PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Coughlin was found guilty in 2019, but the conviction was tossed out in 2020 due to misconduct by two jurors. Court documents say during an internal affairs investigation into Woods at CBI in late 2023, prosecutors in Boulder County learned there were anomalies in her work on Coughlin's case. A judge on Wednesday said a representative from CBI has retested the evidence. The prosecution said the reported anomalies did not impact the findings. Defense attorneys for Coughlin don't trust that and expressed interest in doing more testing, which could take two months to complete. A defense attorney also told the judge they want time to review CBI's 94-page report on the internal affairs investigation. Prosecutors are getting a copy of the report too. It is not available to the public."
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STORY: "Murder retrial postponed due to investigation into the DNA analyst," by Reporter Kelly Reinke, published by 9News, on March 13, 2024.
GIST: Garrett Coughlin was accused of shooting and killing three people in Coal Creek Canyon. He was found guilty in 2019, but the conviction was tossed out in 2020.
GIST: "A retrial in a 2017 triple homicide in Boulder County has been pushed back several months because the DNA analyst on the case is under investigation.
A review at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation found scientist Yvonne "Missy" Woods manipulated data in more than 650 cases. This triple homicide is one of them.
The trial against Garrett Coughlin, now 31 years old, was supposed to start in April. A judge rescheduled it for July.
Coughlin was 24 years old when he was arrested in 2017 for shooting and killing three people in Coal Creek Canyon. The victims were Wallace White, his wife Kelly Sloat-White, and his brother Emory Fraker.
Coughlin was found guilty in 2019, but the conviction was tossed out in 2020 due to misconduct by two jurors.
Court documents say during an internal affairs investigation into Woods at CBI in late 2023, prosecutors in Boulder County learned there were anomalies in her work on Coughlin's case.
A judge on Wednesday said a representative from CBI has retested the evidence.
The prosecution said the reported anomalies did not impact the findings.
Defense attorneys for Coughlin don't trust that and expressed interest in doing more testing, which could take two months to complete.
A defense attorney also told the judge they want time to review CBI's 94-page report on the internal affairs investigation. Prosecutors are getting a copy of the report too. It is not available to the public.
Attorneys had to fight for this report. In a rare move, the district attorney's office subpoenaed CBI to hand over the report."
The entire story 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/
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/
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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-12348801
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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."
