PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I have always been fascinated by the annual report of the National Registry of exonerations. The recently released 2022 report is no exception - especially the revelation that, "of the 233 exonerations in 2022, 59% were cases in which no crime occurred. (No crime. Ever. Nada! HL); These 137 exonerations include wrongful convictions for drug possession, murder, and child sex abuse." This revelation struck home to me, as the common denominator in virtually all of the Charles Smith cases - except one that I am aware of - there was no murder, or harm of any sort inflicted on a child. All of the so-called crimes were manufactured in the warped, bigoted, mind of Charles Smith, the discredited pathologist (namesake of this Blog) who was notorious for 'thinking dirty', and for giving the police and prosecutors the opinions they wanted in order to lay charges against parents and caregivers (innocence be damned) - and to help them win the cases in court. The sad reality was that there are many innocent, non-criminal yet tragic explanations for the deaths of children - and Charles Smith was a master at turning these non-crimes into crimes bearing the most serious punishments and social sanctions. Oh yes. The one case in which there was a murder: Brenda Waudby; Innocent, loving mother charged with murdering her daughter 'Baby Jenna." Brenda insisted from the outset that Baby Jenna had been murdered by her teenage babysitter. She went through hell - thanks to the ignorant, malicious, Charles Smith and the police investigators he persuaded to focus on Brenda, until finally exonerated after JD confessed to the the horrific crime, and pleaded guilty in the Young Offender's court. A last comment. How do we explain, the mounting number of no-crime exonerations? The discussion of no-crimes in the fascinating 2022 Annual National Registry of Exonerations report provides some of the answers. Yet, I can't help wondering, isn't there enough real crime plaguing us in our society, without having to invent more?
Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: ""The exonerations in the Registry’s main database date back to 1989. Seven of the 23 exonerations that oc-curred in 1989 were no-crime cases. For the first 10 years of cases, 32% were no-crime cases, with only two no-crime drug exonerations. For the second 10 years, from 1999-2008, 31% of exonerations were no-crime cases, and no-crime drug cases accounted for 27% of those cases. Since then, the percent of no-crime cases has increased sharply, accounting for 940 (46%) of the 2,065 exonerations from 2009-2022. (Of those, 446 are no-crime drug cases.) It’s unclear if that trend will continue."
KEY FINDINGS ON NO-CRIME EXONERATIONS: "The exoneration of Pamela Moses made national news in 2022. Moses is a political activist in Memphis, Tennessee. She was convicted in 2021 of voter fraud, for which she received a harsh six-year sentence and a tongue-lashing from a judge who criticized Moses for tricking officials. The state’s case, however, fell apart after the conviction. Moses hadn’t tried to deceive anyone. The employees who processed her voter-regis-tration form had done an inadequate review of her request. There was no crime. Such no-crime cases now account for more than 40% of the exonerations in our main Registry. These cases include convictions for child abuse where an alleged victim later recants and says the abuse didn’t happen, murder convictions where the deaths were accidents—such as when fires resulting in deaths were mischar- acterized as arson based on misleading forensic evidence—and convictions for drug possession where corrupt police officers planted the evidence.
Exonerations for drug-possession convictions now make up more than 40% of all no-crime exonerations, but only 18% of all exonerations.
Exonerations where defendants pled guilty make up 48% of no-crime exonerations, but only 25% of all exonerations.
The vast majority of exonerations involving charges filed on behalf of child victims—child sexual abuse, child abuse, and cases based on claims of Shaken Baby Syndrome—are no-crime cases.
4. Female exonerees are disproportionately represented in no-crime cases. They represent 16% of no-crime cases, but only 9% of all cases in the Registry.
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REFERENCE TO PROF. JESSICA HENRY'S WATERSHED BOOK ON NO CRIMES: 'Smoke but no fire: Convicting the innocent of crimes that never happened...."The phenomenon of people being exonerated for crimes that didn’t happen received substantial attention in 2020, when Jessica S. Henry, a professor at Montclair State University, published Smoke But No Fire: Con-victing the Innocent of Crimes that Never Happened. Henry’s research examined 2,468 exonerations published in the Registry as of June 30, 2019. She wrote: “Despite all that I know about wrongful convictions, I was shocked to learn that nearly one-third of all known exonerations involve people wrongfully convicted of crimes that never happened. Unlike the popular understanding of a wrongful conviction, where the wrong person was convicted of a crime committed by someone else, no-crime wrongful convictions involve innocent people convicted of crimes that did not happen in the first place."
https://www.amazon.ca/Smoke-But-No-Fire-Convicting/dp/0520300645
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A STARTLING OVERVIEW: Our database now includes nearly 3,300 exonerations, an accumulation driven in large part by no-crime cases. Of the 233 exonerations that occurred in 2022, 137, or 59%, were no-crime cases. In five of the last 10 years, no-crime cases accounted for more than half of the exonerations.
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No-crime cases are marred by most of the same factors that contribute to all wrongful convictions, except for mistaken witness identification. We have only five no-crime cases involving mistaken witness identi- fication. Three of these cases are arson cases. In each exoneration, there was post-conviction evidence that refuted the state’s case of an intentionally set fire and of the witness testimony about the exoneree’s involvement.
Only 5% of the 1,319 no-crime exonerations involved false confessions, less than half the frequency for total cases. But even that amount raises important questions. In these cases, exonerees are not just falsely con- fessing to crimes they did not do. They are men and women falsely confessing to crimes that did not happen.
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DRUGS AND NO CRIME CASES: "No-crime exonerations for drug possession generally take two forms. The first is that an officer planted the drugs on the defendant or falsely accused the defendant of possessing drugs. The second is that post-con-viction testing showed the substances found on the exonerees weren’t drugs. As noted, 88% of the exonerations for drug crimes in the Registry are no-crime cases. While no-crime drug exonerations happen in many jurisdictions, they are clustered in several communities: Chicago, Illinois; Harris County, Texas (Houston); Swisher County, Texas; Camden, New Jersey, and Los Angeles, Cali- fornia. Together, they account for 84% of the 514 no-crime drug exonerations. In each of these cases, the exonerations would not have occurred without the discovery of misconduct or of breakdowns in the crim- inal-justice system. Cook County has 198 no-crime exonerations for drug possession. All but nine are tied to misconduct by Chicago Police Sgt. Ronald Watts and his crew, who planted drugs on men and women in and around the Ida B. Wells public-housing development between 2003 and 2011. The no-crime exonerations in Swisher County, Camden, and Los Angeles feature many of the same prob- lems uncovered in Chicago. In the Swisher County town of Tulia, an undercover sheriff’s deputy named Tom Coleman framed 35 defendants for drug possession. The cases unraveled after attorneys discovered Coleman had lied about his background and falsified records. The 35 men and women received pardons from Governor Rick Perry in 2003. Twenty-one defendants were exonerated of no-crime convictions for drug possession in Camden, based on misconduct by a group of rogue officers who planted drugs and committed perjury. Sixteen of the 18 Los Angeles no-crime drug cases are based on misconduct by officers in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart division. These officers often targeted Hispanic men, planting drugs on them or falsifying reports about the circumstances of the arrests. (Ten other Rampart defendants were exonerated for weapons con- victions in no-crime cases.) In Harris County, a different problem contributed to the 160 no-crime exonerations. Most of these defen- dants were arrested based on the notoriously inaccurate field-testing of suspected drugs and then pled guilty without knowledge of the results of laboratory tests. The lab tests, which are more accurate, showed that the substances weren’t illegal, but these test results were overlooked by prosecutors and not requested by defense attorneys. Harris County now requires prosecutors to acknowledge a confirmatory lab test prior to accepting a guilty plea in a drug case. Except for the cases from Harris County, the above no-crime drug-conviction clusters are part of our Groups Registry, which uses a different lens to examine wrongful convictions. In that Registry, there is a pattern of official misconduct that connects the members of each group. The vast majority of wrongful con- victions in the Groups registry are for drug possession. Many of them appear to be no-crime cases as well.
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GUILTY PLEAS AN NO CRIME CASES: "Why do so many people plead guilty to crimes that later are exposed not to be crimes at all? As noted, 48% of people exonerated in these cases entered guilty pleas, compared to 25% in all exonerations. Much of the overrepresentation of guilty pleas is due to the number of drug cases included among the no- crime exonerations. The vast majority of all drug cases are resolved by guilty pleas. In no-crime drug cases, 89% of the defendants entered guilty pleas. For all drug cases, 80% of defendants entered guilty pleas. There are several factors at play here. Many defendants enter into plea agreements to avoid the possibility of a longer sentence if convicted at trial. In Tulia, most of the defendants pled guilty after seeing what happened to the first defendants who chose to go to trial. One of those who went to trial, William Cash Love, received a sentence of 361 years in prison. Most of the other defendants who followed after Love’s trial very quickly entered guilty pleas. This pattern is repeated in many no-crime drug cases. These exonerees likely knew that judges and juries tend to believe the testimony and arrest reports offered by the police. In the Harris County cases, defendants also wanted to avoid longer prison sentences and the many months they would have to wait (typically in jail) before a trial would be held. The cases often resolved themselves within a few days after the arrest, most of them before the lab tests had been performed. And with cases completed, neither the defense nor the prosecution bothered to look at the lab test results. The motivations for innocent defendants to plead guilty to a crime that they did not commit—and further, a crime that never occurred—are not limited to drug possession and other non-violent crimes. They extend to serious offenses as well."
NO-CRIME CHILD 'VICTIMS.'..."The Registry contains 667 exonerations involving a child victim, which we define as a person under 18 years old. They represent 20% of total cases and include wrongful convictions for sexual assault, child abuse, kidnapping, and murder. Of those exonerations, 336, or 50%, are considered no-crime cases. They account for 25% of all no-crime cases. Cases involving child victims can be extremely emotional, often pitting family members against each other or relying on forensic testimony that assumes an injury is the result of intentional harm. The most common crime involving child victims is child sexual abuse. Of the 312 exonerations for this crime, 78% are no-crime cases. Fifty-nine of these cases were instances of “Child Sexual Abuse Hysteria,” which we define as “A case in which the exoneree was convicted of child sex abuse as part of a wave of child sex abuse prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s based on aggressive and suggestive interviews of children who were thought to be victims.” These cases generally included bizarre and implausible claims by the supposed victims, frequently featuring satanic rituals. In Chelan County, Washington, for example, 11 people were wrongfully convicted of child sexual assault and other crimes after a girl living in foster care with a police officer told the officer she had been sexually abused by her parents and others in the towns of Wenatchee and East Wenatchee, Washington. Twenty-one people were wrongfully convicted of similar crimes in Kern County, California. In both instances, appellate courts criticized the investigations, ruling that officers used improper interrogation techniques and disre- garded evidence that undermined the allegations. In most of these cases, the children later recanted. Most of the exonerations for these child sex hysteria cases occurred in 2000 or before. But last year, Nancy Smith and Joseph Allen, both of Lorain, Ohio, were exonerated for rape and other convictions in 1994 involving children at a Head Start program. Smith and Allen had never met before they were arrested, but five children testified against them. A relative of one of the alleged victims would later say that his mother coached the victims on how to testify against Smith and Allen. After she was exonerated, Smith said, “It took me almost 30 years for me to get justice here today.” She criticized the woman “who orchestrated this horrible, alleged crime that never happened.” The Registry includes 244 homicide cases (either murder or manslaughter) where the victims were children. Fifty-three of those wrongful convictions, or 22%, are no-crime cases. For all exonerations involving homi- cides, no-crime cases account for 10% of the total. Equally important, 51 of these 53 wrongful convictions involving the death of a child were based in part on the use of false or misleading forensic evidence. Also included in those 53 no-crime homicide exonerations are 19 cases involving Shaken Baby Syndrome, or Abusive Head Trauma. The syndrome was first described in 1971 and is said to occur when an infant is shaken so hard that the brain rotates inside the skull, causing severe and potentially deadly brain injury, often with no external signs of harm. In 2001, the National Association of Medical Examiners published a position paper on abusive head trauma that incorporated the theory that brain swelling, brain bleeding, and retinal hemorrhaging—a so-called “triad of symptoms”—indicated the violent shaking of a child. The first exoneration based on a misdiagnosis of Shaken Baby Syndrome occurred in 1992. Including con- victions for child abuse, we now have 30 exonerations where the prosecution presented evidence to support a theory that an infant was shaken severely enough to cause death or extreme harm. Twenty-seven of the exonerations are no-crime cases, and all 27 include the presentation of false or misleading forensic evidence. More than half of the exonerees who were wrongfully convicted of a crime where the case involved Shaken Baby Syndrome have been exonerated in the last 10 years. This may reflect a growing understanding of in- fant injuries and deaths within the forensic and medical communities, and how they can occur (the medical examiners’ group withdrew its paper on the subject in 2006), as well as an acceptance by some courts of this new understanding. It’s now known that this “triad of symptoms” can be present for reasons that have nothing to do with abuse.
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WOMEN AND NO-CRIME EXONERATIONS: "A disproportionate number of no-crime exonerations include female defendants. This is true for both vio- lent and non-violent crimes. Nine percent of all cases, but 16% of no-crime cases, have female exonerees. For exonerations with female defendants, no-crime exonerations are the rule. In fact, 73% of the 284 cases with female exonerees are no-crime cases. For men, the figure is 37%. Half of exonerations involving child victims are no-crime cases. For female defendants, the figure climbs to 86%. All 37 women wrongfully con- victed of child sex abuse were exonerated of no-crime cases. There is no clear consensus on why women are over-represented in no-crime exonerations. Some research- ers have suggested that investigations by the police and decisions to prosecute are based on stereotypes of women as mothers and caregivers. They are often the last person to come in contact with a child and as such are believed responsible for a child’s injuries or death. There could be other factors at play. To be exonerated, one must first be convicted of a crime. It’s possible that the crimes for which women are prosecuted are ones where there is less objective evidence of a crime in the first place. This would include cases based on the testimony of children, inconclusive forensic evidence, or murder cases where there is a claim of self-defense or accident. Quite often, several of these factors converge."
CONCLUSION: "The exonerations in the Registry’s main database date back to 1989. Seven of the 23 exonerations that oc- curred in 1989 were no-crime cases. For the first 10 years of cases, 32% were no-crime cases, with only two no-crime drug exonerations. For the second 10 years, from 1999-2008, 31% of exonerations were no-crime cases, and no-crime drug cases accounted for 27% of those cases. Since then, the percent of no-crime cases has increased sharply, accounting for 940 (46%) of the 2,065 exonerations from 2009-2022. (Of those, 446 are no-crime drug cases.) It’s unclear if that trend will continue. We know that the lion’s share of the increase in no-crime exonera- tions is tied to wrongful convictions for drug possession. The majority of those cases arose from systemic misconduct by corrupt police officers in a handful of communities. We don’t know whether this pattern of misconduct will continue to be exposed in future years. There has been progress within the larger world of no-crime exonerations. The wave of prosecutions for Child Sexual Abuse Hysteria has long disappeared. Investigations into suspicious fires are less likely to rely on discredited theories about burn patterns. Prosecutors in many jurisdictions, not just Harris County, require a confirmatory lab test before accepting a guilty plea for drug possession. These are all welcome developments. We hope they reduce the number of wrongful convictions for crimes that didn’t happen in years to come.
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SOME EXAMPLES OF NON-CRIME CASES: Lionel White Sr. was one of the men wrongfully convicted of a drug crime based on Sgt. Watts’s misconduct in Chicago. Because of prior convictions, he was facing life in prison. He pled guilty in exchange for a five-year prison term. At his hearing, he told the judge that the officers, including Watts, were “in my house beating me ... your Honor. This is wrong. I am pleading guilty because I’m scared. That’s the honest to God truth, your honor.”
John Peel, of Pinellas County, Florida, pled guilty to manslaughter to avoid a possible con- viction for first-degree murder and life sentence in the death of his young son. He received a sentence of 10 years in prison. It was later determined that the child died of natural causes.
John Miller and his common-law wife, Debbie Loveless, were convicted of murder in the 1989 death of their four-year-old daughter. The couple said the girl was attacked by wild dogs. A medical examiner testified the girl’s wounds were too clean to have been made by an animal. But medical records showed this testimony was flawed; the wound analyzed by the examiner had been made by a scalpel at the hospital during treatment for her injuries.
Elgerie Cash and her daughter, Jennifer Weathington, were convicted of murder in 2013 in the shooting death of Weathington’s boyfriend. They said the death was accidental. But the state pursued a case based on a false interpretation of the forensic evidence, which required the women—neither of whom were firearms experts—to shoot the man in a pe- culiar manner. They were exonerated in 2021. The judge who granted them a new trial wrote: “Here, there is no evidence of conduct before, during, or after the shooting that one defendant intentionally aided or abetted the other or intentionally advised, encouraged, hired, counseled, or procured the other to commit murder.”
The entire report can be read at:
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/NRE%20Annual%20Report%202022.pdf
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: "In devoted a recent post to a new book by Prof. Kent Roach which focused on the "imaginary crimes" of Charles Smith, and notes that, "A first-ever comprehensive Canadian registry of wrongful convictions shows 18 per cent of remedied cases were due to false guilty pleas and a third of all cases involved “imagined” crimes that never happened. Many of these cases involved disgraced former Ontario pathologist Charles Smith, known for “thinking dirty” about child abuse." The book is called, "Wrongfully Convicted: Guilty Pleas, Imagined Crimes, and What Canada Must Do to Safeguard Justice (Simon & Schuster 2023);
The head note to this post reads: "Sorely flawed pathologist Charles Smith: (The namesake of this Blog): The damage he has wrought in innocent people's lives, and Ontario's criminal justice system, is well reflected in Canada's new Registry of Wrongful Convictions, as is evident from my friend and former Toronto Star colleague Jim Rankin, one of Canada's finest criminal justice reporters - in a story headed, "Canadian registry of wrongful convictions shines light on cases the headlines miss."... "A first-ever comprehensive Canadian registry of wrongful convictions shows 18 per cent of remedied cases were due to false guilty pleas and a third of all cases involved “imagined” crimes that never happened. Many of these cases involved disgraced former Ontario pathologist Charles Smith, known for “thinking dirty” about child abuse."..."Maria Shepherd was wrongfully convicted in a case where she entered a false guilty plea to manslaughter in the 1991 death of her 3-year-old stepdaughter on the advice of a lawyer, who advised that now-disgraced coroner Charles Smith’s evidence was solid and could land her more time in jail. She lauds the launch of the Canadian registry. “I’m happy and very grateful to the study group that has been able to bring these numbers together,” said Shepherd, who was finally acquitted in 2016 when the Crown pointed to new evidence that Smith’s opinion and testimony was “fundamentally flawed.” “It is long overdue that our system here in Canada keeps track of this to see where are we going wrong,” said Shepherd, who is a paralegal and advocate on wrongful conviction cases, and called the proportion of imaginary crimes and false guilty pleas “shocking.” “It’s really nice to know that exonerees will be able to not only get recognized on this registry, but that somebody like me, a Canadian that’s been acquitted and looking for statistics, can actually go somewhere now to look at it and not feel like we’re alone because all of these years we really didn’t have something to fall back on that was reliable.”
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/7519456460330760538
Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog:
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. 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;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
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