Sunday, March 24, 2024

James Hunter: Colorado: a beleaguered DND analyst Yvonne (Missy) Woods case: Reporter Christopher Osher reports that accusations of her flawed Colrado crime lab work haunt his 2003 31-3 conviction, The Denver Gazette reports in a story sub-headed, "Defense lawyers say testimony from state crime lab scientist Yvonne “Missy” Woods played a critical role in convicting an innocent man. His case is one of more than a thousand cases now in question."…“Did she tamper with evidence? Did she contaminate evidence potentially? No one knows,” said Phillip Danielson, a professor in DNA science at the University of Denver and a nationally recognized court expert who has administered over $13.5 million in research grants and funding, including for the National Institute of Justice. “This is why this was always a nightmare scenario for a lab director,” said Danielson, who hasn’t worked on the Hunter case, but is fielding calls from defense lawyers seeking to challenge past prosecutions that relied on Woods’ work. “Okay, we found some indication that she was doing things that were incorrect. How far does that extend? What did she do that we don’t know? Or that we may never know?”


PASSAGE OF THE DAY:  "In the case of Hunter, defense lawyers say Woods — whose testimony was the only physical evidence during the trial linking Hunter to the scene of the crime — played a critical role in convicting an innocent man. Hunter’s lawyers point to discrepancies in crime scene hair analysis by Woods, including her microscopic analysis that misidentified two pubic hairs taken from the victim as matching Hunter’s pubic hairs when DNA testing later determined those hairs really were the victim’s. Those lawyers say the true culprit likely is a man convicted in 2016 in Missouri of what the defense calls nearly identical crimes to the one in Colorado."

——————————————————————

PASSAGE TWO OFTHE DAY: "An internal CBI investigation, still not released to the public, found that Woods deviated from standard protocols throughout her 29-year career with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which ended in November when she retired after officials placed her on administrative leave. The internal affairs investigation found that Woods during her tenure tampered with DNA results and omitted material facts in official criminal justice records. Hunter’s conviction is one of potentially thousands now up in the air that relied on Woods’ work. CBI officials say they are reviewing all of Woods’ crime lab work while the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation is conducting a criminal investigation into Woods on Colorado’s behalf to avoid conflict of interests. Still, Colorado officials haven’t said much about what exactly is under review. And they have withheld from the public the 94-page internal affairs investigative report into Woods done by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, much to the consternation of the defense bar and even some prosecutors who have so far unsuccessfully pushed to make the report public."

----------------------------------------------------

STORY: "Accusations of flawed Colorado crime lab work haunt 2003 rape conviction," by Reporter Christopher Osher, published by The Denver Gazette, on March 24, 2024.

SUB-HEADING: "Defense lawyers say testimony from state crime lab scientist Yvonne “Missy” Woods played a critical role in convicting an innocent man. His case is one of more than a thousand cases now in question.

GIST: Every Saturday, the call comes in at 10:30 a.m., on the dot.

Vinnie Chacon knows that’s when her 64-year-old brother James Hunter will telephone her from Colorado’s Territorial Correctional Facility in Caсon City. Hunter has been incarcerated for more than 21 years, ever since his 2003 conviction and sentence of 168 years in prison for a heinous attack and rape he continues to claim he did not do.

James Hunter is serving a 168-year prison sentence for a crime he contends he did not commit. Lawyers argue in court filings that DNA analysis by Yvonne “Missy” Woods was flawed.



Chacon said she believes her brother’s claims of innocence because she knows the type of person he is and because she saw him about an hour before the 1 a.m. April 23, 2002, attack and rape.

 She says he was so inebriated he was in no condition to break into a trailer and terrorize a woman and her 5-year-old daughter for over four hours, as prosecutors successfully convinced a jury he did.

She said that before his incarceration, her brother gave homeless people jobs, bought flowers to cheer up depressed people he met in bars and let the downtrodden sleep at his trailer, where he and his wife lived.

“He was a very sincere person,” Chacon said. “Always trying to help somebody out.

“I’ve stayed by my brother’s side throughout this whole thing, just trying to keep him positive, and hoping something would happen,” she said.

Now, something has happened, giving a boost to the push by Chacon and defense lawyers to exonerate her brother. They are pinning their hopes on the recent announcement from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation of the discovery of “anomalies” in the work of state crime lab scientist Yvonne “Missy” Woods, which state officials in a prepared statement said put “all her work in question.

“Did she tamper with evidence? Did she contaminate evidence potentially? No one knows,” said Phillip Danielson, a professor in DNA science at the University of Denver and a nationally recognized court expert who has administered over $13.5 million in research grants and funding, including for the National Institute of Justice.

“This is why this was always a nightmare scenario for a lab director,” said Danielson, who hasn’t worked on the Hunter case, but is fielding calls from defense lawyers seeking to challenge past prosecutions that relied on Woods’ work. “Okay, we found some indication that she was doing things that were incorrect. How far does that extend? What did she do that we don’t know? Or that we may never know?”

In the case of Hunter, defense lawyers say Woods — whose testimony was the only physical evidence during the trial linking Hunter to the scene of the crime — played a critical role in convicting an innocent man. Hunter’s lawyers point to discrepancies in crime scene hair analysis by Woods, including her microscopic analysis that misidentified two pubic hairs taken from the victim as matching Hunter’s pubic hairs when DNA testing later determined those hairs really were the victim’s.

Those lawyers say the true culprit likely is a man convicted in 2016 in Missouri of what the defense calls nearly identical crimes to the one in Colorado.

Members of Hunter’s family, including his daughter, sister and others, have been battling for years to overturn Hunter’s conviction.

“He’s talked to me a few times about ending his life,” said his sister Chacon. “He’s talked about doing time for a crime he didn’t commit. I’m like, ‘You can’t give up yet. You can’t give up.’”

Prosecutors, though, continue to stand by the conviction. They say they remain convinced that on that April night in 2002 Hunter broke into his next-door neighbor’s trailer around 1 a.m. while masked, savagely punched his neighbor in the face, forced her and her 5-year-old to drink alcohol and then proceeded to rape the woman for nearly four hours while slashing at her breasts and then molesting her child.

The savagery, which included sexually assaulting the woman with a ketchup bottle, left the woman and the child so traumatized that they never lived in their trailer again.

An internal CBI investigation, still not released to the public, found that Woods deviated from standard protocols throughout her 29-year career with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which ended in November when she retired after officials placed her on administrative leave. The internal affairs investigation found that Woods during her tenure tampered with DNA results and omitted material facts in official criminal justice records.

Hunter’s conviction is one of potentially thousands now up in the air that relied on Woods’ work.

CBI officials say they are reviewing all of Woods’ crime lab work while the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation is conducting a criminal investigation into Woods on Colorado’s behalf to avoid conflict of interests.

Still, Colorado officials haven’t said much about what exactly is under review. And they have withheld from the public the 94-page internal affairs investigative report into Woods done by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, much to the consternation of the defense bar and even some prosecutors who have so far unsuccessfully pushed to make the report public.

Anomalies identified in Woods’ work prompted the Colorado Bureau of Investigation in January to ask state legislators for an additional $7.5 million for the review and retesting of an estimated 3,000 DNA samples by an independent third-party laboratory and to pay for post-conviction reviews and potential retrying of cases.

“What CBI has detected could be the tip of the iceberg,” said Danielson, the DU professor, who added that Woods once “had a reputation for being the go-to person to get the more challenging cases solved.” Danielson said in cases in which he testified against Woods, he found Woods “didn’t stick to the science as much as I would have,” and that he found her to be “a bit prosecution friendly.”

In federal court filings, lawyers representing the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, Jefferson County prosecutors and Lakewood police have resisted Hunter’s efforts to allow new DNA analysis of evidence collected from the crime scene, including the rape kit. They’ve also objected to Hunter’s efforts to have crime scene fingerprints submitted to the national Automated Fingerprint Identification System for comparison against convicted sex offenders.

Lawyers representing the CBI, Lakewood police and prosecutors contend Hunter should instead seek relief in Colorado’s court system, where his appeals already have been rejected.

Hunter’s lawyers and his family members say they believe the crime scene fingerprints and DNA will likely identify the true culprit as Kenneth Dale Smith, 44, who they say was in the same Lakewood trailer park where the crime occurred on the date of the crime. Smith pleaded guilty in 2016 in a Missouri courtroom to a host of sexual misconduct offenses, including statutory rape, sodomy and child molestation, and was sentenced to 118 years in a Missouri prison.

For now, Hunter’s requests for DNA testing and for further investigation of crime scene fingerprints are pending before U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Domenico.


Woods has declined comment. Woods’ lawyer, Ryan Brackley, said, “She has long maintained that she’s never created or falsely reported any inculpatory DNA matches or exclusions, nor has she testified falsely in any hearing or trial resulting in a false conviction or unjust imprisonment.”

Solely based on the sworn statement of Woods, then-Jefferson County District Court Presiding Judge Roy Olson back in 2002 approved an arrest warrant for Hunter. Police had identified Hunter as a prime suspect because the victim while under hypnosis told police something in the voice of her attacker sounded “a little” like her next-door neighbor, but that there also was something about the voice that didn’t sound like him.

Hunter also came under scrutiny because in 1985 police had arrested Hunter, when he was 25, for attempting to break into a bank examiner’s home in Portland, Ore. The Portland woman said she saw a masked man peering into her kitchen window after she finished a shower and left the bathroom in a robe. She said she believed the man fled after her home’s alarm system was tripped, either by her or by him. Police apprehended Hunter near the home, and he eventually was sentenced to probation for four years for a burglary conviction.

Hunter’s sister says the crime in Oregon didn’t involve a sexual offense and instead was just a desperate man seeking money who never actually broke into what he thought was an unoccupied residence. She said her brother went on to turn his life around, becoming a successful long-haul trucker who moved furniture for families.

His initial arrest for the rape in Colorado hinged on Woods’ sworn statement that her microscopic analysis found two pubic hairs recovered from the rape victim matched pubic hairs Hunter, then 43, had allowed police to collect from him. But her analysis turned out to be flawed, and Judge Olson freed Hunter from jail after a lab in Pennsylvania determined the DNA from the pubic hairs actually matched the DNA of the victim, not Hunter’s. Woods testified the Pennsylvania lab finding came as a “blow to my ego.”



Undeterred, Woods and prosecutors would two months later take the case to a grand jury, citing new evidence. They secured an indictment against Hunter and eventual conviction on burglary and sexual assault charges. The heart of the prosecution case hinged on Woods’ testimony that additional DNA analysis by her showed a hair collected by police from the victim’s bed contained a mixture of the victim’s DNA and Hunter’s DNA, and a hair police found on the couch in the victim’s living room matched Hunter’s DNA.

Thomas Henry, a lawyer who has unsuccessfully pushed to overturn Hunter’s conviction after meeting him in prison several years ago, said there are problems with the chain of custody related to the hair samples. He said he believes the two hairs Woods testified had DNA linking Hunter to the crime scene actually came from samples Hunter allowed police to take from him.

Even Lakewood police were confused as to why two crime scene hair packets were returned from the CBI crime lab, when there originally was only one crime scene hair packet, according to an evidence log obtained during discovery. Henry added that Woods’ testimony shows she would have to have analyzed more crime scene hairs than police originally logged into evidence, something the defense lawyer contends would be impossible.

“When I went to grade school, two and two is four,” Henry said. “If they tell you there’s eight, and there ends up being 10, somebody’s not adding right. Well, the hair counts don’t match, and the Colorado courts say it’s just a paperwork error. What do you mean it’s a paperwork error?”

Further, Henry said the palm print and partial fingerprints police found at the front door of the victim’s trailer that a police lab technician said likely came from the intruder don’t match Hunter’s palm or fingerprints.



Fingerprints police found inside the victim’s trailer also don’t match Hunter’s, and none of those fingerprints were ever compared to the doorframe prints, the defense lawyer added. None of the crime scene fingerprints were submitted to the Automated Fingerprint Identification System despite the prosecution in court filings stating that had been done, Henry said.

Former Jefferson County Assistant District Attorney Steven Jensen prosecuted the case. In an interview, he said he remains convinced Hunter’s conviction is solid and said he never intentionally made a “misrepresentation” in court filings about whether the fingerprints were submitted for comparison against the national database. “Sometimes you have to rely upon information that you were provided by other people,” he said.

Jensen and defense lawyer Henry are old legal foes. They squared off when Henry, a former federal prosecutor, successfully convinced Jefferson County District Judge Dennis Hall to throw out the murder conviction of Michael Mapps for the 2005 killing of 82-year-old Charles Repenning in his Lakewood home. Jensen also prosecuted that case.

Henry convinced Judge Hall in 2011 that the original defense lawyer in that case had tampered with evidence, which interfered with Mapps’ ability to show an alternate suspect, who had confessed to his girlfriend, was the true mastermind of that crime. Mapps died of complications from hepatitis C in prison in 2013, while Hall’s ruling was under appeal. Mapps never got his new trial.

Henry, the defense lawyer, who now is battling multiple myeloma cancer, has handed off the challenge of Hunter’s rape conviction to another defense lawyer, Kenneth Mark Burton. Henry said he remains haunted by the death of Mapps and hopes another defendant he believes is innocent won’t also die while awaiting freedom from prison.


The likely culprit of the rape is Kenneth Dale Smith, now serving time in a Missouri prison, Henry said. A bottle was also used in the sexual assault in Missouri, and the victims’ breasts in that case also were slashed with a knife, the defense lawyer said.

Hunter once was married to Smith’s mother. Multiple family members said Hunter took Smith under his wing after Smith’s mother died. Smith in an interview denied to The Gazette having any connection to the rape in Colorado and said he believes he was working at an Applebee’s restaurant in Missouri when the rape occurred.

“He’s just trying to pawn it off on somebody else,” Smith said of Hunter. “And he’s got a lot of people convinced.”

Those who are convinced include Smith’s own aunt, Denise Cox, who raised Smith while Smith’s mother was serving time in prison. She said Smith always had a volatile, explosive temper, while Hunter wasn’t the type to violently harm anyone. She recalled when Smith was just 5 years old, Smith once took her toddler son’s face in a fit of anger and continually mashed it against a chain link fence until her son’s face was left bloody and raw.

“I feel bad for my nephew,” Cox said. “I love Kenny, but he needs to own up to what he did. He needs to pay for it.”

Hunter’s daughter, Shay Hunter, now 48, and living in the state of Washington, said Smith is lying when he denies being in Colorado at the time of the rape. She said she recalls talking to Smith on a day near the date of the rape at her father’s trailer. She said she distinctly recalls making fun of Smith because he was wearing a single white glove like Michael Jackson.

The Gazette identified another potential suspect that defense lawyers now say police never considered. The rape victim told police her assailant repeatedly referred to her as Gloria even though that wasn’t her name and pressed her on why she was protecting and hiding Carl, a man the assailant repeatedly told her she knew owed him money, police records show.

About two months after the rape and attack, Carl Ruble and his wife, Dawn, who lived in the trailer park, filed for a restraining order against Donald Hotchkiss. They claimed in their restraining order request, which was granted, that Hotchkiss, who also lived in the trailer park, hit Dawn in the face and continually stalked them and threatened them, standing at their fence, screaming “at the top of his vocal chords.”

Hotchkiss would go on to amass until his death in 2022 more than 50 criminal charges, ranging from trespassing, public indecency for exposing his genitals, to assaults and burglaries. He often was in and out of mental health facilities, records show. He was homeless at the time of his death.

Carl Ruble testified during Hunter’s trial that he briefly attended a raucous barbeque at Hunter's trailer the night of the rape. But Ruble was never questioned while on the witness stand about his issues with Hotchkiss or about the rape victim’s statement that her assailant said she was protecting a Carl. Defense lawyers say they never knew about Hotchkiss and further say none of the police evidence they’ve reviewed mentioned Hotchkiss at all.

Hunter’s sister, Chacon, said about an hour before police say the rape attack began, she drove by her brother’s trailer on the way to her own trailer in the same trailer park. She said she saw the front door to her brother’s trailer open and the lights on. Testimony during the trial showed her brother had thrown a barbeque party that night, with a box of liquor a family he was moving had left him because they couldn’t take the liquor overseas.

She said she found Hunter inside the trailer, stumbling and inebriated, along with Hunter’s brother in-law, who was sleeping in the living room. Another man was sleeping in the front yard, a homeless guy her brother employed in the trucking business. She said her brother was worried about the mess in the trailer because his wife was returning the next day from Missouri, where his wife had relatives.

“I told him, ‘We’ll come back over and clean the house tomorrow. Don’t worry about it,’” she recalled.


Chacon said she trundled her brother off to his bed, where she found him that next morning passed out. Police records show that morning when Hunter was told of the rape, he went out and bought a flowering plant for the victim, put the names of himself and his family on a card, and then spent time consoling the victim for about an hour.

“Unfortunately, they just focused on him,” Chacon said of police and prosecutors. “Eventually, you know, they’re just out to get somebody for it.”

She said after the rape, her brother expressed concern for her safety, installing surveillance cameras on her trailer and refusing to let her even get her mail on her own.

She wonders why prosecutors, police and the CBI continue to resist efforts to submit the crime scene evidence for new DNA testing and still won’t submit the fingerprints from the crime scene to a national database of convicted criminals’ fingerprints.

“How difficult is it to hand over the evidence and let it be redone?” she asked. “But they’ve been shot down left or right every time. There’s something wrong there. If they’ve got nothing to hide, then just hand it over.”

The entire story can be read at:

https://denvergazette.com/premium/httpscolorado-watchaccusations-of-flawed-colorado-crime-lab-work-haunt-rape-case/article_d6975c9f-4c52-5703-a306-3a0a991199d2.html#google_vignette

Posted by at