QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, compared Dr. Blake to Ted Williams, the baseball player regarded as among the greatest of all time. “In forensic science, there are a bunch of .300 hitters, and there’s Ted Williams. Ed Blake is Ted Williams.”
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The legacy of questionable forensic science continues to be seen in cases today. Robert Roberson, a Texas death-sentenced prisoner, was convicted on the basis of “Shaken Baby Syndrome” (SBS), a diagnosis that has since been refuted by most medical experts. In 2024, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned an SBS conviction in another case and recently granted Mr. Roberson a last minute stay of execution under Texas’ junk science law, which allows for reconsideration of convictions when the science relied upon has been discredited. Medical experts who reviewed the evidence in Mr. Roberson’s case have concluded that his 2‑year-old daughter Nikki actually died from accidental and natural causes, not abuse. Cases like Mr. Roberson’s underscore the evolving understanding of forensic science in criminal cases. Dr. Blake’s career demonstrated what this rigor looks like: his work established that forensic science can be a vital tool in ensuring accuracy and fairness in criminal cases."
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Dr. Blake’s work coincided with a period in which the criminal legal system began to confront the use of unreliable forensic evidence in convictions.
The PCR testing used by Dr. Blake was among the few forensic tools that could definitively exclude people who were accused of being involved in crimes.
In 1988, he helped contribute to the first DNA exoneration, proving that Gary Dotson, who had served 8 years in prison for a sexual assault, could not have been the source of the biological evidence from the crime he was accused of committing.
Just five years later, in 1993, Dr. Blake’s work helped free Kirk Bloodsworth from death row in Maryland — the first death-sentenced person to be exonerated through DNA evidence.
“Ed was a guy who saw things in black and white,” said Maurice Possley, a former reporter for The Chicago Tribune who investigated wrongful convictions.
“Like, ‘You can come up with all kinds of different theories about why something doesn’t exonerate this person. But what I’m telling you is this person’s biological materials is not present.’ And that’s pretty definitive.”
Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, compared Dr. Blake to Ted Williams, the baseball player regarded as among the greatest of all time. “In forensic science, there are a bunch of .300 hitters, and there’s Ted Williams. Ed Blake is Ted Williams.”
As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s, Dr. Blake switched his studies from physics to forensics.
“There were just so many things going on in society, and our culture was undergoing a lot of changes,” he told the Associated Press in 1995. “I wanted to be involved in a field that was more practically oriented and societally oriented, and so somehow I just gravitated to the forensic science program.”
He would go on to receive his bachelor’s degree in 1968 and a doctorate in criminology in 1976, also from Berkeley.
In the mid-1980s, Dr. Blake’s consulting company, Forensic Science Associates, occupied the same building as a biotech firm that had developed PCR testing.
After consulting with molecular geneticist Henry Erlich of Cetus Corporation, Dr. Blake began to use PCR testing on degraded tissue samples, which proved to be a transformative technique for forensic analysis.
Alternative methods of DNA analysis existed at the time; however, they required large amounts of biological materials to be able to make an identification.
Often times, crime scene evidence was not substantial enough or too degraded to be tested by these methods.
Dr. Blake was known by his peers for having an unwavering insistence on scientific accuracy.
“Those who know Blake believe that a stick of dynamite sizzling under his nose would not cause him to alter a dot or comma in a laboratory report,” wrote Jim Dwyer for Newsday in 1994.
Dr. Blake’s work took on heightened significance as awareness grew about how unreliable forensic evidence had contributed to wrongful convictions.
His DNA analysis provided a definitive means of exculpating suspects in cases where traditional forensic methods had offered only subjective assessments.
The legacy of questionable forensic science continues to be seen in cases today.
Robert Roberson, a Texas death-sentenced prisoner, was convicted on the basis of “Shaken Baby Syndrome” (SBS), a diagnosis that has since been refuted by most medical experts.
In 2024, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned an SBS conviction in another case and recently granted Mr. Roberson a last minute stay of execution under Texas’ junk science law, which allows for reconsideration of convictions when the science relied upon has been discredited.
Medical experts who reviewed the evidence in Mr. Roberson’s case have concluded that his 2‑year-old daughter Nikki actually died from accidental and natural causes, not abuse.
Cases like Mr. Roberson’s underscore the evolving understanding of forensic science in criminal cases.
Dr. Blake’s career demonstrated what this rigor looks like: his work established that forensic science can be a vital tool in ensuring accuracy and fairness in criminal cases."
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/edward-t-blake-pioneer-of-using-dna-to-prove-innocence-dies-at-80
EXCERPT: "The value of forensic-DNA profiling in exonerating innocent persons has recently been much in the news in Canada, in connection with two murder cases. In 1985, Guy Paul Morin was arrested for the murder of nine-year old Christine Jessop, a crime that also involved sexual assault. Morin was acquitted in his first trial (in 1986) but was re-tried, and convicted, in 1992. In 1995, after 15 months in prison, Morin was exonerated on the basis of DNA testing, a technology not available when the crime had originally been committed. In fact, the DNA sample obtained from Christine Jessop’s clothing was so degraded by 1995 that an advanced form of the technology, only recently perfected, was needed to perform the analysis. The Morin case, and the manner in which it was originally investigated and prosecuted, is currently under intense review by the Ontario government.
More recently, forensic-DNA analysis was used to exonerate David Milgaard, who had been convicted in 1969 of the rape and murder of Gail Miller in Saskatoon. Milgaard spent almost 23 years in prison.(3) The Milgaard case differs from the Morin case in several important ways. First, there was a large amount of DNA (from semen) available for analysis from the clothing of Gail Miller. A U.S. forensic serologist, Edward Blake, who is also an expert on forensic-DNA, has suggested that this material, properly analyzed, would almost certainly have exonerated Milgaard in 1992 when new tests were carried out.(4)
The second major way in which the Milgaard case differs from that of Guy Paul Morin is that police have since arrested a suspect on the basis of the forensic-DNA evidence developed in 1997. Larry Fisher, a convicted serial rapist, who had long been suspected of being involved in the rape and murder of Gail Miller, has been arrested by the RCMP; Fisher’s DNA profile matches that obtained from the semen taken from Gail Miller’s clothing.(5)
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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/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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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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