IAN TOMLINSON INQUEST; (APRIL 4): LINK TO THE GUARDIAN'S LIVE UP-DATE COVERAGE: AUTOMATICALLY UP-DATED EVERY MINUTE;

LINK TO THE GUARDIAN'S LIVE UP-DATE COVERAGE OF THE TOMLINSON INQUEST:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/apr/04/ian-tomlinson-inquest-live-updates

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A thorough account of "The death of Ian Tomlinson" can be found on Wikipedia at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Ian_Tomlinson

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: If Dr. Freddy Patel had the last word, a 47-year-old newspaper vendor named Ian Tomlinson's death after he collapsed on the pavement on the fringes of protests at the G20 on April 1, 2009 would have been written off as "natural causes." However amateur video footage emerged showing him being pushed to the ground by a police officer who faces misconduct proceedings after an inquest beginning in March 2011 is completed. As noted on Wikipedia: "Ian Tomlinson (7 February 1962 – 1 April 2009) was an English newspaper vendor who collapsed and died in the City of London on his way home from work during the 2009 G-20 summit protests. A first postmortem examination indicated that he had suffered a heart attack brought on by coronary artery disease, and had died of natural causes. His death became controversial a week later when The Guardian obtained footage of his last moments, filmed by an American investment fund manager who was visiting London. The video showed Tomlinson being struck on the leg from behind by a police officer wielding an extendable baton, then pushed to the ground by the same officer. It appeared to show no provocation on Tomlinson's part—he was not a protester, and at the time he was struck, the footage showed him walking along with his hands in his pockets. He walked away after the incident, but collapsed and died moments later. After The Guardian published the video, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) began a criminal inquiry. A second postmortem indicated that Tomlinson had died from internal bleeding caused by a blunt force trauma to the abdomen, in association with cirrhosis of the liver. A third postmortem was arranged by the defence team of the accused officer, PC Simon Harwood; the third pathologist agreed that the cause of death was internal bleeding. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced in July 2010 that no charges would be brought, because medical disagreement about the cause of the death meant prosecutors could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a causal link between the death and the alleged assault. The first pathologist, Dr Freddy Patel, was suspended for three months in August 2010 for "deficient professional performance" in several unrelated cases." As the Guardian reported on March 19, 2011, Patel, who had been previously suspended for incompetence in a series of high profile autopsies, was found guilty of professional misconduct after failing to spot that a murder victim had been suffocated. He now faces being struck off the medical register.
A disciplinary panel of the General Medical Council ruled that his "fitness to practise was impaired" because of his reluctance to consider asphyxiation in the murder case, the falsification of his professional CV, and his failure to redress previous professional shortcomings. The UK Press Association says that the inquest, "is likely to examine the actions of police, the pathologist, the coroner and independent investigators in the aftermath of Mr Tomlinson's death." The Goudge Inquiry into many of former Dr. Charles Smith's cases also examined relationships between pathologists and police - particularly a case in which Smith agreed to interview a woman, suspected of murdering her baby, at her home while fully aware that the home had been secretly bugged by the authorities. The inquest is expected to last six weeks. This Blog will follow it closely.

HAROLD LEVY; PUBLISHER; THE CHARLES SMITH BLOG;

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IAN TOMLINSON INQUEST; LINK TO THE GUARDIAN'S LIVE UP-DATE COVERAGE: AUTOMATICALLY UP-DATED EVERY MINUTE;

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/apr/04/ian-tomlinson-inquest-live-updates

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: 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

For a breakdown of some of the cases, issues and controversies this Blog is currently following, please turn to:

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=120008354894645705&postID=8369513443994476774

Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com.

JOHN THOMPSON; (4); DAHLIA LITHWICK; SLATE; "CRUEL BUT NOT UNUSUAL: CLARENCE THOMAS WRITES ONE OF THE MEANEST SUPREME COURT DECISIONS EVER;

"I don't think that the failure at the court is one of empathy. I don't ask that Thomas or Scalia shed a tear for an innocent man who almost went to his death because of deceptive prosecutors. And, frankly, Ginsburg's dissent—while powerful—is no less Vulcan in tone than their opinions. But this case is of a piece with prior decisions in which Thomas and Scalia have staked out positions that revel in the hyper-technical and deliberately callous. It was, after all, Scalia who wrote in 2009 that "this court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent." It was Thomas who wrote that a prisoner who was slammed to a concrete floor and punched and kicked by a guard after asking for a grievance form had no constitutional claim."

DAHLIA LITHWICK: SLATE;

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BACKGROUND: The case concerning a prisoner's exoneration is Connick v. Thompson, 09-571, which arose from a $14 million jury award in favor of a former inmate who was freed after prosecutorial misconduct came to light. The former inmate, John Thompson, sued officials in the district attorney's office in New Orleans, saying they had not trained prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence. A prosecutor there failed to give Mr. Thompson's lawyers a report showing that blood at a crime scene was not his. Mr. Thompson spent 18 years in prison, 14 in solitary confinement. He once came within weeks of being executed.

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"In 1985, John Thompson was convicted of murder in Louisiana," Dhalia Lithwick's brilliant post published on Slate on April 1, 2011 begins, under the heading, "Cruel but Not Unusual: Clarence Thomas writes one of the meanest Supreme Court decisions ever," begins.

"Having already been convicted in a separate armed robbery case, he opted not to testify on his own behalf in his murder trial," the post continues.

"He was sentenced to death and spent 18 years in prison—14 of them isolated on death row—and watched as seven executions were planned for him. Several weeks before an execution scheduled for May 1999, Thompson's private investigators learned that prosecutors had failed to turn over evidence that would have cleared him at his robbery trial. This evidence included the fact that the main informant against him had received a reward from the victim's family, that the eyewitness identification done at the time described someone who looked nothing like him, and that a blood sample taken from the crime scene did not match Thompson's blood type.

In 1963, in Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must turn over to the defense any evidence that would tend to prove a defendant's innocence. Failure to do so is a violation of the defendant's constitutional rights. Yet the four prosecutors in Thompson's case managed to keep secret the fact that they had hidden exculpatory evidence for 20 years. Were it not for Thompson's investigators, he would have been executed for a murder he did not commit.

Both of Thompson's convictions were overturned. When he was retried on the murder charges, a jury acquitted him after 35 minutes. He sued the former Louisiana district attorney for Orleans Parish, Harry Connick Sr. (yes, his dad) for failing to train his prosecutors about their legal obligation to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense. A jury awarded Thompson $14 million for this civil rights violation, one for every year he spent wrongfully incarcerated. The district court judge added another $1 million in attorneys' fees. A panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict. The 5th Circuit, sitting en banc, affirmed again.
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But this week, writing on behalf of the five conservatives on the Supreme Court and in his first majority opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas tossed out the verdict, finding that the district attorney can't be responsible for the single act of a lone prosecutor. The Thomas opinion is an extraordinary piece of workmanship, matched only by Justice Antonin Scalia's concurring opinion, in which he takes a few extra whacks at Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent. (Ginsburg was so bothered by the majority decision that she read her dissent from the bench for the first time this term.) Both Thomas and Scalia have produced what can only be described as a master class in human apathy. Their disregard for the facts of Thompson's thrashed life and near-death emerges as a moral flat line. Scalia opens his concurrence with a swipe at Ginsburg's "lengthy excavation of the trial record" and states that "the question presented for our review is whether a municipality is liable for a single Brady violation by one of its prosecutors." But only by willfully ignoring that entire trial record can he and Thomas reduce the entire constitutional question to a single misdeed by a single bad actor.

Both parties to this case have long agreed that an injustice had been done. Connick himself conceded that there had been a Brady violation, yet Scalia finds none. Everyone else concedes that egregious mistakes were made. Scalia struggles to rehabilitate them all.

One of the reasons the truth came to light after 20 years is that Gerry Deegan, a junior assistant D.A. on the Thompson case, confessed as he lay dying of cancer that he had withheld the crime lab test results and removed a blood sample from the evidence room. The prosecutor to whom Deegan confessed said nothing about this for five years. While Scalia pins the wrongdoing on a single "miscreant prosecutor," Ginsburg correctly notes that "no fewer than five prosecutors" were involved in railroading Thompson. She adds that they "did so despite multiple opportunities, spanning nearly two decades, to set the record straight." While Thomas states the question as having to do with a "single Brady violation," Ginsburg is quick to point out that there was far more than just a misplaced blood sample at issue: Thompson was turned in by someone seeking a reward, but prosecutors failed to turn over tapes of that conversation. The eyewitness identification of the killer didn't match Thompson, but was never shared with defense counsel. The blood evidence was enough to prove a Brady violation, but it was the tip of the iceberg.

In the 10 years preceding Thompson's trial, Thomas acknowledges, "Louisiana courts had overturned four convictions because of Brady violations by prosecutors in Connick's office." Yet somehow this doesn't add up to a pattern of Brady violations in the office, because the evidence in those other cases wasn't blood or crime lab evidence. Huh? He then inexplicably asserts that young prosecutors needn't be trained on Brady violations because they learned everything in law school.

Scalia and Thomas are at pains to say that Connick was not aware of or responsible for his subordinates' unconstitutional conduct, except—as Ginsburg points out—that Connick acknowledged that he misunderstood Brady, acknowledged that his prosecutors "were coming fresh out of law school," acknowledged he didn't know whether they had Brady training, and acknowledged that he himself had 'stopped reading law books … and looking at opinions' when he was first elected District Attorney in 1974." And Connick also conceded that holding his underlings to the highest Brady standards would "make [his] job more difficult." As Bennett Gershman and Joel Cohen point out, the jury had "considerable evidence that both Connick and prosecutors in his office were ignorant of the constitutional rules regarding disclosure of exculpatory evidence; they were ignorant of the rules regarding disclosure of scientific evidence; there was no training, or continuing education, and no procedures to monitor compliance with evidentiary requirements; prosecutors did not review police files; and shockingly, Connick himself had been indicted by federal prosecutors for suppressing a lab report of the kind hidden from Thompson."

It's not just that a jury, a judge, and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Connick knew his staff was undertrained and he failed to fix it. It's that it's almost impossible, on reviewing all of the evidence, to conclude anything else. Nobody is suggesting that the legal issue here is simple or that there aren't meaningful consequences to creating liability for district attorneys who fail to train their subordinates in Brady compliance. But those aren't the opinions that Thomas and Scalia produced. Their effort instead was to sift and resift the facts until the injury done to Thompson can be pinned on a single bad actor, acting in bad faith. It's a long, sad, uphill trek.

Beyond that, there is no suggestion in either opinion that this is a hard question or a close call or even a hint of regret at their conclusion. There is only certainty that the jury, the appeals court, and above all Ginsburg got it completely wrong in believing that someone should be held responsible for the outrages suffered by John Thompson. If there is empathy for anyone in evidence here, it's for the overworked and overzealous district attorneys.

It's left to Ginsburg to acknowledge that the costs of immunizing Connick from any wrongdoing is as high as the cost of opening him to it: "The prosecutorial concealment Thompson encountered … is bound to be repeated unless municipal agencies bear responsibility—made tangible by §1983 liability—for adequately conveying what Brady requires and for monitoring staff compliance." As Scott Lemieux points out, by all-but-immunizing Connick for the conduct of his subordinates, the court has created a perfect Catch-22, since the courts already give prosecutors absolute immunity for their actions as prosecutors (though they may still be liable for their conduct as administrators or investigators). By immunizing their bosses as well, the court has guaranteed that nobody can be held responsible for even the most shocking civil rights violations.

I don't think that the failure at the court is one of empathy. I don't ask that Thomas or Scalia shed a tear for an innocent man who almost went to his death because of deceptive prosecutors. And, frankly, Ginsburg's dissent—while powerful—is no less Vulcan in tone than their opinions. But this case is of a piece with prior decisions in which Thomas and Scalia have staked out positions that revel in the hyper-technical and deliberately callous. It was, after all, Scalia who wrote in 2009 that "this court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent." It was Thomas who wrote that a prisoner who was slammed to a concrete floor and punched and kicked by a guard after asking for a grievance form had no constitutional claim.

The law awards no extra points for being pitiless and scornful. There is rarely a reason to be pitiless and scornful, certainly in a case of an innocent man who was nearly executed. It leads one to wonder whether Thomas and Scalia sometimes are just because they can be."

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The post can be found at:

http://www.slate.com/id/2290036/

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: 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 accessed at:

http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith

For a breakdown of some of the cases, issues and controversies this Blog is currently following, please turn to:

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=120008354894645705&postID=8369513443994476774

Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;

JOHN THOMPSON (3): WHY WHAT HAPPENED TO JOHN THOMPSON IN CONNICK'S OFFICE MUST BE TALKED ABOUT; BENNETT GERSHMAN AND JOEL COHEN. HUFFINGTON POST;

"As the jury learned, under Connick's watch, the misconduct by Thompson's several prosecutors was neither isolated nor aberrant. There was considerable evidence that both Connick and prosecutors in his office were ignorant of the constitutional rules regarding disclosure of exculpatory evidence; they were ignorant of the rules regarding disclosure of scientific evidence; there was no training, or continuing education, and no procedures to monitor compliance with evidentiary requirements; prosecutors did not review police files; and shockingly, Connick himself had been indicted by federal prosecutors for suppressing a lab report of the kind hidden from Thompson."

BENNETT GERSHMAN AND JOEL COHEN; THE HUFFINGTON POST;

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BACKGROUND: The case concerning a prisoner's exoneration is Connick v. Thompson, 09-571, which arose from a $14 million jury award in favor of a former inmate who was freed after prosecutorial misconduct came to light. The former inmate, John Thompson, sued officials in the district attorney's office in New Orleans, saying they had not trained prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence. A prosecutor there failed to give Mr. Thompson's lawyers a report showing that blood at a crime scene was not his. Mr. Thompson spent 18 years in prison, 14 in solitary confinement. He once came within weeks of being executed.

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"Cops Are Stupid, but Prosecutors Are Smart," the Huffington Post by Bennett Gershman and Joel Cohen begins, under the heading, ""Cops Are Stupid, but Prosecutors Are Smart."

"That's the message from the U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 decision vacating a $15 million dollar jury award for John Thompson, a Louisiana man who spent 14 years on death row (in all, 18 years in prison) for back-to-back armed robbery and murder convictions," the post continues.

"He was weeks away from being executed, until his investigator found blood evidence on the robbery victim's clothing that proved Thompson's innocence (he was Type O, but the blood evidence was Type B) that had been hidden from Thompson's lawyer by a team of prosecutors in the New Orleans Parrish District Attorney's Office, and ultimately led to his murder conviction. As one of these rogue prosecutors had stated to Thompson: "I'm going to fry you. You will die in the electric chair."

This grisly, almost unimaginable story of U.S. criminal justice gone amok, was closed by the Supreme Court this week in a decision by Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Kennedy, that has to rank as one of the Court's most questionable opinions in the area. Thompson, in his civil rights lawsuit after his exoneration, claimed that New Orleans District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr. at the time was "deliberately indifferent" to the constitutional rights of defendants prosecuted by his office - one of the prosecutors actually "confessed" to another having allegedly suppressed the exculpatory blood evidence - and, in fact, knowingly allowed prosecutors in his office to engage in repeated acts of misconduct, especially hiding exculpatory evidence, without any adverse consequences to them. Critical to Thompson's argument, which the jury, as well as two lower federal courts, found persuasive, was proof that Connick willfully failed to train his prosecutors about how to handle exculpatory evidence. Connick's office, the civil jury learned, had one of the worst records in the country in mishandling such evidence. Connick astonishingly claimed in his own testimony that training would make his job more difficult.

Agreeing that an office policy of deficient training could establish a prosecutor's deliberate indifference, the Supreme Court majority reasoned that there was insufficient evidence of deficient training in Connick's office, and even if there was such evidence, it was irrelevant to the violation of Thompson's constitutional rights. The majority's bizarre reasoning goes like this: whereas police officers need extensive training, for example, when they chase fleeing felons and need to know when they can use deadly force, prosecutors, by contrast, are lawyers who have been extensively trained in law school on how to interpret and apply legal rules, and how to use evidence, and they have passed a bar examination demonstrating their fitness to practice law. Moreover, prosecutors receive abundant on-the-job training on the use of evidence. And anyway, according to the majority, the constitutional principle at stake in Thompson's case did not require special training; it was an aberrant act - the supposed act of "one rogue prosecutor," all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding - and training would have made no difference.

Unaccountably, the majority ignored, dismissed, or misstated the massive evidence that the jury heard and accepted that the absence of education and training in Connick's office contributed to a culture of deliberate indifference to the rights of defendants, which produced Thompson's horrific miscarriage of justice. This evidence was described in the powerful dissenting opinion of Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, which Justice Ginsburg took the unusual step of reading from the bench. Her dissent was so contemptuous of the majority's decision that it provoked a gratuitous concurring opinion from Justice Scalia in a likely effort to seek to legitimize the majority opinion from her savage rebuke.

As the jury learned, under Connick's watch, the misconduct by Thompson's several prosecutors was neither isolated nor aberrant. There was considerable evidence that both Connick and prosecutors in his office were ignorant of the constitutional rules regarding disclosure of exculpatory evidence; they were ignorant of the rules regarding disclosure of scientific evidence; there was no training, or continuing education, and no procedures to monitor compliance with evidentiary requirements; prosecutors did not review police files; and shockingly, Connick himself had been indicted by federal prosecutors for suppressing a lab report of the kind hidden from Thompson.

Moreover, the culture of misconduct in Connick's office was not unfamiliar to the Supreme Court. A few years earlier, in Kyles v. Whitley, the Court, in an influential 5-4 decision, vacated a capital murder conviction prosecuted by Connick's office based on egregious prosecutorial misconduct, especially hiding exculpatory evidence that, as in Thompson's case, provided a vivid example of how an innocent man had been railroaded to the death chamber by unscrupulous prosecutors. The salient difference between Kyles and Thompson, of course, is that Justice Alito replaced Justice O'Connor.

District Attorney Connick is fortunately gone from office. His famous son might, on his behalf, croon in Sr.'s defense his version of "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone." For those who would seek to reform the continuing frailties of the criminal justice system, the truth is that what happened to John Thompson in Connick's office must be talked about. Prosecutors may indeed be smart, but some may sometimes cause unimaginable injustices."--------------------------------------------------------------------------

The post can be found at:


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bennett-l-gershman/cops-are-stupid-but-prose_b_843583.html

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: 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 accessed at:

http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith

For a breakdown of some of the cases, issues and controversies this Blog is currently following, please turn to:

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=120008354894645705&postID=8369513443994476774

Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;

CHARLES SMITH; MEDICAL WRITER HAD DOUBTS ABOUT SMITH YEARS AGO WHEN SMITH SEEMED OBSESSED INFANTICIDES; ASKS WHY LAWYERS DIDN'T SUSPECT HIM; QMI;

"In an interview at the time, Smith told me had worked on 11 cases of infanticide. It was only “the tip of the iceberg”, he added. He said some women were healthy enough that they could hide a pregnancy, deliver a baby unassisted by a doctor or nurse, and dispose of the child as if nothing had happened.

But if Smith was publicly declaring years ago that the dead babies he examined represented only a fraction of the true number of cases of infanticide, then his comments should have sounded a warning to someone.

Shouldn’t the cops, Crown attorneys, other medical professionals and, yes, the journalists reporting on these cases have wondered whether the doctor’s medical and scientific objectivity was becoming shaky? Was he becoming an avenging angel and setting out on a crusade to find somebody guilty of something?"

CAMERON E. JOHNSTON; QMI AGENCY; Cameron E. Johnston is a London freelance writer.

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BACKGROUND: The Goudge inquiry focused largely on the flawed work of Charles Smith — formerly the province's chief pediatric pathologist and a self-styled member of the prosecution team — whose "errors" led to innocent people being branded as child murderers. (He has since been thrown out of the medical profession in Ontario);

The 1,000-page report by Justice Stephen Goudge slammed Smith, along with Ontario's former chief coroner and his deputy, for their roles in wrongful prosecutions and asked the province to consider compensation.

The provincial coroner's office found evidence of errors in 20 of 45 autopsies Smith did over a 10-year period starting in the early 1990s. Thirteen resulted in criminal charges.

William Mullins-Johnson, who was among those cases, spent 12 years in prison for the rape and murder of his four-year-old niece, whose death was later attributed to natural causes.

In another case, Smith concluded a mother had stabbed her seven-year-old girl to death when it turned out to have been a dog mauling.

The inquiry heard that Smith's failings included hanging on to crucial evidence, "losing" evidence which showed his opinion was wrong and may have assisted the accused person, mistating evidence, chronic tardiness, and the catastrophic misinterpretation of findings.

The cases, along with other heart-rending stories of wrongful prosecutions based in part on Smith's testimony, also raised a host of issues about the pathology system and the reliance of the courts on expert evidence."

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"The annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences offers a smorgasbord of gory, geeky science, perfect for fans of the TV program CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," the column published by QMI Agency on April 1, 2011 under the heading, "Atrocity of Smith a justice lesson for all," begins.

"Criminologists can hone their skills at reconstructing faces with silly putty when all they have to start with is a skull. Workshops demonstrating how to interpret blood spatter patterns are a regular feature," the column continues.

"It’s fascinating stuff; not always pleasant, but very interesting nonetheless.

It was at this meeting, several years ago, that I met Charles Smith. He’s the disgraced pathologist from Toronto, whose “expert testimony” — much of it false and concocted — helped to send more than a dozen people to prison for murder in which the victims were small children.

Last month, Smith was stripped of his licence to practise medicine. Now, the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General has announced that charges will be stayed against a woman who, on the basis of Smith’s testimony, was convicted of killing her one-day old infant, known as “Baby F”.

When I met Smith, he was talking to an audience of forensic scientists about infanticide. His presentation included cases where babies were born into toilets, or wrapped in green garbage bags and tossed into dumpsters as soon as they were born. In the case of Baby F, the young mother claimed she didn’t know she was pregnant, and that the baby was born dead.

In an interview at the time, Smith told me had worked on 11 cases of infanticide. It was only “the tip of the iceberg”, he added. He said some women were healthy enough that they could hide a pregnancy, deliver a baby unassisted by a doctor or nurse, and dispose of the child as if nothing had happened.

But if Smith was publicly declaring years ago that the dead babies he examined represented only a fraction of the true number of cases of infanticide, then his comments should have sounded a warning to someone.

Shouldn’t the cops, Crown attorneys, other medical professionals and, yes, the journalists reporting on these cases have wondered whether the doctor’s medical and scientific objectivity was becoming shaky? Was he becoming an avenging angel and setting out on a crusade to find somebody guilty of something?

Smith was a persuasive and eloquent speaker. He was extremely credible on the witness stand. Also, the graphic images he presented — the ones he allowed me to copy at the meeting — were horrendously chilling.

Few lawyers challenged Smith’s interpretations of what the pictures revealed. The entire justice system heard his testimony from the witness stand and believed him, just as I believed him when he told me that 11 dead babies were just “the tip of the iceberg”.

In the pre-CSI era, few people other than forensic scientists had much knowledge about how the evidence was gathered or interpreted.

Ultimately, a commission of inquiry headed by a justice from the Ontario Court of Appeal concluded Smith twisted, distorted, and in some cases, falsified the facts until they suited his medical opinions.

Moreover, the judge noted there was very little oversight from Smith’s professional colleagues. Nobody was looking over his shoulder to make sure the work he did was legitimate — or competent.

The government has paid out

$5.5 million so far to the innocent men and women who went to prison based on Smith’s testimony, but this is a cheap apology. No amount of money is sufficient compensation for what these people endured.

In fact, each time the verdict is overturned in yet another one of Smith’s cases, maybe somebody should be saying, “I was taken in. I guess I shouldn’t have been so trusting.”"

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The column can be found at:

http://www.lfpress.com/comment/2011/04/01/17843221.html

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: 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 accessed at:

http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith

For a breakdown of some of the cases, issues and controversies this Blog is currently following, please turn to:

http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2010/08/new-feature-cases-issues-and_15.html

Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com

JOHN THOMPSON (2) SUPREME COURT GLOSSES OVER PROSECUTORS FAILURE TO TURN OVER EXCULPATORY BLOOD TEST; "JUSTICE SHOULD BE WEEPING"; SOUTH CAPITOL ST.

"There is no dispute that one of Connick’s prosecutors did not turn over a blood test that would have shown Thompson innocent of one of the charges against him. But Thomas said that a single incident is not enough to prove liability for the district attorney’s office and that Thompson did not show a pattern of similar violations.

Yet according to the Innocence Project New Orleans, favorable evidence was concealed in a quarter of the murder convictions from 1973-2002. In 19 of 25 non-capital cases, the D.A. withheld favorable evidence; in the other six cases, the courts ruled that evidentiary hearings were needed."

SOUTH CAPITOL STREET;"

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BACKGROUND TO APPEAL: The case concerning a prisoner's exoneration is Connick v. Thompson, 09-571, which arose from a $14 million jury award in favor of a former inmate who was freed after prosecutorial misconduct came to light. The former inmate, John Thompson, sued officials in the district attorney's office in New Orleans, saying they had not trained prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence. A prosecutor there failed to give Mr. Thompson's lawyers a report showing that blood at a crime scene was not his. Mr. Thompson spent 18 years in prison, 14 in solitary confinement. He once came within weeks of being executed.

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"John Thompson spent 14 years on death row in Louisiana because New Orleans prosecutors hid evidence that exonerated him. It sounds like the plot of this week’s episode of ABC’s Castle, except in the Hollywood story, the D.A. gets his comeuppance," the South Capital Street editorial published on March 31, 2001, begins, under the heading, "Supreme Court Ruling Is Unjust.

"In real life, the “conservative” block of the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the jury decision against the prosecutor’s office," the editorial continues.

"Conservative justices prevailed in the 5 to 4 ruling, which shielded the district attorney’s office from liability for not turning over evidence that showed John Thompson’s innocence. [...]

There is no dispute that one of Connick’s prosecutors did not turn over a blood test that would have shown Thompson innocent of one of the charges against him. But Thomas said that a single incident is not enough to prove liability for the district attorney’s office and that Thompson did not show a pattern of similar violations.

Yet according to the Innocence Project New Orleans, favorable evidence was concealed in a quarter of the murder convictions from 1973-2002. In 19 of 25 non-capital cases, the D.A. withheld favorable evidence; in the other six cases, the courts ruled that evidentiary hearings were needed.

“Single incident”?

New math.

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice issued a scathing indictment of corruption and “unconstitutional conduct” in the New Orleans Police Department.

Justice should be weeping."

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The story can be found at:

http://southcapitolstreet.com/2011/03/31/supreme-court-ruling-is-unjust/

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: 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 accessed at:

http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith

For a breakdown of some of the cases, issues and controversies this Blog is currently following, please turn to:

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=120008354894645705&postID=8369513443994476774

Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;

LUDMILA ILINA: CBC FIFTH ESTATE EXPlORES POSSIBLE CANADIAN MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE; OSGOODE HALL INNOCENCE PROJECT HAS TAKEN ON CASE; TONIGHT: 9.00;

"Young, along with Melfi and Heydarian, who are in their second year at Osgoode, believe the same evidence that convicted Ilina could now absolve her. They question how Ilina, a petite 55-year-old university professor with no history of violence, could have actually beaten her husband to death. The more they looked into her story, the more problematic the case against her became, convincing them her conviction may be worthy of appeal to the government of Canada.

Ilina’s life sentence was based on the strength of circumstantial and forensic evidence after her husband, Ted Mieczkowski, was found on their driveway in a pool of blood."

OSGOODE HALL RELEASE;

SEE PREVIEW OF TONIGHT'S SHOW AT:

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2010-2011/aquestionofinnocence/

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CBC's 'the fifth estate' profiles Osgoode's Innocence Project tonight

Ludmila Ilina has maintained for 16 years that she was wrongly convicted of murdering her husband in their Winnipeg home. Despite that, she was sent to prison for life. Professor Alan Young, director of the Innocence Project at York's Osgoode Hall Law School, and Osgoode students Alex Melfi and Ziba Heydarian have now taken on her case. Their efforts will be shown tonight on CBC Television’s "the fifth estate".

Right: Host Linden MacIntyre, host of CBC Television's "the fifth estate"

“A Question of Innocence" will air at 9pm with"fifth estate" host Linden MacIntyre taking a closer look at the Ilina case, the Osgoode team reviewing it and how evidence can be used to both convict and acquit. CBC News Network will rebroadcast the episode on Saturday at 8pm, Sunday at 7pm and Tuesday at 10pm.

Left: Alan Young

Young, along with Melfi and Heydarian, who are in their second year at Osgoode, believe the same evidence that convicted Ilina could now absolve her. They question how Ilina, a petite 55-year-old university professor with no history of violence, could have actually beaten her husband to death. The more they looked into her story, the more problematic the case against her became, convincing them her conviction may be worthy of appeal to the government of Canada.

Ilina’s life sentence was based on the strength of circumstantial and forensic evidence after her husband, Ted Mieczkowski, was found on their driveway in a pool of blood.

Osgoode’s Innocence Project seeks to address the problem of wrongful convictions, with students and faculty volunteering their time to assist individuals claiming to have been wrongfully convicted.

For more information, visit "the fifth estate" website.

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The Osgoode Hall release can be found at:

http://www.yorku.ca/yfile/archive/index.asp?Article=16763

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FROM FIFTH ESTATE WEB SITE;

A Question of Innocence

When the paramedics arrived on the scene in the summer of 1995, they found Ludmila Ilina sitting on the front steps of her Winnipeg house, her husband's body lying on the driveway in a pool of blood. She told investigators she woke up early that morning to prepare for a business trip. After going to her husband's bedroom and finding his bed undisturbed, she noticed the front door was unlocked. Outside she discovered her husband's bloodied body. He'd been brutally beaten, bludgeoned, dragged outside and left to die with his bicycle on top of him. This is the story she steadfastly stuck to through 16 hours of intense police interrogation. A brutal crime with one obvious suspect, but did she do it? The police were convinced she did, and charged her with second degree murder.

It's been 15 years, and Ilina is still protesting her innocence. Now she may be on the verge of getting her case looked at again.Sent to prison for life on the strength of circumstantial and forensic evidence, she's exhausted every avenue of appeal. She has one last and final hope — The Innocence Project — a York University Osgoode Hall law program dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted criminals. Her fate now lies in the hands to two young second-year law students. Students Alex Melfi and Ziba Heydarian and well-known law professor Alan Young join forces to test the evidence that convicted a 54-year-old, slightly built intellectual, with no history of violence, of battering her husband to death. It's a long shot, but if they can prove the case against Ilina is flawed, they can appeal her conviction to the Government of Canada. Perhaps the same evidence that convicted Ludmila Ilina could now free her.

In "A Question of Innocence," the fifth estate's Linden MacIntyre takes a closer look at the case of Ludmila Ilina and the Osgoode Hall team tackling her case in an engrossing examination of how evidence can be used to both convict and acquit.

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The Fifth Estate post can be found at:

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2010-2011/aquestionofinnocence/

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: 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

For a breakdown of some of the cases, issues and controversies this Blog is currently following, please turn to:

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=120008354894645705&postID=8369513443994476774

Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;

ARMY LAB: U.S. SENATOR CALLS FOR INDEPENDENT REVIEW Of FORMER ARMY ANALYST PHILIP MILLS AND OF BELEAGUERED MILITARY CRIME LAB; MCCLATCHEY NEWS;

"Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said Wednesday that he'd ask the Defense Department's inspector general to scrutinize the work of former Army analyst Phillip Mills and determine whether the military mishandled problems at the Georgia-based U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory.

"Was key evidence destroyed even as Army supervisors were aware of serious problems in the lab?" Grassley asked. "Did supervisors cover up the alleged problems to spare themselves embarrassment, to the benefit or detriment of criminal defendants?"

McClatchy detailed mistakes made by Mills at the Army laboratory in a story published this month. The story revealed that Mills' errors undermined confidence in hundreds of criminal cases brought against military personnel across the country.

The McClatchy investigation also found that the lab, near Atlanta, was lax in supervising Mills, slow to re-examine his work and slipshod about informing defendants."

REPORTERS MARISA TAYLOR AND MICHAEL DOYLE; MCCLATCHEY NEWSPAPERS;
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"WASHINGTON -- A U.S. senator has called for an independent investigation of the military's premier crime lab to ensure that innocent people weren't wrongfully convicted on the basis of work by a discredited analyst," the McLatchey Newspapers story by reporters Marisa Taylor and Michael Doyle published earlier today under the heading, "Independent review of military crime lab sought," begins.

"Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said Wednesday that he'd ask the Defense Department's inspector general to scrutinize the work of former Army analyst Phillip Mills and determine whether the military mishandled problems at the Georgia-based U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory," the story continues.

""Was key evidence destroyed even as Army supervisors were aware of serious problems in the lab?" Grassley asked. "Did supervisors cover up the alleged problems to spare themselves embarrassment, to the benefit or detriment of criminal defendants?"

McClatchy detailed mistakes made by Mills at the Army laboratory in a story published this month. The story revealed that Mills' errors undermined confidence in hundreds of criminal cases brought against military personnel across the country.

The McClatchy investigation also found that the lab, near Atlanta, was lax in supervising Mills, slow to re-examine his work and slipshod about informing defendants.

More than two years after the lab's internal review, some defendants remain in the dark. McClatchy, for instance, found two defendants who'd never been told that the military's retesting cleared them.

Forensic and legal experts told McClatchy that they were shocked that the military had not detected Mills' mistakes earlier and then failed to uniformly tell defendants that evidence might have been tainted.

"The military should have done better in its oversight," said Michelle Lindo McCluer, executive director of the nonprofit National Institute of Military Justice.

Mills, who's now 65, resigned shortly after being told in November 2005 that he'd be fired, according to court records.

Instead of asking for a full-blown independent audit of the lab, the military asked the Defense Department's inspector general to narrowly review its internal affairs investigation of Mills. A spokesman with the inspector general's office said his office concluded the internal affairs inquiry had been conducted in a "thorough and corroborative" way.

The lab didn't involve the inspector general in its $1.4 million retesting of Mills' work and insisted on retaining control of that three-year effort.

"It can't be the lab investigating itself," said Barry Scheck, a co-director of the nonprofit Innocence Project. "That's astonishingly wrong in principle."

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, added that problems such as those uncovered at the Army laboratory underscored the need for better oversight: "All forensic evidence used in criminal investigations and prosecutions should be reliable and trustworthy," he told McClatchy.

Mills hasn't been able to be reached for comment. TheArmy told McClatchy on Wednesday that it thinks the lab handled Mills' mistakes appropriately and "took numerous important steps when the information was discovered."

N.C. case reviews

When similar scandals have erupted elsewhere, however, independent investigators have been brought in and their findings made public.

In North Carolina, two retired FBI managers reviewed a laboratory's serology unit after the nation's first innocence inquiry commission declared a Raleigh man innocent of a murder. The managers found that the State Bureau of Investigations lab withheld or misreported test results in 227 cases. Prosecutors have since released the names of affected defendants, and a nonprofit law firm is reviewing their cases.

"I was really struck by the contrast in how North Carolina handled it versus how the military handled it," said Chris Swecker, one of the retired managers. "North Carolina said: 'Let's get it out there to everybody who might have been impacted.'"

In Detroit, defense attorneys and prosecutors are involved in a similar notification effort more than two years after the city's crime lab was shut down because of problems with evidence testing.

In Dallas County, Texas, a series of DNA-related exonerations spurred the district attorney to collaborate with Scheck's Innocence Project to review hundreds of previously denied post-conviction requests for DNA testing.

Still, the Justice Department has done little to enforce a law that requires federally funded crime labs to set up outside auditing processes, the department's inspector general has found.

"Now that we've seen so many laboratories come under scrutiny, you'd think the message should be out there that these audits should be routine," said Brandon Garrett, a University of Virginia School of Law professor who's written on the subject. "But many labs have no procedures on how to handle this."

Staff writer Joseph Neff contributed to this report."

The story can be found at:

http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/03/31/1093603/review-of-military-crime-lab-sought.html
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: 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

For a breakdown of some of the cases, issues and controversies this Blog is currently following, please turn to:

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=120008354894645705&postID=8369513443994476774

Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;