PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "George Brauchier, who worked on numerous cases with Woods when he served as a district attorney in Colorado, believes it’s because of the esteem in which she was held. “She had a great reputation. She was like the Tom Brady of DNA. You just sort of accepted that she did it right and that she was going to bring the goods and she was going to make it through any cross-examination.”
PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Brauchier said the Woods case will have profound ramifications for future trials. Today, he said, it feels to many that if DNA testing has been done in a case, it is unimpeachable. “Yet we’ve now injected doubt into that scientific process. That’s a hurdle for prosecutors in the future who are heavily relying upon DNA evidence.” He also wonders how many victims or victims’ families will get a phone call from prosecutors saying there is a question mark over a conviction. “And now they have sleepless nights wondering if they caught the right guy who did this to them or their loved one,” he said. “Or if they did catch the right person, is he going to stay in prison?
--------------------------------------------
"STORY: "Did the 'Tom Brady of DNA' put hundreds of innocent people in jail?" by Reporter Alex Hanaford, published by The Times, on March 19, 2024.
SUB-HEADING: "Yvonne Woods spent three decades at The Colorado Bureau of Investigations. Now claims she tampered with evidence have put all her work under the microscope."
GIST: "James Hunter’s conviction was cut and dry as far as most were concerned. DNA evidence identified him as the suspect who broke into his neighbour’s home and sexually assaulted her, and her daughter, in 2002. He was sentenced to 168 years in prison, ineligible for parole until 2068, by which time he would be 108.
Twenty-two years into that sentence, Hunter returned to court last week in an attempt to overturn his conviction on the grounds that the DNA evidence against him had been fabricated by a lead lab agent with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation: Yvonne “Missy” Woods.
Hunter’s is one of more than a thousand cases under scrutiny after claims that Woods, a 29-year veteran with the bureau described by a colleague as “like the Tom Brady of DNA” in reference to the American football quarterback, had over the course of her career intentionally tampered with hundreds of DNA test results, deleted data and concealed evidence. The revelation, which came as a result of an internal investigation, “puts all of her work in question”, the bureau admitted.
Hunter’s attorneys are suing the state for “injunctive relief” to gain access to the DNA evidence against him, arguing that Woods’s work resulted in the conviction of an innocent man.
In January, the bureau requested $7.5 million in state funding to pay for a third-party laboratory to retest about 3,000 DNA samples, as well as to offset the cost of retrying any criminal cases across Colorado and address claims by people who say they were wrongfully convicted.
WOODS, 60, WAS PUT ON ADMINISTRATIVE LEAVE IN OCTOBER AND RETIRED FROM THE BUREAU THE FOLLOWING MONTH. TO DATE HER FORMER EMPLOYER, FOR WHICH SHE STARTED WORKING IN 1994, HAS ALREADY FOUND ISSUE WITH 652 OF HER CASES BETWEEN 2008 AND 2023.
IT HAS ECHOES OF THE ANNIE DOOKHAN CASE. DOOKHAN WAS A CHEMIST AT A MASSACHUSETTS DRUG LAB WHO IN 2012 ADMITTED FALSIFYING DRUG TEST RESULTS IN AS MANY AS 34,000 CRIMINAL CASES, CASTING DOUBT ON CONVICTIONS AND FORCING THE REVIEW OF COUNTLESS SENTENCES.
Hunter lived with his wife in the trailer next to the woman he was convicted of raping. Although Woods’s sworn statement said her analysis of pubic hairs recovered from the victim matched Hunter’s, a third-party lab that tested the same hairs found they likely came from the victim herself and not Hunter.
The judge refused to set the case for trial and Hunter was freed, but two months later Woods and prosecutors claimed they had new evidence — additional hairs recovered from the victim’s sofa that were a match for Hunter’s — despite the fact that Hunter admitted taking a plant over to his neighbour to console her after she’d returned from hospital the morning after the attack, and had sat with her for an hour.
Mark Burton, Hunter’s attorney, has said that the real culprit is likely to be a man who is serving more than 100 years in prison for another sex offence, who was in the same trailer park during the hours that the crime occurred.
Now he insists that the state analysed fingerprints lifted from the crime scene, but they were never submitted to the national database. The state also never tested the rape kit. Burton said: “And we believe that if it’s tested independently, it will show that it wasn’t Mr Hunter’s.”
Another case the state of Colorado has to reckon with is that of Garrett Coughlin, whose trial for allegedly killing three people is set for April. The bureau has alerted prosecutors that DNA testing conducted by Woods was missing data.
Coughlin’s attorney, Mary Claire Mulligan, refused to talk about the case because it is in court at present. However, she told The Times that not one dollar of the $7.5 million the bureau has asked for to reimburse the various district attorney’s offices for defending any related cases, and to pay outside laboratories for retesting, was going to public defenders or to people in prison who needed to litigate their case if they find out their convictions could have been affected.
MULLIGAN ALSO QUESTIONS THE TRANSPARENCY AROUND WHAT THE BUREAU WAS DOING. “WE KNOW VERY LITTLE ABOUT THEIR PROCESS OR HOW THEY’RE DOING THEIR INVESTIGATION,” SHE SAID.
Mulligan also said the bureau had to figure out a way of notifying all the people whose cases involved Woods. “And there were a lot,” she said. “I’ve been a criminal defence lawyer here in Colorado now for 32 years and Missy and I both kind of came up through the ranks at the same time. I remember cross-examining her in a very early trial of mine in the Nineties.
“I’ve had multiple cases involving her, and probably every other criminal defence lawyer who has practised for the same amount of time I have is in a similar situation. I can think of a handful of people just who I’ve represented who are in prison now following cases in which she provided testimony.”
Mulligan said she was shocked when she heard the news. “Missy always appeared to be a straight shooter. She was always accessible. And, honestly, I’m still shaking my head as to what might have motivated her to do this.”
The fact that Woods’s work was consistently checked as part of the process — that it was independently verified — has Colorado’s legal world perplexed.
George Brauchier, who worked on numerous cases with Woods when he served as a district attorney in Colorado, believes it’s because of the esteem in which she was held. “She had a great reputation. She was like the Tom Brady of DNA. You just sort of accepted that she did it right and that she was going to bring the goods and she was going to make it through any cross-examination.”
The last big case Brauchier had before he left office was a quadruple murder committed by someone the media dubbed “the hammer killer”. His identity was unknown until a few years ago, when Woods identified Alex Ewing from DNA taken from the crime scenes. Ewing was already in prison in a different state for attempted murder.
“It was DNA that finally put him at the crime scenes, and so you can imagine, the DNA piece is epic. It’s huge,” Brauchier said. However, Ewing’s lawyer now says that the DNA evidence used to convict her client had been called into question. “It really raises significant questions as to [its] reliability,” she said. Ewing is appealing against his conviction.
Brauchier said the Woods case will have profound ramifications for future trials. Today, he said, it feels to many that if DNA testing has been done in a case, it is unimpeachable. “Yet we’ve now injected doubt into that scientific process. That’s a hurdle for prosecutors in the future who are heavily relying upon DNA evidence.”
He also wonders how many victims or victims’ families will get a phone call from prosecutors saying there is a question mark over a conviction. “And now they have sleepless nights wondering if they caught the right guy who did this to them or their loved one,” he said. “Or if they did catch the right person, is he going to stay in prison?”
The bureau declined to comment beyond its news release on Woods, citing the active investigation."
——————————————————
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/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
---------------------------------------------------------------
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;
—————————————————————————————————
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;
---------------------------------------------------------
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-12348801
————————————————————————————————
MORE VALUABLE WORDS: "As a former public defender, Texas' refusal to delay Ivan Cantu's execution to evaluate new evidence is deeply worrying for the state of our legal system. There should be no room for doubt in a death penalty case. The facts surrounding Cantu's execution should haunt all of us."
Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett; X March 1, 2024.
---------------------------------------------
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/did-the-tom-brady-of-dna-put-hundreds-of-innocent-people-in-jail-rht5sbt7g
