BACKGROUND; (From link below): "13 wrongful convictions all tied to one forensic analyst. The analyst – Mary Jane Burton – was hailed as a hero for saving the DNA evidence that led to the exonerations. But when reporter Tessa Kramer starts investigating, she meets a former lab trainee with a very different – and much darker – story to tell. Over the course of 12 episodes, Kramer unravels this mystery, searching for proof of explosive allegations against Burton and a possible cover-up at one of the nation’s leading crime labs An original podcast from VPM and Story Mechanics, future seasons of Admissible will investigate the role of evidence in our legal system."
ACCESS PODCAST AT:
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/admissible-shreds-of-evidence/id1668887025
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "“The most inflammatory thing she told us was that she had caught Mary Jane falsifying test results in the lab’s record books, like erasing and changing results of her testing without running more tests,” Kramer said. During the Admissible podcast investigation, the reporters’ initial skepticism of Demas is eventually overcome when Demas provides further evidence of her allegations in the form of old notebooks she had saved and given to an attorney for safekeeping. Demas recounts her numerous efforts to report her concerns about Burton’s work at the lab, and Kramer and Bearman are able to further corroborate Demas’ allegations during additional interviews and the review of documents."
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STORY: "Courteney Stuart Reports: Podcast exposes allegations of wrongdoing at state crime lab," published by WINA News.
“I first became aware of the name Mary Jane Burton, I guess in April of 2018,” said journalist Tessa Kramer, co-producer of the Admissible: Shreds of Evidence podcast in an interview aired on Charlottesville Right Now.
Kramer had been researching the case of Marvin Anderson, who’d been wrongfully convicted of rape in Virginia in the 1980s.
In 2001, Kramer explained, Virginia officials learned that Burton, one of the state’s most senior forensic scientists in the 1970s and ‘80s, had saved clippings of evidence from her original testing and had taped those clippings into her case files.
“They were able to do DNA testing and exonerate him,” Kramer said.
Several years after the discovery of the evidence saved by Burton, former Virginia Governor Mark Warner ordered new DNA testing on dozens of cases handled by Burton, and 13 men were eventually exonerated as a result. Burton was hailed as a hero for having saved evidence.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, that is amazing. Who was she? Why did she do that?’ And I just wanted to know a lot more. So I just started poking around,” said Kramer, who continued working on her investigation through grad school at NYU and eventually found production support with iHeartRadio and Virginia Public Media.
But Kramer and her podcast reporting partner Sophie Bearman soon encountered a self-described whistleblower named Gina Demas, who had worked under Burton at the crime lab as a young scientist in the 1970s and who offered a conflicting account of Burton’s behavior.
“She thought Mary Jane was a hero at first as well,” said Kramer. “But then as she started to observe Mary Jane’s practices, she grew more and more concerned. She felt that Mary Jane was not running proper controls and preliminary tests that they were required to run.”
That wasn’t all Demas alleged.
In a lengthier interview on Charlottesville Right Now host Courteney Stuart’s podcast YouTube channel, Kramer and Admissible Executive Producer Ellen Horne, a journalism professor at NYU, describe the Virginia state crime lab’s response to their inquiries about how the revelations would be handled.
“They sent us a letter asking for us to send them the documents that we had, and we told them we would as soon as we published, which we did,” said Kramer.
Kramer says the current DFS administration hasn’t provided any other information and DFS Director Linda Jackson told her it would be referred for investigation but she has declined to be interviewed after receiving the documents.
“These concerns go beyond just erasing and changing results. They heard it from their own former employees’ mouths in the series,” said Kramer. “You know, are you planning to investigate… regardless of these documents contents? And they won’t answer that question. So I don’t know what level of investigation we’re going to see from them.”
In an emailed response to a request for comment from WINA, Jackson confirmed the matter is being referred to the department’s Scientific Advisory Committee but declined further comment.
“We anticipate that a subcommittee will be designated, and that they will meet virtually in October,” Jackson wrote. “That meeting will be open to the public pursuant to the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.""
Listen to the full interview with Tessa Kramer and Ellen Horne here.
The entire story can e read at:
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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