I don’t drink out of it. It gives me the creeps.
This was one of several Lee retirements.
Gov. John Rowland, who ran through state police commissioners like they were lottery tickets, dragged Lee back to head up the Department of Public Safety for two years.
(This has nothing to do with Lee, but let us all bow our heads and remember Geargate, the scandal wherein Rowland and his cronies and their families snagged camo jackets, helmets, a bayonet, sleeping bags and other military equipment intended for the State Police. It came to seem almost quaint, given what would follow.)
Lee liked to be in the news.
He was so drawn to the white hot lights of shows such as NBC’s “Dateline” that his state job was insufficient to slake his thirst.
When you assemble the list of his outside cases, he seems like the Zelig of true crime.
Lee assisted in the defense of O.J. Simpson. If you are younger than 40, I don’t think you can comprehend the way that case entranced the American public.
Lee assisted in the defense of William Kennedy Smith, the Kennedy cousin acquitted of rape charges in 1991 in Florida. (It may be worth nothing that Lee’s essential role was to impugn the credibility of the accusing woman.)
Lee assisted in the defense of Scott Peterson, found guilty in 2004 of the killing of his pregnant wife.
Lee assisted in the 2007 defense of legendary record producer Phil Spector, eventually found guilty of having murdered actress Lana Clarkson.
Lee assisted in the 2006 defense of Michael Peterson (no relation) who appealed a guilty verdict in the murder of his wife. Peterson’s case was memorialized in a much-viewed documentary, followed by an HBO Max dramatization.
I could go on.
Lee assisted in so many defenses that you might imagine his harshest critics here in his golden years would be the family members of victims.
While that is not entirely untrue, Lee is much more in the news these days for findings of malfeasance in at least two convictions where he assisted the prosecution.
Last week, a federal judge essentially reaffirmed the 2019 finding of the state Supreme Court in the cases of Shawn Henning and Ralph Birch, found guilty in 1989 of the murder of Everett Carr.
Each court has said fabricated evidence was used to convict the two men and blamed Lee for the fabrication.
The two men are now free and attempting to sue the state for their wrongful convictions, which resulted in a combined 60 years in prison.
After their convictions were vacated, Lee told reporters he had participated in more than 8,000 cases “and never, ever was accused of any wrongdoing or for testifying intentionally wrong.”
This is not strictly true. In the Spector case, a judge ruled that Lee wrongfully removed an item from the murder scene.
David Weinberg, convicted of the 1988 murder of Joyce Stochmal, successfully petitioned for release from prison after new evidence came to light about blood found on a knife linked to him.
At the time of trial, Lee said the source of the blood was impossible to determine.
Subsequent testing found it to be from an animal.
Weinberg’s attorney said the new finding was not a matter of scientific advancement but of Lee’s wrongful testimony.
I’ll stop there, but it’s not clear that time and tide will. That “8,000 cases” figure starts to loom large. How many other convicted persons are lawyering up?
And Anglo-American law still lives, I believe, under Blackstone’s famous ratio: it is better that 10 guilty persons go free than that one innocent person suffers.
I wonder if the rest of us share some complicity.
The fascination with true crime is not a new thing. The Victorians loved bloody, turpitude-tinged murders and the 1906 murder of architect Stanford White, with its accompanying celebrity love triangle, was the O.J. case of its day.
But starting around 1990, our fascination intensified. Media and audiences collaborated on a commodification of violent crime, so much so that it often seemed to exist more as entertainment fuel than as tragic reality.
It is in that environment that you could conceivably imagine making up commemorative mugs with festive blood spatter.
It is in that environment that a man from humble origins, a man with undeniable scientific acumen, tremendous drive and a self-effacing way of capturing the attention of juries, could become an important cog in the apparatus.""
The entire commentary can be read at:
https://www.ctpost.com/opinion/article/opinion-the-troubling-legacy-dr-henry-lee-18266465.php
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/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
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.”
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-1234880143/
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