PUBLISHER'S NOTE: One of the most alarming 'contributing factors' I found in the 2025 National Registry of Exonerations (NRE) Report was, as in the previous year, the large number of exonerations in cases where the contributing factor to the wrongful conviction was 'official misconduct'. On the surface the case may have looked fine - but, in reality, all too often it may may have been otherwise sabotaged 'beneath the surface' by police, prosecutors or both. As seen in the excerpt from the report below, most of the 2025 that included official misconduct involved"more than one kind of misconduct." What does that tell you! The NRE'S disturbing black list of types of misconduct includes "failure to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense, witness tampering, perjury by an official actor, misconduct in interrogations, knowingly permitting perjured testimony, prosecutorial dishonesty in court), or forensic misconduct (2 cases). (We can probably think of a multitude of others), It certainly makes me wonder what efforts are being made to prevent "Official misconduct" - which is truly a betrayal of public officials duty to the public - to prevent the wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice - and leads to the conclusion that we have to do an awful lot more, including enforcing accountability, and punishing those in public service in the criminal justice system who abuse their responsibility. Kudos to the N.R.E, for bringing all of this to our attention.
Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
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FROM THE REPORT: (An excerpt) "We know of official misconduct in 70, or 72% of exonerations that occurred in 2025. In 2024, official misconduct was present in
70% of the 158 exonerations. Most of the 2025 exonerations that included
official misconduct involved more than one kind of misconduct, such as the
failure to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense (55 cases), witness
tampering (42 cases), perjury by an official actor (30 cases), misconduct in
interrogations (11 cases), knowingly permitting perjured testimony (10 cases),
prosecutorial dishonesty in court (7 cases), or forensic misconduct (2 cases)."
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GREGORIO CARDONA, ROBERT CARDONA, LOWELL
HIGGINS-BEY, FERNANDO GOMEZ, MICHAEL MCCASTLE,
HARRY RODRIGUEZ
State: Illinois
Crime: Murder/Burglary/Home Invasion
Convicted: 1988/1989
Exonerated: 2025
Contributing Factors:
False Confession, Perjury or False Accusation, Official Misconduct
Gregorio Cardona and five other men—his brother, Robert Cardona, Fernando
Gomez, Lowell Higgins-Bey, Michael McCastle and Harry Rodriguez—are
among more than 50 individuals who were wrongly convicted based on
misconduct by Chicago police detective Reynaldo Guevara and his partner,
Ernest Halvorsen, and in some cases, other detectives. The misconduct
11included coercing false confessions through violence and coercing false
identifications from witnesses. The six men were convicted of crimes ranging
from burglary to murder in the 1987 slaying of a man who was found bound and
stabbed more than 40 times on the north side of Chicago. In addition to the
evidence of police corruption, DNA testing excluded all of them from a DNA
profile found on the murder weapons. Combined, they had served more than
110 years in prison. Rodriguez was exonerated posthumously because he had
died in prison.
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SHERMAN TOWNSEND
Crime: Burglary
Convicted: 1998
Exonerated: 2025
Contributing Factors: Perjury or False
Accusation, Inadequate Legal Defense
No physical evidence connected Sherman
Townsend to a home invasion in Minneapolis,
Minnesota. The people inside the house couldn’t
identify him, but a man in the neighborhood told police he was certain that
Townsend was the person he saw running from the house. Townsend turned
down a plea deal and was convicted in 1998. Later, in prison, he ran into the
person who identified him. The man said he had falsely named Townsend to
confuse the police because he was the real perpetrator. After an investigation,
Townsend was released from prison in 2007 on time served. The Minnesota
Board of Pardons gave him a full pardon on July 9, 2025.
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RAYMOND GAINES
State: Massachusetts
Crime: Murder/Robbery
Convicted: 1976
Exonerated: 2025
Contributing Factors: Mistaken Witness
Identification, False Confession, Perjury or
False Accusation, Official Misconduct
Raymond Gaines was convicted in 1976 of the robbery and murder of a shoe
repair shop owner in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. He
fought for decades to overturn his conviction and was finally released on bond
in 2021. Gaines had served nearly 45 years in prison. In 2022, his convictions
13were vacated based on recantations by two prosecution witnesses as well as
newly discovered evidence of misconduct by one of the detectives in the case.
The prosecution dismissed the charges in October 2025.
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The entire 2025 Report can be read at:
https://exonerationregistry.org/sites/exonerationregistry.org/files/documents/2025Exonerations.pdf
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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. 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;
