STORY: "A man wrongly convicted in the 1994 fatal shooting of a baby sues the city of New Haven and police," published by The Associated Press, on July 19, 2023.
GIST: "A Connecticut man who was exonerated after serving 28 years in prison for killing a baby in 1994 has filed a lawsuit against the city of New Haven and six now-former police officers involved in his arrest.
Adam Carmon, 51, was convicted of murder and other crimes and sentenced to 85 years in prison for the shooting that killed 7-month-old Danielle Taft and paralyzed her grandmother, Charlene Troutman.
A gunman had fired more than a dozen shots through their apartment window from outside.
Carmon was released in December after a judge ruled that prosecutors withheld evidence from the defense and city police failed to pursue other suspects — including one who recanted a confession.
The charges were officially dismissed last month.
In June, Carmon told The Associated Press in a phone interview that his name remained tarnished.
“I have to live with that the rest of my life, regardless of what transpired,” he said. “Right now, I’m just working, trying to piece the pieces of my life back together.”
The lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court seeks unspecified monetary damages.
Patricia King, corporation counsel for the city of New Haven, said in a statement that she could not comment on the specifics of Carmon’s case, but that “the City is committed to cooperating with all parties and appropriately engaging in the civil litigation process to ensure there are reasonable resolutions on matters where city employees are deemed legally responsible for wrongful convictions or miscarriages of justice.”
Carmen’s attorney argued that evidence showed two other men — purported drug dealers — could have been involved in the shooting.
Prosecutors failed to disclose to Carmon’s lawyer that one of those men voluntarily went to the police station and implicated himself and another man in the shooting, the judge said.
Police abandoned their investigation of those men when the firearms expert concluded a handgun Carmon possessed was the murder weapon.
Carmon is working at a grocery distribution warehouse and said he will soon be marrying a woman he was dating before he went to prison. He said he is building a relationship with his 28-year-old son, who was a baby when the shooting happened."
The entire story can be read at:
baby-killed-carmon-exonerated-new-haven-f09a19a323eb4b7446a39dfb87f5a569
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: National Registry of Exonerations: "The judge said Carmon’s conviction rested on three main pillars—the evidence that a firearm connected to him was the gun used in the shooting and his identifications by Stanley and Jones. “Each of these pillars has been splintered by the persuasive force of the new evidence,” Judge Alander declared. “Suppressed exculpatory evidence supports a third-party culpability claim that Brantley and Little were responsible.” On December 12, 2022, Carmon was released on bond. On June 13, 2023, the prosecution dismissed the charges.
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Read the National Registry of Exoneration entry by Maurice Possley, posted on July 12, 2023, at the link below" Contributing factors: Mistaken Witness ID, False or Misleading Forensic Evidence, Perjury or False Accusation and Official Misconduct
(As this is a very lengthy analysis, I have limited my selection to the Judge's analysis of the ballistics evidence in the case. But flawed ballistics - and contemporary recognition of the limits of ballistics - are only one part of the story. It's really worth reading from beginning to end. HL); The bench notes of firearms analyst Stephenson were not disclosed and could have been used to impeach his testimony that the gun was used in the Orchard Street shooting, the judge ruled. “The suppressed bench notes from the 810 Orchard Street shooting contain no drawings or illustrations of the primer breech face marks on the cartridge casings on which Stephenson based his identification of the nine millimeter handgun as the source of the fired casings. The bench notes also fail to contain any meaningful description of the breech face marks,” the judge ruled.
—Stephenson’s four queries of the General Rifling Characteristics database to determine the type of handgun which could have fired the bullets recovered inside the Orchard Street apartment were not disclosed. After three inquiries failed to generate a weapon, Stephenson asked the database for measurements for all Browning firearms, generating measurements for 66 Browning firearms. Stephenson admitted at the evidentiary hearing that he showed the weapon that came closest to the measurements of the bullets recovered from the apartment. “The failure of the first three queries by Stephenson to yield a Browning firearm and the inexact result of the fourth query of all Browning manufactured firearms contained in the database would be useful during cross examination in challenging Stephenson's conclusion that the Browning firearm connected to the petitioner was the murder weapon,” the judge said.
The judge also noted that Stephenson had testified at the hearing that at trial he based his opinion that the Browning weapon recovered on Townsend Street was used in the Orchard Street shooting based on a comparison of the class characteristics and individual characteristics of the casings found on the street with the test-fired casings from the firearm. He admitted that there have been changes in the science of firearm and toolmark identification since the trial.
Stephenson testified at the hearing that it is now understood that subclass characteristics are a potential source of false identifications. He said an examiner could erroneously attribute a microscopic marking on a bullet or casing to be individual to a specific firearm when in fact it is attributable to a manufactured lot of firearms. As a result, he said, a firearm examiner needs to be careful to distinguish between individual and subclass characteristics. The examiner would need to be familiar with the manufacturing process of the weapon in order to perform the analysis, a familiarity that Stephenson said he lacked.
He said that he had not made a differentiation between individual and subclass characteristics in his examination of the fired casings. Stephenson admitted that, based on the new understanding of subclass characteristics, his opinion that the Browning firearm was the source of the 810 Orchard Street shell casings would no longer be valid today.
The judge also cited the evidentiary hearing testimony of William Tobin, a research metallurgist and a former member of the forensic metallurgy operations at the FBI Laboratory. Tobin testified that, since Carmon’s trial, “a consensus has emerged within the relevant scientific community that the practice of opining that a particular projectile or casing was fired by a particular firearm lacks foundational validity, both scientifically and experientially.”
The judge said Carmon’s conviction rested on three main pillars—the evidence that a firearm connected to him was the gun used in the shooting and his identifications by Stanley and Jones.
“Each of these pillars has been splintered by the persuasive force of the new evidence,” Judge Alander declared. “Suppressed exculpatory evidence supports a third-party culpability claim that Brantley and Little were responsible.”
On December 12, 2022, Carmon was released on bond. On June 13, 2023, the prosecution dismissed the charges.
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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/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
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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