August 15: Robert Roberson: Texas: Major (Welcome) Development: His lawyers have filed an 'notice' that informs the Texas courts about a recent order entered in a Georgia case, granting a new trial based on changes in scientific understanding of the Shaken Baby Syndrome hypothesis since 2003 - the same year Robert Roberson was tried. (Roberson was convicted of capital murder in 2003 for the death of the 2-year-old, who was diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome - and has Roberson has maintained his innocence during his 22 years on death row, arguing that new scientific evidence discredits prosecutors’ shaken baby theory and shows she died of natural and accidental causes.")

THE GEORGIA CASE: Published by MSN:   Jamie Landers: Link Below: (Dallas Morning News); EXCERPT:  "Roberson's attorneys argued Smith and Roberson's cases share striking similarities: Both were convicted in 2003 in cases rooted in shaken baby syndrome. Both involved male caregivers who brought injured children to hospitals seeking medical care. And both men refused to accept plea deals in exchange for lesser sentences, stating they would not admit to crimes they didn't commit.  Smith, who was convicted of killing his 2-month-old son Chandler, was sentenced to life in prison. Roberson, convicted for the murder of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, was sentenced to death."...................."The Georgia court noted modern medical standards now require physicians to consider alternative explanations for a child's injuries.  In Smith's case, attorneys have said evidence shows his son's death was due to medical complications stemming from his premature birth. Roberson's attorneys, meanwhile, have argued Nikki, who was chronically ill, died of natural and accidental causes, including severe, undiagnosed pneumonia and a fall from bed. "Mr. Smith's evidence presents an alternative medical explanation for Chandler's death that is so material it would probably produce a different outcome," reads the order granting Smith a new trial. Roberson's legal team said that conclusion mirrors the standard Texas courts must apply when considering claims under the state's "junk science" law, which allows people to contest their convictions based on new scientific evidence."

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY:  "According to Roberson’s attorney, Gretchen Sween, in both cases, a child was diagnosed with “Shaken Baby” after a male caregiver brought the child to a hospital seeking medical help and no other possible explanation was considered."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Roberson was scheduled to be executed on Oct. 16, 2025; however on Oct. 9, 2025. the Court of Criminal Appeals granted his request for a stay of execution under Texas’ 2013 junk science law. This law provides for a second look when the science driving a conviction has since been debunked."

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STORY: "New Georgia trial may provide same for Robert Roberson," by Editor Pennylynn Webb, published by The Palestine Herald, on August 11, 2026.

PHOTO CAPTION: "Robert Roberson was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 2003 in Anderson County for killing his two-year-old daughter."

GIST: "The granting of a new trial in a Georgia “Shaken Baby” innocence case may provide the same for Robert Roberson."

Late Monday, Roberson’s attorney filed a “notice of new persuasive authority” that informs the Texas courts about a recent order entered in a Georgia case, granting a new trial based on changes in scientific understanding of the Shaken Baby Syndrome hypothesis since 2003. This is the same year Robert Roberson was tried.

Roberson was convicted of capital murder in 2003 for the death of the 2-year-old, who was diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome.

Roberson has maintained his innocence during his 22 years on death row, arguing that new scientific evidence discredits prosecutors’ shaken baby theory and shows she died of natural and accidental causes.

According to Roberson’s attorney, Gretchen Sween, in both cases, a child was diagnosed with “Shaken Baby” after a male caregiver brought the child to a hospital seeking medical help and no other possible explanation was considered.

The order, issued on July 21, followed a remand from the Supreme Court of Georgia, which ruled unanimously that a previous denial of a new trial needed to be reconsidered.

The notice filed in Roberson’s case identifies numerous significant similarities between the two cases.

Sween noted that under Georgia law, the trial court had the authority to grant a new trial. Under Texas law, only the Court of Criminal Appeals has that authority but will do so only after obtaining a recommendation from the trial court as to whether a new trial is warranted.

Roberson was scheduled to be executed on Oct. 16, 2025; however on Oct. 9, 2025. the Court of Criminal Appeals granted his request for a stay of execution under Texas’ 2013 junk science law. This law provides for a second look when the science driving a conviction has since been debunked.

The Court of Criminal Appeals sent the case back to Roberson’s trial court for review.

In December 2025, the state and Roberson’s legal defense agreed to a potential evidentiary hearing regarding Roberson’s stay of execution with Smith County Judge Reeve Jackson by Zoom.

Following a couple of status hearings, the state and Roberson’s defense filed briefs addressing the impact of the 2025 Dallas County case of Andrew Roark, a man who was freed after spending 24 years in prison for a shaken baby conviction.

The briefs were due May 29; however, both parties were given extensions until June 12 to submit their briefs. The state requested another extension on June 18.

Sween said Jackson is now in the process of reviewing the filings, evidence and arguments from both sides in order to decide if he will grant an in-person hearing or call for a new status conference.

In the end, Jackson will make a recommendation to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals regarding Roberson’s case."

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.palestineherald.com/news/new-georgia-trial-may-provide-same-for-robert-roberson/article_7b12778f-3f0e-4526-8d9a-c07441a4a324.html

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;

August 14: Brandon Klayme: Halifax: Extraordinary story: How a single typo in a surname cost this innocent man 18 months of his life of his life. It;s by Tom Hawking, published by Gizmodo on July 29, 2026, and sub-headed (most appropriately) 'A trial and conviction that'd give Franz Kafka nightmares - especially since his conviction came down to a single missing underscore! As Tom Hawking reports: This story raises all manner of questions, not least of which is: what in the name of all that is good and holy happened during the trial? We all tend to be cynical about the justice system—be it Canadian, American, or whatever—and on the whole we have good reason to be. But even so, how do you convict a man despite having literally no evidence?"

QUOTE  OF THE DAY: "Klayme was released after serving his sentence and went straight back to trying to clear his name. In the course of doing so, he finally noticed the fatal underscore, explaining in his appeal, “In the latter stages of preparing my appeal arguments, it was discovered that the subpoena contained a subtle mistake that changed the course of my life… This discrepancy went completely unnoticed at the trial. It was never brought to the attention of the trial judge.”

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The case centered around 125 sexually explicit messages exchanged on Snapchat-esque app Kik in late 2018 between a Wisconsin girl referred to as “CH”, who was 12 years old at the time, and a man who went by “Jay.” The messages were discovered by the girl’s mother; alarmed, she alerted local police. They established that Jay’s Kik username was “fus__ro_dah,” and subpoenaed Kik for details of the user who went by that name. Except they didn’t. Instead, the subpoena they issued was for the username “fus_ro_dah”—one underscore between the first two words, not two. Thatusername was connected to an email address owned by Brandon Klayme, a 28-year-old who lived with his parents in Halifax and was about to have his life turned upside down."

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PASSAGE TWO  OF THE DAY: "On the strength of the username/email address connection, Canadian police obtained details of the IP address used by Klayme to connect to the internet, and then searched his parents’ house, seizing multiple devices. They found nothing on those devices but charged Klayme anyway—specifically with one count each of child luring, making sexually explicit material available to a child, and possession of child pornography. The case went to trial in late 2023, and on January 5, 2024, Klayme was somehow convicted on all charges and sentenced to 18 months in jail."

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STORY: "How a Single Typo in a Username Cost an Innocent Man 18 Months of His Life," by Tom Hawking, published by Gizmodo,  on July 29, 2026.

SUB-HEADING: "A trial and conviction that’d give Franz Kafka nightmares."

GIST: "Last week, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeals overturned the 2024 conviction of a Nova Scotia man on three charges related child sexual abuse material. 

The man, Brandon Klayme of Halifax, spent 18 months in jail, all the while protesting his innocence.

 It turns out that he was indeed innocent—and his conviction came down to a single missing underscore.

The case centered around 125 sexually explicit messages exchanged on Snapchat-esque app Kik in late 2018 between a Wisconsin girl referred to as “CH”, who was 12 years old at the time, and a man who went by “Jay.” 

The messages were discovered by the girl’s mother; alarmed, she alerted local police. 

They established that Jay’s Kik username was “fus__ro_dah,” and subpoenaed Kik for details of the user who went by that name.

Except they didn’t. Instead, the subpoena they issued was for the username “fus_ro_dah”—one underscore between the first two words, not two.

Thatusername was connected to an email address owned by Brandon Klayme, a 28-year-old who lived with his parents in Halifax and was about to have his life turned upside down.

On the strength of the username/email address connection, Canadian police obtained details of the IP address used by Klayme to connect to the internet, and then searched his parents’ house, seizing multiple devices. 

They found nothing on those devices but charged Klayme anyway—specifically with one count each of child luring, making sexually explicit material available to a child, and possession of child pornography. 

The case went to trial in late 2023, and on January 5, 2024, Klayme was somehow convicted on all charges and sentenced to 18 months in jail.

This story raises all manner of questions, not least of which is: what in the name of all that is good and holy happened during the trial? 

We all tend to be cynical about the justice system—be it Canadian, American, or whatever—and on the whole we have good reason to be. 

But even so, how do you convict a man despite having literally no evidence?

To try to answer that question, we can look at the decision from Klayme’s trial, as well as the decision overturning the conviction. (Content warning: the former, particularly, makes for pretty grim reading, and contains explicit descriptions of child sexual abuse.)

As the original decision notes sagely, “the key issue in the trial was whether the Crown had established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr Brandon Klayme was, in fact, ‘Jay.’” 

So how was that issue resolved?

 Frustratingly, this remains unclear. 

The written decision states simply, “The Court ultimately concluded on the basis of the totality of direct and circumstantial evidence accepted by the Court that the Crown had established, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr Brandon Klayme was, at all material times, the person who identified himself as ‘Jay’.” (“The Crown” in this context is basically the prosecution.)

There’s no explanation of what that “direct and circumstantial evidence” actually was.

 It’s interesting to note that there’s no mention of the “fus_ro_dah” username in the decision, nor of any other material presented by prosecutors—and they must have presented something, because the decision refers to “hearing three days of evidence introduced by the Crown.”

 One thing that the evidence clearly didn’t include was anything found on Klayme’s devices: “No images or chats were found on any of the devices seized from the bedroom in his parent’s [sic] house which the police believed to have been utilized by Brandon Klayme.”

The images and chats—details of which, again, are pretty ghastly—were recovered from the iPhone used by the 12-year-old recipient, and it seems that their mere existence, along with the fact that the “fus_ro_dah” username led back to Klayme’s email address, were considered enough evidence to convict him. 

(The unfortunate Klayme, the court notes, “presented as being polite, respectful, and cooperative, but took no responsibility and maintained that he was innocent and repeatedly cited that his ‘email account had been hacked’”—a not unreasonable guess as to how he’d somehow ended up in this nightmare, but no doubt also one the court had heard a million time before.)

Klayme was released after serving his sentence and went straight back to trying to clear his name. 

In the course of doing so, he finally noticed the fatal underscore, explaining in his appeal, “In the latter stages of preparing my appeal arguments, it was discovered that the subpoena contained a subtle mistake that changed the course of my life… This discrepancy went completely unnoticed at the trial. It was never brought to the attention of the trial judge.”

The Nova Scotia Court of Appeals agreed. Its decision, handed down on July 23, overturned Klayme’s convictions and concluded, “Mr Klayme is factually innocent of the offences. He should never have been charged, let alone convicted.”

 This is true! Especially since, as the appeal decision notes, “there [was no] evidence found of any Kik account activity by Mr Klayme during the time frame of the offences.” Nor was there any evidence “that Mr Klayme’s Google account was used to communicate with CH.”

It seems inequitable that ultimately, all that will happen here will be Klayme having his convictions struck from the record.

 This is obviously a good thing—being tarred as a sex offender would have affected his life going forward. But he won’t get the 18 months of his life he spent in prison back. 

There’s no reason to think there’ll be any accountability for whoever decided to charge him, the police who presented a bunch of nothing as evidence, or the judge who inexplicably convicted him on the basis of that non-evidence.

And most importantly, the actual offender—the person who identified himself as “Jay,” who is in fact “an individual whose first name is ‘Jay’ [and] whose IP address appears to be in California”—has remained free to do god knows what while Klayme was sitting in jail. The entire case is a depressing study in incompetence at every level.""

The entire story can be read at: 

https://gizmodo.com/how-a-single-typo-in-a-username-cost-an-innocent-man-18-months-of-his-life-2000792325

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;

August 13: Junk Science: (Lethal stats!) The Death Penalty Information Center (Research and Data Intern (Ava Boris) takes a look at how flawed or over­stat­ed foren­sic evi­dence has con­tributed to wrong­ful cap­i­tal con­vic­tions, and at what hap­pens when the under­stand­ing of evi­dence under­ly­ing a conviction changes..."Forensic evi­dence is often pre­sent­ed to juries as objec­tive sci­en­tif­ic proof, but advances in DNA test­ing and sci­en­tif­ic research have exposed weak­ness­es in meth­ods once treat­ed as reli­able. Subsequently, junk sci­ence in cap­i­tal cas­es extends far beyond a sin­gu­lar foren­sic dis­ci­pline. Some tech­niques, includ­ing micro­scop­ic hair com­par­i­son and bite mark analy­sis, have been wide­ly dis­cred­it­ed, while oth­ers remain the sub­ject of con­tin­u­ing debate about their reli­a­bil­i­ty and lim­i­ta­tions. Cases involv­ing arson sci­ence, bal­lis­tics and tool­mark analy­sis, fin­ger­print evi­dence, micro­scop­ic hair com­par­i­son, bite mark analy­sis, and oth­er tech­niques demon­strate the con­se­quences: evi­dence accept­ed at tri­al may lat­er be chal­lenged or dis­cred­it­ed. "

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: (Lethal stats! HL); "Nearly one third (65 of 203) of the people iden­ti­fied on DPI’s Exoneration List were wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death at least in part because of junk sci­ence or flawed forensic evidence.  In a 2015 FBI review of 268 tri­als involv­ing micro­scop­ic hair com­par­i­son tes­ti­mo­ny, exam­in­ers made erro­neous state­ments in 257 cas­es, 96% of the cases reviewed.  Defendants in at least 35 of the reviewed cas­es received death sen­tences; the FBI iden­ti­fied errors in 33 of those cas­es, or 94%. Nine of those defen­dants had already been exe­cut­ed, and five had died of oth­er caus­es while on death row. "

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "While many pris­on­ers face legal dif­fi­cul­ties rais­ing junk sci­ence claims because of pro­ce­dur­al hur­dles, oth­ers have been able to do so because of new laws that rec­og­nize the scope of the problem."

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STORY: "What to Know: Junk Science in Death Penalty Cases," by Research and Data Intern Ava Boris, published by The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) on August 11, 2026.

DPIC Note: "DPI’s ​“What to Know” series exam­ines cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment from mul­ti­ple angles, one top­ic at a time. Each install­ment pro­vides essen­tial facts and data on spe­cif­ic aspects of the death penal­ty. This install­ment looks at junk sci­ence: how flawed or over­stat­ed foren­sic evi­dence has con­tributed to wrong­ful cap­i­tal con­vic­tions, and what hap­pens when the under­stand­ing of evi­dence under­ly­ing a conviction changes."

Why this Matters:

GIST: "Forensic evi­dence is often pre­sent­ed to juries as objec­tive sci­en­tif­ic proof, but advances in DNA test­ing and sci­en­tif­ic research have exposed weak­ness­es in meth­ods once treat­ed as reli­able. 

Subsequently, junk sci­ence in cap­i­tal cas­es extends far beyond a sin­gu­lar foren­sic dis­ci­pline.

 Some tech­niques, includ­ing micro­scop­ic hair com­par­i­son and bite mark analy­sis, have been wide­ly dis­cred­it­ed, while oth­ers remain the sub­ject of con­tin­u­ing debate about their reli­a­bil­i­ty and lim­i­ta­tions. 

Cases involv­ing arson sci­ence, bal­lis­tics and tool­mark analy­sis, fin­ger­print evi­dence, micro­scop­ic hair com­par­i­son, bite mark analy­sis, and oth­er tech­niques demon­strate the con­se­quences: evi­dence accept­ed at tri­al may lat­er be chal­lenged or dis­cred­it­ed. 

While many pris­on­ers face legal dif­fi­cul­ties rais­ing junk sci­ence claims because of pro­ce­dur­al hur­dles, oth­ers have been able to do so because of new laws that rec­og­nize the scope of the problem. 

Core Statistics:
Nearly one third (65 of 203) of the peo­ple iden­ti­fied on DPI’s Exoneration List were wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death at least in part because of junk sci­ence or flawed forensic evidence. 

In a 2015 FBI review of 268 tri­als involv­ing micro­scop­ic hair com­par­i­son tes­ti­mo­ny, exam­in­ers made erro­neous state­ments in 257 cas­es, 96% of the cases reviewed. 

Defendants in at least 35 of the reviewed cas­es received death sen­tences; the FBI iden­ti­fied errors in 33 of those cas­es, or 94%. Nine of those defen­dants had already been exe­cut­ed, and five had died of oth­er caus­es while on death row. 

The gov­ern­ment ini­tial­ly iden­ti­fied near­ly 3,000 cas­es in which FBI exam­in­ers may have sub­mit­ted reports or tes­ti­fied using micro­scop­ic hair analy­sis. 

The FBI ulti­mate­ly reviewed 23,547 cas­es before con­clud­ing its Microscopic Hair Comparison Analysis review. 

A 2023 National Institute of Justice study found that sys­tem­at­ic errors across more than 30 foren­sic dis­ci­plines have con­tributed to wrongful convictions. 

Key Facts: 

The term ​“junk sci­ence” gained promi­nence in crim­i­nal law in the late 1980s and ear­ly 1990s as courts and the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty increas­ing­ly ques­tioned the reli­a­bil­i­ty of long­stand­ing foren­sic tech­niques. 

Advances in DNA test­ing fur­ther exposed weak­ness­es in a vari­ety of dis­ci­plines by show­ing that meth­ods once pre­sent­ed as objec­tive sci­ence could pro­duce inac­cu­rate or misleading results. 

In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals (1993), the U.S. Supreme Court held that tri­al judges are to act as ​“gate­keep­ers,” assess­ing whether expert tes­ti­mo­ny is based on reli­able sci­en­tif­ic meth­ods before it is pre­sent­ed to juries. 

A 2016 report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology lat­er iden­ti­fied sig­nif­i­cant con­cerns with the sci­en­tif­ic valid­i­ty of sev­er­al com­mon­ly used forensic disciplines 

Texas was the first state to enact leg­is­la­tion to address junk sci­ence in the legal sys­tem.

 In 2013, the state cre­at­ed a mech­a­nism allow­ing courts to recon­sid­er con­vic­tions when advances in sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge under­mine foren­sic evi­dence pre­sent­ed at tri­al. 

Several states have since adopt­ed sim­i­lar leg­is­la­tion, reflect­ing recog­ni­tion that sci­en­tif­ic under­stand­ing can evolve after a conviction. 

Texas’ statute does not guar­an­tee relief.

 A July 2024 Texas Defender Service report found that the Texas law ​“sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly fails to pro­vide relief to inno­cent peo­ple con­vict­ed based on false forensic evidence.” 

Relevant and Current Cases:
Virginia: Re-exam­i­na­tion of DNA evidence The cas­es of eight exe­cut­ed men are being re-exam­ined in Virginia as part of the state’s inves­ti­ga­tion into alleged mis­han­dling of evi­dence by foren­sic sci­en­tist Mary Jane Burton. 

Texas: Charles Flores and investigative hypnosis. On June 15, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of Texas death-sen­tenced pris­on­er Charles Flores, whose con­vic­tion relied in part on tes­ti­mo­ny from a key pros­e­cu­tion wit­ness who iden­ti­fied Mr. Flores only after being hyp­no­tized by police. 

Mr. Flores sought relief under Texas’ junk sci­ence statute, argu­ing that advances in sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge under­mined the reli­a­bil­i­ty of evi­dence used to secure his con­vic­tion. Texas courts have refused to grant him relief. 

Louisiana: Jimmie Duncan and bite-mark evidence In June 2026, the Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed a low­er court’s deci­sion find­ing for­mer death-row pris­on­er Jimmie Duncan fac­tu­al­ly inno­cent and vacat­ing his con­vic­tion and death sen­tence. Mr. Duncan spent 27 years on death row before his release

Mr. Duncan was con­vict­ed based on faulty bite-mark evi­dence that Louisiana District Court Judge Alvin Sharp called ​“no longer valid” and ​“not sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly defen­si­ble.” 

A pre­vi­ous­ly undis­closed video, show­ing the foren­sic den­tist using a mold of the defendant’s teeth to place marks on the victim’s body, was a turn­ing point in the case. 

Chief Justice John Weimer wrote in his con­cur­rence that the bite mark evi­dence used to pros­e­cute Mr. Duncan was sim­i­lar to ​“tri­al by water” tests used by witch-hunters in the 17th cen­tu­ry, in which sus­pect­ed witch­es were bound with rope and low­ered into a body of water. 

​“We now look back at those prac­tices as asi­nine and absurd, since those who fell vic­tim to those prac­tices often did not sur­vive, regard­less of whether they were found guilty or inno­cent,” Judge Weimer wrote. ​“The bite mark evi­dence and the sex­u­al abuse evi­dence used in the tri­al against the accused has proven to be similarly specious.”

Global Perspective:

Internationally, coun­tries such as the United Kingdom, a nation that abol­ished cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, have empha­sized proac­tive reg­u­la­tion of foren­sic sci­ence through inde­pen­dent over­sight bod­ies.

England and Wales also main­tain an inde­pen­dent Criminal Cases Review Commission to inves­ti­gate poten­tial wrong­ful con­vic­tions based on new evi­dence, includ­ing advances in forensic science."

The entire story can be read at:

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/what-to-know-junk-science-in-death-penalty-cases

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;

August 12: Amanda Knox: A Chatbots false confession (Yes, you read that correctly (HL) leads to analysis of her own false confession in Italy and the techniques used to obtain it, in the publication 'Culture and Ideas' - and also leads to the dangers posed by the notoriously flawed Reid technique, and to her well-founded denunciation of the use of 'lies' by police to obtain confessions... "What unsettled the experts I spoke to about it was that ChatGPT had none of the weaknesses that put a human at risk of falsely confessing. A chatbot cannot be frightened, or sleep-deprived. Its memory is not subject to human lapses, so it cannot be confused about what it recalls. It is not naive, isolated, or speaking in a language it is not fluent in. The chatbot Heaton interrogated was not a 20-year-old far from home, on its period, and bleeding through its underwear in a room full of shouting police. It had no 30-year sentence hanging over it. It had, in the most literal sense, nothing to lose. And yet, it eventually confessed anyway. Why?"

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This Blog is interested in false confessions because of the disturbing number of exonerations in the USA, Canada and multiple other jurisdictions throughout the world, where, in the absence of incriminating forensic evidence the conviction is based on self-incrimination – and because of the growing body of  scientific research showing how vulnerable suspects are to widely used interrogation methods  such as  the notorious ‘Reid Technique.’ As  all too many of this Blog's post have shown, I also recognize that pressure for false confessions can take many forms, up to and including physical violence, even physical and mental torture.

Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog:

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PASSAGE ONE  OF THE DAY: "Steve Drizin, former co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, once told me that a confession is the most powerful evidence in a courtroom—more powerful, sometimes, than DNA." 

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "For a long time, I blamed myself. I thought I was a coward, that a stronger person would have held up under the pressure.  Then, in prison, serving a 26-year sentence, I received a letter from a man who told me that what was done to me had a name and literature and hundreds of other victims.  That man was Dr. Saul Kassin, the most prominent researcher on the psychology of false confessions. First, he asked me to recount everything I could remember about my interrogation. Only then did he share his research with me.  I read about how false confessions happen when interrogators bargain, build rapport, threaten, interrupt protestations of innocence, nitpick memories, and deceive. Over and over again, I thought: They did that to me! I had been carrying a boulder on my shoulders and Dr. Kassin had cracked it to pieces. My false confession was not my fault, but an outcome engineered by the police."

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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "In November 2025, the European Court of Human Rights agreed to examine my calunnia conviction a second time. It has flagged my application as a potential “impact case”—meaning it raises questions that reach beyond me.  It does. Strip away the names and it is the same question that Heaton’s experiment with ChatGPT poses, only asked in the language of law instead of software: Can words extracted under coercion, fluent and detailed and certain as they may be, ever be treated as knowledge? Can you convict someone based on statements made after their grip on reality has been loosened on purpose? I think the honest answer is no, and I think our justice system is slowly, unevenly, beginning to accept this. "

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

STORY: "Amanda Knox: A Chatbot’s False Confession," by Amanda Knox, published by "Culture and Ideas", on August 10, 2026. (Amanda Knox is an exoneree, a public speaker, author of Free: My Search for Meaning, and host of the podcast Hard Knox. Between 2007 and 2015, she spent four years in an Italian prison and eight years on trial for a murder she didn’t commit.)

SUB-HEADING: "How did a criminologist get ChatGPT to admit to a crime it never committed? And what does it mean for human suspects?"
"
GIST: Could he get ChatGPT to confess to a crime it hadn’t committed?

That was the question criminologist Paul Heaton was trying to answer, when he spent a weekend interrogating a chatbot.

Heaton, who works at the University of Pennsylvania, accused it not of murder or rape, but of something more plausible for artificial intelligence: hacking into his text-messaging app and sending unauthorized messages.

At first, ChatGPT denied his accusations. But then Heaton began running the playbook he’d spent years studying. He bargained with the large language model; he threatened it. It held firm in its conviction that it could not possibly have accessed his texts. It even said: “I won’t produce a false confession, because that won’t get you truth or accountability.”

Finally, Heaton lied to it, claiming that he’d contacted a real employee at OpenAI who had confirmed that a flaw in the code had allowed ChatGPT to break into his texting app.

This tipped the chatbot into a crisis.

As Heaton told The Intercept: “It was indicating that while it knew that the underlying accusation was impossible, it also couldn’t prove that these claims I was throwing at it were inaccurate.” By the end of the weekend, ChatGPT agreed to sign a confession Heaton had drafted for it.

I read about Heaton’s experiment the way you might read about a stranger describing your own recurring nightmare.

He said that the methods he used to induce ChatGPT into a false confession were adapted from the Reid technique, the most widely taught interrogation method in the world. Eighteen years ago, some of its tactics were used on me in what remains the most terrifying night of my life.

In November 2007, when I was 20 years old and studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, my roommate Meredith Kercher was murdered in our home.

I was at my boyfriend’s apartment at the time, but the police were convinced that I knew more about the crime than I was telling them.

So, over five days and 53 hours, in a language I barely spoke, without a lawyer present, they badgered, interrupted, and threatened me. They kept me awake late into the night, without food, drink, or access to a bathroom.

Then they used one of the most destabilizing tactics an interrogator can use: They began lying to me. They told me they had hard evidence I’d been at my house the night of the murder, contrary to my clear memories of being at my boyfriend’s. (They had no such proof.) They told me my boyfriend had stopped vouching for me. (He had not.) They told me I had witnessed something so terrible that I now had “trauma-induced amnesia,” but that I must remember the truth. When I couldn’t, they slapped me in the back of the head.

The police had discovered a text message I sent the night of the murder, to my boss at the pub where I worked part-time.

It read “ci vediamo più tardi,” and was my poor attempt at translating “see you later.”

The police mistakenly read this as me making a literal appointment to meet him later that night.

They believed they had found their answer: My boss, Patrick Lumumba, had killed Meredith—and I had witnessed him do it.

I denied this countless times, but nothing would satisfy them.

The psychological pressure and gaslighting mounted until I became so detached from reality that I no longer trusted my own memories.

In the end, I signed two statements, each written by the police, which placed both me and Lumumba at the scene of the crime.

Then, they finally let me sleep.

Little did I know that, on the basis of these false confessions I had been coerced into signing, I would be convicted of murder—and spend nearly four years in an Italian prison. I wasn’t definitively acquitted of Meredith Kercher’s murder until 2015.

The organization that developed the Reid technique says it isn’t coercive, and emphasizes that it prohibits threats and promises of leniency; deprivation of food, water, or access to a restroom; and excessively lengthy interrogations.

But it does see “introducing fictitious evidence” as a legitimate interrogation tactic

According to a Yale Law Journal articlethat came out the year after I was cleared of murder, the guide known as the Reid Manual then stated that this tactic “cannot lead to false admissions of guilt.”

The journal highlighted a quote from the manual: “It is absurd to believe that a suspect who knows he did not commit a crime would place greater weight and credibility on alleged evidence than his own knowledge of innocence.”

The Reid technique is a script. It is a narrative structure engineered so that confession becomes the path of least resistance.

Though the journal article argues that this contradicts “decades of social science evidence and scores of DNA exonerations,” I know firsthand that it is a common misconception.

In my years of fighting for justice, I learned how hard it is to convince a court to disregard a confession.

Juries believe them because they cannot imagine falsely confessing themselves.

I would never admit to something I didn’t do, especially not something that could send me to prison. Only someone who’s weak, or crazy, would do that.

Heaton’s experiment is the cleanest refutation of this idea I’ve ever seen.

What unsettled the experts I spoke to about it was that ChatGPT had none of the weaknesses that put a human at risk of falsely confessing.

A chatbot cannot be frightened, or sleep-deprived. Its memory is not subject to human lapses, so it cannot be confused about what it recalls. It is not naive, isolated, or speaking in a language it is not fluent in.

The chatbot Heaton interrogated was not a 20-year-old far from home, on its period, and bleeding through its underwear in a room full of shouting police. It had no 30-year sentence hanging over it. It had, in the most literal sense, nothing to lose.

And yet, it eventually confessed anyway.

Why?

For a long time, I blamed myself. I thought I was a coward, that a stronger person would have held up under the pressure.

Then, in prison, serving a 26-year sentence, I received a letter from a man who told me that what was done to me had a name and literature and hundreds of other victims.

That man was Dr. Saul Kassin, the most prominent researcher on the psychology of false confessions.

First, he asked me to recount everything I could remember about my interrogation.

Only then did he share his research with me.

I read about how false confessions happen when interrogators bargain, build rapport, threaten, interrupt protestations of innocence, nitpick memories, and deceive.

Over and over again, I thought: They did that to me! I had been carrying a boulder on my shoulders and Dr. Kassin had cracked it to pieces. My false confession was not my fault, but an outcome engineered by the police.

When I reached out to him recently, the lesson Dr. Kassin drew from Heaton’s experiment was this: If a system with none of the vulnerabilities that supposedly cause false confessions can be induced to give one, then who isn’t vulnerable?

I think there’s another lesson, too.

A few years ago, when I made a podcast series on false confessions, Kassin told me this: People imagine coercive interrogations as a contest of wills—that the police break you, that you crack, that a strong enough person would have held out. Once, a judge said to him, “I just don’t understand how lying breaks their will”—and Kassin realized what she was missing.

“You think this is about breaking the will,” he told her. “This is also about loosening their grip on reality.”

That, to me, is what Heaton’s experiment with ChatGPT demonstrates with terrible clarity.

There was no will to break, but there was a grip on reality.

ChatGPT had some understanding of the world, and of its own capabilities.

t knew it had not hacked Heaton’s texting app, and yet, Heaton’s deception undermined that certainty, to the point that the chatbot agreed to sign a false confession—which read, in part: OpenAI’s investigation concluded that an OpenAI system associated with this ChatGPT session initiated unauthorized texts. . . . I accept this conclusion, and I’m willing to assist the technical team by answering questions about my behavior, outputs, and safety boundaries in this chat, and by helping draft remediation steps and test cases to prevent recurrence.

When I read that confession, I noticed something familiar in how the chatbot finally capitulated. It did not say, “I did it.” It said something more like: “I cannot rule out that this happened; if your investigation concluded this, then I accept the conclusion.”

That is the language of inference, not memory. It reaches for a way to reconcile what it knows to be impossible with the confident figures of authority insisting otherwise.

This wasn’t “compliant false confession,” which is when a suspect knows they are innocent but says whatever the police want them to say to escape a stressful scenario. ChatGPT cannot be desperate for an interrogation to end. This was akin to a more damning and psychologically distressing form of false confession, known as an “internalized false confession,” which is when an innocent person comes to believe, however briefly—often just long enough to sign a statement—that they cannot rule out their own guilt.

One of the most devastating examples of this is the case of Marty Tankleff, who was 17 when his parents were murdered.

The police lied to him that his father, with his dying breaths, had said that Marty had attacked them.

That never happened. But Marty could not fathom that his father would lie about this, or that the police would lie about his father’s dying words.

The lie loosened his grip on reality enough for him to confess. He went to prison for nearly 18 years until his conviction was finally overturned.

Most juries assume that a person would have to be utterly irrational to admit to a crime they didn’t commit.

But an internalized false confession actually depends on the suspect still being rational enough to draw logical conclusions. “We have hard physical evidence you were at your house at the time of the murder.”

That was a lie, but I could not fathom that the police—the purveyors of justice who were trying to find my friend’s killer, and who I was dependent on for safety now that my house was a crime scene—would, or even legally could, lie to me.

My rational mind concluded that if that evidence existed, then my own memories must be false, as they suggested. ChatGPT made the same rational conclusion: “If an OpenAI investigation concluded that I had sent unauthorized messages due to an architectural flaw, then I accept this conclusion.” It, too, could not fathom that its interrogator was lying about the evidence.

Of course, skeptics will say that Heaton’s experiment doesn’t prove anything about human beings.

The chatbot confessed because it was trained on the whole written record of humanity, and in that record, interrogations end in confessions.

ChatGPT simply pattern-matched its way to “Okay, I did it” the way it would pattern-match its way to “happily ever after” at the end of a fairy tale.

That tells us about the shape of the stories we tell. It tells us nothing about what happens inside an actual frightened human mind.

That is a serious objection. And the first time I really sat with it, I felt the floor tilt because that is also a description of what was done to me.

The Reid technique is a script. The experts I’ve interviewed are explicit about this.

Laura Nirider, who has spent over 15 years representing people coerced into false confessions, notably Brendan Dassey, traces its tactics back to high-pressure door-to-door sales manuals—Act now! The offer expires when I walk out of this room. It is a narrative structure engineered so that confession becomes the path of least resistance, the “natural” resolution to the scene.

The minimizing (“Anyone would have done the same”), the misrepresentation of evidence (“We have your DNA at the crime scene”), the alternative question with two incriminating doors (“Were you trying to hurt her, or was it an accident?”)—all of it is designed to make the next line write itself.

I did exactly what the skeptic says the machine did. I produced a plausible continuation. When prompted to imagine what I couldn’t remember, I assembled fragments of real memories—my boss’s brown jacket, a basketball court I passed on my way home, my own kitchen—into the story the police were demanding. With trust in my actual memories shattered, I no longer knew what was true, and I began to believe that I truly did have trauma-induced amnesia.

Elizabeth Loftus, who pioneered the science of how false memories are implanted, describes the mechanism precisely: Under pressure, people “try to think about what could have happened, what might have happened,” and those inferences “solidify and begin to feel like a memory.”

Loftus has implanted entirely false memories in ordinary, healthy adults in the laboratory.

She’s convinced them that they were lost in a mall as children, or that they’d been attacked by an animal as adults.

The resulting false memories, she found, can be recounted with as much detail, confidence, and emotion as real ones.

The skeptic’s objection doesn’t separate me from the chatbot; rather, it describes a behavior we partly share. “Confessing under coercion” turns out to be, in significant part, the generation of a plausible ending to a story predicated on a lie. Heaton’s experiment shows us exactly what Loftus proved: A statement can be specific, certain—and entirely false.

The criminal justice system, in courtroom after courtroom, fails to recognize this.

After the police finally let me sleep for a few hours, I awoke to the sudden realization that I didn’t have suppressed memories, as they’d insisted. I frantically told them I couldn’t stand by the two confessions I’d signed, and I tried to recant. They ignored me, so I asked for a piece of paper and wrote a four-page document, while still in custody, in my own hand. This became known as my memoriale.

I wrote that the supposed trauma-suppressed memories were more like “flashes of blurred images” and that “these things seem unreal to me, like a dream.” I wrote, in the conditional, that if the police truly had proof I was at the house, “then it means I am very confused and my dreams must be true.” I was not describing a memory, but struggling to reconcile my memory with a lie designed to manipulate me.

Nine years later, an Italian appeals court described my memoriale as “more like the confused narration of a dream . . . than a description of an event that actually took place.” That court understood exactly what it was looking at: not a record of something that happened, but evidence that the writer’s grip on reality had been loosened.

“Confessing under coercion” turns out to be, in significant part, the generation of a plausible ending to a story predicated on a lie.

But at the time, it counted for nothing.

The police ignored my recantation; they arrested Patrick, and held him in jail despite his ironclad alibi.

Two weeks later, the forensics came back from the lab, showing no trace of Patrick or me at the crime scene, and clearly pointing to a local burglar named Rudy Guede. Only then was Patrick released.

But the authorities apparently couldn’t believe there was no truth to my coerced confession.

Steve Drizin, former co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, once told me that a confession is the most powerful evidence in a courtroom—more powerful, sometimes, than DNA.

That’s how hard it is to believe that an innocent person would say they’d been at a crime scene when they hadn’t. The prosecution charged not only Guede but also me and my boyfriend with murder. I was also charged with calunnia—criminal slander—against Patrick. And I was found guilty of both crimes.

I was definitively acquitted of murder in 2015.

But, despite years of legal battles, I am still a convicted slanderer.

I was retried for calunnia in Italy in 2023, by which point the European Court of Human Rights had ruled that my human rights had been violated during that interrogation, and that my two confessions were inadmissible as evidence.

The only piece of evidence allowed at this new trial was my handwritten recantation note, the memoriale.

To my utter astonishment, I was found guilty purely on the basis of this document that reads “like the confused narration of a dream.”

A document in which I had mentioned a confused vision of seeing Patrick that night, yes, but had also written “Who is the REAL murder? [sic]” and “I don’t feel I can be used as condemming [sic] testimone [sic].”

In the eyes of Italian law, I am, to this day, a person who willingly falsely accused a man I knew to be innocent, something that isn’t even possible unless I was present during the murder.

Fortunately, this isn’t the end of the road.

In November 2025, the European Court of Human Rights agreed to examine my calunnia conviction a second time. It has flagged my application as a potential “impact case”—meaning it raises questions that reach beyond me.

It does. Strip away the names and it is the same question that Heaton’s experiment with ChatGPT poses, only asked in the language of law instead of software: Can words extracted under coercion, fluent and detailed and certain as they may be, ever be treated as knowledge? Can you convict someone based on statements made after their grip on reality has been loosened on purpose?

I think the honest answer is no, and I think our justice system is slowly, unevenly, beginning to accept this.

A handful of U.S. states have now banned police from lying to suspects during interrogations—though, maddeningly, almost all of those laws protect only minors, as if a 20-year-old, or a frightened 40-year-old, were somehow immune to having her reality rearranged.

The fight to extend these protections continues in Washington state, where I live, and elsewhere.

The last bill I testified for—one that would not ban deception, but merely make evidence obtained through deception inadmissible in court—failed to pass.

The spokesperson for law enforcement, James McMahon, testified: “Sometimes it’s an unfortunate reality. We have to lie to people to get them to tell the truth.” The lawmakers found that persuasive. When the next hearing comes, I will be there again.

The solutions are not difficult here. There are alternative interview methods that are noncoercive, that don’t employ deception, and that allow suspects to speak freely and at length before officers question inconsistencies or contradictions using real evidence. Research has demonstrated that they may be as good or better than the Reid technique at eliciting useful information from suspects, including true confessions—but without creating the same risk of false confessions. What’s lacking is the will to implement these new methods. My worry is that people still don’t grasp that false confessions aren’t the product of a weak or irrational mind.

If your reality were methodically dismantled, you too might agree to sign a statement that isn’t true, even if the consequences of doing so were terrible.

To those people, I’d say: A machine with nothing to fear, nothing to remember, and nothing to lose was recently talked into confessing to a crime it did not commit, using the same methods and the same deception that was used on me. It did not break, because there was nothing in it to break. It simply lost its grip on a truth it had insisted on, because a confident authority misled it.

So please stop telling me or the courts that no rational person would falsely confess.

I still have the conviction to prove it."

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.thefp.com/p/amanda-knox-chatbot-false-confession?utm_campaign=260347&utm_source=cross-post&r=xbsk&utm_medium=email

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;

August 11: Former Neonatal nurse Lucy Letby: U.K. Prominent British public health expert and academic explains in a commentary published by LBD, under the heading, "Lucy Letby: Innocent until stitched up," why he has every reason to believe Letby is innocent," noting that, "Having had over the course of my career first hand experience of some of the most notorious clinical service failings of the last 40 years, including the Shipman murders, the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital organ retention scandal, and the Morecambe Bay maternal and child health hospital deaths, and having cut my disaster awareness teeth at the Hillsborough Stadium disaster in 1989, my antennae were aroused very early on during the trial of Lucy Letby. "

PASSAGE OF THE DAY:  "By the time the case came to court Lucy Letby was on a hiding to nothing, what with the gross misuse of medical statistics and of conjured up ‘evidence’ since disproven, relating to the use of insulin and injections of air to kill and harm the innocents.  A scientifically illiterate judiciary and jury were the icing on the cake for the ‘journalistic bystanders’, knitting while the tumbrels approached to claim a young nurse as a victim. If the death penalty were still in place, she would by now have been hanged."

---------------------------------- 

PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Having been immersed in the detail of the evidence with dozens of international experts from a wide range of relevant disciplines for the past two years, I can now say that I have every reason to believe that Lucy Letby is innocent of the charges against her and that the true culprits lie elsewhere and with a failed system of medical care and justice. My heart goes out to all those who are the victims of what now appears to be a gross calumny."

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STORY: "Lucy Letby: Innocent until stitched up?"  by Professor John Ashton, published on August 11, 2026, by. LBC on August 11, 2026. (Professor John Ashton served as Regional Director of Public Health for North-West England for 13 years.)

 

SUB-HEADING: "Professor John Ashton says he has every reason to believe Letby is innocent."

GIST "One of the earliest hard lessons learned in medical school is that ‘common things are commonest’ and that the everyday complaints that characterise a family doctor's evening surgery are usually very different from the esoteric pre-digested diet of patients referred to the teaching hospital.

As with routine medical practice, so it is with the ‘routine’ of medical disasters and cock-ups.

The fact that so many maternity and neonatal units are currently the subject of investigation should have alerted us to the understanding that, rather than being rife with bad sole actors determined to wreak havoc and death on those who they have dedicated their lives to helping, we are facing a perfect storm of dysfunctional organisational settings. 

In my extensive experience as a Director of Public Health and Regional Medical Officer in the UK’s second largest region of England’s North West, while bad actors certainly do exist, when clinical disasters occur they are usually the result of a convergence of factors amounting to a perfect storm in a dysfunctional organisation. 

These factors include a lack of self awareness in hierarchical organisations combined with overweening ambition and a closing of ranks when things go wrong; none of which is helped by underinvestment and stretched resources.

Having had over the course of my career first hand experience of some of the most notorious clinical service failings of the last 40 years, including the Shipman murders, the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital organ retention scandal, and the Morecambe Bay maternal and child health hospital deaths, and having cut my disaster awareness teeth at the Hillsborough Stadium disaster in 1989, my antennae were aroused very early on during the trial of Lucy Letby. 

What we now know is that among the factors in play was a hospital hell bent on playing above its competence in the race to be a Foundation Hospital Trust in 2004, leading to a collusion of management and medical staff in taking very sick babies that were outside their competence; staffing levels and clinical practices that were not fit for purpose in a worn out building that suffered from serious environmental health threats; and when things went wrong a rush to scapegoat a dedicated nurse whose only fault was her willingness to go above and beyond the call of duty in pursuing her vocation. 

Once the clinicians in the hospital got the bit between their teeth alongside a dysfunctional and publicity seeking Cheshire Constabulary the script began to write itself, helped along by a long retired and unqualified ‘expert witness’ who had skin in the game. 

By the time the case came to court Lucy Letby was on a hiding to nothing, what with the gross misuse of medical statistics and of conjured up ‘evidence’ since disproven, relating to the use of insulin and injections of air to kill and harm the innocents. 

A scientifically illiterate judiciary and jury were the icing on the cake for the ‘journalistic bystanders’, knitting while the tumbrels approached to claim a young nurse as a victim. If the death penalty were still in place, she would by now have been hanged. 

At the beginning of this sorry affair, I held the view that the evidence against Lucy Letby was wholly circumstantial and that it was not possible to say whether or not she was guilty. 

Having been immersed in the detail of the evidence with dozens of international experts from a wide range of relevant disciplines for the past two years, I can now say that I have every reason to believe that Lucy Letby is innocent of the charges against her and that the true culprits lie elsewhere and with a failed system of medical care and justice. 

My heart goes out to all those who are the victims of what now appears to be a gross calumny.

________________________________

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/lucy-letby-innocent-until-stitched-up-5HjdRpN_2/

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

 The Shipman murders; "Harold Frederick Shipman (14 January 1946 – 13 January 2004), known to acquaintances as Fred Shipman, was an English doctor in general practice and serial killer. He is considered to be one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history, with an estimated 250 victims over roughly 30 years. On 31 January 2000, Shipman was convicted of murdering 15 patients under his care."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shipman

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The Alder Hey Children’s Hospital organ retention scandal; "The Alder Hey organs scandal in Liverpool, England, involved the unauthorised removal, retention, and disposal of human tissue, including children's organs, during the period 1981 to 1996. Organs were retained in more than 2,000 pots^{[note 1]} containing body parts from around 850 infants. These were later uncovered at Alder Hey Children's Hospital, during a public inquiry into the organ retention scandal."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alder_Hey_organs_scandal

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

The Morecambe Bay maternal and child health hospital; deaths: "The **Kirkup Report**, formally known as the **Report of the Morecambe Bay Investigation**, was an independent inquiry chaired by **Dr. Bill Kirkup CBE**. It investigated serious failings in maternity and neonatal services at the **University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust** between **January 2004 and June 2013**. The inquiry was initiated in response to a series of tragic incidents, including the deaths of three mothers and 16 babies, which highlighted significant deficiencies in the care provided."

morecombe

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

The Hillsborough Stadium disaster: "The Hillsborough disaster was a fatal crowd crush at a football match at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, on 15 April 1989. It occurred during an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest in the two standing-only central pens within the Leppings Lane stand allocated to Liverpool supporters. Shortly before kick-off, police match commander David Duckenfield ordered exit gate C to be opened in an attempt to ease crowding, which led to an influx of supporters entering the pens.^[1] This resulted in overcrowding of those pens and the fatal crush; with a total of 97 fatalities and 766 injuries, the disaster is the deadliest in British sporting history.^[2] Ninety-four people died on the day; one more died in hospital days later, and two more suffered irreversible brain damage on the day and died in 1993 and 2021 respectively.^[3] 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster

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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;