But If I Did, So Did The Governor
by Bob Walsh
Yesterday the CA DOJ took an interesting step by disagreeing with the fearless leader. Assuming the DOJ has now got it right (not necessarily a safe thing to do) starting July 1 in the formerly great state of California you do NOT necessarily need a REAL ID to buy ammo. The plain old ordinary CA drivers license will do. However, the illegal alien drivers licenses will no longer do the job for the purchase of ammo.
You do need a Real ID to purchase a firearm (legally) in CA.
Also the Governor still thinks you can buy ammo legally off the internet. You can't. With luck somebody on his staff will do a fact check and let him know, but when it comes to firearms he does not seem to give a rat's ass about reality and truth.
I happened to ask about it in one of my favorite gun emporiums on Tuesday, and they told me the DOJ has a training "thing" of some sort scheduled for today on the subject of ammo sales, recording and restrictions. For instance, I asked about the alleged matching of guns owned to ammo being purchased and was told that the system could NOT do that. Probably.
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
BERNIE JUMPING INTO THE POOL WITH BOTH FEET
by Bob Walsh
Bernie Sanders has formally introduced legislation to cancel the $1.6 trillion dollars in student debt. Fauxcahontas Warren has a similar proposal, not yet formalized, that would cancel a paltry $50,000 in debt for only those who earn less than $100,000.
Warren's plan would be paid for by a "wealth tax" on persons with assets of more than $50 million. Bernie is a little fuzzy on how he plans to pay for his plan.
The Democrap pseudo-debates start this week and Santa Claus is coming to town. It will be a race, nay, a STAMPEDE, to the left to see who can promise to give away the most stuff. Be careful or you will get trampled.
Bernie Sanders has formally introduced legislation to cancel the $1.6 trillion dollars in student debt. Fauxcahontas Warren has a similar proposal, not yet formalized, that would cancel a paltry $50,000 in debt for only those who earn less than $100,000.
Warren's plan would be paid for by a "wealth tax" on persons with assets of more than $50 million. Bernie is a little fuzzy on how he plans to pay for his plan.
The Democrap pseudo-debates start this week and Santa Claus is coming to town. It will be a race, nay, a STAMPEDE, to the left to see who can promise to give away the most stuff. Be careful or you will get trampled.
HOUSTON’S BIG MOUTH CONGRESSWOMAN AUTHORED THE HOUSE BILL ON REPARATIONS
Sheila Jackson Lee says “Slavery is the original sin” and wants an “apology and compensation to begin the long-delayed process of atonement for slavery.”
From The Daily Mail
June 25, 2019
Democrats want the federal government to study the issue and possibly provide financial reparations African Americans as a means of apologizing for and attempting to offset the generational effects of slavery.
Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is spearheading a push in the House to study the issue of reparations. She says her bill would 'make recommendations concerning any form of apology and compensation to begin the long delayed process of atonement for slavery.'
She said a Capitol Hill hearing last week that African-Americans 'are the only group that can singularly claim to have been slaves under the auspices of the United States government,' and they have never received an apology.
She said the hearing that coincided with Juneteenth, the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, 'is not a symbolic action,' but about legislation that should be signed into law.
'I just simply ask: Why not and why not now?' she said to the packed hearing room, which had people lined up outside waiting to get in.
'Slavery is the original sin. Slavery has never received an apology,' she argued.
From The Daily Mail
June 25, 2019
Democrats want the federal government to study the issue and possibly provide financial reparations African Americans as a means of apologizing for and attempting to offset the generational effects of slavery.
Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is spearheading a push in the House to study the issue of reparations. She says her bill would 'make recommendations concerning any form of apology and compensation to begin the long delayed process of atonement for slavery.'
She said a Capitol Hill hearing last week that African-Americans 'are the only group that can singularly claim to have been slaves under the auspices of the United States government,' and they have never received an apology.
She said the hearing that coincided with Juneteenth, the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, 'is not a symbolic action,' but about legislation that should be signed into law.
'I just simply ask: Why not and why not now?' she said to the packed hearing room, which had people lined up outside waiting to get in.
'Slavery is the original sin. Slavery has never received an apology,' she argued.
MARILYN WILL NO LONDER BE IN HIS ARMS IN BED WITH HIM
Man Charged With Grand Theft Of Marilyn Monroe Statue
LAPPL News Watch
June 25, 2019
A Glendale man charged with grand theft and vandalism for allegedly stealing a statue of Marilyn Monroe from its perch atop the Ladies of Hollywood Gazebo on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is expected to be arraigned Tuesday.
Austin Mikel Clay, 25, the same man who used a pick ax to vandalize President Donald Trump’s Walk of Fame star, is expected to be arraigned in a downtown courtroom on one felony count each of grand theft of property valued at more than $950 and vandalism causing over $400 in damage.
Clay, who was on felony probation for damaging Trump’s star last summer, was arrested Friday afternoon. Police conducted a search of his home and found evidence that linked him to the theft of the statue, LAPD Detective Douglas Oldfield told NBC4.
LAPPL News Watch
June 25, 2019
A Glendale man charged with grand theft and vandalism for allegedly stealing a statue of Marilyn Monroe from its perch atop the Ladies of Hollywood Gazebo on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is expected to be arraigned Tuesday.
Austin Mikel Clay, 25, the same man who used a pick ax to vandalize President Donald Trump’s Walk of Fame star, is expected to be arraigned in a downtown courtroom on one felony count each of grand theft of property valued at more than $950 and vandalism causing over $400 in damage.
Clay, who was on felony probation for damaging Trump’s star last summer, was arrested Friday afternoon. Police conducted a search of his home and found evidence that linked him to the theft of the statue, LAPD Detective Douglas Oldfield told NBC4.
MORABITO WAS KNOWN AS THE COCAINE KING OF MILAN
Italian mafia boss Rocco Morabito escapes from Uruguayan prison
By Tatiana Arias and Eliza Mackintosh
CNN
June 25, 2019
An Italian mafia boss has escaped from a detention center in Uruguay, where he was awaiting extradition to Italy, the Uruguayan Ministry of Interior said in a statement.
Rocco Morabito, a notorious member of the Ndrangheta, or Calabrian Mafia, has been one of Italy's most-wanted fugitives since 1994.
Morabito was arrested in 2017 in Uruguay after more than 20 years on the run. Convicted in absentia for drug trafficking and organized-crime activities in Italy, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
The drug kingpin and three other inmates managed to break out of the National Institute of Rehabilitation (INR) in Montevideo through a hole and out onto the rooftop of the building late on Sunday night. The group robbed a nearby farmhouse before fleeing, according to the ministry.
"Among the fugitives is the Italian Rocco Morabito, who was waiting for his extradition by the Italian justice being investigated for international drug trafficking," the statement said.
Interpol has issued a red notice -- its highest-priority international arrest warrant -- for all four escapees. One of the fugitives is pending extradition to Brazil, and another to Argentina.
In a statement on Twitter, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said it was disconcerting that a criminal like Morabito had managed to escape from a prison in Uruguay while waiting to be extradited to Italy. He pledged to get to the bottom of the escape, and to "keep hunting Morabito, wherever he is, to throw him in jail as he deserves."
When Morabito was arrested in 2017, Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti said he was "considered one of the sought-after members of the Ndrangheta."
Authorities said Morabito -- one of Italy's five most-wanted fugitives -- entered Uruguay in 2001 using false Brazilian identification papers including a bogus birth certificate. He lived in a comfortable rural villa near the town of Maldonado, adjacent to the resort city of Punta del Este, for about a decade.
When he was arrested, Morabito had 13 cell phones, an automatic pistol, 12 credit and debit cards, a large quantity of Uruguayan money and $50,000 in US cash, plus currency certificates worth US $100,000, the Uruguayan Interior Ministry said.
In a search of Morabito's home, authorities seized a 2015 Mercedes and a Portuguese passport in his false Brazilian name. His wife -- an Angolan national with a Portuguese passport -- was also arrested, authorities said.
By Tatiana Arias and Eliza Mackintosh
CNN
June 25, 2019
An Italian mafia boss has escaped from a detention center in Uruguay, where he was awaiting extradition to Italy, the Uruguayan Ministry of Interior said in a statement.
Rocco Morabito, a notorious member of the Ndrangheta, or Calabrian Mafia, has been one of Italy's most-wanted fugitives since 1994.
Morabito was arrested in 2017 in Uruguay after more than 20 years on the run. Convicted in absentia for drug trafficking and organized-crime activities in Italy, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
The drug kingpin and three other inmates managed to break out of the National Institute of Rehabilitation (INR) in Montevideo through a hole and out onto the rooftop of the building late on Sunday night. The group robbed a nearby farmhouse before fleeing, according to the ministry.
"Among the fugitives is the Italian Rocco Morabito, who was waiting for his extradition by the Italian justice being investigated for international drug trafficking," the statement said.
Interpol has issued a red notice -- its highest-priority international arrest warrant -- for all four escapees. One of the fugitives is pending extradition to Brazil, and another to Argentina.
In a statement on Twitter, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said it was disconcerting that a criminal like Morabito had managed to escape from a prison in Uruguay while waiting to be extradited to Italy. He pledged to get to the bottom of the escape, and to "keep hunting Morabito, wherever he is, to throw him in jail as he deserves."
When Morabito was arrested in 2017, Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti said he was "considered one of the sought-after members of the Ndrangheta."
Authorities said Morabito -- one of Italy's five most-wanted fugitives -- entered Uruguay in 2001 using false Brazilian identification papers including a bogus birth certificate. He lived in a comfortable rural villa near the town of Maldonado, adjacent to the resort city of Punta del Este, for about a decade.
When he was arrested, Morabito had 13 cell phones, an automatic pistol, 12 credit and debit cards, a large quantity of Uruguayan money and $50,000 in US cash, plus currency certificates worth US $100,000, the Uruguayan Interior Ministry said.
In a search of Morabito's home, authorities seized a 2015 Mercedes and a Portuguese passport in his false Brazilian name. His wife -- an Angolan national with a Portuguese passport -- was also arrested, authorities said.
THE ART OF THE DEAL DOES NOT WORK WITH THE PALESTINIANS
What the Trump plan cannot accomplish
by Jonathan S. Tobin
Israel Hayom
June 25, 2019
When the Trump administration released the economic portion of its Middle East peace plan last week, the avalanche of criticism was immediate and harsh. Even though the president’s foreign policy team couched the plan as a “vision” of peace rather than an intricate blueprint, its critics weren’t wrong in pointing out that there was little in it that was new, and that its chances of success were nil.
Yet in analyzing the effort, it’s important to note that there’s a difference saying that the plan won’t succeed and saying that putting it forth was the wrong thing to do. That’s because the problem with it isn’t the content, but the context. An effort to shift the focus from a push on Israeli concessions, which are never enough to satisfy the Palestinians, to one in which Palestinian society could be transformed – economically and hopefully peaceably – was long overdue. But as long as the intended beneficiaries aren’t interested in such programs, the “ultimate deal” is simply not going to happen under any circumstances.
The sticking point is clear. Palestinian Authority leaders say they want the investment and aid, but that any discussion of economics must await a political settlement in which they will be given an independent state. Only after they achieve sovereignty, they say, will the aid be welcome or relevant.
That’s a fact that many Trump-administration critics have echoed when dismissing the plan authored by presidential adviser/son-in-law Jared Kushner and US negotiator Jason Greenblatt. They say Trump’s team is putting the cart before the horse and effectively rendering the peace process irrelevant by not focusing on the actual points of contention that separate the parties, like borders, settlements, and refugees.
As veteran State Department peace processor Aaron David Miller, who now heads the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank, put it: “The Palestinians’ economic problem isn’t a lack of money. It’s a lack of liberty.”
Even if we were to lay aside for the moment the fact that the main obstacle to Palestinian liberty is the tyrannical rule of Hamas in Gaza and that of Fatah in the West Bank rather than Israel, this argument fails to answer the key question that must be posed to critics of Trump’s plan: Why have decades of peace processes by foreign policy professionals like Miller, who knew a lot more about the conflict and diplomacy than Trump’s Middle East team, always failed?
All previous administrations have paid some lip service to economic issues, with many issuing their own plans that were not dissimilar to the one Trump just proposed. They have all taken the approach the Palestinians say they prefer: how to strong-arm Israel into agreeing to a two-state solution. Yet that strategy never succeeded, no matter how much pressure presidents like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama put on the Jewish state, and no matter how many times Israel said “yes” to two states as they did a number of times in the past 20 years.
The Palestinians had their chance to get the “liberty” they say they wanted in 2000, 2001, and 2008, when Israeli governments put a two-state solution with almost all of the West Bank and a share of Jerusalem in their hands. They also enjoyed eight years of an Obama administration that clearly saw Israeli policies as the main obstacle to peace. Still, every time they had the chance to get the state they say they want so badly, they said “no.”
At some point, the foreign-policy professionals should have figured out that the old approach was never going to work.
That is, in essence, what Kushner, Greenblatt, and company have done by attempting to restart the conversation about peace in a different way.
Instead, they think emphasizing policies that will give the Palestinians a stake in peace and promoting measures that will mandate good governance have the potential to change everything. You can call that an attempt to “bribe” the Palestinians into accepting peace with Israel, but all it really amounts to is a reminder that coexistence would create a better reality than the current one rooted in conflict.
Trump was right to try to end his predecessors’ coddling of Palestinian fantasies of defeating Israel, which is what their policies of non-recognition of Jerusalem and refusing to condition aid on ending support for terror amounted to.
The problem is that the Palestinians’ century-old war on Zionism has become inextricably linked to their national identity to the point where it is impossible for anyone inside their political structure to imagine normal life alongside a Jewish state. And even if they could make that leap of imagination, entrenched forces like Hamas and other Islamist groups, as well as the millions of descendants of the 1948 Arab refugees who continue to hold onto the false hope of erasing the last 71 years of history, won’t let them act on it.
That’s why Hamas continues to promote the “right of return” as if the eradication of the Jewish state was a viable option. And it’s why the Palestinian Authority continues to subsidize terror in the form of salaries for imprisoned terrorists, and pensions for their families and survivors, because to do otherwise would be to admit their defeat in a war that they haven’t the courage or the good sense to give up on.
If Trump’s plan is going to fail – and it will – it can be attributed to these reasons. It’s not because previous administrations understood the conflict any better, or that the focus on economics is wrongheaded. If this latest approach doesn’t work, then the blame should fall on those responsible – the Palestinians – not on the ideas behind the plan itself.
by Jonathan S. Tobin
Israel Hayom
June 25, 2019
When the Trump administration released the economic portion of its Middle East peace plan last week, the avalanche of criticism was immediate and harsh. Even though the president’s foreign policy team couched the plan as a “vision” of peace rather than an intricate blueprint, its critics weren’t wrong in pointing out that there was little in it that was new, and that its chances of success were nil.
Yet in analyzing the effort, it’s important to note that there’s a difference saying that the plan won’t succeed and saying that putting it forth was the wrong thing to do. That’s because the problem with it isn’t the content, but the context. An effort to shift the focus from a push on Israeli concessions, which are never enough to satisfy the Palestinians, to one in which Palestinian society could be transformed – economically and hopefully peaceably – was long overdue. But as long as the intended beneficiaries aren’t interested in such programs, the “ultimate deal” is simply not going to happen under any circumstances.
The sticking point is clear. Palestinian Authority leaders say they want the investment and aid, but that any discussion of economics must await a political settlement in which they will be given an independent state. Only after they achieve sovereignty, they say, will the aid be welcome or relevant.
That’s a fact that many Trump-administration critics have echoed when dismissing the plan authored by presidential adviser/son-in-law Jared Kushner and US negotiator Jason Greenblatt. They say Trump’s team is putting the cart before the horse and effectively rendering the peace process irrelevant by not focusing on the actual points of contention that separate the parties, like borders, settlements, and refugees.
As veteran State Department peace processor Aaron David Miller, who now heads the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank, put it: “The Palestinians’ economic problem isn’t a lack of money. It’s a lack of liberty.”
Even if we were to lay aside for the moment the fact that the main obstacle to Palestinian liberty is the tyrannical rule of Hamas in Gaza and that of Fatah in the West Bank rather than Israel, this argument fails to answer the key question that must be posed to critics of Trump’s plan: Why have decades of peace processes by foreign policy professionals like Miller, who knew a lot more about the conflict and diplomacy than Trump’s Middle East team, always failed?
All previous administrations have paid some lip service to economic issues, with many issuing their own plans that were not dissimilar to the one Trump just proposed. They have all taken the approach the Palestinians say they prefer: how to strong-arm Israel into agreeing to a two-state solution. Yet that strategy never succeeded, no matter how much pressure presidents like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama put on the Jewish state, and no matter how many times Israel said “yes” to two states as they did a number of times in the past 20 years.
The Palestinians had their chance to get the “liberty” they say they wanted in 2000, 2001, and 2008, when Israeli governments put a two-state solution with almost all of the West Bank and a share of Jerusalem in their hands. They also enjoyed eight years of an Obama administration that clearly saw Israeli policies as the main obstacle to peace. Still, every time they had the chance to get the state they say they want so badly, they said “no.”
At some point, the foreign-policy professionals should have figured out that the old approach was never going to work.
That is, in essence, what Kushner, Greenblatt, and company have done by attempting to restart the conversation about peace in a different way.
Instead, they think emphasizing policies that will give the Palestinians a stake in peace and promoting measures that will mandate good governance have the potential to change everything. You can call that an attempt to “bribe” the Palestinians into accepting peace with Israel, but all it really amounts to is a reminder that coexistence would create a better reality than the current one rooted in conflict.
Trump was right to try to end his predecessors’ coddling of Palestinian fantasies of defeating Israel, which is what their policies of non-recognition of Jerusalem and refusing to condition aid on ending support for terror amounted to.
The problem is that the Palestinians’ century-old war on Zionism has become inextricably linked to their national identity to the point where it is impossible for anyone inside their political structure to imagine normal life alongside a Jewish state. And even if they could make that leap of imagination, entrenched forces like Hamas and other Islamist groups, as well as the millions of descendants of the 1948 Arab refugees who continue to hold onto the false hope of erasing the last 71 years of history, won’t let them act on it.
That’s why Hamas continues to promote the “right of return” as if the eradication of the Jewish state was a viable option. And it’s why the Palestinian Authority continues to subsidize terror in the form of salaries for imprisoned terrorists, and pensions for their families and survivors, because to do otherwise would be to admit their defeat in a war that they haven’t the courage or the good sense to give up on.
If Trump’s plan is going to fail – and it will – it can be attributed to these reasons. It’s not because previous administrations understood the conflict any better, or that the focus on economics is wrongheaded. If this latest approach doesn’t work, then the blame should fall on those responsible – the Palestinians – not on the ideas behind the plan itself.
HOW MANY MURDER CASES DID CELEB FORENSIC SCIENTIST HENRY LEE BOTCH?
Henry Lee testified in some of America’s biggest murder cases, from O.J. Simpson to JonBenet. But he’s been accused of botching evidence in multiple trials
By Natalie O’Neill
Daily Beast
June 24, 2019
Before he became a true-crime celebrity, forensic scientist Henry Lee took the stand at a wildly bloody murder trial in Connecticut. It was spring of 1989 and the then-50-year-old Chinese-American hadn’t yet worked on his splashiest cases, from O.J. Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey to Scott Peterson.
In the Connecticut trial, Lee faced a difficult task. As the star witness paid by the state, he was asked to back up the prosecution’s story that two homeless teenagers had butchered 65-year-old father Everett Carr—slitting his throat and stabbing him 27 times at his daughter’s home—without getting any blood on themselves, or leaving behind a shred of physical evidence.
Lee wore a crisp suit as he took a seat next to the judge. When questioned, he testified that a reddish-brown stain found on a towel in the bathroom was “identified to be blood.” Despite the violent and messy nature of the attack—which left walls and floors in the home soaked in blood—he said it was possible that the killers had fled without a drop of blood on their clothing.
His testimony bolstered the state’s claim that 17-year-old Shawn Henning and 18-year-old Ricky Birch had used the towel to clean themselves up after a “burglary gone bad.” It played a huge role in convicting the friends, who were sentenced to decades behind bars.
The problem is, it wasn’t true. There was in fact no blood on the towel, and it had never actually been lab-tested, the Connecticut Supreme Court recently concluded. The ruling could lead to the exoneration of both men, who are in their fifties. The case features bombshell new DNA evidence—possibly pointing to a female killer—and witnesses who have since recanted, including a jailhouse snitch and a friend of Henning’s who testified he’d confessed to being at the home.
Last week, the court tossed out the convictions for both men and granted them new trials after 30 years, citing Lee’s incorrect testimony and blaming prosecutors for failing to correct it.
Reached by phone, Dennis Santore, the now-retired DA who put away Henning and Birch, recently admitted “It was a fishy case.”
He said, “It was tough putting it together because it was circumstantial. But we did the best we could with what we had... We didn’t do much testing back then.” Asked if he stands by the evidence, he said, “I would have to, if I put it on [trial].”
A few days after Henning and Birch were granted new trials, Lee held a press conference insisting he made no errors. “In my 57-year career, I have investigated over 8,000 cases and never, ever was accused of any wrongdoing or for testifying intentionally wrong,” said Lee told a throng of reporters. “This is the first case that I have to defend myself.”
But Lee’s history of problems with evidence—intentional or not—doesn’t begin and end with Henning and Birch. The 81-year-old world-renowned forensic scientist—who has appeared on dozens of crime TV shows and documentaries—has allegedly hidden evidence or given incorrect testimony in at least three other cases, potentially sending the wrong men to prison and allowing guilty ones to walk free, according to court documents and other legal sources.
The cases include:
* The Murder of L.A. Actress Lana Clarkson. Lee hid or destroyed a white object—likely an acrylic fingernail—found at the scene of Clarkson’s death by gunshot, a judge ruled in 2007. Lee had been hired by the legal defense of iconic record producer Phil Spector, who was charged with, and eventually convicted of, Clarkson’s second-degree murder. Sara Caplan, then a defense attorney working with Lee, admitted to the judge that she saw Lee take the evidence, which he then failed to hand over to prosecution, according to the ruling.
* The Murder of Young Mother Janet Myers. In 1990, Lee testified that 33-year-old Kerry Myers’ pants were spotted with his dead wife’s blood type, backing up the prosecution’s claim that he and a friend beat her to death with a bat. Both men were convicted. But Lee’s testimony was later called into question by a detective who handled the case and insists Janet’s blood type was never found on Myers’ pants.
* The Disappearance and Murder of Teenager Joyce Stochmal. In 1988, after Connecticut teen Joyce Stochmal went missing and turned up dead, Lee testified that a brown crusty substance, found on a knife belonging to 29-year-old suspect David Weinberg, was blood. Lee said there was no way to know if the blood belonged to a human, but Weinberg was still convicted. Yet lab tests had in fact been done by the time of the trial—and they revealed it was definitively not human blood, according to a petition for a new trial filed on behalf of Weinberg in 2017. His lawyer, Darcy McGraw, claims Lee “knew or should have known” it wasn’t human blood.
Lee has a defense for each alleged screw-up. In the Stochmal case, he insists the “lawyers don’t understand the science”—and that a “chemical presumptive test” taken at the crime scene “tested positive” for blood. In the Carr case, he claims he never testified that the substance on the towel conclusively was blood, only that the same type of field test showed it was “was consistent with blood.” (Testimony from back then, however, shows he went a step further, saying the “smear was identified to be blood,” according to The Washington Post.) In the Janet Myers case, he contends the police officer is mistaken about the blood type found on Kerry Myers’ pants. And in the Clarkson case, he insists he offered the possible fingernail to the prosecution and “they didn’t want it.”
In the years since these cases, Lee has become a rock star in the world of true crime. He’s appeared on the hit Netflix documentary The Staircase and dozens of Investigation Discovery-style programs, and he also scored his own show, Trace Evidence: The Case Files of Dr. Henry Lee. He’s won prestigious awards, including the Medal of Justice and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Science and Engineer Association. And he founded the Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science—where his methods are being taught to future generations of criminalists.
But critics, including a former colleague and legal opponents, say he may simply care more about scoring legal victories than the truth. “His attitude is extremely dangerous in the criminal-justice system,” said McGraw, who is also the executive director of the Connecticut Innocence Project. “His testimony has led to some very unfair and unjust results. These are horrible cases—and there are big reasons to believe some of the men involved are innocent.”
Former O.J. Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden now says Lee “stretched” the truth when he testified on behalf of the former football Hall-of-Famer’s defense team in 1995. Back then, Lee told jurors “something [was] wrong” with a blood sample placed into evidence, boosting the defense’s claim that cops had tampered with it. “I didn’t think it was true then—and I don’t think it’s true today,” Darden said of Lee’s testimony. “It was bullshit, not science.”
Kerry Myers, whom Lee helped send to prison for decades, is still seething. “Henry Lee is caught up in his own ego and loves being a forensic expert to the stars. I don’t think he cares about people—they’re objects he can use to promote himself,” said Myers, 62, who was set free two years ago. “It’s frustrating that he’s still doing it, and nobody is questioning him.”
In May 2013, Lee gave an auditorium packed with graduating students a piece of advice. “You must have a winner’s attitude,” he said at Manchester Community College in Connecticut. “The loser always says, ‘There is no way.’ The winner always finds a way.”
Lee likes to stress the importance of winning in his speeches and writings. As the 11th of 13 children, raised without a father by an immigrant mother, success and ambition set him apart from the pack.
Born in Kiangsu province, China in November 1938, Lee fled with his family to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s. His father, traveling to the island separately, died when his ship sank in January 1949. Lee was 10 years old.
As a young man, Lee was hired by the Taipei Police Department, where he worked his way up to the rank of captain. In 1965, he moved to the U.S. with just $65, and graduated from John Jay College with a degree in forensic science seven years later. He went on to get his doctorate at New York University.
After graduation, he volunteered his then-newfangled crime-lab skills to Connecticut prosecutors, but nobody would take him up on it. Instead, a public defender, Charlie Gill, gave him his first job. “I went to see him and I could barely understand a word he said,” Gill said in an Los Angeles Times profile piece several years ago, referring to Lee’s thick accent.
He asked Lee to work a salacious case. In it, two men were accused of sexually assaulting a woman they had met at a bar in Litchfield, Connecticut, in the mid-1970s. It had been nicknamed the “panties in a tree case” in reference to where the victim’s undergarments were found. As the star witness at the trial, Lee gave dramatic testimony. He said seminal fluid belonging to at least four other men was discovered on the woman’s underwear. In the end, the men on trial were found not guilty.
Lee’s career took off soon after. In 1979, he landed a job as the director of the Connecticut state crime lab, and eventually offered expertise on blood type, spatter, microscopic hair particles, and fibers. Back then, forensic scientists responded to crime scenes alongside cops and EMTs. “We got called in the middle of the night, on holidays and weekends, and we had to respond,” Lee told me. “It was not an easy job.”
On the stand, jurors found him credible and even charming. He was quick with a joke, or a moment of levity and could explain complex theories in simple ways.
“I don’t think I ever met a juror who didn’t find him persuasive,” said one former Connecticut court clerk, who shepherded jurors around during many of Lee’s cases. “He employed science in a way that made sense and he came across as a bona fide scientist. He always seemed very well organized,” he said. “He really impressed me.”
Lee’s first major case was the horrific Helle Crafts “wood chipper” murder of 1986. It centered on a Danish flight attendant whose airline pilot husband, Richard Crafts, slaughtered her and tossed her body into a wood chipper. Cops found human tissue along with Helle’s hair and blood type in a nearby lake. Lee, who led the forensic investigation, helped determine that her remains had gone through the chipper. Richard was sentenced to 50 years in prison, and the case went down in history as Connecticut’s first murder conviction without a victim’s body, thanks in big part to Lee.
In 1995, Lee shot to international fame when he appeared as the star forensics witness during the televised O.J. Simpson trial, where he challenged the Los Angeles Police Department’s handling of blood samples. During the trial, Lee testified that blood was likely placed onto Simpson’s socks while they were lying flat, rather than when someone was wearing them. He said a critical blood stain was improperly handled, creating a smear on a paper evidence holder, and bolstering the defense’s claim that cops tampered with the still-wet sample. “The only opinion I can give under these circumstances is something [is] wrong,” Lee said.
Darden, who was then Marcia Clark’s right-hand man in the case, claims O.J.’s lawyers told Lee to use the memorable-but-vague phrase during a court break. “It was a stretch… He shouldn’t have said anything up there that wasn’t based in science,” Darden told me. “But he has a whole shtick and juries like him.” Indeed, some jurors later called Lee’s testimony a major factor in Simpson’s acquittal.
Lee was soon working some of the most sensational cases of the era. He helped investigators with the case of JonBenet Ramsey, a 6-year-old beauty-pageant contestant found beaten and strangled to death in her Colorado home. He spent hours with the defense team of Scott Peterson, a California businessman who was convicted of murdering his eight-months-pregnant wife, Laci Peterson, and their unborn child, examining the remains of her decapitated body, and taking tissue samples.
Several years later, Lee testified on behalf of accused toddler-killer Casey Anthony, which helped lead to the Florida mom’s acquittal in 2011. He helped investigators on the case of Elizabeth Smart, the abducted 14-year-old Utah girl, leading to the conviction of Brian David Mitchell. He also testified on behalf of novelist Michael Peterson, who was convicted of beating his wife to death near the staircase of their North Carolina home. (The author and subject of the documentary The Staircase was later granted a new trial and took an Alford plea.) And Lee worked for the defense team of Michael Skakel, a Kennedy family relative accused of brutally murdering teenager Martha Moxley.
But Lee’s credibility wasn’t challenged until 2007, as a little-known subplot in one of the year’s most attention-grabbing murder trials—the shooting of actress Lana Clarkson.
Phil Spector and Lana Clarkson
On Feb. 3, 2003, Lana Clarkson, a striking 6-foot-tall actress, was shot in the face at famed music producer Phil Spector’s mansion. Earlier in the night, Spector—who had made records with John Lennon and George Harrison—picked up the 40-year-old former B-movie star in a limo at the House of Blues in Los Angeles, where she worked.
An hour after they got back to Spector’s place, the driver heard a gunshot. “I think I just shot her,” Spector wailed, according to an arrest affidavit.
Later, he insisted Clarkson had “committed accidental suicide” when she “kissed a gun” and it discharged after a night of drinking. Lee soon began working for Spector’s defense team.
While combing through the murder scene, Lee picked up part of an “acrylic fingernail,” placed it in a vial and left, according to testimony from two of Lee’s former colleagues, which was reported by the L.A. Times.
In May 2007, during Spector’s trial, Judge Larry Paul Fidler ruled that Lee failed to hand the flat white object over to prosecutors—and instead hid or destroyed it, according to reports at the time. The evidence was key, prosecutors said, because it proved Clarkson’s hand couldn’t have been on the gun when she died, ruling out the suicide defense.
In the end, a mistrial was declared due to a hung jury. But Spector was convicted of second-degree murder in a second trial in April 2009.
“Lee got his ass kicked on that case. He thought he was a little too powerful,” said Stanley White, a former Spector defense investigator at the scene that day, who testified he saw Lee take the nail.
White, who is also a former sheriff's homicide investigator, said Lee was cavalier about the evidence.
“He said, ‘I think I found some tissue.’ I got down on my hands and knees and I said, ‘That’s not tissue, that’s a piece of a fingernail.’ He said, ‘You need glasses’ and I said, ‘The hell I do.’”
White added, “For whatever reason, people thought he was the greatest forensic guy on the planet. But from my experience, he was a moron.”
It may have simply been a mistake—as opposed to a shrewd move—but it should have been a career-stopper either way, White said. “No police department or federal agency should work with you after that,” he said. “I thought nobody would hire him.”
Lee now contends the object was a piece of thread. He claims he offered it to the defense and the prosecution and neither side wanted it. “It became a moot issue at the trial,” he said.
Lee’s misstep was overshadowed by the more lurid parts of the Spector trial, which was splashed across television sets nationally. His blunder got little media coverage, and so he kept getting hired.
To this day, he’s highly regarded, even by some people who worked the Spector case. Sara Caplan—the former Spector defense lawyer who testified that she saw Lee put the missing evidence in a vial—is still singing his praises.
“The only thing I can say about Dr. Henry Lee is that I have the utmost respect for him as a forensic criminalist and as a human being,” Caplan told me recently without elaborating. “He is one of the most brilliant men with whom I have had the opportunity to work.”
David Weinberg and Joyce Stochmal
On the night Joyce Stochmal went missing in August 1984, she ate a seafood dinner with her family and packed a Nike gym bag with overnight clothes. The petite 19-year-old worked at a dog kennel and sometimes slept there. She was last seen walking on the side of a road near the Housatonic River in Connecticut.
Three people on a fishing trip spotted her body floating in Lake Zoar, a nearby reservoir, a few days later. She had been beaten and stabbed 17 times.
Months later, cops arrested David Weinberg, a 26-year-old printing shop worker and car enthusiast from the blue-collar town of Seymour, just north of where Stochmal was last seen.
Weinberg said he didn’t know Stochmal. But cops zeroed in on him after his girlfriend reported he was “acting funny” and may have been involved in Stochmal’s death. (His girlfriend suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, according to Weinberg’s petition for a new trial, filed in January 2017.)
His girlfriend told cops that she and Weinberg had waded across the Pomperaug River to a burn site on the day Stochmal vanished, according to the court documents. They used her statement to link him to the smoldering pit, where cops said charred clothing from Stochmal’s bag were found. Weinberg’s motive, prosecutors claimed, was a sexual assault gone awry. But there was zero physical evidence to back up that theory, according to Weinberg’s lawyers.
“They had nothing significant against him. In this particular case, an extremely powerful guy, known as a ‘rock ’em sock ’em’ prosecutor, had asked for the death penalty, ” said Weinberg’s lawyer, Darcy McGraw. “Then Henry Lee, with all of his storied credentials, came in.”
At the trial, Lee testified that blood was found on a knife that belonged to Weinberg. Asked whether it was human blood, Lee said on the stand there was no way to know because the sample was insufficient. He also testified that three “unusually fine” hairs consistent with Stochmal’s were discovered in the trunk of Weinberg’s car. His testimony helped convict Weinberg, who was sentenced to 60 years behind bars.
But an investigation, launched decades later by the Connecticut Innocence Project’s post-conviction unit, recently revealed there was in fact no human blood on Weinberg’s knife. What’s more, investigators discovered lab sheets that showed “it was definitively known” at the time of the trial that the substance “was not human blood,” according to Weinberg’s petition for a new trial. Lee had lab notes “in front of him” during the 1988 trial that clearly stated the substance on the knife was not human blood, according to McGraw.
Lee fired back, saying by email, “Every [lab] test was negative (no results). Therefore, I cannot tell the species of the blood.” He didn’t address the claim that he had lab notes at the trial that stated otherwise.
“If you’re on a jury and Henry Lee—the ‘world’s leading criminologist’—comes in and says, ‘Here are these hairs and here’s this blood and this is what it means,’ that’s one thing the jury can hang its hat on because it's quote unquote-science,” McGraw said. “But he knew or should have known at the time of trial it was not human blood.”
Lee insists that a “chemical presumptive” test was taken at the crime scene and that it showed the substance on the knife “tested positive for blood.” He claims he later did a “species test” in a lab to determine if it was animal blood and it yielded no results. He said he couldn’t have known the substance on the knife wasn’t human blood because the sample was inadequate. Still, he admits, the lab tests never showed it was human blood, either.
At the trial, he said lawyers didn’t press him to get specific about the difference between lab testing and less accurate field testing. “I only can answer what they ask, I can’t volunteer information,” he said of the testimony. “I tried to be honest.”
As it turns out, his testimony about Stochmal’s hair ended up being wrong, too, McGraw said at a 2017 court hearing. Further testing revealed that two of the three hairs found in Weinberg’s car were not actually the murder victim’s, and the test on the third was inconclusive, she said.
Other powerful new evidence includes a confession that was never given to Weinberg’s defense attorney. In 2010, McGraw was going through boxes of records on the Weinberg case when she came across a police report. It noted that four years after Stochmal was slain, a female hitchhiker confessed to cops that she had killed her for money, according to Weinberg’s petition for a new trial.
McGraw, along with an investigator and the Connecticut Innocence Project’s then-director, later met in person with the detective who took her statement all those years ago. He admitted that he never turned the woman’s statement over to the prosecutor in charge of Weinberg’s case, the petition for a new trial states. It wasn’t necessary, the cop told them, because the woman was “mentally unstable,” according to the court documents. He said he didn’t “believe her” and thought her confession didn’t fit “with what he believed the facts to be.”
But the hitchhiker knew details of the case that hadn’t been reported to the public—that Stochmal had been stabbed with a six-inch knife and that her purse was filled with rocks before it was tossed the river, according to Weinberg’s petition for new trial. Nevertheless, cops let her walk free. It’s unclear where she is today.
The court didn’t respond to Weinberg’s petition for a new trial. Ultimately, his lawyers and Waterbury county State Attorney Maureen Platt reached an agreement to modify his sentence to “time served.” The deal states that neither party admits “that the claims or defences of the other has merit.” While his conviction still stands, Weinberg was freed from prison two years ago at age 58.
But the ripple effect of Lee’s misleading testimony in the Stochmal case may be immeasurable, McGraw said.
“We have no way of knowing the extent of the effect he has had over the years,” she said. “The criminal justice system runs on guilty pleas, and if you have Henry Lee working cases for the prosecution, [the accused are] going to be more likely to plead [guilty],” she added—whether or not they are actually innocent.
Kerry and Janet Myers
In February 1984, a young mom was found beaten to death with an aluminum baseball bat inside her suburban New Orleans home. Janet Myers, a fiery 26-year-old aspiring writer, had been bludgeoned in the head while her 2-year-old son, Ryan, sat in a high chair nearby.
Her husband, Kerry Myers, and his high-school pal William Fontanille were soon charged with her murder. Each blamed the other for her death. Myers said he walked in on Fontanille attacking his wife, sparking a fight between the two men. Fontanille told cops he had sex with Janet, and that Kerry Myers had killed her and was going to try to pin it on him.
At first, only Fontanille was charged with her murder and Kerry Myers—who had called 911 screaming, “He killed my wife!”—served as the star witness in his trial. When it ended in a hung jury, prosecutors opted to charge both men. This time, they claimed the friends had planned to kill Janet and Fontanille's ex-wife, Susan.
At the second trial, the prosecution’s story was bolstered by Lee, who testified that spots of Type A blood—Janet’s type—were found on Kerry Myers’ pants, according to court documents. A jury found Fontanille guilty of manslaughter and he was hit with a 21-year sentence in 1990. Myers was shocked when a judge convicted him of second-degree murder, and sentenced him to life in prison the same year.
But decades later, Lee’s testimony was challenged by a former Jefferson Parish detective who responded to the crime scene and handled the case. In a letter to the Louisiana Board of Pardons & Parole, Robert Masson claimed the only blood type ever found on Kerry Myers pants was actually Type B, which in fact matched Fontanille’s blood type.
“I was never convinced Myers was guilty of the crime for which he was convicted,” Masson wrote in September 2013. “This case still causes me to have concerns. It is the only case I have ever handled where I have doubt about the guilt of someone.” Even Janet’s mother, who testified on behalf of Myers at his parole hearing in 2013, wasn’t convinced.
Lee contends, “If results say it was consistent [with type A], I report that faithfully … I did not frame somebody.” He added that Myers’ pants were blue jeans, which he said have “antigens” that sometimes yield “incorrect Type B blood results.”
But Myers calls Lee’s testimony stunningly misleading. He said Lee used the words “spots” and “spatter” interchangeably, which is deceptive because the former can be chalked up to transfer stains from the bat, which he said Fontanille used to attack him after Janet. The latter, however, was used during the trial to show Myers was near Janet when she was beaten.
“He was going to come up with the conclusion the state wanted regardless of what the evidence showed,” said Myers, who has maintained his innocence all along. “He ambiguously twisted things. He started with theoretical—‘they could have done this’ or ‘they could have done that’—and he went way outside of his scope of expertise,” Myers said.
In December 2016, Kerry Myers’ life sentence was commuted by Gov. John Bel Edwards after he filed a petition for actual innocence and former detective Masson, along with Janet’s family members, backed him up at a parole hearing. He was set free based on “good time credits” after roughly three decades behind bars.
John Mamoulides, the former District Attorney who tried the case, didn’t return requests for comment.
Not long ago, Myers came across a book Lee had written, Dr. Henry Lee’s Forensic Files: Five Famous Cases, which prominently featured a section on his wife’s murder. Myers says the book fudged the truth and included inaccuracies about his personal life along with Janet’s funeral.
“This guy is still saying outlandish things to make himself look like a forensics superhero,” Myers said. “It ticks me off in a huge way.”
Lee claims he only handled the “scientific explanations” in the book and that his co-author is responsible for those parts of the book that Myers claims are incorrect. His co-author, Jerry Labriola, agreed that he was responsible for the “prose of the story” but said he couldn’t remember that section of the book off-hand.
Shawn Henning, Ralph “Ricky” Birch, and Everette Carr
On Dec. 1, 1985, Shawn Henning and Ralph Birch were living in a stolen brown Buick Regal with a busted muffler. The teens had been burglarizing houses in the semi-rural town of New Milford, Connecticut, in the days leading up to 65-year-old Everette Carr’s murder.
When police arrived at his daughter’s tidy white home, Carr was found with his throat slit from one side of his neck to the opposite ear. His jugular had been severed. He was stabbed dozens of times with a kitchen knife, and there were large gashes in his head.
Blood was pooled up around his corpse, smeared and spattered on walls, nearly up to the ceiling. A set of bloody shoeprints led to a bedroom on the first floor, where a dresser appeared ransacked.
During the investigation, cops learned Henning and Birch had been breaking into homes nearby. After interviewing neighbors, who said they heard a loud muffler, they zeroed in on the teens, who admitted to the burglaries but insisted they hadn’t killed Carr.
“Immediately, we became the prime suspects (understandably) and any evidence that didn’t fit that theory was quickly abandoned with minimal investigation (not so understandably),” Birch wrote in a recent letter from prison.
They were both charged with murder, but the evidence was never rock-solid. Dozens of samples were taken from the floor, walls, and other objects, including a cigar box, Carr’s underwear, and a broken-off piece of the murder weapon. But not a single piece of physical evidence—blood, hair, or fibers—found at the home belonged to the teens, according to lab tests at the time.
The state also tested Henning and Birch’s clothing and shoes, along with the interior of the Buick. Not a speck of Carr’s blood was found on any of it.
Instead, prosecutors relied on testimony from two jailhouse snitches. One of them, Todd Cocchia, got key details of the murder wrong—he said that Carr had been murdered in the daytime, and that the killer was alone—during his first interview with a police officer. A cop corrected him and gave him the actual facts of the case, according to Birch’s appellate brief. (Amazingly, his testimony was used anyway.)
Without air-tight evidence, Henry Lee was a silver bullet for the prosecution.
“They rolled out a red carpet for him,” Henning recalled recently. “There was a certain celebrity to him, a majesty. He was an up-and-coming superstar on a worldwide level.”
He added, “Every one of the jurors was glued to every word he was saying. It was nonsense, but they were eating it up.”
Lee testified over several days at Henning and Birch’s separate trials, often alongside grisly crime-scene photos.
“He had a very big, likable personality,” Birch said. “He cracked wise with his broken English and had the judge, jury, and myself chuckling, even during such a serious trial.”
After Lee testified about “blood” on a towel (blood that wasn’t actually there), prosecutors used his statements to explain away the lack of any physical evidence. They told jurors the killers used it to wipe themselves clean of Carr’s blood before bolting from the home. Ultimately, Henning was sentenced to 50 years. Birch was hit with 55 years.
But in 2006, the Connecticut Innocence Project launched an effort to re-investigate and re-test dozens of items found in Carr’s home, using modern DNA techniques. They discovered Lee’s testimony was “patently false,” that the “the towel had not been tested” and the stains “were not blood,” according to Henning’s appellate brief.
But there was an even more stunning revelation: DNA found mixed with Carr’s blood—including on the waistband of his underwear and floorboards of the house—belonged to a mystery woman. The Innocence Project also found the bloody footprints were size 7.5 to 9, much smaller than Henning’s or Birch’s. The burglary appears to have been staged, too, according to the court documents.
Other powerful evidence includes the fact that Cocchia has since recanted, and another snitch pleaded the Fifth. A friend of Henning, Timothy Saathoff, also recanted, saying he made up a story because a police officer convinced him it would help his pal, according to court documents. Back then, Saathoff testified that Henning confessed to him that he had committed a burglary where an accomplice killed a man. But Saathoff recently came forward to admit he had lied because the cop persuaded him it would help Henning, if he claimed Henning was at the scene but didn’t commit the murder, according to court documents.
Earlier this month, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the men did not receive a fair trial and ordered new trials, citing Lee’s incorrect testimony. Without the Lee’s claim about “blood,” the case “could very well have collapsed,” the court said.
After the ruling, Lee said, “If they are in fact innocent, I’m happy for them… But who is going to speak for the victim?”
The attorneys for Henning and Birch, Jim Cousins and Andrew O’Shea, now want the men exonerated. Cousins said jurors today place a huge weight on DNA evidence and a retrial would almost certainly result in a not-guilty verdict. The state has not decided yet whether it will retry them.
“I believe with every inch of my being that Shawn and Ricky had nothing to do with this crime,” Cousins told me. “But there are legal niceties that have to happen.”
In November, Henning was released on parole and set free. He said he wants his name cleared.
“I will never have what this conviction has taken away from me. I will never have a career. I will never have a family with children, a nice car or a house. I will never have the things normal people have. I have 30 years of [prison] memories I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” he said. “It has been excruciating.”
He added, “I want the state of Connecticut to say in front of the world that it screwed up.”
Birch, who was tried as an adult, remains behind bars at Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers, Connecticut. It wasn’t immediately clear when he’d be set free. As a model inmate, he lives in a single cell with his golden retriever mix, Celly, that he’s training for the America’s VetDogs. He said he’s a born-again Christian, working on forgiveness.
“I harbor no ill-will towards Dr. Henry Lee,” he said. “I don’t think he went into trial saying, ‘I’m going to screw over these guys,’ but he slanted his testimony so that he would help convict two people because police told him we were guilty.”
In response, Lee refused to address whether blood was on the towel specifically, but said the physical evidence he provided to the state was truthful. “I did not link fingerprint, sho[e]print, or any blood typings to [them.]”
He expressed a general feeling of regret, saying, “I don’t think I helped anybody. The [victim’s] family even think[s] I am incompetent… It’s like a nightmare.”
But he contends that, while no lab tests were conducted on the towel, a “chemical presumptive” test was taken at the scene that showed it “could” have been blood. “There was a positive reaction… but the DA said ‘That’s not important,’ so I didn’t request a lab confirmation test,” Lee said. “I did not complete these cases myself. I worked as a team with others.”
Lee said he felt pressure from the then-DA, Dennis Santore, and Carr’s wife to find physical evidence that simply wasn’t there. “Before this case, they didn’t have a suspect,” Lee said. “The victim’s wife came to the laboratory and said, ‘You’re incompetent.’ The DA threatened to take me off the case. I still feel this case is strange.”
Carr’s wife didn’t return a request for comment.
Santore contends he didn’t pressure Lee or threaten to yank him from the case. “That never happened,” he said. He said Lee decided on his own that lab-testing the towel didn’t matter. “I would have done anything Lee thought was important,” he said.
The problem of botched evidence may be bigger than Henry Lee. Forensic witnesses are supposed to be credible, unbiased sources of truth within the justice system. But the set-up fails to take into account human nature, legal experts say.
“There is a tendency to want to be part of the team, and to help the team. That can lead to going over boundaries that should be maintained,” said Joseph Kadane, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who has written about ethical dilemmas expert witnesses face.
“There’s also the fact that one side hires you and pays the bill,” he said. “It’s a slippery slope. Someone’s monetary—or other—desires could overpower their duties to the court.”
One solution, policy-wise, would be to change the model so that a judge chooses a single expert that both sides agree on, he said.
Ultimately, Henry Lee estimates he has worked thousands of cases over his nearly five-decade forensics career, the vast majority of which have not been discredited. He said he now works cold cases, and sometimes gives lectures on the “limitations of forensic science.”
Asked if he’d do anything differently looking back, Lee said, “Maybe I’d pick another career.” He added, “They are using today’s standard to judge 30 years ago.”
Indeed, forensic-science techniques that were widely used by experts in the 1980s and 1990s—including hair-particle and bite-mark evidence—have in recent years been discredited as “junk science” and ruled inadmissible in court.
“Forensics is undergoing a revolution,” Kadane said. “In the past, it hasn’t been as scientific as it needs to be. Experts reached conclusions as if they were absolutely certain when they had no business being that certain.”
“The problem with forensics is that it almost always involves people—and people are not infallible.”
By Natalie O’Neill
Daily Beast
June 24, 2019
Before he became a true-crime celebrity, forensic scientist Henry Lee took the stand at a wildly bloody murder trial in Connecticut. It was spring of 1989 and the then-50-year-old Chinese-American hadn’t yet worked on his splashiest cases, from O.J. Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey to Scott Peterson.
In the Connecticut trial, Lee faced a difficult task. As the star witness paid by the state, he was asked to back up the prosecution’s story that two homeless teenagers had butchered 65-year-old father Everett Carr—slitting his throat and stabbing him 27 times at his daughter’s home—without getting any blood on themselves, or leaving behind a shred of physical evidence.
Lee wore a crisp suit as he took a seat next to the judge. When questioned, he testified that a reddish-brown stain found on a towel in the bathroom was “identified to be blood.” Despite the violent and messy nature of the attack—which left walls and floors in the home soaked in blood—he said it was possible that the killers had fled without a drop of blood on their clothing.
His testimony bolstered the state’s claim that 17-year-old Shawn Henning and 18-year-old Ricky Birch had used the towel to clean themselves up after a “burglary gone bad.” It played a huge role in convicting the friends, who were sentenced to decades behind bars.
The problem is, it wasn’t true. There was in fact no blood on the towel, and it had never actually been lab-tested, the Connecticut Supreme Court recently concluded. The ruling could lead to the exoneration of both men, who are in their fifties. The case features bombshell new DNA evidence—possibly pointing to a female killer—and witnesses who have since recanted, including a jailhouse snitch and a friend of Henning’s who testified he’d confessed to being at the home.
Last week, the court tossed out the convictions for both men and granted them new trials after 30 years, citing Lee’s incorrect testimony and blaming prosecutors for failing to correct it.
Reached by phone, Dennis Santore, the now-retired DA who put away Henning and Birch, recently admitted “It was a fishy case.”
He said, “It was tough putting it together because it was circumstantial. But we did the best we could with what we had... We didn’t do much testing back then.” Asked if he stands by the evidence, he said, “I would have to, if I put it on [trial].”
A few days after Henning and Birch were granted new trials, Lee held a press conference insisting he made no errors. “In my 57-year career, I have investigated over 8,000 cases and never, ever was accused of any wrongdoing or for testifying intentionally wrong,” said Lee told a throng of reporters. “This is the first case that I have to defend myself.”
But Lee’s history of problems with evidence—intentional or not—doesn’t begin and end with Henning and Birch. The 81-year-old world-renowned forensic scientist—who has appeared on dozens of crime TV shows and documentaries—has allegedly hidden evidence or given incorrect testimony in at least three other cases, potentially sending the wrong men to prison and allowing guilty ones to walk free, according to court documents and other legal sources.
The cases include:
* The Murder of L.A. Actress Lana Clarkson. Lee hid or destroyed a white object—likely an acrylic fingernail—found at the scene of Clarkson’s death by gunshot, a judge ruled in 2007. Lee had been hired by the legal defense of iconic record producer Phil Spector, who was charged with, and eventually convicted of, Clarkson’s second-degree murder. Sara Caplan, then a defense attorney working with Lee, admitted to the judge that she saw Lee take the evidence, which he then failed to hand over to prosecution, according to the ruling.
* The Murder of Young Mother Janet Myers. In 1990, Lee testified that 33-year-old Kerry Myers’ pants were spotted with his dead wife’s blood type, backing up the prosecution’s claim that he and a friend beat her to death with a bat. Both men were convicted. But Lee’s testimony was later called into question by a detective who handled the case and insists Janet’s blood type was never found on Myers’ pants.
* The Disappearance and Murder of Teenager Joyce Stochmal. In 1988, after Connecticut teen Joyce Stochmal went missing and turned up dead, Lee testified that a brown crusty substance, found on a knife belonging to 29-year-old suspect David Weinberg, was blood. Lee said there was no way to know if the blood belonged to a human, but Weinberg was still convicted. Yet lab tests had in fact been done by the time of the trial—and they revealed it was definitively not human blood, according to a petition for a new trial filed on behalf of Weinberg in 2017. His lawyer, Darcy McGraw, claims Lee “knew or should have known” it wasn’t human blood.
Lee has a defense for each alleged screw-up. In the Stochmal case, he insists the “lawyers don’t understand the science”—and that a “chemical presumptive test” taken at the crime scene “tested positive” for blood. In the Carr case, he claims he never testified that the substance on the towel conclusively was blood, only that the same type of field test showed it was “was consistent with blood.” (Testimony from back then, however, shows he went a step further, saying the “smear was identified to be blood,” according to The Washington Post.) In the Janet Myers case, he contends the police officer is mistaken about the blood type found on Kerry Myers’ pants. And in the Clarkson case, he insists he offered the possible fingernail to the prosecution and “they didn’t want it.”
In the years since these cases, Lee has become a rock star in the world of true crime. He’s appeared on the hit Netflix documentary The Staircase and dozens of Investigation Discovery-style programs, and he also scored his own show, Trace Evidence: The Case Files of Dr. Henry Lee. He’s won prestigious awards, including the Medal of Justice and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Science and Engineer Association. And he founded the Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science—where his methods are being taught to future generations of criminalists.
But critics, including a former colleague and legal opponents, say he may simply care more about scoring legal victories than the truth. “His attitude is extremely dangerous in the criminal-justice system,” said McGraw, who is also the executive director of the Connecticut Innocence Project. “His testimony has led to some very unfair and unjust results. These are horrible cases—and there are big reasons to believe some of the men involved are innocent.”
Former O.J. Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden now says Lee “stretched” the truth when he testified on behalf of the former football Hall-of-Famer’s defense team in 1995. Back then, Lee told jurors “something [was] wrong” with a blood sample placed into evidence, boosting the defense’s claim that cops had tampered with it. “I didn’t think it was true then—and I don’t think it’s true today,” Darden said of Lee’s testimony. “It was bullshit, not science.”
Kerry Myers, whom Lee helped send to prison for decades, is still seething. “Henry Lee is caught up in his own ego and loves being a forensic expert to the stars. I don’t think he cares about people—they’re objects he can use to promote himself,” said Myers, 62, who was set free two years ago. “It’s frustrating that he’s still doing it, and nobody is questioning him.”
In May 2013, Lee gave an auditorium packed with graduating students a piece of advice. “You must have a winner’s attitude,” he said at Manchester Community College in Connecticut. “The loser always says, ‘There is no way.’ The winner always finds a way.”
Lee likes to stress the importance of winning in his speeches and writings. As the 11th of 13 children, raised without a father by an immigrant mother, success and ambition set him apart from the pack.
Born in Kiangsu province, China in November 1938, Lee fled with his family to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s. His father, traveling to the island separately, died when his ship sank in January 1949. Lee was 10 years old.
As a young man, Lee was hired by the Taipei Police Department, where he worked his way up to the rank of captain. In 1965, he moved to the U.S. with just $65, and graduated from John Jay College with a degree in forensic science seven years later. He went on to get his doctorate at New York University.
After graduation, he volunteered his then-newfangled crime-lab skills to Connecticut prosecutors, but nobody would take him up on it. Instead, a public defender, Charlie Gill, gave him his first job. “I went to see him and I could barely understand a word he said,” Gill said in an Los Angeles Times profile piece several years ago, referring to Lee’s thick accent.
He asked Lee to work a salacious case. In it, two men were accused of sexually assaulting a woman they had met at a bar in Litchfield, Connecticut, in the mid-1970s. It had been nicknamed the “panties in a tree case” in reference to where the victim’s undergarments were found. As the star witness at the trial, Lee gave dramatic testimony. He said seminal fluid belonging to at least four other men was discovered on the woman’s underwear. In the end, the men on trial were found not guilty.
Lee’s career took off soon after. In 1979, he landed a job as the director of the Connecticut state crime lab, and eventually offered expertise on blood type, spatter, microscopic hair particles, and fibers. Back then, forensic scientists responded to crime scenes alongside cops and EMTs. “We got called in the middle of the night, on holidays and weekends, and we had to respond,” Lee told me. “It was not an easy job.”
On the stand, jurors found him credible and even charming. He was quick with a joke, or a moment of levity and could explain complex theories in simple ways.
“I don’t think I ever met a juror who didn’t find him persuasive,” said one former Connecticut court clerk, who shepherded jurors around during many of Lee’s cases. “He employed science in a way that made sense and he came across as a bona fide scientist. He always seemed very well organized,” he said. “He really impressed me.”
Lee’s first major case was the horrific Helle Crafts “wood chipper” murder of 1986. It centered on a Danish flight attendant whose airline pilot husband, Richard Crafts, slaughtered her and tossed her body into a wood chipper. Cops found human tissue along with Helle’s hair and blood type in a nearby lake. Lee, who led the forensic investigation, helped determine that her remains had gone through the chipper. Richard was sentenced to 50 years in prison, and the case went down in history as Connecticut’s first murder conviction without a victim’s body, thanks in big part to Lee.
In 1995, Lee shot to international fame when he appeared as the star forensics witness during the televised O.J. Simpson trial, where he challenged the Los Angeles Police Department’s handling of blood samples. During the trial, Lee testified that blood was likely placed onto Simpson’s socks while they were lying flat, rather than when someone was wearing them. He said a critical blood stain was improperly handled, creating a smear on a paper evidence holder, and bolstering the defense’s claim that cops tampered with the still-wet sample. “The only opinion I can give under these circumstances is something [is] wrong,” Lee said.
Darden, who was then Marcia Clark’s right-hand man in the case, claims O.J.’s lawyers told Lee to use the memorable-but-vague phrase during a court break. “It was a stretch… He shouldn’t have said anything up there that wasn’t based in science,” Darden told me. “But he has a whole shtick and juries like him.” Indeed, some jurors later called Lee’s testimony a major factor in Simpson’s acquittal.
Lee was soon working some of the most sensational cases of the era. He helped investigators with the case of JonBenet Ramsey, a 6-year-old beauty-pageant contestant found beaten and strangled to death in her Colorado home. He spent hours with the defense team of Scott Peterson, a California businessman who was convicted of murdering his eight-months-pregnant wife, Laci Peterson, and their unborn child, examining the remains of her decapitated body, and taking tissue samples.
Several years later, Lee testified on behalf of accused toddler-killer Casey Anthony, which helped lead to the Florida mom’s acquittal in 2011. He helped investigators on the case of Elizabeth Smart, the abducted 14-year-old Utah girl, leading to the conviction of Brian David Mitchell. He also testified on behalf of novelist Michael Peterson, who was convicted of beating his wife to death near the staircase of their North Carolina home. (The author and subject of the documentary The Staircase was later granted a new trial and took an Alford plea.) And Lee worked for the defense team of Michael Skakel, a Kennedy family relative accused of brutally murdering teenager Martha Moxley.
But Lee’s credibility wasn’t challenged until 2007, as a little-known subplot in one of the year’s most attention-grabbing murder trials—the shooting of actress Lana Clarkson.
Phil Spector and Lana Clarkson
On Feb. 3, 2003, Lana Clarkson, a striking 6-foot-tall actress, was shot in the face at famed music producer Phil Spector’s mansion. Earlier in the night, Spector—who had made records with John Lennon and George Harrison—picked up the 40-year-old former B-movie star in a limo at the House of Blues in Los Angeles, where she worked.
An hour after they got back to Spector’s place, the driver heard a gunshot. “I think I just shot her,” Spector wailed, according to an arrest affidavit.
Later, he insisted Clarkson had “committed accidental suicide” when she “kissed a gun” and it discharged after a night of drinking. Lee soon began working for Spector’s defense team.
While combing through the murder scene, Lee picked up part of an “acrylic fingernail,” placed it in a vial and left, according to testimony from two of Lee’s former colleagues, which was reported by the L.A. Times.
In May 2007, during Spector’s trial, Judge Larry Paul Fidler ruled that Lee failed to hand the flat white object over to prosecutors—and instead hid or destroyed it, according to reports at the time. The evidence was key, prosecutors said, because it proved Clarkson’s hand couldn’t have been on the gun when she died, ruling out the suicide defense.
In the end, a mistrial was declared due to a hung jury. But Spector was convicted of second-degree murder in a second trial in April 2009.
“Lee got his ass kicked on that case. He thought he was a little too powerful,” said Stanley White, a former Spector defense investigator at the scene that day, who testified he saw Lee take the nail.
White, who is also a former sheriff's homicide investigator, said Lee was cavalier about the evidence.
“He said, ‘I think I found some tissue.’ I got down on my hands and knees and I said, ‘That’s not tissue, that’s a piece of a fingernail.’ He said, ‘You need glasses’ and I said, ‘The hell I do.’”
White added, “For whatever reason, people thought he was the greatest forensic guy on the planet. But from my experience, he was a moron.”
It may have simply been a mistake—as opposed to a shrewd move—but it should have been a career-stopper either way, White said. “No police department or federal agency should work with you after that,” he said. “I thought nobody would hire him.”
Lee now contends the object was a piece of thread. He claims he offered it to the defense and the prosecution and neither side wanted it. “It became a moot issue at the trial,” he said.
Lee’s misstep was overshadowed by the more lurid parts of the Spector trial, which was splashed across television sets nationally. His blunder got little media coverage, and so he kept getting hired.
To this day, he’s highly regarded, even by some people who worked the Spector case. Sara Caplan—the former Spector defense lawyer who testified that she saw Lee put the missing evidence in a vial—is still singing his praises.
“The only thing I can say about Dr. Henry Lee is that I have the utmost respect for him as a forensic criminalist and as a human being,” Caplan told me recently without elaborating. “He is one of the most brilliant men with whom I have had the opportunity to work.”
David Weinberg and Joyce Stochmal
On the night Joyce Stochmal went missing in August 1984, she ate a seafood dinner with her family and packed a Nike gym bag with overnight clothes. The petite 19-year-old worked at a dog kennel and sometimes slept there. She was last seen walking on the side of a road near the Housatonic River in Connecticut.
Three people on a fishing trip spotted her body floating in Lake Zoar, a nearby reservoir, a few days later. She had been beaten and stabbed 17 times.
Months later, cops arrested David Weinberg, a 26-year-old printing shop worker and car enthusiast from the blue-collar town of Seymour, just north of where Stochmal was last seen.
Weinberg said he didn’t know Stochmal. But cops zeroed in on him after his girlfriend reported he was “acting funny” and may have been involved in Stochmal’s death. (His girlfriend suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, according to Weinberg’s petition for a new trial, filed in January 2017.)
His girlfriend told cops that she and Weinberg had waded across the Pomperaug River to a burn site on the day Stochmal vanished, according to the court documents. They used her statement to link him to the smoldering pit, where cops said charred clothing from Stochmal’s bag were found. Weinberg’s motive, prosecutors claimed, was a sexual assault gone awry. But there was zero physical evidence to back up that theory, according to Weinberg’s lawyers.
“They had nothing significant against him. In this particular case, an extremely powerful guy, known as a ‘rock ’em sock ’em’ prosecutor, had asked for the death penalty, ” said Weinberg’s lawyer, Darcy McGraw. “Then Henry Lee, with all of his storied credentials, came in.”
At the trial, Lee testified that blood was found on a knife that belonged to Weinberg. Asked whether it was human blood, Lee said on the stand there was no way to know because the sample was insufficient. He also testified that three “unusually fine” hairs consistent with Stochmal’s were discovered in the trunk of Weinberg’s car. His testimony helped convict Weinberg, who was sentenced to 60 years behind bars.
But an investigation, launched decades later by the Connecticut Innocence Project’s post-conviction unit, recently revealed there was in fact no human blood on Weinberg’s knife. What’s more, investigators discovered lab sheets that showed “it was definitively known” at the time of the trial that the substance “was not human blood,” according to Weinberg’s petition for a new trial. Lee had lab notes “in front of him” during the 1988 trial that clearly stated the substance on the knife was not human blood, according to McGraw.
Lee fired back, saying by email, “Every [lab] test was negative (no results). Therefore, I cannot tell the species of the blood.” He didn’t address the claim that he had lab notes at the trial that stated otherwise.
“If you’re on a jury and Henry Lee—the ‘world’s leading criminologist’—comes in and says, ‘Here are these hairs and here’s this blood and this is what it means,’ that’s one thing the jury can hang its hat on because it's quote unquote-science,” McGraw said. “But he knew or should have known at the time of trial it was not human blood.”
Lee insists that a “chemical presumptive” test was taken at the crime scene and that it showed the substance on the knife “tested positive for blood.” He claims he later did a “species test” in a lab to determine if it was animal blood and it yielded no results. He said he couldn’t have known the substance on the knife wasn’t human blood because the sample was inadequate. Still, he admits, the lab tests never showed it was human blood, either.
At the trial, he said lawyers didn’t press him to get specific about the difference between lab testing and less accurate field testing. “I only can answer what they ask, I can’t volunteer information,” he said of the testimony. “I tried to be honest.”
As it turns out, his testimony about Stochmal’s hair ended up being wrong, too, McGraw said at a 2017 court hearing. Further testing revealed that two of the three hairs found in Weinberg’s car were not actually the murder victim’s, and the test on the third was inconclusive, she said.
Other powerful new evidence includes a confession that was never given to Weinberg’s defense attorney. In 2010, McGraw was going through boxes of records on the Weinberg case when she came across a police report. It noted that four years after Stochmal was slain, a female hitchhiker confessed to cops that she had killed her for money, according to Weinberg’s petition for a new trial.
McGraw, along with an investigator and the Connecticut Innocence Project’s then-director, later met in person with the detective who took her statement all those years ago. He admitted that he never turned the woman’s statement over to the prosecutor in charge of Weinberg’s case, the petition for a new trial states. It wasn’t necessary, the cop told them, because the woman was “mentally unstable,” according to the court documents. He said he didn’t “believe her” and thought her confession didn’t fit “with what he believed the facts to be.”
But the hitchhiker knew details of the case that hadn’t been reported to the public—that Stochmal had been stabbed with a six-inch knife and that her purse was filled with rocks before it was tossed the river, according to Weinberg’s petition for new trial. Nevertheless, cops let her walk free. It’s unclear where she is today.
The court didn’t respond to Weinberg’s petition for a new trial. Ultimately, his lawyers and Waterbury county State Attorney Maureen Platt reached an agreement to modify his sentence to “time served.” The deal states that neither party admits “that the claims or defences of the other has merit.” While his conviction still stands, Weinberg was freed from prison two years ago at age 58.
But the ripple effect of Lee’s misleading testimony in the Stochmal case may be immeasurable, McGraw said.
“We have no way of knowing the extent of the effect he has had over the years,” she said. “The criminal justice system runs on guilty pleas, and if you have Henry Lee working cases for the prosecution, [the accused are] going to be more likely to plead [guilty],” she added—whether or not they are actually innocent.
Kerry and Janet Myers
In February 1984, a young mom was found beaten to death with an aluminum baseball bat inside her suburban New Orleans home. Janet Myers, a fiery 26-year-old aspiring writer, had been bludgeoned in the head while her 2-year-old son, Ryan, sat in a high chair nearby.
Her husband, Kerry Myers, and his high-school pal William Fontanille were soon charged with her murder. Each blamed the other for her death. Myers said he walked in on Fontanille attacking his wife, sparking a fight between the two men. Fontanille told cops he had sex with Janet, and that Kerry Myers had killed her and was going to try to pin it on him.
At first, only Fontanille was charged with her murder and Kerry Myers—who had called 911 screaming, “He killed my wife!”—served as the star witness in his trial. When it ended in a hung jury, prosecutors opted to charge both men. This time, they claimed the friends had planned to kill Janet and Fontanille's ex-wife, Susan.
At the second trial, the prosecution’s story was bolstered by Lee, who testified that spots of Type A blood—Janet’s type—were found on Kerry Myers’ pants, according to court documents. A jury found Fontanille guilty of manslaughter and he was hit with a 21-year sentence in 1990. Myers was shocked when a judge convicted him of second-degree murder, and sentenced him to life in prison the same year.
But decades later, Lee’s testimony was challenged by a former Jefferson Parish detective who responded to the crime scene and handled the case. In a letter to the Louisiana Board of Pardons & Parole, Robert Masson claimed the only blood type ever found on Kerry Myers pants was actually Type B, which in fact matched Fontanille’s blood type.
“I was never convinced Myers was guilty of the crime for which he was convicted,” Masson wrote in September 2013. “This case still causes me to have concerns. It is the only case I have ever handled where I have doubt about the guilt of someone.” Even Janet’s mother, who testified on behalf of Myers at his parole hearing in 2013, wasn’t convinced.
Lee contends, “If results say it was consistent [with type A], I report that faithfully … I did not frame somebody.” He added that Myers’ pants were blue jeans, which he said have “antigens” that sometimes yield “incorrect Type B blood results.”
But Myers calls Lee’s testimony stunningly misleading. He said Lee used the words “spots” and “spatter” interchangeably, which is deceptive because the former can be chalked up to transfer stains from the bat, which he said Fontanille used to attack him after Janet. The latter, however, was used during the trial to show Myers was near Janet when she was beaten.
“He was going to come up with the conclusion the state wanted regardless of what the evidence showed,” said Myers, who has maintained his innocence all along. “He ambiguously twisted things. He started with theoretical—‘they could have done this’ or ‘they could have done that’—and he went way outside of his scope of expertise,” Myers said.
In December 2016, Kerry Myers’ life sentence was commuted by Gov. John Bel Edwards after he filed a petition for actual innocence and former detective Masson, along with Janet’s family members, backed him up at a parole hearing. He was set free based on “good time credits” after roughly three decades behind bars.
John Mamoulides, the former District Attorney who tried the case, didn’t return requests for comment.
Not long ago, Myers came across a book Lee had written, Dr. Henry Lee’s Forensic Files: Five Famous Cases, which prominently featured a section on his wife’s murder. Myers says the book fudged the truth and included inaccuracies about his personal life along with Janet’s funeral.
“This guy is still saying outlandish things to make himself look like a forensics superhero,” Myers said. “It ticks me off in a huge way.”
Lee claims he only handled the “scientific explanations” in the book and that his co-author is responsible for those parts of the book that Myers claims are incorrect. His co-author, Jerry Labriola, agreed that he was responsible for the “prose of the story” but said he couldn’t remember that section of the book off-hand.
Shawn Henning, Ralph “Ricky” Birch, and Everette Carr
On Dec. 1, 1985, Shawn Henning and Ralph Birch were living in a stolen brown Buick Regal with a busted muffler. The teens had been burglarizing houses in the semi-rural town of New Milford, Connecticut, in the days leading up to 65-year-old Everette Carr’s murder.
When police arrived at his daughter’s tidy white home, Carr was found with his throat slit from one side of his neck to the opposite ear. His jugular had been severed. He was stabbed dozens of times with a kitchen knife, and there were large gashes in his head.
Blood was pooled up around his corpse, smeared and spattered on walls, nearly up to the ceiling. A set of bloody shoeprints led to a bedroom on the first floor, where a dresser appeared ransacked.
During the investigation, cops learned Henning and Birch had been breaking into homes nearby. After interviewing neighbors, who said they heard a loud muffler, they zeroed in on the teens, who admitted to the burglaries but insisted they hadn’t killed Carr.
“Immediately, we became the prime suspects (understandably) and any evidence that didn’t fit that theory was quickly abandoned with minimal investigation (not so understandably),” Birch wrote in a recent letter from prison.
They were both charged with murder, but the evidence was never rock-solid. Dozens of samples were taken from the floor, walls, and other objects, including a cigar box, Carr’s underwear, and a broken-off piece of the murder weapon. But not a single piece of physical evidence—blood, hair, or fibers—found at the home belonged to the teens, according to lab tests at the time.
The state also tested Henning and Birch’s clothing and shoes, along with the interior of the Buick. Not a speck of Carr’s blood was found on any of it.
Instead, prosecutors relied on testimony from two jailhouse snitches. One of them, Todd Cocchia, got key details of the murder wrong—he said that Carr had been murdered in the daytime, and that the killer was alone—during his first interview with a police officer. A cop corrected him and gave him the actual facts of the case, according to Birch’s appellate brief. (Amazingly, his testimony was used anyway.)
Without air-tight evidence, Henry Lee was a silver bullet for the prosecution.
“They rolled out a red carpet for him,” Henning recalled recently. “There was a certain celebrity to him, a majesty. He was an up-and-coming superstar on a worldwide level.”
He added, “Every one of the jurors was glued to every word he was saying. It was nonsense, but they were eating it up.”
Lee testified over several days at Henning and Birch’s separate trials, often alongside grisly crime-scene photos.
“He had a very big, likable personality,” Birch said. “He cracked wise with his broken English and had the judge, jury, and myself chuckling, even during such a serious trial.”
After Lee testified about “blood” on a towel (blood that wasn’t actually there), prosecutors used his statements to explain away the lack of any physical evidence. They told jurors the killers used it to wipe themselves clean of Carr’s blood before bolting from the home. Ultimately, Henning was sentenced to 50 years. Birch was hit with 55 years.
But in 2006, the Connecticut Innocence Project launched an effort to re-investigate and re-test dozens of items found in Carr’s home, using modern DNA techniques. They discovered Lee’s testimony was “patently false,” that the “the towel had not been tested” and the stains “were not blood,” according to Henning’s appellate brief.
But there was an even more stunning revelation: DNA found mixed with Carr’s blood—including on the waistband of his underwear and floorboards of the house—belonged to a mystery woman. The Innocence Project also found the bloody footprints were size 7.5 to 9, much smaller than Henning’s or Birch’s. The burglary appears to have been staged, too, according to the court documents.
Other powerful evidence includes the fact that Cocchia has since recanted, and another snitch pleaded the Fifth. A friend of Henning, Timothy Saathoff, also recanted, saying he made up a story because a police officer convinced him it would help his pal, according to court documents. Back then, Saathoff testified that Henning confessed to him that he had committed a burglary where an accomplice killed a man. But Saathoff recently came forward to admit he had lied because the cop persuaded him it would help Henning, if he claimed Henning was at the scene but didn’t commit the murder, according to court documents.
Earlier this month, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the men did not receive a fair trial and ordered new trials, citing Lee’s incorrect testimony. Without the Lee’s claim about “blood,” the case “could very well have collapsed,” the court said.
After the ruling, Lee said, “If they are in fact innocent, I’m happy for them… But who is going to speak for the victim?”
The attorneys for Henning and Birch, Jim Cousins and Andrew O’Shea, now want the men exonerated. Cousins said jurors today place a huge weight on DNA evidence and a retrial would almost certainly result in a not-guilty verdict. The state has not decided yet whether it will retry them.
“I believe with every inch of my being that Shawn and Ricky had nothing to do with this crime,” Cousins told me. “But there are legal niceties that have to happen.”
In November, Henning was released on parole and set free. He said he wants his name cleared.
“I will never have what this conviction has taken away from me. I will never have a career. I will never have a family with children, a nice car or a house. I will never have the things normal people have. I have 30 years of [prison] memories I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” he said. “It has been excruciating.”
He added, “I want the state of Connecticut to say in front of the world that it screwed up.”
Birch, who was tried as an adult, remains behind bars at Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers, Connecticut. It wasn’t immediately clear when he’d be set free. As a model inmate, he lives in a single cell with his golden retriever mix, Celly, that he’s training for the America’s VetDogs. He said he’s a born-again Christian, working on forgiveness.
“I harbor no ill-will towards Dr. Henry Lee,” he said. “I don’t think he went into trial saying, ‘I’m going to screw over these guys,’ but he slanted his testimony so that he would help convict two people because police told him we were guilty.”
In response, Lee refused to address whether blood was on the towel specifically, but said the physical evidence he provided to the state was truthful. “I did not link fingerprint, sho[e]print, or any blood typings to [them.]”
He expressed a general feeling of regret, saying, “I don’t think I helped anybody. The [victim’s] family even think[s] I am incompetent… It’s like a nightmare.”
But he contends that, while no lab tests were conducted on the towel, a “chemical presumptive” test was taken at the scene that showed it “could” have been blood. “There was a positive reaction… but the DA said ‘That’s not important,’ so I didn’t request a lab confirmation test,” Lee said. “I did not complete these cases myself. I worked as a team with others.”
Lee said he felt pressure from the then-DA, Dennis Santore, and Carr’s wife to find physical evidence that simply wasn’t there. “Before this case, they didn’t have a suspect,” Lee said. “The victim’s wife came to the laboratory and said, ‘You’re incompetent.’ The DA threatened to take me off the case. I still feel this case is strange.”
Carr’s wife didn’t return a request for comment.
Santore contends he didn’t pressure Lee or threaten to yank him from the case. “That never happened,” he said. He said Lee decided on his own that lab-testing the towel didn’t matter. “I would have done anything Lee thought was important,” he said.
The problem of botched evidence may be bigger than Henry Lee. Forensic witnesses are supposed to be credible, unbiased sources of truth within the justice system. But the set-up fails to take into account human nature, legal experts say.
“There is a tendency to want to be part of the team, and to help the team. That can lead to going over boundaries that should be maintained,” said Joseph Kadane, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who has written about ethical dilemmas expert witnesses face.
“There’s also the fact that one side hires you and pays the bill,” he said. “It’s a slippery slope. Someone’s monetary—or other—desires could overpower their duties to the court.”
One solution, policy-wise, would be to change the model so that a judge chooses a single expert that both sides agree on, he said.
Ultimately, Henry Lee estimates he has worked thousands of cases over his nearly five-decade forensics career, the vast majority of which have not been discredited. He said he now works cold cases, and sometimes gives lectures on the “limitations of forensic science.”
Asked if he’d do anything differently looking back, Lee said, “Maybe I’d pick another career.” He added, “They are using today’s standard to judge 30 years ago.”
Indeed, forensic-science techniques that were widely used by experts in the 1980s and 1990s—including hair-particle and bite-mark evidence—have in recent years been discredited as “junk science” and ruled inadmissible in court.
“Forensics is undergoing a revolution,” Kadane said. “In the past, it hasn’t been as scientific as it needs to be. Experts reached conclusions as if they were absolutely certain when they had no business being that certain.”
“The problem with forensics is that it almost always involves people—and people are not infallible.”
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
REPARATIONS IS A GREAT IDEA
Here's How We Can Make Sure That Everyone Pays For The Sins Of Their Ancestors
By Matt Walsh
Daily Wire
June 20, 2019
Daily Wire Editor's Note: Because the internet is filled with foolish and utterly dishonest people, the editors of The Daily Wire wish to note that this column utilizes a literary device called sarcasm.
Yesterday [June 19], House Democrats held a hearing to discuss reparations. Actually, it was a hearing to discuss forming a commission to conduct a study to examine reparations. We may be far away from anything like a reparations system actually being enacted in this country, but we're closer than we were even a few years ago, when the leader of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, came out against the idea. Now, most mainstream Democrats, including presidential candidates like Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), favor it. As a noted progressive myself, I, too, support the policy. And I think I know how to make it work.
At the most basic level, reparations would involve the payment of a certain sum of cash to people whose ancestors six generations ago were slaves. It seems most reasonable to take this money from those whose ancestors six generations ago were slaveholders. Wealthy Hollywood actor Danny Glover was at the hearing because his great-great-great-grandmother was a slave. The fact that Glover is worth $40 million, and that most of the slaveholder descendants today are likely quite a bit poorer than him, does not matter. As it turns out, sometimes it's okay to take from the poor and give to the rich.
Now, a few questions must be addressed: Namely, how do we know who is descended from slaves and who is descended from slaveholders? Surely, a black person whose family arrived on these shores in 1970 can't claim any historical entitlement to slavery reparations. And a white person whose family came here after abolition — perhaps as Irish indentured servants — cannot be said to carry any guilt for North American slavery in his blood. It seems odd to think that anyone could carry the guilt for slavery in their blood, but that is the premise we must accept in order to get this ball rolling.
How can we sort this all out? Well, it seems that we would need mandatory DNA testing. Perhaps Ancestry.com can be contracted by the government to help in the effort. We simply need to force 327 million people to send in samples of their DNA so that we can trace their bloodlines and figure out who owes and who receives. This would probably be unconstitutional, but never mind that.
What about non-whites who owned slaves? There were a few black slaveholders. There were also Native American slaveholders. Obviously they would need to pay, rather than receive, reparations. But then what if someone is descended from both slaveholders and slaveowners? Consider a Native American whose family was enslaved 300 years ago but owned slaves 200 years ago. Or consider a person whose great-great-great-great-grandfather was a slave owner and great-great-great-great-grandmother a slave. What to do about them? We'll come back to that.
It seems that if we are rectifying historical wrongs, we should not limit ourselves to the borders of this country — borders that, we must recall, are arbitrary and meaningless. Besides, if we're reaching back 150 years anyway, to a time when everyone who was alive is long dead, then why not expand our search even more? It would be absurd to expect a Jewish person whose grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust to pay reparations. Indeed, they are owed reparations from anyone of German descent. Indigenous people in our hemisphere practiced slavery (and human sacrifice) on a massive scale. They were also enslaved by Europeans. They owe but are also owed. North Africans enslaved whites on the Barbary coast. There are many people alive today descended from those who were persecuted by the Japanese. And there are many Japanese alive today descended from those who were persecuted because they were Japanese. What about the descendants of Genghis Kahn (all 16 million of them)? Surely they must pay for the suffering visited upon the innocent by their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, who likely kidnapped and raped their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother. But who pays who here? We'll circle back.
The Romans subjugated and enslaved many people. So did the Ottomans and the Chinese and the Egyptians and the Mayans and every other empire you can name. The descendants of these oppressors should finally pay the piper so that the distant relatives of their victims can be made whole. And we haven't yet dealt with those black people who are descended from the African tribal chieftains who sold other Africans to white slave traders. Clearly, they must answer for their ancestors' roles in this evil. The only problem is that there are probably a lot of people descended from both slaves and slavers.
If we we look at this on a global scale, we discover that everyone in the world is the progeny of the persecutors and the persecuted. Everyone carries guilt and victimhood in their blood. Once you open this can of worms, you find that there are a whole lot more worms than you ever expected. Is this a reason to give up on the whole enterprise? Not at all.
Here's what we should do: All of the people in every town and city in America should, on the appointed day, meet at a designated location. We will then form giant circles so that everyone in the circle has someone standing to the left and right of them. Next, we will all pull 100 dollars out of our pockets and hand it to the person to our left. Thus we have all paid for the sins of our ancestors and have also been paid for the suffering of our ancestors. Everything is put into balance. All accounts are settled. Utopia awaits.
By Matt Walsh
Daily Wire
June 20, 2019
Daily Wire Editor's Note: Because the internet is filled with foolish and utterly dishonest people, the editors of The Daily Wire wish to note that this column utilizes a literary device called sarcasm.
Yesterday [June 19], House Democrats held a hearing to discuss reparations. Actually, it was a hearing to discuss forming a commission to conduct a study to examine reparations. We may be far away from anything like a reparations system actually being enacted in this country, but we're closer than we were even a few years ago, when the leader of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, came out against the idea. Now, most mainstream Democrats, including presidential candidates like Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), favor it. As a noted progressive myself, I, too, support the policy. And I think I know how to make it work.
At the most basic level, reparations would involve the payment of a certain sum of cash to people whose ancestors six generations ago were slaves. It seems most reasonable to take this money from those whose ancestors six generations ago were slaveholders. Wealthy Hollywood actor Danny Glover was at the hearing because his great-great-great-grandmother was a slave. The fact that Glover is worth $40 million, and that most of the slaveholder descendants today are likely quite a bit poorer than him, does not matter. As it turns out, sometimes it's okay to take from the poor and give to the rich.
Now, a few questions must be addressed: Namely, how do we know who is descended from slaves and who is descended from slaveholders? Surely, a black person whose family arrived on these shores in 1970 can't claim any historical entitlement to slavery reparations. And a white person whose family came here after abolition — perhaps as Irish indentured servants — cannot be said to carry any guilt for North American slavery in his blood. It seems odd to think that anyone could carry the guilt for slavery in their blood, but that is the premise we must accept in order to get this ball rolling.
How can we sort this all out? Well, it seems that we would need mandatory DNA testing. Perhaps Ancestry.com can be contracted by the government to help in the effort. We simply need to force 327 million people to send in samples of their DNA so that we can trace their bloodlines and figure out who owes and who receives. This would probably be unconstitutional, but never mind that.
What about non-whites who owned slaves? There were a few black slaveholders. There were also Native American slaveholders. Obviously they would need to pay, rather than receive, reparations. But then what if someone is descended from both slaveholders and slaveowners? Consider a Native American whose family was enslaved 300 years ago but owned slaves 200 years ago. Or consider a person whose great-great-great-great-grandfather was a slave owner and great-great-great-great-grandmother a slave. What to do about them? We'll come back to that.
It seems that if we are rectifying historical wrongs, we should not limit ourselves to the borders of this country — borders that, we must recall, are arbitrary and meaningless. Besides, if we're reaching back 150 years anyway, to a time when everyone who was alive is long dead, then why not expand our search even more? It would be absurd to expect a Jewish person whose grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust to pay reparations. Indeed, they are owed reparations from anyone of German descent. Indigenous people in our hemisphere practiced slavery (and human sacrifice) on a massive scale. They were also enslaved by Europeans. They owe but are also owed. North Africans enslaved whites on the Barbary coast. There are many people alive today descended from those who were persecuted by the Japanese. And there are many Japanese alive today descended from those who were persecuted because they were Japanese. What about the descendants of Genghis Kahn (all 16 million of them)? Surely they must pay for the suffering visited upon the innocent by their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, who likely kidnapped and raped their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother. But who pays who here? We'll circle back.
The Romans subjugated and enslaved many people. So did the Ottomans and the Chinese and the Egyptians and the Mayans and every other empire you can name. The descendants of these oppressors should finally pay the piper so that the distant relatives of their victims can be made whole. And we haven't yet dealt with those black people who are descended from the African tribal chieftains who sold other Africans to white slave traders. Clearly, they must answer for their ancestors' roles in this evil. The only problem is that there are probably a lot of people descended from both slaves and slavers.
If we we look at this on a global scale, we discover that everyone in the world is the progeny of the persecutors and the persecuted. Everyone carries guilt and victimhood in their blood. Once you open this can of worms, you find that there are a whole lot more worms than you ever expected. Is this a reason to give up on the whole enterprise? Not at all.
Here's what we should do: All of the people in every town and city in America should, on the appointed day, meet at a designated location. We will then form giant circles so that everyone in the circle has someone standing to the left and right of them. Next, we will all pull 100 dollars out of our pockets and hand it to the person to our left. Thus we have all paid for the sins of our ancestors and have also been paid for the suffering of our ancestors. Everything is put into balance. All accounts are settled. Utopia awaits.
TRUMP THREATENS TO NUKE IRAN
America’s liberals and the Europeans must be pissing in their pants because Trump has warned Iran of obliteration
Sunday, during an interview with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, Trump warned Iran by saying:
“I'm not looking for war, and if there is, it'll be obliteration like you’ve never seen before.”
The only way to obliterate Iran is to nuke it. A massive conventional strike won’t do it.
An empty warning? Trump called back a strike on Iran because 150 innocent people could have gotten killed. But he’s willing to kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent Iranians … I don’t think so!
I think America’s liberals and the Europeans can change out of their piss-soaked clothes and just rest at ease.
Sunday, during an interview with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, Trump warned Iran by saying:
“I'm not looking for war, and if there is, it'll be obliteration like you’ve never seen before.”
The only way to obliterate Iran is to nuke it. A massive conventional strike won’t do it.
An empty warning? Trump called back a strike on Iran because 150 innocent people could have gotten killed. But he’s willing to kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent Iranians … I don’t think so!
I think America’s liberals and the Europeans can change out of their piss-soaked clothes and just rest at ease.
IF YOU WANT IT REALLY FUCKED UP, TAKE IT TO THE DMV
by Bob Walsh
The CA DMV has had an awful time of late. Seems like they can't do anything right. They thought they MAYBE had it right with the REAL ID but they didn't, but maybe they did, sort-of. I know when I went in to get my REAL ID earlier this year (necessary to buy firearms now, and maybe ammo in CA as of July 1) I had all the right paperwork, and I THINK they got it recorded right, and two different people looked it all over and verified it looked all right. Then I got a form letter from DMV that said "Sorry, we screwed the pooch" and that they buggered up my second address verification. They also said that the letter they sent me could serve as the second address verification, and all I had to do was check the right box, sign it, and send it back in the enclosed self-addressed and stamped letter and it would all be good. And maybe it is, for me anyway.
That being said DMV is shutting down ALL of it's offices a half day on July 24 so they can train their staff in how to un-fuck themselves. It might work. And the sun might rise in the West tomorrow morning.
Maybe if they quit spending all their time registering illegal aliens to vote they could perform their core functions correctly.
The CA DMV has had an awful time of late. Seems like they can't do anything right. They thought they MAYBE had it right with the REAL ID but they didn't, but maybe they did, sort-of. I know when I went in to get my REAL ID earlier this year (necessary to buy firearms now, and maybe ammo in CA as of July 1) I had all the right paperwork, and I THINK they got it recorded right, and two different people looked it all over and verified it looked all right. Then I got a form letter from DMV that said "Sorry, we screwed the pooch" and that they buggered up my second address verification. They also said that the letter they sent me could serve as the second address verification, and all I had to do was check the right box, sign it, and send it back in the enclosed self-addressed and stamped letter and it would all be good. And maybe it is, for me anyway.
That being said DMV is shutting down ALL of it's offices a half day on July 24 so they can train their staff in how to un-fuck themselves. It might work. And the sun might rise in the West tomorrow morning.
Maybe if they quit spending all their time registering illegal aliens to vote they could perform their core functions correctly.
HOW ABOUT REPARATIONS FOR EVERY MEMBER OF A GROUP THAT HAS BEEN DISCRIMINATED AGAINST? ….. OOPS, THAT WOULD BE ALMOST EVERYBODY
Elizabeth Warren Wants Reparations For Same-Sex Couples
By Virginia Kruta
Daily Caller
June 23, 2019
Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has added “gay and lesbian couples” to the growing list of groups for whom she would support reparations.
Citing a tax code that was “discriminatory” against non-heterosexual married couples, Warren tweeted Saturday, “It wasn’t until marriage equality became law that gay & lesbian couples could jointly file tax returns—so they paid more in taxes. Our government owes them more than $50M for the years our discriminatory tax code left them out. We must right these wrongs.”
Warren’s Refund Equality Act, introduced June 20, would retroactively apply “married-filing jointly” status — along with refunding the amount overpaid — to same sex couples who were married in states where such unions were recognized prior to the federal government doing so in 2013.
“The federal government forced legally married same-sex couples in Massachusetts to file as individuals and pay more in taxes for almost a decade,” Warren explained. “We need to call out that discrimination and to make it right — Congress should pass the Refund Equality Act immediately.”
According to NBC News, such reparations could run up a tab of $57 million or higher.
By Virginia Kruta
Daily Caller
June 23, 2019
Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has added “gay and lesbian couples” to the growing list of groups for whom she would support reparations.
Citing a tax code that was “discriminatory” against non-heterosexual married couples, Warren tweeted Saturday, “It wasn’t until marriage equality became law that gay & lesbian couples could jointly file tax returns—so they paid more in taxes. Our government owes them more than $50M for the years our discriminatory tax code left them out. We must right these wrongs.”
Warren’s Refund Equality Act, introduced June 20, would retroactively apply “married-filing jointly” status — along with refunding the amount overpaid — to same sex couples who were married in states where such unions were recognized prior to the federal government doing so in 2013.
“The federal government forced legally married same-sex couples in Massachusetts to file as individuals and pay more in taxes for almost a decade,” Warren explained. “We need to call out that discrimination and to make it right — Congress should pass the Refund Equality Act immediately.”
According to NBC News, such reparations could run up a tab of $57 million or higher.
MAYOR PETE’S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN HAS STUMBLED OVER BODY OF BLACK MAN SHOT BY HIS COPS
Buttigieg faces shout-downs, heckles, profanity at testy town hall after fatal police shooting of black man
By Josh Lederman and Allan Smith
NBC News
June 23, 2019
SOUTH BEND, Indiana — South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg was peppered with tough questions Sunday as he sat alongside the city's police chief at a town hall event following a white police officer shooting a black man to death one week prior.
Buttigieg was repeatedly shouted down and met with profanities and heckles as he spoke during the extremely tense and emotional town hall meeting at a local high school about last weekend's shooting.
The shooting took place when South Bend police responded to a report of a suspicious person going through cars at an apartment complex. When South Bend Police Sgt. Ryan O’Neill, engaged with the suspect, 53-year-old Eric Jack Logan, Logan allegedly approached the officer with a knife. The officer then fired at Logan, who was taken to a hospital and soon after was pronounced dead. The officer was treated for minor injuries.
It was later revealed that O'Neill's body camera was not running during the encounter and O’Neill failed to turn it on at any point. The incident is now under investigation by the St. Joseph County Prosecutor's Office, and O'Neill has been placed on administrative leave.
Buttigieg and South Bend Police Chief Scott Ruszkowski took questions for nearly two hours, with attendees pointedly asking about the failures of the police officer's body camera.
Buttigieg acknowledged that two of his initiatives — implementing body cameras for officers and diversifying the police force — have not yet been successful.
Asked about the failure of the body cameras, he said, "If anybody is trying to figure out who to hold responsible, the administration bought the technology, hired the officer and wrote the policy."
"So at the end of the day, I'm responsible," Buttigieg said.
But he also said, "I can't accept the suggestion that we haven't done anything."
Buttigieg also made news in announcing he will write to the Justice Department to say he agrees that a civil rights division review of the shooting should occur, adding that he can’t promise that DOJ will do one.
The town hall quickly descended into chaos, with attendees shouting in each other’s faces and at the local NAACP chapter president, who tried in vain to calm the crowd by imploring them to “walk in love one to another."
“You are lying,” one attendee shouted at Buttigieg. “We don’t trust you,” said another.
Buttigieg displayed a few flashes of frustration as he was repeatedly interrupted, admonishing crowd to let him finish speaking and return to their seats.
After the meeting broke up, a visibly emotional Buttigieg told reporters that it was difficult to see “people I’ve known for years anguished,” angry at the city and at him, adding, “and I’m angry, too.”
“Right now, I’m not really thinking about the politics of it,” Buttigieg said. “I hope people can see what it’s like for a city to face up to the demons that racism has unleashed.”
The incident comes amid already-high tensions in South Bend over policing. Earlier in Buttigieg's term, he demoted the city's first black police chief, Darryl Boykins, who had ordered the taping of phone calls of senior police officers he alleged made racist comments about him. Buttigieg said he demoted Boykins because he failed to disclose that the FBI was investigating him for allegedly inappropriately wiretapping subordinates. The demotion sparked a wave of criticism from the city's black community, and Boykins' name was brought up multiple times during the town hall.
Boykins sued the city after his 2012 demotion, alleging racial discrimination and saying the taping scandal was used as a pretext for his ouster. Meanwhile, the South Bend Common Council has pushed to make public the secretly recorded tapes of police officers allegedly making racist comments.
EDITOR’S NOTES: I think Mayor Pete just lost what little black support he may have had.
He’s not going to get the cop vote either if Sgt. Ryan O’Neill is hung out to dry. Asking the DOJ for a civil rights division review of the shooting isn’t going to go over well with the cops either.
By Josh Lederman and Allan Smith
NBC News
June 23, 2019
SOUTH BEND, Indiana — South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg was peppered with tough questions Sunday as he sat alongside the city's police chief at a town hall event following a white police officer shooting a black man to death one week prior.
Buttigieg was repeatedly shouted down and met with profanities and heckles as he spoke during the extremely tense and emotional town hall meeting at a local high school about last weekend's shooting.
The shooting took place when South Bend police responded to a report of a suspicious person going through cars at an apartment complex. When South Bend Police Sgt. Ryan O’Neill, engaged with the suspect, 53-year-old Eric Jack Logan, Logan allegedly approached the officer with a knife. The officer then fired at Logan, who was taken to a hospital and soon after was pronounced dead. The officer was treated for minor injuries.
It was later revealed that O'Neill's body camera was not running during the encounter and O’Neill failed to turn it on at any point. The incident is now under investigation by the St. Joseph County Prosecutor's Office, and O'Neill has been placed on administrative leave.
Buttigieg and South Bend Police Chief Scott Ruszkowski took questions for nearly two hours, with attendees pointedly asking about the failures of the police officer's body camera.
Buttigieg acknowledged that two of his initiatives — implementing body cameras for officers and diversifying the police force — have not yet been successful.
Asked about the failure of the body cameras, he said, "If anybody is trying to figure out who to hold responsible, the administration bought the technology, hired the officer and wrote the policy."
"So at the end of the day, I'm responsible," Buttigieg said.
But he also said, "I can't accept the suggestion that we haven't done anything."
Buttigieg also made news in announcing he will write to the Justice Department to say he agrees that a civil rights division review of the shooting should occur, adding that he can’t promise that DOJ will do one.
The town hall quickly descended into chaos, with attendees shouting in each other’s faces and at the local NAACP chapter president, who tried in vain to calm the crowd by imploring them to “walk in love one to another."
“You are lying,” one attendee shouted at Buttigieg. “We don’t trust you,” said another.
Buttigieg displayed a few flashes of frustration as he was repeatedly interrupted, admonishing crowd to let him finish speaking and return to their seats.
After the meeting broke up, a visibly emotional Buttigieg told reporters that it was difficult to see “people I’ve known for years anguished,” angry at the city and at him, adding, “and I’m angry, too.”
“Right now, I’m not really thinking about the politics of it,” Buttigieg said. “I hope people can see what it’s like for a city to face up to the demons that racism has unleashed.”
The incident comes amid already-high tensions in South Bend over policing. Earlier in Buttigieg's term, he demoted the city's first black police chief, Darryl Boykins, who had ordered the taping of phone calls of senior police officers he alleged made racist comments about him. Buttigieg said he demoted Boykins because he failed to disclose that the FBI was investigating him for allegedly inappropriately wiretapping subordinates. The demotion sparked a wave of criticism from the city's black community, and Boykins' name was brought up multiple times during the town hall.
Boykins sued the city after his 2012 demotion, alleging racial discrimination and saying the taping scandal was used as a pretext for his ouster. Meanwhile, the South Bend Common Council has pushed to make public the secretly recorded tapes of police officers allegedly making racist comments.
EDITOR’S NOTES: I think Mayor Pete just lost what little black support he may have had.
He’s not going to get the cop vote either if Sgt. Ryan O’Neill is hung out to dry. Asking the DOJ for a civil rights division review of the shooting isn’t going to go over well with the cops either.
FIRST NYPD WOULD HAVE TO STOP CLASSIFYING RAPE AS ILLEGAL ENTRY
De Blasio Promises NYPD Will Investigate Trump If A ‘Complaint’ Is Made In New Rape Allegation
By Scott Morefield
Daily Caller
June 23, 2019
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters Saturday that the NYPD would investigate recently revealed allegations against President Donald Trump and “find out the truth” if a “complaint” is made.
Elle advice columnist E. Jean Carroll accused the then-businessman of raping her inside the dressing room of a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman in 1995 or 1996, but said she decided not to press charges because it would be “disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock down there without any protection.”
A senior White House official disputed Carroll’s claim as a “completely false and unrealistic story” that was “created simply to make the president look bad.” President Trump himself later responded to the allegations via a statement that claimed “zero evidence” for the charge.
“No pictures?” the statement read. “No surveillance? No video? No reports? No sales attendants around?? I would like to thank Bergdorf Goodman for confirming they have no video footage of any such incident, because it never happened. False accusations diminish the severity of real assault. All should condemn false accusations and any actual assault in the strongest possible terms.”
De Blasio called the charges “serious” in a statement.
“Now this is the most serious of all the charges,” de Blasio said. “The moment we in New York City with our police department have a complaint, we will investigate immediately, and we will find out the truth.”
However, former SDNY federal prosecutor and current NBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah, who’s no fan of the president, pointed out a critical legal fact — that the five-year statue of limitations for first-degree rape, repealed in 2006, would still apply to anything that allegedly occurred prior to that.
By Scott Morefield
Daily Caller
June 23, 2019
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters Saturday that the NYPD would investigate recently revealed allegations against President Donald Trump and “find out the truth” if a “complaint” is made.
Elle advice columnist E. Jean Carroll accused the then-businessman of raping her inside the dressing room of a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman in 1995 or 1996, but said she decided not to press charges because it would be “disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock down there without any protection.”
A senior White House official disputed Carroll’s claim as a “completely false and unrealistic story” that was “created simply to make the president look bad.” President Trump himself later responded to the allegations via a statement that claimed “zero evidence” for the charge.
“No pictures?” the statement read. “No surveillance? No video? No reports? No sales attendants around?? I would like to thank Bergdorf Goodman for confirming they have no video footage of any such incident, because it never happened. False accusations diminish the severity of real assault. All should condemn false accusations and any actual assault in the strongest possible terms.”
De Blasio called the charges “serious” in a statement.
“Now this is the most serious of all the charges,” de Blasio said. “The moment we in New York City with our police department have a complaint, we will investigate immediately, and we will find out the truth.”
However, former SDNY federal prosecutor and current NBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah, who’s no fan of the president, pointed out a critical legal fact — that the five-year statue of limitations for first-degree rape, repealed in 2006, would still apply to anything that allegedly occurred prior to that.
JUST ANOTHER DAY IN L.A.
Famed Snowboarding Daredevil Randomly Killed On L.A. Street
LAPPL News Watch
June 24, 2019
Dmitry Koltsov spent most of his life with two feet planted on a board. His ability to pull off precise tricks and flips while vaulting through the air on a snowboard earned him a place on the podium at Russian championship meets and international competitions.
Friends said his daredevil nature also made him a hero at skate parks in Southern California. He’d even taken his talents to the ocean, working as a surf instructor in Bali and later Los Angeles.
Friends said Koltsov was hopping off a board in downtown Los Angeles on June 10 with a group of other skaters when a Kia Sorrento drove toward them. Neither Koltsov nor his friends knew the man approaching them. Koltsov didn’t know the skate session he’d just completed would be his last.
Prosecutors say the man in the car, Rhett Nelson of Utah, shot Koltsov in the head without provocation.
It was the latest in a string of senseless, violent crimes that authorities say culminated an hour later when Nelson walked into a Jack in the Box restaurant in Alhambra and fatally shot veteran Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Joseph Solano.
Nelson has been charged with two counts of murder and other crimes.
LAPPL News Watch
June 24, 2019
Dmitry Koltsov spent most of his life with two feet planted on a board. His ability to pull off precise tricks and flips while vaulting through the air on a snowboard earned him a place on the podium at Russian championship meets and international competitions.
Friends said his daredevil nature also made him a hero at skate parks in Southern California. He’d even taken his talents to the ocean, working as a surf instructor in Bali and later Los Angeles.
Friends said Koltsov was hopping off a board in downtown Los Angeles on June 10 with a group of other skaters when a Kia Sorrento drove toward them. Neither Koltsov nor his friends knew the man approaching them. Koltsov didn’t know the skate session he’d just completed would be his last.
Prosecutors say the man in the car, Rhett Nelson of Utah, shot Koltsov in the head without provocation.
It was the latest in a string of senseless, violent crimes that authorities say culminated an hour later when Nelson walked into a Jack in the Box restaurant in Alhambra and fatally shot veteran Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Joseph Solano.
Nelson has been charged with two counts of murder and other crimes.
SIGHTS TO SEE NEAR GUADALAJARA
Jalisco: 15 trash bags with remains of 12 women and men
By Chivis Martinez
Borderland Beat
June 23, 2019
Tlaquepaque, Jal. - Around fifteen blackplastic bags containing human remains was located five bundles in the colony El tajo in Tlaquepaque, Jalisco.
The bags contained the remains of 8 women, 2 men and 2 undetermined because of decomposition.
This finding occurs just a few hours after the confrontation occurred in the Jardin de Eden colony, after the murder of a police investigator from the to the State Attorney office, as well as the murder of another officer, murdered in the Colonia Villas de San MartÃn, both sites located in Tlajomulco.
By Chivis Martinez
Borderland Beat
June 23, 2019
Tlaquepaque, Jal. - Around fifteen blackplastic bags containing human remains was located five bundles in the colony El tajo in Tlaquepaque, Jalisco.
The bags contained the remains of 8 women, 2 men and 2 undetermined because of decomposition.
This finding occurs just a few hours after the confrontation occurred in the Jardin de Eden colony, after the murder of a police investigator from the to the State Attorney office, as well as the murder of another officer, murdered in the Colonia Villas de San MartÃn, both sites located in Tlajomulco.
IS THE NEW US PEACE PLAN GOING TO WORK?
The White House peace plan has been criticized for relying on what has been tried before, but some say its a good start. “Chances of it getting implemented are there," says Palestinian economist. Under plan, Gulf states will help Palestinians upgrade their economy by investing $50 billion in projects
Reuters and Israel Hayom
June 24, 2019
Several major projects in U.S. President Donald Trump’s $50 billion economic blueprint for Israeli-Palestinian peace mirror previous proposals stalled by conflict, analysts said on Sunday.
The plan, spearheaded by Trump's son-in-law and Senior Strategic Adviser Jared Kushner, calls for the creation of a global investment fund to boost the Palestinian and neighboring Arab state economies with some 179 infrastructure and business projects.
Shaul Arieli, a former Israeli peace negotiator, said many were not new.
“Most of the plans have already been presented under the Obama administration,” said Arieli, now an analyst at the Economic Cooperation Foundation think-tank that advocates for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In an interview with Reuters, Kushner said the plan’s authors had studied why previous peace efforts had failed in formulating a fresh initiative.
“We tried to take the good things they did and then come up with a new approach to try to bring this forward,” he said.
The plan, presented in a slick 40-page document, aims to cut the Palestinian poverty rate in half and double the amount of drinkable water in the Palestinian territories but some of the ideas require Israeli agreement and have been knocking around for decades.
The Trump administration’s decision to release the economic portion of its peace plan without any discussion of political solutions has prompted a mixture of derision and exasperation among Arab politicians and commentators.
However, Mohammad Abu Jayyab, a Palestinian economist in Gaza, said the plan might still work.
“Chances of it getting implemented are there: the Gulf money and the influential American policy and the regional satisfaction to achieve common interests,” he said.
Gaza-west bank corridor, via Israel
Proposed projects include:
Under the plan, a proposed $5 billion transportation corridor would be built between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, crossing Israel.
Gaza and the West Bank are around 35km apart at their closest point. However, they are divided not just by geography but by long-standing and bitter divisions between President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA), whose power base is in the West Bank, and the PA’s Islamist rival, Hamas, which controls Gaza
A 47km long “safe passage” through Israel between Gaza and the Hebron in the West Bank was envisaged by interim peace deals in the 1990s. Proposals included railroads, tunnels, elevated roads and a monorail.
The plan also entails upgrading facilities at key crossing points along Gaza’s border, including with Egypt. Citing security concerns, Egypt has often kept its Rafah crossing closed, cutting off Gaza’s main gateway to the world.
Power plants
The plan proposes a $590 million upgrade to Gaza’s sole power plant. The enclave has suffered for years from unreliable electrical supply, with daily, prolonged blackouts the norm. Within a year of the project’s implementation, Palestinians in Gaza would receive at least 16 hours of electricity per day.
Before the proposal’s publication, Qatar was already in talks with Israeli officials about building a new power line from Israel to Gaza, which the Gulf nation would help to fund. The new line would provide 100 megawatts to Gaza, which currently gets a total of 120 megawatts from Israel, short of the 500 megawatts to 600 megawatts that Palestinians say the blockaded enclave needs.
The plan also includes $1.2 billion in loans and private sector financing for gas-fired power plants in Hebron and Jenin in the West Bank.
The Palestine Investment Fund (PIF), which is the PA’s sovereign fund, is the lead investor in an ongoing initiative to build a power plant in Jenin. PIF says the power plant requires $600 million in capital, which matches the figure quoted in the Trump team’s proposal.
A cornerstone was laid for the project in late 2016 and PIF and its partners have issued bids for the plant’s construction. According to documents reviewed by Reuters, project shareholders will finance $180 million, with “$420 million from international development and finance institutions”.
Even if the project is fully financed and built, it cannot be operated without a gas supply, which requires Israeli approval, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.
Gaza desalination plant
The US plan calls for channeling “significant investments” into infrastructure to increase water supply in Gaza, including desalination facilities aiming to double the amount of potable water available to Palestinians, per capita, within five years.
The Palestinian Water Authority, in partnership with international institutions including the European Commission (EC), the European Investment Bank, the Union for the Mediterranean, the Islamic Development Bank and World Bank, has already prepared a comprehensive and integrated investment program for the Gaza central desalination plant.
In 2018, the EU said it had received €456 million in international financial support for the project.
Work still has not been carried out, but the EC noted in April “substantial progress” in ongoing discussions between the PA and Israel on the entry of building materials to Gaza.
The Trump team’s proposals include $1 billion in grants, loans and private sector financing for the development of a natural gas field offshore of Gaza. The gas field is currently fully-owned by the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF).
PIF estimates the field’s development would cost $1 billion, which matches the figure quoted in the Trump team’s proposal.
Plans to develop the field have been put off several times over the past decade due to Palestinian political disputes and conflict with Israel, as well as economic factors, analysts say.
Reuters and Israel Hayom
June 24, 2019
Several major projects in U.S. President Donald Trump’s $50 billion economic blueprint for Israeli-Palestinian peace mirror previous proposals stalled by conflict, analysts said on Sunday.
The plan, spearheaded by Trump's son-in-law and Senior Strategic Adviser Jared Kushner, calls for the creation of a global investment fund to boost the Palestinian and neighboring Arab state economies with some 179 infrastructure and business projects.
Shaul Arieli, a former Israeli peace negotiator, said many were not new.
“Most of the plans have already been presented under the Obama administration,” said Arieli, now an analyst at the Economic Cooperation Foundation think-tank that advocates for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In an interview with Reuters, Kushner said the plan’s authors had studied why previous peace efforts had failed in formulating a fresh initiative.
“We tried to take the good things they did and then come up with a new approach to try to bring this forward,” he said.
The plan, presented in a slick 40-page document, aims to cut the Palestinian poverty rate in half and double the amount of drinkable water in the Palestinian territories but some of the ideas require Israeli agreement and have been knocking around for decades.
The Trump administration’s decision to release the economic portion of its peace plan without any discussion of political solutions has prompted a mixture of derision and exasperation among Arab politicians and commentators.
However, Mohammad Abu Jayyab, a Palestinian economist in Gaza, said the plan might still work.
“Chances of it getting implemented are there: the Gulf money and the influential American policy and the regional satisfaction to achieve common interests,” he said.
Gaza-west bank corridor, via Israel
Proposed projects include:
Under the plan, a proposed $5 billion transportation corridor would be built between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, crossing Israel.
Gaza and the West Bank are around 35km apart at their closest point. However, they are divided not just by geography but by long-standing and bitter divisions between President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA), whose power base is in the West Bank, and the PA’s Islamist rival, Hamas, which controls Gaza
A 47km long “safe passage” through Israel between Gaza and the Hebron in the West Bank was envisaged by interim peace deals in the 1990s. Proposals included railroads, tunnels, elevated roads and a monorail.
The plan also entails upgrading facilities at key crossing points along Gaza’s border, including with Egypt. Citing security concerns, Egypt has often kept its Rafah crossing closed, cutting off Gaza’s main gateway to the world.
Power plants
The plan proposes a $590 million upgrade to Gaza’s sole power plant. The enclave has suffered for years from unreliable electrical supply, with daily, prolonged blackouts the norm. Within a year of the project’s implementation, Palestinians in Gaza would receive at least 16 hours of electricity per day.
Before the proposal’s publication, Qatar was already in talks with Israeli officials about building a new power line from Israel to Gaza, which the Gulf nation would help to fund. The new line would provide 100 megawatts to Gaza, which currently gets a total of 120 megawatts from Israel, short of the 500 megawatts to 600 megawatts that Palestinians say the blockaded enclave needs.
The plan also includes $1.2 billion in loans and private sector financing for gas-fired power plants in Hebron and Jenin in the West Bank.
The Palestine Investment Fund (PIF), which is the PA’s sovereign fund, is the lead investor in an ongoing initiative to build a power plant in Jenin. PIF says the power plant requires $600 million in capital, which matches the figure quoted in the Trump team’s proposal.
A cornerstone was laid for the project in late 2016 and PIF and its partners have issued bids for the plant’s construction. According to documents reviewed by Reuters, project shareholders will finance $180 million, with “$420 million from international development and finance institutions”.
Even if the project is fully financed and built, it cannot be operated without a gas supply, which requires Israeli approval, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.
Gaza desalination plant
The US plan calls for channeling “significant investments” into infrastructure to increase water supply in Gaza, including desalination facilities aiming to double the amount of potable water available to Palestinians, per capita, within five years.
The Palestinian Water Authority, in partnership with international institutions including the European Commission (EC), the European Investment Bank, the Union for the Mediterranean, the Islamic Development Bank and World Bank, has already prepared a comprehensive and integrated investment program for the Gaza central desalination plant.
In 2018, the EU said it had received €456 million in international financial support for the project.
Work still has not been carried out, but the EC noted in April “substantial progress” in ongoing discussions between the PA and Israel on the entry of building materials to Gaza.
The Trump team’s proposals include $1 billion in grants, loans and private sector financing for the development of a natural gas field offshore of Gaza. The gas field is currently fully-owned by the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF).
PIF estimates the field’s development would cost $1 billion, which matches the figure quoted in the Trump team’s proposal.
Plans to develop the field have been put off several times over the past decade due to Palestinian political disputes and conflict with Israel, as well as economic factors, analysts say.
Monday, June 24, 2019
THE BABY THAT RECEIVED EVERY MILITARY COMBAT AWARD FOR VALOR THE US CAN BESTOW ON A SOLDIER
Audie Murphy said: “No soldier ever really survives a war.”
I like to watch the Grit channel on TV because it is a Western channel. Lately Grit has been showing a lot of Audie Murphy movies. I enjoy his movies and I think he turned out to be a fairly good actor. I have always admired Murphy for the awesome hero he was in WW2. The little Texan received the Medal of Honor for holding off an entire company of German soldiers for an hour all by himself at the Colmar Pocket in France in January 1945, then leading a successful counterattack while wounded and out of ammunition.
Terry Kettler, a former FBI agent who took my place at College of the Mainland when I retired in 1993, just sent me an article about the life of Audie Murphy.
Here is that article about a hero the likes of which will probably never be seen again.
Remembering “Baby”: The Life of Audie Leon Murphy
By David E. Petzal
Field & Stream
May 24, 2019
He was a Texan, and a child of the Great Depression. Born in 1925, he was one of seven children. His father deserted his family when he was a boy, and his mother died when he was sixteen. He dropped out of school in the fifth grade to chop cotton, and he kept his brothers and sisters from starving by shooting rabbits and squirrels.
When World War II began, he tried to enlist in the Marine Corps, the Navy, and the Army paratroops, but they beheld his 5-foot, 5-inch, 110-pound frame and said there was not enough there to work with. He tried the Army Infantry and, with an affidavit from his sister that falsified his age, was accepted.
He showed so little promise at first that his unit tried to make him a cook. He fainted after his first round of injections. His fellow soldiers nicknamed him “Baby,” and his commanding officers did their best to keep him from seeing combat, because they thought he had no chance at all. But he persevered, and his true nature emerged.
He was a born soldier. He was an expert shot, and fearless. He had that quality that the Army calls “command presence.” Men would follow him willingly in a fight. He walked with a stooped, hunched-over gait, sniffing for German cigarette smoke. When it led him to Germans, he killed them.
He was assigned to Company B, First Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division. With this unit, he would go on to fight in Sicily, Italy, France, and Belgium. He was promoted to corporal, then to sergeant, and ultimately to second lieutenant. He was awarded every medal that the United States Army can bestow for bravery, including the Medal of Honor.
He survived the war and, at the urging of the actor James Cagney, auditioned for the movies. He succeeded, and insisted that he was able to do so only because his directors protected him from situations where he would really have to act, as Gary Cooper did in High Noon, or John Wayne in The Searchers, or Alan Ladd in Shane.
Part of his film success came from the audience’s awareness that the slender, handsome actor on the screen was in real life a killer, and a braver man than any character he ever played.
His movie career lasted from 1948 to 1969. Almost all of his films were westerns. One exception is the 1955 film version of his book, To Hell and Back, his experiences in World War II. The movie was an enormous success, and he described making it as "…watching my friends get killed all over again."
He carried the war with him. He was addicted at times to pills and alcohol, slept—badly—with a pistol under his pillow, and wept for the German orphans he’d created. He said: “No soldier ever really survives a war.”
On May 28, 1971, the weather did what the Germans could not. A small plane in which he was a passenger ran into a thunderstorm and crashed near Catawba, Virginia. Everyone on board was killed. At age 46, he would have no more nightmares.
He is buried at Arlington. Medal of Honor recipients who are interred there are entitled to headstones decorated with gold leaf, but he insisted that his marker be left plain, and so it was.
The only Arlington gravesite to receive more visitors than that of Audie Leon Murphy is that of John F. Kennedy.
I like to watch the Grit channel on TV because it is a Western channel. Lately Grit has been showing a lot of Audie Murphy movies. I enjoy his movies and I think he turned out to be a fairly good actor. I have always admired Murphy for the awesome hero he was in WW2. The little Texan received the Medal of Honor for holding off an entire company of German soldiers for an hour all by himself at the Colmar Pocket in France in January 1945, then leading a successful counterattack while wounded and out of ammunition.
Terry Kettler, a former FBI agent who took my place at College of the Mainland when I retired in 1993, just sent me an article about the life of Audie Murphy.
Here is that article about a hero the likes of which will probably never be seen again.
Remembering “Baby”: The Life of Audie Leon Murphy
By David E. Petzal
Field & Stream
May 24, 2019
He was a Texan, and a child of the Great Depression. Born in 1925, he was one of seven children. His father deserted his family when he was a boy, and his mother died when he was sixteen. He dropped out of school in the fifth grade to chop cotton, and he kept his brothers and sisters from starving by shooting rabbits and squirrels.
When World War II began, he tried to enlist in the Marine Corps, the Navy, and the Army paratroops, but they beheld his 5-foot, 5-inch, 110-pound frame and said there was not enough there to work with. He tried the Army Infantry and, with an affidavit from his sister that falsified his age, was accepted.
He showed so little promise at first that his unit tried to make him a cook. He fainted after his first round of injections. His fellow soldiers nicknamed him “Baby,” and his commanding officers did their best to keep him from seeing combat, because they thought he had no chance at all. But he persevered, and his true nature emerged.
He was a born soldier. He was an expert shot, and fearless. He had that quality that the Army calls “command presence.” Men would follow him willingly in a fight. He walked with a stooped, hunched-over gait, sniffing for German cigarette smoke. When it led him to Germans, he killed them.
He was assigned to Company B, First Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division. With this unit, he would go on to fight in Sicily, Italy, France, and Belgium. He was promoted to corporal, then to sergeant, and ultimately to second lieutenant. He was awarded every medal that the United States Army can bestow for bravery, including the Medal of Honor.
He survived the war and, at the urging of the actor James Cagney, auditioned for the movies. He succeeded, and insisted that he was able to do so only because his directors protected him from situations where he would really have to act, as Gary Cooper did in High Noon, or John Wayne in The Searchers, or Alan Ladd in Shane.
Part of his film success came from the audience’s awareness that the slender, handsome actor on the screen was in real life a killer, and a braver man than any character he ever played.
His movie career lasted from 1948 to 1969. Almost all of his films were westerns. One exception is the 1955 film version of his book, To Hell and Back, his experiences in World War II. The movie was an enormous success, and he described making it as "…watching my friends get killed all over again."
He carried the war with him. He was addicted at times to pills and alcohol, slept—badly—with a pistol under his pillow, and wept for the German orphans he’d created. He said: “No soldier ever really survives a war.”
On May 28, 1971, the weather did what the Germans could not. A small plane in which he was a passenger ran into a thunderstorm and crashed near Catawba, Virginia. Everyone on board was killed. At age 46, he would have no more nightmares.
He is buried at Arlington. Medal of Honor recipients who are interred there are entitled to headstones decorated with gold leaf, but he insisted that his marker be left plain, and so it was.
The only Arlington gravesite to receive more visitors than that of Audie Leon Murphy is that of John F. Kennedy.
IS FAUXCAHONTAS WARREN ABOUT TO CLIMB OVER UNCLE JOE AND CRAZY BERNIE?
by Bob Walsh
Some of the Sunday show talking heads are now openly speculating that, at least for the nonce, Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Warren may be about to make a strong move against the large lead of Joe Biden and the microscopic lead of Bernie Sanders, at least if she can make a credible showing in the upcoming Democrap "I'm More Of A Commie Than You Are" pseudo-debates.
The general speculation is that Crazy Bernie is unelectable and that Joe Biden is about to crash and burn due to the weight of all the bullshit he is carrying around. Plus they are both ancient White men where Warren is a female pseudo-AMI. (At least she has the good taste to WANT to be a minority and to pretend for years to be one.)
Her actual positions are no more stupid than most of the rest of the 743 people running for the Democrap nomination and she has managed to articlulate some actual positions other than "Donald Trump Is The Anti-Christ."
Personally I would hope that "the system" would eventually reject a person who lied about her basic background for over 20 years for personal gain, but I am not sure I would bet on that actually happening. How about an Elizabeth Warren and Pete Bootiejudge ticket? Damn, would that be fun or what?
Of course this far out such speculation is just that, speculation. Rank speculation at that. But it sure is fun. I may even watch some of the pseudo-debates, just to see if anybody crashes and burns, or says anything so outrageous the liberal pimp moderators piss themselves.
Some of the Sunday show talking heads are now openly speculating that, at least for the nonce, Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Warren may be about to make a strong move against the large lead of Joe Biden and the microscopic lead of Bernie Sanders, at least if she can make a credible showing in the upcoming Democrap "I'm More Of A Commie Than You Are" pseudo-debates.
The general speculation is that Crazy Bernie is unelectable and that Joe Biden is about to crash and burn due to the weight of all the bullshit he is carrying around. Plus they are both ancient White men where Warren is a female pseudo-AMI. (At least she has the good taste to WANT to be a minority and to pretend for years to be one.)
Her actual positions are no more stupid than most of the rest of the 743 people running for the Democrap nomination and she has managed to articlulate some actual positions other than "Donald Trump Is The Anti-Christ."
Personally I would hope that "the system" would eventually reject a person who lied about her basic background for over 20 years for personal gain, but I am not sure I would bet on that actually happening. How about an Elizabeth Warren and Pete Bootiejudge ticket? Damn, would that be fun or what?
Of course this far out such speculation is just that, speculation. Rank speculation at that. But it sure is fun. I may even watch some of the pseudo-debates, just to see if anybody crashes and burns, or says anything so outrageous the liberal pimp moderators piss themselves.
THE RETURN OF THE GIANT GIRAFFE.... MAYBE KIND-OF SORT-OF
by Bob Walsh
TOYS R US may be baking a come-back, after a fashion, prior to the Christmas season. You may be able to look forward to Geoffrey the Giraffe enticing your kiddies again.
Richard Berry, formerly the head of Toys R Us, is attempting a relaunch at probably six brick-and-mortar locations, with a significant internet presence, calling the operation Tru Kids Inc..
The new stores will be only about 10,000 square feet and will have a play area as well as a retail space. He is hoping to cut down substantially on initial costs by getting the suppliers to front the merchandise, essentially selling on consignment.
It will be a tough road. Amazon is going to offer a print toy catalog this year, and both Walmart and Target are offering a major holiday presence in the toy field.
The old chain had about 700 retail locations in the US and sold about $7 billion per year.
TOYS R US may be baking a come-back, after a fashion, prior to the Christmas season. You may be able to look forward to Geoffrey the Giraffe enticing your kiddies again.
Richard Berry, formerly the head of Toys R Us, is attempting a relaunch at probably six brick-and-mortar locations, with a significant internet presence, calling the operation Tru Kids Inc..
The new stores will be only about 10,000 square feet and will have a play area as well as a retail space. He is hoping to cut down substantially on initial costs by getting the suppliers to front the merchandise, essentially selling on consignment.
It will be a tough road. Amazon is going to offer a print toy catalog this year, and both Walmart and Target are offering a major holiday presence in the toy field.
The old chain had about 700 retail locations in the US and sold about $7 billion per year.
KIM FOXX SHOULD BE TARRED AND FEATHERED AND RUN OUT OF CHICAGO ON A RAIL!
Ex-ethics officer calls Kim Foxx a liar in blast over Smollett case
By Gabrielle Fonrouge
New York Post’s Page Six
June 21, 2019
Hours after State’s Attorney Kim Foxx deflected blame to her former chief ethics officer for her decision to not appoint a special prosecutor in the Jussie Smollett case, that former staffer called Foxx’s assertions lies.
April Perry, who served as Foxx’s chief ethics officer until May, sent an email to reporters Friday that contradicted statements Foxx made shortly after a Chicago judge slammed her handling of the Smollett case and appointed a special prosecutor Friday.
Foxx said she was just following “the advice and counsel of my then Chief Ethics Officer” when she opted out of ordering a special prosecutor — but Perry said the opposite to be true.
“My advice was that First Assistant Joseph Magats seek the court’s approval and request a Special State’s Attorney appointment in this matter. I prepared a motion and order to that effect, and e-mailed it to the First Assistant on February 20. Shortly after sending that email, the First Assistant advised me that State’s Attorney Foxx determined that the motion and order should not be filed,” Perry wrote in an email.
Records of Perry’s emails were obtained by The Post in April and back up her claims. A special prosecutor order was never filed in the case, according to court records.
“It is a Chief Ethics Officer’s job to provide the best advice and guidance possible based upon the facts given to her at the time,” Perry said Friday.
“Sometimes that advice is followed, sometimes it is not.”
Perry resigned from Foxx’s office in April.
Earlier Friday, a Chicago judge slammed Foxx’s handling of the case and said her office’s entire prosecution of Smollett was invalid because Magats never had the authority to act in her place.
Foxx’s office did not return emails or phone calls about Perry’s claims.
By Gabrielle Fonrouge
New York Post’s Page Six
June 21, 2019
Hours after State’s Attorney Kim Foxx deflected blame to her former chief ethics officer for her decision to not appoint a special prosecutor in the Jussie Smollett case, that former staffer called Foxx’s assertions lies.
April Perry, who served as Foxx’s chief ethics officer until May, sent an email to reporters Friday that contradicted statements Foxx made shortly after a Chicago judge slammed her handling of the Smollett case and appointed a special prosecutor Friday.
Foxx said she was just following “the advice and counsel of my then Chief Ethics Officer” when she opted out of ordering a special prosecutor — but Perry said the opposite to be true.
“My advice was that First Assistant Joseph Magats seek the court’s approval and request a Special State’s Attorney appointment in this matter. I prepared a motion and order to that effect, and e-mailed it to the First Assistant on February 20. Shortly after sending that email, the First Assistant advised me that State’s Attorney Foxx determined that the motion and order should not be filed,” Perry wrote in an email.
Records of Perry’s emails were obtained by The Post in April and back up her claims. A special prosecutor order was never filed in the case, according to court records.
“It is a Chief Ethics Officer’s job to provide the best advice and guidance possible based upon the facts given to her at the time,” Perry said Friday.
“Sometimes that advice is followed, sometimes it is not.”
Perry resigned from Foxx’s office in April.
Earlier Friday, a Chicago judge slammed Foxx’s handling of the case and said her office’s entire prosecution of Smollett was invalid because Magats never had the authority to act in her place.
Foxx’s office did not return emails or phone calls about Perry’s claims.
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