PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Lawyers who represent defendants were more outspoken. “The NYPD’s disclosure letter reveals next to nothing about how this misidentification may have negatively impacted any number of our clients’ cases,” said Jenny Cheung, supervising attorney of the Legal Aid Society’s DNA Unit, which handles forensic matters for the public defender group. “It is unacceptable that even one client would have their right to a fair trial jeopardized as a result of the NYPD’s failure to disclose, for nearly a decade, all pertinent case-related information to defendants and their counsel. We need answers now.” Karen Newirth, founder of Newirth Law, PLLC and a former attorney with The Exoneration Project, called for an independent review of all cases the detectives touched, including those cases already reviewed by the NYPD. “It is not enough that the NYPD in its own review — the parameters of which are unknown — concluded that there were ‘no discrepancies’ in other cases,” she said, adding that prosecutors should examine the work of the unit “writ large.”
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STORY: "Prosecutors Review Dozens of Cases After NYPD Informed Them — Eight Years Later — of a Detective’s Fingerprint Mistake," by Reporters George Joseph and Yoav Gonen, published by The City, on August 31, 2023: (George Joseph is a Senior Reporter for THE CITY with a focus on criminal justice and courts. He previously worked for WNYC and Gothamist, and has published stories with NPR, ProPublica, Esquire, and The Intercept among other outlets…Yoav Gonen is a Senior Reporter for THE CITY. Previously, he covered City Hall and education for the New York Post, after stints at the Staten Island Advance, NY Daily News and the Brooklyn Papers.)
SUB-HEADING: "The incident led to the transfer of the detective, the retraining of two others, and changes in police procedure."
GIST: "Prosecutors across New York City are reviewing dozens of criminal convictions after the NYPD informed them in July of an eight-year-old incident in which three detectives were involved in a fingerprint misidentification at a Brooklyn crime scene.
The incident, which police said did not lead to any arrests or prosecutions, triggered the removal of Detective Joe Martinez from the Latent Print Section, which analyzes finger and palm print matches, the retraining of two detectives who validated his findings, and changes in department fingerprint comparison practices.
In 2015, investigators determined that Martinez “erroneously reported” that a person described as “known to the NYPD” had been “identified as the source of a latent print left at a crime scene,” according to a letter sent by Lt. Rosalyn Joseph, who heads the Latent Print Section, to the city’s five DAs and the two local U.S. Attorney’s offices.
The letter did not describe the nature of the crime under investigation.
In response to questions from THE CITY, the NYPD did not immediately explain why it took so long to reveal information to prosecutors, who have a constitutional obligation to disclose information favorable to defendants.
According to the July letter, the department conducted its own review of past cases and found “no discrepancies.” But public defenders and innocence attorneys expressed alarm at the belated revelations.
Martinez never again worked as a latent print examiner and never testified again, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the matter.
The errant identification had been “verified” by two of Martinez’s colleagues, detectives Edward Sanabria and Gerald Rex, but a month after the supposed match the department realized the individual “could not have been the source of the crime scene latent fingerprint,” according to the letter.
In response to inquiries from THE CITY, state and federal prosecutors confirmed that they had launched, and had in some cases completed, internal reviews. But the scale of those reviews differed.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecutors are in the middle of a review of about 30 convictions.
Those cases include ones in which the three retired detectives made identifications or were otherwise involved, according to a spokesperson.
A spokesperson for Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said his office’s Forensic Science Unit, Conviction Review Unit and Appeals Bureau are probing eleven convictions that took place after the NYPD’s review of the incident in 2015.
Those convictions, which came after Martinez was transferred out of the unit, involved Sanabria and Rex.
Patrice O’Shaughnessy, a spokesperson for Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark, said her office was first notified of the misidentification this July. “We notified the defense attorneys on 20 cases and we continue to review these cases as part of our commitment to pursuing justice with integrity, disclosure obligations, and transparency,” she said.
Frank Sobrino, a spokesperson for Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, said his agency conducted a more narrow reinvestigation, reviewing just three convictions in which Martinez, Sanabria, or Rex had themselves identified a defendant. The analysis “confirmed the original latent print results,” he said.
Staten Island District Attorney spokesperson James Clinton, said the office had an independent examiner review and verify the identifications that Sanabria or Rex did that contributed to five convictions in the borough.
“Nevertheless, and in the interest of full disclosure, our office has begun sending letters to defense counsel on each of these cases notifying them of this disclosure by NYPD,” said Clinton.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York said it had already conducted a review, which did not raise any red flags. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment.
The Bronx District Attorney’s Office and the Family Court Division of the New York City Corporation Counsel’s Office, which also received the letter, did not respond to requests for comment.
Lawyers who represent defendants were more outspoken.
“The NYPD’s disclosure letter reveals next to nothing about how this misidentification may have negatively impacted any number of our clients’ cases,” said Jenny Cheung, supervising attorney of the Legal Aid Society’s DNA Unit, which handles forensic matters for the public defender group.
“It is unacceptable that even one client would have their right to a fair trial jeopardized as a result of the NYPD’s failure to disclose, for nearly a decade, all pertinent case-related information to defendants and their counsel. We need answers now.”
Karen Newirth, founder of Newirth Law, PLLC and a former attorney with The Exoneration Project, called for an independent review of all cases the detectives touched, including those cases already reviewed by the NYPD.
“It is not enough that the NYPD in its own review — the parameters of which are unknown — concluded that there were ‘no discrepancies’ in other cases,” she said, adding that prosecutors should examine the work of the unit “writ large.”
Public records show Martinez left the NYPD around July 2016 and Sanabria left the force in September 2017. Rex, whose LinkedIn profile says he served as lead instructor for the latent print division, on top of handling case work, left the force in December 2019.
Messages sent to all three former detectives, and phone messages that were left on numbers listed for Rex, weren’t immediately responded to.
The Detectives Endowment Association, the union representing current and retired detectives, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The NYPD letter to prosecutors noted that the department secured accreditation from a national board in 2019, four years after the false identification.
The former commander of the forensics unit told AMNY that year that securing the accreditation had required passing more than 400 standards.
The entire story can be read at:
prosecutors-review-cases-nypd-detectives-fingerprint-mistake
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 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 physical violence, even physical and mental torture.
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog:
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The number of interviewees is vast, which suggests a thorough and meticulous approach from the beginning. Tair’s mother and her late father talk about their daughter and what they endured in the aftermath of her death. Zadorov’s wife, Olga, gives her account of events. Prosecutors, pathologists, investigators, regional military commanders, school friends and reporters are interviewed, as are Zadorov’s lawyers, who begin to carefully unravel the many knots in the prosecution’s case against him."
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REVIEW: "Shadow of Truth' – an utterly gripping case about murder, conspiracy and corruption," by Observer and Guardian Columnist Rebecca Nicholson, published on August 1 2023/
SUB-HEADING: "Tair Rada, an Israeli pupil, was 13 when she was found dead in a school toilet. This meticulous, riveting documentary on the case is sensitively handled and never forgets the victim."
GIST: "Shadow of Truth was first shown in 2016 in Israel, where the murder case it examines is notorious, before being bought a year later by Netflix for global streaming.
Now it arrives on the BBC, with the addition of a fifth and final episode to include new information and more recent events.
There is a lot to digest.
What begins as a seemingly straightforward, if horrifying, true-crime documentary takes flight at the end of the first episode, where it transforms into a much wider story about corruption, conspiracy and justice in Israel.
Tair Rada was 13 when she was found dead at school in Katzrin, a town of 8,000 people, in the Golan Heights area between Israel and Syria.
The documentary starts with a nightmarish interview with Tair’s mother, Ilana, who describes returning home and noticing her daughter’s backpack was not there.
Initially, the head of the investigation, retired commander Avi Shai, said there were “no particularly worrisome signs” – after all, children are sometimes late home after school.
But after a frantic search into the night, Tair’s body was found behind a locked cubicle door in the school toilets. Official photographs, thankfully shown sparingly, indicate a distressing and gruesome crime scene.
The first episode pieces together the day of Tair’s disappearance and the various avenues investigators initially pursued.
Unsurprisingly, a girl murdered at school during the day became an enormous story and, as Shai explains, it had all the makings of a “public fiasco”.
Kids were afraid to go to school, while their parents were scared to let them.
There was intense media interest, which began less than an hour after Tair’s body was discovered, to the great disgust of her father, Shmuel, who only learned details of the “brutal violence” of his daughter’s death from a news reporter.
The initial stages of the investigation took place, then, against a backdrop of national interest, it was ordered that every lead, no matter how unlikely, should be fully investigated.
From guilty-seeming hitchhikers, to an agitated school gardener and a psychic who claimed to have had a vision of blood on the banks of the River Jordan, every red herring had to be explored.
Eventually, the gardener tip led police to Roman Zadorov – a man who resembled the gardener.
He was a Ukrainian contractor at the school, working under a questionable permit, against whom a pile of circumstantial evidence began to build up.
Until the last few moments of the first episode, it looks like an open-and-shut case.
The question of guilt is straightforward and the details are truly chilling.
Yet it pulls a clever about-turn in the closing minutes, showing footage not previously seen, suggesting that Zadorov was coached into re-enacting the events of the murder despite insisting that he did not know what had taken place.
Now it becomes utterly gripping.
There is an astonishing amount of film presented in this series, from contemporaneous news reports to the taped police interviews with Zadorov, to the filming of Zadorov in his holding cell in prison, as a paid informant attempts to coerce him into a confession.
Often, particularly with older crimes, documentaries fall back on re-enactments, a necessary reliance in the absence of recordings of what happened.
Here, that is not called for. So much of what we need to see in order to piece together the story is already there.
There is footage, too, of Tair as a child, and this never loses sight of the victim at the centre of a horribly thorny, deeply upsetting crime.
The number of interviewees is vast, which suggests a thorough and meticulous approach from the beginning.
Tair’s mother and her late father talk about their daughter and what they endured in the aftermath of her death.
Zadorov’s wife, Olga, gives her account of events.
Prosecutors, pathologists, investigators, regional military commanders, school friends and reporters are interviewed, as are Zadorov’s lawyers, who begin to carefully unravel the many knots in the prosecution’s case against him.
True crime documentaries often tread a fine line. There are the cheap ones which foreground sensationalism over any sense of respect for the victims and their families, and then there are the rare examples conducted with decency, insofar as decency is possible.
Given that Shadow of Truth has so many questions to address and to attempt to answer, there are clearly reasons for its existence, other than to titillate or entertain.
The involvement of Tair’s mother and father underlines its case.
This is upsetting, riveting and far broader than it initially seems.
Shadow of Truth is available on BBC iPlayer
The entire review can be read at:
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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