EXCLUSIVE: 'When They See Us is LIES.' NYPD cop who arrested two of the Central Park Five says they DID attack jogger and forensic evidence proves it - and showing police and prosecutors as racist is putting lives at risk
By Laura Collins
Daily Mail
June 28, 2019
The NYPD police officer who made the first arrests in the Central Park Five investigation has condemned Netflix's drama When They See Us as 'lies' and said it puts the lives of cops and prosecutors at risk.
Eric Reynolds, who as a plainclothes officer arrested Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson, tells DailyMailTV that the four-part television adaptation is so filled with errors that it is 'malicious recreation'.
He described the miniseries, produced by Robert De Niro and Oprah Winfrey and directed by Ava DuVernay, as 'total nonsense' that left him 'flabbergasted'.
Reynolds retired in 2001 after a 20-year career where he rose to Detective Third Grade and earned department recognition multiple times for his police work.
He spoke out after an outcry in the wake of the series led to prosecutors Linda Fairstein and Elizabeth Lederer losing publishing contracts, board seats and lecturing roles.
Reynolds, 59, rejected criticism of the investigation, prosecution and conviction of the five for the rape of 28-year-old jogger, Patricia Meili - and particularly took issue with the portrayal of the black men as victims of a racist system.
As an African American, he said, the allegations of racism cut particularly deep.
Asked if he has been accused of being a race-traitor he said, 'Oh yes and worse.' Yet all he wanted to do as an officer was, he said, 'serve his community.'
And he said that even the brief appearance he makes in the series, which has been watched by 23 million Netflix accounts worldwide, is pure 'fiction,' portraying events which simply did not happen; he was shown as a uniformed officer when he in fact wore plain clothes.
He believes the series is inflammatory by depicting members of the five looking badly beaten when they were arrested.
Reynolds told DailyMailTV, 'Please, someone, show me the pictures of them. Show me the injuries, show me the black eyes, show me the swollen faces because every single one of them that came out of that precinct had none of that.'
He has shared his own recollections of the night of April 19, 1989 when more than 30 young men embarked on a violent spree of terror, and Meili was found raped and close to death in Central Park.
Raymond Santana, then 14, Kevin Richardson, 14, Korey Wise, 16, Antron McCray, 15 and Yusef Salaam, 15 all confessed and were convicted of participating in multiple crimes on April 19. But the one that is remembered is Meili's rape.
In 2002 their convictions were sensationally vacated in their entirety when Matias Reyes, a serial rapist already in prison, confessed to the crime and claimed to have acted alone. The five sued New York City, said their confessions were coerced and won a $41 million payout.
Supporters said they had been exonerated and the Central Park Five became synonymous with an unimaginable miscarriage of justice.
When They See Us opens on the night of the 'wilding', where a mass of young men rushed through Central Park, casting the five very squarely as innocents caught up in events and on the fringes of any violence.
Reynolds said, 'When I saw the opening scenes it was like watching a musical. I was flabbergasted. That absolutely was not what occurred.'
In one scene a man, most likely a depiction of teacher John Loughlin, is shown being felled by a single punch while three of the five look on.
Reynolds said, 'It did not happen that way. They were beating him with a pipe. They beat him so savagely that both of his eyes were shut and he had a cracked skull.'
Testimony from one who was there stated that Yusef Salaam was wielding that pipe and 'going to work on him.'
The cop who found Loughlin told Reynolds that he 'looked like his head was dunked in a bucket of blood.'
In another scene the boys are part of a crowd halfheartedly harassing a couple on a tandem bike. Again Reynolds watched in outrage at what he said is a 'total fiction.'
He explained, 'The group lay in wait. They stretched out across the roadway and held hands to knock them off their bike. It was a couple on the tandem and the woman said she was scared for her life.
'Her boyfriend just told her, 'Put your head down and pedal as hard as you can.' And they rode through them as they were grabbing at her clothes and by the grace of God they got away.'
Pointing to the couple attacked on their tandem he said it was the violence, not the ethnicity, of its perpetrators that mattered to police officers.
He said, 'I don't understand how that's a race issue if you're in the middle of a park riding on a bike in the middle of the night and a group of males, whether they're black, white or whatever, you know are standing on the road with the express purpose of knocking you off the bike.
'As a woman I think you're going to be scared out of your mind.'
As an example of one of the worst 'lies' in the drama Reynolds pointed to the scenes where Fairstein, played by Felicity Huffman, arrives at the precinct to take charge of the rape investigation.
She is shown repeatedly referring to the boys in the park as 'animals' and delivering orders to detectives with the words, "I need the whole group. Every young black male who was in the park. You go into the projects and stop every motherfucker you see."'
According to Reynolds, 'It is so preposterous that it's laughable. The sad thing is people believe it and are incensed by this.
'As detectives we work on evidence. We don't go rounding people up and Linda Fairstein wasn't even there the first day. It just never happened.'
Reynolds was a plainclothes officer in the Anti-Crime Unit on patrol with his partner on the night of April 19, 1989.
He recalled, 'We were getting numerous radio runs of a large crowd of black and Hispanic kids assaulting and robbing people. We had people going into the station house and cops out in the field who had gotten flagged down by civilians saying, 'There's a crowd of kids there. They've tried to assault us and thrown rocks.'
Reynolds and his partner were just one of many units looking for the group reportedly moving through the vast dark interior of Central Park.
And the reports were getting more serious. Reynolds said, 'We find out about John Loughlin who had been beaten savagely and we figured because there were so many cops in the park they must have left.'
The cops were barely out of the park when they saw them. Reynolds recalled, 'There were 30 of them on the move. There's only two of us so, you know, clearly we're not going to get all of them. Long story short we got five of them.'
Two were Raymond Santana - who had, Reynolds said, been leading the pack - and Kevin Richardson who started crying in the back of the squad car.
Reynolds said, 'He [Richardson] started crying and saying that he 'knew who did the murder'. He said it was Antron McCray and he would tell us where he lived.'
The officers assumed he was talking about Loughlin who was beaten unconscious.
Back at the precinct Reynolds began processing the arrests, reaching out to their parents and writing up appearance tickets for the boys who, as juveniles, would have to return to family court at a later date.
Reynolds' partner asked Santana and Stephen Lopez, a member of the group he was arrested alongside, what they were doing out making trouble and why weren't they with their girlfriends instead.
According to Reynolds, 'Santana said, 'I already got mine,' and they kind of laughed. I just assumed it was an in-joke. It only became significant after we learned what had happened to the jogger.'
Reynolds couldn't release any of them or complete the mounds of paperwork required by their juvenile status until their parents had shown up.
Reynolds, played by 'Power' actor Ty Jones, makes a brief appearance in the mini-series' first episode - but Reynolds says the show makers got this wrong as well.
Reynolds is seen angrily remonstrating with Santana's father Raymond Santana Sr, played by John Leguizamo, for turning up late. Reynolds says that never happened.
Instead, Reynolds explained, he sent a squad car to bring Santana's grandmother to the station as various family members who said they would come failed to show.
He also noted, as a plainclothes officer, he never wore his uniform when in the police precinct. Jones wears a uniform in the scene.
While the boys were waiting, at around 1.30am, the call came in that a female jogger had been found in the park, raped and beaten to within an inch of her life.
The detectives responding to the crime had been told that Reynolds had arrested five out of a group of about 30 kids 'wilding' in the park. Now they instructed Reynolds not to let them go.
He recalled, 'They said, 'Look, we don't think these kids have anything to do with it but they were up there at the same time that she was attacked. They might have seen something so we're going to come down and debrief them.'
Reynolds was in the room for all of those interviews. He said, 'Their parents are there, they're getting their rights read. We ask them what happened in the park?'
According to Reynolds they did not ask the kids about the rape directly. The first two kids told almost identical stories. They said they'd been in the park with a bunch of kids who were beating people up but they didn't touch anybody.
Reynolds wrote them up and let them go home.
Then, he said, 'The third kid is Kevin Richardson. He's there with his mother. We read him his rights. We ask him what happened. He said the exact same thing the other kids said - everyone else was beating people up but I didn't touch anyone.'
Then one of the detectives noticed he had a scratch on his face. They asked him how he'd got it and at first he blamed Reynolds's partner for the injury.
When told the officer was next door and would be asked if that was true Richardson changed his story.
Reynolds said, 'He said, "Okay, it was the female jogger." And I'll be honest with you I almost fell off my seat because I was not expecting him to say that.
'And then he starts to go into the story of the attack on the jogger. No coercion. We didn't even think he was involved. He starts to give it up right there in front of us.'
Ultimately police questioned 37 boys and, contrary to Netflix's dramatic depiction, there was nothing random or rushed in the five who were ultimately charged.
They became the Central Park Five, he said, not because cops were anxious to pin the crime on someone but because they implicated themselves and each other when interviewed.
In DuVernay's drama particular attention is given to Korey Wise's story. He is shown accompanying his friend Salaam to the station, an act of loyalty that sees him embroiled in the case when he wasn't even on the cops' radar.
Reynolds is exasperated by this. He said: 'Korey Wise was named by other participants in the wilding that day. We went specifically to look for him.
'When detectives asked a couple of people in front of their building if they had seen him they said they saw him earlier and he said, "Y'all better stay away from me because the cops are after me."'
When they asked him why, Reynolds said, the people in front of the building stated that Wise had told them: 'You see that woman in Central Park last night? That was us.'
This account was committed to written statements.
Reynolds also pointed to the fact that the first thing Wise did when he got home late on April 19 was wash the clothes he'd been wearing.
When they went to pick up Antron McCray - whom Reynolds had earlier let go - the detective asked him to go and get the clothes he had been wearing the night before.
Reynolds said, 'He comes back out and he's got on a sweat suit. The front of it is completely covered with mud from head to toe. What could he possibly be doing that he's completely flat in mud?'
Reynolds said the officers who discovered the jogger told him she was 'covered from head to toe in mud.'
Several weeks after his police confession to participating in the attack on Meili, McCray repeated this admission, while minimizing his own role, to the pre-trial psychologist appointed by his own team.
Meanwhile, while Wise was being held on Riker's Island awaiting trial, a female friend came forward with information she thought would exonerate him but in fact only bolstered the case against him.
Reynolds said, 'He called this young lady and she was surprised to hear his voice. She was like, 'Korey, what did you do? They're saying that you raped this woman.'
'He says, 'I didn't rape her. I only held her legs while Kevin Richardson fucked her.'
If true, that scenario would make Wise every bit as guilty of rape as Richardson under New York law.
The crime, the trial and the convictions of the four black and one Hispanic teen were the focus of public outrage and racial conflict at the time.
Donald Trump, then a real estate mogul in New York, took out newspaper advertisements calling for the return of the death penalty.
But Reynolds insisted, 'Look, this idea that there's outside pressure for us to wrap it up and get some suspects is totally false.
'Nobody was looking at the newspaper and saying, 'Donald Trump's mad, we'd better do something.' And the jury weren't asking to see the newspaper, they were asking to see the evidence.'
Reynolds points to a wealth of physical evidence that was never refuted at trial: hair and blood 'consistent' with the jogger's was found on the boys' sneakers and clothing, along with semen in the boys' underwear.
The fact that none of them claimed to be able to finish the act of penetrative sex is the reason, Reynolds said, that their semen was only found on the inside of their underwear and clothing rather than on Meili.
But isn't Reynolds in danger of sounding like somebody who just can't accept that he was involved in a terrible miscarriage of justice?
After all, weren't the five exonerated thanks to Reyes' confession - one backed up by the presence of his DNA on the victim and clear proof that he had penetrated her?
Reynolds rejected this notion. He does not equate the vacation of the five's sentences with their exoneration. And he does not believe that Reyes' clear guilt is proof of the others' innocence.
Reynolds said, 'They were not cleared. The convictions were vacated. They were given the opportunity to have another trial but there was no reason to retry because they had already done their time.
'The reason they were granted that is because Matias Reyes came forward with the fictitious claim that he had attacked her alone.
'The medical evidence alone proves that it was not one person that attacked her. There was plenty of physical evidence.
'That notion that there was none, no physical evidence, that tied them to the crime is an absolute lie.'
Asked about what evidence was found, Reynolds said, 'There was blood, semen, there was grass stains on Kevin Richardson's underwear.'
He explained, 'When I heard [about his confession] I was like, 'Really? He did it alone? There's just no way.' Yeah, he was involved. He was just one of the perps that got away.'
He is not alone in this view. Following Reyes' confession the original investigation was itself the subject of an investigation in 2003 set up by NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly.
Kelly had lawyers Michael F. Armstrong and Jules Martin go through the investigation with Stephen Hammerman, deputy police commissioner for legal affairs.
The result of that forensic review was the 43 page-long Armstrong Report.
It noted that as part of his confession Reyes, who would have been 18 at the time of the rape, had offered up a piece of information that he claimed only he could know since he was there alone.
Reynolds explained, 'Reyes comes forward to say he did it by himself and he can prove it because he knows something we don't know. And he's correct.
'She had a fanny pack with her Walkman in it and he took it and he threw it away.
'She didn't have it on her in the hospital. She was in a coma for 50 something days. She couldn't tell us that she'd had one and it had been stolen, right?
'But then Armstrong found that a detective had taken some notes of an interview with Korey Wise. And Korey said that there was a guy named 'Rudy,' who he said took her fanny pack and her Walkman.'
Reynolds believes that Rudy was Reyes and his name muddled up by Wise who has hearing difficulties.
He said, 'He told that to us on April 20, 1989, the day after. So how in the world does Korey Wise know about her fanny pack and Walkman in 1989 when Reyes says he knows about it because he was the only person there?'
The Armstrong report noted, 'At the time of this interview the police had no way of knowing that the jogger had a Walkman or that she carried it in a pouch.'
It said that, based on the evidence including Reyes confession, 'it was more likely than not that the defendants participated in an attack upon the jogger.'
The report stated, 'the most likely scenario for the events of April 19, 1989 was that the defendants came up on the jogger and subjected her to the same kind of attack, albeit with sexual overtones, that they inflicted upon other victims in the park that night.
'Perhaps attracted to the scene by the jogger's screams, Reyes either joined in the attack as it was ending or waited until the defendants have moved on to their next victims before descending upon her himself, raping her and inflicting upon her the brutal injuries that almost caused her death.'
Reynolds's view is supported by both the medical opinion of Meili's two Urgent Care Physicians at Metropolitan Hospital and the Armstrong Report.
Dr Robert Kurtz is on record as saying Meili had injuries consistent with a sharp, clean blade or object while Reyes' confession only mentioned a blunt object.
Dr Kurtz noted that Reyes, 'never said he had used a knife, or broken glass, or broken bottle or something like that that would have been able to inflict a clean laceration.'
Dr Jane Mauer, a surgeon who helped reconstruct Meili's face recalled seeing hand print bruising on her thighs.
Dr Mauer said, 'You could see the four fingers and the thumb indented in her skin to hold her legs apart.'
It led her to doubt that this could be the work of one man.
Moreover the Armstrong Report concluded Reyes could not be considered a reliable witness.
It revealed a fellow inmate in prison with Reyes said Reyes told him 'the attack on the jogger was already in progress when he joined, attracted to the scene by the jogger's screams.'
Reynolds does not believe that the five should still be in prison. He said, 'They did their time. They paid the price for what they did. You know, that's it.'
When Bill de Blasio was elected New York City mayor in 2014 he ordered the $41 million settlement to go through for the five men.
All legal action finished in 2016 when the men were awarded a further $3.9 million from New York State.
But despite the case now being closed, Reynolds feel the Netflix mini-series is unfairly punishing people who prosecuted the five.
In the wake of the drama's release Linda Fairstein, who supervised the prosecution, and lead prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer have both fallen victim to an angry public backlash.
Fairstein, who now writes crime fiction, was dropped by her publisher. Lederer, who continues to work in the District Attorney's office, resigned from teaching law as an adjunct at Columbia University in New York.
Reynolds said, 'It's like mob justice. People are doing everything they can to destroy these women's lives and they've done nothing wrong. They don't even know that they're not basing their opinions and their fury on what actually happened.
'If they knew what actually happened they would be ashamed of themselves.'
But, he said, 'Don't come back for revenge and destroy two people who were only doing their job and did nothing wrong. Linda Fairstein and Elizabeth Lederer did absolutely nothing wrong.'
Reynolds believes the show falsely depicts a racist criminal justice system.
He is keen to point out that growing up in Eighties New York, criminals posed the threat to public safety, not police officers.
He said, 'I grew up in the projects, my mother used to go to school at night. She got her high school diploma the same year I got mine. She went to college at night also.
'I would have to go every night and meet [my mother] at the bus-stop and bring her upstairs because it just wasn't safe. And who was she going to get victimized by? It wasn't the cops.'
Reynolds said of When They See Us, 'We can't even call it a sanitized version. It's a malicious recreation, which has nothing to do with the facts other than they ended up arrested and going to jail.
'I think that's the only thing in it that stays true to what actually occurred.'
He said, 'This has got people so divided and so at each other's throats it's sad. Let me tell you there's a lot of people who believe that they are guilty but they're not going to say anything because they don't want to get shouted down. They don't want to be called racist.'
But Reynolds, who was there and part of it all, believes facing that backlash is the lesser of two evils and remaining silent in the face of what he sees as injustice isn't an option.
For Reynolds, his reason for speaking up is clear and unimpeachable, 'The truth matters.'
Sunday, June 30, 2019
THE NY STATE GESTAPO STOMPS ON A POOR GUN OWNER
This New York Man Got Arrested After Defending His Own Home
By Amy Swearer and Lucas Drill
The Daily Signal
June 20, 2019
All too often, advocates of strict gun control promise that more complex and convoluted laws will save lives without imposing a serious burden on the right of law-abiding citizens to exercise their constitutional rights.
Their argument simply doesn’t hold up. Their gun control laws fail not only to address how actual criminals get their firearms, but they also impose a real burden on ordinary citizens’ Second Amendment rights. They even risk making felons out of otherwise law-abiding citizens.
If that sounds like an exaggeration, just look to the case of Ronald Stolarczyk of Oneida County, New York. He’s now facing felony charges for lawfully protecting himself against criminals without first getting the county’s permission to possess a handgun in his home—something that would cost him hundreds of dollars and months of paperwork.
The 64-year-old Stolarczyk was “minding his own business in his kitchen” one day when he heard voices coming from his garage. Stolarczyk tried simply waiting for the intruders to leave, but the two assailants soon ascended the stairs and attempted to enter his central living space.
Stolarczyk then yelled at the burglars to leave, hoping that knowledge of his presence would scare them away. The burglars were undeterred by his warning, and one even aggressively advanced toward him.
Stolarczyk now feared for his life, both because his home had previously been broken into and because he was aware of recent home invasions that resulted in the death of the homeowner.
Stolarczyk quickly retrieved his deceased father’s .38-caliber Rossi revolver and fired several rounds at the burglars, both of whom were killed.
After making sure he was safe from all threats, Stolarczyk immediately called the police and walked to the far end of his driveway to wait for their arrival.
Once they arrived, the responding officers investigated the incident and the Oneida County district attorney concluded that the shooting was likely justified, and that Stolarczyk would not face homicide charges.
The state police, however, arrested Stolarczyk on a charge of felony criminal possession of a firearm.
The gun Stolarczyk used had been legally owned by his father, who had properly registered the revolver and lived with it in the same house where the shooting took place.
Stolarczyk came into possession of it after his father died and left him the gun, and nothing legally prohibited him from possessing firearms.
The problem was that he failed to obtain his own handgun permit and register the gun in his name.
Thus, under state law, this otherwise law-abiding citizen was “guilty” of a Class E felony punishable by up to four years in state prison and the permanent loss of his Second Amendment rights.
Additionally, the local government seized possession of Stolarczyk’s house, claiming it was in violation of local housing codes, purportedly because he could not afford running water or electricity and kept the house full of old electronics.
All of this happened because Stolarczyk—who couldn’t even afford a standard cellphone plan—failed to properly jump through all the hoops necessary to gain the government’s permission to possess a firearm in his home for self-defense.
Just How Bad Is the Local System?
Most people would agree that Stolarczyk, an otherwise law-abiding citizen, should not be criminally punished after calling the police on himself to report the justified use of lethal force against burglars.
More concerning, however, is the fact that these charges expose a deeper problem stemming from the severe burden that Oneida County places on residents’ Second Amendment rights.
To fully appreciate how inappropriate these charges are, we decided to find out exactly what it takes to obtain a pistol permit in Oneida County—again, the only thing Stolarczyk allegedly failed to do properly here.
It turns out that, after a lengthy investigation, we’re still not certain we fully understand the process. Our best educated guess is something like the following:
First, anyone interested in owning a handgun must pick up the application in person, which can only be done at the Oneida County Office Building. But prepare to take time off work, because this building is only open Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 12 p.m., and 1 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Alternatively, if you live on the opposite side of the county and want to avoid a 50-minute drive to Utica, you can try the Griffiss Business and Technology Park office, open on Thursdays between 8 a.m. and 12 p.m.
Once at the Office of Pistol Licensing, you’ll need to present a New York state driver’s license proving that you’re at least 21 years old and have lived in Oneida County for at least one year.
You also must provide a certificate of completion for an NRA Basic Pistol Course, which lasts approximately eight hours and must be led by a county-approved instructor.
After calling many of the recommended instructors, we learned that the introductory course can cost anywhere between $40 and $165 and that classes aren’t necessarily offered on a regular basis.
Further, had we not called these instructors and the licensing office itself for clarification, it would have been nearly impossible to determine which courses Oneida County does and does not accept to meet the requirement.
Finally, after paying a $10 processing fee to the county, you can receive the application form and begin the process of seeking the county’s permission to own a gun in your own home.
The application itself consists of five parts, which must be completed in black ink, and all signatures on the form must be notarized. Two identical head shot photographs no larger than 2 x 2 inches must be attached to the application.
Each application also requires four notarized character references from individuals 21 years of age or older, who are not related to the applicant, and who reside in Oneida County.
After completing the application, you will be responsible for paying several additional fees for processing and fingerprinting. These include $150 to the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office, $100 to the Utica Police Department, or $50 to the Rome Police Department, depending on the jurisdiction in which you reside.
All payments must be made through a postal money order, which requires a trip to the post office—and possibly additional research if, like many people, you have no idea what a postal money order is or where to get one.
There will then be a six-month waiting period for processing, after which you’ll be informed whether your application was accepted or denied. Denials can occur for a myriad of reasons, including seemingly arbitrary determinations by the application processor that you are not “of good moral character.”
An Onerous Burden
This is the complex and costly system that Stolarczyk—who couldn’t afford to keep his lights on—needed to navigate in order to legally own the revolver that may have saved his life.
That’s not to say the government can never impose any requirements on gun owners, or regulate the manner in which firearms are purchased or carried outside the home. The Second Amendment right, like all other enumerated rights, is not unlimited.
But examples like this make clear that laborious and costly gun licensing requirements impose substantial and undue burdens on the exercise of the right to keep and bear arms—burdens we would never allow to be imposed on another fundamental constitutional right.
Worse still, these burdens fall heaviest on the shoulders of those who, unlike many of the wealthy politicians calling for gun control, can’t afford to live in gated communities and will never receive a police escort.
No level of government—be it federal, state, or local—should get away with imposing such great barriers to exercising a constitutional right.
It certainly shouldn’t punish individuals whose only crime was failing to properly navigate a nightmarishly complex and expensive web of bureaucracy prior to defending their life, liberty, and property with a handgun.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In Texas he would have been given the Citizen of the Year award along with a new pistol.
By Amy Swearer and Lucas Drill
The Daily Signal
June 20, 2019
All too often, advocates of strict gun control promise that more complex and convoluted laws will save lives without imposing a serious burden on the right of law-abiding citizens to exercise their constitutional rights.
Their argument simply doesn’t hold up. Their gun control laws fail not only to address how actual criminals get their firearms, but they also impose a real burden on ordinary citizens’ Second Amendment rights. They even risk making felons out of otherwise law-abiding citizens.
If that sounds like an exaggeration, just look to the case of Ronald Stolarczyk of Oneida County, New York. He’s now facing felony charges for lawfully protecting himself against criminals without first getting the county’s permission to possess a handgun in his home—something that would cost him hundreds of dollars and months of paperwork.
The 64-year-old Stolarczyk was “minding his own business in his kitchen” one day when he heard voices coming from his garage. Stolarczyk tried simply waiting for the intruders to leave, but the two assailants soon ascended the stairs and attempted to enter his central living space.
Stolarczyk then yelled at the burglars to leave, hoping that knowledge of his presence would scare them away. The burglars were undeterred by his warning, and one even aggressively advanced toward him.
Stolarczyk now feared for his life, both because his home had previously been broken into and because he was aware of recent home invasions that resulted in the death of the homeowner.
Stolarczyk quickly retrieved his deceased father’s .38-caliber Rossi revolver and fired several rounds at the burglars, both of whom were killed.
After making sure he was safe from all threats, Stolarczyk immediately called the police and walked to the far end of his driveway to wait for their arrival.
Once they arrived, the responding officers investigated the incident and the Oneida County district attorney concluded that the shooting was likely justified, and that Stolarczyk would not face homicide charges.
The state police, however, arrested Stolarczyk on a charge of felony criminal possession of a firearm.
The gun Stolarczyk used had been legally owned by his father, who had properly registered the revolver and lived with it in the same house where the shooting took place.
Stolarczyk came into possession of it after his father died and left him the gun, and nothing legally prohibited him from possessing firearms.
The problem was that he failed to obtain his own handgun permit and register the gun in his name.
Thus, under state law, this otherwise law-abiding citizen was “guilty” of a Class E felony punishable by up to four years in state prison and the permanent loss of his Second Amendment rights.
Additionally, the local government seized possession of Stolarczyk’s house, claiming it was in violation of local housing codes, purportedly because he could not afford running water or electricity and kept the house full of old electronics.
All of this happened because Stolarczyk—who couldn’t even afford a standard cellphone plan—failed to properly jump through all the hoops necessary to gain the government’s permission to possess a firearm in his home for self-defense.
Just How Bad Is the Local System?
Most people would agree that Stolarczyk, an otherwise law-abiding citizen, should not be criminally punished after calling the police on himself to report the justified use of lethal force against burglars.
More concerning, however, is the fact that these charges expose a deeper problem stemming from the severe burden that Oneida County places on residents’ Second Amendment rights.
To fully appreciate how inappropriate these charges are, we decided to find out exactly what it takes to obtain a pistol permit in Oneida County—again, the only thing Stolarczyk allegedly failed to do properly here.
It turns out that, after a lengthy investigation, we’re still not certain we fully understand the process. Our best educated guess is something like the following:
First, anyone interested in owning a handgun must pick up the application in person, which can only be done at the Oneida County Office Building. But prepare to take time off work, because this building is only open Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 12 p.m., and 1 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Alternatively, if you live on the opposite side of the county and want to avoid a 50-minute drive to Utica, you can try the Griffiss Business and Technology Park office, open on Thursdays between 8 a.m. and 12 p.m.
Once at the Office of Pistol Licensing, you’ll need to present a New York state driver’s license proving that you’re at least 21 years old and have lived in Oneida County for at least one year.
You also must provide a certificate of completion for an NRA Basic Pistol Course, which lasts approximately eight hours and must be led by a county-approved instructor.
After calling many of the recommended instructors, we learned that the introductory course can cost anywhere between $40 and $165 and that classes aren’t necessarily offered on a regular basis.
Further, had we not called these instructors and the licensing office itself for clarification, it would have been nearly impossible to determine which courses Oneida County does and does not accept to meet the requirement.
Finally, after paying a $10 processing fee to the county, you can receive the application form and begin the process of seeking the county’s permission to own a gun in your own home.
The application itself consists of five parts, which must be completed in black ink, and all signatures on the form must be notarized. Two identical head shot photographs no larger than 2 x 2 inches must be attached to the application.
Each application also requires four notarized character references from individuals 21 years of age or older, who are not related to the applicant, and who reside in Oneida County.
After completing the application, you will be responsible for paying several additional fees for processing and fingerprinting. These include $150 to the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office, $100 to the Utica Police Department, or $50 to the Rome Police Department, depending on the jurisdiction in which you reside.
All payments must be made through a postal money order, which requires a trip to the post office—and possibly additional research if, like many people, you have no idea what a postal money order is or where to get one.
There will then be a six-month waiting period for processing, after which you’ll be informed whether your application was accepted or denied. Denials can occur for a myriad of reasons, including seemingly arbitrary determinations by the application processor that you are not “of good moral character.”
An Onerous Burden
This is the complex and costly system that Stolarczyk—who couldn’t afford to keep his lights on—needed to navigate in order to legally own the revolver that may have saved his life.
That’s not to say the government can never impose any requirements on gun owners, or regulate the manner in which firearms are purchased or carried outside the home. The Second Amendment right, like all other enumerated rights, is not unlimited.
But examples like this make clear that laborious and costly gun licensing requirements impose substantial and undue burdens on the exercise of the right to keep and bear arms—burdens we would never allow to be imposed on another fundamental constitutional right.
Worse still, these burdens fall heaviest on the shoulders of those who, unlike many of the wealthy politicians calling for gun control, can’t afford to live in gated communities and will never receive a police escort.
No level of government—be it federal, state, or local—should get away with imposing such great barriers to exercising a constitutional right.
It certainly shouldn’t punish individuals whose only crime was failing to properly navigate a nightmarishly complex and expensive web of bureaucracy prior to defending their life, liberty, and property with a handgun.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In Texas he would have been given the Citizen of the Year award along with a new pistol.
SORRY ABOUT THAT, BUT WE THOUGHT YOU WERE A JEW
Syrian refugee persuaded Palestinian to murder German 'Jew'
By Benjamin Weinthal
The Jerusalem Post
June 28, 2019
The Syrian refugee Mohammed Omran Albakr persuaded his Palestinian accomplice Iyad Bayatneh to murder a German millionaire because he allegedly was a Jew.
The dramatic development was reported on Thursday by the local newspaper Schwarzwälder Bote.
The 57-year-old victim Michael Riecher, a real estate investor who was not Jewish, was found strangled in his home in November.
According to the report, the 28-year-old Albakr told a number of acquaintances that he was looking for help to rob Riecher, who reportedly had gold and 250,000 Euro in a safe.
A Lebanese-born Palestinian named Haitham Ahmad provided the eye-popping testimony about Albakr and the 31-year-old Bayatneh. Ahmad, who is a barber, said he recommended Bayatneh as an accomplice to Albakr because Bayatneh has a “strong heart.”
According to Ahmad, who used an alias during his testimony, he said Albakr said to Bayatneh that “the man who will be attacked is a Jew.” Bayatneh responded: “The Jews destroyed my country.” Albakr then said "Riecher has no one. We have the right to take the money away from him," according to Ahmad.
The reporter Jürgen Lück, who broke the story about the role of deadly antisemitism as a motive for the murder of Riecher, wrote that a antisemitism watchdog organization Recherchestelle Antisemitismus contacted him on Thursday.
After reports in the Schwarzwälder Bote and The Jerusalem Post , Germany’s top-selling paper Bild titled its Friday story: “Millionaire murdered because perpetrator considered him Jew?”
The next court session is in early July.
By Benjamin Weinthal
The Jerusalem Post
June 28, 2019
The Syrian refugee Mohammed Omran Albakr persuaded his Palestinian accomplice Iyad Bayatneh to murder a German millionaire because he allegedly was a Jew.
The dramatic development was reported on Thursday by the local newspaper Schwarzwälder Bote.
The 57-year-old victim Michael Riecher, a real estate investor who was not Jewish, was found strangled in his home in November.
According to the report, the 28-year-old Albakr told a number of acquaintances that he was looking for help to rob Riecher, who reportedly had gold and 250,000 Euro in a safe.
A Lebanese-born Palestinian named Haitham Ahmad provided the eye-popping testimony about Albakr and the 31-year-old Bayatneh. Ahmad, who is a barber, said he recommended Bayatneh as an accomplice to Albakr because Bayatneh has a “strong heart.”
According to Ahmad, who used an alias during his testimony, he said Albakr said to Bayatneh that “the man who will be attacked is a Jew.” Bayatneh responded: “The Jews destroyed my country.” Albakr then said "Riecher has no one. We have the right to take the money away from him," according to Ahmad.
The reporter Jürgen Lück, who broke the story about the role of deadly antisemitism as a motive for the murder of Riecher, wrote that a antisemitism watchdog organization Recherchestelle Antisemitismus contacted him on Thursday.
After reports in the Schwarzwälder Bote and The Jerusalem Post , Germany’s top-selling paper Bild titled its Friday story: “Millionaire murdered because perpetrator considered him Jew?”
The next court session is in early July.
IF YOU WANT TO GET RICH BE A LAWYER, BUT IF YOU WANT TO STAY POOR BE A WORKER
Daily Mail
June 29, 2019
Toys 'R' Us bankruptcy lawyers to receive $56 million in fees while tens of thousands of laid-off workers will split $2 million leaving each of them with just $60 severance pay
June 29, 2019
Toys 'R' Us bankruptcy lawyers to receive $56 million in fees while tens of thousands of laid-off workers will split $2 million leaving each of them with just $60 severance pay
Saturday, June 29, 2019
TIME OUT FOR A LITTLE HUMOR
Here are a couple of jokes that should make you laugh out loud.
DID SHE JUMP?
Yesterday, a group of hell's angels, South Carolina bikers were riding east on Rt 378 when they saw a girl about to jump off the Pee Dee River Bridge.
So they stopped. Bubba G, their leader, a big burly man, gets off his Harley, walks through a group of gawkers, past the state trooper who was trying to talk her down off the railing, and says, "Hey baby whatcha doin' up there on that railin'?"
She says tearfully, "I'm going to commit suicide!!"
Why don't you give ol' Bubba G here your best last kiss?
So, with no hesitation at all, she leaned back over the railing and did just that. It was a long, deep, lingering kiss followed immediately by another even better one.
After they breathlessly finished, Bubba G gets a big thumbs-up approval from his biker-buddies, the onlookers, and even the state trooper, and then says, "Wow! That was the best kiss I have ever had! That's a real talent you're wasting there, sugar shorts. You could be famous if you rode with me. Why are you committing suicide?"
"My parents don't like me dressing up like a girl."
It’s unclear if he jumped or was pushed.
__________
MY WIFE SAID I MIGHT HAVE GOTTEN DISABILITY TOO
After retiring, I went to the Social Security office to apply for Social Security. The woman behind the counter asked me for my driver's license to verify my age. I looked in my pockets and realized I had left my wallet at home. I told the woman that I was very sorry, but I would have to go home and come back later.
The woman said, 'Unbutton your shirt'. So I opened my shirt revealing my curly silver hair. She said, 'That silver hair on your chest is proof enough for me' and she processed my Social Security application.
When I got home, I excitedly told my wife about my experience at the Social Security office.
She said, 'You should have dropped your pants. You might have gotten disability too.'
DID SHE JUMP?
Yesterday, a group of hell's angels, South Carolina bikers were riding east on Rt 378 when they saw a girl about to jump off the Pee Dee River Bridge.
So they stopped. Bubba G, their leader, a big burly man, gets off his Harley, walks through a group of gawkers, past the state trooper who was trying to talk her down off the railing, and says, "Hey baby whatcha doin' up there on that railin'?"
She says tearfully, "I'm going to commit suicide!!"
Why don't you give ol' Bubba G here your best last kiss?
So, with no hesitation at all, she leaned back over the railing and did just that. It was a long, deep, lingering kiss followed immediately by another even better one.
After they breathlessly finished, Bubba G gets a big thumbs-up approval from his biker-buddies, the onlookers, and even the state trooper, and then says, "Wow! That was the best kiss I have ever had! That's a real talent you're wasting there, sugar shorts. You could be famous if you rode with me. Why are you committing suicide?"
"My parents don't like me dressing up like a girl."
It’s unclear if he jumped or was pushed.
__________
MY WIFE SAID I MIGHT HAVE GOTTEN DISABILITY TOO
After retiring, I went to the Social Security office to apply for Social Security. The woman behind the counter asked me for my driver's license to verify my age. I looked in my pockets and realized I had left my wallet at home. I told the woman that I was very sorry, but I would have to go home and come back later.
The woman said, 'Unbutton your shirt'. So I opened my shirt revealing my curly silver hair. She said, 'That silver hair on your chest is proof enough for me' and she processed my Social Security application.
When I got home, I excitedly told my wife about my experience at the Social Security office.
She said, 'You should have dropped your pants. You might have gotten disability too.'
PERFECT DESCRIPTION OF PAROLE SUPERVISION IN TEXAS
BarkGrowlBite
June 29, 2019
An Anon made this comment on Grits for Breakfast:
Present yourself for office visit, pay, and piss, don't commit a new offense and see you again in 90 days for next appointment.
That about sums it up. His or her comment amounts to a perfect description of parole supervision in Texas. I could not have said it any better.
June 29, 2019
An Anon made this comment on Grits for Breakfast:
Present yourself for office visit, pay, and piss, don't commit a new offense and see you again in 90 days for next appointment.
That about sums it up. His or her comment amounts to a perfect description of parole supervision in Texas. I could not have said it any better.
HELPFUL HINT: DON'T BURY THE BODY IN YOUR OWN BACK YARD
by Bob Walsh
MacKenzie Lueck was a student at the Univ. of Utah. She also had a hobby involving older men. It is a high-risk past time which almost certainly got her killed.
They found her body buried in the back yard of Ayoola A. Ajayi, who has been charged with aggravated murder, kidnapping and desecrating a corpse. Electronic footprints from telephone communication led the cops to Ajayi, who I strongly suspect is in deep shit right about now. Twenty years ago he never would have made it to jail.
They may keep him alive just so they can hang him. They still do that in Utah. Firing squad is an option too. Trouble is, if they really hate you they will all just shoot you in the gut. Whoops. Sights must have been off.
EDITOR'S NOTE: She let it be known on the internet that she was a sugar baby looking for a sugar daddy. She got salt instead.
MacKenzie Lueck was a student at the Univ. of Utah. She also had a hobby involving older men. It is a high-risk past time which almost certainly got her killed.
They found her body buried in the back yard of Ayoola A. Ajayi, who has been charged with aggravated murder, kidnapping and desecrating a corpse. Electronic footprints from telephone communication led the cops to Ajayi, who I strongly suspect is in deep shit right about now. Twenty years ago he never would have made it to jail.
They may keep him alive just so they can hang him. They still do that in Utah. Firing squad is an option too. Trouble is, if they really hate you they will all just shoot you in the gut. Whoops. Sights must have been off.
EDITOR'S NOTE: She let it be known on the internet that she was a sugar baby looking for a sugar daddy. She got salt instead.
OH WE'RE HAVING A HEAT WAVE, A TROPICAL HEAT WAVE.....
by Bob Walsh
Yesterday it hit 115 degrees in France, the highest temperate EVER recorded there. It was so hot some French taxi drivers actually took showers. It wasn't a cleanliness thing, it was just to cool off, but still.........
EDITOR'S NOTE: Proof of global warming.
Yesterday it hit 115 degrees in France, the highest temperate EVER recorded there. It was so hot some French taxi drivers actually took showers. It wasn't a cleanliness thing, it was just to cool off, but still.........
EDITOR'S NOTE: Proof of global warming.
TRUMP IS PUTIN’S KIND OF MAN OR VICE VERSA
Putin attacks Western views on gay rights and multiculturalism and says immigrants are free to 'kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights are protected'
Daily Mail
June 28, 2019
Vladimir Putin has boasted that liberalism in Europe and the US has 'outlived its purpose' and called the decision to allow millions of migrants into the EU a 'cardinal mistake' as the G20 summit in Osaka began today with the Russian President sharing warm words with Donald Trump.
The Moscow leader criticised Western views on gay rights, immigration and multiculturalism – which he claimed were an attack on 'traditional family values'.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Putin said 'the liberal idea' was on its way out as the public turned its back on these issues. And he claimed German chancellor Angela Merkel made a 'cardinal mistake' in her 2017 decision to allow a million refugees into the country.
He said: '[Liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades.
'This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected.'
He added: 'Every crime must have its punishment. The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.'
Mr Putin has reserved special praise for Donald Trump for trying to stem the flow of migrants and drugs into the US, just before the men met today.
Daily Mail
June 28, 2019
Vladimir Putin has boasted that liberalism in Europe and the US has 'outlived its purpose' and called the decision to allow millions of migrants into the EU a 'cardinal mistake' as the G20 summit in Osaka began today with the Russian President sharing warm words with Donald Trump.
The Moscow leader criticised Western views on gay rights, immigration and multiculturalism – which he claimed were an attack on 'traditional family values'.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Putin said 'the liberal idea' was on its way out as the public turned its back on these issues. And he claimed German chancellor Angela Merkel made a 'cardinal mistake' in her 2017 decision to allow a million refugees into the country.
He said: '[Liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades.
'This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected.'
He added: 'Every crime must have its punishment. The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.'
Mr Putin has reserved special praise for Donald Trump for trying to stem the flow of migrants and drugs into the US, just before the men met today.
KILLER TOMATOES NO MATCH FOR METH-FUELED SQUIRREL
‘Attack squirrel’ suspect Mickey Paulk captured in Limestone County
By Howard Koplowitz
AL.com
June 27, 2019
Mickey Paulk, the man suspected of feeding meth to an “attack squirrel” in an incident that has gone viral, was captured Thursday night in Limestone County, authorities said.
The Limestone County Sheriff’s Office said deputies were surveilling a Lauderdale County hotel when Paulk left the establishment on a stolen motorcycle. Authorities said Paulk rammed an investigator’s vehicle and was captured after a brief pursuit.
Paulk is set to be booked into the Limestone County Jail on drug and gun charges. He is also being charged with attempting to elude, criminal mischief and felon in possession with a firearm stemming from his capture. The sheriff’s office said Paulk had a gun in his waistband when he was captured.
Paulk had been wanted by the sheriff’s office since June 18, when a drug bust in Athens turned up meth, ammunition and body armor.
Also found was a caged squirrel. Before authorities acted on a search warrant, they were told that Paulk fed meth to the animal to keep it aggressive. The sheriff’s office said it released the squirrel into a wooded area.
“There was no safe way to test the squirrel for meth,” Limestone County Sheriff Mike Blakely’s office said in a June 18 statement shortly after the bust.
The squirrel garnered national fame when the story came to light, including its own Twitter account.
Paulk released a video the day after the bust with a squirrel that he claimed was the same one released by sheriff’s deputies. He denied that he fed the squirrel meth.
By Howard Koplowitz
AL.com
June 27, 2019
Mickey Paulk, the man suspected of feeding meth to an “attack squirrel” in an incident that has gone viral, was captured Thursday night in Limestone County, authorities said.
The Limestone County Sheriff’s Office said deputies were surveilling a Lauderdale County hotel when Paulk left the establishment on a stolen motorcycle. Authorities said Paulk rammed an investigator’s vehicle and was captured after a brief pursuit.
Paulk is set to be booked into the Limestone County Jail on drug and gun charges. He is also being charged with attempting to elude, criminal mischief and felon in possession with a firearm stemming from his capture. The sheriff’s office said Paulk had a gun in his waistband when he was captured.
Paulk had been wanted by the sheriff’s office since June 18, when a drug bust in Athens turned up meth, ammunition and body armor.
Also found was a caged squirrel. Before authorities acted on a search warrant, they were told that Paulk fed meth to the animal to keep it aggressive. The sheriff’s office said it released the squirrel into a wooded area.
“There was no safe way to test the squirrel for meth,” Limestone County Sheriff Mike Blakely’s office said in a June 18 statement shortly after the bust.
The squirrel garnered national fame when the story came to light, including its own Twitter account.
Paulk released a video the day after the bust with a squirrel that he claimed was the same one released by sheriff’s deputies. He denied that he fed the squirrel meth.
A STEADFAST ALLIANCE, STRONGER THAN EVER
A strong Israel helps maintain the safety and security of the Middle East, which is essential to us and to our friend, the United States
by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Israel Hayom
June 27, 2019
Theodor Herzl, who envisioned and paved the way for the rebirth of Israel as a nation, lent great importance to the forging of alliances and the fostering of friendly relations between the Jewish people and the nations of the world. I am happy and proud that in the fabric of our ties with the nations of the world, the alliance between Israel and the United States stands first and prominent. This alliance is steadfast and stronger than ever, and under President Donald Trump it has reached new heights.
We remember very well that it was the United States, led by President Harry Truman, was the first country to recognize Israel 71 years ago. Over time, this friendship has grown deeper, and in the past few years, it has proved itself as a close strategic alliance.
We have always shared the common democratic values of liberty and justice, as well as mutual interests. But the big change lies in the fact that Israel is becoming a growing global force in the fields of security and technological innovation.
These impressive achievements are the result of the policies promoted by the governments under my leadership, with aim of making Israel's economy free and robust, and to establish our status as a technology and cyber power. At the same time, we are investing considerable resources in securing the superiority of our intelligence apparatus and our military might.
Our growing strength has brought many countries closer, which attests to the deep appreciation they have for Israel's capabilities. Israel's flourishing diplomatic relations with nations across the five continents is the result of our exceptional achievements and a policy of fostering and nurturing the strengths that are our advantages.
Particularly noteworthy is the budding ties – both overt and clandestine – between us and leading countries in the moderate Arab and Muslim world. This is a dramatic change that is based on the recognition that partnership with Israel contributes to the security, stability, and prosperity of the Middle East.
We lend great importance to our diplomatic relations as a whole, and we know that our alliance with the United States is the cornerstone of these ties. Throughout all my years as prime minister, I have endeavored to bolster these ties, even when disagreements arose on issues such as the peace process and the Iranian issue.
I thank Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama for signing the memorandums of understanding that granted Israel generous military aid. Every Israeli citizen is grateful for this vital assistance, which enhances our qualitative advantage over those who seek our demise.
The US itself benefits from this because a strong Israel helps maintain stability and security in our region, which is important to both us and our friend, the United States.
Over the past two and a half years, I have been working with President Trump to achieve another goal – we are expanding our military-intelligence collaboration and cyber capabilities so as to make our countries safer.
In addition, we have marked a series of historical decisions: President Trump, in a courageous decision, recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moved the US Embassy there. He recently made another welcome and strategically important decision for, us when he recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The president has also revolutionized US policy on Iran when he decided to withdraw from the nuclear agreement.
Iran, a rogue state that repeatedly threatens to annihilate Israel and strives to possess nuclear weapons, is currently facing significant American pressure, in the form of restored and exacerbated sanctions on its regime.
For over two decades I have been tirelessly warning about Iran's nuclear aspirations. I remained steadfast in that even when it meant taking on the world. When I address the US Congress in March 2015 and explained at length why the nuclear deal was dangerous to Israel, to the Middle East and to humanity as a whole.
The United States, under President Trump, offers us its unequivocal backing in our efforts to protect ourselves against Iran and our other enemies. The US administration stands as one with Israel vis-à-vis the attempts made by the International Criminal Court to undermine our right of self-defense and lends us its unwavering support in the United Nations, as well.
The team the administration has assigned to the peace deal, headed by senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, special envoy Jason Greenblatt and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, has demonstrated an unfaltering commitment to Israel's vital interests and security needs. I look forward to continuing working with the president to promote security, prosperity, and peace for both our countries.
The alliance between the United States and Israel is stronger than ever. To preserve and even bolster it, we need to continue to nurture American public opinion, for all its parts, to fight hostility toward Zionism and the new wave of anti-Semitism that is rearing its head in the US, as in Europe, and to continue to enhance our economic and military power and diplomatic standing.
Today it is clearer than ever: The US has no more loyal ally than Israel, and Israel has no more important and loyal ally than the United States.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Great campaign material. Nevertheles, Netanyahu is spot on.
by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Israel Hayom
June 27, 2019
Theodor Herzl, who envisioned and paved the way for the rebirth of Israel as a nation, lent great importance to the forging of alliances and the fostering of friendly relations between the Jewish people and the nations of the world. I am happy and proud that in the fabric of our ties with the nations of the world, the alliance between Israel and the United States stands first and prominent. This alliance is steadfast and stronger than ever, and under President Donald Trump it has reached new heights.
We remember very well that it was the United States, led by President Harry Truman, was the first country to recognize Israel 71 years ago. Over time, this friendship has grown deeper, and in the past few years, it has proved itself as a close strategic alliance.
We have always shared the common democratic values of liberty and justice, as well as mutual interests. But the big change lies in the fact that Israel is becoming a growing global force in the fields of security and technological innovation.
These impressive achievements are the result of the policies promoted by the governments under my leadership, with aim of making Israel's economy free and robust, and to establish our status as a technology and cyber power. At the same time, we are investing considerable resources in securing the superiority of our intelligence apparatus and our military might.
Our growing strength has brought many countries closer, which attests to the deep appreciation they have for Israel's capabilities. Israel's flourishing diplomatic relations with nations across the five continents is the result of our exceptional achievements and a policy of fostering and nurturing the strengths that are our advantages.
Particularly noteworthy is the budding ties – both overt and clandestine – between us and leading countries in the moderate Arab and Muslim world. This is a dramatic change that is based on the recognition that partnership with Israel contributes to the security, stability, and prosperity of the Middle East.
We lend great importance to our diplomatic relations as a whole, and we know that our alliance with the United States is the cornerstone of these ties. Throughout all my years as prime minister, I have endeavored to bolster these ties, even when disagreements arose on issues such as the peace process and the Iranian issue.
I thank Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama for signing the memorandums of understanding that granted Israel generous military aid. Every Israeli citizen is grateful for this vital assistance, which enhances our qualitative advantage over those who seek our demise.
The US itself benefits from this because a strong Israel helps maintain stability and security in our region, which is important to both us and our friend, the United States.
Over the past two and a half years, I have been working with President Trump to achieve another goal – we are expanding our military-intelligence collaboration and cyber capabilities so as to make our countries safer.
In addition, we have marked a series of historical decisions: President Trump, in a courageous decision, recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moved the US Embassy there. He recently made another welcome and strategically important decision for, us when he recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The president has also revolutionized US policy on Iran when he decided to withdraw from the nuclear agreement.
Iran, a rogue state that repeatedly threatens to annihilate Israel and strives to possess nuclear weapons, is currently facing significant American pressure, in the form of restored and exacerbated sanctions on its regime.
For over two decades I have been tirelessly warning about Iran's nuclear aspirations. I remained steadfast in that even when it meant taking on the world. When I address the US Congress in March 2015 and explained at length why the nuclear deal was dangerous to Israel, to the Middle East and to humanity as a whole.
The United States, under President Trump, offers us its unequivocal backing in our efforts to protect ourselves against Iran and our other enemies. The US administration stands as one with Israel vis-à-vis the attempts made by the International Criminal Court to undermine our right of self-defense and lends us its unwavering support in the United Nations, as well.
The team the administration has assigned to the peace deal, headed by senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, special envoy Jason Greenblatt and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, has demonstrated an unfaltering commitment to Israel's vital interests and security needs. I look forward to continuing working with the president to promote security, prosperity, and peace for both our countries.
The alliance between the United States and Israel is stronger than ever. To preserve and even bolster it, we need to continue to nurture American public opinion, for all its parts, to fight hostility toward Zionism and the new wave of anti-Semitism that is rearing its head in the US, as in Europe, and to continue to enhance our economic and military power and diplomatic standing.
Today it is clearer than ever: The US has no more loyal ally than Israel, and Israel has no more important and loyal ally than the United States.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Great campaign material. Nevertheles, Netanyahu is spot on.
THE WHOLE AIM AND PURPOSE OF BUILDING A PALESTINIAN NATION IS TO DESTROY THE JEWISH STATE
It’s Time for the Palestinians to Surrender: The Palestinians see abandoning their bloody nationalist agenda as “surrender,” but there can be no peace without it
By David Lazarus
Israel Today
June 28, 2019
That’s the conclusion of Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon in his latest NY Times piece titled “What’s Wrong with Palestinian Surrender?” Danon says that Palestinian surrender is needed for peace.
“Many on the Palestinian side, including President Mahmoud Abbas and the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, say that the plan is dead on arrival and that engaging with it is tantamount to a Palestinian declaration of surrender. I ask: What’s wrong with Palestinian surrender?” Danon writes in reference to the “Deal of the Century” peace proposal offered by US President Donald Trump’s envoys in Bahrain this week.
The Palestinian Authority boycotted the gathering and persuaded Palestinian businessmen not to attend even the important economic strategy workshops designed to significantly improve the everyday lives of Palestinians. Danon reminds the Palestinians that yet again they are missing a wonderful opportunity for a better life by finally entering into a peace agreement with Israel.
We all recall Ambassador Danon lifting his Bible in the UN to boldly proclaim that the Land of Israel belongs eternally to the Jewish people. Now Danon is calling for the Palestinians to lay down their “national identity” that is based on a misguided fantasy of destroying Israel. “Yet Mr. Erekat and the Palestinian leadership choose to stay the course and reject the term surrender. In doing so, they expose the uncomfortable truth about the Palestinian national identity: It is motivated not by building a better life for its people, but by destroying Israel,” he writes.
Danon then cites from the PLO charter: “The Palestinian Authority states its ‘mottos’ as ‘national unity, national mobilization, and liberation’ and talks about the ‘basic conflict that exists between the forces of Zionism and of imperialism on the one hand, and the Palestinian Arab people on the other.’ Palestinian leaders have rejected multiple peace overtures, launched intifadas and wars, and sponsored countless acts of terrorism in adherence to this belief.”
Danon points out that the whole aim and purpose of building a Palestinian nation is to destroy the Jewish state, and therefore the Palestinians must abandon their national, not ethnic, identity. “Negotiating without the explicit endorsement of a Palestinian state is seen as a rejection of the Palestinian national identity, and an acknowledgment that Israel and the Jewish people are here to stay. In short, for Mr. Abbas and Mr. Erekat, this approach is akin to national suicide. Yet a national suicide of the Palestinians’ current political and cultural ethos is precisely what is needed for peace. The belief that the Jews have no right to the land and Israel is to be destroyed, which engenders a culture of hate and incitement, needs to end.”
Danon compares the surrender of Egypt to Israel to the situation of the Palestinians. “In the Middle East, following defeat in four conventional wars between 1948 and 1973, Egypt surrendered the idea that it could wipe Israel from the region, and President Anwar Sadat chose peace, which Israel was ready to accept. After the 1979 peace agreement, Egypt became a favored recipient of American foreign and military aid, and the beneficiary of an influx of Western investment. There is no reason to believe a Palestinian declaration of surrender could not lead to a similar transformation.”
Danon concludes his article with, “The Palestinians have little to lose and everything to gain by putting down the sword and accepting the olive branch. Israel awaits the emergence of a Palestinian Anwar Sadat, a leader who is willing to do what is best for his people – a leader who recognizes that building a bright future requires surrendering a dark past.”
By David Lazarus
Israel Today
June 28, 2019
That’s the conclusion of Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon in his latest NY Times piece titled “What’s Wrong with Palestinian Surrender?” Danon says that Palestinian surrender is needed for peace.
“Many on the Palestinian side, including President Mahmoud Abbas and the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, say that the plan is dead on arrival and that engaging with it is tantamount to a Palestinian declaration of surrender. I ask: What’s wrong with Palestinian surrender?” Danon writes in reference to the “Deal of the Century” peace proposal offered by US President Donald Trump’s envoys in Bahrain this week.
The Palestinian Authority boycotted the gathering and persuaded Palestinian businessmen not to attend even the important economic strategy workshops designed to significantly improve the everyday lives of Palestinians. Danon reminds the Palestinians that yet again they are missing a wonderful opportunity for a better life by finally entering into a peace agreement with Israel.
We all recall Ambassador Danon lifting his Bible in the UN to boldly proclaim that the Land of Israel belongs eternally to the Jewish people. Now Danon is calling for the Palestinians to lay down their “national identity” that is based on a misguided fantasy of destroying Israel. “Yet Mr. Erekat and the Palestinian leadership choose to stay the course and reject the term surrender. In doing so, they expose the uncomfortable truth about the Palestinian national identity: It is motivated not by building a better life for its people, but by destroying Israel,” he writes.
Danon then cites from the PLO charter: “The Palestinian Authority states its ‘mottos’ as ‘national unity, national mobilization, and liberation’ and talks about the ‘basic conflict that exists between the forces of Zionism and of imperialism on the one hand, and the Palestinian Arab people on the other.’ Palestinian leaders have rejected multiple peace overtures, launched intifadas and wars, and sponsored countless acts of terrorism in adherence to this belief.”
Danon points out that the whole aim and purpose of building a Palestinian nation is to destroy the Jewish state, and therefore the Palestinians must abandon their national, not ethnic, identity. “Negotiating without the explicit endorsement of a Palestinian state is seen as a rejection of the Palestinian national identity, and an acknowledgment that Israel and the Jewish people are here to stay. In short, for Mr. Abbas and Mr. Erekat, this approach is akin to national suicide. Yet a national suicide of the Palestinians’ current political and cultural ethos is precisely what is needed for peace. The belief that the Jews have no right to the land and Israel is to be destroyed, which engenders a culture of hate and incitement, needs to end.”
Danon compares the surrender of Egypt to Israel to the situation of the Palestinians. “In the Middle East, following defeat in four conventional wars between 1948 and 1973, Egypt surrendered the idea that it could wipe Israel from the region, and President Anwar Sadat chose peace, which Israel was ready to accept. After the 1979 peace agreement, Egypt became a favored recipient of American foreign and military aid, and the beneficiary of an influx of Western investment. There is no reason to believe a Palestinian declaration of surrender could not lead to a similar transformation.”
Danon concludes his article with, “The Palestinians have little to lose and everything to gain by putting down the sword and accepting the olive branch. Israel awaits the emergence of a Palestinian Anwar Sadat, a leader who is willing to do what is best for his people – a leader who recognizes that building a bright future requires surrendering a dark past.”
Friday, June 28, 2019
WHOEVER CHOSE THE SLATE OF CANDIDATES FOR WEDNESDAYS DEBATE MUST HAVE TRIED TO TORPEDO ELIZABETH WARREN
Warren was placed with low-polling candidates like Beto O’Rourke and Bill de Blasio, rather than on a slate with Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders
BarkGrowlBite
June 28, 2019
I watched the debate and, like Trump said, it was boring. The only awakening moment occurred when Beto O’Rourke got into a shouting match with Julian Castro over immigration.
A Drudge Report poll had 39-year-old Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as the runaway winner with nearly 40 percent of those surveyed saying she won the debate. Elizabeth Warren came in second with 12.26 per cent. O’Rourke and Cory Booker polled last in the10 candidate field with around four percent..
I have to agree with the poll. Gabbard made a very good showing while O’Rourke came across as a blathering idiot.
Gabbard is a Hindu woman who was born in American Samoa. She served in a field medical unit of the Hawaii Army National Guard in a combat zone in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and was deployed to Kuwait from 2008 to 2009. Gabbard wants our soldiers to get out of Afghanistan and Iraq. In the 2016 primaries she supported Bernie Sanders. In January 2017, she met with Syria’s Assad in Damascus, a trip she claims to have made to broker a peace agreement. She has been a member of congress since 2013.
Except for Warren, all the other candidates polled low before the debate, most if not all of them in single digits. That leads me to believe that whoever made the debate selection deliberately tried to torpedo Warren. She belonged in the slate with Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.
__________
KAMALA SHINED THURSDAY
She blistered Biden as demands were made that he and Sanders pass the torch to a “new generation”
Kamala Harris was the clear winner Thursday while Biden was a big loser. Her blistering of Biden over his joining with segregationist senators to oppose school busing of black children to white schools left him stammering as he tried to respond.
And Kamala really shined in a dig at the other candidates when she told them: “Hey guys America does not want to witness a food fight they’re wondering how we’re going to get food on their tables.”
Bernie Sanders was attacked by some of the candidates for his socialism and he had to admit he would raise taxes on the middle class to pay for his programs.
Both Biden and Sanders were attacked over their age with demands they pass the torch to a “new generation.”
Mayor Pete was attacked because one of his cops shot a black man dead.
All the candidates wanted to provide health care for illegal immigrants and they demanded a ban on assault rifles.
Unlike the night before when Trump’s name was hardly mentioned, all of them, especially Biden, attacked Trump’s policies and character, with Sanders calling the President a “pathological liar” and a “racist.”
Thursday’s debate was not boring.
BarkGrowlBite
June 28, 2019
I watched the debate and, like Trump said, it was boring. The only awakening moment occurred when Beto O’Rourke got into a shouting match with Julian Castro over immigration.
A Drudge Report poll had 39-year-old Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as the runaway winner with nearly 40 percent of those surveyed saying she won the debate. Elizabeth Warren came in second with 12.26 per cent. O’Rourke and Cory Booker polled last in the10 candidate field with around four percent..
I have to agree with the poll. Gabbard made a very good showing while O’Rourke came across as a blathering idiot.
Gabbard is a Hindu woman who was born in American Samoa. She served in a field medical unit of the Hawaii Army National Guard in a combat zone in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and was deployed to Kuwait from 2008 to 2009. Gabbard wants our soldiers to get out of Afghanistan and Iraq. In the 2016 primaries she supported Bernie Sanders. In January 2017, she met with Syria’s Assad in Damascus, a trip she claims to have made to broker a peace agreement. She has been a member of congress since 2013.
Except for Warren, all the other candidates polled low before the debate, most if not all of them in single digits. That leads me to believe that whoever made the debate selection deliberately tried to torpedo Warren. She belonged in the slate with Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.
__________
KAMALA SHINED THURSDAY
She blistered Biden as demands were made that he and Sanders pass the torch to a “new generation”
Kamala Harris was the clear winner Thursday while Biden was a big loser. Her blistering of Biden over his joining with segregationist senators to oppose school busing of black children to white schools left him stammering as he tried to respond.
And Kamala really shined in a dig at the other candidates when she told them: “Hey guys America does not want to witness a food fight they’re wondering how we’re going to get food on their tables.”
Bernie Sanders was attacked by some of the candidates for his socialism and he had to admit he would raise taxes on the middle class to pay for his programs.
Both Biden and Sanders were attacked over their age with demands they pass the torch to a “new generation.”
Mayor Pete was attacked because one of his cops shot a black man dead.
All the candidates wanted to provide health care for illegal immigrants and they demanded a ban on assault rifles.
Unlike the night before when Trump’s name was hardly mentioned, all of them, especially Biden, attacked Trump’s policies and character, with Sanders calling the President a “pathological liar” and a “racist.”
Thursday’s debate was not boring.
I STRONGLY SUSPECT THAT ROBERT FRANCIS IS TOAST
by Bob Walsh
I watch only a tad of the democrap gaggle Wednesday. I did however see enough to convince me that, barring some miracle, former poster boy Robert Francis O'Rourke is probably history. Responding right out of the box in Spanish and then looking the rest of the night like a deer caught in the headlights is not going to propel him to the big kids table.
I would be very much surprised if he makes it on stage at the next round of the debates. He will probably be too busy to attend anyway, because he will be working his new gig as a shift manager at The Golden Corral.
I watch only a tad of the democrap gaggle Wednesday. I did however see enough to convince me that, barring some miracle, former poster boy Robert Francis O'Rourke is probably history. Responding right out of the box in Spanish and then looking the rest of the night like a deer caught in the headlights is not going to propel him to the big kids table.
I would be very much surprised if he makes it on stage at the next round of the debates. He will probably be too busy to attend anyway, because he will be working his new gig as a shift manager at The Golden Corral.
TRUMP ACCUSED OF LACKING MORAL PRINCIPLE BY DALAI LAMA WHO ALSO WARNED EUROPE ABOUT MUSLIM REFUGEES FROM AFRICA
Dalai Lama warns Europe could become ‘Muslim’ or ‘African’
by Zachary Halaschak
Washington Examiner
June 27, 2019
The Dalai Lama said in a recent interview that refugees to Europe should eventually return home, despite his support for international cooperation and institutions like the European Union.
Last year the Dalai Lama sparked controversy after he said, “Europe belongs to the Europeans.” He said he is still standing by that view, in an interview with the BBC.
The 83-year-old Tibetan spiritual leader is a refugee himself, exiled from his homeland after China sent troops to the Tibet region in 1959.
During the interview, he said that although Europe should help the refugees fleeing from the Middle East and Africa, it should also educate them with the goal of the refugees returning to their home countries.
“European countries should take these refugees and give them education and training, and the aim is return to their own land with certain skills,” he said.
Despite his insistence on Europe assisting to rebuild the countries from where the refugees fled, the Dalai Lama also addressed those who might want to remain in Europe.
“A limited number is OK. But the whole of Europe [will] eventually become Muslim country — impossible. Or African country, also impossible,” he said.
The spiritual leader also said that if a woman replaces him, she should be good looking.
"If a female Dalai Lama comes, she should be more attractive," he said while laughing.
During the same interview, the Dalai Lama also had some tough words for President Trump, whom he said had a “lack of moral principle.”
“When he became president he expressed America first. That is wrong,” the Dalai Lama said, noting that unlike prior U.S. presidents, Trump has not met with him or called him since becoming president.
The Dalai Lama has been the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people for decades. The Dalai Lama has met with dozens of world leaders and notable figures throughout the years, becoming somewhat of a celebrity himself.
by Zachary Halaschak
Washington Examiner
June 27, 2019
The Dalai Lama said in a recent interview that refugees to Europe should eventually return home, despite his support for international cooperation and institutions like the European Union.
Last year the Dalai Lama sparked controversy after he said, “Europe belongs to the Europeans.” He said he is still standing by that view, in an interview with the BBC.
The 83-year-old Tibetan spiritual leader is a refugee himself, exiled from his homeland after China sent troops to the Tibet region in 1959.
During the interview, he said that although Europe should help the refugees fleeing from the Middle East and Africa, it should also educate them with the goal of the refugees returning to their home countries.
“European countries should take these refugees and give them education and training, and the aim is return to their own land with certain skills,” he said.
Despite his insistence on Europe assisting to rebuild the countries from where the refugees fled, the Dalai Lama also addressed those who might want to remain in Europe.
“A limited number is OK. But the whole of Europe [will] eventually become Muslim country — impossible. Or African country, also impossible,” he said.
The spiritual leader also said that if a woman replaces him, she should be good looking.
"If a female Dalai Lama comes, she should be more attractive," he said while laughing.
During the same interview, the Dalai Lama also had some tough words for President Trump, whom he said had a “lack of moral principle.”
“When he became president he expressed America first. That is wrong,” the Dalai Lama said, noting that unlike prior U.S. presidents, Trump has not met with him or called him since becoming president.
The Dalai Lama has been the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people for decades. The Dalai Lama has met with dozens of world leaders and notable figures throughout the years, becoming somewhat of a celebrity himself.
WHILE YOU ARE A REPUBLICAN MEMBER OF CONGRESS, THE BEST WAY TO HIDE YOUR HOMOSEXUALITY IS BY BEING ANTI-GAY
Former Republican congressman known for his anti-gay policies and using taxpayer dollars to 'decorate his office like Downton Abbey' is filmed slipping cash into go-go dancer's tiny briefs at a gay bar in Mexico City
Daily Mail
June 27, 2019
Aaron Schock was filmed slipping cash into a go-go dancer's tiny briefs in a gay bar in Mexico City on Saturday around midnight. The former Republican congressman from Illinois watched as the muscly dancer, who wore just briefs, sneakers and socks, cavorted on stage.
An onlooker who filmed the video said he was surprised to see Schock, who was known for supporting anti-gay policies at gay hotspot Boy Bar. 'I was taking a video of the go-go dancer on stage and all of a sudden I saw him. He looked like he was enjoying himself,' the source told DailyMailTV.
Schock has denied being gay in past interviews but earlier this year he partied with gay men at Coachella and was allegedly photographed kissing a man.
He resigned in 2015 after his lavish spending, including decorating his office like the set of Downton Abbey, was investigated.
Daily Mail
June 27, 2019
Aaron Schock was filmed slipping cash into a go-go dancer's tiny briefs in a gay bar in Mexico City on Saturday around midnight. The former Republican congressman from Illinois watched as the muscly dancer, who wore just briefs, sneakers and socks, cavorted on stage.
An onlooker who filmed the video said he was surprised to see Schock, who was known for supporting anti-gay policies at gay hotspot Boy Bar. 'I was taking a video of the go-go dancer on stage and all of a sudden I saw him. He looked like he was enjoying himself,' the source told DailyMailTV.
Schock has denied being gay in past interviews but earlier this year he partied with gay men at Coachella and was allegedly photographed kissing a man.
He resigned in 2015 after his lavish spending, including decorating his office like the set of Downton Abbey, was investigated.
GERMANS BUY UP ALL THE BEER TO PROTEST NEO-NAZIS
Small German town is being praised for creative means of neutering neo-Nazi gathering
By David Lazarus
Israel Today
June 27, 2019
Residents in Ostritz, a small town in Saxony on the German-Polish border, protested a neo-Nazi gathering by buying up all the beer in town.
The far-right German rock festival called “Shield and Sword,” or SS, draws neo-Nazi devotees from around the country, and local residents were concerned about the possibility of violence and damage to their quiet town. Police were concerned, too, and enforced a ban on alcohol during the festival after a district court ruled that the event had an “aggressive character” and ordered the police to seize 4,400 liters of beer from festival-goers, according to The Local, a Germany-based online international news portal.
But the residents of the town of about 2,300 were concerned that the white nationalist crowds would simply head to the local supermarket to stock up on alcohol. So they organized a shopping spree and bought up all the beer in town just to make sure the neo-Nazis stayed sober –and thirsty, as beer is Germany’s favorite beverage.
One of the town’s residents told the German daily Bild: “The plan was devised a week in advance. We wanted to dry the Nazis out. We thought, if an alcohol ban is coming, we’ll empty the shelves.”
In the end, only about 500-600 attended the festival, compared to 1,200 last year. About 1,400 police were stationed at the event and reported that there were no major incidents.
Newspapers around German are now praising the creative way the residents responded with civic responsibility to protect their town. Now they can enjoy their large quantities of beer in peace and quiet. “We will have a wonderful celebration shortly,” said one of the boycott organizers, according to The Local.
EDITOR’S NOTE: No beer for the neo-Nazis. These folks sure know how to hurt someone.
By David Lazarus
Israel Today
June 27, 2019
Residents in Ostritz, a small town in Saxony on the German-Polish border, protested a neo-Nazi gathering by buying up all the beer in town.
The far-right German rock festival called “Shield and Sword,” or SS, draws neo-Nazi devotees from around the country, and local residents were concerned about the possibility of violence and damage to their quiet town. Police were concerned, too, and enforced a ban on alcohol during the festival after a district court ruled that the event had an “aggressive character” and ordered the police to seize 4,400 liters of beer from festival-goers, according to The Local, a Germany-based online international news portal.
But the residents of the town of about 2,300 were concerned that the white nationalist crowds would simply head to the local supermarket to stock up on alcohol. So they organized a shopping spree and bought up all the beer in town just to make sure the neo-Nazis stayed sober –and thirsty, as beer is Germany’s favorite beverage.
One of the town’s residents told the German daily Bild: “The plan was devised a week in advance. We wanted to dry the Nazis out. We thought, if an alcohol ban is coming, we’ll empty the shelves.”
In the end, only about 500-600 attended the festival, compared to 1,200 last year. About 1,400 police were stationed at the event and reported that there were no major incidents.
Newspapers around German are now praising the creative way the residents responded with civic responsibility to protect their town. Now they can enjoy their large quantities of beer in peace and quiet. “We will have a wonderful celebration shortly,” said one of the boycott organizers, according to The Local.
EDITOR’S NOTE: No beer for the neo-Nazis. These folks sure know how to hurt someone.
Thursday, June 27, 2019
CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY ….. NO TOOTHBRUSHES AND NO DIAPERS
The Trump-hating media has been full of reports on deplorable conditions children are experiencing in illegal immigrant detention facilities
By Howie Katz
Big Jolly Times
June 26, 2019
Quick, someone call the humanity police. Someone get chief prosecutor Fatou Bom Bensouda of the International Criminal Court to charge President Trump and the U.S. with Crimes Against Humanity.
Children held in illegal immigrant detention facilities have no toothbrushes or toothpaste. They haven’t been able to take showers. There’s no soap. They’re wearing the same dirty clothing they wore when the Border Patrol swooped them up. There are no diapers. They complain about being hungry. And some of them are sleeping on concrete floors because the facilities are overcrowded.
That’s what the Trump-hating media has been reporting for the past couple of weeks. And the reports are most probably true … no fake news here.
But before you get all exercised, it’s time for a reality check. The children swooped up by the Border Patrol are from Latin American families seeking asylum in the U.S. However. they do not meet the standard for asylum seekers. They were not being persecuted, imprisoned or murdered by the governments of Guatemala, Honduras or Mexico. While some of them want to escape the violence in their home countries, that does not constitute grounds for seeking asylum.
The truth is that the ‘asylum seekers’ are really seeking the American dream. They are fleeing living conditions in Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico that are no better, if not worse, than the conditions the detained children are experiencing now.
I’ve been to towns in Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Columbia and Brazil, and believe me, most of the poor in our country are living a life of luxury by comparison.
The inhabitants of many Latin American slums do not have running water. They pee and shit in the streets. Diaper-age kids are diaperless. The inhabitants are dirty and unkempt. I’m sure many of them go hungry. I suspect some of them do not have toothbrushes or toothpaste. And the slums are overcrowded. Some children are sleeping four or five to a bed. And some children have no bed to sleep on … they sleep on dirt floors.
Those living under those deplorable conditions in Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico have heard that the streets of America are paved with gold. That’s why they want to come to this country.
The media has been making a big deal out of children dying at the detention facilities. Of course, the death of any child is tragic whether in a detention facility or a million-dollar home. But I’ll bet the mortality rate of young children at the detention facilities is significantly lower than the mortality rate of young children in the slums of Latin America.
The Democrats are screaming bloody murder, calling the conditions torturous. But not so fast there Dems! The condition of children in the detention facilities under the Obama administration were similar, if not the same, as the condition which now infuriate the Democrats. The only difference is that while Obama was President, there were only blips about that in the Obama-loving media. Obama was given a pass because he was the first black president.
Should the conditions in our illegal immigrant detention facilities be improved? Of course they should! Do I think the conditions are abhorrent? Of course I do! But before Trump is charged with Crimes Against Humanity, it is important to note that the detained children are suffering no more than they did when they lived free in the slums of their home countries.
By Howie Katz
Big Jolly Times
June 26, 2019
Quick, someone call the humanity police. Someone get chief prosecutor Fatou Bom Bensouda of the International Criminal Court to charge President Trump and the U.S. with Crimes Against Humanity.
Children held in illegal immigrant detention facilities have no toothbrushes or toothpaste. They haven’t been able to take showers. There’s no soap. They’re wearing the same dirty clothing they wore when the Border Patrol swooped them up. There are no diapers. They complain about being hungry. And some of them are sleeping on concrete floors because the facilities are overcrowded.
That’s what the Trump-hating media has been reporting for the past couple of weeks. And the reports are most probably true … no fake news here.
But before you get all exercised, it’s time for a reality check. The children swooped up by the Border Patrol are from Latin American families seeking asylum in the U.S. However. they do not meet the standard for asylum seekers. They were not being persecuted, imprisoned or murdered by the governments of Guatemala, Honduras or Mexico. While some of them want to escape the violence in their home countries, that does not constitute grounds for seeking asylum.
The truth is that the ‘asylum seekers’ are really seeking the American dream. They are fleeing living conditions in Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico that are no better, if not worse, than the conditions the detained children are experiencing now.
I’ve been to towns in Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Columbia and Brazil, and believe me, most of the poor in our country are living a life of luxury by comparison.
The inhabitants of many Latin American slums do not have running water. They pee and shit in the streets. Diaper-age kids are diaperless. The inhabitants are dirty and unkempt. I’m sure many of them go hungry. I suspect some of them do not have toothbrushes or toothpaste. And the slums are overcrowded. Some children are sleeping four or five to a bed. And some children have no bed to sleep on … they sleep on dirt floors.
Those living under those deplorable conditions in Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico have heard that the streets of America are paved with gold. That’s why they want to come to this country.
The media has been making a big deal out of children dying at the detention facilities. Of course, the death of any child is tragic whether in a detention facility or a million-dollar home. But I’ll bet the mortality rate of young children at the detention facilities is significantly lower than the mortality rate of young children in the slums of Latin America.
The Democrats are screaming bloody murder, calling the conditions torturous. But not so fast there Dems! The condition of children in the detention facilities under the Obama administration were similar, if not the same, as the condition which now infuriate the Democrats. The only difference is that while Obama was President, there were only blips about that in the Obama-loving media. Obama was given a pass because he was the first black president.
Should the conditions in our illegal immigrant detention facilities be improved? Of course they should! Do I think the conditions are abhorrent? Of course I do! But before Trump is charged with Crimes Against Humanity, it is important to note that the detained children are suffering no more than they did when they lived free in the slums of their home countries.
SHOES STILL DROPPING FROM PARKLAND
by Bob Walsh
Two more Broward County deputies have been sacked due to the Parkland School debacle on Valentine's Day last year.
Edward Eason and Josh Stambaugh were both fired yesterday for inaction at the scene. Two other deputies were sacked earlier this month. One of them, the school resources officer, Scot Peterson, is being prosecuted.
No action was taken against three other deputies who were involved in the Parkland response.
Scott Israel, the sheriff at the time, was removed from office by the Governor. Gregory Tony is the new sheriff. Former Sheriff Israel is appealing his dismissal via the state legislature.
Two more Broward County deputies have been sacked due to the Parkland School debacle on Valentine's Day last year.
Edward Eason and Josh Stambaugh were both fired yesterday for inaction at the scene. Two other deputies were sacked earlier this month. One of them, the school resources officer, Scot Peterson, is being prosecuted.
No action was taken against three other deputies who were involved in the Parkland response.
Scott Israel, the sheriff at the time, was removed from office by the Governor. Gregory Tony is the new sheriff. Former Sheriff Israel is appealing his dismissal via the state legislature.
SEEKING MORE INFORMATION
by Bob Walsh
This is, of course, from an news report and not an incident report. It does, however, point out some holes somewhere, either in the reporting or in the procedure being reported on.
Sunday afternoon a guest of the state of California tried to escape. Specifically an inmate was being transported from Mule Creek State Prison at Ione to the prison ward at San Joaquin County Hospital for a scheduled medical appointment. OK, not a big deal, that happens all the time. Then a CHP officer who happens to be arriving at the hospital sees a man hot-footing it across the parking lot with two state correctional officers in pursuit.
The prisoner makes it to I-5 nearby, then crosses part of the freeway and starts to shed his orange jump suit. At that point the CHP officer pepper sprays the crap out of the suspected escapee and the state correctional officers gaffle him back up. He was then returned to Ione, presumably without completing his medical appointment.
The prisoner, Isidro Hernandez, was a lifer out of Santa Clara county and was 12 years into his sentence for L&L with a minor. He physically attacked one of the correctional officers and then ran.
Here we get into questions. How is it he was unrestrained? Did he beat feet from the parking lot of inside the building? Why didn't the officer who was not attacked shoot him? How close was he being pursued? Why wasn't he fired on as he left the parking lot if nothing else? (The freeway is elevated there, there would be little risk to others.)
Somehow I doubt subsequent news stories, if any, will fill in the blanks. I am, however, curious.
This is, of course, from an news report and not an incident report. It does, however, point out some holes somewhere, either in the reporting or in the procedure being reported on.
Sunday afternoon a guest of the state of California tried to escape. Specifically an inmate was being transported from Mule Creek State Prison at Ione to the prison ward at San Joaquin County Hospital for a scheduled medical appointment. OK, not a big deal, that happens all the time. Then a CHP officer who happens to be arriving at the hospital sees a man hot-footing it across the parking lot with two state correctional officers in pursuit.
The prisoner makes it to I-5 nearby, then crosses part of the freeway and starts to shed his orange jump suit. At that point the CHP officer pepper sprays the crap out of the suspected escapee and the state correctional officers gaffle him back up. He was then returned to Ione, presumably without completing his medical appointment.
The prisoner, Isidro Hernandez, was a lifer out of Santa Clara county and was 12 years into his sentence for L&L with a minor. He physically attacked one of the correctional officers and then ran.
Here we get into questions. How is it he was unrestrained? Did he beat feet from the parking lot of inside the building? Why didn't the officer who was not attacked shoot him? How close was he being pursued? Why wasn't he fired on as he left the parking lot if nothing else? (The freeway is elevated there, there would be little risk to others.)
Somehow I doubt subsequent news stories, if any, will fill in the blanks. I am, however, curious.
THE RISE OF AOC REWARDS RADICAL LEFTIES IN QUEENS WITH FUNDS RAISED NATIONWIDE
The Queens majority needs to unite to stop Tiffany Cabán
By Post Editorial Board
New York Post
June 26, 2019
Lefties nationwide are crowing over Tiffany Cabán’s apparent victory in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for the Queens district-attorney job. The question now is whether leaders who represent the solid majority of the borough’s residents can join together to beat Cabán in the general election.
This is about not just the rise of the Democratic Socialists, but also the slow death of the once-vaunted Queens Democratic machine. It started losing at least three years ago, to moderates angry at how the establishment had grown out of touch with local concerns.
Brian Barnwell beat longtime Assemblywoman Marge Markey on the issue of a homeless shelter opening in Maspeth. The next year, reformer Robert Holden ousted incumbent City Councilwoman Liz Crowley.
But the machine’s weakness attracted national progressives to move in, recruit Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to challenge Rep. Joe Crowley — and succeed in offing the king of the machine.
Rep. Greg Meeks took over as county chairman — and opted for business as usual. But AOC’s rise allows Queens lefties to fund-raise nationwide: Cabán drew a legion of small donations from across America, plus endorsements from Sens. Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders. The New York Times, desperate to renew its lefty cred, also blessed her.
And Cabán’s win wasn’t even Meeks’ only humiliation Tuesday: Lumarie Maldonado-Cruz also beat the machine, as the ex-Bronx resident won a “once-in-a-generation” countywide Civil Court race.
Borough President Melinda Katz, on Election Night a close second to Cabán, has a tiny chance of turning out the victor once all the votes are counted next week. More likely, she’ll need to find a way to fight on in the general election, by allying with voters the machine’s been ignoring — including the county’s Republicans. The current GOP candidate for DA has no hope, and there’s already talk of replacing him with Katz.
Queens residents deserve some real alternative to Cabán, who has vowed to stop prosecutions for prostitution, pot possession and other “broken windows” crimes, and to completely stop seeking cash bail.
The borough’s future is at stake: Its non-lefty majority needs to unite, and fast.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Those who have been belittling and laughing at AOC or calling her crazy better beware. She is no dummy and she is not crazy! She has acquired a nationwide following of radical lefties and that is helping other radical candidates like her. We are seeing a transformation in the Democratic party from old white men to young radical men and women.
By Post Editorial Board
New York Post
June 26, 2019
Lefties nationwide are crowing over Tiffany Cabán’s apparent victory in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for the Queens district-attorney job. The question now is whether leaders who represent the solid majority of the borough’s residents can join together to beat Cabán in the general election.
This is about not just the rise of the Democratic Socialists, but also the slow death of the once-vaunted Queens Democratic machine. It started losing at least three years ago, to moderates angry at how the establishment had grown out of touch with local concerns.
Brian Barnwell beat longtime Assemblywoman Marge Markey on the issue of a homeless shelter opening in Maspeth. The next year, reformer Robert Holden ousted incumbent City Councilwoman Liz Crowley.
But the machine’s weakness attracted national progressives to move in, recruit Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to challenge Rep. Joe Crowley — and succeed in offing the king of the machine.
Rep. Greg Meeks took over as county chairman — and opted for business as usual. But AOC’s rise allows Queens lefties to fund-raise nationwide: Cabán drew a legion of small donations from across America, plus endorsements from Sens. Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders. The New York Times, desperate to renew its lefty cred, also blessed her.
And Cabán’s win wasn’t even Meeks’ only humiliation Tuesday: Lumarie Maldonado-Cruz also beat the machine, as the ex-Bronx resident won a “once-in-a-generation” countywide Civil Court race.
Borough President Melinda Katz, on Election Night a close second to Cabán, has a tiny chance of turning out the victor once all the votes are counted next week. More likely, she’ll need to find a way to fight on in the general election, by allying with voters the machine’s been ignoring — including the county’s Republicans. The current GOP candidate for DA has no hope, and there’s already talk of replacing him with Katz.
Queens residents deserve some real alternative to Cabán, who has vowed to stop prosecutions for prostitution, pot possession and other “broken windows” crimes, and to completely stop seeking cash bail.
The borough’s future is at stake: Its non-lefty majority needs to unite, and fast.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Those who have been belittling and laughing at AOC or calling her crazy better beware. She is no dummy and she is not crazy! She has acquired a nationwide following of radical lefties and that is helping other radical candidates like her. We are seeing a transformation in the Democratic party from old white men to young radical men and women.
DID THE PENTAGON ‘ACCIDENTALLY’ POST NUCLEAR DOCUMENTS FOR IRAN TO TAKE NOTE?
Pentagon document on US nuclear operations inadvertently posted online
by Assaf Golan
Israel Hayom
June 26, 2019
A Pentagon document laying out the US doctrine on nuclear operations was accidentally posted online and was publicly available for about a week, Israel Hayom has learned.
Dated June 11, the document, which has since been removed, noted that Pentagon believes using nuclear weapons could "create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability."
According to The Guardian, the simply titled "Nuclear Operations" document was the first such doctrine paper in 14 years. It reveals that Washington essentially sees nuclear war as "winnable.
The report quotes arms control experts as saying the doctrine marks "a shift in US military thinking towards the idea of fighting and winning a nuclear war – which they believe is a highly dangerous mindset."
"Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability," the joint chiefs’ document says. "Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict."
According to The Guardian, the document quotes Cold War theorist Herman Kahn as saying: "My guess is that nuclear weapons will be used sometime in the next hundred years, but that their use is much more likely to be small and limited than widespread and unconstrained."
A spokesperson for the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the document was removed "because it was determined that this publication, as is with other joint staff publications, should be for official use only".
The spokesperson did not say why the document was made public in the first place.
Before it was taken down, the Nuclear Operations document was downloaded by Steven Aftergood, who directs the project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.
Aftergood told the British daily that the doctrine "is very much conceived as a war-fighting doctrine – not simply a deterrence doctrine, and that’s unsettling."
He pointed out that as a Pentagon document – rather than a policy paper – the doctrine sets out to plan for worst-case scenarios.
"That kind of thinking itself can be hazardous. It can make that sort of eventuality more likely instead of deterring it," he said.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This must have the liberal quaking all over. But it is inevitable that sooner or later one of the nuclear powers is going to use its nuclear weapons. Those weapons are not made just to be polished every day. If we used them, say against Iran, the lives of many American soldiers would not be lost.
by Assaf Golan
Israel Hayom
June 26, 2019
A Pentagon document laying out the US doctrine on nuclear operations was accidentally posted online and was publicly available for about a week, Israel Hayom has learned.
Dated June 11, the document, which has since been removed, noted that Pentagon believes using nuclear weapons could "create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability."
According to The Guardian, the simply titled "Nuclear Operations" document was the first such doctrine paper in 14 years. It reveals that Washington essentially sees nuclear war as "winnable.
The report quotes arms control experts as saying the doctrine marks "a shift in US military thinking towards the idea of fighting and winning a nuclear war – which they believe is a highly dangerous mindset."
"Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability," the joint chiefs’ document says. "Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict."
According to The Guardian, the document quotes Cold War theorist Herman Kahn as saying: "My guess is that nuclear weapons will be used sometime in the next hundred years, but that their use is much more likely to be small and limited than widespread and unconstrained."
A spokesperson for the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the document was removed "because it was determined that this publication, as is with other joint staff publications, should be for official use only".
The spokesperson did not say why the document was made public in the first place.
Before it was taken down, the Nuclear Operations document was downloaded by Steven Aftergood, who directs the project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.
Aftergood told the British daily that the doctrine "is very much conceived as a war-fighting doctrine – not simply a deterrence doctrine, and that’s unsettling."
He pointed out that as a Pentagon document – rather than a policy paper – the doctrine sets out to plan for worst-case scenarios.
"That kind of thinking itself can be hazardous. It can make that sort of eventuality more likely instead of deterring it," he said.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This must have the liberal quaking all over. But it is inevitable that sooner or later one of the nuclear powers is going to use its nuclear weapons. Those weapons are not made just to be polished every day. If we used them, say against Iran, the lives of many American soldiers would not be lost.
MANSLAUGHTER CHARGE INFURIATES PRO-ABORTION GROUPS
Alabama woman loses unborn child after being shot, gets arrested; shooter goes free
By Carol Robinson
AL.com
June 26, 2019
A woman whose unborn baby was killed in a 2018 Pleasant Grove shooting has now been indicted in the death.
Marshae Jones, a 27-year-old Birmingham woman, was indicted by a Jefferson County grand jury on a manslaughter charge. She was taken into custody on Wednesday.
Though Jones didn’t fire the shots that killed her unborn baby girl, authorities say she initiated the dispute that led to the gunfire. Police initially charged 23-year-old Ebony Jemison with manslaughter, but the charge against Jemison was dismissed after the grand jury failed to indict her.
The shooting happened about noon on Dec. 4, 2018, outside Dollar General on Park Road. Officers were dispatched to the scene on a report of someone shot but arrived to find the shooting victim – later identified as Jones - had been picked up and driven to Fairfield. Police and paramedics then found the Jones at a Fairfield convenience store.
Jones was taken from Fairfield to UAB Hospital. She was five months pregnant and was shot in the stomach. The unborn baby did not survive the shooting.
“The investigation showed that the only true victim in this was the unborn baby,’’ Pleasant Grove police Lt. Danny Reid said at the time of the shooting. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”
Reid said the fight stemmed over the unborn baby’s father. The investigation showed, he said, that it was Jones who initiated and pressed the fight, which ultimately caused Jemison to defend herself and unfortunately caused the death of the baby.
"Let’s not lose sight that the unborn baby is the victim here,’’ Reid said. “She had no choice in being brought unnecessarily into a fight where she was relying on her mother for protection."
The 5-month fetus was "dependent on its mother to try to keep it from harm, and she shouldn’t seek out unnecessary physical altercations,” Reid added.
Jones will be transferred to the Jefferson County Jail where she will be held on $50,000 bond.
News of Jones’ grand jury indictment outraged many, including women’s rights activists.
The Yellowhammer Fund, a member of the National Network of Abortion Funds which helps women access abortion services, released a statement Wednesday night. The group gained national attention after the passage of Alabama’s new abortion law.
“The state of Alabama has proven yet again that the moment a person becomes pregnant their sole responsibility is to produce a live, healthy baby and that it considers any action a pregnant person takes that might impede in that live birth to be a criminal act,’’ Executive Director Amanda Reyes said in the statement.“
“Today, Marshae Jones is being charged with manslaughter for being pregnant and getting shot while engaging in an altercation with a person who had a gun. Tomorrow, it will be another black woman, maybe for having a drink while pregnant. And after that, another, for not obtaining adequate prenatal care,” Reyes said.
“We commit ourselves to making sure that Marshae is released from jail on bond, assisting with her legal representation, and working to ensure that she gets justice for the multiple attacks that she has endured,’’ Reyes said.
By Carol Robinson
AL.com
June 26, 2019
A woman whose unborn baby was killed in a 2018 Pleasant Grove shooting has now been indicted in the death.
Marshae Jones, a 27-year-old Birmingham woman, was indicted by a Jefferson County grand jury on a manslaughter charge. She was taken into custody on Wednesday.
Though Jones didn’t fire the shots that killed her unborn baby girl, authorities say she initiated the dispute that led to the gunfire. Police initially charged 23-year-old Ebony Jemison with manslaughter, but the charge against Jemison was dismissed after the grand jury failed to indict her.
The shooting happened about noon on Dec. 4, 2018, outside Dollar General on Park Road. Officers were dispatched to the scene on a report of someone shot but arrived to find the shooting victim – later identified as Jones - had been picked up and driven to Fairfield. Police and paramedics then found the Jones at a Fairfield convenience store.
Jones was taken from Fairfield to UAB Hospital. She was five months pregnant and was shot in the stomach. The unborn baby did not survive the shooting.
“The investigation showed that the only true victim in this was the unborn baby,’’ Pleasant Grove police Lt. Danny Reid said at the time of the shooting. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.”
Reid said the fight stemmed over the unborn baby’s father. The investigation showed, he said, that it was Jones who initiated and pressed the fight, which ultimately caused Jemison to defend herself and unfortunately caused the death of the baby.
"Let’s not lose sight that the unborn baby is the victim here,’’ Reid said. “She had no choice in being brought unnecessarily into a fight where she was relying on her mother for protection."
The 5-month fetus was "dependent on its mother to try to keep it from harm, and she shouldn’t seek out unnecessary physical altercations,” Reid added.
Jones will be transferred to the Jefferson County Jail where she will be held on $50,000 bond.
News of Jones’ grand jury indictment outraged many, including women’s rights activists.
The Yellowhammer Fund, a member of the National Network of Abortion Funds which helps women access abortion services, released a statement Wednesday night. The group gained national attention after the passage of Alabama’s new abortion law.
“The state of Alabama has proven yet again that the moment a person becomes pregnant their sole responsibility is to produce a live, healthy baby and that it considers any action a pregnant person takes that might impede in that live birth to be a criminal act,’’ Executive Director Amanda Reyes said in the statement.“
“Today, Marshae Jones is being charged with manslaughter for being pregnant and getting shot while engaging in an altercation with a person who had a gun. Tomorrow, it will be another black woman, maybe for having a drink while pregnant. And after that, another, for not obtaining adequate prenatal care,” Reyes said.
“We commit ourselves to making sure that Marshae is released from jail on bond, assisting with her legal representation, and working to ensure that she gets justice for the multiple attacks that she has endured,’’ Reyes said.
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
TRUMP INSISTS HE NEVER MET E. JEAN CARROLL DESPITE PHOTO SHOWING THE PAIR YACKING IT UP AT A 1987 PARTY
E. Jean Carrol tells CNN’s Anderson Cooper that “I think most people think of rape as being sexy.”
BarkGrowlBite
June 26, 2019
Advice columnist E. Jean Carrol, who has accused Trump of sexually assaulting her 23 years ago, shocked an unsettled CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday with her response when he asked her about her refusal to use the word rape and pointed out that most people describe rape as a violent assault. Here is how Carrol responded:
“I think most people think of rape as being sexy. Think of the fantasies.”
Cooper immediately interrupted the interview by calling for a commercial.
In her forthcoming book, Carrol said she ran into Trump at Bergdorf Goodman in either the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996. She said Trump recognized her and asked for her help choosing a gift. She said they eventually made their way into the lingerie section, and then a dressing room. Then she describes what happened next:
“The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights. I am astonished by what I'm about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway -- or completely, I'm not certain -- inside me.”
According to Carrol, Trump did more than just grab her pussy. But she must have enjoyed it since she thinks of rape as being sexy.
Trump vehemently denies the sexual encounter with Carrol ever occurred and states that he “never met this person in my life.”
But - Oops - a photo has emerged which shows him and Carrol in 1987 yacking it up at an NBC party.
When Trump told The Hill that “she’s not my type,” Carrol responded “I love that, I am so glad I am not his type. I’m so glad.”
NY mayor Bill DeBlasio is unhappy with Carrol because she won’t file a rape complaint against Trump. The uber-left mayor, now also a Democratic presidential candidate, – hahaha – wants NYPD to investigate Trump for rape. But de Blasio needs a complainant in order for NYPD to start such an investigation. And then there is the problem of NYPD classifying rape as illegal entry so as to give the appearance of NY being safe for women tourists.
I wonder if Anderson Cooper has recovered by now.
BarkGrowlBite
June 26, 2019
Advice columnist E. Jean Carrol, who has accused Trump of sexually assaulting her 23 years ago, shocked an unsettled CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday with her response when he asked her about her refusal to use the word rape and pointed out that most people describe rape as a violent assault. Here is how Carrol responded:
“I think most people think of rape as being sexy. Think of the fantasies.”
Cooper immediately interrupted the interview by calling for a commercial.
In her forthcoming book, Carrol said she ran into Trump at Bergdorf Goodman in either the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996. She said Trump recognized her and asked for her help choosing a gift. She said they eventually made their way into the lingerie section, and then a dressing room. Then she describes what happened next:
“The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights. I am astonished by what I'm about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway -- or completely, I'm not certain -- inside me.”
According to Carrol, Trump did more than just grab her pussy. But she must have enjoyed it since she thinks of rape as being sexy.
Trump vehemently denies the sexual encounter with Carrol ever occurred and states that he “never met this person in my life.”
But - Oops - a photo has emerged which shows him and Carrol in 1987 yacking it up at an NBC party.
When Trump told The Hill that “she’s not my type,” Carrol responded “I love that, I am so glad I am not his type. I’m so glad.”
NY mayor Bill DeBlasio is unhappy with Carrol because she won’t file a rape complaint against Trump. The uber-left mayor, now also a Democratic presidential candidate, – hahaha – wants NYPD to investigate Trump for rape. But de Blasio needs a complainant in order for NYPD to start such an investigation. And then there is the problem of NYPD classifying rape as illegal entry so as to give the appearance of NY being safe for women tourists.
I wonder if Anderson Cooper has recovered by now.
UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT
by Bob Walsh
If you are in the retail business you are there to sell shit to people who want to buy your shit and who have the money to pay for it. It is really fairly simple.
A bunch of employees of Wayfair, an internet based furniture store, are planning a walkout to protest the fact that their employer is actually selling office equipment to ...... wait for it......ICE.
Specifically the sale, for $200,000, was to a NGO non-profit that operates detention facilities for ICE. A group of 500 employees signed a letter asking Wayfair to stop dealing with this contractor and similar businesses. The furniture is mostly camp beds so the illegal aliens won't have to sleep on the fucking floor.
Wayfair said the order will be processed and shipped as scheduled. They further said, "...we believe it is our business to sell to any customer who is acting within the laws of the countries within which we operate."
I hope they've got the stones to follow thru. The 547 employees who are threatening a walkout all work at the Boston offices of the company.
EDITOR'S NOTE: If the do walk out, fire all 547 of them!
If you are in the retail business you are there to sell shit to people who want to buy your shit and who have the money to pay for it. It is really fairly simple.
A bunch of employees of Wayfair, an internet based furniture store, are planning a walkout to protest the fact that their employer is actually selling office equipment to ...... wait for it......ICE.
Specifically the sale, for $200,000, was to a NGO non-profit that operates detention facilities for ICE. A group of 500 employees signed a letter asking Wayfair to stop dealing with this contractor and similar businesses. The furniture is mostly camp beds so the illegal aliens won't have to sleep on the fucking floor.
Wayfair said the order will be processed and shipped as scheduled. They further said, "...we believe it is our business to sell to any customer who is acting within the laws of the countries within which we operate."
I hope they've got the stones to follow thru. The 547 employees who are threatening a walkout all work at the Boston offices of the company.
EDITOR'S NOTE: If the do walk out, fire all 547 of them!
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.
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.”
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