the ones Woods and Scott were found guilty of, are a big driver of life-without-parole sentences. The state has long had the highest homicide rate in the nation.
But Louisiana law contains an unusually sweeping definition of second-degree murder that includes even some accidental deaths, legal experts say. And despite the wide variations in circumstances that can produce a second-degree murder conviction — from a premeditated ambush to a getaway car accident — the sentence is the same: mandatory life without parole. Judges have almost no discretion.
More than half of the people serving life in Louisiana were convicted of second-degree murder, our investigation found, including over three-quarters of the 124 women serving life (parole is forbidden for almost all life sentences in the state).
Pennsylvania is the only other state where a second-degree murder conviction guarantees an automatic sentence of life without parole, according to The Sentencing Project, an advocacy organization. Pennsylvania and Louisiana rank among the top five states for lifetime sentences in the U.S., according to the group’s analysis.
Louisiana’s statute is extreme, said Preston Robinson, executive director of the nonprofit Second Look Alliance, which lobbies for changes to the state's sentencing practices.
“The law is so broad that it's leading to things no rational person could have possibly intended,” said Robinson, a former chief of staff for Sen. John Kennedy, the Louisiana Republican.
Supporters of the second-degree murder law say that it is meant to be used only in egregious cases, and that mandatory life without parole provides solace for victims. The child-neglect provisions are “designed to protect those that are the least able to protect themselves,” said Loren Lampert, executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association.
Yet data suggests Louisiana may not be applying the punishment equally. More than 70% of people serving life without parole are Black, according to our analysis of state data, while about 66% of those imprisoned in Louisiana are Black. Black people make up a third of Louisiana’s population.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Woods grew up in New Orleans East, where she dropped out of high school a few months before graduating when she gave birth to her first son. She had three healthy pregnancies, but two months before her fourth child was due in 2005, she started bleeding heavily. She had not gotten prenatal care, according to her medical records, and told doctors she had an occasional beer during her pregnancy.
Doctors delivered the baby boy early via cesarean section on June 23. He weighed just over three pounds, according to medical records, and was dehydrated. They had to resuscitate him and insert a tube to help him breathe.
Like all newborns in the U.S., Emmanuel had blood drawn so doctors could screen for genetic abnormalities and diseases, including MCAD deficiency, which makes the body unable to break down certain fats (the abbreviation stands for Medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency). Babies with this condition face an increased risk of sudden death due to low blood sugar, and need very frequent feedings.
Emmanuel’s MCAD screen came back positive. But blood testing isn’t foolproof, so babies with positive results almost always need follow-up testing at a biomedical genetic lab. In the meantime, Tulane Medical Center fed Emmanuel special baby formula on a round-the-clock schedule, according to medical records, trying to help him grow bigger and healthier.
Before the hospital sent the baby home after 41 days in intensive care, staff taught Woods what to do for her premature infant. But his discharge papers said nothing about very frequent feeding, and Woods says hospital staff never mentioned that. The hospital did not respond to requests for comment.
He was released weighing about 5 pounds. A doctor wrote on his chart: “Good luck with this one, he is very CUTE.”
Days later, Woods took the baby to a pediatrician for a follow-up appointment and vaccines. His visit to the Tulane genetics lab was scheduled for Aug. 29 — the day after New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued an evacuation order as Katrina menaced the city.
The family never made it back to Tulane.Katrina evacuees — many of them poor and Black — often faced intense discrimination. Some communities refused to house evacuees, even when the federal government provided trailers or money.
Jason Shelton, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington who lived in Houston right after the hurricane, published a study in 2009 documenting the resentment evacuees faced.
“They were seen as ‘outsiders’ coming and straining public services, tearing ‘our’ culture down,” Shelton said in an interview.
Woods and her kids were crammed into a sports arena in Shreveport before moving into a motel and, eventually, a rented house. In a video interview last month from her Louisiana prison, she said she sometimes felt the judgment of those who were supposed to be helping her after they evacuated, but she brushed it off.
“I wasn’t worried about what they were saying; I was in survival mode,” she said.
When Woods and Scott ran out of government vouchers in late October, they decided to try organic cow’s milk. Experts say it’s a common mistake, though pediatricians generally advise against giving cow’s milk to children under one year old.
On the morning of Nov. 27, the parents found Emmanuel unresponsive in his crib and called 911.
Police and a social worker sent to the home quickly became suspicious of the couple, they later testified. Woods didn't react the way they thought a grieving mother should, seeming calm and detached rather than crying and hysterical.
Officers noted the house was tidy, but photographed the contents of the fridge, including home-cooked food, cartons of organic milk, and a few large cans of Natural Ice beer.
Police collected partially full baby bottles found in the crib as evidence. Woods told them she had been worried about her baby’s health and wanted to take him to a doctor, but Scott disagreed and she couldn’t drive.
In September 2006, the Caddo Parish district attorney’s office charged Emmanuel’s parents with second-degree murder. Prosecutors needed to prove only that Scott and Woods were negligent for not taking their child to a doctor, because under Louisiana law, cruelty to juveniles is one of the felonies that allows for a murder conviction in accidental death.
“This is a pretty astonishing law,” said Guyora Binder, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law who studies murder charges. “This particular child abuse offense would not even be a felony in other jurisdictions.”
Scott and Woods were defended by court-appointed lawyers, who advised them to opt for a bench trial together before Judge Jeanette Garrett.
In his opening statement, the prosecutor, Brady O’Callaghan, argued that the parents should have sought help for the baby. “Ms. Woods and Mr. Scott had the complete custody and care of this child,” he said, “and they watched it die of starvation and dehydration in a city that at that time was doing everything it could to reach out to evacuees and in a place where medical care is available to anyone who needs it.”
O’Callaghan told the judge that a test eliminated the possibility of MCAD deficiency. A letter from a genetic specialist at Tulane filed in court said tests after the initial screening suggested that it may have produced a false positive. But some of the test results went missing, according to hospital records.
A forensic pathologist who ruled the child died of malnutrition testified that the baby’s liver also indicated he did not have a metabolic disorder.
But Dr. Irene Chang, a biochemical geneticist at Seattle Children’s Hospital who has published studies on the metabolic disorder, said in an interview that a pathologist wouldn’t be able to tell if a baby had died of MCAD deficiency by examining his liver — genetic testing is the only surefire way.
The genetic testing was never completed.
The defense lawyers said Emmanuel may have had MCAD deficiency or some other disorder, but that neither parent understood how sick their child was. They also argued that if the hospital had such a hard time feeding Emmanuel, what chance did his parents have as impoverished evacuees far from home?
But prosecutors argued that the infant’s death was 90 days after the storm, so the devastation and trauma of Katrina shouldn’t be factored in.
“Emmanuel did not starve in a hut in a war-ravaged African nation,” O’Callaghan said in closing arguments. “He didn't starve while he was trapped in an attic in New Orleans, surrounded by floodwater. He starved in a house in Shreveport, a house with a refrigerator full of beer and food and baby food and two healthy parents.”
O’Callaghan, now a judge in Caddo Parish, said in an interview that Woods and Scott showed “absolute callous disregard for the child” and lacked remorse.
“As a prosecutor at the time, I never had reservations about the punishment they got,” he said. “If we want to talk about the slow death sentence, then look at the child’s pictures.”
The autopsy photos showed Little Emmanuel with an open mouth, thin arms and a sunken, hollowed stomach.
“The only way I can describe those photos is absolutely haunting,” Judge Garrett said when she found the parents guilty.
In her ruling, she stated the parents had money for beer and cigarettes, so they could have bought formula. There were inconsistencies in their timeline and testimony, she said, and the law required her to sentence both to life without parole. (Judge Garrett did not respond to requests for comment.)
Little Emmanuel’s family says the photos, preserved in the court file, are the only known pictures of him.
The Louisiana Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions and sentences in August 2009, saying: “There is no excuse for what these two people allowed to happen to the infant.”
The current Caddo Parish district attorney, James Stewart, said he couldn’t comment on the case because he was a judge on the Second Circuit panel, which upheld the convictions and sentences.
Eddie Mouton, the lawyer who represented Scott, the baby’s father, said he believes Little Emmanuel was another casualty of Katrina.
“This was a tragic case on every level,” he said. “Unfortunately, the law just didn’t contemplate a situation like this.”
Scott said in an interview that he struggles to stay hopeful and motivated after almost 15 years inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
“When I first got locked up, I woke up in that cell and kept my eyes closed, hoping it was all a dream,” he said.
He was transferred to maximum security housing at the prison in 2017, after being accused of attempted escape. He said he smoked synthetic marijuana, started hallucinating and somehow ended up on the roof. He now spends his days and nights in a one-man cell.
When Woods was arrested, her three remaining children — two sons from prior relationships with men who were later incarcerated, and a baby daughter with Scott — were placed in foster care. She gave birth to her youngest, another daughter, behind bars.
The kids bounced around from foster care to relatives, according to court records and interviews. Eventually, Troy John Woods and his older brother, Nie-John Woods, were sent to live with a cousin, Allen Warrick, in New Orleans.
“I wonder if anyone even considered these children in the process — to take their parents away and leave them hanging in the balance,” Warrick said in an interview. “There was no real hope for them.”
Now adults, Woods’ two oldest sons said their brother’s death defined their childhoods.
Troy John, 21, said some of his earliest memories are of fighting schoolmates who taunted him and called his mother a murderer.
“What is the benefit to society of keeping these people in prison for life?” he said. “My mama does not deserve to die in jail because of an accident.”
Nie-John, now 24, said he wanted more than anything to prove people wrong about his family and himself. He graduated from Southeastern Louisiana University in 2019, and enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. He is stationed in North Carolina.
Tiffany Woods said that she only found out how sick Little Emmanuel was when she was in prison and read court documents and medical records. She has earned a bachelor's degree through the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in prison and is working on her master's.
“Because I want to tell my children, even in the midst of struggle and heartache and no matter what situation you’re in,” she said, “you can change yourself for the better.”
She said one question has haunted her: Where was Emmanuel buried?
No one knows. The infant was cremated, the Caddo Parish Coroner’s office told us via email.
“It is possible the cremains were placed in one of the pauper cemeteries,” officials wrote, “but nothing is documented in the file.”
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/12/16/her-baby-died-after-hurricane-katrinaPUBLISHER'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;
