ENTRY: "National Registry of Exonerations (NRE) 2025 Report (15 pages): (Entire 15-page report can be read at the link below:
FALSE OR MISLEADING FORENIC EVIDENCE: "Thirty-nine exonerations (40%) included false or misleading forensic evidence. This is an increase from 2024, when 29% (44/158) included false or misleading forensic evidence."
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FEATURED EXONERATIONS: 'FALSE OR MISLEADING FORENSIC EVIDENCE:
SUBRAMANYAM VEDAM
State: Pennsylvania
Crime: Murder
Convicted: 1983
Exonerated: 2025
Contributing Factors: False or Misleading
Forensic Evidence, Perjury or False
Accusation, Official Misconduct
Twice, in 1983 and 1988, Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam was convicted by juries
in central Pennsylvania of murder in the death of a friend, whose body was
found in 1981 on the outskirts of State College. He was exonerated on October 2, 2025, after his legal team uncovered impeachment evidence against a key witness and mistakes by the state’s forensic witness in his analysis of the victim’s bullet wounds. Vedam spent more than 40 years in prison. Despite his exoneration, Vedam, who was 64 years old at the time of his release, was taken immediately into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, based on a 1988 detainer issued at the time of his conviction. He was then transferred to a processing center to await deportation to his native India. In February 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice Board of Immigration Appeals vacated the 1998 deportation order. The ruling restored Vedam's permanent U.S. residency and paved the way for a new hearing.
PATIENCE FRAZIER
State: Nevada
Crime: Manslaughter
Convicted: 2019
Exonerated: 2025
Contributing Factors: False Confession,
False or Misleading Forensic Evidence, Perjury
or False Accusation, Official Misconduct,
Inadequate Legal Defense
Patience Frazier pled guilty to manslaughter after she was charged with inducing an abortion by taking drugs in Humboldt County, Nevada, in 2019. Although the prosecution promised to seek probation, the judge sentenced her to 2½ to eight years in prison. In 2021, her conviction was vacated by a different judge following testimony at a hearing that indicated it was impossible to say there were signs of life after birth. In addition, an expert in addiction medicine said there was no evidence to support the claim that any of Frazier’s behaviors had caused a stillbirth. The case remained pending for four years before the judge finally dismissed it in April 2025. The judge said he believed “that there has been a miscarriage of justice,” and declared, “Patience has been portrayed as an antichrist, but this judge thinks she is, instead, just a mother caught hopelessly in the web of poverty with lack of any support system.”
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Also of interest in the forensic arena in the 2025 NRE Report:
NO-CRIME CASES. (Shaken Baby Syndrome case, for example): Of the 97 exonerations in 2025, 32% were no-crime cases. These 31 exonerations included wrongful convictions for drug possession, homicide, sexual assault, and child sex abuse. No-crime exonerations occur when an exoneree was convicted of a crime that did not occur. For example,the “crime” may have been an accident, an act of self-defense, a suicide that was mistaken for a crime, or the exoneree may have been accused.
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LONG TERM TRENDS: (HL NOTE);
(The forensics can be perfect -but that doesn't matter if, in fact the drugs or guns have been planted - or the plea of guilty to drug-related charges is made before the drugs have been analyzed.) HL;
NRE TEXT: As of April 6, 2026, the Registry added 97 exonerations that occurred in 2025. This is the lowest yearly total in any of our annual reports since 2013, when we reported 87 exonerations. The total for 2025 will undoubtedly increase as we
discover exonerations we don’t yet know about. When the 2024 annual report
was published in April 2025, we reported 147 exonerations for 2024. Since
then, we have added eleven more 2024 exonerations that we didn’t know about
at the time of that report’s publication. Exoneration totals have fluctuated like
this before. As we have explained in prior years, peaks have been driven by
clusters of drug exonerations. The biggest was in 2022, with 105 drug crime
exonerations in a single year, 99 of them in Cook County, Illinois. Thes e drug
crime cases involved more than 200 people who had been falsely convicted of
possessing drugs and weapons that had been planted by Chicago Police
Sergeant Ronald Watts and his fellow officers.
In 2024, a smaller group of drug crime exonerations (17) occurred in Harris
County, Texas (Houston), pushing Texas to the top of the list for that year.
Prior to that, the last time Texas had the most exonerations in a single year
was 2016, which capped a four-year period when nearly 140 defendants were
cleared of drug possession convictions after the Harris County CIU discovered
that scores of people had pled guilty to drug possession charges before lab
results came back showing that what they had possessed were not, in fact,
controlled substances.
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The entire 15-page report can be read at:
https://exonerationregistry.org/sites/exonerationregistry.org/files/documents/2025Exonerations.pdf
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. 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.
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;
