QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Meanwhile, (City Lawyer) Gerarde also argued during his opening statement of the trial that a pause in a tape recording can be perfectly innocuous. “There are incidents when a tape needs to be stopped: the witness wants a bathroom break, the detectives need to gather their notes,” Gerarde said. “Stopping the tape is not a problem. Stopping the tape and threatening a witness is a problem, but there is no evidence that occurred.”
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "One tape was the recording of Morant’s initial interview with Raucci, in which Morant stated that Lewis had committed the murder. Morant would later say that he had been intoxicated at the time of the interview and that Raucci had subjected him to “hours of threats,” as his lawyer Nick Brustin put it during opening statements of the trial. Morant never signed the statement, and returned to the police station the next day to disavow it. Koenig analyzed the recording of Raucci’s interview of Morant in 2017. He told the jury that he had identified at least nine, “probably 10” instances of “over-recorded events” — meaning that someone appeared to have overwritten portions of the recording with new audio. Additionally, in 2023, Koenig examined a copy of Raucci’s interview with a witness named Hector Ortiz. He found at least seven instances in which he had confidence that someone stopped and started the recording. He told the jury that he found three more “probable” stop-start events and “more than three incidents of over-recorded events.”
STORY: "Stop. Start. Rewind. Record Over, by Staff Reporter Laura Glesby, published by The New Haven Independent, on May 5
GIST: "A former FBI analyst who analyzed the Monica Lewinsky tapes kept finding mysteries in three recordings that helped put Stefon Morant behind bars.
The analyst, Brian Koenig, couldn’t explain why someone re-recorded at least 12 portions of the tapes. He couldn’t say how long the tapes were paused at least 18 times. He couldn’t tell if the missing audio would have documented an innocuous interruption or a police conspiracy to frame Morant for murder.
Koenig could only say that at least 30 moments were missing from the audio record of three interviews conducted by former New Haven police Det. Vincent Raucci.
He offered that conclusion before a federal jury in U.S. District Judge Sarala Nagala’s Hartford courtroom on Thursday afternoon in the ongoing federal case Stefon Morant v. City of New Haven.
He had been hired as an expert witness by lawyers for Morant, who is pursuing a wrongful-conviction lawsuit against the City of New Haven as well as six former New Haven detectives, including Raucci.
The city, meanwhile, enlisted its own forensic expert to undermine Koenig’s report.
Morant was convicted in 1994 of the 1990 double murder of former alder Ricardo Turner and Lamont Fields. He and his co-defendant, Scott Lewis, always maintained their innocence of the crime. They claim that former Det. Raucci framed them by coercing witnesses to make false statements against them — a claim that the FBI unearthed evidence to back up in the years following their conviction, with Koenig’s help.
Lewis eventually won his freedom and cleared his name after a judge overturned his conviction in 2013. Morant, meanwhile, left prison in 2015 after a sentence modification and eventually received a pardon. While former Mayor Toni Harp’s administration decided to settle a lawsuit brought about by Lewis for $9.5 million, the city under Mayor Justin Elicker has decided to take Morant’s lawsuit to trial. Raucci, meanwhile, continues to deny the claims against him.
Koenig was working as a part-time contractor with the FBI, following two decades of full-time work at the agency, when investigators contacted him about Morant’s and Lewis’ cases in 1996. The FBI enlisted Koenig to analyze the original tape recording of Raucci’s interview with Jose Roque, a 16-year-old witness at the time of the interview who helped convict Lewis and Morant. (Koenig would soon go on to examine Linda Tripp’s recordings of Monica Lewinsky discussing her relationship with President Bill Clinton, according to his C.V.)
In 1991, Roque had stated on the tape that he overheard Lewis and Morant discussing the murder and that he witnessed Lewis toss a gun into the Mill River.
But at Morant’s criminal trial in 1994, Roque said repeatedly under oath that Raucci had coached his entire statement.
He said that Raucci would periodically stop the tape, tell him how to answer a question, and resume recording so that Roque could repeat the words for the tape.
“He kept stopping the tape… And he’d tell me what to say and he’d play the tape again,” Roque said at the trial.
Former New Haven detectives have faced similar allegations in several other wrongful-conviction cases.
To analyze tapes like the recording of Roque’s interview, Koenig followed a process that the FBI developed following the Watergate scandal. He would conduct a “critical listen,” meaning that he would “listen repeatedly with high-level headphones,” as he told the jury on Thursday. He would produce a waveform graph, digitally mapping out the amplitude and frequency of the sounds recorded on the tape. And he would analyze the physical tape, examining how the iron oxide had responded to the electromagnetic signals from the recorder. To do so, according to a 1990 journal article that Koenig authored, he would treat the tape with a ferrofluid that would illuminate the physical residue of the recording.
As Koenig explained to the jury in Hartford, his 1996 analysis for the FBI found “11 times in which the tape was stopped and then restarted during the interview. This does not include the beginning stop and the end stop.”
Many years later, Morant’s lawyers hired Koenig as a private consultant to analyze copies of two additional tapes pertaining to the case. Since these tapes were not originals, Koenig could not draw conclusions from their physical features, but his report examined waveform graphs to find evidence “consistent with” pauses and over-recordings.
One tape was the recording of Morant’s initial interview with Raucci, in which Morant stated that Lewis had committed the murder. Morant would later say that he had been intoxicated at the time of the interview and that Raucci had subjected him to “hours of threats,” as his lawyer Nick Brustin put it during opening statements of the trial. Morant never signed the statement, and returned to the police station the next day to disavow it.
Koenig analyzed the recording of Raucci’s interview of Morant in 2017. He told the jury that he had identified at least nine, “probably 10” instances of “over-recorded events” — meaning that someone appeared to have overwritten portions of the recording with new audio.
Additionally, in 2023, Koenig examined a copy of Raucci’s interview with a witness named Hector Ortiz. He found at least seven instances in which he had confidence that someone stopped and started the recording. He told the jury that he found three more “probable” stop-start events and “more than three incidents of over-recorded events.”
Koenig testified on Tuesday that the three tapes stand out among the audio he’s examined throughout his career for the number of times that someone paused or altered the tapes.
“In the thousands of cases you’ve reviewed, have you ever seen this many stops and starts or over-recordings on the same tape?” asked Anna Benvenutti Hoffmann, a lawyer for Morant.
“No,” replied Koenig.
“Your three tapes is the case I’ve seen by far the most amount of starts, stops, and over-recordings,” he stated at another point. “Usually it’s just one or two,” if anything at all.
“Once there has been this erasing and over-recording, is there any way to know what was on the tape before it was erased?” asked Benvenutti Hoffman.
“No,” said Koenig. It’s not even possible, according to Koenig, to determine the length of the portion of the clip that was over-recorded.
Thomas Gerarde, the lawyer representing the City of New Haven, enlisted audio-visual analyst Nick Barreiro to evaluate Koenig’s analysis of the recordings, using copies of all three tapes.
Barreiro noted numerous unspecified “discontinuities” that correspond to the stop-start and over-recording events listed in Koenig’s analysis, but he did not identify what might have caused those discontinuities. He concluded that “more definitive identification of the types and number of discontinuities present in these recordings would require physical examination of the original recording device and the authentic original cassette tapes.” He also criticized Koenig for not including images or waveform graphs of the Morant and Roque tapes that he analyzed.
Ostensibly relying on Barreiro’s analysis, Gerarde argued during his opening statement, “There is no evidence that any of the tape was over-recorded.”
Koenig, for his part, argued on the stand that Barreiro was unqualified and that he had been working with insufficient materials. “He didn’t have the original tape. He had a bad copy,” Koenig said.
Gerarde pressed Koenig, arguing that although “very few people have the entire body of qualifications that you have… that doesn’t mean those persons can’t at least confirm that, yes, there’s an event that happened here.”
“I don’t know that I ever really thought about it,” Koenig responded. “I look at it as a non-expert, a layperson hearing it… He did more of a layperson kind of analysis.” Koenig also argued that the word “discontinuity” would not have been used by an expert in the field.
Meanwhile, Gerarde also argued during his opening statement of the trial that a pause in a tape recording can be perfectly innocuous.
“There are incidents when a tape needs to be stopped: the witness wants a bathroom break, the detectives need to gather their notes,” Gerarde said. “Stopping the tape is not a problem. Stopping the tape and threatening a witness is a problem, but there is no evidence that occurred.
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.newhavenindependent.org/2026/05/05/tape-stops-raise-coercion-questions/
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;
