Flawed Forensics: Virginia: Major (unfortunate) Development: Move by unanimous Virginia legislative sub-committee to kill a bill aimed at helping innocent people wrongfully convicted by flawed forensic science because of concerns about its cost is eviscerated by Washington Post criminal justice commentator Radley Balko - (and rightly so! HL)..."A bill aimed at helping innocent people wrongfully convicted by flawed forensic science was killed by a unanimous vote in the House Appropriations Public Safety subcommittee because of concerns about its cost." (Bravo Radley. HL);

PASSAGE OF THE DAY "As we have previously discussed here, it can be extraordinarily difficult for people convicted because of bad forensics to appeal their convictions. First, the courts are loath to admit their mistakes, so it’s hard to even get an appeals court to concede that a field of forensics or a specific practitioner that it has already approved has since been discredited. Second, both state and federal courts have imposed deadlines on people who find new, potentially exculpatory evidence. Generally, you must file your petition within a year of the time the evidence could have reasonably been discovered. Since the discrediting of forensics fields or specific actors tends to be a gradual process, those convicted are often trapped: If you file before the court agrees that a consensus has been reached that you were convicted with junk science, you’ll not only lose; you’ll also be prevented from making the same claim later once a clear consensus has been reached. But if you wait too long, you risk missing your one-year window to file. That’s where bills like the proposed law in Virginia can provide some relief. They give defendants a new path to a new trail via a “junk science writ.” Texas was the first state to pass a law like this, after the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham — who was likely innocent — made national headlines. The idea is to give the convicted the opportunity to shortcut the procedural barriers if they can show they were convicted with faulty forensic evidence. The Innocence Project estimates that faulty forensic science plays a role in about a quarter of wrongful convictions. The National Registry of Exonerations lists 51 Virginians who have been exonerated since 1989. Ten were convicted at least in part because of faulty or fraudulent forensic evidence."

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COMMENTARY: "Virginia legislators claimed a bill to allow appeals from people convicted by junk science was too expensive," by Radley Balko, published by The Richmond Times-Dispatch, on February 19, 2019.

GIST: A bill aimed at helping innocent people wrongfully convicted by flawed forensic science was killed by a unanimous vote in the House Appropriations Public Safety subcommittee because of concerns about its cost. The legislation would have allowed people who claim innocence to petition the Virginia Court of Appeals, arguing that developments in forensic science now clear them, or that they were convicted largely by a forensic science technique or testimony that has since been discredited. The bill was opposed both years by the Virginia Association of Commonwealth’s Attorneys. This year, the department of Planning and Budget reported that if the bill became law, the Virginia attorney general’s office would require additional staff at a cost of $439,078 as well as funding to hire independent experts to respond to forensic science challenges in court. As we have previously discussed here, it can be extraordinarily difficult for people convicted because of bad forensics to appeal their convictions. First, the courts are loath to admit their mistakes, so it’s hard to even get an appeals court to concede that a field of forensics or a specific practitioner that it has already approved has since been discredited. Second, both state and federal courts have imposed deadlines on people who find new, potentially exculpatory evidence. Generally, you must file your petition within a year of the time the evidence could have reasonably been discovered. Since the discrediting of forensics fields or specific actors tends to be a gradual process, those convicted are often trapped: If you file before the court agrees that a consensus has been reached that you were convicted with junk science, you’ll not only lose; you’ll also be prevented from making the same claim later once a clear consensus has been reached. But if you wait too long, you risk missing your one-year window to file. That’s where bills like the proposed law in Virginia can provide some relief. They give defendants a new path to a new trail via a “junk science writ.” Texas was the first state to pass a law like this, after the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham — who was likely innocent — made national headlines. The idea is to give the convicted the opportunity to shortcut the procedural barriers if they can show they were convicted with faulty forensic evidence. The Innocence Project estimates that faulty forensic science plays a role in about a quarter of wrongful convictions. The National Registry of Exonerations lists 51 Virginians who have been exonerated since 1989. Ten were convicted at least in part because of faulty or fraudulent forensic evidence. A half-million dollars seems like a pretty paltry amount to make sure there aren’t more. But let’s take a closer look at that half-million dollars. First, note that this estimate isn’t the estimated cost of enforcing the law. It’s an estimate of what it would cost to fight incarcerated people the new law would allow to file claims. Certainly some people would make fraudulent claims. But some would be legitimate, and there’s no requirement that the state fight every claim. In some cases, it may well be in the interest of justice to concede that someone was convicted with junk science, and either allow them to be released or agree that they deserve a new trial. But even taking the estimate at face value, let’s get some perspective on just how much money we’re talking about. Virginia’s 2018 state budget was $51.8 billion. If we round up the Virginia AG’s estimate to $500,000, we’re looking at just .00097 percent of the state’s annual budget. In fact, last year Virginia saw a $2.2 billion surplus. The $500,000 would represent just .0227 percent of the surplus. It would amount to .05 percent of the $1 billion the state spends on prisons and 2 percent of what it spends on jails. It would be just 3.2 percent of the state’s rainy-day fund. Relatively speaking, then, the bill itself isn’t expensive at all. But it could get much more expensive than $500,000 per year. Yet ironically, if this law did end up costing Virginia a lot of money, it would be because over the years, the state’s legislators have refused to spend the money to ensure that people accused of crimes get an adequate crack at justice. For example, when Virginia hires outside lawyers to advocate on behalf of the state, it pays them $400, $500, sometimes as much as $700 per hour. But when it hires attorneys to represent indigent defendants, it pays $90 per hour, with a cap of $1,235 per felony. That’s one of the lowest caps in the country. A 2004 American Bar Association report concluded that the public-defender system was “deeply flawed and fails to provide indigent defendants the guarantees of effective assistance of counsel required by federal and state law.” Likewise, a 2003 Public Defender Commission report found the state’s system lacking on all 10 criteria evaluated. Virginia has also had some of the most aggressive prosecutors in the country. It trails only Texas in number of executions since 1976, and Prince William County in particular is among the killingest counties in the country. In 2012, an Urban Institute study looked at a sample of cases in Virginia from 1973 through 1987 for which biological evidence had been preserved. Incredibly, the study found that in 5 percent of the murder and sexual assault cases examined, DNA testing showed that the state had convicted the wrong person. The state also has a less-than-stellar law for compensating people once they’ve been exonerated. Virginia gives exonorees 90 percent of the state’s per capita income for each year they were incarcerated. That comes to about $40,000 per year. But the law requires the legislature to appropriate funds for each exonoree, and it tends to do so only if the wrongly convicted person agrees not to sue. Compensation can also get tied up for years due to circumstances unrelated to a particular exonoree’s case, such as a budget impasse. The payout is also capped at 25 years, and exonorees can’t use it to secure a mortgage or other loan. Consequently, some exonorees have passed on seeking compensation and sought a settlement through litigation, or by threatening it. In one of the more notorious cases to ever come out of Virginia, for example, the state and the city of Norfolk recently agreed to a combined $8.4 million payout to four Navy sailors wrongly convicted of a rape and murder in 1997. A half-million dollars is a drop in the bucket. But if you start piling up the multimillion-dollar settlements, you start to put a bigger dent in the commonwealth’s coffers. I suspect this is what the delegates on that subcommittee were really worried about. A bill aimed at helping innocent people wrongfully convicted by flawed forensic science was killed by a unanimous vote in the House Appropriations Public Safety subcommittee because of concerns about its costAn honest politician willing to admit that much is at least stating that the state can’t afford the tens or hundreds of millions-dollar price tag that would come with awareness of those false convictions. For the delegates who voted against this bill, the price of a conscience was quite a bit cheaper. They were willing to remain in the dark for $439,078."

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/19/virginia-legislators-claimed-bill-allow-appeals-people-convicted-by-junk-science-was-too-expensive/
 
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. 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. 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. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html 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.

Sonja Farak: Massachusetts: White Elephant cases: The Gazette reports on The American Civil Liberties Union's herculian effort to inform people that they have been cleared of chatgers because of misconduct at the Amherst testing lab..."Following the Supreme Judicial Court’s October decision to overturn thousands of drug convictions because of misconduct at an Amherst testing lab, a campaign has been launched to inform the defendants that they have been cleared of those charges. The campaign is being led by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and the Committee for Public Counsel Services, which is the state’s public defender agency. The cases were dismissed as a result of the misconduct of former state chemist Sonja Farak, of Northampton, who was using drugs from the Department of Health’s Amherst lab almost every day she worked there, and subsequent prosecutorial misconduct."

In the years since I started publishing this Blog I have become increasingly disturbed by the 'white elephant' in the room: Sheer, unadulterated, willful   misconduct in the criminal justice system - much  of it involving forensic evidence - committed by lab technicians,  pathologists, police officers, prosecutors and others.  Think Annie Dookhan; Think Sonia Farak; Think David Kofoed; Think Charles Smith; Think Ken Anderson; Think Gene Morrison.  I have therefore decided to run this image of a white elephant at the top of every applicable post henceforth, to draw our reader's attention to   what I see as a major problem in all too many criminal justice system's - my own included.  Harold Levy; Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
"Reformers have for years recommended that all forensic labs be independent from law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies' and this is a key reform promoted by The Justice Project (2008). But fixing these problems is only half the answer' because half of the wrongful convictions attributed to misleading forensic evidence involved deliberate forensic fraud' evidence tampering' and/or perjury.
From "The Elephant in the Crime Lab," by co-authored by Sheila Berry and Larry Ytuarte; Forensic Examiner; Spring, 2009; http://www.t-mlaw.com/blog/post/the-elephant-in-the-crime-lab/

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PASSAGE ONE  OF THE DAY: "Northampton attorney Luke Ryan’s work on behalf of his clients proved vital in exposing the breadth of Farak’s misconduct. Ryan said the treatment records his advocacy helped bring to light showed that Farak was either using or affected by drugs nearly every day she worked at the lab. He also said that this misconduct began virtually the same day she became a chemist in Amherst. Ryan said that although he is not part of the effort to contact those whose convictions have been overturned, he supports it. “With a drug conviction comes almost a second-class citizenship,” Ryan said. “The collateral consequences are really profound.” He said that such a conviction can impact anything from being able to volunteer at your child’s school to one’s immigration status. Of those convicted, Ryan said, “They’ve grown accustomed to living with this baggage.” He also said that written notices aren’t sufficient alone, as they aren’t always received and people can also move, noting that someone’s address at the time of a conviction may well be different now. Newman said that the search campaign for those who had their convictions overturned as a result of the Farak case is more robust than was the case for Dookhan, although the hotline is happy to answer questions from Dookhan defendants as well. He also said that a search firm has been engaged to find the current addresses of Farak defendants. Ryan said he doesn’t believe that the drug lab scandals in Massachusetts are unique to the Bay State, but that the state’s public defender system, which he said is more robust that public defender systems in a number of other states, was able to bring it to light."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "As for preventing such scandals in future, Ryan noted that society has made a choice to treat the public health problem of drug addiction as a criminal matter. “You’re making a choice that you’re devoting significant resources to,” he said. Still, Ryan said that if that choice is made, drug labs should operate under the principles of forensic science and not an “assembly line.” Newman said that Farak and Dookhan cases show the short cuts the criminal justice system will take, to “put people behind the razor wire.” And he indicted the war on drugs and war on crime as responsible for the destruction of millions of families across the United States. “Misguided policies result in Farak and Dookhan,” Newman said. Those who wish to see if their drug conviction was overturned can call 1-888-999-2881."

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STORY:   "ACLU reaching out to drug defendants cleared in state lab scandal," by reporter Bera
Dunau, published  by The Gazette on February 21, 2018.

PHOTO CAPTION: "Sonja Farak, of Northampton, a former chemist at the state crime lab in Amherst, appears in Hampshire Superior Court on Monday, April 24, 2013. Farak was found guilty of evidence tampering, drug theft and drug possession, and the Supreme Judicial Court last years dismissed thousands of drug convictions secured through testing at the Amherst lab."

GIST: "Following the Supreme Judicial Court’s October decision to overturn thousands of drug convictions because of misconduct at an Amherst testing lab, a campaign has been launched to inform the defendants that they have been cleared of those charges. The campaign is being led by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and the Committee for Public Counsel Services, which is the state’s public defender agency. The cases were dismissed as a result of the misconduct of former state chemist Sonja Farak, of Northampton, who was using drugs from the Department of Health’s Amherst lab almost every day she worked there, and subsequent prosecutorial misconduct.

“This is a path to justice for thousands of people across Massachusetts — and an opportunity for them to more easily rebuild their lives,” Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “Most of the people affected by the court’s decision have already served their sentences, but continue to face the collateral consequences of a drug conviction, like challenges finding housing and employment. “We can’t turn back time and get back the liberty people have lost — but we can get the word out that there may be significant relief.” The campaign will utilize newspaper, radio, internet and television advertisements with a focus on western Massachusetts platforms, as well as flyers and printed postcards. “Most of the Farak drug lab cases were from western Massachusetts,” said Bill Newman, director of the Western Regional Law Office of the ACLU of Massachusetts. The ruling that overturned the convictions also required the attorney general’s office to pay to notify those whose convictions have been overturned. Newman said that, so far, 10,912 charges in 7,554 cases have been dismissed as a result of the Farak misconduct. “There are going to be more,” said Newman, who said he believes that number will be in the thousands. The misconduct of Annie Dookhan, who falsely submitted positive test results at a drug lab in Jamaica Plain, also resulted in the voiding of tens of thousands of drug convictions. Between the two scandals, Newman said that more than 47,000 charges across more than 28,000 cases have been dismissed. The affected cases range from 2003 to 2013.  Northampton attorney Luke Ryan’s work on behalf of his clients proved vital in exposing the breadth of Farak’s misconduct. Ryan said the treatment records his advocacy helped bring to light showedthat Farak was either using or affected by drugs nearly every day she worked at the lab. He also said that this misconduct began virtually the same day she became a chemist in Amherst. Ryan said that although he is not part of the effort to contact those whose convictions have been overturned, he supports it. “With a drug conviction comes almost a second-class citizenship,” Ryan said. “The collateral consequences are really profound.” He said that such a conviction can impact anything from being able to volunteer at your child’s school to one’s immigration status. Of those convicted, Ryan said, “They’ve grown accustomed to living with this baggage.” He also said that written notices aren’t sufficient alone, as they aren’t always received and people can also move, noting that someone’s address at the time of a conviction may well be different now. Newman said that the search campaign for those who had their convictions overturned as a result of the Farak case is more robust than was the case for Dookhan, although the hotline is happy to answer questions from Dookhan defendants as well. He also said that a search firm has been engaged to find the current addresses of Farak defendants. Ryan said he doesn’t believe that the drug lab scandals in Massachusetts are unique to the Bay State, but that the state’s public defender system, which he said is more robust that public defender systems in a number of other states, was able to bring it to light. Ryan’s chief client eventually had his conviction overturned, but only after more than five years of incarceration. Ryan is now representing this client in his effort to seek monetary compensation for his imprisonment. Ryan is also one of three attorneys with a pending class action lawsuit on behalf of exonerated defendants seeking the return of fees and fines that resulted from their now overturned convictions. As for preventing such scandals in future, Ryan noted that society has made a choice to treat the public health problem of drug addiction as a criminal matter. “You’re making a choice that you’re devoting significant resources to,” he said. Still, Ryan said that if that choice is made, drug labs should operate under the principles of forensic science and not an “assembly line.” Newman said that Farak and Dookhan cases show the short cuts the criminal justice system will take, to “put people behind the razor wire.” And he indicted the war on drugs and war on crime as responsible for the destruction of millions of families across the United States. “Misguided policies result in Farak and Dookhan,” Newman said. Those who wish to see if their drug conviction was overturned can call 1-888-999-2881."

The entire story can be read at:  

https://www.gazettenet.com/Campaign-seeks-to-contact-those-whose-drug-convictions-have-been-overturned-23655312

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. 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. 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. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html 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.

Technology: Disturbing revelation by reporters George Joseph and Debbie Nathan in the Intercept: "Prisons Across the U.S. Are Quietly Building Databases of Incarcerated People’s Voice Prints"...Implications far beyond prisons?

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Either way, Greco said, there’s cause for concern. “Once the data exists, and it becomes an accepted part of what’s happening, it’s very hard to protect it or limit its use in the future,” he said. That has implications far beyond prisons, argues Garcia, the man incarcerated at Sing Sing. “First you use this on the people marginalized in society, criminalizing the families of those incarcerated,” he said. “But, especially in Trump’s America, the sky is the limit with this.” (George Joseph is a criminal justice reporter at The Appeal. His work has appeared in outlets such as ProPublica, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and The Verge. Debbie Nathan lives in Brownsville, Texas, on the Mexico border, and has been writing about the border and immigration for over three decades.)

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PASSAGE ONE OF THE DAY: "The Intercept, and follow-up interviews with prison authorities, indicate that Dukes was right to be suspicious: His audio sample was being “enrolled” into a new voice surveillance system. In New York and other states across the country, authorities are acquiring technology to extract and digitize the voices of incarcerated people into unique biometric signatures, known as voice prints. Prison authorities have quietly enrolled hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people’s voice prints into large-scale biometric databases. Computer algorithms then draw on these databases to identify the voices taking part in a call and to search for other calls in which the voices of interest are detected. Some programs, like New York’s, even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners regularly. Corrections officials representing the states of Texas, Florida, and Arkansas, along with Arizona’s Yavapai and Pinal counties; Alachua County, Florida; and Travis County, Texas, also confirmed that they are actively using voice recognition technology today. And a review of contracting documents identified other jurisdictions that have acquired similar voice-print capture capabilities: Connecticut and Georgia state corrections officials have signed contracts for the technology (Connecticut did not respond to repeated interview requests; Georgia declined to answer questions on the matter). Authorities and prison technology companies say this mass biometric surveillance supports prison security and fraud prevention efforts. But civil liberties advocates argue that the biometric buildup has been neither transparent nor consensual. Some jurisdictions, for example, limit incarcerated people’s phone access if they refuse to enroll in the voice recognition system, while others enroll incarcerated people without their knowledge. Once the data exists, they note, it could potentially be used by other agencies, without any say from the public. It’s particularly alarming, they add, that the technology’s use in prisons can ensnare people beyond their walls. “Why am I giving up my rights because I’m receiving a call from somebody who has been convicted of a crime?” asks Jerome Greco, a digital forensics attorney at New York’s Legal Aid Society. Greco argues that the mining of outside parties’ voice prints should require a warrant."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Greco of the Legal Aid Society says he understands the value of such monitoring capabilities, pointing out that incarcerated people do sometimes have to deal with other prisoners taking their PINs or threatening their families for money. But the extension of this technology into the monitoring of people outside prisons, and the lack of transparency and regulation of these new databases concerns him. If voice prints were shared with police, for example, they could try to compare them with voices caught on a wiretap, he notes, despite scientists’ skepticism about the reliability of voice print matches for criminal prosecutions. New York State’s Department of Corrections declined to answer questions regarding whether it would share the data with other agencies.  Either way, Greco said, there’s cause for concern. “Once the data exists, and it becomes an accepted part of what’s happening, it’s very hard to protect it or limit its use in the future,” he said. That has implications far beyond prisons, argues Garcia, the man incarcerated at Sing Sing. “First you use this on the people marginalized in society, criminalizing the families of those incarcerated,” he said. “But, especially in Trump’s America, the sky is the limit with this.”"

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STORY:  by George Joseph and Debbie Nathan, published by The Intercept on  January 30, 2019.

GIST: "Roughly six months ago at New York’s Sing Sing prison, John Dukes says he was brought out with cellmates to meet a corrections counselor. He recalls her giving him a paper with some phrases and offering him a strange choice: He could go up to the phone and utter the phrases that an automated voice would ask him to read, or he could choose not to and lose his phone access altogether. Dukes did not know why he was being asked to make this decision, but he felt troubled as he heard other men ahead of him speaking into the phone and repeating certain phrases from the sheets the counselors had given them. “I was contemplating, ‘Should I do it? I don’t want my voice to be on this machine,’” he recalls. “But I still had to contact my family, even though I only had a few months left.” So when it was his turn, he walked up to the phone, picked up the receiver, and followed a series of automated instructions. “It said, ‘Say this phrase, blah, blah, blah,’ and if you didn’t say it clearly, they would say, ‘Say this phrase again,’ like ‘cat’ or ‘I’m a citizen of the United States of America.’” Dukes said he repeated such phrases for a minute or two. The voice then told him the process was complete. “Here’s another part of myself that I had to give away again in this prison system,” he remembers thinking as he walked back to the cell. Dukes, who was released in October, says he was never told about what that procedure was meant to do. But contracting documents for New York’s new prison phone system, obtained by The Appeal in partnership with The Intercept, and follow-up interviews with prison authorities, indicate that Dukes was right to be suspicious: His audio sample was being “enrolled” into a new voice surveillance system. In New York and other states across the country, authorities are acquiring technology to extract and digitize the voices of incarcerated people into unique biometric signatures, known as voice prints. Prison authorities have quietly enrolled hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people’s voice prints into large-scale biometric databases. Computer algorithms then draw on these databases to identify the voices taking part in a call and to search for other calls in which the voices of interest are detected. Some programs, like New York’s, even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners regularly. Corrections officials representing the states of Texas, Florida, and Arkansas, along with Arizona’s Yavapai and Pinal counties; Alachua County, Florida; and Travis County, Texas, also confirmed that they are actively using voice recognition technology today. And a review of contracting documents identified other jurisdictions that have acquired similar voice-print capture capabilities: Connecticut and Georgia state corrections officials have signed contracts for the technology (Connecticut did not respond to repeated interview requests; Georgia declined to answer questions on the matter). Authorities and prison technology companies say this mass biometric surveillance supports prison security and fraud prevention efforts. But civil liberties advocates argue that the biometric buildup has been neither transparent nor consensual. Some jurisdictions, for example, limit incarcerated people’s phone access if they refuse to enroll in the voice recognition system, while others enroll incarcerated people without their knowledge. Once the data exists, they note, it could potentially be used by other agencies, without any say from the public. It’s particularly alarming, they add, that the technology’s use in prisons can ensnare people beyond their walls. “Why am I giving up my rights because I’m receiving a call from somebody who has been convicted of a crime?” asks Jerome Greco, a digital forensics attorney at New York’s Legal Aid Society. Greco argues that the mining of outside parties’ voice prints should require a warrant. “If you have a family member convicted of a crime, yet you haven’t been, why are you now having your information being used for government investigations?” The Spread of Voice Recognition Technology: Voice-print technology works by dissecting physical features that distinguish individuals’ voices, such as their pitch. With this data, the program’s algorithm generates a computer model of their vocal signatures, known as “voice prints,” which can be stored in a database for comparisons with utterances recorded in the future. In recent years, voice recognition technology has come to be associated with consumer offerings, like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, but the technology was originally developed for military and intelligence applications. Over a decade ago, as The Intercept reported, U.S. intelligence agencies were using voice recognition programs to identify the voices of top Al Qaeda officials in their online audio postings. Similarly, the algorithms and structure behind the prison telecommunications firm Securus Technologies’ particular voice software, known as Investigator Pro, were developed in part through a $50 million grant from the Department of Defense. The software was licensed to JLG Technologies, a company that Securus acquired in 2014. According to Securus’s 2017 proposal for New York, the technology was developed because “DOD needed to identify terrorist calls out of the millions of calls made to and from the United States every day.” But it wasn’t long before major prison technology firms, such as Securus and Global Tel Link, began marketing the technology to U.S. jurisdictions that were seeking to extract and store voice prints associated with incarcerated people in their systems. “IPRO [Investigator Pro] has a 10-year track record of providing pinpoint voice accuracy capability country-wide in 243 states, county, and local correctional agencies,” notes Securus in the Pinal County contract. The enrollment of incarcerated people’s voice prints allows corrections authorities to biometrically identify all prisoners’ voices on prison calls, and find past prison calls in which the same voice prints are detected. Such systems can also automatically flag “suspicious” calls, enabling investigators to review discrepancies between the incarcerated person’s ID for the call and the voice print detected. Securus did not respond to a request for comment on how it defined “suspicious.” The company’s Investigator Pro also provides a voice probability score, rating the likelihood that an incarcerated person’s voice was heard on a call. Michael Lynch, an intelligence coordinator for the Alachua County Jail in northern Florida, confirmed that his county recently agreed to purchase Securus’s voice recognition program. Lynch said that the voice prints produced by the program will be permanently archived at Securus’s facility in Texas. He said the jail hopes the technology will address the problem of incarcerated people using each others’ personal identification numbers, or PINs. “The problem is inmates that are committing other criminal acts or contacting victims or witnesses and using other inmates’ PIN to do that,” he said in a phone call. “Voice [biometrics] will tell us who’s making the calls.” Securus’s voice recognition program can also identify the voices of people outside prisons, both former prisoners and those who have never been incarcerated but communicate with people inside. New York and Texas state corrections officials confirmed that their agencies retain the voice prints of formerly incarcerated people, like Dukes, allowing them to identify them by name if currently incarcerated people call them in the future. And New York and Pinal County, Arizona, confirmed that their voice recognition programs can identify the voices of outside callers. New York’s contract proposal with Securus states that outsiders’ voice samples can be used to “search for all other calls” in their recorded call database to find where those voices occur. In an email, New York prison officials confirmed that this program will give investigators the ability to extract a voice print from an outside caller and use it to “identify that a call recipient has participated in multiple phone calls.” They added that the program will not have names associated with outsiders’ voice prints. In a statement, Pinal County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Navideh Forghani also confirmed this outsider voice-tracking capability, noting that while their software does not identify non-incarcerated people by name, it can track “suspicious activities,” such as “multiple inmates speaking to one person on the outside on a reoccurring basis.” With this technology, a press release for Investigator Pro notes, an investigator can now answer questions like, “What other inmates are talking to this particular called party?” and “Are any of my current inmates talking to this released inmate?” Prisoners’ rights advocates worry that outsider voice surveillance technology could also be used to coordinate crackdowns against prison organizing campaigns. “Using this technology to trace the voices of outside callers and flag those who speak with more than one person in a system, staff can use calls with outside organizers to quickly identify the incarcerated activist they support,” said Bianca Tylek, director of the Corrections Accountability Project, which works to curb the influence of commercial interests in the criminal justice system. Tylek noted that during the 2018 national prison strike, corrections staff routinely retaliated against incarcerated activists by using tactics like solitary confinement, job termination, and facility reassignment.  The Pressure to Participate: Advocates assert that corrections agencies have been building up large-scale voice-print databases with limited input from the public or from incarcerated people and their families. While some state corrections agencies have put out public notices to families about payment options for new phone systems, they seldom mention the voice-print databases, which are rarely discussed outside of industry conferences and internal talks with contractors. “Every time there’s a new contract, there’s new surveillance, but they don’t say anything,” said Tylek. “I’ve never seen authorities post a public notice about new surveillance updates or tell families.” Keeping their plans opaque has allowed authorities to quietly pressure incarcerated people into giving up their biometric data — or to enroll them without their knowledge. According to Securus’s 2019 Investigator Pro contract with Alachua County, Florida (which includes Gainesville), “Inmates will participate in a covert voice print enrollment process.” In Texas, state prisoners must enroll in the voice recognition program if they want to make calls. According to Jeremy Desel, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Investigator Pro’s voice enrollment process is “the lock and key” to the Texas state prison phone system. Likewise, in Pinal County, Arizona, phone access is severely limited for prisoners who decline to enroll in the voice recognition program. “If inmates choose not to participate, they can still utilize the phone system but only to make phone calls to their attorneys,” said Forghani, the county sheriff’s office spokesperson. In some cases, prisoners participate without even knowing, said Martin Garcia, a 33-year-old who is incarcerated at Sing Sing in New York. “A lot of guys don’t know technology,” he said. “They’ve been in there so long, they’ve never heard of Google.” The voice enrollment procedure, he continued, is seen as “just another thing they follow to talk to their family.” Garcia was upset to hear that Securus’s voice-tracking capabilities, as described in its approved contract with the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, could mine prison call databases to identify which other prisoners outside callers had contacted. “Are they criminals just because they’re talking to someone incarcerated?” he said. “To me, you’re criminalizing relationships. Some people may be hesitant to interact with me if they could be put in a database.” After being briefed by The Appeal and The Intercept about the program, New York State Assembly Member David Weprin publicly called on the state Department of Corrections to give incarcerated people more choice regarding the voice recognition program. At a Tuesday hearing, Weprin, chair of the Assembly’s Committee on Correction, asked the Department of Corrections’ acting commissioner, Anthony J. Annucci, to add a provision that allows incarcerated people with legitimate concerns about voice surveillance to “not be denied phone privileges.” Annucci did not immediately agree to the request, instead pointing out that people have the option to make unmonitored calls to their attorneys. In a statement to The Appeal and The Intercept, Weprin said he is “concerned with the deployment and use of voice recognition software” in New York state prisons and will be working with his colleagues to further investigate the technology. Building the Databases: The rapid, secretive growth of voice-print databases is “probably not a legal issue, not because it shouldn’t be, but because it’s something laws haven’t entertained yet,” noted Clare Garvie, a senior associate at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology. “It’s not surprising that we’re seeing this around prisons, just because it can be collected easily,” she continued, referring to biometric voice data. “We’re building these databases from the ground up.” The scale of prisons’ emerging voice biometric databases has not been comprehensively documented nationwide, but, at minimum, they already hold more than 200,000 incarcerated people’s voice prints. New York’s Department of Corrections, which incarcerates just under 50,000 people, confirmed that approximately 92 percent of its population had been enrolled in the voice recognition system. State corrections authorities for Florida, Texas, and Arkansas, which hold about 260,000 prisoners combined, also confirmed that they are using Investigator Pro’s voice recognition technology. Connecticut and Georgia’s state corrections systems, which incarcerate roughly 13,000 and roughly 52,000 people, respectively, have also purchased Securus’s voice-print technology. The databases of recorded calls from which prison authorities could search for outsiders’ voice samples could also potentially include millions of recorded calls for state and countywide systems. According to the design requirements New York’s Department of Corrections gave to Securus, for example, the company must be able to record every call, archive all call recordings for a year, and maintain any calls flagged for investigative purposes “indefinitely” through the life of the contract, which ends in 2021. (In the documents, Securus estimated that 7 percent of prison calls made per year would total 1.5 million calls, suggesting that the call database could retain over 20 million calls.  Greco of the Legal Aid Society says he understands the value of such monitoring capabilities, pointing out that incarcerated people do sometimes have to deal with other prisoners taking their PINs or threatening their families for money. But the extension of this technology into the monitoring of people outside prisons, and the lack of transparency and regulation of these new databases concerns him. If voice prints were shared with police, for example, they could try to compare them with voices caught on a wiretap, he notes, despite scientists’ skepticism about the reliability of voice print matches for criminal prosecutions. New York State’s Department of Corrections declined to answer questions regarding whether it would share the data with other agencies.  Either way, Greco said, there’s cause for concern. “Once the data exists, and it becomes an accepted part of what’s happening, it’s very hard to protect it or limit its use in the future,” he said. That has implications far beyond prisons, argues Garcia, the man incarcerated at Sing Sing. “First you use this on the people marginalized in society, criminalizing the families of those incarcerated,” he said. “But, especially in Trump’s America, the sky is the limit with this.”

The entire story can be read at:

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/prison-voice-prints-databases-securus/

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. 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. 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. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html 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.

Richard Vorder Bruegge: Important ProPublica investigation: 'The FBI Says Its Photo Analysis Is Scientific Evidence. Scientists Disagree. The bureau’s image unit has linked defendants to crime photographs for decades using unproven techniques and baseless statistics. Studies have begun to raise doubts about the unit’s methods.'..."At ProPublica’s request, several forensic scientists, statisticians and clothes manufacturing experts reviewed Vorder Bruegge’s article. They said the FBI examiner’s central claims were misleading or wrong. Building a Legal Foundation; But in the years after the article on bluejeans identification was published, Vorder Bruegge won acclaim for his work. Newspapers ran short articles characterizing the method as a forensic science breakthrough. In interviews, Vorder Bruegge gave credit to his predecessors at the FBI . “I’m really standing on their shoulders,” he told the Chicago Tribune in June 1999, adding, “It’s exciting to find ways to show that everything around us is unique.” The television documentary series “Forensic Files” aired an episode about the Washington state case a couple of years later. It featured Vorder Bruegge extensively, even showing him outfitted in a full-length lab coat to take pictures of bluejeans. Over the following decade, Vorder Bruegge went on a legal winning streak. He convinced judges across the country that unproven methods were sound science. ProPublica searched court databases and found more than a dozen criminal cases involving Vorder Bruegge’s lab work since 2000. In those cases, judges overruled each request from defense lawyers to block his testimony. The FBI did not respond to questions about Vorder Bruegge’s casework. Courts have historically permitted evidence from the FBI Lab, sometimes without considering its accuracy. “Jurors think that if you’re a big FBI examiner you know it all,” said Alicia Carriquiry, an Iowa State University statistics professor and director of the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence. Vorder Bruegge’s statements contradicted his written lab results in at least three cases, court and FBI Lab records show. His testimony in several other trials indicate he improvised techniques."

As the Marshall Project describes this important ProPublica story: "Problems with “perhaps the most ubiquitous of the United States expert witnesses.” Richard Vorder Bruegge, an FBI scientist, has made a career of testifying for prosecutors against criminal defendants when “images” are central to a case. But he has on at least three occasions offered incriminating testimony even when the results of his lab work suggested otherwise. More proof, say experts, that there are problems with the reliability of FBI lab work portrayed as state-of-the-art.

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Dr. Michael Bower's perspective: (CSI DDS: Forensics and Law in Focus); "This has a familiar ring to it. More or less it is the “I can see it, even if you can’t” brand of accepted “scientific” testimony. This is the path of other forensic innovators who single-handedly advance their own version of “accuracy” and “probability.” In this story, a  pixel pushing FBI Image lab guy climbs the ladder by putting bad guys away and rises to the high atmosphere of the AAFS org." (American Academy of Forensic Science);

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Court records and FBI Lab files show statements by prosecutors or Vorder Bruegge veered from his original conclusions in at least three cases. Vorder Bruegge, who earned a doctorate in geology 28 years ago, came to the FBI after abandoning his hopes of becoming an astronaut. He had no crime laboratory experience, but he quickly became a force in the forensic sciences. Now 55, he is the most prominent member of the Forensic Audio, Video and Image Analysis Unit at the FBI Lab in Quantico, Virginia. The unit’s comparisons can advance investigations by sharpening pictures and narrowing the list of suspects. But most of the image examiners’ lab work has no scientific basis proving their methods are reliable and findings are correct. A ProPublica investigation, published in January, found that image examiners’ methods have never had a strong scientific foundation. The bureau’s use of the unit’s findings as trial evidence troubles many experts and raises anew questions about the role of the FBI Lab as a standard-setter in forensic science. Such shortcomings could have led judges to block image analysis from criminal trials. But Vorder Bruegge single-handedly built a body of case law that has kept the FBI unit’s testimony admissible in the courts. His 22-year-old comparison of bluejeans is the legal foundation for most photo comparison methods."

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STORY: "FBI Scientist’s Statements Linked Defendants to Crimes, Even When His Lab Results Didn’t,"  by reporter Ryan Gabrielson, published by ProPublica on February 22, 2018.

SUB-HEADING: "Court records and FBI Lab files show statements by prosecutors or Richard Vorder Bruegge, the most prominent member of the Forensic Audio, Video and Image Analysis Unit, veered from his original conclusions in at least three cases."

 

SUB-HEADING: "The FBI Says Its Photo Analysis Is Scientific Evidence. Scientists Disagree. The bureau’s image unit has linked defendants to crime photographs for decades using unproven techniques and baseless statistics. Studies have begun to raise doubts about the unit’s methods."

 

PHOTO CAPTION: "FBI image examiner Richard Vorder Bruegge’s comparison of bluejeans seams in a 1996 robbery and bombing case is the legal foundation for most photo comparison methods. "

GIST: "A man stepped into a rural South Carolina bank a few days before Christmas in 2001, aimed a gun at tellers and stole $7,800 from the drawers. Witnesses couldn’t identify the robber. The surveillance video was too grainy to help investigators. More than three years later, FBI agents narrowed the investigation to a suspect. They believed John Henry Stroman robbed the bank. But during questioning, Stroman told them the security footage instead showed his brother, Roger. How could investigators prove one brother was the robber and not the other? Agents shipped the video and pictures of both Stromans to the FBI Laboratory in July 2005. The package went to Richard Vorder Bruegge, one of the bureau’s image examiners. In his report, Vorder Bruegge wrote that John Henry Stroman and the robber had similar “overall shape of the face, nose, mouth, chin, and ears.” But Vorder Bruegge stopped short of declaring a match, saying the video and pictures were too low resolution for that. Nevertheless, prosecutors said in court filings that if Vorder Bruegge took the stand, he would testify that “the photograph is of sufficient resolution to definitively state that the robber is John Henry Stroman.” The judge said the testimony would be admitted if the case went to trial. A week later, Stroman accepted a plea deal. It wasn’t the first time, nor the last, Vorder Bruegge’s lab results said one thing and the courts were told something different. Court records and FBI Lab files show statements by prosecutors or Vorder Bruegge veered from his original conclusions in at least three cases. Vorder Bruegge, who earned a doctorate in geology 28 years ago, came to the FBI after abandoning his hopes of becoming an astronaut. He had no crime laboratory experience, but he quickly became a force in the forensic sciences. Now 55, he is the most prominent member of the Forensic Audio, Video and Image Analysis Unit at the FBI Lab in Quantico, Virginia. The unit’s comparisons can advance investigations by sharpening pictures and narrowing the list of suspects. But most of the image examiners’ lab work has no scientific basis proving their methods are reliable and findings are correct. A ProPublica investigation, published in January, found that image examiners’ methods have never had a strong scientific foundation. The bureau’s use of the unit’s findings as trial evidence troubles many experts and raises anew questions about the role of the FBI Lab as a standard-setter in forensic science. Such shortcomings could have led judges to block image analysis from criminal trials. But Vorder Bruegge single-handedly built a body of case law that has kept the FBI unit’s testimony admissible in the courts. His 22-year-old comparison of bluejeans is the legal foundation for most photo comparison methods. The FBI Lab’s image unit had routinely used unproven techniques since the 1960s, but Vorder Bruegge embraced and expanded them, according to court records and his published articles. At times, he has given jurors baseless statistics to say the risk of error was almost zero. Studies on several methods in the past decade have found them unreliable.

Today, Vorder Bruegge is one of the nation’s most influential crime lab scientists. He serves on the Forensic Science Standards Board, which sets rules for every field, from DNA to fingerprints. He’s a co-chair organizing the American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting this week in Baltimore, a gathering of thousands of crime lab professionals, researchers, lawyers and judges. Vorder Bruegge has testified for the federal government so often, and so successfully, that a 2013 law review article referred to him as “perhaps the most ubiquitous of the United States expert witnesses.” ProPublica requested an interview with Vorder Bruegge and sent him written questions. The FBI declined the requests and did not respond to the questions. Vorder Bruegge has produced an extensive public record detailing and defending his practices during his 24-year career at the FBI. Image analysis typically involves scrutinizing pictures from crime scenes to determine if suspects’ faces, hands, clothes or cars match, according to court documents and published articles. Examiners base their identifications on the pattern they see along a shirt seam, the shape of an ear or a cluster of freckles. At a conference in Seattle last year, Vorder Bruegge recounted the most common criticism he hears from defense attorneys: he’s just looking at pictures, no different than anyone else with eyesight. Vorder Bruegge has a ready response. “Yes, I’m just looking at this pair of images,” Vorder Bruegge said, “the same way a radiologist looks at an X-ray. Anyone in this room can look at an X-ray, just look at it. But who do you want deciding what type of treatment you are going to get as a result of examination of that radiograph? Do you want anyone in this room to determine if you have cancer, or if you just have an artifact in your image?” Radiologists and FBI image examiners both work with pictures. The similarities end there. Radiology is exhaustively researched and its methods continually tested to make certain they are reliable. Radiologists must graduate from medical school and complete four-year residency programs before they diagnose patients. Image examiners rarely have advanced degrees. New examiners learn how to analyze pictures by doing casework with lab veterans. Their methods remain unproven, at best. Vorder Bruegge, however, has not only a doctorate in geology but an ease with the language and standards of science. At public events, he sounds like a progressive voice urging crime labs to improve, said Hal Stern, a University of California, Irvine, statistics professor who researches forensic science methods. Despite that public image, Vorder Bruegge has used unproven science throughout his career. “It’s a little disturbing, to be sure,” Stern said. From the Cosmos to Forensics: Vorder Bruegge moved to Providence, Rhode Island, in the fall of 1981 for his freshman year at Brown University, a couple of hours from his family’s home in Connecticut. He majored in electrical engineering and spent summers working for a data processing company. His focus turned sharply during a planetary science course on the solar system, taught by geology professor James Head III. Over the years, Head’s lectures have inspired many Brown undergraduates to study space, “including Rich,” said Scott Murchie, who met Vorder Bruegge while both were graduate students. Vorder Bruegge completed his bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1985, then secured a place on Head’s research team. He would study Venus’ mountain belts while earning a master’s degree and doctorate in planetary geology. He met his future wife, a fellow Venus researcher, and aspired to join the NASA space program. Duane Bindschadler worked alongside Vorder Bruegge examining Soviet radar images of Venus’ surface. Vorder Bruegge was innovative  from the start, Bindschadler said, “trying to come up with new interpretations or extract new information from them.” The research required complex image analysis, said Murchie, now a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Vorder Bruegge was one of several impressive students working with Head in the late 1980s. (Ellen Stofan, director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, was another.) “I have nothing but wonderful things to say about Rich,” Murchie said. “He was a young researcher with a great deal of integrity.” Vorder Bruegge finished writing his doctoral thesis in October 1990 and went to work that same month for a NASA contractor in Washington. He was providing technical support for space missions, but he intended to make it a stepping stone. “The person whose job I took left to become an astronaut and that was actually something I was trying to do, so I thought it would be a good career move,” Vorder Bruegge said during a 2008 court hearing in which he was asked about his credentials and training. NASA chose new astronaut classes in 1992 and 1994; Vorder Bruegge didn’t make it to the interview stage of the intensely competitive process either time. In January 1995, he again veered onto an entirely different course, taking a position at the FBI Lab on what was then called the Special Photographic Unit. He’d examine security video rather than spacecraft images. Vorder Bruegge’s move to the FBI surprised some of his colleagues, said Bindschadler, now a systems engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Scientists with kind of an academic bent, that isn’t the first place you think that people are going,” he said. “Especially if they’re in the physical sciences. I doubt the FBI employs more than one geologist.” Vorder Bruegge’s resume shows that, even with his Ivy League degrees and image analysis experience, he started with a two-year apprenticeship under the unit’s veterans, same as any other photo examiner. But he proved his value shortly thereafter. The U.S. Supreme Court had recently raised the standard for scientific evidence to require proof that methods are reliable. No one had tested any of the FBI Lab’s long-standing photo comparison techniques, let alone proven them trustworthy. Defense lawyers might be able to block image examiners’ testimony from trials outright. The high court’s opinion lists several ways a method can meet the new requirement, including “peer review” — scrutiny by outside experts — and publication in a scientific journal. In a 1996 bombing and bank robbery case in Washington state, Vorder Bruegge identified bluejeans in surveillance footage as the pair seized from a suspect. He used one of the unit’s established techniques: matching the series of light and dark spots along the seams. Vorder Bruegge’s testimony helped convict defendants in the bombings. Then he used the case to secure something vital for his team: publication in a scientific journal. The new image examiner wrote an article describing the unit’s method of comparing bluejeans’ seams in pictures and submitted it to the Journal of Forensic Sciences. In the article, Vorder Bruegge used technical terms — “ridge-and-valley pattern” and “planar surface” — that echoed his doctoral thesis about mountains on Venus. He included pictures showing his results, zoomed-in images of bluejeans with arrows pointing where the seams and hemlines allegedly matched. The journal accepted Vorder Bruegge’s article and published it in spring 1999. The article repeatedly acknowledged that the technique had not been validated. Nonetheless, court records show Vorder Bruegge referenced the article in at least a dozen trials and hearings as proof that the image unit’s methods were reliable evidence. At ProPublica’s request, several forensic scientists, statisticians and clothes manufacturing experts reviewed Vorder Bruegge’s article. They said the FBI examiner’s central claims were misleading or wrong. Building a Legal Foundation; But in the years after the article on bluejeans identification was published, Vorder Bruegge won acclaim for his work. Newspapers ran short articles characterizing the method as a forensic science breakthrough. In interviews, Vorder Bruegge gave credit to his predecessors at the FBI . “I’m really standing on their shoulders,” he told the Chicago Tribune in June 1999, adding, “It’s exciting to find ways to show that everything around us is unique.” The television documentary series “Forensic Files” aired an episode about the Washington state case a couple of years later. It featured Vorder Bruegge extensively, even showing him outfitted in a full-length lab coat to take pictures of bluejeans. Over the following decade, Vorder Bruegge went on a legal winning streak. He convinced judges across the country that unproven methods were sound science. ProPublica searched court databases and found more than a dozen criminal cases involving Vorder Bruegge’s lab work since 2000. In those cases, judges overruled each request from defense lawyers to block his testimony. The FBI did not respond to questions about Vorder Bruegge’s casework. Courts have historically permitted evidence from the FBI Lab, sometimes without considering its accuracy. “Jurors think that if you’re a big FBI examiner you know it all,” said Alicia Carriquiry, an Iowa State University statistics professor and director of the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence. Vorder Bruegge’s statements contradicted his written lab results in at least three cases, court and FBI Lab records show. His testimony in several other trials indicate he improvised techniques. In a 2002 trial highlighted in ProPublica’s investigation of image analysis, Vorder Bruegge testified that he had identified a defendant’s plaid shirt as the shirt a robber wore to seven banks during a spree in South Florida. He told jurors only 1 in 650 billion plaid shirts would randomly match as precisely as the defendant’s shirt. None of Vorder Bruegge’s lab reports included calculations to support the statistics he gave in court. In fact, the reports said nothing about how he reached his conclusions. And for one of the robberies, Vorder Bruegge wrote he could not conclusively match the defendant’s shirt to the robber’s. He said the opposite on the stand, according to trial transcripts. At the time, Vorder Bruegge led a group that wrote most of the guidelines for law enforcement image analysis. It compiled a list of criminal cases in which judges ruled that examiners’ testimony was scientific evidence. Those provided the field with a kind of legal foundation, giving judges a clearer path to admitting photo comparison evidence. The plaid shirt case, U.S. v. McKreith, was the first to win clearance for image analysis. Vorder Bruegge’s facial comparisons in the South Carolina bank robbery case, U.S. v. Stroman, is another. In child pornography cases, prosecutors must often provide evidence that video and pictures show actual children. Such “authentication” has become part of FBI image unit’s regular caseload. During a 2008 federal court hearing in Boston, the transcript shows Vorder Bruegge estimated a victim’s age in a picture based solely on the size of her breasts and pubic hair. The image analysis group lists that case, U.S. v. Frabizio, as another piece of the field’s legal foundation. In his presentations and articles,Vorder Bruegge hasn’t mentioned perhaps the most remarkable legal victory of his career. To bolster a conviction that was being challenged, Vorder Bruegge took the stand in 2010 to assail his field’s most common method and dispute his own lab results. A jury had convicted 19-year-old Brian Avery in 1995 of participating in two armed robberies at Milwaukee convenience stores. Prosecutors built their case on witness identification and Avery’s confession during police interrogation, court records show. (Avery recanted his confession and declared his innocence thereafter.) The trial judge sentenced him to more than 20 years in prison.

Lawyers at the Wisconsin Innocence Project took up Avery’s case in 2007. They hired a video analyst to measure the robber’s height in surveillance footage. The images had been too fuzzy to use at trial. But in intervening years, software engineers had developed programs to filter and sharpen pictures and others to measure the distance between pixels. FBI examiners have calculated criminals’ heights in pictures for decades using a collection of techniques called “photogrammetry.” Computers increasingly allowed the bureau and others to analyze low-quality images. Avery stood 6 feet, 3 inches tall when police booked him into jail. The innocence project’s video expert, unaware of Avery’s actual height, determined the robber was under 6 feet tall, according to court records. The defense lawyers filed a motion for a new trial. Local prosecutors asked the FBI Lab to see if its own analysis could include Avery. Vorder Bruegge determined the robber could not have been taller than 6 feet, 2 inches, court records show. Therefore, the Lab’s own results also found Avery was at least an inch taller than the robber, which the defense team argued exonerated him. However, Vorder Bruegge’s testimony at an appellate hearing did otherwise. He said the photogrammetry method is too imprecise to reliably rule out a suspect. “I am saying you can’t determine absolutely that it can’t be this person,” he said of Avery. “That is the bottom line of my examination.” The bureau’s examiners have presented height measurements in court in scores of criminal cases. Under cross examination, Vorder Bruegge acknowledged he knew Avery’s height before starting his analysis. That height — 6 feet, 3 inches — was what prosecutors hoped Vorder Bruegge would calculate for the robber. Such information can influence how an examiner performs lab work and reaches conclusions. More than a dozen scientists and law professors filed a brief with the Wisconsin Supreme Court urging the judges to disregard the FBI examiner’s testimony as severely biased by trial records, especially details on Avery’s height. The state Supreme Court did not disregard Vorder Bruegge’s testimony. Rather, the judges accepted his argument that height measurements aren’t scientifically reliable enough and denied Avery a new trial."

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.propublica.org/article/fbi-scientists-statements-linked-defendants-to-crimes-even-when-his-lab-results-didnt

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. 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. 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. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html 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.

Steven O'Leary: Sheriff's Office Deputy; Martin County; Florida: White Elephant Case: He has been fired for faking drug field tests, WPBF (reporter Kyle Swenson) reports..."O’Leary — who has not publicly commented on the cases — started working for the Martin County Sheriff’s Office in February 2018. A former pastor, he spent time at two other Florida law enforcement agencies before starting with Martin County, WPTV reported. He had a clean record at both departments, according to the station. According to a news conference Snyder gave earlier this month, O’Leary’s questionable arrests came to the attention of authorities after an assistant state attorney contacted the office Jan. 9. The prosecutor informed the sheriff’s office that there were problems with three arrests the deputy had recently made. Although O’Leary had claimed in his report that substances found on the suspects field-tested positive for drugs, “the evidence collected did not test positive for narcotics after examination at the regional crime lab,” Snyder explained. In one instance, the substance O’Leary documented as an illegal drug was simply a headache powder, Snyder said. Another substance submitted by the deputy was just sand. On the basis of the original three cases, investigators began going through the dozens of drug arrests O’Leary made in close to a year on the job. According to Snyder, 120 substances identified as illegal by O’Leary have been resubmitted to the regional crime lab for follow-up testing. So far, the agency has dismissed 11 cases based on the bad evidence — including Crull’s heroin trafficking case."

In the years since I started publishing this Blog I have become increasingly disturbed by the 'white elephant' in the room: Sheer, unadulterated, willful   misconduct in the criminal justice system - much  of it involving forensic evidence - committed by lab technicians,  pathologists, police officers, prosecutors and others.  Think Annie Dookhan; Think Sonia Farak; Think David Kofoed; Think Charles Smith; Think Ken Anderson; Think Gene Morrison.  I have therefore decided to run this image of a white elephant at the top of every applicable post henceforth, to draw our reader's attention to   what I see as a major problem in all too many criminal justice system's - my own included.  Harold Levy; Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
"Reformers have for years recommended that all forensic labs be independent from law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies' and this is a key reform promoted by The Justice Project (2008). But fixing these problems is only half the answer' because half of the wrongful convictions attributed to misleading forensic evidence involved deliberate forensic fraud' evidence tampering' and/or perjury.
From "The Elephant in the Crime Lab," by co-authored by Sheila Berry and Larry Ytuarte; Forensic Examiner; Spring, 2009; http://www.t-mlaw.com/blog/post/the-elephant-in-the-crime-lab/

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY; 'But while Crull was locked away, a scandal was unfolding within the local sheriff’s office. Earlier this month, Martin County Sheriff William Snyder announced the agency had discovered O’Leary had made arrests based on substances he claimed field-tested positive as drugs. But later tests showed those substances actually were not illegal. The deputy was fired from the department on Jan. 15. On Monday, the agency announced 11 people have been released from jail — including Crull. According to Snyder, detectives are now combing through the 80 drug arrests O’Leary made in his 11 months with the sheriff’s office. “I’m as bewildered as you are,” Snyder told a reporter Monday, according to Treasure Coast Newspapers. “We’re trying to undo whatever harm has been done.” Law enforcement officers mistake benign substances for drugs at a fairly regular rate. In the past two years, faulty field tests have identified everything from cat litter to candy floss to Krispy Kreme doughnut crumbs as illicit substances. As The Washington Post’s Radley Balko wrote in a March 2018 column, studies have shown field tests may produce false positives anywhere from 1-in-5 to 1-in-3 times they are used. But in the recent Martin County case, the deputy apparently purposely submitted false test results as part of his arrest reports. Now, those arrests, including cases that may have been for actual illegal substances, have all been tainted.'

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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The van and the driver — a young man with flowing blond, surfer-dude locks — apparently aroused suspicion. Soon, Martin County Sheriff’s Office deputy Steven O’Leary approached Crull’s window. During a search of the car, O’Leary pulled a plastic bag cinched shut with a hair tie from the driver’s side door compartment. Inside was a white powder — Tide laundry detergent. But Crull’s world flipped upside down when the deputy announced a field test had determined the substance was actually heroin — 92 grams worth. “I really freaked out,” Crull told WPBF. “I started panicking and didn’t really know what to think.” Crull landed in jail.

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STORY: "Martin County Sheriff's Office deputy Steven O'Leary fired for faking drug field tests," by reporter Kyle Swenson, published by The Washington Post on January 20, 2019.

SUB-HEADING:  "He was jailed for 41 days for having heroin. It was only detergent — and part of a wider scandal."

PHOTO CAPTION: "Matt Crull was sleeping in his van when a Florida deputy approached, leading to a purported drug bust.  

GIST: "Matthew Crull had just bought the van a few weeks before, a hulking gray Chevrolet Astro that set him back $1,400. On the night of Dec. 5, 2018, the 28-year-old swung the van into a KFC parking lot located amid the busy sprawl of strip malls and chain restaurants in Jensen Beach, Fla. He parked. As Crull told WPTV on Monday, he took a slug of an open Budweiser sitting in the cup holder before falling asleep. The van and the driver — a young man with flowing blond, surfer-dude locks — apparently aroused suspicion. Soon, Martin County Sheriff’s Office deputy Steven O’Leary approached Crull’s window. During a search of the car, O’Leary pulled a plastic bag cinched shut with a hair tie from the driver’s side door compartment. Inside was a white powder — Tide laundry detergent. But Crull’s world flipped upside down when the deputy announced a field test had determined the substance was actually heroin — 92 grams worth. “I really freaked out,” Crull told WPBF. “I started panicking and didn’t really know what to think.” Crull landed in jail. Because of the amount of heroin he was allegedly caught with, his bond was set at $500,000. He sat in a cell for 41 days, missing Christmas and New Year’s with his family while a weighty felony charge with a possible 25-year sentence hung over his head. But while Crull was locked away, a scandal was unfolding within the local sheriff’s office. Earlier this month, Martin County Sheriff William Snyder announced the agency had discovered O’Leary had made arrests based on substances he claimed field-tested positive as drugs. But later tests showed those substances actually were not illegal. The deputy was fired from the department on Jan. 15. On Monday, the agency announced 11 people have been released from jail — including Crull. According to Snyder, detectives are now combing through the 80 drug arrests O’Leary made in his 11 months with the sheriff’s office. “I’m as bewildered as you are,” Snyder told a reporter Monday, according to Treasure Coast Newspapers. “We’re trying to undo whatever harm has been done.” Law enforcement officers mistake benign substances for drugs at a fairly regular rate. In the past two years, faulty field tests have identified everything from cat litter to candy floss to Krispy Kreme doughnut crumbs as illicit substances. As The Washington Post’s Radley Balko wrote in a March 2018 column, studies have shown field tests may produce false positives anywhere from 1-in-5 to 1-in-3 times they are used. But in the recent Martin County case, the deputy apparently purposely submitted false test results as part of his arrest reports. Now, those arrests, including cases that may have been for actual illegal substances, have all been tainted. O’Leary — who has not publicly commented on the cases — started working for the Martin County Sheriff’s Office in February 2018. A former pastor, he spent time at two other Florida law enforcement agencies before starting with Martin County, WPTV reported. He had a clean record at both departments, according to the station. According to a news conference Snyder gave earlier this month, O’Leary’s questionable arrests came to the attention of authorities after an assistant state attorney contacted the office Jan. 9. The prosecutor informed the sheriff’s office that there were problems with three arrests the deputy had recently made. Although O’Leary had claimed in his report that substances found on the suspects field-tested positive for drugs, “the evidence collected did not test positive for narcotics after examination at the regional crime lab,” Snyder explained. In one instance, the substance O’Leary documented as an illegal drug was simply a headache powder, Snyder said. Another substance submitted by the deputy was just sand. On the basis of the original three cases, investigators began going through the dozens of drug arrests O’Leary made in close to a year on the job. According to Snyder, 120 substances identified as illegal by O’Leary have been resubmitted to the regional crime lab for follow-up testing. So far, the agency has dismissed 11 cases based on the bad evidence — including Crull’s heroin trafficking case. He was released Jan. 14.

Martin County Sheriff Lt. Mike Dougherty told reporters that even though some of those defendants were found in possession of actual narcotics, O’Leary’s alleged pattern of behavior has made those prosecutions untenable. “Some of them didn’t have as many drugs as what was said, but a lot of them did have drugs on them, and those charges were dismissed because we couldn’t find anything credible with anything [O’Leary] did, so we have to dismiss them,” Dougherty said, Treasure Coast Newspapers reported. Snyder told reporters it did not appear O’Leary planted substances on suspects. The shadow of impropriety will probably undermine all his arrests, however. “There’s ample reasonable doubt that all of his cases are probably destined for the ash heap,” the sheriff explained. The sheriff’s office is offering to help the 11 falsely charged individuals expunge their records, as well as pay for any court costs, according to Treasure Coast Newspapers. Snyder also said O’Leary could face criminal charges in the future. Crull says he’s hoping the ex-deputy faces legal consequences. As he explained to CBS 12, when he was arrested, O’Leary showed him only a cellphone picture of the positive field test for his bag of Tide detergent. Crull admitted he had had past run-ins with law enforcement, including disorderly conduct and possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, according to court records. But he had never faced the kind of criminal charge O’Leary allegedly attempted to pin on him. “In the past, when I have gone to jail, it’s been something where I knew I wasn’t going to be there forever,” he told WPTV. “It’s a lot different than going to jail and the charge of trafficking of heroin carries a penalty of 25 years in prison.” 

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/01/30/he-was-jailed-days-having-heroin-it-was-only-detergent-part-wider-scandal/

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. 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. 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. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html 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;

Motherisk: Dr. Gideon Koren: (Hospital for Sick Children); Toronto Star reports (Legal Affairs Reporter Jacques Gallant) that the former head of The Hospital for Sick Children's defunct Motherisk lab has given up gives up his medical licence amid a professional regulator's investigation..."Dr. Gideon Koren has agreed to never practise medicine again in Ontario in the face of an investigation by the province’s medical regulator into whether he committed “professional misconduct or was "incompetent” while he was in charge of the Hospital for Sick Children’s Motherisk laboratory."

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I have included with this post a previous post  April 30, 2017_ in which I opined that Gideon Koren wasn't the only prestigious staff member who the Hospital for Sick Children failed to curb before serious harm was done, and asked "How about Charles Smith?".."There is much in common between Gideon Koren and Charles Smith," I pointed out. "Both brought fame, prestige and money, to the world-famous hospital; Both were treated with silk gloves in spite of the disturbing allegations against them which called for a strong measure of protection of the public. Both were permitted by SickKids to carry on their work - Koren, in spite of the Discipline Panel's statement that there were grounds for dismissal, Smith in spite of the fact that his colleagues at the hospital believed that children of trusting parents were at risk. Both Koren and Smith have left legacies of destroyed lives and families; Some of the Smith cases have yet to be sorted out in the Ontario Court of Appeal, and the aftermath of Motherisk, as innocent parents ae forced to fight in the courts to get their children back, could go on for years."  Read the entire editorial at the link below: 

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PASSAGE ONE  OF THE DAY: An independent review sparked by a Star investigation into Motherisk concluded in 2015 that the lab’s drug and alcohol hair tests, used in thousands of child protection cases and several criminal cases, were “inadequate and unreliable.” The Star’s investigation revealed that prior to 2010, Motherisk’s testing process was using a methodology that experts described as falling short of the “gold-standard test.” “In the circumstances, I have concluded that the laboratory’s flawed hair-testing evidence had serious implications for the fairness of child protection and criminal cases,” said independent reviewer Susan Lang, a retired Court of Appeal judge, in 2015."

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY:   "This was not Koren’s first time in the college’s crosshairs. He was suspended for five months, two of which without pay, for professional misconduct in 2003 for writing so-called anonymous “poison pen letters” to Dr. Nancy Olivieri and her supporters at Sick Kids, calling them “a bunch of pigs” among other things. The pair had worked on a drug study for generic drug maker Apotex, but ended up disagreeing on the drug’s effectiveness, with Olivieri wanting to go public with her concerns about potentially harmful side-effects. Apotex terminated her clinical trials, but she published her findings anyway in the New England Journal of Medicine. “It defies belief that an individual of Dr. Koren’s professed character and integrity could author such vicious diatribes against his colleagues as he did in the ‘poison pen letters,’” reads the 2003 decision. “His actions were childish, vindictive and dishonest.” A separate Star investigation published last year also identified what appear to be problems in more than 400 of Koren’s papers. That prompted Sick Kids to announce in December a review of his vast body of published work. The Star’s investigation found these papers had been inadequately peer-reviewed, fail to declare, or perhaps even obscure, conflicts of interest and, in a handful of cases, contain lies about the methodology used to test hair for drugs."

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STORY: "Former head of Sick Kids’ Motherisk lab gives up medical licence amid investigation," by Legal Affairs Reporter Jacques Gallant, published by The Toronto Star on February 22, 2019.

PHOTO CAPTION: "Dr. Gideon Koren, founder and former director of Motherisk."

GIST: "Dr. Gideon Koren has agreed to never practise medicine again in Ontario in the face of an investigation by the province’s medical regulator into whether he committed “professional misconduct or was incompetent” while he was in charge of the Hospital for Sick Children’s Motherisk laboratory. The promise to relinquish his licence is laid out in what is known as an “undertaking,” posted on Koren’s profile on the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario’s website. In the document, signed by Koren this month in Tel Aviv, he also promises not to reapply for a license in this province.  An independent review sparked by a Star investigation into Motherisk concluded in 2015 that the lab’s drug and alcohol hair tests, used in thousands of child protection cases and several criminal cases, were “inadequate and unreliable.” The Star’s investigation revealed that prior to 2010, Motherisk’s testing process was using a methodology that experts described as falling short of the “gold-standard test.” “In the circumstances, I have concluded that the laboratory’s flawed hair-testing evidence had serious implications for the fairness of child protection and criminal cases,” said independent reviewer Susan Lang, a retired Court of Appeal judge, in 2015. In March 2017, the college first confirmed to the Star it was investigating Koren, who was in charge of the now-shuttered Motherisk lab until retiring in 2015. Koren has had an active license to practise medicine in Ontario since 1982. In recent years, he has been living and working in Israel. Koren and his Toronto-based lawyer did not return requests for comment Thursday. The undertaking means that the college’s investigation into Koren will cease. Had the probe continued, one potential outcome could have seen the college referring allegations of professional misconduct to its discipline committee to hold a public hearing. It’s unclear when the regulator first began its investigation into Koren. Sick Kids previously told the Star that it forwarded results of its internal investigation into Motherisk to the college in 2015. That internal probe found the laboratory was at times operating without appropriate oversight or proper quality assurance checks and had misled the hospital over its testing process — which was relied upon in many child protection cases across the country. “We deeply regret that the practices in the Motherisk drug testing laboratory didn’t meet the high standard of excellence that we have here at Sick Kids, and we extend our sincere apologies to children, families and organizations who feel that they may have been impacted in some negative way,” former Sick Kids CEO, Dr. Michael Apkon, told the Star in an interview in 2015. This was not Koren’s first time in the college’s crosshairs. He was suspended for five months, two of which without pay, for professional misconduct in 2003 for writing so-called anonymous “poison pen letters” to Dr. Nancy Olivieri and her supporters at Sick Kids, calling them “a bunch of pigs” among other things. The pair had worked on a drug study for generic drug maker Apotex, but ended up disagreeing on the drug’s effectiveness, with Olivieri wanting to go public with her concerns about potentially harmful side-effects. Apotex terminated her clinical trials, but she published her findings anyway in the New England Journal of Medicine. “It defies belief that an individual of Dr. Koren’s professed character and integrity could author such vicious diatribes against his colleagues as he did in the ‘poison pen letters,’” reads the 2003 decision. “His actions were childish, vindictive and dishonest.” A separate Star investigation published last year also identified what appear to be problems in more than 400 of Koren’s papers. That prompted Sick Kids to announce in December a review of his vast body of published work. The Star’s investigation found these papers had been inadequately peer-reviewed, fail to declare, or perhaps even obscure, conflicts of interest and, in a handful of cases, contain lies about the methodology used to test hair for drugs." (Files by Rachel Mendleson and Michele Henry.)

The entire story can be read at:
 https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/02/22/former-head-of-sick-kids-motherisk-lab-gives-up-medical-licence-amid-investigation.html
 

EDITORIAL FROM PREVIOUS POST: (April 30, 2017);  Rachel Mendleson reports in her Toronto Star story, (April 29, 2017) headed, "Years before Motherisk scandal, SickKids stood by doctor who wrote ‘poison pen letters,'  that, after finding the allegations against Dr. Gideon Koren proven,"  a discipline panel,   composed of  the former presidents of SickKids and the University of Toronto, ruled,  "Your actions constitute gross misconduct and provide sufficient grounds for dismissal.” Although the panel upbraided Koren  for "repeatedly lying” and showing a “reckless dereliction of duty,” Mendleson notes: "But, citing his research achievements and the many young doctors he supervised, who they said would be “disproportionately disadvantaged” if Koren were fired, they instead docked him two months’ pay, fined him $35,000 and continued his suspension until June 1, 2000. Koren remained head of the Motherisk Program he founded in 1985.  Charles Smith, the notorious namesake of this Blog, also faced a barrage of serious allegations before his voluntary, departure from the Hospital in July, 2005.  However, before he quietly slunk out into the night - without announcement or ceremony. the once celebrated pathologist had been the subject of a battery of complaints made by physicians at the hospital who were concerned about his diagnostic accuracy. In response to evidence called about the hospital's response to these complaints, Justice Stephen Goudge, concluded in the report of his independent Inquiry into many of  Smith's cases: "As well as timeliness, the hospital had concerns about Dr. Smith's diagnostic accuracy, Clinicians rely on pathologist's  diagnoses to make critical decisions of treatment. Diagnostic discrepancies in surgical pathology can have profound effects on patient care. As pathologist-in-chief, Dr. Becker dealt with diagnistic concerns about Dr. Smith's pathology reports on several occasions. Arround 1997, there was deonstrable convern at Sickkids about Dr. Smith's clinical skills in the reading and interpretation of microscopic slides. ........"On March 21, 1997, Dr. Paul Thorner, the associate head of pathology at SickKids, wrote a memo to Dr. Becker regarding diagnostic discrepancies in four of Dr. Smith's surgical pathology cases. The identification of four misdiagnoses within a short time frame was concerning. The first involved an error in what should have been a straightforward diagnosis. In the second case, the  proper diagnosis was one that was easy to confuse with the diagnosis made by Dr. Smith. The third case involved diagnosis of an unusual lesion that might be difficult to recognize. These three cases did not affect patient care. The fourth did. In the fourth case, Dr. Smith misdiagnosed two frozen  sections of tissue. Dr. Smith reported that  the two frozen sections were reactive, or non-malignant. Based on Dr. Smith's diagnosis, the patient was removed from the operating roo to recover.  Subsequently the tissue samples were blocked and the permanent slides were prepared. Dr. Smith correctly read the permanent section as malignant. The child had to return to the operating room for placement of a chemotherapy line. At a minimum, the child required a second surgical procedure. More seriously, the peoper treatment may have been  delayed unnecessarily. In April 1997,  Dr. Becker prepared a letter addressed to Dr. Smith about "a disproportion in the number of complaints about  diagnostic inconsistencies from pediatricians and surgeons"  regarding Dr. Smith's surgical pathology work. The letter indicated  that Dr. Becker was curtailing Dr. Smith's responsibilities in surgical pathology  until Dr. Smith completed continuing medical education courses  to improve his surgical pathology skills. The letter was unsigned and appears not to have been sent. Dr. Smith testified that no one ever advised him of significant concerns regarding his surgical pathology work or informed him that, as a result, he should cease performing surgical cases. Dr. Becker's letter also stated that, as Dr. Smith woud not be conducting surgical pathology on a regular rotation, his "salary from the Division of Patholgy will be reduced by $20,000 for 1997." However, Dr. Smith's salary was not reduced in this matter. Whether the letter was sent or not, it clearly reflects Dr. Becker's concerns with Dr. Smith's diagnostic skills.".........Also, in 1997, a SickKids oncologist complained about two surgical pathology cases in which Dr. Smith had made errors.........These cases were a small minority of all the surgical pathology work that Dr. Smith conducted during the course of his career. However, at times, his colleagues were clearly frustrated with his diagnostic mistakes. This frustration was evidenced by an email written by Dr. Thorner to Dr. Becker in May, 1997 in which he referred to two complaints  regarding Dr. Smith as "another nail for the coffin." However it must be said that the complaints regarding diagnostic issues did not rise to the level where the pathologist-in-chief formally restricted Dr. Smith's privileges."  There is much in common between Gideon Koren and Charles Smith: Both brought fame, prestige and money, to the world-famous hospital; Both were treated with silk gloves in spite of the disturbing allegations against them which called for a strong measure of protection of the public. Both were permitted  by SickKids to carry on  their work - Koren, in spite of the Discipline Panels statement that there were grounds for dismissal, Smith in spite of the fact that his colleagues at the hospital believed that children of trusting parents were at risk.  Both have left legacies of destroyed lives and families: some of the Smith cases have yet to be sorted out in the Ontario Court of Appeal, and the aftermath of Motherisk, as innocent parents fight to get their children back, could go on for years."

Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
 http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2017/04/hospital-for-sick-children-dr-gideon.html

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. 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. 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. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html 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;