- Adrienne August was convicted of burglary in 2018 based on an impermissibly suggestive eyewitness identification process and exonerated in November.
- In Quintin Alonzo's case, exculpatory evidence withheld by the prosecution in Dallas back in 2003 turned out to be decisive.
Finally, Lydell Grant's name isn't on the registry yet, but it should be soon enough after he was released on bond last week pending a final decision from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. DNA testing ruled him out as a potential suspect in a 2010 capital murder for which he was falsely convicted.
Congratulations to everyone involved in all these cases.
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11 comments:
Regarding these exonerations, the central forensic analyst Charles Linch of SWIFS was a wild-card and mentally unbalanced, steeped in depression and alcoholism.
[In 1993] Charles Linch, a trace evidence analyst [SWIFS Crime Lab in Dallas], testified about carpet fibers found on a sheet and blanket used to wrap the bodies. He said, “There was one fiber from the white bed sheet that I could not exclude as coming from the master bedroom of the mobile home trailer [where Kussmaul was staying]. There was one trilobal fiber from the pink blanket that I could not exclude as coming from the bedroom of the mobile home trailer.”
Linch said that “going through my steps of comparison with the comparison light microscope, the polarized light microscope, the fluorescence microscope and micro spectrophotometer, no differences at all were seen. That means that the fibers found with the bedding with the bodies either came from the carpet in the mobile trailer or carpet that is identical to that in the mobile trailer.”
Although Linch had not performed any DNA testing, he testified that he examined the bedding used to wrap the bodies and found no semen. He said that without sperm, no DNA tests could be performed using the method of DNA testing then employed by the crime lab. “To answer your question with regard to seminal fluid and the absence of sperm, it would be unlikely to recover DNA,” he testified. He was never asked whether any tests were performed on the rape kit or paper towels found next to Murphy’s body.
He [defendant Kussmaul] subsequently obtained his file from his trial attorney Walter Reaves. In the file, Kussmaul found a 1993 report showing that DNA testing had been performed on the vaginal swab from the rape kit and on the paper towels found next to Murphy’s body, all of which contained sperm. The tests excluded Kussmaul, Long, Shelton, and Pitts.
[In 2014] Blake Goertz, the DNA section supervisor of the Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab in Waco, testified and agreed with [senior DNA forensic analyst for Cellmark Forensics] Leal’s findings. Leal and Goertz agreed that the 1993 DQ-Alpha testing on evidence gathered during the investigation of the crime excluded all four defendants. Both disagreed with Linch’s trial testimony in which he suggested that such results did not exist in the case and were unlikely in any case because of the limitations of the technology at the time.
Soon after Mr. Linch's testimony, he was hospitalized into a psychiatric unit. As such, this testimony, and every other testimony he provided (as well as all the case work he handled at SWIFS), should have been re-analyzed for accuracy and completeness. His mental well-being should have been disclosed to the defense and prosecution. It should have been considered as Brady Material.
His boss, SWIFS Crime Lab Director Dr. Jeffrey Barnard, knew of Linch's unstable mind. Yet did nothing regarding his testimony or trace evidence analysis.
"Just because someone is hospitalized for depression doesn't mean that results of tests done at a previous time aren't accurate and that those findings could not be adequately conveyed to a jury."
The willful obliviousness of Dr. Barnard's statement is astounding.
Charles Linch was required to testify about his work at SWIFS at other trials even after being hospitalized.
Dr. Barnard did not notify anyone.
And 25 years of freedom was taken away from 4 men...that we know of.
More about Charles Linch and the oblivious Dr. Jeffrey Barnard…
As reported in The Dallas Morning News, 05/07/2000, By Holly Becka and Howard Swindle / The Dallas Morning News
One in an occasional series
The irony wasn't lost on him, his hands cuffed behind his back, as the pair of law officers steered him toward the electronically controlled door.
"It was unnecessary," he said, "humiliating." Particularly for a man of his position.
Beyond the locked door and down the hall of Doctors Hospital's 3 North Psychiatric Unit, Brenda Franklin had been in bed for hours but was awakened by commotion.
"He didn't come willingly," she recalled. "'Cause there was a big ruckus...it woke everybody up. But we didn't get up. We were used to it."
It was February 1994, another chaotic night in the fractured world of big-city psychiatric units.
The next morning, Ms. Franklin saw the ward's newest patient in the day room, a meticulously dressed man in a sports jacket, sipping coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes while he jotted notes on a legal pad. She read his notes upside down; they were details about a serial killer.
The man vanished from the lockdown unit a couple of days later, Ms. Franklin said, only to return. She was stunned when he told her where he'd been.
Declared a danger to himself or others and prescribed powerful anti-depressive drugs, he had been temporarily released to testify in two of the Southwest's most infamous capital murder trials. Notwithstanding circumstance, he was an expert witness.
At the time he was hospitalized, Charles Linch, a boot-strapping ex-Marine who started as a body-tagger in the morgue, had already established himself as the prosecution's premier trace evidence analyst at Southwestern Institute of Forensic Science in Dallas.
His testimony had been crucial against Charles Albright, the so-called Eyeball Killer who murdered, then cut out the eyes of three prostitutes in south Dallas County. It was a no-fingerprint case, but Mr. Linch took hair from the victims' bodies, a blanket left at a crime scene and from Mr. Albright's own vacuum cleaner and linked him to the victims - conclusively enough for a jury to sentence him to life in prison.
In months and years to come, the quiet-spoken forensic expert would deliver equally compelling testimony against Jason Massey, an accused mutilation killer; Michael Blair, an accused child abductor-killer; and Darlie Routier, a Rowlett homemaker accused of fatally stabbing two of her sons. All were condemned to death, in no small part, according to records, to Mr. Linch's testimony.
'Very angry'
What Brenda Franklin saw that late-February day in 1994, however, was not the unflappable, authoritative expert capable of weathering cross-examination.
"I don't think he really knew what was going on when they brought him in there," said Ms. Franklin, a licensed vocational nurse who was undergoing treatment for depression and who struck up a friendship with Mr. Linch. "He was too out of it, except for fighting. He was very angry, very angry...
"In the mornings before he got his medicine, he would be real, real shaky, and it was really obvious he was detoxing real hard, and was very irritable. Very angry."
The primary focus of his anger, Ms. Franklin recalled, was Mr. Linch's supervisors at SWIFS, the same people who deemed his depression and drinking dangerous enough to have him treated, but apparently not serious enough to keep him from testifying in two capital murder trials while he was hospitalized.
Mr. Linch, now a forensic analyst in Virginia after resigning from SWIFS last August in a bitter dispute over pay and promotion, doesn't question that he was depressed six years ago. But he questions his supervisors' motives and methods.
continued...
Confrontation
Only days before he was scheduled to testify in the capital murder trials of accused serial killer Kenneth McDuff and two men accused of killing three youths in West Memphis, Ark., Mr. Linch said he phoned an administrator at SWIFS to find out how much compensatory and vacation time he had coming.
"She asked me why I wanted to know, and I said, 'I might just quit.' "
Dr. Jeffrey Barnard, Dallas County's chief medical examiner and director of the county-operated SWIFS crime lab, recalls the scenario differently.
"He called a secretary in a different area and, over the phone, just quit," said Dr. Barnard, terming the call "an impulsive, unexpected, peculiar event."
"We always thought he was a good analyst and got along with him just fine. They thought he might have been intoxicated."
Mr. Linch, now 47, acknowledged that he had been depressed and drinking too much, particularly since the August 1985 crash of Delta 191 at D/FW Airport, during which he helped recover many of the 137 fatalities.
"Too many bodies," he said. "I wanted to do something else," Mr. Linch said, "another job."
Shortly after his phone call to SWIFS, he said, Dr. Joseph Guileyardo, deputy medical examiner, and Chief Field Agent Bill Lene showed up at his apartment with two Dallas detectives.
Confined
When he saw them, Mr. Linch said, he remarked, "What's the service number?" referring to the police report he assumed would be written, and invited them in for a drink.
The group left, and Dr. Guileyardo returned with Dr. Barnard.
"They [had] come back and...said he was extremely depressed," Dr. Barnard said. "I'm a physician, and I was disturbed with what I heard so I went over to check on him. I felt he was a danger to himself and, because of some of the things he said, possibly others."
According to Dr. Barnard, Mr. Linch agreed "that he needed to see someone."
"He walked out with us voluntarily. We went to the hospital to get some help."
Dr. Barnard said he and Dr. Guileyardo left Mr. Linch at Methodist Hospital "once I knew he was going to receive treatment that would address those concerns.
"It was a humanitarian act," the chief medical examiner said.
At some point, though, according to Mr. Linch, his decision to voluntarily seek psychiatric treatment became an involuntary commitment.
After he spent several hours at Methodist, he said, two constables showed up, handcuffed him, took him into custody and transferred him to Doctors Hospital, near White Rock Lake in East Dallas.
Routine procedure in Dallas County mental illness court calls for involuntarily committed patients to be taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital's psychiatric unit, which is only a short walk from SWIFS, also in the Parkland complex.
Involuntary commitment warrants for mental illness and chemical dependency are issued by judges based on sworn affidavits by family members or associates who must show that a person poses a danger to himself or others. Those warrants and affidavits are not open to the public, so the specifics leading up to Mr. Linch's hospitalization could not be examined.
continued…
Process unclear
Even now, Mr. Linch said, he is unsure who signed the affidavit. Dr. Barnard said it wasn't he.
"I don't recall ever signing anything myself," the chief medical examiner said. "I wouldn't have known what you have to do legally [to have someone committed]."
It did not escape him, Mr. Linch said, that if defense attorneys discovered that he had been committed to a psychiatric unit, his credibility as an expert forensic witness would be challenged in court.
His fear was well-founded. A 1987 Texas Court of Criminal Appeals opinion, Virts vs. Texas, concludes: "Cross-examination of testifying State's witness, to show witness has suffered recent mental illness or disturbance, is proper, provided such illness or disturbance might tend to reflect upon witness' credibility."
Mr. Linch recalled taking prescribed drugs during his hospitalization, and one drug, he said, "made me run around like a rabbit." Ms. Franklin said patients routinely were prescribed Ativan, a sedative frequently used to prevent alcoholic seizures and which, according to pharmacological warnings, can cause "decreased or lack of recall of events." Mr. Linch also recalled taking Zoloft, a drug used to treat major depression and obsessive-compulsive and panic disorders.
The trace-evidence expert said he received phone calls from SWIFS officials while he was hospitalized. A supervisor, he said, told him that he would still be required to testify in upcoming cases, the first of which was that of Kenneth McDuff, a previously convicted multiple murderer about to stand trial in Seguin in yet another slaying.
Called to testify
According to Mr. Linch, he initially refused, telling his supervisors that if he was so incapacitated that he had to be locked up, then he was too incapacitated to testify in trials.
He quoted a supervisor as telling him, "By God, you'd better do McDuff. We started this and we're going to finish it."
"That doesn't sound like the way he [the supervisor] would have couched something," said Dr. Barnard, who noted that he never asked Mr. Linch to testify.
"It would be an unusual circumstance that you would ask someone to leave a hospital to provide testimony," Dr. Barnard said. "I can't tell you whether he was ordered to or not, or if it was voluntary on his part.
"Just because someone is hospitalized for depression doesn't mean that results of tests done at a previous time aren't accurate and that those findings could not be adequately conveyed to a jury."
Ultimately, Mr. Linch said, he agreed to testify, saying he had not yet lined up a new job and "had child support to pay."
"I had to take care of my boys," he said.
continued…
Mr. Linch said a judge from mental illness court appeared at the hospital to interview him shortly after he had been hospitalized. According to procedure, an involuntarily committed patient can be held only 24 hours; that period, however, can be extended with a doctor's statement. At the time, Mr. Linch said, he had been seen by two doctors, one at Methodist and the other at Doctors.
"I need to testify," Mr. Linch recalled telling the judge. "The office is calling.
"He [the judge] was initially unwilling to let me go testify, but I convinced him. I said, 'Look, I would have signed myself in. I know I'm depressed.' "
Mr. Linch said the judge reluctantly concurred, and he flew to San Antonio, rented a car and drove to Seguin to testify in Mr. McDuff's trial. The forensic analyst testified during the punishment phase of the trial, linking Mr. McDuff's hair to that found on the body of a previous victim, Melissa Northrup of Waco.
The same supervisor who demanded that he testify, Mr. Linch said, posed in a picture with him at the Seguin trial.
"[The supervisor] has, or had, a picture of he and I sitting on the courthouse lawn in Seguin, Texas, under a huge pecan tree," Mr. Linch said. "It has some kind of inscription...'biggest nut in Texas,' or something to that effect."
Mr. McDuff was subsequently sentenced to death for killing Colleen Reed, a 28-year-old secretary he abducted from an Austin car wash. Already condemned to death for the slaying of Melissa Northrup, a 22-year-old pregnant mother of two from Waco, he was executed Nov. 17, 1998.
In court again
Mr. Linch was released from the psychiatric unit a second time during the approximately two weeks he was hospitalized, this time to appear as an expert for the defense.
Paul N. Ford, a Jonesboro, Ark., defense attorney, had issued a subpoena for Mr. Linch to testify in the so-called Robin Hood Hills murders in which the mutilated bodies of three 8-year-old boys were left in a ditch in West Memphis.
Two experts for the state used a single red rayon fiber taken from one of the boys' bodies to link Mr. Ford's client, Charles Jason Baldwin, to the murders.
At the time Mr. Linch appeared in Arkansas, Mr. Ford said, he had no idea the forensic scientist had been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment.
"There may have been a time when I had trouble contacting him by phone," Mr. Ford recalled. "Seems like I may have left my phone number and he finally called me back.
"It bothers me that, Number 1, Charlie Linch didn't tell me about this, but it really bothers me that his supervisors at SWIFS didn't tell me."
Mr. Ford's and Mr. Linch's recollections of the forensic expert's testimony on the state's only physical evidence differ dramatically. State analysts had testified that the single fiber discovered on one of the boys' bodies matched the fiber in a housecoat found inside Mr. Baldwin's home.
Mr. Linch said he "blew away" the state's only physical evidence, pointing out that the boys' bodies had been lying in water for more than a day.
Said Mr. Ford: "He [Mr. Linch] sounded real good until cross-examination. He looked good, smelled good. Then the prosecution got him on rebuttal. Well..."
Mr. Baldwin, 16 at the time of the slayings, was convicted of three counts of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison plus 40 years; his co-defendant, Damien Wayne Echols, 18, was condemned to death.
[NOTE: This is the West Memphis Three case. Even though all the physical evidence used by the prosecution eventually fell apart, the three defendants took an Alford Plea to get out. Still guilty, not exonerated.]
continued…
Word gets out
Dr. Barnard said he didn't tell anyone that Mr. Linch had been hospitalized for depression and drinking: "I was afraid that was a violation of someone's privacy. I don't know if I could legally have done that."
Word nonetheless reached the courthouse.
Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Toby Shook, Mr. Linch said, had a friend at Doctors Hospital who told him about his hospitalization, and the prosecutor asked
Mr. Linch about it one day at the courthouse.
Mr. Shook, the prosecutor who had relied heavily on Mr. Linch's testimony in the Albright case and would later use him in the Routier trial, said he believed the forensic expert had been treated for alcoholism and only recently learned that he had been hospitalized for depression, too.
"As far as people's personal business, yeah, I think that it was no secret that Charlie had some drinking problems," Mr. Shook said. "That was what I was aware of ...That was always on his own personal time."
Greg Davis, the lead prosecutor in the Routier case, said he had not discussed Mr. Linch's treatment with SWIFS officials "because, frankly, I don't care to know about his personal life."
"I've never had any reason to question his personal life because I've never seen it have any effect on his professional ability," Mr. Davis said, "so for me, it's never been an issue.
"I've considered him to be probably one of the most recognized authorities in this area, certainly on trace evidence."
One day, just as he was about to testify in a trial, Mr. Linch said, a police officer jokingly made a reference to his remark about the police service number when SWIFS officials and police had gone to his house to check on him.
Kept quiet
Though at least some prosecutors and police may have known about Mr. Linch's psychiatric treatment, the defense attorneys in the McDuff and Arkansas cases apparently knew nothing.
Stephen Cooper, a Dallas attorney handling Ms. Routier's death row appeal, said there is a "legal as well as moral" obligation that Mr. Linch's treatment for
depression and drinking be revealed to "both sides, as well as the presiding judge."
"Clearly when a side sponsors an expert, a jury is expecting that to be true," Mr. Cooper said. "Rules of evidence and procedure don't specify between a misdemeanor marijuana possession and capital murder. But I think it would be even more pressing when the stakes are this high.
"You're misleading a jury by omission in this situation."
Another of Ms. Routier's attorneys, Steven Losch of Longview, said, "There is no judge that would not allow me to bring out the fact that he [Mr. Linch] went from a rubber room to a courtroom."
Keith Hampton, an Austin appellate lawyer who handled one of Mr. McDuff's writs, said Mr. Linch's hospitalization, which spanned about two weeks, would have been "an extremely significant fact" had defense attorneys known about it.
"Clinical depression is off the scale, but people don't understand that," Mr. Hampton said. "I think it would have been important to raise [in the appellate writ], too, because it all comes down to a subjective thing.
"You've got a guy coming in here, 'I've looked at this thing and that thing and I say they're a match.' That is pure opinion. If that's an opinion formed in an alternative state of consciousness, I think the defense would have wanted to know that in a big way, and the jury was entitled to hear about that."
continued…
Resignation
The circumstances of his hospitalization, Mr. Linch said, humiliated him. "In retrospect," he said, "it could have been a well-meaning overreaction. I wanted to do something else, another job."
Shortly after his release from the hospital, Mr. Linch resigned from SWIFS - though he would return about three months later. In a handwritten letter dated April 28, 1994, he wrote: "Continuing attitudes make it necessary that I seek other employment...If I remain in this crime lab...I predict the ugly head of depression to rear itself again."
In the same letter, Mr. Linch wrote that he was "deeply grateful to Dr(s) Barnard and Guileyardo for their intervention in my time of personal crisis." He also noted that he "would appreciate your assistance in locating...employment."
Notwithstanding his notation of gratitude to his supervisors, Mr. Linch said, he still regards the events surrounding his treatment as "unnecessary and humiliating."
Said Dr. Barnard recently: "If I have to take criticism for possibly saving a man's life, so be it. I did the right thing."
If supervisors at SWIFS had taken his hospitalization seriously, Mr. Linch said, they wouldn't have asked him to testify. They were more concerned about the forensic lab's image and income, he said, than about his personal welfare:
"That was the message - 'I saved your life. You owe me. You're mine.' "
.....
Remember, this was an article from May of 2000. Dr. Jeffrey Barnard knew, yet did nothing. He didn't notify anyone. He didn't perform any kind of quality re-assessment of Linch's work. He didn't investigate his own staff for improper actions, negligence, or misconduct.
Dr. Jeff Barnard is still the Crime Lab Director at SWIFS of Dallas County.
Dr. Jeff Barnard is currently the Chair of The Texas Forensic Science Commission.
He may see submitted complaints of scientific negligence and misconduct. But he's not one to address them, especially if they're in his own backyard,
ha-ha!
Said Dr. Barnard, "If I have to take criticism for possibly saving a man's life, so be it. I did the right thing."
How very Trumpian of him. He might believe he saved one man's life, but it cost the lives of 4 other men.
It gets worse...
"Routier trial expert cast doubts on own abilities"
Prosecutors say forensic analyst competent; defense questions credibility of testimony
05/10/2000
By Holly Becka and Howard Swindle, The Dallas Morning News
Two years after providing the scientific evidence that helped send accused child killer Darlie Routier to death row, a Dallas forensic expert questioned his abilities in areas in which he testified, records show.
A series of memos attached to a job grievance filed last year against the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences shows that Charles Linch questioned his qualifications in hair and fiber analysis and blood-spatter interpretation - all areas in which he testified against Ms. Routier, who was accused of fatally stabbing sons Devon and Damon in 1996...
Dr. Barnard knew of Linch's problems, yet did nothing to disclose them.
How many other cases did Barnard know were problematic because of Linch's testimonies and analyses? How many cases did NOT go to trial because of these problems?
Reminiscent of the Amherst Massachusetts lab analyst Sonja Farak who was high on drugs while working in the lab for the better part of 8 years. In this case, upon the discovery, two former Assistant Attorneys General Kris Foster and Anne Kaczmarek covered up the extent of Farak’s misconduct.
Not only did the prosecutors fail to disclose the time-frame that Farak used drugs from the lab to defendants or the court, they also failed to meaningfully investigate the extent of misconduct for years. In that 8 year period nobody inside the lab, including her lab mates, supervisors, raised questions about her behaviour though she was high or in withdrawal at work constantly. There were no audits, and there was no meaningful oversight. Apparently, attention to detail was not their forte.
"It doesn't mean that the work she produced was wrong. It doesn't mean she lied during testimony."
Ultimately, the courts demanded the dismissal with prejudice of 8,000-plus cases in which Farak signed the drug certificates for the Amherst Lab. And the lab was shut down.
According to the article about Lydell Grant:
"...Jurors also heard incorrect testimony that DNA analysis could not rule Grant out as a suspect, his lawyers argued..."
I can reasonably believe that the problematic 2012 DNA analysis from this analyst, from this crime lab, probably has happened numerous times over. There are probably a dozen of more wrongful conviction because of this incorrect DNA analysis and testimony. Yet no one is going to perform a review of past DNA analysis from this analyst, from this crime lab, because Crime Lab Directors are lazy as fuck, just as obtuse, and unaccountable for idiotic errors.
Doctors have to have insurance to cover malpractice, as do lawyers. Why not Crime Lab Directors? Why do taxpayers have to cover for incompetence?
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