BACKGROUND: Read comprehensive National Registry of Exonerations by Maurice Possley entry at the link below:
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QUOTE OF THE DAY: “This litigation was a long and hard-fought battle that resulted in a significant settlement that will give Walter Ogrod the economic support he needs as he continues re-establishing his life,” Ogrod’s lawyer, Joe Marrone, wrote in a statement. “He remains optimistic about his future and is committed to fighting for his fellow inmates who have also been wrongfully convicted.”
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STORY: "WHO KILLED BARBARA JEAN? City to pay $9.1 million to man wrongfully convicted of killing Barbara Jean Horn," by reporters Claudia Vargas and David Chang, published by NBC Philadelphia, on November 3, 2023.
SUB-HEADING: "Walter Ogrod’s settlement is the third highest in the city’s history."
SUB-HEADING: "Walter Ogrod spent 28 years in prison after he was wrongfully convicted of murdering 4-year-old Barbara Jean Horn in 1988. After filing a lawsuit against the city of Philadelphia as well as detectives involved in his case, he’ll now receive $9.1 million from Philly taxpayers. NBC10 investigative reporter Claudia Vargas has the details.
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WHAT TO KNOW: "The city of Philadelphia will pay more than $9.1 million to Walter Ogrod, a man who spent 28 years behind bars after being wrongfully convicted of murdering 4-year-old Barbara Jean Horn. Ogrod lived across the street from Horn’s family at the time of her murder. He was arrested four years later in 1992 after police said he confessed to killing her. Ogrod’s first trial ended in a mistrial in 1993 while he was convicted and sentenced to death in a second trial in 1996. In 2018, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit took another look at Ogrod’s case. They determined Ogrod was not the killer and instead came up with two potential suspects."
On July 12, 1988, Horn disappeared from her front yard in Philadelphia’s Castor Gardens neighborhood. A few hours later, her body was found stuffed in a cardboard TV box only a few blocks away from her home.
Walter Ogrod lived across the street from Horn’s family at the time of her murder.
He was arrested four years later in 1992 after police said he confessed to killing her.
Ogrod’s first trial ended in a mistrial in 1993 while he was convicted and sentenced to death in a second trial in 1996.
In 2018, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit took another look at Ogrod’s case. They determined Ogrod was not the killer and instead came up with two potential suspects.
In 2020, Ogrod was released from prison after his conviction was overturned.
Ogrod then filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Philadelphia in 2021, accusing the city of wrongful prosecution and the detectives involved in his case of framing him.
On Thursday, the city reached a settlement in which they denied all wrongdoing while Ogrod, now 59-years-old, received $9.1 million from Philadelphia taxpayers.
“This litigation was a long and hard-fought battle that resulted in a significant settlement that will give Walter Ogrod the economic support he needs as he continues re-establishing his life,” Ogrod’s lawyer, Joe Marrone, wrote in a statement.
“He remains optimistic about his future and is committed to fighting for his fellow inmates who have also been wrongfully convicted.”
A spokesperson for the city also issued a statement on the settlement.
“The City remains committed to transparency in the pursuit of justice,” the spokesperson wrote
. “Although the City’s settlement is not a finding of wrongdoing by any party, the City recognizes the pain and burden to all parties that continued litigation of this lawsuit would bring. The City hopes that this resolution can be a just result for all those affected, and our hearts remain with the family of Barbara Jean Horn as they continue to seek justice for their loved one.”
Judy Rubino, the prosecutor in Ogrod’s second trial, told NBC10 that she was not happy the city settled and hoped the case would go to trial.
Ogrod’s settlement is the third highest in the city’s history, behind the $9.8 million that Anthony Wright and Chester Hollman were both rewarded in their settlements.
The entire story can be read at:
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Check out the National Registry of Exonerations entry at the link below: As usual, Maurice Possley's has provided an insightful, in-depth analysis of the case, with its important forensic aspects: Contributing factors: "False Confession, False or Misleading Forensic Evidence, Perjury or False Accusation, Official Misconduct, Inadequate Legal Defense"
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: (National Registry): "In February 2018, Ogrod’s legal team asked the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit to review the case. Shortly thereafter, the CIU began re-investigating the case and turned over the prosecution’s file—more than 40,000 pages. In February 2020, CIU chief Patricia Cummings and Assistant District Attorney Carrie Wood filed an additional response to the defense petition asking that Ogrod’s convictions be vacated. “At trial, Ogrod found himself adrift in a perfect storm of unreliable scientific evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, Brady violations, and false testimony,” Cummings and Wood said in the response. The filing included a 54-page stipulation of facts signed by Cummings and assistant district attorney Carrie Wood as well as Federal Community Defender Office attorneys Tracy Ulstad, Samuel Angell, and Loren Stewart, as well as Andrew Gallo and Robert McDonnell from the firm of Morgan, Lewis Y Bockius LLP, and James Rollins from the firm of Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP. The defense and prosecution agreed that Ogrod’s trial defense lawyer had never been provided with a multitude of exculpatory evidence.'
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GIST: "After his first trial ended in a mistrial after a jury could not reach a verdict, voting eleven-one in favor of acquittal in 1993, Walter Ogrod was convicted and sentenced to death at a second trial in October 1996 for the murder of four-year-old Barbara Jean Horn in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
However, those detective notes were never disclosed to Ogrod’s defense lawyer and the prosecution’s case rested on misleading forensic evidence to argue that the girl had been killed with a heavier metal weightlifting bar.
On June 5, 2020, nearly a quarter century after his conviction, Ogrod was released from death row after evidence showed that in fact the girl was likely asphyxiated.
The exoneration followed a re-investigation of the case by the Conviction Integrity Unit of the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s Office that was triggered by years of litigation seeking to overturn his conviction.
The murder sent shock waves through Philadelphia and was the subject of massive media attention.
Police initially focused on two suspects.
Police also collected evidence from the plastic bag and box in which the body had been found, but no DNA testing was performed on that, either. One of the witnesses who had identified Felice also identified yet another suspect, Raymond Sheehan, from a photo. But he also was not charged.
Nearly four years later, in February 1992, the murder was still unsolved when the case was assigned to veteran Philadelphia Detectives Martin Devlin and Paul Worrell. The first person they interrogated was Barbara Jean’s stepfather, John Fahy, who was in his late twenties, stood 5 feet, 7 inches tall, weighed about 160 pounds, and had short brown hair.
The detectives were considered experts at solving crimes and particularly with getting confessions.
Devlin and Worrell also threatened and physically coerced witness statements and false confessions that had culminated in the conviction of Shaurn Thomas and his brother, Clayton “Mustafa” Thomas Jr. , for the 1990 murder of the seventy-eight-year-old operator of a payday-loan business. Shaurn was exonerated in 2017 and Clayton was exonerated in 2019.
Also in 2019, Willie Veasy was exonerated of a 1992 murder because Devlin and Worrell coerced a false confession from him.
Once assigned to the investigation of Barbara Jean’s murder, Devlin and Worrell began re-interviewing people who had been interviewed four years earlier. In addition to John Fahy, they interrogated Barbara Jean’s mother, Sharon.
The detectives also questioned a middle school teacher and—the teacher later claimed—told him he failed a polygraph test when asked about the murder. He said he was interrogated for several hours by Devlin and Worrell before he was released.
The detectives then focused on Ogrod, who at the time of the crime was 23 years old and shared a home in the neighborhood with a couple who lived across the street from Barbara Jean. The couple’s young son, known as “Charliebird,” was a friend and playmate of the girl.
In April 1992, Worrell went to an apartment above a chandelier shop in suburban Glenside where Ogrod had moved in 1990. Ogrod was not at home, but Worrell left his business card at the chandelier shop, asking the owner to ask Ogrod to call the next day.
Ogrod had no criminal record and had attended a school for youths with learning disabilities, graduating two years late.
After a lengthy interrogation, none of which was electronically recorded, Ogrod signed each page of a 16-page statement—purportedly in his own words, but in Devlin’s handwriting— confessing to the murder and attempted sexual assault of Barbara Jean.
According to the statement, which Ogrod recanted almost immediately, the four-year-old had come to his house looking for Charliebird. He then lured her into the basement to “play doctor” and tried to force her to perform oral sex. She screamed, prompting him to strike her head at least four times with “what felt like a pipe,” but perhaps was a “pull-down bar” from his weight set.
According to the statement, Ogrod said he washed the girl’s body in the basement sink.
The statement said he carried her back outside through the rear basement door and into the garage.
On April 6, 1992, Ogrod was arrested on charges of murder and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse.
He went to trial in October 1993 in Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas. The prosecution relied principally upon the signed confession, which Judge Juanita Kidd Stout held admissible despite a psychiatrist’s testimony that it was not in Ogrod’s style of speaking.
Ogrod testified and denied committing the crime. He said that, during the interrogation, the detectives had persuaded him—briefly—that he must have done it. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime. The murder weapon had not been, and never was, recovered.
Ogrod said the detectives falsely told him that there witnesses who had identified him carrying the box and fed him details about the crime.
Devlin and Worrell testified that the statement was a verbatim transcript of the questions asked and Ogrod’s answers. Devin said he would formulate a question, write it down, and then ask it. He said he then wrote down Ogrod’s response.
On November 4, 1993, after nine hours of deliberation at the end of the eight-and-a-half-day trial, the jury foreman sent a note to Judge Stout stating that the jury was deadlocked eleven-to-one. Stout summoned the parties to the courtroom, but before court reconvened, the foreman informed her that the jury had reached a verdict after all—to acquit Ogrod.
The jury was brought into the courtroom. When the Judge Stout announced that the verdict was an acquittal, one juror declared, “I do not agree with the verdict.”
As a result, Judge Stout declared a mistrial.
Nearly two years later, in September 1996, Ogrod went to trial again.
Hall was a serial informant known as “the Monsignor” for his success in obtaining, or rather claiming to obtain, jailhouse confessions. Hall was not called to testify against Ogrod, but Wolchansky, under the alias of Jason Banachowski, testified that Ogrod had admitted luring Barbara Jean into his house and trying to force her to perform oral sex, but when “she became hysterical . . . he grabbed a weight bar and smacked her in the head with it.”
Wolchansky, who claimed that he expected nothing in exchange for his testimony and denied that he had a history of any mental problems, added that Ogrod had told him that his mother—by this time deceased—had accused him of the killing, to which he had replied, “Damn right I did, and if you know what’s best for you, you’ll keep quiet.”
Assistant medical examiner Paul Hoyer had conducted the autopsy and reported five blunt injuries to the head causing four lacerations, but no skull fracture. Hoyer had identified a bruise on the girl’s left shoulder as being consistent with being inflicted at the time of the head injuries.
Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Haresh Mirchandani testified to the autopsy results based upon his review of Hoyer’s records. He said the girl’s death was caused by blows to the head and that a weight bar was consistent with what could have caused those injuries.
Dr. Lucy Rorke, a forensic neuropathologist, testified similarly that as a result of blows to the head, the victim’s brain swelled. There were axonal injuries indicating the brain rotated inside the skull. She said the head injuries were consistent with having been caused by an object like the weight bar or a tire iron. Assistant Philadelphia County district attorney Judith Rubino asked Dr. Rorke if she was able to determine, from the damage to the brain, what actually caused Barbara Jean to die. Dr. Rorke did not answer the question. However, she said there was no indication of suffocation, as in a hand over the child’s mouth.
On Greenberg’s advice, Ogrod did not testify at the retrial. Greenberg, moreover, presented nothing to rebut the confession testimony and did not challenge the claim that the murder weapon had been a weight bar, which never was recovered. He focused instead on the possibility that one of the initial suspects, Ross Felice, had committed the crime.
In her closing argument, Rubino suggested that Ogrod’s silence was indicative of guilt, telling the jury that the “defendant admitted to his mother that he killed Barbara Jean and threatened his own mother; there had been no denial of that.”
On October 8, 1996, the jury convicted Ogrod of murder and attempted involuntary deviate sexual intercourse.
More than seven years later, on December 30, 2003, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed Ogrod’s conviction and death sentence, rebuffing his claims, including that Rubino had impermissibly commented on his silence
After the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in Ogrod’s case, a team of lawyers from the Federal Community Defender Office in Philadelphia and pro bono attorneys from the Philadelphia firm of Bingham McCutchen LLP brought a state law petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
The petition also had a statement from a man who said he had been in Ogrod’s basement shortly after Barbara Jean’s body was found and that he saw no blood or any sign of a clean-up. A forensic pathologist provided an affidavit saying that the murder weapon could not have been the weight bar. Dr. Hoyer, who performed the autopsy, agreed with that opinion.
The petition said a witness recalled that the man carrying the box had lit a cigarette and that there was evidence that Ogrod was a non-smoker.
The petition also claimed that Ogrod’s trial defense attorney provided an inadequate legal defense by failing to obtain an expert in false confessions to explain why Ogrod, in light of his sleep deprivation and limited intellect, had been especially vulnerable to psychologically coercive interrogation techniques employed by police. The petition also said that the prosecution had failed to disclose that Hall and Wolchansky had received leniency in exchange for their cooperation in the Ogrod case.
Judge Shelley Robins New, a former Philadelphia assistant district attorney who had worked as a homicide prosecutor alongside Judith Rubino until 1995, was assigned to the case. She declined a request to step off the case because of her background in the district attorney’s office.
In 2014, DNA testing was performed on evidence gathered from the homes of Ross Felice and Wesley Ward—two of the initial suspects. The DNA of Barbara Jean was not found.
In February 2018, Ogrod’s legal team asked the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit to review the case. Shortly thereafter, the CIU began re-investigating the case and turned over the prosecution’s file—more than 40,000 pages.
In February 2020, CIU chief Patricia Cummings and Assistant District Attorney Carrie Wood filed an additional response to the defense petition asking that Ogrod’s convictions be vacated.
“At trial, Ogrod found himself adrift in a perfect storm of unreliable scientific evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, Brady violations, and false testimony,” Cummings and Wood said in the response.
The filing included a 54-page stipulation of facts signed by Cummings and assistant district attorney Carrie Wood as well as Federal Community Defender Office attorneys Tracy Ulstad, Samuel Angell, and Loren Stewart, as well as Andrew Gallo and Robert McDonnell from the firm of Morgan, Lewis Y Bockius LLP, and James Rollins from the firm of Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP.
The defense and prosecution agreed that Ogrod’s trial defense lawyer had never been provided with a multitude of exculpatory evidence.
This information included:
--Records showing that Hall had cooperated with prosecutors in multiple cases—including 12 murders, in Philadelphia and other counties. One of those cases had been handled by Rubino, the prosecutor in Ogrod’s second trial.
--Notes from a police investigation of a separate crime at the Ogrod home two years before Barbara Jean was killed. At that time, it was clear that the rear basement door was barricaded and could not have been used—as Ogrod’s confession purported—to go out to the garage and come back into the basement.
-- Notes taken by Rubino during her pretrial interview with forensic neuropathologist Rorke, which showed that Rorke had said the probable cause of death was asphyxiation.
--Records showing that Wolchansky had significant and longstanding mental health issues, including schizophrenia, which he denied during his testimony.
--Notes from the autopsy taken by the detective indicating the murder weapon was “lighter than a baseball bat or tire iron,” which contradicted the prosecution theory that Ogrod used a heavier weightlifting bar.
--Interviews with nine of Ogrod’s former teachers who described him as “a complacent, socially inadequate youngster who followed the lead of others, who was unable to make decisions for himself, and would do anything to please others.
--The correspondence from Ogrod’s mother written in 1992 before she died that was sent to the Pennsylvania governor’s office describing Ogrod’s “infirmities and the mistreatment he suffered at the hands of interrogating detectives and pleading for his release”—contrary to Wolchansky’s claim that Ogrod’s mother believed he was guilty.
The CIU retained Dr. Ljubisa J. Dragovic, an expert in forensic pathology and neuropathology. Dragovic concluded, after reviewing the evidence that the “conclusions reached by Drs. Hoyer and Mirchandani that Barbara Jean died from cerebral injuries are not supported by medical science.” Dr. Dragovic also said that bruises on Barbara Jean that Hoyer and Mirchandani said were caused by being struck were in fact “hickeys.”
Dr. Ian Hood, a forensic pathologist, also reviewed the evidence and concluded that she most likely died of asphyxiation. Dr. Hood said the “hickeys” were likely inflicted by an adult.
Dr. Kirk L. Thibault, a biomechanical engineer and an expert in human injury biomechanics, also evaluated the case and concluded that Barbara Jean was not struck with the weight bar because of the absence of skull fractures and underlying brain injuries.
In addition, DNA testing had been performed on the wash used to clean Barbara Jean’s body at the autopsy. The testing revealed a male profile that was not Ogrod or Dr. Hoyer, who conducted the autopsy. The profile was submitted to the state and national DNA databases, but no match was found. On June 5, 2020, the joint motion for a new trial was granted and Ogrod was released on bond. It was an emotional hearing during which Carrie Wood, a member of the Conviction Integrity Unit, apologized to Ogrod and his family, as well as to the family of Barbara Jean.
“I am sorry it took 28 years for us to listen to what Barbara Jean was trying to tell us…that you are innocent,” Wood said tearfully. “That the words on that statement came from detectives and not you. And that we not only stole 28 years of your life, but that we threatened to execute you based on falsehoods.”
On June 10, Common Pleas Court Judge Leon W. Tucker granted the prosecution motion to dismiss the case.
On June 18, 2020, Andrew Swainson was exonerated of a Philadelphia murder investigated by Detective Manuel Santiago, who worked with Detective Devlin. Swainson was released after more than 31 years in prison.
In June 2021, Ogrod filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Philadelphia and several police officers, including Devlin and Worrell.
In August 2021, Santiago, Devlin and another detective, Frank Jastrzembski, were charged with perjury and other crimes for their conduct in the investigation and prosecution of Wright. Philadelphia County District Attorney Larry Krasner said Santiago and Devlin had coerced what was a clearly false confession from Wright. He said Santiago and Devlin used “unlawful tactics in order to coerce Wright” into signing the confession. Krasner said they prevented him from reading what he had signed, had made false promises that he could go home if he signed the document and made violent threats toward him.
Krasner said Jastrzembski lied under oath about finding the bloody clothing that linked Wright to the crime while searching his room. Krasner said the clothes were actually found at the victim’s house."
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=5752
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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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