The university had even cleared Hadden to see patients three days after he was arrested when a patient called 911 to report that he had assaulted her during a postpartum exam. University higher-ups had been informed of the arrest but allowed Hadden to continue working for another five weeks. Patients he saw during that time also reported being assaulted.
The latest settlement, combined with payouts from previous cases, means that Columbia will have paid out more than $1 billion to resolve claims of sexual abuse by Hadden. Columbia also said that it has now settled more than 1,000 claims of sexual abuse by Hadden’s former patients.
Hadden was convicted of sex crimes in federal court in January 2023 and is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.
Laurie Kanyok, the patient who called 911, said the settlement is bittersweet. “It’s emotional because it’s been 13 years,” she told ProPublica.
She also said that financial compensation does not amount to justice.
“I’m grateful that I’m involved in this,” Kanyok said. “At the same time, I feel like I want to see people held accountable and not just somebody’s insurance company or checkbook.”
Unlike in other high-profile cases involving sexual abuse by doctors, no administrators from Columbia have been fired or have stepped down as a result of the Hadden case.
In a statement, Columbia acknowledged failing to protect Hadden’s patients. “We deeply regret the pain that his patients suffered, and this settlement is another step forward in our ongoing work and commitment to repair harm and support survivors,” the statement said. “We commend the survivors for their bravery in coming forward.”
The latest settlement puts Columbia on par with the largest payout ever by a university to settle sexual abuse claims. In 2021, the University of Southern California agreed to pay $1.1 billion to survivors of George Tyndall, a university gynecologist who abused thousands of women.
Anthony DiPietro, the attorney who handled most of the Columbia claims, said the lesson from this week’s settlement is clear: Institutions “cannot continue to cover up sexual exploitation and abuse by their doctors because they’re going to be held accountable.”
Weeks after ProPublica’s investigation, Columbia announced that it would set up a $100 million settlement fund for patients who did not want to file civil suits. Survivors have about another week, until May 15, to submit a claim.
As part of the same announcement, Columbia also said it would notify all of Hadden’s nearly 6,500 former patients of the doctor’s crimes and that it would commission an external investigation to examine failures that allowed the abuse to go on for so long.
Asked about the status of that investigation, which was announced a year and a half ago, the university said it is ongoing. Columbia did not give a time frame for the report’s completion.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
A Louisiana judge this week set aside the first-degree murder conviction and death sentence of Jimmie Chris Duncan, whose 1998 conviction for killing his girlfriend’s 23-month-old daughter was based in part on bite mark evidence that experts now say is junk science.
The decision comes after a Verite News and ProPublica investigation in March examined the questions surrounding Duncan’s conviction as Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, made moves to expedite executions after a 15-year pause.
Judge Alvin Sharp, of the 4th Judicial District in Ouachita Parish, pointed to new testimony during a September appeals hearing that such bite mark analysis presented by a once-heralded forensics team is “no longer valid” and “not scientifically defensible.”
The original analysis came from forensic dentist Michael West and pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne, whose longtime partnership as state experts fell under legal scrutiny after questions emerged about the validity of their techniques.
Over the past 27 years, nine prisoners have been set free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence given by West and Hayne. Three of those men were on death row.
Duncan was the last person awaiting an execution based on the pair’s work, which Sharp said in his ruling appeared “questionable at best.”
Other expert witnesses said that Hayne’s autopsy and his findings were “sloppy in practice” and “inadequate overall.”
“It is worth noting that the qualifications of Dr. Hayne were lacking in certain ways to an extent that called into serious question” the pathologist’s “expert designation,” Sharp wrote in his ruling.
Sharp also stated in his ruling that he found “very compelling” the September testimony of an expert medical witness who said that the child’s death was not the result of a homicide but of an accidental drowning.
It remains unclear when — or if — Duncan will walk free.
Robert S. Tew, district attorney for the 4th Judicial District, can choose to appeal the decision, retry Duncan on the murder charge or a lesser offense or accept the court’s ruling and set him free. Tew did not respond to requests for comment. Duncan’s legal team declined to comment.
Louisiana has a long record of convicting and sentencing to death people later found to be innocent. In the past three decades, the state has exonerated 11 people facing execution, among the highest such numbers in the country, according to The National Registry of Exonerations.
Duncan, 56, has maintained his innocence for more than three decades, while prosecutors continued to insist that Duncan committed the murder and should be executed without delay.
Duncan was babysitting Haley Oliveaux, his girlfriend’s daughter, at the house they shared in West Monroe, Louisiana, on Dec. 18, 1993. He said he had left her alone in the bathtub while he washed dishes. At some point, he said he heard a loud noise from the bathroom. When he went to check on Haley, he found her floating face down in the water. She was pronounced dead a few hours later.
While Duncan claimed it was a tragic accident, authorities charged him with first-degree murder after Hayne and West examined the girl’s body and determined there was evidence she was sexually assaulted and intentionally drowned. After about two weeks of testimony in 1998, the jury found Duncan guilty and sentenced him to death.
Years later, Duncan’s post-conviction attorneys uncovered evidence that was not presented at trial that, they said, proves his innocence. This includes a jailhouse informant who wrote to prosecutors offering to share Duncan’s confession to the crime in what the defense claims was an exchange for leniency (the informant later recanted his trial testimony); past head injuries Haley suffered that might explain her death; and a video in which West can be seen grinding a cast of Duncan’s teeth into Haley’s body. West later claimed those bite marks, which the defense says the forensic dentist manufactured, were a match for Duncan’s teeth.
Dr. Lowell Levine, a defense expert, testified in a September hearing as part of Duncan’s post-conviction appeal over the death of his girlfriend’s daughter. He is quoted in a brief summarizing Duncan’s case following his appeal hearing.
(Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)
Hayne died in 2020. West did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ruling.
West has previously said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique, in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks because it provides the most accurate results, according to a 2020 interview with Oxygen.com.
West said he no longer believed in bite mark analysis in a 2011 deposition in a different post-conviction appeal, saying, “I don’t believe it’s a system that’s reliable enough to be used in court” and admitted to making mistakes in previous cases. But he told The New Republic in a 2023 interview that his methods are valid because other people have used them.
In this week’s ruling, Sharp also noted the September testimony of Detective Chris Sasser, who investigated Haley’s death. Sasser said there was “no blood, no signs of struggle, no cleaning rags and no cleaning agents” in the bathroom or house where the alleged crime occurred. This undermined the state’s assertion that there was “massive blood loss,” the ruling said.
In addition, Sharp found that Duncan’s trial attorney, Louis Scott, provided ineffective counsel. Sharp pointed to a witness who testified that Scott failed to “investigate or present evidence that was available at the time of the trial,” that he did not “develop a coherent theory of defense,” and that he failed to disclose a conflict of interest.
Scott’s wife told Verite News and ProPublica that he has suffered significant health problems including memory and speech impairment and declined to comment on the judge’s ruling.
Duncan is among 55 people on death row in Louisiana, though until very recently he and the others were not in imminent danger of being executed as the state hadn’t put anyone to death since 2010 due to the unavailability of execution drugs. That changed with Landry’s 2023 election.
Landry has made clear his intention to carry out these death sentences as soon as possible, having recently approved the use of nitrogen gas, a controversial method allowed in only three other states.
This cleared the way for the state’s first execution in more than 15 years, as Jessie Hoffman was put to death on March 18 using nitrogen gas.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
Calvin Alexander thought he had done everything the Louisiana parole board asked of him to earn an early release from prison.
He had taken anger management classes, learned a trade and enrolled in drug treatment. And as his September hearing before the board approached, his disciplinary record was clean.
Alexander, more than midway through a 20-year prison sentence on drug charges, was making preparations for what he hoped would be his new life. His daughter, with whom he had only recently become acquainted, had even made up a room for him in her New Orleans home.
Then, two months before the hearing date, prison officials sent Alexander a letter informing him he was no longer eligible for parole.
A computerized scoring system adopted by the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections had deemed the nearly blind 70-year-old, who uses a wheelchair, a moderate risk of reoffending, should he be released. And under a new law, that meant he and thousands of other prisoners with moderate or high risk ratings cannot plead their cases before the board. According to the department of corrections, about 13,000 people — nearly half the state’s prison population — have such risk ratings, although not all of them are eligible for parole.
Alexander said he felt “betrayed” upon learning his hearing had been canceled. “People in jail have … lost hope in being able to do anything to reduce their time,” he said.
Calvin Alexander’s daughter, Sabrina Brown, left, and his sister, Jerry Hart. Alexander was planning for his new life with Brown when he found out he was no longer eligible for parole.
(Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)
The law that changed Alexander’s prospects is part of a series of legislation passed by Louisiana Republicans last year reflecting Gov. Jeff Landry’s tough-on-crime agenda to make it more difficult for prisoners to be released.
While campaigning for governor, Landry, a former police officer and sheriff’s deputy who served as Louisiana attorney general until 2024, championed a crackdown on rewarding well-behaved prisoners with parole. Landry said early release, which until now has been typically assumed when judges hand down sentences, is a slap in the face to crime victims.
“The revolving door is insulting,” Landry told state lawmakers last year as he kicked off a special legislative session on crime during which he blamed the state’s high violent crime rate on lenient sentences and “misguided post-conviction programs” that fail to rehabilitate prisoners. (In fact, Louisiana’s recidivism rate has declined over the past decade, according to a 2024 department of corrections report.)
The Legislature eliminated parole for nearly everyone imprisoned for crimes committed after Aug. 1, making Louisiana the 17th state in a half-century to abolish parole altogether and the first in 24 years to do so. For the vast majority of prisoners who were already behind bars, like Alexander, another law put an algorithm in charge of determining whether they have a shot at early release; only prisoners rated low risk qualify for parole.
That decision makes Louisiana the only state to use risk scores to automatically rule out large portions of a prison population from being considered for parole, according to seven national criminal justice experts.
Alexander can’t read or write, so he dictated answers to mailed questions from Verite News and ProPublica to a fellow prisoner.
(Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica)
That was not how the tool, known as TIGER, an acronym for Targeted Interventions to Greater Enhance Re-entry, was intended to be used. Developed as a rehabilitative measure about a decade ago, it was supposed to help prison officials determine what types of classes or counseling someone might need to prevent them from landing back behind bars — not be used as a punitive tool to keep them there, said one of its creators.
Criminal justice advocates and civil rights attorneys say the new law could disproportionately harm Black people like Alexander in part because the algorithm measures factors such as criminal history where racial disparities already exist. The law’s opponents also contend that the unique step Louisiana has taken to curtail parole is deeply problematic — and potentially unconstitutional — because it does not take into account the efforts of prisoners to better themselves while incarcerated.
“They deserve that opportunity to show they’ve changed,” said Pearl Wise, who was appointed to the parole board by Landry’s Democratic predecessor and served from 2016 until 2023. “You demonstrate over time the changes that you made and that you are not the person that was sentenced on that day.”
An Immutable Risk Score
Alexander is like thousands of prisoners who have previously appeared before the board — repeat offenders accused of nonviolent crimes, often mired in addiction with limited education or learning disabilities. Alexander can’t read or write, having dropped out of school as a fourth grader in the early 1960s. He needed to help support his family in deeply segregated Mississippi and turned to selling crack cocaine as a child. That period was also the start of his own lifelong struggle with narcotics that resulted in multiple arrests and extended stints in prison.
The department of corrections would not allow an in-person or phone interview with Alexander. Instead, Verite News and ProPublica mailed Alexander written questions, which a fellow inmate read to him and then wrote down his responses. Alexander admitted he was reckless in his youth and that he had violated his parole — related to a 1994 drug possession conviction — by drinking and staying out after curfew. That mistake would prove devastating three decades later because a prisoner’s history of parole violations plays a significant role in their TIGER risk score.
Louisiana’s TIGER scoring system was born out of a 2014 federal initiative to help states reduce their prison populations. The risk assessment tool, developed by the state department of corrections and Louisiana State University researchers using a $1.75 million federal grant, was meant to “treat criminal thinking,” said Keith Nordyke, one of the creators of TIGER. For populations with the highest risk of reoffending, he said, the prison would flood them with services — addiction counseling, therapy, job training — to help keep them out of trouble once they were freed.
“The whole purpose of this was to slow down the revolving door,” Nordyke said.
Louisiana corrections officials started using the TIGER scores as part of the parole determination process in 2018, but it was only in 2024 that they became the sole measure of parole eligibility.
Similar algorithms are used throughout the country in the parole decision-making process, but legal scholars say the way such risk tools calculate a person’s odds of reoffending is among the reasons why no other state exclusively uses them to bar individuals from parole. While algorithms like TIGER can predict on a group level that 40 out of 100 people will reoffend upon their release, they can’t pinpoint exactly who those 40 people will be, according to experts.
The Louisiana department of corrections declined multiple interview requests and did not respond to questions about the state’s use of the risk tool.
The reliance on a TIGER score to potentially block a prisoner’s bid for freedom is especially concerning, experts on risk assessment tools say, because most of the factors considered by the algorithm — the crimes they committed, work history, age at first arrest, whether they had any marijuana-related convictions, prior parole revocations — are from a prisoner’s past, which cannot be changed; they do not include anything related to what people have done in prison to rehabilitate themselves.
Criminal justice scholars say that when scores based on immutable facts are weighted so heavily in parole decisions, prisoners from impoverished, racially segregated communities are more likely to be hurt.
A fellow inmate wrote down Alexander’s answers to Verite and ProPublica’s questions on what he misses and what he would have done had he been granted parole.
(Obtained by ProPublica and Verite News)
Take the algorithm’s use of prior employment data: People raised in low-income communities do not have the same work opportunities as those brought up in more affluent neighborhoods, said Megan Stevenson, an economist and criminal justice professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Using such an algorithm to determine someone’s chances of parole, she said, “suggests that poor people should be less eligible for parole than wealthier people.”
Factoring in prior drug convictions, too, is more likely to impact Black prisoners, Stevenson said. Black people use illegal drugs at roughly the same rate as white people, but are arrested and convicted for it in greater numbers because their neighborhoods are more heavily policed, she said.
In using these data points to produce a risk score, “you’re going to create a biased algorithm to make biased decisions,” Stevenson said.
Already, Black people account for nearly two-thirds of Louisiana’s prison population, more than double their share of the state population.
The Landry administration did not respond to requests for comment regarding potential racial biases in the way the TIGER scores are used for parole.
Louisiana’s legislation might also violate the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits laws that retroactively increase the severity of a person’s criminal sentence, according to several legal scholars. Tying parole eligibility to a computerized risk score that can’t be lowered by an inmate through good behavior or other actions appears to do just that since the opportunity for parole has traditionally been considered part of a sentence, said Sonja Starr, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
Some former Louisiana parole board members also bristled at the idea of an algorithm superseding human judgment.
“It doesn’t make much sense to me that a score generated by a process that the inmate has no control over takes away the authority and the power of the parole board,” said Keith Jones, who was appointed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards and served on the board from 2018 to 2020. “Why have a parole board?”
Jones and two other former parole board members said the introduction of the TIGER tool as part of parole determination wasn’t in itself a bad thing, as long as it remained just one factor to be considered among many.
Although some board members did refuse to parole anyone with a moderate or high risk score before the law took effect, the state’s parole board had much more discretion in determining when a prisoner was released, former board members said.
Tony Marabella, a former East Baton Rouge criminal court judge who served on the parole board until last year, said he had placed greater emphasis on a prisoner’s disciplinary record and completion of self-improvement programs. He also took into account whether the warden or victims supported their release when deciding whether to grant parole.
“If someone was a moderate risk, I wasn’t going to throw them out,” said Marabella, who served on the board for four years under Edwards. “I was more concerned about what they had accomplished.”
That’s exactly what Alonzo Allen was able to show.
Alonzo Allen, outside of his home in Mansfield, Louisiana, was paroled nearly four years ago. He had a moderate risk assessment score, which, after the passage of a 2024 law, would now prohibit him from appearing before the board.
(Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)
In 2021, three years before the new law went into effect, Allen succeeded in convincing the parole board that he was worthy of release — despite having the same TIGER score and a similar criminal history as Alexander.
Allen had been sentenced to 40 years behind bars in 2012 on multiple drug charges and carrying a gun. While in prison, he was written up for possessing contraband, including a pencil sharpener and $2 worth of sugar, and he previously had his parole revoked twice, according to Allen and the parole board.
As a result, he was marked a moderate risk.
During Allen’s parole hearing, Jerry Goodwin, then warden at the David Wade Correctional Center in Homer, where Allen was being held, lauded Allen for his tireless work overcoming his drug addictions and improving his communication skills. Goodwin noted that Allen took classes even when he knew he had reached his limit for “good time” credits, time shaved off a sentence for good behavior.
“He’s worked hard for this opportunity,” Goodwin told the parole board, “and I think he’s really got his best foot forward.”
Allen works full time as a truck driver.
(Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)
Alvin Roche’ Jr., then a member of the parole board, questioned the accuracy of Allen’s TIGER score. “Is it possible that this instrument might be wrong?” Roche’ asked during Allen’s hearing. “You think you are rehabilitated to the point where you can prove that assessment wrong?”
“Yes, sir, very much, sir,” Allen responded. “I do think that is wrong.”
The board unanimously voted to parole Allen.
Speaking by telephone from his home in Mansfield, just south of Shreveport, Allen, 61, said he was grateful for the second chance. He’s stayed sober, works full time as a truck driver and has not violated the terms of his parole in the nearly four years since his release.
“God has been good,” he said.
Allen at home. Since his parole almost four years ago, he’s stayed sober and has held a steady job.
(Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)
Steeply Declining Parole Hearings
Lawmakers who supported Louisiana’s push to place strict limits on parole have maintained that relying on the algorithm over human judgment was the most efficient way to clear a backlog of parole applications.
State Sen. Patrick McMath, R-Covington, the bill’s author, claimed during a Senate committee hearing in February 2024 that so many unrealistic parole petitions were coming before the board that prisoners most deserving of early release were not being prioritized.
“What I’m really trying to do here is make the system run more efficiently and effectively,” McMath said.
But data from the parole board doesn’t support his assertion. According to the parole board’s annual reports, the number of cases heard by the board actually dropped by 40% between 2016 and 2023.
Prison reform advocates and civil rights attorneys say McMath’s bill was never anything more than a Trojan horse designed to kill parole, given the law’s other requirements that make parole substantially harder to achieve, including a unanimous board vote before parole is granted and an increase in the number of years prisoners must maintain clean disciplinary records.
McMath declined to be interviewed and did not answer questions concerning the impact of his legislation.
Landry, who signed the legislation into law in March 2024, appointed five new people to the seven-member board. None of the seven were permitted to comment about the use of TIGER to deny prisoners parole, according to Francis M. Abbott, executive director of the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole, citing board policy. Instead, he provided a statement from board chair Sheryl Ranatza: “We believe Governor Landry’s reforms passed in the special crime session will enhance public safety.”
The average number of people paroled in Louisiana has already dropped from 32 per month in 2023 to six per month since the law went into effect in August, according to Department of Corrections data. And at least 70 parole hearings, including Alexander’s, were canceled between Aug. 1 and Dec. 13 because of the prisoner’s risk score, according to the parole board.
Opponents of the bill predict the new restrictions on parole will swell the state’s prison population, costing taxpayers billions of dollars to build new corrections facilities and leading to more violence behind bars as inmates have fewer incentives to behave.
For Alexander, that means he will not have the same opportunity Allen did to show the parole board that he had heeded their advice to improve himself.
Brown, right, shows a photo on her phone taken when she visited Alexander, center, at Rayburn Correctional Center last year.
(Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)
With his health rapidly deteriorating, his family fears he will not live to see the end of his sentence in five years. “He’s got one eye. He’s diabetic. He’s got poor circulation,” said Alexander’s daughter, Sabrina Brown. “I don’t want to have to go to a funeral for him.”
Instead of moving into Brown’s New Orleans home as planned, Alexander will be able to see his daughter only when she makes the 85-mile trek north to the Rayburn Correctional Center.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, he said.
“They told me once I received my risk score there is nothing I can do to change it,” Alexander said. “It’s like walking into a brick wall.”
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This piece was originally published in Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country. Sign up to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
When Edgar Barrientos-Quintana left prison last November, he told reporters: “Happy to be out here. … It’s the best week. And more to come.” It was an understated moment from a man who had been in prison for close to 16 years for a murder that officials said he didn’t commit. And it provided a stark contrast to the reality television show that depicted the investigation that led to his arrest.
Barrientos-Quintana was freed after the Minnesota attorney general’s Conviction Review Unit found he had been wrongfully convicted and recommended vacating his conviction. The unit’s 180-page report cited failures by police, prosecutors and Barrientos-Quintana’s own defense lawyers. But it also mentioned something reporter Jessica Lussenhop had never seen before in a wrongful conviction case: the involvement of popular true crime show “The First 48.” The show begins each episode with the premise that the chance of solving a murder is “cut in half” if police don’t have a significant lead within 48 hours of a killing — which also creates a sense of deadline pressure.
In two stories ProPublica recently published, Lussenhop follows the show’s involvement in the murder investigation that landed Barrientos-Quintana in prison, and how the show’s two-decade history of filming in cities across the U.S. has left a complicated trail of problems and municipal regret.
I talked to Lussenhop about what she learned about how “The First 48” operates and why so many cities have stopped working with the show.
What did you find surprising while reporting this story?
Finding out that these episodes often air before a defendant’s trial. The show has disclaimers to the effect of “everyone is innocent until proven guilty,” but those words go by in a flash, and as a viewer, I certainly haven’t paid much attention to them. This person is still innocent until proven guilty, but the show does a good job of depicting them as guilty.
What else was surprising was just the sheer number of times there were problems. There are shows like “Live PD” that have had extremely high-profile controversies and have been canceled. But “The First 48” has been on the air for 20 years, and multiple cities ended their relationships with the show. It’s not just the defense bar that’s upset with it. It’s prosecutors, judges, mayors, city council people, all saying, “Why did our police department decide to do this?”
Why do police departments get involved with this show?
As far as we understand it, police departments don’t make any money off this show, and if you take into account the lawsuits, sometimes the show winds up costing cities money. Then the question becomes, well, why would any police department agree to do this? I think the answer is that police departments are often the subject of negative news coverage. They want a light shone on the work of their homicide detectives and everyone who supports their investigations.
But one of the other important things is these are often the kinds of homicides that are not going to get a lot of press attention. “The First 48” does often interview the victim’s family; they’ll show the victim’s picture on television and say a little bit about their lives. That might be way more media attention than these victims would otherwise get. They’re often poor, they’re often people of color, and the kinds of homicides that may get very little attention in their local media. So I think that it does, in a sense, provide a service.
Watch: Reality Cop Show “The First 48” and the Wrongly Convicted Man
How is this similar to and different from other wrongful conviction cases?
A lot of what’s in Barrientos-Quintana’s Conviction Review Unit report are the hallmarks of wrongful convictions: very young witnesses being interrogated for a very long time, sometimes without parents or lawyers involved; police not following photo lineup procedures; the defense claiming that the prosecution is withholding evidence from them. But to our knowledge, this is the first exoneration ever to be tied to “The First 48.”
Multiple people, including the Hennepin County prosecutor, told me that the very premise of the show is extremely problematic because it makes it sound like you have to rush. The show has a literal clock that’s ticking down in the corner of the screen. Obviously, you want good leads early on, but you have to keep an open mind to evidence that’s going to come into play later on. One of the big pieces of evidence in Barrientos-Quintana’s exoneration is the existence of surveillance tape of him at a grocery store with a girl roughly 33 minutes before the shooting happened. That was not a piece of evidence that they had within the first 48 hours, or even within the first two weeks.
There’s also just the notion that if you have a camera crew following you around, you’re going to behave differently. Especially if it’s a camera crew for a show called “The First 48,” which implies you better make something happen in 48 hours. That could have an effect on your actions as an investigator.
What did you hear from the family of Jesse Mickelson, the victim Barrientos-Quintana was convicted of killing?
Multiple members of the family have accepted that Barrientos-Quintana is not guilty. Those were some of the most fascinating conversations that I had. If you spent 15 years not only believing that he’s guilty but in a certain sense hating him for destroying your family, and to be presented with new evidence and then be like, “Wait a minute, I think we got this wrong” — that just takes a lot of courage and heart.
I spoke to Mickelson’s half-sister, Tina Rosebear. She thought of the show as sort of a document of this awful experience that her family had gone through, but it was something that acknowledged her brother’s life. She found it almost a source of comfort to watch the episode. But now she has very, very different feelings, and she draws a bright line connecting the television show to the fact that their family may never know who shot and killed Mickelson. Maybe these investigators didn’t do as good a job as they could have because they were rushing to meet this 48-hour thing. For a variety of reasons, the opportunity to catch whoever did this has passed, and she can’t help wondering if that’s in some way the show’s fault.
The companies that produce the show did not respond to numerous requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions. The detectives involved in the case also declined to comment. One prosecutor in the original case against Barrientos-Quintana is now a judge and thus precluded from speaking to the press by the Minnesota Code of Judicial Conduct; another took issue with many of the characterizations in the Conviction Review Unit report but agreed that “The First 48” had been a problem.
ProPublica found that the mayor championed the New York City Police Department’s Community Response Team despite a pattern of aggressive and often abusive policing flagged by department officials. An officer in the unit killed a motorcyclist after swerving his police car into him. A team commander punched and kicked a driver in the head. And another commander shoved a man into a car window after the man complained about being stopped for no apparent reason.
Two of the unit’s founders, who are close to the mayor, have their own problematic records.
One, Chief of Department John Chell, once shot a man in the back, killing him. While Chell argued he fired by accident, a jury in a civil suit determined the shooting was intentional. The jury awarded the man’s family $2.5 million dollars. Chell did not respond to requests for comment.
The other CRT leader, Kaz Daughtry, has been repeatedly found by the city’s police oversight agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, to have engaged in misconduct, including pointing a gun at a motorcyclist and threatening to kill him. Daughtry was docked 10 vacation days for that. Daughtry did not respond to requests for comment. Adams recently made him deputy mayor for public safety.
State Sen. Jessica Ramos told ProPublica that Adams’ “reliance on cronyism makes New York City less safe.” She added, “People like Chell and Daughtry should have never been trusted with the authority they were given — and wouldn’t have been by a serious mayor. If we’re going to have a professional police department and real community policing, the rot needs to be cut out.”
Local civil rights organizations, meanwhile, demanded that the Community Response Team be shuttered. “It’s time to dismantle this unit,” said the New York Civil Liberties Union in a statement.
“The CRT is a dangerous unit, and ProPublica’s reporting shows it operates without accountability under the protection of a corrupt and compromised mayor,” said civil rights group LatinoJustice. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch “should disband this unit.”
The Community Response Team was started in the early days of Adams’ administration. It focused on so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorcyclists joyriding in groups, which Adams had identified as a priority. “Our mayor has given us the mandate to start playing offense out here,” Chell told a local TV station in 2023.
But Tisch may be reducing the role of the CRT. At a recent City Council hearing — held on the day ProPublica’s story published — the commissioner described how she is changing the NYPD’s approach to the quality-of-life issues that have long been the CRT’s focus.
Tisch said the department is shifting away from using centralized units such as CRT for these problems and moving instead to rely on local officers at precinct houses.
“Over the past several years, quality-of-life enforcement at the NYPD has been led by a unit called CRT,” Tisch said. “We are proposing to create a quality-of-life division at the NYPD so that we can make precinct commanders and the resources that they control responsible for quality-of-life complaints.”
Asked about the unit and the commissioner’s comments at a recent mayoral press conference, Adams offered support for the team.
“CRT is here,” the mayor said. “I support all my units. And if they don’t all stand up and do the job the way they’re supposed to do, those who don’t will be held accountable.”
Over the past two years, New Yorkers have filed at least 200 complaints alleging improper use of force by CRT members, according to Civilian Complaint Review Board records obtained by ProPublica. Another NYPD team with a similar size and mandate has had about half as many complaints.
The scrutiny of the CRT will almost certainly continue. One of the police department’s oversight agencies, the office of the inspector general for the NYPD, has been digging into the unit. The watchdog put out a report last fall criticizing the CRT’s “lack of public transparency” and “absence of clear rules.” A spokesperson said that the unit is still under investigation.
The role of the CRT was not the only reform related to ProPublica’s reporting that Tisch discussed in her recent testimony. The commissioner also said the NYPD has stopped its policy of throwing out misconduct cases without looking at the evidence. ProPublica investigated that practice last fall and found that the department ended hundreds of cases of alleged misconduct simply because it had received the referrals from civilian investigators within three months of a deadline for discipline.
The cases had already been investigated and substantiated by the Civilian Complaint Review Board and were sent to the NYPD for disciplinary action. In one case, an officer punched a man in the groin, the oversight agency found. In another, officers tackled a young man and then wrongly stopped and searched him.
An NYPD spokesperson said the department has already begun processing such cases again.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
Eleven days after 18-year-old Jesse Mickelson was gunned down in a South Minneapolis alley, homicide detectives returned to the home where Mickelson had been playing football moments before his murder. The detectives had good news to share, so Mickelson’s family and friends squeezed around the dining room table to hear it.
“We have made an arrest,” said Sgt. Robert Dale, the lead investigator.
(Via “The First 48”)
Dale and his partner, Sgt. Christopher Gaiters, told the family they had arrested a suspect, a man witnesses said they saw firing from the back seat of a white Dodge Intrepid as it rolled down the alley. His name was Edgar Barrientos-Quintana, and the police had the 25-year-old in custody.
As the family members hugged one another and cried, Mickelson’s father stuck his hand out to Gaiters, then wrapped the detective in a hug.
“Thanks a lot, man,” he said quietly. “Thanks a lot.”
The scene in the grieving family’s dining room was captured in October 2008 by cameras for the A&E true crime reality television series “The First 48.” The premise of the show, as explained by a deep-voiced narrator, is that homicide detectives’ “chance of solving a murder is cut in half if they don’t get a lead within the first 48 hours.” In each episode of the program, which debuted in 2004 and is currently in its 27th season, camera crews follow along with police as they work to beat a clock that counts down in the corner of the screen.
The episode, titled “Drive-By,” tracked the detectives from the moment Mickelson’s family dialed 911 to the arrest of Barrientos-Quintana. Under moody, dark music punctuated by dramatic sound effects, Dale and Gaiters determined that Mickelson, a lanky high school senior with icy blue eyes, was “a pretty good kid” and the unintentional victim of a gang-related drive-by shooting. Based on interviews with witnesses, their faces blurred and voices distorted for TV, the detectives pieced together that “Smokey,” a nickname for Barrientos-Quintana recorded in a police database, was the shooter.
“Looks like we have our guy,” Gaiters says to the camera.
(Via “The First 48”)
The episode aired in April 2009, about a month before Barrientos-Quintana went to trial.
In court, the case against Barrientos-Quintana that Hennepin County prosecutors presented built on the clean, conclusive narrative of the episode. Witnesses from rival gang cliques testified they either were in the car with Barrientos-Quintana when the crime occurred or saw him shooting at them.
The prosecutors also told jurors that Barrientos-Quintana’s alibi, that he’d been with his girlfriend at a grocery store across town before the murder, still allowed him time to get to the crime scene.
After a jury found Barrientos-Quintana guilty, reruns of the episode ended with a title card that read, “Edgar ‘Smokey’ Barrientos was subsequently convicted of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life without parole.”
Sixteen years later, that tidy narrative unraveled. Last year, the Minnesota attorney general’s Conviction Review Unit released a 180-page report concluding that Barrientos-Quintana’s conviction “lacks integrity” and ought to be vacated. In November, Barrientos-Quintana — who always maintained his innocence and was never linked to the crime by any physical evidence — walked out of prison.
At a press conference led by Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, who made the decision to dismiss the charges, Barrientos-Quintana shifted back and forth on his feet and smiled nervously, the grey in his beard a notable difference from his appearance in “The First 48” episode.
“Happy to be out here,” was all that he offered to the reporters asking how he felt. “It’s the best week. And more to come.” Barrientos-Quintana, through his lawyers, declined an interview request.
Edgar Barrientos-Quintana served nearly 16 years in prison for a murder in Minneapolis before he was exonerated.
(Amy Anderson Photography/Courtesy of the Great North Innocence Project)
The Conviction Review Unit report that ultimately convinced both Moriarty’s office and a judge that Barrientos-Quintana should be freed outlined dozens of issues with the investigation and trial, many of them hallmarks of wrongful convictions. Long, coercive interrogations. Improper use of lineup photos.
Both the report and the judge’s order also highlighted one unique issue: the role of “The First 48.”
“In the episode, events happened out of order, and Sgts. Dale and Gaiters staged scenes for the producers that were not a part of the investigation,” wrote Judge John R. McBride. “What is more, the episode failed to include other, actual portions of the investigation, painting a wholly inaccurate picture of how the MPD investigation unfolded.”
Conviction Review Unit attorneys concluded that police and prosecutors became locked into a narrative they did not deviate from. In essence, the unit alleged, instead of the case shaping the show, the show shaped the case.
“They said, ‘We got the right guy. We got him,’ before they knew or really looked into the existence of Edgar’s alibi,” said Anna McGinn, an attorney for the Great North Innocence Project who represented Barrientos-Quintana. “It’s on TV. I mean, that’s problematic.”
Barrientos-Quintana’s exoneration may be the first in the country related to the “The First 48,” but it is not the first time the program has found itself embroiled in controversy, though not necessarily because of its conduct. In 2010, for instance, “The First 48” was filming when a Detroit police SWAT-style team raided an apartment and an officer shot and killed 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones. In Miami, a man featured on the show as the prime suspect in a 2009 double murder sat in jail for 19 months before the police finally determined he wasn’t responsible. In both cases, subsequent lawsuits accused the police of shoddy investigations and hasty decision-making in the service of creating good TV. Both cases ended in settlements — $8.25 million in Detroit — paid out by the cities, not “The First 48.”
“No one cared that my boy was killed, and the cops just rushed it for a damn show,” the father of one of the double murder victims told the Miami New Times.
Prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys and city officials across the country have bemoaned their police departments’ decision to allow the show into active crime scenes to film officers investigating sensitive homicide cases. It’s even been raised as an issue by an attorney who represents a death row inmate in Tennessee.
“I wish that the city would never contract with ‘The First 48,’” remarked one New Orleans judge in 2015 after the show was accused by defense lawyers of lying about deleting raw footage of a triple murder investigation. “I hope in the future they would think through that.”
“The First 48,” like similar programs such as “Cops” and “Live PD,” is sometimes derided as “copaganda,” pro-law-enforcement entertainment that poses as documentary. But it’s popular enough that A&E frequently programs hours of reruns back to back. Fans discuss favorite episodes on a busy, dedicated Reddit channel.
While other police reality shows have also received negative attention and have been canceled after high-profile incidents, “The First 48” has largely avoided broader public scrutiny. Over the past two decades, the cities of Memphis, Tennessee; New Orleans; Detroit; and Miami have ended their relationships with “The First 48” after the show’s presence snarled prosecutions or otherwise created problems.
Those severed partnerships seem to have done little to slow production of the show. Kirkstall Road Enterprises, the subsidiary of ITV that produces the show, simply moved on; the most recently released episodes were filmed in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Gwinnett County, Georgia; and Mobile, Alabama, although Mobile did not renew its contract in 2023 after complaints from defense attorneys.
Neither ITV nor ITV America responded to numerous requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions. A spokesperson for A&E Network declined to comment.
Moriarty was Minnesota’s chief public defender the last time she tangled with “The First 48” on behalf of clients in 2016, and she is still dealing with fallout from the show in her first term as Hennepin County attorney.
“They are allowed to continue to do probably a great deal of damage without being discovered, without really having any consequences,” said Moriarty. “Hopefully, places where this is happening, the city, city council, mayor, whatever, could put a stop to it, and cities where it isn’t happening, they could be prepared when ‘First 48’ comes to their town.”
Photos of Jesse Mickelson are on display in his sister’s apartment.
(Sarahbeth Maney/Propublica)
“A False Narrative”
When Assistant Attorney General Carrie Sperling, the director of the Minnesota Conviction Review Unit, began her reinvestigation of the Barrientos-Quintana conviction, one of the first things she did was watch the episode of “The First 48” that featured his case. She was immediately alarmed.
“It’s a false narrative,” she said. “Investigators are just misrepresenting details about the case on TV.”
Barrientos-Quintana began reaching out for help with his conviction almost as soon as he got to prison. In 2011, he became one of a handful of inmates whose cases were accepted for review by the Great North Innocence Project, a nonprofit that investigates possible wrongful convictions in Minnesota and the Dakotas.
But his appeals went nowhere and, according to McGinn, the case was essentially dormant until the Minnesota attorney general’s office launched its Conviction Review Unit in 2021. Because the unit operates within a state law enforcement agency, its investigators had access to material Barrientos-Quintana’s lawyers said they never saw.
Sperling wanted to understand why detectives zeroed in on Barrientos-Quintana and left other potential suspects to the side. In Gaiters and Dale’s theory of the crime, Barrientos-Quintana was a member of the Sureños 13 gang and had recently gotten into a fight with a member of a rival clique called South Side Raza. The leader of that clique, nicknamed Puppet, lived across the alley from Mickelson’s house and may also have been seeing the same girl as Barrientos-Quintana.
Early on in the investigation, a student at Mickelson’s high school told police she’d heard that the shooter was named “either Smokey or Sharky.” Dale and Gaiters identified a 16-year-old boy known as Sharky, but for reasons the Conviction Review Unit report said are “not clear,” detectives decided that Sharky was an accomplice, while Barrientos-Quintana, or Smokey, was the shooter.
Assistant Attorney General Carrie Sperling, the director of the Minnesota Conviction Review Unit, reinvestigated the Barrientos-Quintana conviction.
(Sarahbeth Maney/Propublica)
In the course of listening to hours of Gaiters and Dale’s original interviews with witnesses, Sperling was struck by how differently “The First 48” portrayed those conversations. According to the Conviction Review Unit report, about a half-dozen witnesses, some of them Mickelson’s friends and family and some from Puppet’s side of the alley, all agreed on one thing: The shooter was bald, “shiny bald” even. That fact is never mentioned in the episode, and footage of Barrientos-Quintana’s arrest and interrogation shows him with a full head of black hair.
“They show the video footage of Edgar being arrested at work, and he’s clearly not bald,” said McGinn. “That is an intentional omission, I believe, and that’s very misleading.”
At the time Mickelson was shot and killed, Barrientos-Quintana had an arrest record and had convictions for driving offenses and misdemeanor property damage, according to court records. He’d been affiliated with the Sureños 13 gang, but he told detectives he’d left that life behind and was working at a computer warehouse.
More importantly, perhaps, he told police he was with his girlfriend in a suburb on the other side of town the day of the shooting. In “The First 48,” Dale makes a phone call to a “family friend” of Barrientos-Quintana’s, a conversation that Dale implies has blown the alibi apart, leaving a four-hour window when Barrientos-Quintana could have committed the murder.
“It’s not looking so good for Smokey,” Dale says to the camera.
(Via “The First 48”)
In reality, the 15-year-old girl Barrientos-Quintana was with on the day of the shooting was being questioned at the same time in a separate room. She told detectives repeatedly that Barrientos-Quintana had been with her the whole day at her home. When investigators suggested the pair couldn’t have spent the entire day indoors, the girl offered that at one point they’d left to go to the grocery store but had come straight back.
Toward the end of the episode, a distraught Barrientos-Quintana tells Dale, “Right now, I just want to get myself a lawyer.” In the episode, the interrogation stops, as if Barrientos-Quintana’s constitutional right to an attorney was immediately honored. But according to the Conviction Review Unit report, Gaiters and Dale ignored his requests for a lawyer and, at one point, a third officer told Barrientos-Quintana that the detectives would not listen to him if he kept asking for representation.
“The First 48” cameras were long gone when, months later, Gaiters and Dale obtained security camera footage of Barrientos-Quintana and the girl at the grocery store. The footage shows the pair together, smiling and walking toward the store’s exit, just before 6:20 p.m. The shooting took place roughly 33 minutes later and about 14 miles away, creating a narrow window of time for Barrientos-Quintana to part ways with the girl, change clothes and meet up with his supposed accomplices before witnesses first spotted the Dodge Intrepid behind the Mickelson home.
Security video from a grocery store showed Barrientos-Quintana shortly before Jesse Mickelson was shot and killed.
(Obtained from the Great North Innocence Project by ProPublica)
“The First 48” episode about the case aired about two months after this new piece of evidence came to light. There is no mention of it in the program.
The security footage was far from prosecutors’ only challenge heading into the May 2009 trial. In preparation, according to the Conviction Review Unit report, prosecutors Susan Crumb and Hilary Caligiuri learned that Dale had been “playacting for a reality TV crew” and the defense might be able to use that revelation to undermine the testimony of Dale or Gaiters.
In addition, prosecutors told their supervisors in a memo that the show had edited footage of the investigation out of chronological order, generating an inaccurate depiction of what happened. As a result, only Gaiters testified.
Because the episode aired before trial and a key witness watched it, Crumb and Caligiuri scuttled plans to ask him to identify Barrientos-Quintana in court. All of this was revealed in the memo Caligiuri and Crumb wrote to their supervisors immediately following the trial to express their concerns about the city working with “The First 48,” the contents of which were never shared with Barrientos-Quintana’s defense attorneys.
Caligiuri, who is now a judge, is precluded from speaking to the press by the Minnesota Code of Judicial Conduct, according to a court spokesperson. Crumb, in an email response to questions from ProPublica, took issue with many of the characterizations in the Conviction Review Unit report but agreed that “The First 48” had been a problem.
She said the producers’ scripting for Dale was “innocuous” but could have caused problems for prosecutors in cross-examination. And she said a young witness became so afraid after seeing clips of the episode that he ran away from home and, even after police arrested him, refused to testify for prosecutors.
“Contrary to the CRU’s assertion, Barrientos-Quintana was not wrongfully convicted, as the Minnesota Supreme Court confirmed and as an unbiased review of the file and trial record would confirm,” Crumb, who is retired, said in the email.
“The filming of the First 48 created problems the defense used to try to sow doubt regarding the Defendant’s guilt,” she added. “If there was any ‘hindrance to the administration of justice’ in this case, it was only to the detriment of the prosecution, not the defense.”
At trial, Gaiters testified that when he re-created the route from the grocery store to the crime scene, it took 28 minutes, enough time for Barrientos-Quintana to commit the shooting with just minutes to spare. But that did not account for how the girl he was with got home, nor did it square with the claim by Sharky, who was by now one of the prosecution’s chief witnesses, that after he met up with Barrientos-Quintana in a park near Mickelson’s home, they “cruised around,” adding several minutes to the timeline. A private investigator hired by the defense testified that his re-creation of the route took him 33 minutes.
The man identified as Sharky could not be reached for comment.
Dale, who retired from the Minneapolis Police Department in 2023, declined to comment. Gaiters rose through the ranks of the department to become assistant chief of community trust. Through a department spokesperson, Gaiters declined to comment.
The Police Department did not respond to a detailed list of questions other than to confirm that it ended its relationship with “The First 48” in 2016. But ahead of Barrientos-Quintana’s release, Chief Brian O’Hara said publicly he supported Dale and Gaiters’ original investigation and was “concerned that a convicted killer will be set free based only upon a reinterpretation of old evidence rather than the existence of any new facts.”
The jury struggled to come to a verdict, at one point close to deadlocking with three members unwilling to convict, according to the Conviction Review Unit report. But after being allowed to review Sharky’s testimony, they found Barrientos-Quintana guilty. He was sentenced to life without parole.
In his order vacating the conviction, McBride wrote that the “colossal failures” and “ineptitude” of Barrientos-Quintana’s original lawyers were — on their own — grounds for a new trial. The Conviction Review Unit report also criticized his lawyers, saying they repeatedly failed to challenge many aspects of the prosecution’s case as well as Gaiters’ testimony.
Messages left for Barrientos-Quintana’s four pretrial and trial attorneys were not returned. According to the Conviction Review Unit report, in the years following the trial, one of the lawyers was disbarred, a second had his law license suspended for unethical behavior and a third, who dropped out of the case just before trial, was convicted of swindling a client. The fourth lawyer, the report said, has a clean disciplinary record but had passed the Minnesota bar just a month before trial.
According to McGinn, being featured on “The First 48” gave Barrientos-Quintana an added — and unwelcome — notoriety in prison. She said that although he is now free, he is distraught that, until recently, “The First 48” episode was still available in reruns on A&E and other channels, and was available for streaming.
“There’s been no statement that says, ‘Hey, we retract this,’ or ‘This is an inaccurate depiction of what actually happened that night that Jesse was killed,’” said McGinn.
A&E said last week that the episode is not currently available.
Journalism or Entertainment?
Kirkstall Road Enterprises, which was once known as Granada Entertainment USA and Granada America, enters into agreements with police departments sometimes without the knowledge or approval of other departments in city government. That’s one reason prosecutors and other officials have felt blindsided by the problems “The First 48” has caused them.
After 7-year-old Stanley-Jones was shot and killed by police in 2010 as “The First 48” cameras rolled, then-Detroit Mayor Dave Bing said he was shocked to find out that his chief of police had agreed to embed a reality television crew with officers.
“That’s the end of that,” he reportedly told the chief before banning the practice.
Minneapolis police signed agreements to allow the program to film from 2007 to 2009 and then signed a new deal with the program in 2014. But the city ended its relationship with the show two years later, after legal fighting over the show’s raw footage delayed court proceedings and then-Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman slammed the program.
“‘The First 48’ is an entertainment device. It’s not a device seeking truth or justice,” Freeman said at the time. “It gets in the way of us doing our job, the defense doing their job. We wish the police would never have signed up for this.”
Freeman, since retired, did not respond to requests for comment.
Copies of contracts between police departments and Kirkstall Road Enterprises reviewed by ProPublica give producers broad access to investigations so long as they do not interfere with officers’ work. They also have creative control over the final product, though departments are allowed to review an episode before it airs. Police departments can request changes, but producers are not obligated to make them.
The contracts also show that Kirkstall Road Enterprises does not provide departments with any monetary compensation. Before ending its relationship with the show after nine years, the chief of the Miami police requested that the production company donate $10,000 for every Miami episode to the department’s charitable youth athletic league in order to continue filming. The show did not accept those terms.
There are benefits to law enforcement, like positive publicity and recruitment potential. Alabama police officials in Birmingham and Mobile said they believed the show helped them solve more murders.
After New Orleans ended its contract with the show, the head of the police union, the Police Association of New Orleans, told a reporter, “At a time when community relations are so fragile, locally and nationally, it was of enormous benefit to everyone to have an avenue open for the public to see what we do and how we do it.”
Although the New Orleans police ended their relationship with “The First 48” in 2016, they’re now participating in a new A&E program called “Homicide Squad New Orleans,” which began airing episodes this year.
Officers featured on “The First 48” also sometimes enjoy a degree of local celebrity. One Dallas detective became so well known that a suspect recognized him as soon as he walked into an interrogation room. A detective in Memphis, according to court filings, carried photos of herself to sign for fans of the program. Fan accounts on Instagram wish their favorite detectives happy birthday and track their promotions.
The biggest issue with the show for defense attorneys and prosecutors is access to the raw footage, especially in the days before body-worn cameras — footage that may not make the ultimate “The First 48” episode but could capture important conversations and some of the earliest images of the crime scene.
“It’s incredibly important for prosecutors and defense lawyers to have video of anything that pertains to the scene or witnesses,” said Moriarty.
But according to court documents, Kirkstall Road Enterprises instructs all of its field producers — employees “who act as producer, cameraman and sound technician all rolled into one,” according to an affidavit provided by the show’s senior executive producer — never to share raw footage with law enforcement. It is also the show’s practice to decline all subpoenas for footage using First Amendment arguments, citing state shield laws that protect journalists from turning over their reporting material. Prosecutors and defense lawyers have struggled to convince judges that the needs of the state or the defendants override those protections. The show also claims it is routine practice to destroy all raw footage after a completed episode is delivered to A&E.
But reporters and others say it’s important to protect their work from being seized by police and prosecutors, as well as to maintain their credibility and independence. In short, they don’t want to become, or even be seen as, arms of government. But Moriarty said she believes that, by embedding with police during an active investigation, “The First 48” occupies a gray area.
In 2016, when Freeman, the former Hennepin county attorney, was trying to get footage from “The First 48” in ongoing cases, he said that he found the show’s refusal to provide it problematic.
“If ‘The First 48’ tries to pull the mantle of the First Amendment around this and be sanctimonious — you know something, defendants have rights,” he said at the time. “And people want the truth.”
Later that year, the contract between “The First 48” and the city of Minneapolis expired and was not renewed. A spokesperson for the Minneapolis Police Department confirmed the end of the relationship and added that “MPD has transitioned away from formal contractual agreements with media partners and now engages with them on a case-by-case basis.”
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, who dismissed the case against Barrientos-Quintana, is critical of how “The First 48” affects police investigations.
(Sarahbeth Maney/Propublica)
A Pivotal Scene
Looking back on the “The First 48” episode now, the Conviction Review Unit’s Sperling said one part bothers her most: the oddly performative scene with Mickelson’s family jammed around the dining room table with Gaiters and Dale.
Tina Rosebear, Mickelson’s 44-year-old half-sister, was present the night of the detectives’ visit, though she barely registered that a camera crew was filming; she was still in shock over the murder.
Rosebear, a personal care assistant and gas station clerk, took on a lot of responsibility in her family at an early age. She was more than an older sister to Mickelson, becoming his primary caregiver when he was 8 years old.
“I know that’s your son,” she remembers telling their mother when Mickelson died, “but that’s my baby.”
Before “The First 48” became more widely available, Rosebear kept multiple copies of the episode on DVD, labeled in Sharpie with the date of his death. She’s watched the episode dozens of times. Although she acknowledges some might find it strange, she said she gets a sense of comfort seeing the blurred shots of her brother’s body — the footage captured one of the last times she saw him in his “human form,” as she puts it, before he was zipped in a body bag and later reduced to the box of ashes she keeps on her bookshelf.
But Rosebear said it only took until Page 40 of the Conviction Review Unit report for her to realize that she and her family had been misled by the police — and also by “The First 48.”
“I feel like it was all done for the TV show,” she said. “But that was unfair to him, and that was unfair to us.”
Mickelson’s half-sister, Tina Rosebear, apologized to Barrientos-Quintana after he was freed and is concerned about the role “The First 48” played in the police investigation. “If their cameras behind the detectives in the investigations are going to hinder the rightful convictions,” she said, “then I don’t think they should be able to.”
(Sarahbeth Maney/Propublica)
Rosebear attended the press conference announcing Barrientos-Quintana’s release. She’d seen him in court at his trial, but that was their first real meeting. She apologized to him on behalf of her family and gave him a hug.
“He gets to be with his family now, and now we can try to continue to heal with the loss of my brother now that everything was just ripped back open,” she told reporters.
The Conviction Review Unit report not only cleared Barrientos-Quintana, but it contained information that could theoretically point to the real gunman. But Rosebear isn’t sure she could handle going through the whole process again — another arrest, another trial.
Once a fan of “The First 48,” Rosebear said she now hopes that the program is shut down.
“Could they have did a better job if the TV show wasn’t involved? Probably,” she said. “Nobody knows now. Because it’s too late.”
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
When the A&E true crime reality television show “The First 48” comes to town, the police and sheriff’s departments that work with it do not receive financial compensation from the show. The benefits are more intangible: a chance to showcase and celebrate the work of a department’s officers, the opportunity to improve their image in the eyes of the public, and some acknowledgement for victims who might be overlooked by the media.
But the show’s two-decade history of filming in cities across the U.S. has also left a complicated trail of problems and municipal regret, as ProPublica has reported. Detectives have admitted that they’ve acted out scenes as the cameras rolled. Key developments in the investigations have sometimes not been shown or mentioned. Episodes sometimes aired before defendants went to trial, publicly disclosing information that potential jury members and witnesses would normally never hear in court.
What’s more, many law enforcement and legal experts wonder whether the mere presence of cameras changes how the police behave, twisting the truth for the sole purpose of a more engaging narrative.
“I don’t think that anyone would deny that having a camera when you’re doing a ride-along like that affects behavior,” Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm said in 2010, after a 7-year-old girl was shot and killed during a Detroit police SWAT-style raid “The First 48” was filming. “I think it’s not a good practice.”
Controversies like the one in Detroit have prompted at least a half-dozen cities to cancel their contracts or end their relationships with “The First 48.” Dallas; Memphis, Tennessee; Mobile, Alabama; Minneapolis; and New Orleans, as well as other cities, have stopped working with the show, with some municipal officials heaping criticism on the program as they severed ties with it.
The show has not been found to have engaged in any misconduct.
“I don’t want an investigator spending even a minute essentially working for the camera instead of elements of the case,” Miami police Chief Jorge Colina said in 2018, five years after the city ended its relationship with the program. “It’s not worth the tradeoff.”
Representatives from Kirkstall Road Enterprises, ITV America and ITV, the companies that produce the program, did not respond to requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions. A&E, the television network that airs “The First 48,” declined to comment through a spokesperson.
The show’s most recent seasons were filmed in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Gwinnett County, Georgia; and Mobile.
Once problems arise, these once enthusiastic and mutually beneficial partnerships between the police and reality television can turn into messy breakups. It can also take time for the problems involving “The First 48” to come to light, sometimes years after the episodes have aired and only after cases have wound their way through the courts.
Here’s how that has played out in three cities.
Mobile
In 2022, in a courthouse on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, a judge was trying to help defense attorneys determine if there were any fans of “The First 48” in the jury pool. The defendant in the case had been featured on an episode of the show that aired before his trial, and attorney Chase Dearman was concerned fans would be predisposed to find his client guilty.
“It is an extremely popular show, especially in the South,” Dearman said in an interview.
The judge instructed the assembled prospective jurors to stand if they were regular viewers of shows like “60 Minutes,” “20/20,” and “True Crimes.” Three jurors, then two, then two jurors again stood, respectively. Then he mentioned “The First 48.” Fourteen potential jurors rose to their feet.
“This is a more popular show. Okay,” the judge said, according to a transcript of the trial.
Dearman said that the show’s disclaimer, that “all suspects shown are presumed innocent until proven guilty,” is not enough to contend with human biases. “What do you think those jurors are going to do when they go home at night?” Dearman said. “They’re going to look it up and watch it.”
Dearman’s client was acquitted after two mistrials.
Mobile defense attorney Domingo Soto was also concerned when one of his clients was shown on the show before trial. “The cops decided a version of the truth from the very beginning and sold it to ‘First 48’ and more importantly sold it to themselves,” he said.
A spokesperson for the Mobile Police Department declined to comment on its involvement with “The First 48” as well as on the cases that involved the men whom Dearman and Soto represented.
In 2023, the city did not renew its contract with “The First 48.” James Barber, a former police chief and former city public safety director in Mobile and now chief of staff to the mayor, said the show helped shine a positive light on the “dedication and professionalism of our homicide investigators.”
“However, our most important focus is always public safety, and we saw that pre-trial coverage of criminal cases had led to litigation and legal challenges in other jurisdictions,” Barber said in a statement. “We did not want our work with any media partner to impact any criminal matter or create legal issues for the city.”
Dallas
Sometimes small narrative touches to “The First 48” episodes, perhaps inconsequential to the viewer, have major repercussions in real life. In 2013, a man named Arking Jones was interviewed by Dallas police about the murder of a suspected drug dealer, an investigation captured in the episode “Safe House.”
Jones told ProPublica that he had no idea he was being taped for the show and did not sign a consent form to appear on the program. He said he only learned he had been on “The First 48” after the episode had aired. Despite the show’s efforts to hide his identity by blurring his face and altering his voice, Jones said it was obvious to people who knew him that he was in the episode.
“I start getting all type of threats. They start coming by my mother’s house,” Jones said.
According to Jones, the worst part was that the episode was edited in a way to suggest he had become a police informant; Jones denied that he spoke with police voluntarily or that he was an informant. The threats to his life got so bad, he said, that he had to stop working. Court records show that Dallas police filed retaliation charges against several people for allegedly making threats to Jones and his family. Those charges never resulted in convictions, according to Jones.
In 2015, Jones was shot several times at a barber shop in an attack that also injured a bystander. He was hit in the chest and hip, and he said he now has a metal rod in his thigh. The man who shot Jones pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in retaliation and was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
According to Dallas police reports, the shooting was motivated by Jones’ appearance on “The First 48.” Jones filed a lawsuit against Kirkstall Road Enterprises, claiming it acted negligently. In its response, attorneys for the show implied that Jones’ criminal history could have been the root cause of the attack and that his “sole claim of negligence is barred by the First Amendment.”
A judge dismissed the case and an appeals court upheld that decision.
“If we were to place the burden to prevent the kind of unforeseeable injury that befell Jones in this case on the media, the result would be a significant infringement on its Constitutional protections when reporting matters of public interest,” the appeals court wrote.
A&E removed Jones’ episode from its catalog. However, in the decade since the shooting, Jones said that his reputation has never recovered. He said he’s been attacked and robbed and, last year, his truck was shot up. He sent photos of the truck to a ProPublica reporter.
“Y’all looking at it just for good TV. You know, you’re not caring about innocent lives,” Jones said of the show. “My life is in a situation like, I’m dead. That’s how I see it. I’m dead. Because I can’t live life.”
The Dallas Police Department declined to comment. In 2021, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill into law that bans reality television shows from partnering with law enforcement. The law was named after Javier Ambler II, a Texas man who died after a high-speed chase and violent arrest, captured by a camera crew for “Live PD,” another A&E police reality series. “Live PD” was canceled in 2020.
Memphis
The immediate aftermath of one of the worst mass killings in Memphis history was captured by producers for “The First 48” for an episode named “Lester Street.” On March 3, 2008, police discovered the bodies of four adults and two children in a small brick house. Three other children survived the attack with serious injuries.
The investigation converged on Jessie Dotson, the brother of one of the victims, who confessed to detectives on camera that he committed the murders after a drunken fight. The episode aired before his trial, a concern District Attorney General Bill Gibbons raised in a letter to the police chief.
“Several judges have expressed to prosecutors in this office their concern that events of a pending criminal case are edited, taken out of sequence, and then aired nationally,” Gibbons wrote. “It is my hope that you will not renew the Memphis Police Department’s contract with ‘The First 48’ — a show that clearly airs potential evidence and information on pending criminal cases.”
The judge in the case did not allow the jury to watch edited footage of Dotson’s confession on “The First 48” because representatives of the show said they had already destroyed the raw footage. Dotson was convicted and sentenced to death. The city of Memphis ended its relationship with “The First 48” in 2008.
But the show has cast a long shadow over the case. In January 2024, Kelley Henry, a federal public defender representing Dotson, filed an appeal pointing out dozens of issues with the original investigation, among them that Dotson, who has “neurocognitive disorders,” was pressured into confessing, though he recanted shortly afterwards. She said that she believes “The First 48” influenced detectives to exert that pressure before the FBI was about to take over the case and that Dotson is innocent.
The Memphis Police Department did not respond to requests for comment. Dotson’s appeal is pending.
“It just really crystallized for me, just how dangerous these folks are and the pressure that they put on the cities and the prosecutors and the police departments to come up with a story,” Henry said. “It’s not necessarily that they’re malevolent, but their objectivity is compromised by the presence of those cameras.”
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
Alaska’s Supreme Court has placed new limits on how long criminal cases can be postponed, part of an effort to reduce the time many criminal defendants wait to face trial in the state.
The court’s order, which takes effect May 12, directs state judges to allow no more than 270 days of new delays for criminal cases filed in 2022 or before. Court system data shows that about 800 active cases fall into that category, making each one more than 800 days old and counting.
The time to resolve Alaska’s most serious felony cases, such as murder and sexual assault, has nearly tripled over the past decade. Victims rights advocates had long complained that judges rubber-stamped delays, particularly in Anchorage, where about half of the cases impacted by the Supreme Court order are pending. Some cases dragged on so long that victims or witnesses had died in the meantime.
In addition to capping the duration of delays, the state Supreme Court’s order says judges must explain why they’ve allowed any request for delay.
“It’s a positive step by the court to be able to work with the lawyers to move cases along,” said state Sen. Matt Claman, D-Anchorage, chair of the Judiciary Committee, which held a hearing on pretrial delays in February.
Alaska Court System spokesperson Rebecca Koford said the new Supreme Court order, issued on March 12, tackles the “most pressing concern.”
The time needed to close out the oldest cases “is exceedingly long,” she said, “and we need to get them resolved.”
The Supreme Court order said judges in pre-2023 cases are to allow only 90 days of new delays at the request of the defense, 90 days for prosecutors and 90 days for “other periods of delay for good cause.”
Koford said that an example of why a case might be delayed for good cause would be when a witness is temporarily unavailable to testify. Additional efforts are in the works to reduce the time it takes cases to get to trial, she said.
“We do not view it as the solution; it is part of the solution,” Koford said.
Alaska criminal rules grant defendants the right to a trial within 120 days of being charged with a crime. Crime victims have the right to the “timely disposition” of their case under the state constitution.
The 120-day deadline is rarely met. One sexual assault case highlighted by the Daily News and ProPublica was filed in 2014 and has been delayed more than 70 times. That case has now been set for trial on April 1.
Several high-ranking state officials have spoken of the need to rein in delays since the news organizations highlighted the issue in January.
Chief Justice Susan M. Carney told state lawmakers on Feb. 12 that the court system was working to curb delays, noting recent news coverage of the issue. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing focused on pretrial delays later that month, when court system General Counsel Nancy Meade told legislators that the cases recently highlighted in news stories were unacceptable but were outliers among criminal cases.
“The time it takes to resolve cases now is certainly longer than it was 20 years ago. Nobody is happy about that,” Meade testified.
The new order signed by Carney and other Alaska Supreme Court justices said that a 2023 judicial order had led to “some decrease” in what the court characterized as “persistent backlogs.” The current order, the court said, “is intended to facilitate the further reduction in the time to disposition of these older criminal cases without undue delay.”
The order also addresses delays caused when attorneys fail to provide evidence to the opposing party in a timely manner. It says that judges should consider sanctions, including dismissing the charges, when prosecutors fail to provide evidence or banning the missing evidence from being used at trial.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
Attorney Scott Greene warned those present in a Louisiana courtroom last September that the video they were about to see was disturbing. Created as part of a murder investigation, the 1993 tape showed a dentist repeatedly grinding a dental mold of the suspect’s teeth into the face and arm of a dead toddler during a post-mortem examination.
Those marks, which prosecutors decades ago had told jurors came from the suspect, were critical evidence in convicting Jimmie Chris Duncan, who has spent the past 27 years on death row for the killing of his girlfriend’s daughter. They were also a fraud, Greene argued at the appeals hearing.
Nine other prisoners have walked free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence presented by Michael West, the dentist, or his pathologist partner, Dr. Steven Hayne, once stars of the Mississippi forensics field. Seven of those convictions had involved bite mark identification analysis, a discipline that has been called into question. And three of the freed men had been sentenced to die.
There is only one person who still awaits an execution date based on evidence produced by the pair: Duncan.
Since his 1998 conviction, Duncan has maintained his innocence. Now, with a tough-on-crime Republican governor in office, he faces the very real threat of being put to death as Louisiana is slated to resume executions after a 15-year pause, with the first scheduled for March 18.
Louisiana has a long record of convicting and sentencing to death people later found to be innocent. In the past three decades, the state has exonerated 11 people facing execution, among the highest such numbers in the country, according to The National Registry of Exonerations.
Prosecutorial misconduct such as withholding evidence accounted for about 60% of wrongful convictions in Louisiana, nearly twice the national average, according to the registry.
And yet, upon taking office last year, Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, has attempted to expedite executions. Louisiana has not put anyone to death since 2010 because of the unavailability of execution drugs. Landry recently approved the use of nitrogen gas, a controversial method allowed in only three other states.
“For too long, Louisiana has failed to uphold the promises made to victims of our State’s most violent crimes,” Landry said in a February news release. “The time for broken promises has ended; we will carry out these sentences and justice will be dispensed.”
Louisiana prosecutors say they have no doubt Duncan is guilty and insist he be put to death without delay. In a Jan. 9 brief, they acknowledged questions surrounding the credibility of bite mark analysis but said there is no consensus on whether it is junk science. They also downplayed the importance of the evidence presented by the dentist, saying it was not needed to connect Duncan to the crime scene, despite his defense team’s argument that it was the only physical evidence linking Duncan to the child’s death.
This is the purest manifestation of the harm of junk science, bad lawyering and pro-prosecution bias that one can imagine.
—Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation at the Innocence Project
Robert S. Tew, district attorney for Louisiana’s 4th Judicial District, and Michael Ruddick, the lead prosecutor in the case, declined through a spokesperson to be interviewed, citing the case’s ongoing nature. Neither answered follow-up questions about allegations of prosecutorial misconduct or of West manufacturing the bite marks.
In Duncan’s original trial, the video of the dentist’s post-mortem examination was never shown in court. Nor did prosecutors show it to their own expert testifying in the case. And yet, they used photographs of the bite mark evidence prepared by West even though they chose not to put him on the witness stand because he had been temporarily suspended by a professional board for a pattern of errors.
As defense expert Dr. Lowell Levine watched the video during last year’s hearing as part of Duncan’s post-conviction appeal, he recoiled.
“It’s a fraud, simply put,” Levine, former president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, said from the witness stand.
Dr. Lowell Levine, a defense expert, testified in a September hearing as part of Jimmie Chris Duncan’s post-conviction appeal over the death of his girlfriend’s daughter. He is quoted in a brief summarizing Duncan’s case following his appeal hearing.
(Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)
The bite marks are not the only evidence in Duncan’s case that has been cast into doubt by the defense team. A jailhouse informant who claimed Duncan confessed to the crime has since recanted his testimony. And in what Duncan’s current attorneys described in a 2022 court filing as a “bizarre, one-sided” deal, prosecutors and Duncan’s previous defense team had agreed not to present evidence at his original trial that his current team says indicates the child could have died due to a seizure caused by prior head injuries.
In a January court filing, Ruddick dismissed all the new evidence presented by Duncan’s current defense team, accusing it of “throwing another handful of spaghetti on the wall to see if anything can stick.” He wrote that the video of West does not show what the defense claims and said the dentist was simply doing his job.
West did not respond to emailed requests for an interview or questions about the case that were hand-delivered to his Mississippi home.
In a 2023 interview with The New Republic, however, West said that while he believes Duncan is guilty, he does not believe he should be executed. “You can be 99.9999999%, but you will never be 100%,” he said, adding, “It is a lot easier to get you out of jail than it is to get you out of the cemetery.”
Duncan’s fate now rests in the hands of a judge, who is expected to issue a ruling on his appeal in the coming months. The court can either grant Duncan a new trial or decide that his original verdict stands. Duncan’s defense team would not grant Verite News and ProPublica an interview with him.
“This is the purest manifestation of the harm of junk science, bad lawyering and pro-prosecution bias that one can imagine,” said attorney Chris Fabricant with the Innocence Project in New York, who is part of Duncan’s legal team.
He said moving forward with Duncan’s execution would not amount to justice, as Landry purports; it would be murder.
The Original Charge: Negligent Homicide
On Dec. 18, 1993, Detective Chris Sasser pressed record on a tape deck as he sat across from Duncan at the West Monroe Police Department headquarters. Haley Oliveaux had been pronounced dead just three hours earlier. In a clipped Southern drawl, the 13-year veteran officer instructed Duncan to “tell us exactly what happened.”
The 25-year-old sniffled and breathed deeply, then spoke, his voice barely above a whisper: “I got up this morning and I fed the baby. …”
At the time of Haley’s death, Duncan was living with Haley’s mother, Allison Oliveaux, in West Monroe, a struggling town about 280 miles northwest of New Orleans. Duncan’s father, Bennie, described the couple’s relationship as strained but said his son adored Haley, even though he wasn’t her father. “If the baby got sick, he was the one carrying her to the doctor,” Bennie said.
On the morning Haley died, Oliveaux left for work around 8:30, Duncan said. He got the toddler out of bed, fed her oatmeal, then left her in the bathtub while he washed dishes. At some point, Duncan said, he heard a loud noise.
“I thought I heard her splashing in the tub. I thought she was just playing,” he told Sasser, his voice starting to quiver. “I went in there and she was face down in the tub.”
Duncan said he yanked the 23-month-old girl out of the bathwater and attempted CPR. She spit up oatmeal but didn’t regain consciousness. “I was shaking her, holding her and just shaking her as much as I could,” he told the detective.
He ran next door with Haley, screaming for help. His neighbors also tried CPR without success. Someone called 911. Paramedics arrived and failed to revive the girl.
“Nobody could wake her up,” Duncan said, sobbing uncontrollably as he recounted the scene to the detective.
Duncan and his girlfriend, Allison Oliveaux, were living in this home at the time of 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux’s death.
(Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)
Haley was taken to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead less than an hour later. Child welfare workers and a coroner examined her and noticed some scratches and a faded bruise on her face but no bite marks, according to recent court filings. Sasser said he didn’t see any bite marks either but noted the bruising and “extensive injuries to her anus” in legal filings.
The detective searched the couple’s home for any evidence of sexual assault but didn’t find a trace of blood or semen — not on Duncan, his clothing or any of the items within the house. Later that evening, Sasser arrested Duncan for negligent homicide, which carried a maximum sentence at the time of five years in Louisiana.
That charge would only stick for a few hours.
Shortly after Duncan’s arrest, law enforcement and prosecutors would send the girl’s body to a morgue 120 miles to the east in Jackson, Mississippi, where West and Hayne were awaiting its arrival.
The Pathologist and the Dentist
At the time of Haley’s death, Hayne and West dominated the autopsy business in Mississippi and were making inroads into Louisiana. Hayne could turn autopsies around quickly, and his findings nearly always supported the working theory of law enforcement, implicating their main suspect in whatever crime they were investigating, defense attorneys in multiple cases said.
Hayne had found an ideal collaborator in West, one of the leading experts in forensic bite mark analysis, a relatively new science that claimed to be able to match bite marks on a victim with the teeth of the suspected biter.
On multiple occasions, Hayne claimed to be performing up to 90% of all autopsies in Mississippi and boasted that he completed 1,200 to 1,800 procedures in a single year. If true, that would far exceed the recommended annual maximum of 250 set by the National Association of Medical Examiners. When pathologists surpass that number, they risk engaging in shortcuts and making mistakes, according to the organization.
Hayne, who died in 2020, had a long, documented history of errors, according to news reports, court records and books written about the pair in the years after Duncan’s conviction. In one case, he testified that he removed a victim’s spleen when in fact it had already been removed prior to the man’s death. In another, he said he found in a female child a fully formed prostate gland, an organ that does not exist in girls.
Hayne, however, dismissed questions over his workload, saying he had a superhuman capacity for labor, according to the 2018 book “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist” by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington. “I work at a much more efficient level and much harder than most people,” Hayne said, according to court testimony from a 2003 murder trial outlined in the book. “I was blessed with that and cursed with that, but that’s what I carry with me.”
West held an equally high opinion of his own abilities. When a defense attorney in an unrelated case later asked how often he is wrong, the dentist replied that his error rate is “something less than my savior, Jesus Christ.”
In 1993, after receiving Haley’s body, Hayne performed what Duncan’s defense described in legal filings as a preliminary examination and noted what he believed to be bite marks on the body. He called Sasser that same night to report his findings, saying there was also evidence of sexual assault. Shortly after that call, the detective told the DA to upgrade Duncan’s charge from negligent homicide to first-degree murder, which can be punishable by death.
The next morning, West examined the girl’s body and, according to the video he recorded, appeared to manufacture the bite marks that confirmed Hayne’s findings.
West has said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique, in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks because it provides the most accurate results, according to a 2020 interview with Oxygen.com.
At Duncan’s trial in 1998, Hayne took the stand. West didn’t.
By then, West was serving a one-year suspension from the American Board of Forensic Odontology for “overstating his credentials” and misidentifying tooth marks. So prosecutors brought in another bite mark expert, Dr. Neal Riesner, to testify — but they never showed him the West video. Instead, Riesner commented only on photographs taken from West’s examination, a move by prosecutors that Duncan’s current defense team called an “appalling failure.”
The prosecution had pushed for the West video to remain hidden, arguing to Judge Charles Joiner that the only reason the defense wanted to show it was so it could “drag Dr. West into the case” and “create ancillary issues for the jury to consider.”
Joiner agreed that the video was inadmissible after determining there was nothing on it that would point to Duncan’s innocence. Joiner did not explain his reasoning.
West, in the interview with The New Republic, disputed the merits of his suspension, saying his methods are valid because other people have used them. He said he chose not to testify because of Haley’s physical resemblance to his daughter, and it would have been too emotional for him.
When Hayne took the stand, he testified that Haley had suffered a savage attack in which she was bitten, sexually assaulted, then drowned to cover up the crime. It was later revealed that Hayne had misrepresented his forensics pathology credentials during the trial, according to the Innocence Project.
Haley’s mother did not respond to requests for comment. She had testified during the trial that she never saw Duncan physically or sexually abuse the child and said she told him to follow the doctor’s guidance not to leave Haley unattended in the tub.
First image: Duncan, center, with his family and friends during a visit at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Second image: Duncan’s parents, Sharon and Bennie.
(Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)
After about two weeks of testimony and arguments, the jury found Duncan guilty and later sentenced him to death. Rape, the jury determined, was an aggravating factor that prompted them to recommend the death penalty, even though such charges were never brought. He was taken to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola while prosecutors continued to call upon Hayne and West to help them solve some of the worst crimes in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Cracks, however, continued to grow in the forensics team’s facade. And in a few years, it would completely shatter.
A Broader Pattern of Misconduct
A decade into Duncan’s sentence, two men from Noxubee County in Mississippi walked out of prison after problems emerged with Hayne’s and West’s testimonies used to convict them.
Juries had sentenced Levon Brooks to life in prison and Kennedy Brewer to death after the testimonies connected them to the separate rapes and murders of two 3-year-old girls. In each instance, Hayne conducted an autopsy, during which he found what he characterized as human bite marks. He then brought in West, who confirmed the presence of those bite marks and, after pushing dental molds of suspects’ teeth into the victim’s bodies, connected the marks to the prime suspects identified by police.
Throughout their trials, Brooks and Brewer insisted they were innocent and offered alibis to clear their names.
Their exonerations in 2008 marked the first high-profile cases in which the testimonies of Hayne and West were found by the courts to be riddled with errors and, in some instances, completely fabricated.
In Brooks’ and Brewer’s cases, DNA evidence proved that the two girls were murdered by the same man, Justin Albert Johnson, who was later convicted. Forensic experts determined that the marks Hayne and West said were created by human teeth in the Brewer case were actually created by bugs and crawfish eating away at the girl’s corpse while it floated in a pond. In Brooks’ case, West and Hayne misidentified scrapes as bite marks, according to news reports at the time.
West told Oxygen.com that while he accepts that Johnson confessed to the killings, he doesn’t believe Johnson acted alone and still believes Brooks and Brewer were responsible for the bite marks on the two girls. Brooks died in 2018; Brewer declined to comment through his attorney.
A year after Brooks and Brewer were freed, the National Academy of Sciences issued a damning report on bite mark analysis in which it stated there is “no evidence of an existing scientific basis for identifying an individual to the exclusion of all others.” Other reports found that skin cannot accurately hold the form of teeth, that there is no proof teeth provide unique individual markers and that analysts often have trouble determining if a bite mark is in fact a bite mark and if the source is even human.
Since 1982, there have been 32 people in the United States who were convicted largely due to bite mark evidence and later exonerated, according to the Innocence Project.
Following the exonerations of Brooks and Brewer, civil rights attorneys began to dismantle many of Hayne and West’s most high-profile cases.
When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe that.
—Michael West
West even admitted that he no longer believed in bite mark analysis in a 2011 deposition that was part of the post-conviction appeal for Leigh Stubbs, who had been sentenced to 44 years in prison for assault. West had testified at her 2001 trial that he found bite marks on the victim’s hip, which he matched to a mold of Stubbs’ teeth. As in Duncan’s case, West is seen on a video using that mold to make bite marks on the victim, who was in a coma at the time, according to Stubbs’ attorney who saw the video. West has said pressing the dental mold against the victim’s flesh was part of his verification method.
Stubbs was exonerated in 2013 after more than a decade in prison.
“When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe that,” West said during a deposition when a defense attorney asked if he was still confident in his analysis of bite marks. “And if I was asked to testify in this case again, I would say I don’t believe it’s a system that’s reliable enough to be used in court.”
When pressed as to whether he made mistakes in previous cases, West said, “I made bite mark analysis that turned out to be wrong, yes.”
In 2021, the courts overturned Eddie Lee Howard’s murder conviction and death sentence after noting the absence of bite marks in the autopsy photos — and the presence of another man’s DNA on the murder weapon — despite West’s 1994 testimony connecting bite marks to Howard. Hayne had had the body of murder victim Georgia Kemp exhumed and unembalmed three days after her burial because he believed he might have missed several bite marks during her autopsy. West then examined the body and claimed to have found those bite marks.
Mississippi Supreme Court Justice James Kitchens said in his opinion about Howard’s case that West and his methodology have faced “overwhelming rejection by the forensics community,” and that the court “should not uphold a conviction and death sentence on the testimony of a proven unreliable witness, Dr. West.”
Hayne’s reputation had also been unraveling over the years. A Louisiana judge on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described Hayne as the “now discredited Mississippi coroner” who “lied about his qualifications as an expert and thus gave unreliable testimony about the cause of death” in a 2014 opinion about a different murder case.
Prosecutors Suppressed Evidence
All the while, Duncan, now 56, remained locked behind bars.
During that time, his defense team discovered more examples of what they characterized as prosecutorial misconduct.
Aside from the discredited bite mark analysis, the most damning testimony during Duncan’s trial had come from a jailhouse informant, Michael Cruse, who briefly shared a cell in the Ouachita Correctional Center with more than a dozen people, including Duncan, as he awaited trial.
According to Cruse, a distraught Duncan willingly provided graphic details about raping and killing Haley, insisted he blacked out at one point during the attack and claimed “the devil took over.”
What prosecutors did not reveal at the time, though, is that when Cruse initially wrote to them from his jail cell, he offered to share Duncan’s confession for “obvious” reasons. Cruse, who had been arrested for burglary and was facing up to 12 years in prison, then suggested if the DA helps him, he could return the favor. “If I can work this out perhaps I can help in other areas as well.”
Michael Cruse, a former cellmate of Duncan’s in 1993, wrote a letter to prosecutors offering to testify about an alleged confession Duncan made. Duncan’s defense team claims Cruse did so in exchange for leniency.
(Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)
After testifying in Duncan’s case, Cruse was given a three-year suspended sentence; prosecutors said in the January brief that his sentence was “not an out of the ordinary plea offer.”
The DA’s office never gave Duncan’s defense team a copy of Cruse’s letter in which he appeared to offer his assistance in exchange for leniency, something that could have been used to undermine his testimony. Duncan’s team, which only learned of the letter years after his conviction, described the transgression as a flagrant violation of a federal law requiring prosecutors to hand over all evidence that could help in their client’s defense.
Prosecutors, in their January filing defending Duncan’s conviction, pointed to a Louisiana Supreme Court rejection of Duncan’s 1999 appeal in which the court stated that even if the letter had been produced, it would not have affected the outcome of the trial.
In November 2022, more than 24 years after Duncan was convicted, his legal team tracked Cruse down and pressed him about the accuracy of his testimony. Cruse admitted to an investigator hired by the defense that Duncan “never said he was guilty” and spent the majority of this time in their jail cell with his “head down … mumbling and crying to himself,” according to Cruse’s statements in the court filings. The defense team also found another cellmate of Duncan’s, Michael Lucas, who said that Cruse was constantly harassing Duncan about the baby’s death, and that Duncan never confessed.
He “just cried over and over again saying he did not do it. He didn’t do it,” Lucas told the investigator, according to court documents filed by the defense.
Ruddick, the lead prosecutor, dismissed the new statements, saying in last year’s appeals hearing that Cruse, who could not be located to testify in 2024, had previously testified twice under oath that Duncan had confessed. Any statement given decades later is worthless hearsay, Ruddick said.
Verite News and ProPublica could not reach Cruse for comment through email or phone calls.
Allegations that Duncan had raped Haley were similarly problematic, according to court filings. Dr. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist and an expert witness for the defense, said in court last September that Haley’s anal injuries were likely caused by hard stools, constipation or an infection, which can often mimic an assault.
“There’s absolutely no sexual assault,” Melinek said in court after reviewing Haley’s post-mortem exams.
Duncan’s defense team also uncovered evidence, not heard at the first trial, that provided a potential cause of Haley’s death. In the weeks prior to her drowning, Haley had suffered several head injuries, the worst happening when she attempted to climb a chest of drawers and the entire structure fell on her. Haley spent six days in the hospital during which a CT scan showed three skull fractures.
When she was discharged, doctors warned her family to not leave her unattended in a bathtub as she might suffer seizures, according to court filings. Haley spent most of the next two weeks with her maternal grandparents. She returned home to her mother and Duncan the night before she died.
None of that evidence, however, was presented at trial. Louis Scott, who represented Duncan at the time, struck a deal with prosecutors that neither side would raise the issue. Scott’s wife told Verite News and ProPublica that he is experiencing health challenges, including memory loss, but would relay a message to him; Scott has not responded.
In October 2023, Duncan’s current legal team flew to the DA’s office in Monroe to present to prosecutors all the additional evidence it had uncovered. Greene, one of the defense attorneys, said he wanted to give Tew, the DA, a chance to reconsider his position and avoid a miscarriage of justice before the new evidence was laid bare in court. But Tew did not show.
Instead, Ruddick sat patiently through the defense team’s hourlong PowerPoint presentation, asked a question or two and said very little, according to members of the team.
Greene offered to fly back at any time to meet with the DA to further discuss the case. “Ruddick said, ‘I’ll let you know,’” Greene recalled. “And then nothing happened.”
One year later, following the six-day appeals hearing last fall, the state filed its response, making clear what it thought of all the new evidence: “Defendant, Jimmie Duncan, is a murderer.”
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
The last time Missouri took control of St. Louis’ police force was just before the start of the Civil War, when the state’s secessionist-leaning leaders were trying to prevent police officers from taking up arms against the Confederacy.
The law that put the police department under state control was in effect for the next 152 years. In November 2012, nearly two-thirds of voters approved a statewide ballot measure, pushed by police reform activists and elected officials, that restored local authority and placed the department under the mayor’s jurisdiction.
Now, the state’s Republican governor and GOP-led legislature are again pushing to take over the St. Louis Police Department. They argue that the Democratic-run city government is responsible for a drop in officer morale and that statistics that show a decline in crime are inaccurate.
The Missouri House voted 106-47 last week to transfer control from the city to a state-appointed board this summer. The five-member board would be made up of the mayor and four commissioners appointed by the governor, essentially leaving the governor with the votes to control the police department.
The state Senate is debating the measure, but a vote has not yet been scheduled.
The attempt to reverse a measure overwhelmingly approved by state voters, albeit more than a decade ago, is part of a broader pattern of Missouri’s conservative-led government trying to override the will of the electorate, from repealing voter-approved redistricting reform to trying to reinstate an abortion ban even though voters approved a constitutional amendment last year legalizing the procedure.
State takeovers of metropolitan police departments are rare; Kansas City, Missouri, remains the only major U.S. city with its police force under state control. Its arrangement dates to Reconstruction, when Missouri lawmakers, aiming to limit Black political influence, stripped the city of its oversight role.
After a brief return to local control in the 1930s, the state reasserted authority over Kansas City police to weaken political boss Tom Pendergast, who had used the department for patronage and election fraud.
Republican-led states have taken away control of other aspects of government from local leaders in other cities with majority-Black populations. In Mississippi, officials have expanded the jurisdiction of the state-run Capitol Police beyond government buildings into residential and commercial areas in Jackson, the state capital. They’ve also created a state-run court with appointed judges and increased police funding while the Black-led Jackson Police Department struggles to respond to calls.
Texas and Missouri have intervened in local schools and city governments, leading to disputes about local control — though these takeovers have generally been temporary, with a path to restoring local authority. In Tennessee, the state comptroller backed down from taking over the majority-Black city of Mason after local officials agreed that a certified public accounting or law firm would help the town complete audits, balance its budget and train officials on proper use of tax revenue. It happens in states led by Democrats, too, but less frequently.
“It really is removing this political power from residents, allowing them to have less authority, oversight and voice in how their system of public safety and policing operates,” said Sandhya Kajeepeta, a senior researcher at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute.
Some St. Louis leaders see the current effort there as echoing 19th-century efforts to limit Black political power. They argue that a majority-white, conservative government is again moving to strip authority from local officials and diminish Black influence over policing.
State Sen. Karla May, a Black Democrat from St. Louis who has testified against the push for state control, said it’s no coincidence that the plan became an urgent matter for legislators, and is advancing, during the tenure of Mayor Tishaura Jones, who also is Black.
May said the St. Louis Police Officers Association, the collective bargaining unit for city police officers, “does not want to be controlled by an African American mayor.” Representatives from the union did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for Jones did not make her available for an interview. But the mayor said in an emailed statement that “I don’t think Republican legislators want to give a Black woman who is also a Democrat credit for dramatically reducing crime, increasing officer pay and building out successful public safety programs.” She said advocates for state control have never explained how it would improve public safety.
The push to take control of the St. Louis police is a top priority for Gov. Mike Kehoe, a newly elected Republican whose State of the State address framed the issue in economic terms. He said what mattered was whether businesses felt “safe enough to invest in our cities.” Kehoe, who is white, frequently invokes his upbringing in St. Louis to push for state control.
The House sponsor of the measure, Rep. Brad Christ, a white Republican from the southwestern suburbs of St. Louis, argues that calling his proposal “state control” is misleading because the governor’s appointees would be required to have lived in the city for at least three years.
He noted that the effort to return the police to the state predates Jones’ term as mayor. A Black Democrat from St. Louis filed a similar bill that stalled in the House in 2019 during the tenure of Mayor Lyda Krewson, who is white. Christ said in a text that this was “clear evidence that the wild assertion that this effort has been race motivated is completely false.”
The Ethical Society of Police, a group that represents Black police officers in St. Louis, also supports a state takeover. Its president, Donnell Walters, wrote an opinion piece in 2023 with then-Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican, calling for state control and alleging mismanagement and low morale under city control.
Walters did not return messages seeking comment.
Heather Taylor, a retired sergeant who led ESOP from 2015 to 2020 — and who later worked in the Jones administration before resigning in 2023 after criticizing the mayor and the department on social media — said she worries the department will suffer under state control. But, she said, ESOP members believe that the city lacks urgency in providing basic support for officers and that the state might do a better job addressing those needs.
Jones has repeatedly pointed to city crime data showing a decline since she hired Robert Tracy as police chief two years ago. Notably, the city’s murder totals have plummeted.
But many argue that the city’s statistics on other types of crimes don’t reflect the sense of lawlessness in St. Louis. Ness Sandoval, a professor of sociology and demography at Saint Louis University who studies crime trends, said he believes the city underreports crime and lacks transparency. “Most people who rely on the data believe there probably should be an asterisk,” he said. Jones has stood behind the crime numbers, saying they are accurate.
Still, the mayor and her police chief maintain that state control does not necessarily reduce crime. In 2012, while the police were still under state oversight, Forbes magazine ranked St. Louis as the second-most-dangerous city in the nation.
Kansas City, which is still under state control, continues to struggle with violent crime. Efforts to restore local oversight have never gained much traction there. Despite past studies and proposals — including a 1968 report listing local control as the top recommendation after police killed six Black residents during riots, and a 2013 mayoral committee vote for local control that failed by a single vote — no serious push has materialized.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
In 2021, the number of people in Illinois killed from acts of domestic violence was growing at an alarming pace, and state legislators acted with a sense of urgency.
In a near-unanimous vote, they passed legislation designed to blunt the trend. The state would establish a network of panels to review killings related to domestic violence and identify whether existing strategies for preventing them fell short.
But since then the state has made only meager progress in implementing the plans laid out in that law, and the number of domestic violence killings continues to increase.
The bill called for building the network over six years, but nearly four years after Gov. JB Pritzker signed it, only seven of the state’s 102 counties have helped establish fatality case review teams.
The first reviews began only late last year, and key deadlines have been missed. An initial report of statewide policy recommendations based on reviews by the panels was expected to be delivered to lawmakers in April 2024. But that has yet to happen.
The most glaring absence from the program is Cook County, which is home to Chicago and accounts for nearly 40% of the state’s population. Discussions between organizers of the initiative and agencies that could take charge of a local review panel in the county have failed to yield a commitment.
People familiar with the effort say a lack of funding and a gap in leadership have slowed the initiative’s progress. The law does not provide money to staff the local review panels, hampering recruitment of people to serve. Moreover, a top state administrator in charge of developing the network abruptly left the project and was only recently replaced.
Illinois Sen. Celina Villanueva, one of several sponsors of the bill creating the initiative, acknowledged the delays but expressed confidence in the overall direction. “My hope is that once everything is fully established, that it’s a strong working mechanism to be able to address the larger issues of why we passed this bill to begin with,” she said.
Cristin Evans, spokesperson for the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, the state agency that oversees the review effort, said that “the amount of time it has taken for teams to conduct their first review is not unexpected given the structure and complexity of the initiative.”
The current teams are on track to complete a minimum of two cases in 2025, she added.
Chicago police respond to the fatal stabbing of Lacramioara Beldie in the Portage Park neighborhood in November.
(Molly DeVore/Block Club Chicago)
Recent killings underscore the urgency of addressing breakdowns in the systems designed to protect people from domestic violence. In November, Chicago police found Lacramioara Beldie stabbed to death in an apparent murder-suicide at the hands of her estranged husband, Constantin. Court records that surfaced after Beldie’s death detailed a disturbing timeline.
Six weeks before he allegedly killed his wife, Constantin Beldie appeared inside a Cook County court to face accusations he’d assaulted and held her inside a car against her will. Prosecutors did seek to detain Beldie ahead of his trial over the incident but failed to submit evidence of his alleged prior abuse. Judge Thomas E. Nowinski denied the state’s petition, noting that state prosecutors had failed to establish Beldie’s alleged history of violence toward his wife and concluded he was a “medium-low risk.” The judge released him on electronic monitoring.
In a letter to the chief judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County, nearly 30 Chicago-area elected officials, including several city alderpersons, blasted the “multiple systemic failures” that led to Beldie’s killing and called for Nowinski to be removed from domestic violence court.
He was later transferred to municipal court, where he will oversee traffic and misdemeanor cases. But the chief judge has defended Nowinski, emphasizing prosecutors’ role in the hearing’s outcome.
Learning from Failure
With the goal of learning from past failures, the fatality review legislation calls for a two-tiered approach, with county-based review teams and oversight from a statewide committee.
The county teams are supposed to review the circumstances surrounding certain killings to assess how systems designed to intervene and prevent domestic violence performed. Just a few counties have joined review teams since 2021: Kankakee, Lake and Will, with joint teams operating in Madison and Bond counties as well as Winnebago and Boone counties. Those teams represent five of the state’s 25 judicial circuits.
The statewide committee consists of representatives of law enforcement, academics and social service providers. Drawing on the local teams’ reviews, it is supposed to submit a report every two years outlining specific recommendations for “legislative, systemic, policy, and any other changes to reduce domestic violence and domestic violence related fatalities.”
In its first report, in 2024, the committee revealed it could not yet provide recommendations because none of the local teams had been formed.
Fatality review committees first appeared around 1995, as advocates and lawmakers around the United States began searching for new ways to stem the tide of domestic violence. In the years since, all but five states have established processes for reviewing fatal cases of domestic or intimate partner violence, according to the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative, an Arizona nonprofit that helps states develop review boards.
Those who back these efforts say they’re a tool that can improve outcomes for the vulnerable people domestic violence prevention policies are intended to protect.
A 2013 University of Washington study of outcomes in states that had established fatality reviews found that recommendations made by the panels had successfully prioritized issues related to their work. But prioritization alone “may not translate into organizational and institutional changes,” the study found.
Other states have experienced similar difficulties to Illinois’, not only in establishing a review process but maintaining it over time.
In South Carolina, implementation of the 2016 law establishing a review process of those killings has been “uneven,” said Sara Barber, executive director of the South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.
The state’s apparatus is overseen by a central committee, with local teams operated by county-based district attorneys. But similar to Illinois’ law, the South Carolina law does not include new funding. With resources already stretched thin, that has led to spotty participation among local groups.
Many of the local teams meet only infrequently, Barber said. “I don’t want to say that there hasn’t been progress, but there’s more that could be done,” she said.
Even with all the attention the issue has received, not all states compile tallies of domestic violence-related killings. Tracking those numbers is notoriously difficult. Federal law requires law enforcement agencies to report general crime statistics. But determining whether there was domestic violence leading up to a killing requires collecting and analyzing records from disparate sources, something advocates say not all city or state governments require.
That said, estimates made by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from death certificates, police reports and other sources reveal a steady increase in domestic violence killings across the nation.
Signed by the governor earlier this month, Karina’s Law is named after Jesus Alvarez’s late mother, Karina Gonzalez, and is aimed at giving additional protections to victims of domestic violence. Gonzalez and her daughter, Daniela Alvarez, were shot to death in 2023, allegedly by José Alvarez, Gonzalez’s husband, who has pleaded not guilty.
(Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)
In 2017, 1,070 people were killed in the United States in circumstances involving domestic or intimate partner violence. By 2021, the most recent year for which statistics are available, that number had skyrocketed to 1,800.
Illinois’ own tally reflects the national pattern. The total rose from 34 killings to 49 over that same period, according to the CDC tallies.
Lawmakers and advocates in Illinois continue to look for ways to address the problems. Last month, after three failed attempts, the Illinois General Assembly passed Karina’s Law, which will require police to confiscate firearms from anyone whose Illinois gun permit has been revoked because a judge issued an emergency order of protection against them. Pritzker signed the bill into law earlier this month.
The bill is named after Karina Gonzalez, who in 2023 was shot to death along with her 15-year-old daughter in their Chicago home. Her estranged husband has been charged with the killings and has pleaded not guilty.
Jesus Alvarez, Gonzalez’s son, said he believes it’s important not only to pass laws aimed at domestic violence, but to make sure they work as intended. There are obviously flaws in the system, Alvarez said. “But if you get these laws right, it should hopefully be a little bit easier for people, and they won’t have to face the same kind of situation that I faced.”
Two Counties, Two Paths
With so many horrific examples of domestic violence taking place in Chicago and Cook County suburbs, the county’s omission from the review effort remains glaring.
Nonetheless, it was not an initial target as the statewide program launched, said Sara Block, a managing director at the nonprofit social service provider Ascend Justice and volunteer co-chair of the statewide effort.
“There’s just more dynamics to consider in Cook,” she said. “It’s not that it’s not a priority. We very much hope that every single circuit will have one in the end. But some just aren’t ready yet, and it will take more groundwork, it takes more education, more relationship building, before they are.”
The law enforcement and social service agencies asked to lead efforts in Cook County and elsewhere are already stretched for time and resources, said Jennifer Greene, advocacy director for nonprofit service provider Life Span and a member of the statewide overseeing committee.
“You have to have someone who can run that team — who can handle administration and making contact, and there’s just not any funding attached to it to do those things,” she said.
Officials and advocates in Winnebago County, in northwest Illinois, have found a way to overcome those and other obstacles.
When state lawmakers passed legislation calling for the review panels, the city of Rockford’s Office of Domestic and Community Violence Prevention saw an opportunity and took a leadership role.
Jennifer Cacciapaglia, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Domestic and Community Violence Prevention in Rockford, says there has been wide support for forming a local review panel in Winnebago and Boone counties.
(Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)
Forming a local committee wasn’t a hard sell, said Jennifer Cacciapaglia, director of that Rockford office, which is in Winnebago County. A foundation grant to pay for staff and research time helped ease concerns about capacity.
“I think countywide there was a recognition that this could really create positive outcomes for people, so support has been wide,” she said.
Last month, she joined a small group of county advocates and officials to conduct the county’s first reviews of domestic violence killings, focusing on two cases. Cacciapaglia said the panel’s goal is to continue examining cases through the end of the year and submit findings to the statewide committee.
In early February, the statewide committee came together for its bimonthly virtual meeting. These gatherings begin with a moment of reflection, to pause and be reminded of what’s at stake by recalling a recent victim.
“We do this simply to keep survivors and those who have died due to domestic violence in the forefront of our minds,” said Andrea Wilson, recently installed director of the committee, to the assembled group.
The committee’s attention turned to Tanisha Weeks. A judge had granted the 41-year-old mother an order of protection against her ex-boyfriend last December. She was shot dead in January in an apparent murder-suicide in Chicago involving an ex-boyfriend.
Because the killing occurred in Cook County, there is no panel to review the circumstances.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
The chief justice of the Alaska Supreme Court told state lawmakers this week that the court system is taking steps to reduce the amount of time it takes criminal cases to reach trial, a problem highlighted by a recent ProPublica and Anchorage Daily News investigation.
In an annual State of the Judiciary speech to legislators Wednesday at the Capitol in Juneau, Chief Justice Susan M. Carney said the court system has increased training for judges, created new policies on postponements and authorized overtime pay. She noted that the court system’s mission includes deciding cases “expeditiously and with integrity.”
“You are probably aware that we are not meeting expectations — our own or Alaskans’ — about the expeditious part of that mission,” Carney said.
Noting “recent media accounts” of extreme delays, Carney said the state is gaining ground and that resolving the problem is “our No. 1 priority.”
“We must, and we will, improve how we handle criminal cases to prevent that kind of delay,” Carney said.
The Daily News and ProPublica reported in January that the most serious felony cases in Alaska can takefive, seven or even 10 years to reach trial as judges approve dozens of delays. These delays might be requested because defense attorneys are waiting for prosecutors to share evidence or because attorneys have high caseloads to juggle, or even as a tactic to weaken the prosecution’s case with the passage of time.
The category of cases that ProPublica and the Daily News examined, the most serious felonies such as murders and violent sexual assaults, took the judicial system a median of three years to complete in 2023, a threefold increase from 2013.
The Alaska judicial system and lawmakers were aware of serious pretrial delays long before COVID-19 disrupted the courts, particularly in Anchorage. In 2009, a report by the National Center for State Courts noted that the time to resolve felony criminal cases in Anchorage had increased nearly 400% over the prior decade.
While acknowledging the long delays described in news reports and their impact on victims and defendants in major felonies, Carney told legislators that less serious criminal cases — which are most cases in the system — do not take as long to resolve.
“I do this not to justify those extraordinarily delayed cases, but I do want to provide a bigger picture,” said Carney, a Fairbanks judge who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2016 and became the chief justice this year.
The median time to close misdemeanor cases is six months or shorter, Carney said. Less serious felony cases such as vehicle theft and certain assault charges are resolved within a median of six months, she said. Class A felonies, which include some sexual assaults, manslaughter and some drug charges, take a median of 13 months.
Carney also noted that only about 3% of criminal cases go to trial. Many are resolved when the defendant agrees to plead guilty to reduced charges, rather than take the chance of being found guilty by a jury, or when prosecutors drop the charges.
Carney told legislators that judges have created new limits on the number of times a case can be delayed and on the duration of the delays, and that judges devoted one-third of their annual conference to training on how to reduce the number of pending cases.
More cases are now being closed than are being opened, and the number of open cases last month was down by one-third from a year before, Carney said, bringing the number of open criminal cases to its lowest since 2018.
“So we are making progress,” said Carney, who spent nearly three decades as a lawyer for the Alaska Public Defender Agency and Office of Public Advocacy.
She did not provide caseload figures specifically for unclassified felonies, the category of serious crimes that ProPublica and the Daily News focused on.
Alaska’s sluggish justice system has created palpable impacts on crime victims, defendants and the community.
A Daily News and ProPublica report in October found the city of Anchorage dismissed hundreds of criminal cases in 2024 because it didn’t have enough prosecutors to meet speedy trial deadlines. Dismissed cases included charges of domestic violence assault and child abuse.
State prosecutors have responded to that investigation by offering added staff to help the city keep cases moving.
This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News.
This story describes an alleged sexual assault and serious injuries resulting from it.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
The sexual assault case was one of the most horrendous that two Alaska Superior Court judges said they had encountered in their long careers on the bench. The victim suffered internal injuries that required surgery and the use of a bag for her digestive system.
“Even somebody like me, who does nothing but this work for so long, still has their sensibility shocked,” Judge Philip Volland said at an early bail hearing, warning that he worried the suspect might try to threaten the woman. “The facts of this case tell me there is a very, very real risk of intimidation of the victim. If she wasn’t afraid then, she should be afraid now.”
Detectives had interviewed the alleged victim, executed search warrants and, two weeks after the reported incident, arrested a suspect: then-38-year-old Lafi “Beago” Faualo, who pleaded not guilty to first-degree sexual assault.
That was a decade ago. The case has still not gone to trial.
Over the years, the state assigned the case to four different judges, including Volland, who between them agreed to delay the trial more than 70 times — usually at the request of the defense attorney. Such delays and judges’ acquiescence have become routine in Alaska, robbing victims of timely justice and sometimes eroding the prosecution’s ability to mount an effective case using eyewitness testimony.
A spokesperson for the court system said the state is taking steps to reduce the length of time it takes to resolve Alaska criminal cases, including providing new training for judges and issuing orders to limit delays.
In the neverending case of sexual assault against Faualo, it all began with an alleged attack on July 16, 2014, in a van parked outside an Anchorage church. According to the charges, Faualo was in the back seat with the victim during the incident. Prosecutors additionally accused a second man, who was in the driver’s seat, of sexual assault in the case but later dropped the charges when the man pleaded guilty to coercion.
According to a charging document, Faualo denied sexually assaulting the woman but told Anchorage police he might have “accidentally” put his hand in her anus. The report quotes Faualo saying he might have used a bottle, but then saying it was definitely his hand. Faualo’s defense attorney has since said that Faualo’s co-defendant — who has since died — was the one who committed the assault and not Faualo.
ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News obtained audio recordings and logs from each hearing or listened to it live. Nearly every time the defense attorney asked to delay the trial, a judge agreed. Not once did anyone in the courtroom ask what the victim wanted.
Faualo did not respond to an interview request and did not respond to emailed and hand-delivered questions.
Here’s how an Alaska sexual assault defendant has been able to prevent his case from going to trial since 2014. Prosecutors typically raised no objection to the delays. Unless noted, the judge granted the defense request for a delay in every instance.
Sept. 25, 2014: Faualo has hired a private attorney, Rex Butler, who asks to delay the hearing.
Oct. 7, 2014: Judge Philip Volland agrees to a delay because the defense attorney says he is still new to the case.
Nov. 4, 2014: The judge grants the defense a three-week delay.
Nov. 25, 2014: The judge delays the case as Faualo’s co-defendant considers a plea deal.
Dec. 9, 2014: The defense attorney has a scheduling conflict, delaying the case.
Jan. 13, 2015: Faualo files a motion to suppress evidence, delaying the case for months.
By 2015, the case has stretched past the state’s 120-day speedy-trial deadline. With no trial date in sight, Faualo asks to be released on bail, but the prosecutor claims he is a flight risk and a threat to the victim. The judge denies the bail request. The stakes are high. If convicted, Faualo faces a minimum of 25 years in prison for one count of sexual assault that resulted in serious injury, plus additional time for each of three additional counts of sexual assault.
April 7, 2015: The defense asks for another delay.
July 7, 2015: The judge grants a two-week delay, no questions asked.
Aug. 18, 2015: Judge Michael Wolverton has been assigned to the case. He approves another delay.
Aug. 26, 2015: The judge delays the trial to November 2015.
Oct. 14, 2015: The judge agrees to another delay.
Nov. 18, 2015: The judge delays the case another 35 days.
Dec. 9, 2015: The first motion to suppress evidence fails, and the judge agrees to another delay.
Jan. 20, 2016: The defense asks for a 30-day delay.
Feb. 17, 2016: The state has offered a plea deal. The defense asks for a 30-day delay.
Mar. 16, 2016: The defendant hasn’t decided on the plea deal and asks for another monthlong delay.
April 20, 2016: The defense files another motion and asks for a 30-day delay.
May 18, 2016: The judge agrees to delay the case for another month.
June 15, 2016: With a new prosecutor assigned to the case, the defense again asks for a 30-day delay.
July 13, 2016: The defendant is considering a plea deal that has been offered; the prosecutor asks for a two-week delay.
July 27, 2016: The defendant hasn’t decided on whether to take the deal. The judge delays the trial by six weeks.
By now, the delays in the case mostly revolve around motions filed by the defense to throw out evidence collected by detectives early in the investigation. For example, Faualo’s lawyer says police served a search warrant too late at night — despite the warrant saying it could be served at any time. Meanwhile, Faualo’s co-defendant has agreed to a plea deal and is expected to testify against him at trial.
Oct. 12, 2016: The defense asks for a one-month delay to continue negotiating a deal.
Nov. 16, 2016: The judge agrees to the defendant’s request for another one-month delay.
Dec. 14, 2016: The judge delays the case a month to make time for an evidentiary hearing.
Feb. 8, 2017: The judge denies the defense’s motions to suppress evidence, and the defense asks for another three-week delay.
Mar. 8, 2017: Faualo’s lawyer tells the judge he will “try to get” the case resolved soon but asks to delay the trial two months.
May 17, 2017: The defense asks to delay the trial by one month to negotiate a deal.
July 5, 2017: The defense asks for another one-month delay to continue negotiating.
Aug. 2, 2017: The defense says they’re “very close” to making a plea deal and just need to delay proceedings by another two weeks.
Aug. 16, 2017: Still negotiating, the defense says, asking for another two-week delay.
Aug. 30, 2017: The defense says it needs a three-week delay to continue negotiating.
Sept. 27, 2017: “Give us two more weeks,” the defense attorney asks. The judge OKs the delay.
Oct. 11, 2017: The defense is “pretty close” to a plea deal but needs a two-week delay.
Nov. 1, 2017: The defense asks for a one-month delay — long enough “so we don’t come back in two weeks and not have an answer.”
Dec. 6, 2017: The defense asks for a one-month delay. The judge agrees without asking questions.
Jan. 10, 2018: The defense says the two sides are “close to resolving” negotiations but need a two-week delay.
Jan. 24, 2018: The judge delays the trial to allow more negotiations.
Feb. 14, 2018: The defense asks for a new three-week delay without explanation. The judge agrees.
Mar. 7, 2018: A new prosecutor takes over the case; the defense attorney asks for a two-week delay.
Mar. 21, 2018: The defense asks for a one-week delay to negotiate.
Mar. 28, 2018: The defense asks for two more weeks to negotiate.
May 2, 2018: The defense attorney asks to delay the trial until October.
Prosecutors often say that trial delays make it harder to win a conviction because witnesses’ and police officers’ memories fade over time.
“Without question, the delay that occurs in cases going to trial makes it more difficult to keep track of where victims and witnesses are,” said Alaska Deputy Attorney General John Skidmore. “Police officers retire, move out of state. Lab analysts leave.”
“All of our cases depend upon us being able to present the evidence, and it’s just a fact of life that as time progresses, life moves on,” he said.
Sept. 5, 2018: The defense asks for a one-month delay.
Oct. 3, 2018: The defense asks for a two-week delay.
Oct. 17, 2018: The judge agrees to delay the trial for two weeks for “attorney negotiations.”
Nov. 28, 2018: Faualo has a new public defender, who asks to delay a week to prepare.
Dec. 12, 2018: The public defender asks to delay again.
Feb. 6, 2019: Butler, the private defense attorney, returns. He requests a delay until September.
Nothing happens in the case for seven months because Faualo’s attorney says he doesn’t have time for the trial. Faualo has now been in jail for five years, but the case appears to finally be destined for trial when a judge sets a new date for November 2019.
Oct. 28, 2019: The defense attorney asks to delay the trial one month.
The 2019 trial date comes and goes, and Wolverton has now retired. At a spring hearing held before Judge Catherine Easter, the defense attorney says he’s once again considering a plea deal rather than a trial. The judge chuckles when she reads the case number, which shows it has been awaiting trial since 2014. When the defense asks for a delay, the prosecution objects.
Because of the age of the case, the judge sets a trial date. But soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic pauses jury trials across Alaska.
May 11, 2020: COVID-related delay.
June, 11, 2020: COVID-related delay.
Oct. 27, 2020: COVID-related delay.
Jan. 12, 2021: COVID-related delay.
Mar. 9, 2021: COVID-related delay.
June 17, 2021: COVID-related delay.
Aug. 16, 2021: The defense asks for a delay to negotiate a deal. Judge Erin Marston, the latest judge assigned to the case, agrees.
Oct. 26, 2021: A new prosecutor is assigned to the case and asks for a delay.
Nov. 24, 2021: The defense requests a delay.
Jan. 5, 2022: Jury trials have resumed across Alaska, but both sides in this case ask for a delay.
May 9, 2022: The prosecutor says she’s ready for trial. The defense wants a delay.
June 10, 2022: The defense asks for a 30-day delay to continue negotiations.
July 14, 2022: The judge delays a hearing a week. The prosecutor doesn’t show up to the new hearing, so the judge delays again.
July 26, 2022: The defense asks for a delay due to a scheduling conflict.
Sept. 9, 2022: The prosecutor asks the judge to delay the case for “one last status hearing.”
The only witness to the alleged assault, other than the victim, has now died, the defense attorney says. Faualo has been in jail for eight years, and the judge agrees to release him on bail. His daughters will be asked to watch him and report to police if he violates conditions of his release.
Nov. 28, 2022: “I know it’s an old case,” the defense attorney acknowledges while asking that the trial be delayed several more months.
Feb. 1, 2023: The defense asks for a delay of 45 days.
Mar. 15, 2023: The defense requests a delay. A new judge assigned to the case, Judge Andrew Peterson, agrees.
April 26, 2023: The defense asks to delay a trial until 2024.
The talk of trial dates pauses for a few months as Faualo’s lawyer works, successfully, to loosen bail restrictions. At a bail hearing, a judge confuses Faualo with the codefendant who pleaded guilty to lesser charges. Misunderstanding the severity of the charges against Faualo, the judge agrees to ease up on his bail conditions. Faualo is now allowed to leave his house during the day.
Nov. 15, 2023: The defense asks for a 30-day delay.
Dec. 13, 2023: The prosecutor wants time to negotiate. She asks for a 30-60 day delay.
It’s now been nearly 10 years since the alleged sexual assault. Having failed to reach a plea agreement, the two sides say the earliest they can appear at trial is October 2024.
Aug. 30, 2024: With the trial set for October, the defense asks for a 15-day delay.
Sept. 25, 2024: The defense requests a 30-day delay.
Oct. 30, 2024: The prosecutor is ready. But the trial is delayed again because Faualo’s lawyer had double-booked himself for two trials at the same time.
Nov. 27, 2024: The prosecutor and defense are supposed to select a trial date, but the defense isn’t ready. The judge delays the case again.
The most recent hearing in this case was held on Dec. 16, 2024, when Judge Andrew Peterson set a trial date for June 2025, 10 years and 11 months after the alleged sexual assault took place.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
The evidence was overwhelming from the time it all began in 2017. A sexual assault in broad daylight at a popular Anchorage park, with a witness who dialed 911 and described the attack as it was happening. A police officer hoisting the suspect from atop one of the victims, the suspect’s pants still around his knees. DNA evidence corroborating the crime.
Yet in Alaska’s slow-motion court system, it took more than seven years for the case against Fred Tom Hurley III to finally go to trial, in December. Attorneys came and went with the passage of time — a series of six for the defense and four for the prosecution — as judges granted 50 delays. Most of the slowdowns came at the request of Hurley’s lawyers, long before and long after the COVID-19 pandemic paused jury trials across the state. At hearing after hearing, talks concerned scheduling, not the facts of the case.
For the two women Hurley was charged with assaulting, justice delayed meant justice denied in their lifetimes. Both died before the case ever reached the jury.
Told the details of the case, former Florida state prosecutor Melba Pearson called it “a travesty of justice.”
“That’s a travesty. Period. End of story,” said Pearson, who recently co-authored a report on trial delays across the country.
What’s surprising isn’t how long the Hurley case lingered unresolved, but how ordinary it is in Alaska’s court system.
But when it comes to felonies in Anchorage and across the state, the opposite problem often exists for victims and witnesses: a wait of five, seven or even 10 years or more to reach trial, plea agreement or dismissal, often because of defense motions to delay. As a benchmark, the National Center for State Courts says 98% of felonies should be resolved in under a year.
The extreme pretrial delays in Alaska are especially striking because it has one of the nation’s strictest limits on how long cases can drag out: 120 days from the time a person is charged.
In reality, this deadline is rarely met. Over a recent 12-month period, only seven criminal cases went to trial within 120 days in Alaska state courts.
The problem is getting worse. The median time to resolve the most serious felony cases, such as murder and sexual assault, has nearly tripled over the past decade, from just over a year in 2013 to 1,160 days in 2023. About 54% of people held in Alaska jails and prisons last year were there to await trial or, in a smaller number of cases, to await sentencing. That’s up from just 30% in 2016.
A courts spokesperson, Rebecca Koford, said by email that the state “is well aware of the issues with case backlogs and has been actively working to improve time to disposition.” Koford cited an Anchorage presiding judge’s orders limiting when postponements may be used, as well as new training for judges on managing case flows.
“We have made inroads in that direction,” she said, “but it takes time and continues to be exacerbated by the low number of attorneys who are able to handle complex criminal cases.”
Some defense attorneys request pretrial delays to cope with overwhelming caseloads. According to the Alaska court system, Hurley’s current attorney, Rex Butler, represents defendants in at least 375 active cases, for example. (In an interview, the attorney said he sometimes hires other lawyers to help with that workload and noted that most cases do not require a jury trial.)
Time is generally a friend to a defendant. Witnesses may get into trouble or their recollections may fade, which could work to your benefit.
—Assistant public advocate Jim Corrigan in an email to a client
Attorneys also can employ delays as a tactic, increasing the odds their clients will walk free as the prosecution’s case ages. Defendants sit in jail or live on monitored release pending trial, but the wait can avert a heftier prison sentence.
The thought was captured in a 2017 email from a state-appointed defense attorney to his client, later made public in a court proceeding.
“Time is generally a friend to a defendant,” assistant public advocate Jim Corrigan wrote. “Witnesses may get into trouble or their recollections may fade, which could work to your benefit.”
The defendant had been questioning why his lawyer asked to delay his sexual assault case.
“You should not be in any hurry to take these cases to trial,” Corrigan replied.
Corrigan did not respond to a recent request for comment.
Terrence Haas, a former judge who oversees public defenders in Alaska, said that any lawyer who believes a delay is necessary or would benefit a client’s case is “bound by the ethics of their profession and duty of loyalty to their client to request a continuance.”
But one person has the power to say no to such requests: the judge. Records show Alaska judges routinely agree to such requests even after years of delays. These preventable failures have existed for more than a decade. What’s more, everyone saw it coming.
Repeated Warnings
Victims advocates in Alaska have raised alarms about pretrial delays over and over again, largely without impact.
“It is not unusual for felony cases to take 2 to 3 years before victims see their case go to trial or result in a plea agreement,” the Alaska Office of Victims’ Rights wrote in 2014. Few judges were giving serious consideration to victims who asked them to speed up the process.
The agency issued similar warnings as the years went by:
2015: Judges often allowed 20 or more status meetings before forcing the two sides to go to trial.
2016: The most common victim complaint is “pre-trial delays allowed by the courts.”
2017: The maxim that “justice delayed is justice denied” could not be more true than for victims of crime in Alaska. “Victims cannot heal or find closure when the wounds caused by the offender are constantly reopened by a prolonged court case. Victims are often held hostage to the system for far too long and in violation of their rights as victims.”
The victims’ rights office laid blame for the delays mostly with judges, particularly judges in Anchorage.
One week in 2018, the agency watched four Anchorage Superior Court judges hold pretrial hearings for 181 criminal cases. The judges let 161 be delayed up to two months. In most cases, the victims’ rights office said, neither the defense attorney nor the prosecutor gave a good reason for the delay. Not once did a judge ask what the victim wanted, the report said.
The next year, the Office of Victims’ Rights accused Anchorage judges of being enablers. “It is up to the judge to control the docket, to adhere to standing court orders, to follow the law and to protect victims’ rights as well as defendants’ rights,” the agency wrote. “Generally, what is seen is more of a rubber stamping of such requests.”
A common delay tactic during the pandemic known as the “off-record continuance” allowed attorneys to delay cases by email and skip court. But it persisted after courts reopened. Records show judges in 2024 allowed off-record continuances in dozens of cases, ranging from a 4-year-old felony assault to a 5-year-old sexual assault to a 6-year-old car theft.
(The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica delivered questions to all Anchorage Superior Court judges by email and in hard copy, receiving a response from only two judges, who both said they mostly hear civil cases and rarely preside over criminal trials.)
Crime survivors pay a price for the inaction. They take time off work or pay for day care to attend hearings, advocates note. Victims fight to calm the pit in their stomachs before stepping into a courtroom, only to find the event is canceled.
The Office of Victims’ Rights in May filed paperwork on behalf of the alleged victim in a 2017 sexual abuse case, demanding the court honor the woman’s right to “timely disposition” under the Alaska Constitution. The agency asked Superior Court Judge Jack McKenna to hold a trial in June so that the woman and her family could move on with their lives. The judge delayed the case once again.
McKenna did not respond to an email or questions delivered to his courthouse mailbox. But Koford, the court spokesperson, said the trial in the 2017 case had to be delayed because the defense attorney was scheduled to appear in another trial. Other delays were because the prosecutor was unavailable.
The state of Alaska’s criminal justice system is operating on the fringes, barely able to protect against the deprivation of fundamental rights, barely able to respond in a professionally responsible manner.
—Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Michael MacDonald
Koford said the case illustrated Alaska’s shortage of experienced attorneys to handle major felonies, which often leaves judges with a choice between postponing a trial and forcing one with unprepared attorneys, unavailable witnesses or an incomplete examination of evidence.
“A victim’s right to a speedy trial is important,” Koford said, “but it is also important to try a case correctly the first time.”
One judge has publicly blamed backups on lawmakers and governors, whom he accused of skimping on money for public defenders.
Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Michael MacDonald was presiding over a case in 2019 involving the beating death of an Alaska Native woman in a Yukon River village. It was less than 2 years old and about to go before a jury. The defendant admitted to the killing.
Then the defendant’s state-appointed attorney requested a delay, saying she had been juggling 200 cases at once, felt burned out and couldn’t ethically move forward with a trial. (A 1998 audit for the Alaska Legislature said public defenders can “ethically” handle no more than 59 cases in a 60-hour workweek.)
MacDonald described the request as a sign of dysfunction.
“The state of Alaska’s criminal justice system is operating on the fringes,” MacDonald wrote, “barely able to protect against the deprivation of fundamental rights, barely able to respond in a professionally responsible manner” to violent crime.
He went ahead and ordered the trial postponed. The defendant eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree murder under an agreement with the prosecution. (The judge has since retired but declined to be interviewed for this story, saying he still occasionally fills in for other judges and presides over cases.)
Seven Years, No Trial
At the December sexual assault trial for Hurley in Anchorage, few people were more eager to see the case concluded than Eva Foxglove. The 53-year-old mother was the one who called 911 during the attack. Foxglove didn’t know the women, but she said she had been sexually assaulted before and knew they might not be able or willing to testify when the time arrived.
“I have to come and do this for them,” she told the jury.
The events Foxglove watched unfold in 2017 had their origins shortly after Hurley’s release from jail on a previous sexual assault charge.
Accused of sexually assaulting a woman in her home, Hurley was acquitted at trial, walked out of jail and wrote on Facebook July 13, 2017, “What’s up free at last.” Two days later, he showed up at an Anchorage soup kitchen, where he met the two women he was later charged with attacking, according to a police report.
The report said the three of them walked to the Delaney Park Strip, several city blocks of grass that skirt a gleaming oil company tower and the governor’s office building. One alleged victim told police Hurley said she was beautiful and tried to kiss her but that she turned her head and told him she was engaged to be married, the report said.
The Delaney Park Strip is a popular park that covers several city blocks in the heart of Anchorage.
(Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)
Foxglove recalled in a recent interview that she was charging her phone at an outlet in the park. It was about 4 p.m. in the thick of tourist season, 68 degrees under a clear, bright sky.
The women seemed to pass out after drinking from a half-gallon bottle, Foxglove said. She could see Hurley moving on top of one and then the other, she said. “I was like, ‘What the fuck is he doing?’” Foxglove said. Shortly after she dialed 911, a police officer jogged up to Hurley and yanked him from one of the two women, the officer, now a sergeant, told jurors in December.
Police later collected DNA matching Hurley’s from the second woman’s body and from the first woman’s clothing.
The case was assigned to Anchorage Superior Court Judge Kevin Saxby and given a trial date of Oct. 9, 2017. But that date came and went. Saxby and other judges agreed to delay the trial 50 times, most often at the request of Hurley’s lawyers. One example: Hurley’s attorney wanted to see the criminal records of the two alleged victims.
Saxby did not respond to emailed and hand-delivered questions. Koford, the court system spokesperson, said judges generally do not comment on their actions for “fairness and due process reasons” and “cannot and do not comment on decision-making and reasoning in a case.”
One of the alleged victims was described in enough detail in police reports for the Daily News and ProPublica to track down additional information about her life. She lived unhoused and was listed in police reports as a victim in at least two prior sexual assault cases.
The woman told officers that she had passed out and awoke to find Hurley on top of her, police records say. A charging document quoted her using the word “rape” to describe what happened. Unlike the arriving police officer, the woman could testify not only to sexual contact, but also her lack of consent.
She never got the chance.
A passerby found her body outside a public library in Anchorage on April 19, 2019, some time between Hurley’s 19th pretrial delay and his 20th. Police said there was no evidence of a crime. At some other point during the long wait for Hurley’s trial, the second woman died as well.
Prosecutors had the DNA and witnesses who could establish sexual contact. But without the victims, prosecutors needed to show that they were incapacitated and therefore inherently incapable of agreeing to sex. The job fell largely to Foxglove. On the witness stand, she wore an oversized T-shirt and loose ponytail. “I’ve never been to court before,” she told the jury. But she recounted the events from seven years ago clearly, with greater precision and consistency than she’d offered in an earlier interview with a reporter.
Eva Foxglove testifies during Fred Tom Hurley III’s sexual assault trial at the Nesbett Courthouse in Anchorage in December.
(Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)
When Butler, Hurley’s defense attorney, challenged her statement that the two women were passed out — rather than simply asleep — she never flinched. She could tell when someone wasn’t just napping but dead-to-the-world unconscious, she told the jury.
“I was a drunk. I know what sleep is. When you want to sleep you lay down and go to sleep. But when you drink so much, you pass out,” she said. “I know the difference, and I see.”
Fred Tom Hurley III, left, talks with his attorney, Rex Butler, during his trial.
(Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)
After seven years of delays, Hurley’s attorney gave no opening statement and did not call any witnesses. The trial took five days, including two days of jury selection.
The jurors returned their decision within two hours on Dec. 10: guilty on five of six felony sexual assault charges. As of Monday, the state court website indicated Hurley has not filed an appeal.
In the Defendant’s Favor
Although the Hurley case ended in a conviction, delays have worked to the defendants’ advantage in other Alaska criminal cases.
A man held at Fairbanks Correctional Center for two years without a trial had his drug charges thrown out after asserting his attorney waived his speedy trial rights violation without his consent.
And since October, at least 10 pretrial inmates at the Goose Creek Correctional Center have filed petitions in federal court challenging their state detention. They allege the state violated their speedy trial rights and in some cases appointed unreliable public defenders, saying they never signed forms saying they wanted to stop the 120-day countdown to a trial. Federal judges dismissed four of the petitions, while another six are awaiting a decision.
Haas, the official who supervises Alaska public defenders, said he wasn’t familiar with the petitions but said it’s not uncommon for defense attorneys and their clients to disagree about how long it will take to get ready for trial. “During the pandemic, of course, that got a little bit more extreme in terms of what delays were going on,” he said.
Pretrial delays can lead to a reversal for prosecutors even if they’ve won a conviction.
In a recent decision that could have far-reaching impact in Alaska, a man convicted of sexually abusing children succeeded in forcing the Superior Court to revisit his case.
Police arrested Ralph Hernandez in 2011 after an 11-year-old girl told her friend about the alleged abuse. Prosecutors said he abused, tortured or sexually assaulted children from toddlers to teenagers.
Over the seven years that it took the case to get to trial, Hernandez repeatedly voiced his demand for a speedy trial, often over the objections of his public defender. A jury convicted Hernandez of three counts of first-degree sexual abuse of a minor and one count of attempted second-degree sexual abuse of a minor.
But Alaska’s appeals court ruled in February that Hernandez had proven his pretrial delays were “presumptively prejudicial” and sent the case back to lower court for review.
In the 1978 federal ruling that set the precedent for the Hernandez case, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made clear that states can’t get away with violating speedy trial rights simply by blaming a shortage of public defenders or prosecutors.
“A state government’s allocation of resources plays a major role in creating congested dockets, and it is unfair to require defendants to bear the entire burden that results from the government’s fiscal decisions,” the court wrote. “There must be a point at which delay due to a congested docket becomes so unacceptable that by itself it violates the right to a speedy trial.”
Although defendants may object to endless delays, they can benefit from them as time eats away at the prosecution’s case.
“We as prosecutors are obligated to present evidence in court and persuade a jury beyond a reasonable doubt about what happened,” said John Skidmore, Alaska deputy attorney general. “But when memories fade and people are less certain about what happened at some point in the past, that makes it more difficult for us to meet those burdens.”
Especially in cases of sexual violence, it’s prosecutors who are in a race against time. Often the evidence rests on a survivor’s word against an attacker’s. Losing the alleged victim’s testimony — a likelier outcome each day without a trial — can crush a prosecutor’s odds of a conviction.
It happened, a prosecutor said, in the case of Andre Corcoran.
“What She Deserved”
The charges say Corcoran met his alleged victim, an unhoused woman taking cooking classes at a soup kitchen, shortly after moving to Alaska. The woman told police Corcoran seemed safe because he volunteered to clear kitchen tables. When Corcoran told her he had no place to stay, the woman offered to show him an abandoned tent.
Inside, according to the charging document, Corcoran and the woman began kissing, but she said she felt uncomfortable and asked him to stop. The charging document says Corcoran admitted to holding her down and attempting to have sex as she screamed for help. A police report on Corcoran’s arrest describes his subsequent interview with a detective.
“I think women need to be raped,” Corcoran told the detective, according to a transcript. The defendant said his only regret was not completing the act, the report said.
She wanted to make sure that he was held accountable for what he did and that he wouldn’t be able to do this again.
—Prosecutor Betsy Bull
A grand jury indicted Corcoran on Aug. 30, 2018, on felony sexual assault charges. He waited in jail as defense attorneys had the case delayed at least 11 times. Still, when it finally reached trial in late April, Corcoran’s alleged victim was willing to testify despite suffering anxiety, a prosecutor later said.
“She wanted to make sure that he was held accountable for what he did and that he wouldn’t be able to do this again,” prosecutor Betsy Bull told the court.
Then the judge declared a mistrial. Corcoran’s attorney said he wasn’t told the alleged victim had a boyfriend at the time the assault was reported — which the attorney said gave the woman a potential motive to lie and cover up consensual sex with another man.
The prosecution was ready to give it a second try this fall, but as the new trial date approached, Corcoran’s alleged victim died of severe burns after her tent caught fire.
Bull said she was forced to offer a deal that let Corcoran plead guilty to a single count of felony assault. He would be sentenced to time served — his years in jail awaiting trial — and would not have to register as a sex offender. The prosecutor told the judge it was the best she could do.
“It’s not, from the state’s perspective, because he didn’t do it,” Bull said.
The courtroom was empty. No jury. No spectators. The judge asked the defendant if he wanted to say anything, and Corcoran stood.
“I do feel bad about who I used to be,” he said. “And I have made changes to who I want to be. I want to be a better person.”
Corcoran’s attorney, Jaffer Khimani, said Corcoran’s expression of remorse “was sincere to me.” Khimani said he was unaware of something else that, according to a report filed by a police detective, his client imparted moments after.
The report said Corcoran spoke to the court officer who escorted him to an elevator on his way to being set free.
It quoted Corcoran saying something very different from what he’d told the judge about his actions: “She got what she deserved.”
When Valentino Rodriguez started his job at a high-security prison in Sacramento, California, informally known as New Folsom, he thought he was entering a brotherhood of correctional officers who hold each other to a high standard of conduct.
Five years later, Rodriguez would be found dead in his home. His unexpected passing would raise questions from his family and the FBI.
Before he died, Rodriguez was promoted to an elite unit investigating crimes in the prison. His parents and his widow say he had been hoping for the position for a long time.
But once inside the unit, the job consumed him. From day one, his fellow officers began to undermine and harass him. Stressed and fed up with how he was being treated, Rodriguez reached a breaking point.
He left the prison, but his experiences there still haunted him—so he went in for a meeting with the warden. He didn’t know it would be his last.
This week on Reveal, we partner with KQED reporters Sukey Lewis and Julie Small and the On Our Watch podcast to explore what this correctional officer’s story shows about how the second-largest prison system in the country is failing to protect the people who live and work inside it.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in March 2024. Listen to the whole On Our Watch series here.
This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system.
Amairani Salinas was 32-weeks pregnant with her fourth child in 2023 when doctors at a Texas hospital discovered that her baby no longer had a heartbeat. As they prepped her for an emergency cesarean section, they gave her midazolam, a benzodiazepine commonly prescribed to keep patients calm. A day later, the grieving mother was cradling her stillborn daughter when a social worker stopped by her room to deliver another devastating blow: Salinas was being reported to child welfare authorities. A drug test had turned up traces of benzodiazepine—the very medication that staff had administered before wheeling her into surgery.
For Victoria Villanueva, pregnant with her first child, the drug detected in her baby’s system was morphine. Villanueva had arrived at an Indiana hospital at 41 weeks to have her labor induced. To ease the pain of her contractions, doctors gave her narcotics. A day later, a social worker told the new mother, the baby’s meconium—or first bowel movement—had tested positive for opiates. Now, instead of bonding with her baby, Villanueva shook with fear that her newborn could be taken away. “I didn’t even know how to function,” she recalled.
What happened to Salinas and Villanueva are far from isolated incidents. Across the country, hospitals are dispensing medications to patients in labor, only to report them to child welfare authorities when they or their newborns test positive for those same substances on subsequent drug tests, an investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal has found.
The positive tests are triggered by medications routinely prescribed to millions of birthing patients in the United States every year. The drugs include morphine or fentanyl for epidurals or other pain relief; anxiety medications; and two different blood pressure meds prescribed for C-sections.
The reporting for this story included interviews with two dozen patients and medical professionals, and a review of hundreds of pages of medical and court records. Some spoke about cases on condition of anonymity because the custody of children is at stake.
“The hospitals are at fault. The clinicians are at fault. Our policies are at fault.”
In New York, a mother with no history of drug use lost custody of her toddler and newborn for five months after she tested positive for fentanyl that the hospital had given her in her epidural. In Oklahoma, when a mother tested positive for meth, sheriff’s deputies removed her newborn and three other children. They were held in foster care for 11 days, until a confirmation test proved that the culprit was a heartburn medication the hospital had given the patient.
By the time of Villanueva’s hospital stay in 2017, researchers and doctors had known for years that medications can rapidly pass from mother to baby, causing positive drug test results. Two tests from Villanueva’s prenatal visits, and another test done right before she went into labor, all showed the mother had no drugs in her system. The morphine given to Villanueva for her contractions was documented in her medical records. But the staff reported her to the state child welfare agency anyway, hospital records show.
Marion General Hospital in Indiana did not respond to requests for comment. Brian Heinemann, a spokesperson for the Indiana Department of Child Services, declined to comment on Villanueva’s case, but said policy has since changed to ensure that drug screen results alone are not used to substantiate an allegation of abuse or neglect.
Kimberly Walton, a spokesperson for the Texas Health Resources system, declined to answer questions about Salinas’ case, but said that doctors order drug tests if there is a concern about patient health, and that they are required “to report suspected illegal drug use that could endanger the health or safety of a child.”
Credit: Marci Suela/The Marshall Project and Getty Images
Hospital drug testing of pregnant women, which began in the 1980s and spread rapidly during the opioid epidemic, was intended in part to help identify babies who might experience withdrawal symptoms and need extra medical care. Federal law requires hospitals to alert child welfare agencies anytime such babies are born. But a previous investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal found that the relatively inexpensive, pee-in-a-cup tests favored by many hospitals are highly susceptible to false positives, errors, and misinterpretation —and many hospitals have failed to put in place safeguards that would protect patients from being reported over faulty test results.
In some cases examined by The Marshall Project, doctors and social workers did not review patient medications to find the cause of a positive test. In others, providers suspected a medication they prescribed could be the culprit, but reported patients to authorities anyway.
“How much harm to birthing people are we willing to allow? Our patients are being harmed until we can get our act together,” said Dr. Davida Schiff, whose hospital network, Mass General Brigham in New England, instituted a new policy this year that directs providers to drug test patients, with their consent, only when medically necessary. The new policy also halted automatic reporting of positive test results. Hospitals have a responsibility to address the testing problems, she said. “The hospitals are at fault. The clinicians are at fault. Our policies are at fault.”
The risks from giving medications to birthing patients and then testing them for illicit substances have been well documented. A 2022 study by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital found that 91 percent of women given fentanyl in their epidurals tested positive for it afterward. Other studies have found that mothers can quickly pass these medications on to their babies. A baby’s positive drug test “cannot and should not be used to identify fentanyl drug abuse in mothers,” said Athena Petrides, the lead researcher of one of the studies at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Despite these warnings, hospitals often lack policies requiring providers to review a patient’s records to see what medications they received before reporting them to authorities. Mandatory reporting laws protect doctors from liability for reports made “in good faith,” even if they turn out to be wrong. And toxicologists and doctors say many doctors lack the time and expertise needed to adequately interpret drug test results.
“It’s not something routinely taught in medical school or even residency,” said Dr. Tricia Wright, an OB-GYN and professor at University of California, San Francisco Medical Center who specializes in substance use disorders in pregnancy. “It’s all up to individuals who make their own interpretations.” In 2021, Wright helped change the policy at her hospital, one of the country’s leading teaching facilities, to direct doctors not to drug test patients unless medically necessary.
While drug tests can help pediatricians determine how to treat an infant who may experience withdrawal symptoms, many OB-GYNs say that positive drug test results do not generally inform the mother’s medical care, so they have little reason to dwell on them.
Instead, at many hospitals, it is social workers—responsible for contacting child welfare agencies—who are more likely to pay attention to drug test results. Some hospitals require social workers to automatically file a report for any positive test, while other facilities first perform an assessment to determine whether a parent might be a risk to the baby.
But hospital social workers are often overworked, said Kylie Haines, who manages a program for pregnant women with opioid use disorder at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, one of the top maternity teaching hospitals in the nation. Social workers generally have even less training than doctors on drug testing, and little authority to question test results, she said. Investigating the cause of a positive drug test is not considered part of their job.
“We’re not medical providers,” said Haines, a licensed social worker herself. “We can’t interpret drug screens.”
The timing of the tests can also make it tricky to interpret them. In theory, the best time to take a urine sample for drug testing is when a patient arrives at the hospital, before receiving medications. But it is common for hospitals to test urine samples taken from a birthing patient’s catheter bag, or to request a urine sample after medications have already been administered, providers said.
Newborn drug tests can add another layer of complexity. While urine tests can detect potential drug use over a period of days, testing the baby’s meconium can uncover illicit substances going back months. Meconium tests are widely considered to be the gold standard for newborn drug testing because they can indicate potential drug use earlier in pregnancy, a possible sign of addiction.
But in some cases, there is no way to tell whether a baby’s positive test was caused by a medication the hospital dispensed or a substance the mother used earlier. Nor do such tests tell providers how much or how frequently a person may have used drugs—for example, if a patient used substances in the past but stopped when she realized she was pregnant. “You actually don’t know,” said Schiff. “Which is kind of a mess.”
“It makes me sick to think of all the moms that have come through and said they don’t use fentanyl and we don’t believe them.”
Medications such as morphine or fentanyl have led some patients to get flagged as opioid users. Ephedrine and phenylephrine, medications for low blood pressure that are commonly prescribed during C-sections, have caused false positives for meth. The Marshall Project also found that women were questioned over positive drug tests after hospitals gave them sedatives such as benzodiazepines or barbiturates.
Ephedrine and phenylephrine, medications for low blood pressure used during cesarean sections, can trigger positive results for meth in drug tests. Credit: Marci Suela/The Marshall Project and Getty Images
When women are flagged by a positive drug test result, other aspects of their lives can quickly come under suspicion. Medical conditions or birth complications that can be associated with addiction—such as high blood pressure, a placenta that separates before birth, or a premature birth—may mistakenly be viewed as further evidence that a pregnant patient used drugs. Through the lens of a positive drug test, even something as innocuous as missing some prenatal appointments becomes potential evidence that a mother is a risk to her baby. And patients who had traumatic experiences giving birth may suddenly find themselves under threat.
In 2023, Salinas was still in a haze of grief after delivering her stillborn baby when she learned she would be reported to child welfare authorities. Salinas had no idea the hospital had given her the benzodiazepine for which she tested positive and denied using the medication. She had also tested positive for Delta-9, a legal hemp-derived product, which she said she had bought at the grocery store. But soon, Salinas found herself under a monthslong investigation, trying to fight off paralyzing depression while processing her grief and caring for her other children.
Amairani Salinas tested positive for midazolam, the same medication her hospital record shows she had received there hours earlier. Credit: Photo illustration by The Marshall Project; Courtesy of Amairani Salinas
“I still have three live children. They still need to eat. They still need to get up for school. They still need their mom,” Salinas recalled thinking as she was being questioned.
Officials closed the case about four months later as “unsubstantiated.” But it wasn’t until a year later that Salinas read through her medical records with a Marshall Project reporter and discovered the cause of the positive test.
Marissa Gonzales, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, declined to discuss Salinas’ case, citing confidentiality laws.
Salinas said she wondered why child welfare workers weren’t spending their time investigating allegations of actual child abuse. “Why are you giving your attention to this person who’s a good mom, who hasn’t done anything, instead of a child who may actually be in danger?”
In recent years, studies have found that drug tests aren’t necessarily the best way to identify someone with a substance use problem—a simple screening questionnaire is also effective. Leading medical groups advise hospitals to use questionnaires instead of universal drug tests. But hospital drug testing—and reporting—of labor and delivery patients remains ubiquitous.
In at least 27 states, hospitals are required by law to alert child welfare agencies about a positive test or a potential exposure to the baby. But not a single state requires hospitals to confirm test results before reporting them. Hospitals routinely contact authorities without ordering confirmation tests or waiting to receive the results.
Not every state explicitly requires reporting a positive test, but many hospitals do so anyway. In 2022 alone, more than 35,000 babies were reported to child welfare authorities as substance-exposed, federal data shows, with no guarantee that the underlying test results were accurate.
“I couldn’t even really enjoy properly my child being born.”
“The system is primed for a report,” said Dr. Mishka Terplan, an OB-GYN in Maryland and a leading researcher on substance use disorders during pregnancy. “To slow it down, or to stop it, takes effort.”
The consequences of a faulty drug test can be especially severe for people with histories of addiction, who are less likely to be believed when they protest that the positive test was caused by a hospital medication. In this environment, a patient’s word is often pitted against a single drug test, and it’s up to an individual doctor, nurse, or social worker to decide whether to ferret out the truth.
Lisa Grisham, a nurse in Arizona, recalled the case of a patient in recovery for opioid use disorder who tested positive for fentanyl. The woman insisted that another nurse had given her the medication during labor, even though it was not listed in her hospital records. Grisham, the director of a hospital program for substance-exposed infants at Banner University Medical Center in Tucson, took it upon herself to investigate and eventually tracked down the nurse, who confirmed the patient’s explanation.
“It makes me sick to think of all the moms that have come through and said they don’t use fentanyl and we don’t believe them,” Grisham said.
Victoria and her children share some strawberries outside their home in Indiana on a November afternoon in 2024.
Villanueva was just 18, newly married and still working on her GED, when she gave birth to her first baby. As a child, she had been taught to be honest with medical providers. So during hospital admission, she told a nurse that she had briefly experimented with drugs such as marijuana and acid when she was 15 years old. She hadn’t used drugs since, she said.
When she was admitted, Villanueva took a drug test that came back negative for any illicit substances—the same result as the two drug tests from her prenatal appointments. Then she received medicine to induce labor, and her contractions began. They were so painful, Villanueva recalled, that she was relieved when a nurse told her she was giving her morphine.
The day after Villanueva gave birth, an investigator with the Indiana Department of Child Services arrived. The hospital had informed the agency about Villanueva’s “history of drug use,” according to medical records. Without her knowledge, Villanueva said, the hospital also sent her daughter’s meconium for testing, which found the morphine.
Villanueva was certain that her hospital records would prove she had received morphine, and she was right. The drug test results even stated, “Drugs administered during labor and delivery may be detected in meconium.”
But even after the investigator received the hospital records, Villanueva said, the agency required her to submit to more drug tests and allow inspections of her home. Finally, after several weeks, the agency closed the case, Villanueva recalled.
Only after the investigators were out of her life did Villanueva feel that she could finally revel in her baby’s birth and allow herself to be happy.
“I couldn’t even really enjoy properly my child being born,” she recalled. “Until after the fact, when they were gone.”
The Marshall Project reporters Weihua Li, Andrew Rodriguez Calderón, Nakylah Carter and Catherine Odom contributed to this story.
Melissa Turnage approached the 12-year-old girl with the imposing affect of a cop: arms crossed, lips pursed, badge visible, tone skeptical.
“So, you don’t know how many times this has happened this week?”
Taylor Cadle slouched on a couch, staring at her lap and picking at her nails. That morning, in the summer of 2016, she had gotten into a fight with her adoptive parents when they took away her phone on the ride to church, on the outskirts of Tampa, Florida. A minister’s wife, noticing Taylor’s tear-stained face, pulled her into an office to ask what was going on. Taylor hadn’t been planning to tell her everything, but it all came spilling out. The minister called the police, and now Turnage, a detective with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, was standing before her.
Taylor spoke tentatively, in barely more than a whisper, as she told Turnage in a recorded interview that her adoptive father, Henry Cadle, had been sexually assaulting her for years. The inappropriate touching had started when she was 9 years old, shortly after Henry and Lisa, Taylor’s great uncle and his wife, had adopted her. Over time, the abuse escalated. Now, he assaulted her “anytime he gets the chance,” she said. She didn’t like going with him on errands because it happened then, on the side of a quiet road that cut through a swamp. Standing outside the car, he would put his privates inside of her privates, she told Turnage. Taylor couldn’t say how many times he had raped her, but it had happened just the night before. He did it whenever they drove to get milk, too, which was three times a week.
“That’s a lot of driving,” Turnage said.
Taylor said nothing.
Turnage was embarking on the type of investigation that her boss, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, had made a core mission of his agency. Judd is a beloved figure in Polk County, where he has served as sheriff for the past two decades and was just reelected to his sixth term. Known for his tough-on-crime rhetoric and social media presence, Judd gives a near-daily “morning briefing” to his 700,000 TikTok followers, holding up mugshots of suspects, telling the stories of crimes they allegedly committed—from stealing baby formula to driving drunk—and welcoming them to jail, which he calls “Grady Judd’s Bed & Breakfast.” Fans buy Grady Judd bobbleheads, Grady Judd mugs, and sweatshirts reading “God Guns and Grady Judd.”
An old joke that has been repeated by Judd himself is that the most dangerous place in Polk County is between Judd and a camera. He’s a regular guest on Fox News, where he shares his outspoken views about subjects ranging from the dangers of undocumented immigrants to the peril of looters after hurricanes, and where the stories in Judd’s TikTok posts often find a national audience.
A Grady Judd figurine in Polk County, Florida Credit: Melanie Metz
But he claims his top priority is protecting children from sexual predators. The county’s deputies have traveled to faraway places—from Colorado to Guatemala—to extradite men accused of victimizing children in Polk County. “If you think that you’re going to physically, sexually, or emotionally abuse a child and I’m not going to get in there and protect them, you’re making a big mistake,” he told MSNBC in 2015. In 2020, President Donald Trump appointed Judd to a federal council overseeing all programs related to juvenile delinquency, and missing and exploited children.
One might think that someone accused of the crimes Henry Cadle was accused of would be a prime target for the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. But when Turnage spoke with him, on a patio outside the church, she kept the interview brief and light. Henry, who was 57, spoke about his relationship with Taylor with a breezy confidence. She had anger issues and could be difficult—traits he attributed to her rocky upbringing—but he loved her to death. “Does she have dad wrapped around her finger? Yes. Everybody will tell you that,” Henry said.
Rather than asking him if he had sexually abused Taylor, Turnage floated a theory: “Basically, Taylor, I guess, has made up these allegations, okay? That you have been sexually abusing her.”
Henry brimmed with righteous indignation. “Why in the heck she would conjure up something like this about me, I don’t know. Only thing I’ve ever did with that kid is loved her.”
To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Henry Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.
Lisa Cadle was also dumbfounded by the allegations against her husband. Taylor adored Henry, Lisa told Turnage, and always begged to go with him on errands. She was quick to point out that Taylor was “mouthy” and “has been known to say things.” Turnage assured Lisa that kids had a way of making unfounded accusations “when things don’t go the way that they want it to.”
“Back when we were younger, it was, you know, ‘We’ll call [the Department of Children and Families] and say you abused me,’” Turnage said. “Now it’s, ‘We get sexually abused.’”
By the time Turnage spoke to Taylor again, later that afternoon, her skepticism sounded palpable. Turnage focused on one particular inconsistency: whether Taylor actually liked going for rides with Henry. “If you’re mad because you got your phone taken away, let’s say that now and be done with it,” she said in the recorded interview. “Because I have three stories that say you like to be with your dad, you’re daddy’s little girl, you love to go with him because you like to get out of the house.”
Taylor went silent. By necessity, she had developed a keen sense of the unsaid moods and whims of the adults around her. She had done the mental math when she joined Henry on the car ride the night before to visit his sister in the hospital. Taylor thought the somber occasion would keep her safe. But after the hospital and a quick stop at Taco Bell, Henry pulled into the Handy gas station and came out with a box of condoms stuffed into his front pocket, and she knew she had miscalculated.
Now, faced with an irritated deputy, Taylor realized she miscalculated again: She assumed the police would believe her.
“They’re going to pull you from your mom and your brother, and you’re going to have to go back into foster care.”
Melissa turnage
“What’s going on, Taylor?” Turnage asked. “Because you understand, if your dad goes to jail, he doesn’t come back.” There would be other consequences too, Turnage said. Her dad’s mower repair business would shut down. Her mom would lose the car while police checked it for DNA. She wouldn’t get the shoes she wanted, or the braces she needed. “They’re going to pull you from your mom and your brother, and you’re going to have to go back into foster care,” Turnage said.
A moment passed, and then another. Finally, in a small, strained voice, Taylor said, “Everything I told you earlier is not a lie.”
With that, Turnage told Taylor that she was going to the regional hospital “to have a sexual assault kit done.” Taylor didn’t know what that was.
To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Taylor Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audiocan be found here.
Later that night, she slipped her arms through the sleeves of a too-big hospital gown and gingerly placed her feet into the stirrups. She shivered under the bright, fluorescent lights, nauseated from hunger and exhaustion. Although a doctor had walked her through what the examination would entail, Taylor was still shocked by the cold, hard metal thing that she later learned was called a speculum. As the doctor took one swab, and then another, and then another, Taylor clenched the side of the hospital bed, knuckles white, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Now 21 years old, Taylor has the same long hair and slight frame that she had when she was 12, but she no longer holds herself like she’s trying to make herself small. When we first met her in person, at an Airbnb for an interview in front of cameras and lights, she walked in as if she did this all the time, deftly setting her then-8-month-old daughter up for a nap in the bedroom before speaking, for nearly five hours straight, with the self-assurance and confidence of someone much older. She has a tattoo of the birthday of her son, who is 3 years old, in roman numerals on her left forearm, a nose ring, and dyed black hair—all decisions, she notes with a trace of pride, that she made despite Lisa’s disapproval soon after she turned 18.
Taylor Cadle at home with her two children. Credit: Melanie Metz
But perhaps the biggest act of defiance is that she has decided to speak publicly about what happened to her when she was 12. Asked if she wanted to use a pseudonym or just part of her name, she said no—she wants to use her full name, and she wants to share her whole story.
The way Taylor was treated—as a victim, but also as a suspect—flies in the face of best practices in handling sexual assault investigations. Her case isn’t an isolated one. In a multiyear investigation, the Center for Investigative Reporting identified hundreds of similar cases across the country in which police criminalized the very people reporting sexual assault.
“I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me. She made me feel like the monster.”
Taylor cadle
Armed with hours of recorded interviews, police reports and state records stemming from her report eight years ago, Taylor simmers with fury about how Turnage handled her allegation. “I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me,” she says. “She made me feel like the monster.”
But when she thinks about herself that night on the hospital bed, Taylor crumples. In court records from her case is a photo from the sexual assault exam, her 12-year-old self looking up at the camera from the hospital bed.
“Little me,” she said recently, her voice catching as she stared into her own eyes. “Broken inside. With a look of ‘Are you listening yet? Do you believe me yet?’”
Taylor’s earliest memories are of parenting her younger siblings. As a child, she gave them baths, made them food, and tucked them into bed. She was her mom’s “best friend,” she says. Taylor served as a lookout when her mom would steal drugs from her boyfriend, and she knew to pee in a cup and leave it under the bathroom sink when the probation officer came by.
“I worried about everything,” she says. “I stressed about everything that, quite honestly, a child should never have to worry about.”
When she was 7, amid drug use and violence at home, DCF placed Taylor into foster care, according to agency records. “I wasn’t relieved as much as I probably should’ve,” Taylor says. “It was still hard because being a child, and all you ever want is your mom.”
For the next year and a half, she bounced from foster home to foster home. It was a “scary, confusing” time, Taylor says. She desperately wanted to be reconnected with her parents and siblings, who had been placed in other homes. Her birth father had been a source of normalcy and stability before she was taken into state custody, but his drug use, too, precluded him from being cleared by DCF.
Cows graze in a field near the Cadles’ Polk County home. Credit: Melanie Metz
Taylor’s tendency to assert control, key to her survival as a young child, became a liability that was pathologized in reports and case notes. Foster parents and case workers labeled her “defiant” and “bossy.” She had tantrums often and was accused of lying about little things, like stealing peanuts from the grocery store and taking another child’s phone. “Lying seems to have been a defense mechanism that has worked in the past to keep her safe,” noted one social worker in an assessment.
When Taylor was 8, Lisa and Henry “surfaced,” as it was described in a case manager’s notes. They were relatives of her birth father—Taylor didn’t really remember them—and were excited about adopting Taylor. They said their 6-year-old adoptive son wanted a big sister.
Taylor soon began making regular visits to the Cadles’ home in Polk City, partway between Tampa and Orlando. The family lived in a small mobile home surrounded by pastures and swamps, 45 minutes from the nearest Walmart. Taylor had reservations, telling staffers on her case that she was wary of moving again and scared of being rejected.
But she had little say in the matter: Two days before Taylor’s ninth birthday, her adoption was finalized. The Cadles had taken Taylor on shopping sprees and trips to SeaWorld during her weekend visits, but after the adoption, the family dynamic shifted. Discipline was harsh: Lisa was quick to smack Taylor across the mouth if she talked back, Taylor says, “but when Henry got ahold of us, it was a whole different story.” She still remembers having to wear jeans to school one sweltering day because his beating with a cooking spoon on her calves had left welts.
She felt claustrophobic in the cramped home, and begged Henry and Lisa to let her get out of the house. Lisa and her adoptive brother were homebodies, but Henry also liked to go for drives, so she went along.
It was on these long drives that he would assault Taylor, sometimes several times in a week, she says. A turnoff on an isolated backroad became his go-to spot. Across from a wilderness preserve, next to a cell tower access road, he would pull over.
Taylor tried to predict and avoid situations where he would see opportunity for abuse. “If I knew we were taking a back road or anything of the sort, I didn’t want to go because I knew what would happen,” she says. “I had to be on all 10 toes, 24-7.”
Fearful of going back to foster care, Taylor didn’t tell any authority figures—until that Sunday morning in July 2016, when she met Detective Melissa Turnage.
Statues outside the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. Credit: Melanie Metz
Turnage was in her ninth year with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office and considered a model deputy, according to her performance reviews. Turnage’s “integrity is above reproach,” wrote her supervisor in the spring of 2015.
But mistakes quickly followed. In November 2015, during an interview with a man suspected of sexually assaulting a child, Turnage failed to read the suspect a key part of his Miranda rights—an omission that resulted in the suppression of the suspect’s confession. Turnage was suspended for eight hours, according to department records.
The following month, Turnage interviewed children who alleged their father was raping them, and then left for Christmas vacation without bringing the suspect in for questioning or updating her supervisors on the status of the case. While she was away, her colleagues found out about the seriousness of the accusations and immediately arrested the suspect. “Your decision to not complete this investigation or advise me of the interview results is inexcusable,” her supervisor wrote in a letter that year. “Disclosures made by children in this case must be acted upon immediately if the investigation allows for it.”
By August 2016, Turnage was in the middle of her investigation into Taylor’s case, and she wanted to do a “clarification interview” with Taylor—at a noisy truck stop parking lot. As cars whizzed by on the highway, Taylor thought it was an odd location to meet. Perhaps, she thought, it was out of convenience—the midpoint between the sheriff’s office and Tampa, where Taylor had been crashing with Henry’s adult daughter ever since that day in church.
Leaning against her car, Turnage said she’d gone through Taylor’s phone records, and saw that she was texting continuously at the time she said she was raped. Taylor explained that she used her phone as a barrier so Henry wouldn’t talk to her during the abuse. If that was the case, asked Turnage, why didn’t Taylor alert someone to the abuse while it was occurring? Taylor said she didn’t know.
Turnage looked for Henry on surveillance footage from the gas station where he supposedly bought condoms, she told Taylor, but he wasn’t there. Taylor had been quiet, if skeptical, in her interactions with Turnage up to this point, but now her temper flared. Henry was there, Taylor said, and it wasn’t her fault if Turnage couldn’t find evidence. “I am telling the truth,” she insisted. She stormed to her sister’s car and locked herself inside.
Polk County Courthouse in Bartow, Florida. Credit: Melanie Metz
Turnage concluded that there wasn’t evidence to support a criminal charge against Henry. The surveillance footage turned up nothing. The car hadn’t shown any evidence of bodily fluids. The hospital exam hadn’t found evidence of trauma. Taylor had said the abuse happened near a pile of tires on a quiet road near the Cadles’ home, but Turnage only found a busy road with no tire pile in sight.
Sexual assault investigations involve sensitive gathering of information by trained professionals who understand the dynamics of abuse—ideally in neutral, safe, quiet settings with no distractions, said Jerri Sites, an expert in child abuse investigations who facilitates trainings on best practices. After listening to recordings of Turnage’s interviews, Sites concluded that they sounded like interrogations by a biased detective. “It seemed as though she was trying to pressure the child to recant,” she said. “It was really, really hard to listen to.”
Turnage didn’t bring the same skepticism to her interviews with Lisa and Henry. Her interview with Henry outside the church—the only time he was officially questioned—lasted just 20 minutes. During this time, he made a troubling admission. When asked if he would take a polygraph test, Henry declined. “I’ve had sex with a lot of people in the shower with my eyes closed, if you know what I mean,” he explained. “I’m a man.”
If Turnage was concerned about Henry acknowledging he had sexual thoughts about his adoptive daughter, she didn’t show it. “Daydreaming about it and answering questions in reference to the allegations are two totally different things,” she told him.
There were other missed opportunities during the investigation. There is no indication that Turnage asked for Henry to be forensically examined, even though the suspect’s body sometimes provides more evidence than the victim’s. When Turnage went looking for the remote road with the pile of tires, a location that Taylor described with the uncertainty of a 12-year-old who doesn’t drive, she never asked Taylor to join her to show her where it was.
Finally, Turnage erred in gathering a key piece of evidence: video of Henry buying condoms at a gas station. Surveillance footage from Henry and Taylor’s previous stop, Taco Bell, showed them leaving at 7:43 p.m. They should have arrived at the gas station about a half hour later, but confoundingly, Turnage requested footage starting 45 minutes later. In those missing 15 minutes, Henry likely would have already come and gone.
Turnage’s investigation came to a head after five months, in December 2016. She spoke with Taylor on the porch outside the Cadles’ home to deliver the news: The final results from the rape kit had come back, and there was no evidence of Henry’s DNA. “I’m not saying you’re lying,” Turnage told Taylor. “I just want to know why, if everything you said is true, why am I not finding anything?”
Taylor’s voice came out as a whimper. “I don’t know,” she said. “I swear on my life it happened.”
In fact, rape kits often don’t show evidence of abusers’ DNA, especially when more than 24 hours have passed since the abuse occurred, or when a condom was used—both of which applied in Taylor’s case.
“If it happened, there would be—there would be DNA found,” Turnage said. “And we didn’t find anything.”
If Taylor lived in another county, perhaps her case would have ended there: allegations made, no corroborating evidence found, no charge against the alleged abuser. But in Polk County, no wrongdoing is too small for a consequence. Sheriff Judd often quotes a phrase he learned from his late father: “Right is right, and wrong is never right.”
“Polk County has a very pro-arrest outlook,” said Joel Dempsey, a detective with the office until 2018. “If charges are deemed justifiable, then [suspects] are likely going to be charged.”
Inside the house, Turnage told Lisa that the sheriff’s office planned to move forward with a criminal charge against Taylor for lying to a law enforcement officer about a felony. Lisa was on board. “We know she’s mouthy, and she tries to act older than what she is,” she said.
Afterward, Turnage spoke with Taylor’s adoptive sister about what Taylor’s life would look like if she were sent to the juvenile detention center.
“You’re in your pretty little blue jumpsuit, with your little flip flops, and you’re housed with everybody else,” said Turnage. “She would come in and look like the pretty girl.”
Hearing bits and pieces of the conversation through the sliding porch door, Taylor had the distinct feeling that she was drowning.
Two days after meeting with Taylor at the Cadles’ home, Turnage filed an affidavit. The real crime wasn’t the alleged sexual abuse—it was that Taylor had given false information to a law enforcement officer, a first-degree misdemeanor. The victim of this crime, according to the affidavit, was the Polk County Sheriff’s Office.
Taylor Cadle, 21, wrote records requests to obtain documents and recordings from her 2016 and 2017 cases. Credit: Melanie Metz
Taylor is one of hundreds of victims alleging sexual assault who have been charged with false reporting nationwide. No federal agency tracks the prevalence of false-reporting charges, but over a multiyear investigation, documented in the Emmy Award–winning film Victim/Suspect, the Center for Investigative Reporting (which produces Mother Jones and Reveal) identified more than 230 cases of reporting victims charged with crimes, originating from nearly every state.
Most criminal justice experts estimate that 2 to 8 percent of sexual assault allegations are actually false. But law enforcement officers tend to assume the rate of false reporting is much higher—in part because police officers don’t always receive training on how trauma can affect memory or behavior.
Through dozens of freedom of information requests, we amassed a first-of-its-kind trove of audio and video evidence documenting the police practice of criminalizing those who report sexual assault. We found examples of police officers lying, deploying interrogation techniques meant for criminal suspects that, when used on unsuspecting, traumatized people, can undercut their credibility and even cause them to recant. Of 52 cases analyzed closely, nearly two-thirds resulted in the alleged victim recanting. In nine cases, the recantation was the only evidence cited by police.
Most cases centered on adults accusing other adults, largely because juvenile arrests are not usually matters of public record. But a few examples emerged of children being charged.
In 2008, after an 11-year-old girl in Washington, DC, twice reported being sexually assaulted, she was charged with making a false report. But, as a Washington Postinvestigation detailed, detectives didn’t follow basic guidelines for how to treat victims of sexual assault. They lied to her, saying there was evidence contradicting her account, despite two medical reports confirming that she suffered genital injuries. Still, police and prosecutors wanted her punished for fabricating her report. After a plea deal, she was taken in as a ward of the District of Columbia, and spent more than two years in residential mental health facilities.
In 2014, a 12-year-old Indiana girl told police that a boy forced her to have sex with him. Phone records revealed that the boy apologized to her after the incident. Still, a detective challenged her use of the word “force”—she told the boy no, she said in a recorded police interview, but he didn’t hold her down. The detective sent the case to prosecutors, who charged her with lying.
We also learned of a 12-year-old girl in Polk County, Florida: Taylor. Last year, we sent Taylor a message on Facebook, explaining our investigation into police turning the tables on victims and asking if she’d like to talk about what happened to her. She immediately responded: “I’m sorry I’m shocked,” she wrote. “Is this real?” Within an hour, she called to talk.
There were few public records tied to the case due to confidentiality laws meant to protect children. So Taylor wrote records requests, signed release forms, and notarized documents to obtain case files and recordings from the sheriff’s office, the juvenile court, the circuit court, the Department of Children and Families, and the Department of Juvenile Justice. Then she shared them with us.
The culture of consequences that permeates the Polk County Sheriff’s Office applies to kids as well as adults. The same year as Taylor’s case, for example, the sheriff’s office accused an 11-year-old girl of lying about an attempted abduction. She, too, was charged with filing a false police report, which the sheriff’s office wrote on Facebook would “help re-enforce the lesson” after she wasted police resources.
Between 2019 and 2023, more children in Polk County were charged with misdemeanor obstruction of justice—an umbrella category that includes false reporting—than in any other Florida county. Children in Polk were twice as likely to face the charge than children in the state overall, according to an analysis of data from Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice.
Such charges may be intended to make the community safer, but they can do the opposite, said Sites, the child abuse expert. “It’s hard enough to come forward in the first place,” she said, “and if the community feels that someone might be charged, people aren’t going to come forward.” Even in cases when a child isn’t telling the truth, she said, the response should be support services to help a child understand that it’s not okay to lie—but also efforts to understand why they did so in the first place. “Something is not right if somebody’s going to go to those lengths to falsely accuse somebody,” she said.
Turnage’s conclusion that Taylor was lying had bigger ramifications: DCF was supposed to conduct its own investigation, but it closed the case on the grounds that Turnage hadn’t found evidence of abuse.
The agency also appears to have used Taylor’s years of records against her. DCF records reference two allegations of sexual abuse before 2016. When Taylor was 5, her mother’s friend was arrested for sexually assaulting Taylor. And when Taylor was 11, DCF investigated a report made by her school that her gym teacher had touched her inappropriately. Taylor didn’t report the incident herself—rather, it was a rumor started by a group of girls. Taylor denied the rumor, and the case was closed with no indicators of abuse, according to the report.
“It’s hard enough to come forward in the first place, and if the community feels that someone might be charged, people aren’t going to come forward.”
JERRI SITES
But by 2016, the details didn’t seem to matter to DCF. In its report closing the investigation into Henry’s alleged abuse, the agency noted, “There is a pattern of...reports involving Taylor with allegations of sexual abuse and being touched by other males.”
Richard Wexler, who leads the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, said that child protective services agencies often give adoptive families the benefit of the doubt. “Whenever a child welfare agency investigates abuse in foster care or in an adoptive home it is, in effect, investigating itself—because they put the child there in the first place,” he said. “That creates an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the casefile.”
Remarkably, the same day Turnage filed the affidavit accusing Taylor of lying, she received a disciplinary letter from a lieutenant regarding another case. After investigating the sexual assault of a minor, Turnage had arrested the wrong person. A video of the assault showed the suspect had visible tattoos, but the man she detained had none. “It is imperative that as a detective you look at the totality of the circumstances and all evidence present in developing probable cause to make an arrest,” the letter read. It concluded, “You are a valued member of this agency and I am confident this will not recur.”
After four months with her adoptive sister, Taylor moved back in with the Cadles. Henry was friendly with her, full of smiles. “It was like a sticky sweet,” she says. He didn’t ask about the past four months or comment on the investigation—instead, he acted as if nothing had happened.
Taylor kept to herself, holing up in her room. She wrote about her dreams in her journal, like the one where she was trapped with an alligator in a locked room. Sometimes, she’d get so upset that she’d crouch on the floor, rocking back and forth, pulling out fistfuls of hair.
She vacillated between depression, fury, and exhaustion. She worried that if she stuck to her story in the face of her criminal charge, she would be sent to juvie. “I was basically like, I have no other choice,” she says. “I have to recant my story.”
In a meeting in February 2017 with Lisa, Henry, and her probation officer, Taylor said that she lied about being raped because she was mad about her cellphone being taken away. A report from the meeting reads, “Father extremely hurt by youth’s actions but forgives her.”
Three months later, on the way to the Polk County Courthouse for her arraignment, Lisa told her to “take it on the chin,” Taylor remembers. The state had offered Taylor a deal: If she pleaded guilty to her charge and completed the terms of her probation, the charge would be dismissed. Lisa and Taylor both signed a document agreeing for Taylor to “freely and voluntarily” waive her right to a lawyer and represent herself. She pleaded guilty to giving false information to a law enforcement officer.
Judge Mark Hofstad ordered probation, and signed an order for the terms: 15 hours of community service, a 7 p.m. curfew, and limits on leaving a tri-county area without permission from Taylor’s probation officer.
Taylor also had to write two apology letters: one to an unspecified officer, and the second to Henry. Without giving the words any thought, she scribbled in her journal and tore the pages out.
“Dear dad,
im sorry for what i did. I didn’t stop and think of my consequences of these actions. This will not happen again + im sorry.”
One evening in July 2017, a month after writing the apology letters, Taylor accompanied Henry to pick up a mower that needed repairs.
The sun was setting as they made their way home, and Henry pulled into a Dollar General to get something to drink. Taylor waited in the truck—now that she was 13, she could finally sit in front. As Henry walked out of the store, she saw that he was empty-handed, but his front pocket was bulging.
She realized several things simultaneously. The first was that he had bought condoms—which was confirmed when he got into the car and tossed a Lifestyles box in her lap. The second: She had thought that Henry would be too scared to abuse her again after all the scrutiny, but he had been emboldened. The third: She didn’t have anyone to call for help. The adults in her life—and the police—thought she was a liar.
Finally: She had to document what he did to her that night, so there would be no question about what had happened.
“I had to find the evidence for them,” she says. “Because if I didn’t find the evidence for them, I wasn’t too sure they would find it.”
As Henry drove, she made sure he could see that she was playing a game called Piano Tiles, tapping black piano keys as they floated across the screen. About 15 minutes into their drive, Taylor tilted the screen away from Henry for a moment and snapped a photo of the condom box.
Henry drove to the same spot as he had a year before, on the turnout of the quiet road that cut through the swamp. It was dusk outside, the road empty, the night quiet other than the chirping crickets and cows bellowing in a nearby pasture. As Henry walked around the back of the truck, Taylor recorded a six-second video panning to four crucial visuals: the radio clock reading 8:29 p.m., the back of Henry’s head, the condoms on the dashboard, and the view outside her window.
Then, she says, Henry unzipped his pants and ordered her to pull down hers. “You know what to do,” he said. Taylor’s Android allowed her to take photos by swiping up anywhere on the screen. When Henry told her to hurry up with her phone, she told him to wait a second—she was just closing applications. She swiped up again and again, silently snapping photos.
After it was all over, when he turned around to check for cars, she shoved the empty condom box under the seat. They began the drive home—AC pumping, pop music playing on the radio—and Taylor mentally collected more evidence: the white smear on the seat, the bushes where he threw a used tissue, the stretch of grass where he tossed unused condoms out the window as they drove.
Once home, Taylor told Lisa she was taking the dogs for a walk. Standing in the yard in the dark, she deliberated. She was terrified of calling the cops. If she wasn’t believed again, surely she’d face an even harsher punishment than the first time. But if she didn’t call the cops, nothing would change. The thought, on repeat: Am I going to do it?
She dialed 911.
Taylor describes the next few hours like scenes in a movie: the cars driving up, no lights or sirens, as Taylor had instructed, since Henry was sleeping. A cop’s flashlight through the backdoor. Taylor standing outside with an officer, showing the photos and video on her phone. The lights of cop cars bouncing off Henry’s vacant face as he was escorted through the yard in handcuffs. Taylor bawling after an officer asked her to go back to the godforsaken, freezing hospital in the middle of the night for another rape kit exam.
“I was fighting for my life, in a very quiet scream.”
Taylor Cadle
At first, Henry denied any wrongdoing. “I don’t know what the hell—why is she doing this again?” he told Polk County Detective Joel Dempsey in a recorded interview. It was only when Dempsey showed Henry the photos that Henry admitted that the photos were, in fact, of him.
Henry continued to deflect blame in recorded calls from jail, insisting that he had been set up. “I was dealing with a venomous snake,” he told his sister. In another call, he insisted, “It’s not all my fault neither. Yes, I’m the adult, but it’s not all my fault.”
Two days after the assault, Taylor sat through a videotaped forensic interview at a child advocacy center—the same child advocacy center and the same case worker she spoke to the year before. She spoke with urgency as she explained the evidence she had collected, still convinced that, somehow, Henry would work his way out of this.
“I mean, I really hope that they actually, like, take the time to, like, actually investigate and to listen to my side of the story before they just want to accuse me of giving false information,” Taylor told the case worker. “I tried everything. I did everything I could do.”
Today, Taylor remembers this moment in vivid detail. “I was fighting for my life,” she says, “in a very quiet scream.”
The next day, Henry Cadle was charged with sexually assaulting Taylor.
“I don't remember any other case where the victim had the forethought or the intelligence to collect their own evidence and to be so thorough,” Dempsey said recently. “Just, unbelievable amount of presence of mind that she showed.”
Assistant State Attorney Joni Batie-McGrew, who approved the original false-reporting charge against Taylor, filed a motion to vacate Taylor’s probation and guilty plea. The information Taylor had provided to the police, the motion said, “has since been determined to be true.”
The Department of Juvenile Justice sent Taylor a letter terminating her supervision, adding that it was the department’s hope that the experience was beneficial to her.
In February 2019, Henry pleaded no contest to the sexual battery of a child. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
Taylor still lives in Polk County, just a half hour away from where she once lived with Lisa and Henry. She stays at home with her two kids—a 3-year-old boy and a 1-year-old girl—and the family’s massive pitbull mastiff while her fiancé works at an auto glass repair shop.
Motherhood comes naturally to Taylor. In the moments of chaos—when she’s trying to feed her baby and her toddler is climbing on her back and the dog is barking—she laughs. When her baby cries, she coos, “What’s wrong, girlie?” In her free time, Taylor vlogs about beauty and parenting in a way that’s refreshingly real, talking, for example, about how to wax your armpits or how dinner that night will be subs because the Walmart bread is getting stale.
In October, our interview with Taylor aired on PBS NewsHour. “Why punish me?” she said on camera, with an unflinching gaze. “What did I do for you to punish me?”
The video got millions of views on TikTok, and local and national publications picked up the story. Viewers flooded the comments sections of the Polk County Sheriff’s Office’s social media pages to demand justice for Taylor. But some of those comments mysteriously disappeared from view, prompting more outrage. Taylor decided to send Judd an email directly. She admired his work overall, she wrote, but she was outraged.
“I thought you guys were supposed to help? Not silence a victim.”
Judd has often said that the key to being a good sheriff is transparency with the public. One of his often-repeated phrases is: “If you mess up, then dress up, fess up, and fix it up.” But records show Henry Cadle’s arrest didn’t prompt any disciplinary action at the time. Judd has not responded to questions about the case publicly, or to Taylor.
Turnage didn’t respond to our attempts to reach her, and Judd’s office declined an interview. When we showed up at the sheriff’s office in August and asked to speak with Judd, we were told that a public information officer would come down to talk. Minutes later, we were told, she had been pulled into a meeting and didn’t know when she would be available. (A spokesperson told the Lakeland Ledger that the sheriff’s office wouldn’t speak to us because it “became clear they were not interested in accurately reporting an investigation that occurred in 2016.”)
Florida Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book, however, had more luck. A Democrat from Broward County, Book sponsored recent legislation requiring law enforcement to receive training in trauma-informed sexual assault investigations. After listening to audio of Turnage’s interviews that we shared with her, an incensed Book asked Judd for information about Taylor’s 2016 case.
Credit: Melanie Metz
In a letter to Book last month, Polk County Captain Dina Russell defended Turnage’s “thorough investigation” and doubled down on the same concerns with Taylor that Turnage had back in 2016: Taylor had said she didn’t like going on rides with Henry, but family members said otherwise. Henry wasn’t on the surveillance video buying condoms. Taylor was texting during the abuse, but, Russell wrote, “made no mention in her texts she was being abused.”
But after listening to a recording of an interview from the case, Russell acknowledged that Turnage’s approach didn’t meet the department’s standards. She sent Turnage a “letter of retraining” last month.
“Several of your questions and comments were inappropriate,” Russell wrote. “While your intent may have been to elicit the truth and gather essential information, referencing personal circumstances such as foster care or financial hardships can create an environment of discomfort, fear, mistrust is simply unacceptable.” The letter made no mention of the ramifications of these failures for Taylor, or the fact that Taylor was later deemed to be telling the truth.
The captain’s demands of Turnage were minimal: Within a week, she was required to complete an online course on interview and interrogation techniques. The captain’s conclusion echoed the disciplinary letter Turnage received in 2016, when she arrested the wrong suspect: “I am confident you will take the appropriate steps to prevent any similar events in the future.”
Turnage is still a detective, though she’s no longer in the special victims unit. Her latest performance review noted that she’s on track to become a sergeant.
Batie-McGrew, who prosecuted Taylor’s first case, also didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. But the state attorney’s office said in an email that after Taylor was proven to be telling the truth, they made a policy change: They now require that the office be consulted before charging a juvenile who claims to be a victim of sexual abuse, according to Jacob Orr, the chief assistant state attorney for the 10th Judicial Circuit.
Since Taylor’s case, Orr said, the office has charged three other juveniles with falsely reporting sexual abuse. He said those cases included “irrefutable evidence proving the falsehood” of their claims, but he didn’t elaborate on how police were able to irrefutably prove that the children were not sexually abused.
For Taylor, three more children is far too many. “It should have stopped with me,” she says. “It shouldn’t have even gotten to me, but it should have stopped with me.”
Once in a while, Taylor drives on the quiet road through the swamp, past the spot where Henry abused her. It’s still hard, but having her kids in the backseat makes clear how much things have changed over the past seven years. She’s no longer a child being driven there against her will, bracing herself for the worst, preparing to crouch on the floorboard if anyone drives by.
Now, she is in the driver’s seat. “It’s a sense of relief, in a way,” she says. “I’m going past this spot because this is the route I chose to take.”
Reveal data reporterMelissa Lewis contributed data analysis.
The Unflinching Courage of Taylor Cadle is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This story was co-published with WTTW News. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
Sign up for Dispatches, a ProPublica newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. WTTW News is Chicago’s PBS affiliate. Sign up for the Daily Chicagoan, a newsletter that explores the backstory of the city’s biggest issues.
In the five and a half years since the Chicago Police Department agreed to extensive oversight from a federal judge, there have been bursts of activity to address the brutality and civil rights violations that led to the agreement.
Court hearings: more than a hundred. Meetings: hundreds. Money: hundreds of millions in Chicago taxpayer dollars allocated to making the court-ordered reforms, known as a consent decree, a reality.
But the record of actual accomplishment is meager.
Chicago police haven’t crafted a system for officers to work with residents to address threats to public safety.
In fact, all told, police have fully complied with just 9% of the agreement’s requirements. And while excessive force complaints from citizens have dropped, complaints about all forms of misconduct have risen.
Sheila Bedi, an attorney who represented the coalition of police reform groups that sued the city years ago, called the faltering reform effort a “tragedy.”
“It has been a waste of time and money,” said Bedi, a Northwestern University law professor. “It has been nothing more than an exercise in pushing paper.”
A review by WTTW News and ProPublica of the efforts in Chicago since 2019 shows Bedi’s bleak view is supported by a range of assessments produced for the court and is also widely held among advocates, academics and officials following the process.
The goal is to emerge from the consent decree by 2027 with a police force finally ready to move beyond a long history of civil rights violations targeting Black and Latino Chicagoans. But the city is now on a path to devote substantial resources and large amounts of money to the reform effort for years beyond that. It’s a trajectory that echoes what happened in Oakland, where the police department continues to be marred by scandal and remains under federal court oversight more than 20 years into its consent decree.
No one in a position of power or oversight has pushed forcefully or effectively to make the process move faster, WTTW News and ProPublica found. Six permanent and interim superintendents have led CPD since 2019 and the city has had three mayors, all of whom vowed to implement the consent decree but failed to make good on those promises with money and other resources.
In addition, the Chicago City Council has repeatedly failed to exercise its authority to oversee CPD’s operations and demand quicker change. The council has approved $667 million to go toward implementing the decree since 2020, but at least a quarter of the city’s annual allotment goes unspent each year, a WTTW News analysis found.
At the same time, inside the federal courtroom, the court-appointed monitoring team has never demanded sanctions for the city’s slow pace. Similarly, judges overseeing the decree have not expressed concerns about the lack of significant advances.
No major city exemplifies the stubborn problems of police misconduct more than Chicago, where a series of civil cases and wrongful convictions have led to expensive court settlements that regularly cost the city more than $80 million a year. Distrust in the community now makes attacking the city’s crime rate even harder.
Now many of the city’s reform advocates have lost faith in the process and are increasingly concerned that the opportunity for lasting reform is slipping away. Surveys of Chicagoans completed as part of the consent decree show a clear drop in confidence that there will be lasting and positive change.
The process has its defenders, including current Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, whose predecessor sued the city to force it to agree to federal court oversight. Raoul still believes the consent decree is the best way of “making these necessary reforms a reality.”
But he also appears to be losing patience. Raoul warned last week that he would seek sanctions against the city if Mayor Brandon Johnson did not reverse the planned cuts. “I must remind you that the consent decree is not optional,” Raoul wrote to the mayor. “The City of Chicago must deliver on its consent decree obligations.”
Johnson rarely speaks publicly about the need to reform the police department, instead focusing on efforts to improve officer morale and reduce crime. He declined to be interviewed for this story but has told reporters he is committed to ensuring CPD “engages in constitutional policing.”
Porscha Banks’ brother Dexter Reed was shot and killed by Chicago police during a traffic stop. She’s frustrated by the city’s lack of progress toward meaningful police reform
Porscha Banks, whose brother Dexter Reed was shot and killed in a barrage of police gunfire during a March 21 traffic stop, is among those who are frustrated by Chicago’s lack of progress toward meaningful reform. Four officers fired 96 shots at Reed in 41 seconds, hitting him 13 times, shortly after he shot and wounded an officer, according to a preliminary investigation.
The Civilian Office of Police Accountability has not completed its inquiry into the shooting and has not ruled whether the officers’ actions were justified. But reform advocates immediately seized on the incident as an example of how police tactics can lead to dangerous situations for both civilians and officers.
“Unless something changes, it is going to keep happening,” Banks said. “They are failing Black people. They are failing all of us.”
How Police Helped Stall the Process
At its core, the consent decree is designed to fix the shattered relationship between police and Chicago communities.
The goal is to increase communication and familiarity by having officers patrol the same geographic area of the city and report to the same supervisor on a consistent basis, instead of moving throughout the city to chase crime. As a first step, the consent decree required CPD to complete a study to determine whether officers are efficiently deployed to stop crime and respond to calls for help.
But it took more than five years to authorize the study. And now, more than five months after the Chicago City Council ordered it, the police department acknowledges it has yet to start in earnest.
“It is deeply embarrassing,” said Alderperson Matt Martin, who represents the North Side’s 47th Ward and authored the measure requiring the staffing study. He said that police leaders simply ignored the May 21 deadline set by aldermen. The contract to perform the study was not finalized until Oct. 24, according to records obtained by WTTW News.
Matt Martin, a Chicago alderperson, wrote a measure requiring the police department to complete a staffing study, but it has yet to get underway.
It’s not the first time Chicago has missed an opportunity to align the department with community needs.
In 2019, former Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck took over as the city’s interim police superintendent for Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Beck’s first order of business was to reassign more than 1,100 detectives and gang intelligence and narcotics officers from citywide teams to work in Chicago’s 22 police districts.
The goal was to tie each of those officers directly to one of Chicago’s 77 community areas, a necessary change to make community policing a reality, said Beck, who led the LAPD through its own reform push that was widely hailed as lightning fast and successful.
But Beck was only an interim chief and led the CPD for less than six months before Lightfoot replaced him with former Dallas Police Chief David Brown. Brown quickly reversed those changes and reestablished teams of specialized officers that moved throughout the city to address crime hot spots.
Beck declined to comment for this article; Brown did not respond to requests for interviews.
Brown’s successor, Larry Snelling, who has been at the helm of CPD for more than a year, has not attempted to reorganize the department. While acknowledging that the reform effort is far from complete, Snelling often emphasizes that the department is making progress on most goals laid out in the consent decree.
CPD now has written policies addressing just under half the items included in the consent decree. It also has trained a majority of its officers on the new policies involving a little over a third of the items. To be in full compliance, CPD must prove to the monitoring team that officers are following the new policies over a sustained period of time. The most significant victory for the city has been providing officers with annual training on the department’s policies for use of force, the latest report from the monitoring team found.
But CPD has yet to reach full compliance on any part of the consent decree that involves community policing, unbiased policing or crisis intervention, records show.
Community trust is at the heart of another consent-decree misstep by the department, which for decades has failed to hold its officers accountable for misconduct, according to the federal probe that led to the decree. An early-warning system that would identify problematic officers and get them off the street was drawn up near the beginning of the consent-decree process but has yet to be implemented.
Police reform advocates say that Snelling is more committed to reform than his predecessor, but he rarely talks publicly about the consent decree. Snelling declined to be interviewed for this story.
As a candidate for mayor, Johnson promised to succeed where his predecessors failed and quickly implement the consent decree. But his main policing focus since taking office has been on reducing the number of people killed and shot in Chicago following a surge that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. Homicide rates have dropped in the last two years.
Johnson’s latest budget proposal, which closed a projected budget gap of $982 million, slashes the number of employees assigned to implementing the decree by 13%.
Questioned by WTTW News at a press conference, Johnson acknowledged Chicago’s long history of police violence against Black Chicagoans.
“Unfortunately, we’ve had a trail of destruction over the course of decades where there has been an erosion of the relationship between community and policing,” Johnson said. “What I can say is that it has gotten considerably better from where we started.”
Despite such assertions, critics of the reform push contend the mayor is ultimately responsible for the lack of progress during his time in office.
“I expected to see much more of the mayor and his administration step up and be present and be at the table,” said Craig Futterman, a professor of law at the University of Chicago who represented one of the coalition of groups that sued the city to force it to agree to judicial oversight.
“It’s been left to the police department, and that’s again like the fox guarding the henhouse.”
Efforts to assign each officer to a specific part of town where they could get to know the people were reversed when a new police superintendent was appointed.
Delays Come Without Consequences in Court
What frustrates observers like Futterman is not just that police have dragged their feet; it’s that the formal mechanism for oversight hasn’t led to meaningful progress.
For instance, the monitoring team — which is made up of lawyers and public safety specialists — has the power to recommend to the judge that the city and CPD be punished for failing to meet the terms of the consent decree. While it has repeatedly highlighted the slow pace of reforms in its reports, the monitoring team has never demanded sanctions, despite pleas from the coalition of reform groups.
Barry Friedman, a professor at New York University who studies police reform and has advised CPD on implementing community policing policies, said he is baffled by this.
He cited the monitors’ unique position of power and the money going to their efforts. Chicago taxpayers have paid the monitoring team more than $20.4 million from the beginning of the decree through March 31, 2024, records show.
“For that amount of money, you should have a consent decree that is working,” Friedman said. “Five years in, one is entitled to ask what the city is getting out of the consent decree.”
Members of the consent decree monitoring team and the judge overseeing the case declined to be interviewed. The spokesperson for the judge and the team said they’re prohibited from doing so under the decree.
For its part, the Chicago City Council has not called out the CPD for its failures. The council had vowed to hold hearings about the progress of police reform every three months, but the last hearing took place in February. Alderperson Brian Hopkins, chair of the Public Safety Committee, and Alderperson Chris Taliaferro, chair of the Police and Fire Committee, did not respond to a request for comment about why no hearings have taken place for nine months.
Another factor in the slow pace is the structure of the oversight itself. To amend the agreement, all relevant parties must get involved — the state attorney general, the coalition of reform groups and City Hall. They have to exhaust efforts to negotiate a solution before asking the judge to resolve any stalemate.
Chicago police swarmed into Anjanette Young’s home in a raid on the wrong address. She often finds peace by visiting the lakefront.
The delays and compromises have led to unsatisfying results, as exemplified by the aftermath of the widely criticized raid on the home of Anjanette Young. In 2019, a group of male officers handcuffed Young, a social worker, inside her home while she was naked; they had raided the wrong address.
When Young and advocates for reform sought restrictions on raids, they ran into opposition from Lightfoot. They then asked that the consent decree be expanded to impose reforms.
That launched unfruitful negotiations between CPD’s leaders, city lawyers, attorneys for the coalition and the attorney general’s office that stretched for two years. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer resolved the dispute by rejecting almost all of the demands made by reform groups. She didn’t add any significant restrictions on police raids and didn’t bar no-knock warrants. Young was bitterly disappointed.
Porscha Banks’ quest for reforms in the aftermath of her brother’s killing has been similarly frustrating. Dexter Reed, whose car had tinted windows that made it almost impossible to see inside, was pulled over for a safety belt violation, according to the preliminary investigation.
For groups that had been sounding the alarm for years that CPD was aggressively using traffic stops to target Black and Latino drivers, Reed’s death was heartbreaking evidence that such tactics inevitably lead to volatile encounters. Banks has demanded officials ban traffic stops like the one that led to her brother's death.
CPD leaders and the monitoring team agreed just two months after Reed’s death to expand the consent decree to include traffic stops, but reform advocates and politicians pushed back. The consent decree is not capable of delivering the kind of urgent change the city needs, they told Pallmeyer; instead, the city’s new police oversight board should set the rules for traffic stops.
The request was a rejection of the consent decree process.
“I’m frustrated that despite what I have to believe is everyone’s best effort, it has not been good enough,” said Alderperson Daniel La Spata, whose ward is on the Northwest Side.
Pallmeyer has not ruled on that request yet.
Banks does not particularly care how reform is achieved. She just wants to see signs of hope.
“They just need to stop talking about it and fucking doing it,” Banks said.
Chicago Alderman Daniel La Spata is frustrated by the lack of progress toward police reform.
An Opportunity May Be Slipping Away
Inside a room at Corliss High School on Chicago’s Far South Side, a few dozen residents assembled for a community meeting with police in a district that has long struggled with pervasive crime. These were people who care about their neighborhoods, the future of Chicago and the trajectory of policing here. And in interviews, many of them expressed skepticism.
Tony Little, who volunteers as a community liaison with CPD, said police today are more responsive to residents’ concerns than in the past, but there’s still room for improvement. “If they could just make sure officers, especially young officers, are aware of the community and get to know the neighborhood, that would build trust,” he said.
His wife, Malinda, is more pessimistic. Although the consent decree requires CPD to demonstrate that residents can trust officers to protect and serve them, those are no more than empty promises, she said. “Some of the individuals, they have an attitude that this is just a job. … They don’t care about the people.”
Such comments should come as no surprise to the police department or the monitoring team.
“By most indications, many Chicagoans are not feeling many of the changes that have been made by the city and the CPD so far,” the monitoring team wrote in its most recent assessment of the city’s progress.
The most recent survey conducted by the monitoring team, in 2022, found that 43.2% of Chicagoans were “doubtful” or “very doubtful” that police reform would have a lasting and positive effect, an increase of more than 10 percentage points since 2020.
The survey identified a similar decrease in the number of Chicagoans who said the police were doing a “good” or “very good” job in their neighborhood and citywide, while the number of Chicagoans who said the police were doing a “poor” or “very poor” job in the city as a whole grew to 42.7% in 2022, compared with 30.2% in 2020.
A billboard for the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation, which provides support for families of officers killed or seriously injured on the job.
“Of course there’s a lack of trust in the police,” said Roxanne Smith, a West Side resident and police reform advocate who was part of the coalition that sued the city. “We’re in a new generation and some things still haven’t changed. These things need immediate attention.”
Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg, whose office was the first, and so far only, city department to fully comply with its obligations under the consent decree, said the reform effort is at a tipping point, much like a bicycle ridden too slowly.
“The risk is that you tip over for a lack of forward momentum,” Witzburg said.
Anjanette Young is now among those in Chicago who feel the tipping point is past.
“The consent decree is not the answer,” Young said. “It is just oversight on paper. We need a plan B. We need to do something else.”
Content warning: The story discusses childhood sexual abuse.
In Polk County, Florida, where its sheriff has said his department will “go to the ends of the earth” to arrest child predators, one child victim was left wondering how she ended up on the other side of the law.
Taylor Cadle was 12 years old when she disclosed to a trusted adult that her adoptive father had been sexually abusing her since she was 9. Law enforcement was quick to respond, and almost just as quick to suspect that Taylor had made up the allegations. The lead detective, Melissa Turnage, began to question Taylor aggressively, even threatening her with returning to foster care if she continued with her allegations.
“I told her time and time and time and time again that I am not the liar here,” Taylor said of the detective.
Despite Taylor’s pleas, Turnage eventually sought criminal charges against her for lying to police.
For the Emmy Award-winning Center for Investigative Reporting and Netflix documentary Victim/Suspect, I found hundreds of others who, like Taylor, began as alleged victims reporting sexual assaults to police and ended up criminal suspects. My reporting uncovered shocking police missteps in several of those investigations. All of those alleged victims remain adamant that their reports were truthful.
In a surprising development in her case, Taylor vindicated herself. With our partner PBS NewsHour, I went to Polk County to meet Taylor—and hear how she finally put her abuser in prison.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
On May 1, a man in Anchorage, Alaska, called 911 to say he had “beat” his wife, according to a court document supporting an assault charge against him. When police stepped through the door of Vernon Booth’s apartment, they found the victim’s face bloody and her eye nearly swollen shut, the prosecution said.
You’re late, the charging document says he told officers. “She could have been dead by now.”
Four months later, prosecutors dropped the charge. It wasn’t because police made a mistake that got evidence tossed or because a jury found the defendant not guilty. Instead: The city said it did not have enough lawyers to take the man to trial. (Booth declined to comment on the case.)
Defendants in at least 930 Anchorage misdemeanor cases have walked free for this reason since May 1, the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica found. These include people accused of crimes ranging from violating a restraining order to driving drunk with children in the backseat.
In one case, prosecutors said a mother told police she’d beaten her 5-year-old daughter with a belt. The prosecution said the girl, who was found with bruises across her back, told police she’d also been struck with a wire and a stick.
Dismissed.
Prosecutors accused one man of animal cruelty after he allegedly punched and choked a dog, while another allegedly raised fighting roosters found tied to barrels.
Dismissed.
More than 270 DUI cases.
Dismissed.
A grand total of three defendants have gone to trial since May, according to the city.
The cascade of failed prosecutions is especially disturbing in a state with the nation’s highest rate of women killed by men. More than 250 of the cases dismissed since May included charges of domestic violence assault, such as men allegedly punching, kicking or threatening to kill their wives or girlfriends. They include charges dropped against a state official accused of elbowing his then-girlfriend in the nose.
Two factors are at work in the mass dismissals. First, Alaska’s overloaded court system has limped along for years by allowing extensive trial delays, defying a state requirement for speedy trials. Second, the Anchorage prosecutor’s office, as in many American cities and states, is struggling to hold onto lawyers.
When a judge this year tried to clear out a backlog of Anchorage misdemeanors by having them brought forward as a group to regularly check which ones were ready for trial, defense attorneys pounced. They began demanding speedy-trial rights for their clients. The city couldn’t keep up. Cases started dying.
City officials say they’re aware of the problem. They have raised prosecutor pay and are hiring attorneys to take more cases to trial, in hopes the prosecutor’s office will be “fully back in action” in three to four months, according to City Attorney Eva Gardner.
Mayor Suzanne LaFrance, who took office July 1, said her transition team knew the lack of prosecutors was a problem, but she was surprised by the number of dropped cases.
“Right now, the prosecutors are frustrated, the police are frustrated. The public is frustrated. Victims are frustrated,” she said in an interview. “We see that. I see that, and this is something that we are working to fix.”
Attorneys use a courtroom jury box for seating as they await their turn during trial calls at the Boney Courthouse in Anchorage.
(Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)
Angela Garay, executive director of the state’s Office of Victims’ Rights, told an Anchorage judge in July that the city is doing wrong by people who call the police on abusers.
“This is unacceptable for victims to have cases dismissed because prosecutors can’t do their jobs,” Garay said.
At a hearing in which city prosecutors dropped two dozen cases, she warned that she planned to open an investigation if the mass dismissals continued.
“We’re Not Going to Hold You Accountable”
The widespread failure to prosecute crimes has stayed largely below the public’s radar because the charges are misdemeanors — which in Anchorage, home to 39% of Alaskans, are pursued by city prosecutors rather than the state. Despite the low profile of these cases, they include allegations of serious, sometimes outrageous acts.
At least 70 cases of child neglect or abuse have been dismissed since May.
A charging document described police finding one woman slumped over the wheel after her SUV crashed into another car. Two whiskey bottles lay on the floorboards, according to the charges. Although prosecutors said that the woman’s blood alcohol level tested at 4.6 times the limit and that she was on probation for a prior DUI when the crash happened, the city dropped the case. The 120-day speedy-trial deadline had expired the day before.
“I would say there’s absolutely no justice right now in our system,” said Anchorage attorney Kara Nyquist, who represents domestic violence victims.
Nyquist has a unique perspective because she was also named as the victim in multiple cases of stalking, trespassing and violating protective orders against a fellow Anchorage attorney.
Jacob Sonneborn and Nyquist had worked on opposing sides of family law cases, and Nyquist filed a request for a restraining order saying Sonneborn’s behavior became threatening. A judge granted the request. Emails that Sonneborn allegedly sent her afterward led prosecutors to charge him with violating the judge’s order, but they dropped the charges on Oct. 2 because of the speedy-trial deadline.
In an email to the Daily News and ProPublica, Sonneborn said two other cases against him were dismissed in August for reasons other than the speedy-trial deadline. He said that he believes he would have been acquitted had any of the charges against him gone to trial and that he never intended to harm Nyquist. “From my perspective, the whole series of charges alleging I violated bail conditions or the protective order were an abuse of the justice system,” he wrote.
The Alaska Supreme Court has temporarily suspended Sonneborn’s law license in connection with Nyquist’s allegations and complaints from other attorneys.
Anchorage attorney Kara Nyquist represents domestic violence victims and was the named victim in a restraining order against a fellow attorney. After he was charged with violating the restraining order — a charge the city ultimately dropped because of its prosecutor shortage — she started keeping a pistol in her drawer for protection.
(Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily News)
Nyquist now keeps a .38 Special pistol in her drawer and has armed staff members in her downtown Anchorage law firm with pepper spray and a Taser.
Nyquist said she recently had to tell a client that she couldn’t rely on the city to prosecute a pending domestic violence assault case, something she’s never had to do before in 24 years of practicing law.
“They’re going to cause a situation where it’s going to increase domestic violence,” she said, “because these perpetrators have now been told, ‘We’re not going to hold you accountable.’”
The city prosecutor’s office has said that about half the cases it handles involve domestic violence.
Among the domestic violence cases that have ended without a trial was the assault charge against the superintendent of a state youth detention center. Prosecutors said in charging documents that Darrell Garrison, head of the Mat-Su Youth Facility in Palmer, was recorded on video hitting his romantic partner in the face with his elbow.
The woman said in an interview that she thought he had broken her nose when the incident occurred. “I heard the crack,” she said. ”Three popping sounds.”
A woman who wants to remain anonymous shows her nails with purple on the ring finger, a sign of support for people who have been in violent relationships. She was named as the victim in a domestic violence assault charge against Darrell Garrison, head of the Mat-Su Youth Facility in Palmer, in November. It is among hundreds of criminal cases that the city has since dismissed, citing a lack of prosecutors. An attorney for Garrison, who is a state employee, had called for a trial and said his client was innocent.
(Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily News)
Garrison told police the blow was accidental, court documents say. Garrison remains superintendent of Mat-Su Youth Facility in Palmer, part of the state Department of Family and Community Services, where he oversees 14 counselors and 15 juveniles accused or convicted of crimes.
As months passed, Garrison began declaring himself ready to stand trial. His attorney, John Cashion, said that it was because Garrison was innocent and that the video evidence contradicted the claims in the charging document. He also filed papers saying if the case went to trial, he might argue self-defense.
“Look, if you’re falsely accused of a crime, what do you do? You say you’re ready for trial,” Cashion said.
But once the clock ran out for a speedy trial in August, Cashion said, it made sense for his client’s case to come to an end. “Why would anybody take a risk of actually saying, ‘Now let’s do the trial, now that I’m entitled to a dismissal,’” Cashion said.
The woman said she learned the case had been dismissed after looking it up on a public database. No one from the police department or prosecutor’s office called to tell her they were going to drop the charges, she said, despite a state law requiring alleged victims to be notified.
“It’s like they’re just sweeping it under the rug,” she said.
Lead prosecutor Dennis Wheeler, a former city attorney who agreed to return to Anchorage this year with an offer of $12,500 beyond the normal salary cap, said the volume of dismissals has indeed meant the city failed to notify some victims.
“We’ve definitely dropped the ball in some cases,” he said.
“People Have Caught On”
Anchorage is letting people free, in part, because of Alaska state court rules that say prosecutors must bring defendants before a jury within 120 days unless their attorneys grant extensions.
The deadline has proved impossible for the Anchorage prosecutor’s office to hit. The number of prosecutors dwindled from 13 in July 2021 to nine in July of this year. All but three as of July were new hires. Some of the most experienced lawyers on staff left.
The departures took place under the leadership of then-Mayor Dave Bronson, during a chaotic era of employee turnover at City Hall that has threatened other core services. But the city has also said previously it’s hard to compete with other private and public employers that can offer attorneys better pay.
City officials cited the office’s staffing as one of the struggles facing key departments as they transitioned from Bronson’s administration to that of the newly elected LaFrance in July. The police department predicted the consequences.
“Misdemeanor crimes are unlikely to be prosecuted due to low attorney staffing,” the department wrote at the time. “This adds to morale issues as officers see repeat offenders free.”
The ultimate stress test for the office came when judges early this year moved to clear out gridlock in Alaska’s court system.
The city cases took an average of 90 days to resolve before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Jan. 31 order by Anchorage Presiding Judge Thomas Matthews. By the time the judge issued his order, more than 1,500 city misdemeanor cases had sat more than a year on the court calendar.
Pretrial delays lasting years are a long-standing problem in state court, while delays in Anchorage misdemeanor cases appear to be a more recent development.
To speed things up, Matthews ordered judges to end pretrial delays for misdemeanor charges filed before this year “unless the parties provide a good cause basis”; no more than three delays would be allowed in 2024 cases. Another judge started moving cases to weekly sessions known as “trial calls,” where the two sides declare whether they are ready to proceed.
Dozens of cases showed up every Wednesday. If every defense attorney refused further delays for defendants nearing or crossing their 120-day speedy-trial deadlines, the city would have to mount trials in all these cases at once. The attorneys saw an easy way to help their clients. They flooded the city with requests to go to trial.
“Yes, people have caught on, and yes, people are calling their bluffs, that is true,” said Amanda Lancaster, who works for a firm that provides public defender services. “I don’t think people are doing that in terms of like, malpractice. But certainly, people have figured out that trend.”
Matthews put the responsibility on the city in an interview with the Daily News and ProPublica, saying he was shocked to learn the number of domestic violence cases the city had dismissed because of speedy-trial deadlines. “It’s like: ‘Really? You aren’t prioritizing this?’” Matthews said.
“I don’t think it was ever our intention to have the city simply taking cases and throwing them out the window without looking at them,” he said.
Ugly Numbers
City officials say they have been working hard to turn things around.
“The numbers are ugly — both the dismissal numbers and the turnover rate in the office,” said Gardner, the new city attorney hired shortly after LaFrance took office as mayor in July.
Gardner said the prosecutor’s office has prioritized domestic violence and drunken driving cases when enough prosecutors are available to go to trial. But cases that make it to court have been few and far between.
Gardner said work on a fix began under the former mayor. The Anchorage Assembly approved 20% pay increases for prosecutors and other municipal attorneys in 2023.
Boney Courthouse in Anchorage. The city has dropped hundreds of cases since May because the deadline to hold a speedy trial had expired or was about to expire.
(Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)
Gardner said that, in addition, her predecessor and the city’s lead prosecutor met with state officials on April 30 to ask for help prosecuting cases but that the state did not provide assistance.
The deputy attorney general in charge of criminal prosecutions for the state, John Skidmore, said the meeting did not involve any ask for help with caseloads.
“On April 30 there was NOT an ask for help from the state with cases, and certainly not help with DV cases,” Skidmore said in an email to the Daily News and ProPublica. “Nor am I aware of any subsequent request for help.”
Gardner said the city has considered hiring prosecutors on contract to avoid dropping cases but ultimately decided it was not practical. Alaska lacks a law school, she said, and the pool of private attorneys with prosecution experience is small. Contract prosecutors would need to receive special training and clearance to handle confidential criminal justice information, a process that takes 30 to 60 days.
The city has focused instead on recruiting permanent, full-time hires and retaining current prosecutors. The office is back up to 12 line prosecutors plus the lead, Wheeler. Five of the attorneys on staff are new to the practice.
In explaining its special $175,000 offer to Wheeler in August, the Anchorage Assembly said the city’s failure to prosecute cases “has had significant impacts on public safety and contributed to a perception that wrongdoers in the Municipality face no consequences.”
LaFrance has asked for an additional $75,000 for raises and higher salaries for new hires in her 2025 budget proposal — an effort to boost retention and recruitment.
Gardner said the recent hiring efforts are starting to pay off, and prosecutors are beginning to schedule more trials.
“Unfortunately, it’s not something that can be fixed overnight,” she said. “Fortunately, we knew this coming in.”
A Frustrating Marathon
Inside the courtroom where Anchorage misdemeanor cases get dropped week after week, measuring time on the speedy-trial clock is a tedious but essential task.
Defendants who showed up in person — many are free on bail — get to go first, followed by attorneys for clients who are absent.
The city prosecutors often don’t know which of their cases are nearing the 120-day deadline, the Daily News and ProPublica found when sitting in on three recent trial call sessions. A defense attorney will claim it’s about to expire, and the judge will make a quick calculation from the bench. In some cases, it turns out the countdown expired weeks earlier. In others, the city only had a day or two left to take the case to trial.
Almost always, the defense asks for a trial. In a defeated tone, the prosecutor asks the judge to toss out the case.
During these marathon case dismissals, defendants sometimes express surprise or delight to learn the charges against them have been tossed out. The voices of victims are almost never heard.
On a day in September, when District Judge David Wallace dismissed 31 cases at the city’s request, veteran city prosecutor Tyler Wright took a moment hours into the process and chatted with the judge about an upcoming trip. Wright said he was quitting the prosecutor’s office to work in private practice.
It’s been a discouraging few months, Wright acknowledged in response to a reporter’s question later on, after the courtroom emptied.
“It’s frustrating for everybody. Everybody involved. Judges, the court clerks, the prosecutors,” Wright said.
Wallace overheard Wright and completed his sentence from the bench: “The victims, the witnesses, police officers.” Wright added to it further. “The entire city,” he said.
Within weeks, the prosecutor was gone, replaced at the Wednesday court hearings by another city attorney.
He carried with him a list of 100 cases to dismiss.
About the Numbers
In order to calculate the minimum number of criminal cases that the city has dismissed because of speedy-trial deadlines, the newsrooms reviewed audio recordings from all weekly trial call hearings between May 1 and Oct. 2. The number of dismissed cases does not include cases that prosecutors dismissed without any discussion of the speedy-trial deadline or cases dropped for other stated reasons, such as the arresting officers moving out of state.
The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica plan to continue reporting on issues with Alaska's court system. Do you have information that we should know? Kyle Hopkins can be reached by email at khopkins@adn.com.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
In February, a prosecutor from a rural area outside Baton Rouge asked members of Louisiana’s Senate judiciary committee to imagine a frightening scene: You are home with your wife at 4 a.m. when suddenly a 17-year-old with a gun appears. The teenager won’t hesitate, District Attorney Tony Clayton said. “He will kill you and your wife.”
According to Clayton, teenagers were terrorizing the state without fear of consequences. The only way to stop them was to prosecute all 17-year-olds in adult court, regardless of the offense, and lock them up in prison. Law enforcement officials from around the state made similar arguments. Legislators quickly passed a bill that lowered the age at which the justice system must treat defendants as adults from 18 to 17.
But according to a review of arrests in the five months since the law took effect, most of the 17-year-olds booked in three of the state’s largest parishes have not been accused of violent crimes. Verite News and ProPublica identified 203 17-year-olds who were arrested in Orleans, Jefferson and East Baton Rouge parishes between April and September. A total of 141, or 69%, were arrested for offenses that are not listed as violent crimes in Louisiana law, according to our analysis of jail rosters, court records and district attorney data.
Just 13% of the defendants — a little over two dozen — have been accused of the sort of violent crimes that lawmakers cited when arguing for the legislation, such as rape, armed robbery and murder. Prosecutors were able to move such cases to adult court even before the law was changed.
The larger group of lesser offenses includes damaging property, trespassing, theft under $1,000, disturbing the peace, marijuana possession, illegal carrying of weapons and burglary. They also include offenses that involve the use of force, such as simple battery, but those are not listed in state law as violent crimes either, and they can be prosecuted as misdemeanors depending on the circumstances.
In one case in New Orleans, a boy took a car belonging to his mother’s boyfriend without permission so he could check out flooding during Hurricane Francine last month, according to a police report. When the teen returned the car, the front bumper was damaged. The boyfriend called police and the teen was arrested for unauthorized use of a vehicle. In another case, a boy was charged with battery after he got into a fight with his brother about missing a school bus.
In July, a 17-year-old girl was charged with resisting arrest and interfering with a law enforcement investigation. She had shoved a police officer as he was taking her older sister into custody for a minor charge resulting from a fight with another girl. None of those defendants have had an opportunity to enter a plea so far; convictions could result in jail or prison time of up to two years.
In juvenile court, teenagers facing charges such as these could be sentenced to a detention facility, but the juvenile system is mandated to focus on rehabilitation and sentences are generally shorter than in adult court, juvenile justice advocates said. And in the juvenile system, only arrests for violent crimes and repeat offenses are public record. But because these 17-year-olds are in the adult system, they all have public arrest records that can prevent them from getting jobs or housing.
Rachel Gassert, the former policy director for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, said there was one word to describe what she felt when Verite News and ProPublica shared their findings: “Despair.”
Eight years ago, Gassert and other criminal justice advocates convinced lawmakers to raise the age for adult prosecution from 17 to 18 years old, pointing to research that shows that the human brain does not fully develop until early adulthood and that youth are more likely to reoffend when they are prosecuted as adults. The law enacted this spring was the culmination of a two-year effort to reverse that.
“The whole push to repeal Raise the Age was entirely political and all about throwing children under the bus,” Gassert said. “And now we are seeing the tire treads on their backs.”
Gov. Jeff Landry’s office, Clayton and state Sen. Heather Cloud, R-Turkey Creek, who sponsored the bill to roll back Raise the Age, did not respond to requests for comment. The Louisiana District Attorneys Association, which supported the bill, declined to comment.
The whole push to repeal Raise the Age was entirely political and all about throwing children under the bus. And now we are seeing the tire treads on their backs.
—Rachel Gassert, former policy director at the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights
Louisiana is the only state to have passed and then fully reversed Raise the Age legislation. It’s one of four states, along with Georgia, Texas and Wisconsin, that automatically prosecute all 17-year-olds as adults. In other states, 17-year-olds can be prosecuted as adults only in special circumstances, such as when they are charged with a serious, violent crime like murder.
Landry and his Republican allies argued that Raise the Age and other liberal policies were responsible for a pandemic-era uptick in violent offenses committed by juveniles in Louisiana. They said juvenile courts, where a sentence can’t extend past a defendant’s 21st birthday, are too lenient.
Juvenile justice advocates argued that the law would cause teenagers to be prosecuted as adults for behaviors that are typical for immature adolescents. These 17-year-olds would face long-lasting consequences, including arrest records and prison time. And the harm would fall largely on Black children. Nearly 9 out of every 10 of the 17-year-olds arrested in Orleans and East Baton Rouge parishes are Black, Verite News and ProPublica found. (A similar figure couldn’t be calculated for Jefferson Parish because some court records weren’t available.)
Opponents of the law also pointed out that the data didn’t show a link between enacting the Raise the Age legislation and a surge in violent crime. In 2022, when then-Attorney General Landry and others first tried to repeal the law, crime data analyst Jeff Asher said in a legislative hearing that Louisiana’s increase in homicides during the pandemic was part of a national trend that began before Raise the Age was passed.
“It happened in red states. It happened in blue states. It happened in big cities, small towns, suburbs, metro parishes,” Asher told lawmakers. Starting in 2023, data has shown a significant drop in homicides in Louisiana and nationwide.
Conservative lawmakers dismissed Asher’s numbers and instead cited horrific crimes committed by teenagers, such as the brutal killing of 73-year-old Linda Frickey amid a surge in carjackings in New Orleans in 2022. In that incident, four teenagers between 15 and 17 years old stole Frickey’s SUV in broad daylight. One of them kicked, punched and pepper-sprayed her as he pulled her out of the vehicle, according to court testimony. Frickey, who had become tangled in her seat belt, was dragged alongside the vehicle. Landry argued that teenagers who commit such heinous crimes must be punished as adults.
Opponents said the Frickey case instead showed why the law wasn’t needed: District attorneys in Louisiana have long had the discretion to move cases involving the most serious crimes out of juvenile court, which is what Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams did. Three girls who took part in the carjacking pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were each sentenced to 20 years in prison; the 17-year-old who attacked Frickey and drove her car was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
After the attempt to repeal the Raise the Age law failed in 2022, lawmakers passed a bill in 2023. It was vetoed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards. “Housing seventeen year olds with adults is dangerous and reckless,” Edwards said in a written statement at the time. “They often come out as seasoned criminals after being victimized.”
This year, with Landry in lockstep with the Republican supermajority in the Legislature, the law sailed through. For Landry, who was elected on an anti-crime platform, the law’s passage fulfilled a campaign pledge. When the law took effect, he declared, “No more will 17-year-olds who commit home invasions, carjack, and rob the great people of our State be treated as children in court.”
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry speaks before lawmakers in Baton Rouge.
(Michael Johnson/The Advocate via AP)
Now these teenagers are treated as adults from arrest to sentencing. In New Orleans, that means that when a 17-year-old is arrested, police no longer alert their parents, a step that department policy requires for juveniles, according to a department spokesperson. It’s not clear if law enforcement agencies elsewhere in the state have made a similar change.
All 17-year-olds arrested in New Orleans are now booked into the Orleans Parish jail, where those charged with crimes not classified as violent have spent up to 15 days before being released pending trial. Though the jail separates teens from adults, it has been under a court-ordered reform plan since 2013 after the Department of Justice found routine use of excessive force by guards and rampant inmate-on-inmate violence. Federal monitors said in May that violence remains a significant problem, although they acknowledged conditions have improved somewhat. The sheriff has agreed with this assessment, blaming understaffing.
Most of the cases involving 17-year-olds in Orleans, Jefferson and East Baton Rouge parishes are pending, according to court records and officials in those offices. Several defendants have pleaded guilty. Prosecutors have declined to file charges in a handful of cases. Many defendants are first-time offenders who should be eligible for diversion programs in which charges will eventually be dropped if they abide by conditions set by the court, according to officials with the Orleans and Jefferson Parish district attorneys.
None of the DAs in Orleans, Jefferson or East Baton Rouge parishes took a position on the law, according to officials in those offices and news reports. Williams, the Orleans Parish DA, responded to Verite News and ProPublica’s findings by saying his office is holding “violent offenders accountable” while providing alternatives to prison for those teenagers “willing to heed discipline and make a real course correction.”
Margaret Hay, first assistant district attorney with Jefferson Parish, declined to comment on Verite and ProPublica’s findings except to say, “We’re constitutionally mandated to uphold and enforce the laws of the state of Louisiana.” East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore declined to comment.
Having a felony arrest or conviction on your record is like wearing a heavy yoke around your neck.
—Aaron Clark-Rizzio, legal director at the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights
Even those who avoid prison face the long-term consequences of going through the adult court system. Background checks can reveal arrests and convictions, which could prevent them from obtaining a job, housing, professional licenses, loans, government assistance such as student aid or food stamps, or custody of their children.
“Having a felony arrest or conviction on your record,” said Aaron Clark-Rizzio, legal director for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, “is like wearing a heavy yoke around your neck.”
Marsha Levick, chief legal officer with the Juvenile Law Center, a nonprofit law firm based in Philadelphia, said that what’s happening in Louisiana reminds her of the late 1990s, when states toughened punishments for juveniles after a noted criminologist warned of a generation of “super predators.” That theory was eventually debunked — but not before tens of thousands of children had been locked up and saddled with criminal records.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
The Nashville, Tennessee, medical examiner who determined 24 years ago that Russell and Kaye Maze’s young son, Alex, was the victim of homicide — a finding that helped persuade a jury to send Russell to prison for life — now says he was wrong.
“I recant my trial testimony that Bryan Maze suffered from shaken baby syndrome,” Dr. Bruce Levy stated in a sworn affidavit, which used the child’s legal name. “If called to testify now, I would assert Bryan Maze’s brain, at the time of his death, showed no indication, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, of prior trauma or abuse. Instead, the residual brain lesions viewed at autopsy more likely than not resulted from a natural disease process.”
Levy went on to state that he would now classify the child’s manner of death as “natural.”
In July, the Maze case was the subject of an in-depth article by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, which examined new scientific evidence that suggested Alex died not from shaking but an undiagnosed, underlying condition. That evidence first came to light when the Nashville district attorney’s office, through its conviction-review unit, began reinvestigating the case in 2023. The ProPublica-Times story explored the challenges in overturning convictions, even when prosecutors themselves determine that the underlying evidence no longer stands up to scrutiny.
Russell Maze stood trial twice. He was convicted before Alex’s death of aggravated child abuse and after Alex’s death of murder. He is currently serving a life sentence.
Levy’s affidavit, which was filed on Monday with the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, marks a watershed moment in the Maze case. Because his trial testimony directly contributed to Russell’s conviction, Levy’s recantation will be hard for the courts to ignore. Whether this is enough to persuade the courts to set aside Russell’s conviction remains to be seen. But it offers a lifeline to a defendant whose chances of relief dramatically narrowed in May when a lower-court judge, after hearing two days of testimony from multiple experts who found no evidence that Alex had been shaken, nevertheless concluded, “The court does not find an injustice nor that the petitioner is actually innocent based on new scientific evidence.”
The affidavit also creates a highly unusual situation: Now both the DA’s office and the original medical examiner agree that the crime for which Russell was convicted never occurred.
At both of Russell’s trials, prosecutors presented evidence that they said showed Alex was a victim of shaken baby syndrome. The diagnosing doctor, Suzanne Starling, told jurors that internal bleeding around Alex’s brain and eyes indicated that he endured a ferocious act of violence by shaking. “You would be appalled at what this looked like,” she testified at Russell’s first trial. So forceful was the shaking, she added, that “children who fall from three or four floors onto concrete will get a similar brain injury.”
But in the years since the infant was rushed to the emergency room, shaken baby syndrome has come under increasing scrutiny. A growing body of research has demonstrated that the triad of symptoms doctors traditionally used to diagnose the syndrome — brain swelling and bleeding around the brain and behind the eyes — are not necessarily produced by shaking; a range of natural and accidental causes can generate the same symptoms.
“If called to testify today,” Levy stated in his affidavit, “I would refute the previous testimony of Dr. Suzanne Starling that Bryan Maze was definitely a victim of shaken baby syndrome and that there was no other explanation for his condition.”
Before reaching his new conclusion, Levy reviewed the original medical examiner’s file, which included his 2000 autopsy report, photos and slides. He also studied medical records that the CRU provided him this summer. Those records gave essential context about the health challenges that Alex faced before his father called 911 on May 3, 1999, to report that the 5-week-old had stopped breathing.
The records documented Alex’s first five weeks of life, which included 13 days in a neonatal intensive care unit, and health problems that spurred his parents to seek medical attention seven different times in the three weeks that followed. Levy also examined Kaye’s obstetric records, which documented her troubled pregnancy and Alex’s preterm birth.
“I do not believe many of these records were previously provided for my review,” Levy, who was the Nashville medical examiner for 13 years, wrote in the affidavit.
Levy also reviewed reports written by experts in the fields of pathology, radiology and neonatology, who reexamined the evidence in the case last year as part of the CRU’s probe.
Those experts testified at a hearing in March before Judge Steve Dozier, who had overseen Russell’s previous two trials. “Every single medical expert, using current science, confirms that Russell and Kaye Maze are actually innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted,” Nashville DA Glenn Funk told the judge. “It is my duty as district attorney to ask the court to vacate these convictions.”
At that hearing, Dozier pointedly asked about Levy, who — along with Starling, the diagnosing doctor — was not called to testify by the CRU. Its director, Sunny Eaton, and assistant DA Anna Hamilton chose to call medical experts who did not have a record to protect and who could approach the case with fresh eyes.
During the hearing, Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan, the chief medical examiner in Knox and Anderson counties, criticized Levy’s original work in the case. “He was a good pathologist,” she said, but she thought he had been “too busy to really dedicate enough time to study this case thoroughly.”
Dozier, who sometimes interrupted witnesses during the hearing with provocative questions, said pointedly, “You’re not busy?”
Mileusnic-Polchan explained that for forensic pathologists who are saddled with heavy workloads, “sometimes the easiest thing is just to copy and paste” previous medical conclusions. She suggested that if Levy had the opportunity to look at the case anew, and took more time with the evidence, that he would see what she saw. “I am almost certain if I were to bring Dr. Levy here and just kind of slow him down —”
“There is no way you can say that,” Dozier said. “Really?”
“I — I think that any pathologist looking at the brain slides —”
Dozier was skeptical of the notion that Levy would take a different stance. “He’s going to admit he was wrong?” the judge asked dismissively.
After two days of testimony and a forceful closing argument from Eaton — “The state got this wrong,” she told the judge — Dozier did not find that there was enough evidence to set aside Russell’s conviction.
Levy, Starling and Dozier did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
The CRU subsequently reached out to Levy and asked him to review the record, including Alex’s full medical history and Kaye’s obstetrics record. Levy could have upheld his previous position or written a more measured reappraisal. Instead, after reviewing all the evidence, he unequivocally rejected his original findings and testimony.
When Levy memorialized his conclusions in his affidavit, the CRU informed Jason Gichner of the Tennessee Innocence Project, who is representing Russell, and Melissa Dix and Daniel Horwitz, who are representing Kaye.
(Kaye, who was not home with her husband when their son became unresponsive in 1999, was charged with aggravated assault. After she was told that having an open criminal case would make it harder for her to regain custody of her son, she took an Alford plea to a reduced felony charge — a plea that allows defendants to accept punishment while maintaining their innocence. Kaye has asked that her conviction be vacated. Her appeal has been consolidated with her husband’s and will move through the courts with his.)
Levy’s affidavit comes as the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals considers whether Dozier was correct, this May, in finding that there was not enough new evidence to set aside Russell’s conviction.
Levy came to Nashville in 1997 to reform a medical examiner’s office that was plagued by backlogs and scandal, and he was praised for restoring integrity to the office. He also became the state’s chief medical examiner. But he lost both jobs after he was arrested in Mississippi in 2010 on a felony marijuana possession charge, for which he entered a pretrial diversion program. He subsequently pleaded guilty to a misconduct charge in Nashville after investigators found that some of the marijuana came from evidence bags from the medical examiner’s office. Levy is currently a professor of pathology and informatics at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals must now decide whether to remand the case back to the trial court, where Levy’s new findings would be presented and entered into evidence. Dozier would then have to weigh whether all of the evidence taken together — both the experts’ testimony from the March hearing and Levy’s new conclusions — is sufficient to vacate Russell’s conviction.
In the meantime, Russell remains at Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, a long-troubled prison run by private contractor CoreCivic. Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation that it said “will examine whether Tennessee protects those incarcerated at Trousdale Turner from harm, including physical violence and sexual abuse.”
“The safety and dignity of every person in our care is a top priority,” CoreCivic spokesperson Steven Owen said in a statement in August. “We take this matter very seriously and are committed to working closely with both TDOC and USDOJ officials to address areas of concern.”
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
Four years before a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, prompting nationwide demonstrations, hundreds of people marched in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to protest officers’ killing of Alton Sterling in front of a convenience store. Law enforcement responded in force: Officers armed with rifles, body armor and gas masks pushed protesters back and forcibly arrested about 200 people. Some were injured.
A group of 13 protesters and two journalists filed suit, alleging their constitutional rights were violated when they were arrested. Eventually, the city agreed to pay them $1.17 million. Photographs and videos taken by protesters, witnesses and journalists were critical in contradicting officers’ claims that protesters were the aggressors, said William Most, an attorney for the plaintiffs.
On Thursday, a Louisiana law will go into effect that will make it a misdemeanor for anyone, including journalists, to be within 25 feet of a law enforcement officer if the officer orders them back. The two independent journalists who sued, whose photos were used to support allegations against the police, said they wouldn’t have been able to capture those images if the law had been on the books during the protests.
Karen Savage was working for a news site focused on juvenile justice issues on the second day of the demonstrations in July 2016 when she photographed officers putting a Black man in a chokehold as they detained him. Cherri Foytlin, who was working for a small newspaper and a community media project, said she was within 4 feet when she photographed officers violently dragging a Black man off private property and arresting him.
Foytlin and Savage said they are hesitant to cover protests in Louisiana now that they could face criminal charges if they’re too close to an officer. “I was thinking about how far exactly 25 feet is, and, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It’s going to be whatever the officer wants it to be,” Savage said. “And if it doesn’t get to court, it won’t matter because they will have accomplished what they wanted, which was to get the cameras away.”
On Wednesday, a coalition of media companies representing a couple dozen Louisiana news outlets, including Verite News, filed suit against Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, State Police Superintendent Robert Hodges and East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore III, alleging the law violates the First Amendment.
Police buffer laws, as they are commonly known, are relatively new; Louisiana is the fourth state to enact one. Although those states already prohibit interfering with police officers, supporters say buffer laws are necessary to protect police from distrustful, aggressive bystanders. And with advances in cellphone cameras, including zoom lenses, supporters say there’s no need to get close to officers in order to record their activities.
“There’s really nothing within a 25-feet span that someone couldn’t pick up on video,” Rep. Bryan Fontenot, R-Thibodaux, the sponsor of Louisiana’s bill and a former law enforcement officer, said during a legislative hearing this year. At the same time, he said, “that person can’t spit in my face when I’m making an arrest.” (He did not respond to a request for comment.)
Foytlin disagreed. “You can’t even get an officer’s badge number at 25 feet. So there’s no way to hold anyone accountable.”
She and Savage said police targeted them during the Baton Rouge protests because they were taking photos of protesters being slammed to the ground, dragged across the pavement, choked and zip-tied by law enforcement officers. Both journalists were charged with obstructing public rights of way and resisting arrest. Prosecutors did not pursue those charges.
The journalists and protesters sued the city of Baton Rouge, the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office and the Louisiana State Police, claiming law enforcement officers had used excessive force when arresting them. The Sheriff’s Office was dismissed as a defendant because a judge concluded its deputies weren’t involved with those arrests. The State Police settled for an undisclosed amount in 2021. The suit against Baton Rouge went to trial in 2023; the city agreed to the million-dollar settlement the day before closing arguments.
Neither the Sheriff’s Office nor the Baton Rouge Police Department responded to requests for comment. The Louisiana State Police declined to comment on the lawsuit or protests.
Foytlin said she didn’t think the settlement would cause law enforcement agencies to change their tactics; now, she believes they’ll be emboldened by the buffer law to crack down more harshly on anyone trying to document officers’ actions.
“From what I saw in Baton Rouge, and what they were able to get away with, I have no doubt that in the future, the consequences of trying to use your free speech or to protest are going to be much harsher,” she said.
“You Can’t Tase a Child.” “Watch me.”
Given the inconsistent use of police body-worn cameras, said Nora Ahmed, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, often the only way people can guard against false charges and prove that officers used excessive force is to film them in close proximity. “In the absence of video or audio evidence,” she said, “it’s very difficult to convince anyone that the story occurred in any way different other than what the police report.”
As De’Shaun Johnson filmed deputies who were arresting his mother in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, in 2020, Deputy Ryan Moring told him to “get back” several times and pointed a Taser at him. Johnson, then 14 years old, refused. A new state law allows officers to arrest people if they remain within 25 feet after an officer orders them back.
(Courtesy of Teliah Perkins)
The May 2020 incident started with an anonymous complaint about someone riding a motorcycle without a helmet in a Slidell neighborhood, according to the lawsuit. Deputies Ryan Moring and Kyle Hart showed up at Teliah Perkins’ home, writing in an incident report that they saw Perkins ride a motorcycle without a helmet. In Perkins’ lawsuit, she denied doing so.
The conversation quickly became heated. Perkins accused the deputies of harassing her because she is Black; the deputies wrote in the incident report that she was “irate” and verbally attacked them.
Perkins called for her son De’Shaun Johnson, then 14, and her nephew, then 15, to come outside and record what was happening, according to the deputies’ incident report and the videos. When they did, at least one of the deputies ordered them to go back on the porch, which was more than 25 feet away.
The boys ignored the deputies and continued to film from about 6 feet away. As Hart forced Perkins to the ground, Moring approached Johnson, shoving him and telling him to move back, according to Perkins’ lawsuit and her son’s video. When Perkins screamed that she was being choked, Moring stood in front of Johnson to block his view, he later admitted in his deposition. Moring then pointed his Taser at the boy.
“You can’t tase a child,” Johnson said, according to the lawsuit and the son’s video.
“Watch me,” Moring responded.
Perkins was arrested for resisting a police officer with force or violence, battery of a police officer, having no proof of insurance and failing to wear a helmet. She was found guilty only on the resisting charge; the others were dropped. She sued the deputies in federal court, claiming they had violated her and her son’s rights. An appeals court dismissed Perkins’ claims against the deputies, but her son’s claim against Moring went to trial. In May, a jury found that Moring had intentionally inflicted emotional distress on Johnson and awarded him $185,000, to be paid by the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office.
Ahmed said she believes the jury was swayed by videos of the incident, which showed “with clear granularity exactly what was transpiring.”
Moring denied in court that he intentionally harmed Johnson and has filed a notice of appeal. The deputies’ lawyer didn’t comment for this story.
Teliah Perkins and her son De’Shaun Johnson outside their home in Slidell, Louisiana
(Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)
In an interview with Verite News and ProPublica, Perkins said she fears what could have happened had the new law been in effect. The boys could have been arrested when they refused to move back to the porch. And from there, she said, neither would have been able to see or hear what was happening to her.
Johnson, who is about to start his first year at Alabama State University, said the videos he and his cousin took that day are the only evidence of what actually happened. Without them, he said, no one would have believed a 14-year-old boy’s claim that a deputy had threatened to shock him with a Taser simply because he was recording with a cellphone.
After George Floyd’s Murder, a New Tool to Keep the Public at Bay
There were no police buffer laws when Floyd was murdered on a Minneapolis street in 2020. Seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier stood several feet away and recorded a video that showed Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck and back for more than nine minutes, causing Floyd to lose consciousness and die. The video was critical in securing Chauvin’s conviction for second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to more than 22 years in prison.
In this image from a police body camera, Darnella Frazier, third from right, records on her cellphone a video of then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressing his knee on George Floyd’s neck and back for several minutes in 2020.
(Minneapolis Police Department via AP)
Floyd’s murder fueled protests across the country and efforts to rein in the police. New York City ended qualified immunity, a legal defense used to shield officers from civil liability. Many states restricted the types of force officers can use, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The video of Chauvin “really drew people’s attention to how powerful these recordings can be in inspiring protests and legislative action,” said Grayson Clary, a staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “I think some legislators are now trying to claw back ground that they feel they lost.”
Arizona state Sen. John Kavanagh, a Republican from outside Phoenix who authored the first of these bills in 2022, wrote in an op-ed that police officers asked him to introduce it because “there are groups hostile to the police that follow them around to videotape police incidents, and they get dangerously close to potentially violent encounters.”
Kavanagh’s bill, which was signed into law by then-Gov. Doug Ducey, prohibited people from filming police within 8 feet. But federal courts across the country have affirmed the right to film the police, and a federal judge struck down the law after a coalition of media outlets and associations sued the state.
Indiana was the next state to pass a similar law. It, like the two others enacted since, doesn’t mention filming and requires people to stay at least 25 feet from police. That’s based on a controversial theory, often cited to justify police shootings, that someone armed with a knife can cover 21 feet running toward an officer before the officer can fire their weapon.
Shortly after the law was enacted in April 2023, an independent journalistsued the city of South Bend after an officer pushed him 25 feet from a crime scene and another officer ordered him to move back another 25 feet. The journalist claimed in the lawsuit that it was impossible to observe the crime scene from that distance. The state denied in court that the journalist’s rights were violated.
In January, a federal judge dismissed the journalist’s suit, stating that officers have a right to perform their jobs “unimpeded.” The judge said 25 feet is a “modest distance … particularly in this day and age of sophisticated technology” and that “any effect on speech is minimal and incidental.” That case is under appeal.
A second lawsuit in Indiana, filed in December by a group of news organizations and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, is pending. They are suing the state attorney general and the prosecutor and sheriff of Marion County, where Indianapolis is located, arguing that it is “essential for reporters to be within 25 feet of law enforcement in order to record them.” In a court filing, the defendants have argued that the law doesn’t infringe on reporters’ ability to record police activities.
Florida’s law went into effect in April. An early version of that bill specified that it did not apply to the act of peacefully recording, photographing or witnessing a first responder, which it called a “legitimate purpose.” That language was taken out of the bill before it was passed.
If these laws stand up to constitutional challenges, “we’re going to see more states go down this road,” said Clary of the Reporters Committee.
The effect of Louisiana’s law may be limited in New Orleans, where the police department has been under federal oversight since 2013 due to widespread abuses, including excessive use of force and racial discrimination. New Orleans Independent Police Monitor Stella Cziment said the law may violate a court-approved list of reforms, which states that police must allow people to “witness, observe, record, and/or comment” on officers’ actions, including arrests and uses of force. Another provision says officers cannot arrest anyone for being nearby or recording them except under certain conditions, including risks to the safety of officers or others.
In response to questions from Verite News and ProPublica, the New Orleans Police Department said it is revising its policies to account for the new law, and those policies could “restrict officers’ actions” more than the law does. The NOPD said the Department of Justice and a team of court-appointed monitors will review any changes; neither responded to requests for comment.
However, the Louisiana State Police, which recently sent a contingent of troopers to New Orleans under a directive from Gov. Jeff Landry, does not have to abide by the terms of the consent decree, according to a federal judge. As such, troopers are free to invoke the new law.
The State Police is being investigated by the Department of Justice following a 2021 Associated Press investigation that uncovered more than a dozen incidents over the past 10 years in which troopers beat Black men and sought to cover up their actions. The State Police didn’t respond to a request for comment on those incidents.
When asked how troopers are being trained to use the new law, State Police spokesperson Capt. Nick Manale said only that they undergo regular training on how to engage with the public. The State Police, Manale said, “strives to ensure a safe environment for the public and our public safety professionals during all interactions.”
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
Several months ago, in a lawsuit that was in its ninth year, a federal judge blasted the medical care at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Many inmates hoped it would be a watershed moment.
In her opinion, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick excoriated the state for its “callous and wanton disregard” for the health of those in its custody. “Rather than receiving medical ‘care,’ the inmates are instead subjected to cruel and unusual punishment,” Dick said in her November opinion. The “human cost,” she said, is “unspeakable.”
She then ordered the appointment of three independent monitors to devise and implement a plan to reform the system.
That plan, however, may never come to fruition. Before those monitors could even be chosen, the state appealed the ruling, invoking a federal law — the Prison Litigation Reform Act — that hobbled a similar lawsuit over Angola’s health care nearly 26 years ago. The current case could suffer a similar fate.
That class-action suit is now before the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In a March hearing, two of the three judges who heard the case asked questions that appeared sympathetic to the state’s argument that Dick’s ruling violated provisions of the Prison Litigation Reform Act.
If the ruling is thrown out, it would close off the most viable path for inmates to force improvements to a medical system that Dick found to be in violation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment. And it would come as prison policy experts expect a number of new, tough-on-crime laws to increase the state’s prison population, further straining Angola’s medical system.
Because this lawsuit concerns one of the country’s largest prisons — and one with a long history of litigation over its conditions — inmate advocates are watching it closely. It is one of many class-action lawsuits across the country seeking to force state officials to improve conditions in their facilities. At some point, said Margo Schlanger, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former trial attorney in the Department of Justice’s civil rights division, all of those suits will have to contend with the Prison Litigation Reform Act.
That’s by design. The federal law was passed to reduce the number of lawsuits filed by inmates, particularly class-action cases that resulted in sprawling, court-monitored reform efforts lasting a decade or more. Supporters of the law said it was needed to weed out frivolous suits that tied state officials up in court and invited judges to meddle in how prisons are run.
But the law “did considerable damage to the ability of courts to be a backstop for safe and constitutional prisons,” Schlanger said. Since the PLRA was passed about three decades ago, the number of lawsuits filed by inmates nationwide has dropped by nearly 40%, according to a 2021 report she wrote for the Prison Policy Initiative, a research and advocacy organization; the percentage of inmates in prisons where courts are monitoring reforms dropped as well.
Still, those victories are not the norm, Fathi said. “This law is unique in the world,” he said. “There is no other country that has established a separate and inferior legal system that applies exclusively to incarcerated people.”
Inmates Sue Over a Broken, Abusive Medical System
Some of the earliest allegations regarding Angola’s failing health care system were included in a lawsuit largely concerned with other issues. In that 1971 case, inmates alleged unchecked violence and racial discrimination within the walls of the prison. They claimed that they were crammed into overcrowded dormitories, that they were subjected to rape and that the prison was overrun with weapons that resulted in more than 270 stabbings, 20 of them fatal, in less than three years, according to court documents.
As part of that case, a federal judge determined in 1975 that prison officials had failed to provide adequate health care, which amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. The prison remained under court monitoring for more than a decade as officials addressed shortcomings.
Nearly 20 years later, that suit spurred another, focused solely on the prison’s medical care. In their 1992 complaint, inmates claimed that it was nearly impossible to obtain the bare minimum of care. They contended they were routinely disciplined for seeking treatment if medical staff determined that their complaints weren’t warranted; their lawyers contended that the fear of punishment caused them to delay seeking care. When requests for medical care were heeded, inmates were generally assessed by staff who had little or no medical training. Those staffers would decide if the complaint warranted an appointment with a doctor or nurse, which didn’t take place for weeks or even months, according to the lawsuit. The wait for surgery could be years.
The same year the suit was filed, a patient with AIDS appeared to be “in the process of dying” when staff mistakenly inserted a feeding tube into his lung instead of his stomach, according to a medical expert’s testimony for the plaintiffs and medical records introduced as evidence. The inmate’s breathing became labored and he started “coughing up large amounts of frothy liquid,” according to medical records. He was taken by ambulance to a local hospital, where he died several days later. The cause of death was AIDS, sepsis and aspiration pneumonia, which occurs when food or liquid is inhaled instead of air, according to medical experts.
The next year, another inmate was diagnosed with “persistent dislocation of the finger,” which was described in medical records as “black and red in color, with yellow drainage.” A physician at Angola warned that if the injury was left untreated, the bone could swell and require amputation. And yet, although the inmate was seen by medical staff at least 13 times, he never received the needed care, according to a plaintiffs’ court filing. Nearly a year after the inmate first sought help, his finger was amputated.
In court, the state denied that it was “deliberately indifferent” to the medical needs of the inmates — the standard under which medical care is deemed unconstitutional — and argued that Angola’s care was “constitutionally adequate.”
The state contended in a court filing that the patient whose finger was amputated was seen repeatedly by the prison’s medical staff and provided the necessary treatments, including antibiotics and wound care. The amputation wasn’t the result of a denial of care, the state argued, but was necessary to “promote complete healing” of a chronic condition. As for the AIDS patient, the state claimed that he received care that was “supportive, palliative and which attempted to prolong his life.” The state did, however, note an “unfortunate incident of a misplacement” of a feeding tube.
Verite News and ProPublica tried to contact several of the 11 named plaintiffs in that suit and reached one, Thad Tatum, who served 28 years for armed robbery and attempted murder. During a recent interview in his New Orleans home, Tatum shifted back and forth in the seat of a motorized scooter, straining to relieve the pressure in his back. He laid the blame for the loss of function in his legs and right hand on prison officials.
In 1988, Tatum was hospitalized for nearly five weeks after another inmate smashed an ice pick into his forehead and neck, damaging his spine. Shortly after the attack, doctors assured him that if his physical therapy continued at Angola, he would walk again, Tatum said. Neither happened, Tatum claimed in the lawsuit.
After he was sent back to Angola, the prison’s medical staff failed to provide him with physical therapy, Tatum alleged in court. He told Verite News and ProPublica that when he tried to work out on his own, by lifting weights or pacing the yard with the assistance of a walker, he was ordered to sit in his wheelchair and written up for disobedience and insubordination.
The lack of medical attention “is why I am still in this chair,” Tatum said. “Those people just don’t care.”
Thad Tatum sits in a motorized scooter outside his New Orleans home. Tatum was injured when he was stabbed by another inmate. He said medical staff at Angola refused to provide him with physical therapy that would have helped him regain the use of his legs and right hand.
(Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)
The state claimed in court that Tatum did receive physical therapy, and though he had “variable success” walking with a cane, he was never able to walk consistently. His subsequent paralysis was not caused “by lack of therapy but rather by the injury itself,” the state argued. The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections did not respond to a request for comment on Tatum’s allegations that he was disciplined for working out on his own.
Lawmakers Act to Stop “Endless Flood of Frivolous Litigation”
By suing the prison, Tatum said, he hoped to force change by exposing the horrors he and others endured. Initially it appeared that the strategy was working. After an evidentiary hearing in 1994, U.S. District Judge Frank Polozola instructed both sides to come to an agreement on how best to address the problems that the inmates had exposed.
But as negotiations dragged on, Congress passed the PLRA. The 1996 law came as the nation’s incarcerated population was exploding, along with the number of civil rights lawsuits filed by inmates over conditions. Both had tripled over the previous 15 years.
“Jailhouse lawyers with little else to do are tying our courts in knots with an endless flood of frivolous litigation,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said in 1995 when he introduced the bill. “It is past time to slam shut the revolving door on the prison gate and to put the key safely out of reach of overzealous Federal courts.”
To do so, the PLRA instituted hurdles that inmates had to face before filing suit. If they cleared them, the law required judges to consider lesser interventions before they could order court-monitored reforms, typically in response to a class-action lawsuit. With little possibility of court intervention, many plaintiffs agreed to settlements that offered little in damages or reforms, according to three legal experts who specialize in the PLRA.
That’s how it played out in Louisiana.
On Sept. 21, 1998, inmates at Angola were given an advance copy of a proposed settlement between the state and the Department of Justice, which had intervened in the case on behalf of the inmates. Prison officials had agreed to make a host of improvements to the health care system. If they fixed the problems by the following February, the case would be dismissed with no further court oversight. If they didn’t, the lawsuit would move forward to a possible trial.
In addition to those stipulations, the settlement lauded prison officials for what the state and the Justice Department agreed were significant improvements in the delivery of medical care at Angola, including updated laboratory equipment, the addition of telemedicine and training for technicians who responded to inmates’ requests for medical care.
In 1998, Angola inmates responded to a proposed settlement in a lawsuit over failures in the prison’s medical system by saying claims that certain improvements had already been made “read like a fantasy.” The settlement was approved the next day.
(Document obtained by ProPublica. Highlighting by ProPublica.)
Two days later, several inmates fired off a scathing letter to the Department of Justice in which they said the list of improvements so far read like a “FANTASY.” Health care at the prison remained abysmal, they wrote, saying the treatment of chronically ill patients was “non-existent.” Raw sewage often leaked into Angola’s hospital and its kitchen, something they had been complaining about for years. “HOW COULD THIS PROBLEM STILL EXIST AFTER ALL THIS TIME?????” they asked.
They concluded by telling the Department of Justice that it had been fooled. Before its inspectors visited Angola, prison officials had time to “cover up and steer you away from the problems here,” inmates wrote. “The hospital has NOT been straightened up as claimed.”
The settlement was finalized in court the next day.
The plaintiffs’ medical expert, Dr. Michael Puisis, shared many of the inmates’ reservations. In a January 1999 report filed in court, a month before the deadline to determine if the state had made enough progress, he said it would take another year to fix Angola’s health care system.
But Karam reversed his position 33 days later. In a report to Polozola, he noted that his employer, the Louisiana State University Medical School, was about to sign a three-year contract to provide health care services at the prison for $43,200 per month. This, he said, “created an additional comfort zone for me and has made me confident that we can achieve everyone’s stated goal of quality medical care” at Angola.
In March 1999, after less than six months of oversight, Polozola decided the state had done enough. He freed it from any further obligations and dismissed the case. The Justice Department did not object to the judge’s ruling.
The Justice Department declined interview requests for the attorneys who had been involved with the case and didn’t respond to questions about the settlement. Puisis declined an interview request. Karam did not respond to multiple requests for comment submitted to him and his office.
Attorney Keith Nordyke, who represented inmates in the lawsuit, said he understands why they were so angry; he remains disappointed himself. By the time of the settlement, he said, his role in the case was secondary to the Justice Department, so he didn’t have much of a say. Even so, he said, “with the PLRA right there, what leverage did I have?” When the law passed, he said, it felt like “the day of prison reform was coming to a close.”
Attorney Keith Nordyke, pictured here in Baton Rouge, represented prisoners in a 1992 lawsuit alleging that medical care at Angola was unconstitutional. Six years later, plaintiffs agreed to a settlement that Nordyke acknowledged was ineffective due to limitations imposed by the Prison Litigation Reform Act.
(Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)
Lawsuits Tossed Nationwide
One measure in the PLRA that has proven to be a significant obstacle for inmates was a requirement that they exhaust options within their prison’s grievance system before filing suit. In order to assert they had been beaten or raped by guards, or denied vital medical care, inmates first had to seek remedies from within the same system that they contended had harmed them. “It really is a case of the fox guarding the henhouse,” Fathi said.
Some corrections officials responded by making their grievance process more onerous: Illinois reduced the time inmates had to file complaints from six months to 60 days, according to an investigation by WBEZ and ProPublica. Other states threw out complaints “for tiny technical violations, like writing in the wrong color ink,” WBEZ and ProPublica reported.
That rule has caused cases to be thrown out even when inmates allege egregious abuse or misconduct. In 2003, more than a dozen female prisoners filed a lawsuit against the state of New York, claiming they had been subjected to “forcible rape, coerced sexual activity, oral and anal sodomy, and forced pregnancies,” according to Human Rights Watch. The state argued that the women hadn’t gone through the entire grievance process first, and the case was dismissed for that reason. An appeals court partially overturned the ruling because three inmates had exhausted their grievance options. The suit was eventually settled.
Thirteen years later, a guard at the Clarence N. Stevenson Unit, a state prison near the Texas Gulf Coast, slammed an inmate into a concrete floor, according to a federal lawsuit. The man lay in a coma in a hospital for two weeks, the Houston Chronicle reported. Texas had a 15-day deadline for inmates to file a grievance; the inmate, Candelario Hernandez, failed to meet it because he was unconscious.
A federal judge granted the state’s motion to dismiss the suit because Hernandez hadn’t gone through the grievance process. But because the state said in court that it would have considered a late grievance, the judge granted Hernandez two months to file one. After the state promptly rejected those grievances, the judge reversed his order to dismiss the case. The state’s denial was proof, he wrote, that the grievance process was a “dead end.” The suit is pending.
Puisis, the plaintiffs’ medical expert in the 1992 lawsuit, is serving in the same role in the current case; he has found many of the same problems he identified in the 1990s. Dick noted this when she ruled for the plaintiffs in 2021: “Given the fact that many of the complaints in this lawsuit … are the same as those ‘settled’ in 1998, the Court finds that Defendants have been aware of these deficiencies in the delivery of medical care at LSP for decades,” she wrote.
But in the hearing before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this year, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill complained that Dick has never given Angola officials credit, “at any stage,” for the improvements they have made, which she said include the addition of air conditioning in several medical dorms. (Neither her office nor the Department of Corrections responded to questions about the two lawsuits.)
Murrill also rejected Dick’s conclusion that Angola’s medical care was inadequate, saying the state “never conceded there was a violation in the first place.” She argued that the judge’s decision to appoint monitors to oversee reforms infringed on the state’s ability to operate its prisons. “And the PLRA says, ‘Don’t do that,’” Murrill added.
The 5th Circuit could uphold or reverse Dick’s ruling, or it could send it back to her to rehear the case, which could include legal arguments over whether her ruling follows the PLRA.
Circuit Judge Edith Jones, who was appointed in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan, echoed the state’s arguments in the hearing, saying that Angola prison for too long has “been under a Damocles sword imposed by the federal courts.” If inmates got their way and independent monitors were appointed to oversee the prison’s medical care, she said, the state would have to “jump at every turn and do precisely what they say.”
One of the lawyers for the inmates, Lydia Wright of the Promise of Justice Initiative, said she disagreed with that characterization of Dick’s ruling given that the state has failed to fix these problems over three decades. “We’re not talking about anything fancy, or exotic or wild,” Wright said. “We’re talking about basic medical care.”
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
This article is a partnership between ProPublica, where Pamela Colloff is a senior reporter, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a staff writer.
Sunny Eaton never imagined herself working at the district attorney’s office. A former public defender, she once represented Nashville, Tennessee’s least powerful people, and she liked being the only person in a room willing to stand by someone when no one else would. She spent a decade building her own private practice, but in 2020, she took an unusual job as the director of the conviction-review unit in the Nashville DA’s office. Her assignment was to investigate past cases her office had prosecuted and identify convictions for which there was new evidence of innocence.
The enormousness of the task struck her on her first day on the job, when she stood in the unit’s storage room and took in the view: Three-ring binders, each holding a case flagged for evaluation, stretched from floor to ceiling. The sheer number of cases reflected how much the world had changed over the previous 30 years. DNA analysis and scientific research had exposed the deficiencies of evidence that had, for decades, helped prosecutors win convictions. Many forensic disciplines — from hair and fiber comparison to the analysis of blood spatter, bite marks, burn patterns, shoe and tire impressions and handwriting — were revealed to lack a strong scientific foundation, with some amounting to quackery. Eyewitness identification turned out to be unreliable. Confessions could be elicited from innocent people.
Puzzling out which cases to pursue was not easy, but Eaton did her best work when she treaded into uncertain territory. Early in her career, as she learned her way around the courthouse, she felt, she says, like “an outsider in every way — a queer Puerto Rican woman with no name and no connections.” That outsider sensibility never completely left her, and it served her well at the DA’s office, where she was armed with a mandate that required her to be independent of any institutional loyalties. She saw her job as a chance to change the system from within. Beneath the water-stained ceiling of her new office, she hung a framed Toni Morrison quote on the wall: “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
Sunny Eaton, director of the conviction review unit in the Nashville district attorney’s office
If Eaton concluded that a conviction was no longer supported by the evidence, she was expected to go back to court and try to undo that conviction. The advent of DNA analysis, and the revelations that followed, did not automatically free people who were convicted on debunked evidence or discredited forensics. Many remain locked up, stuck in a system that gives them limited grounds for appeal. In the absence of any broad, national effort to rectify these convictions, the work of unwinding them has fallen to a patchwork of law-school clinics, innocence projects and, increasingly, conviction-review units in reform-minded offices like Nashville’s. Working with only one other full-time attorney, Anna Hamilton, Eaton proceeded at a ferocious pace, recruiting law students and cajoling a rotating cast of colleagues to help her.
By early 2023, her team had persuaded local judges to overturn five murder convictions. Still, each case they took on was a gamble; a full reinvestigation of a single innocence claim could span years, with no guarantee of clarity at the end — or any certainty, even if she found exculpatory evidence, that she could spur the courts to act. One afternoon, as she weighed the risks of delving into a case she had spent months poring over, State of Tennessee v. Russell Lee Maze, she reached for a document that Hamilton wanted her to read: a copy of the journal that the defendant’s wife, Kaye Maze, wrote about the events at the heart of the case.
The journal began a quarter-century earlier with Kaye’s unexpected but much wanted pregnancy in the fall of 1998. Then 34 and the manager of the jewelry department at a local Walmart, Kaye had been unable to conceive in a previous marriage, and she was elated to be pregnant. Her husband, who shared in her excitement, accompanied her to every prenatal visit. But early on, there were signs of trouble, and Kaye was told she might miscarry. “I found out at four weeks that I was pregnant,” she wrote. “I was in the hospital two days later with cramping and bleeding.” The bleeding continued intermittently throughout her pregnancy, and she suffered from intense, at times unrelenting nausea and vomiting. She was put on bed rest, and Russell cared for her while also working the overnight shift at a trucking company. For the next six months, they hoped and waited, while Kaye remained in a state of suspended animation.
Eaton noted dates and details as she read. “After developing gestational diabetes, pregnancy-induced hypertension and having low amniotic fluid, it was decided to induce labor at 34 weeks,” Kaye wrote. When she gave birth to her son, Alex, on March 25, 1999, he weighed 3 pounds, 12 ounces.
First image: Kaye Maze and Alex in the NICU in 1999. Second image: The Mazes on their wedding day. Third image: Russell Maze visits Alex in the NICU.
(Courtesy of Kaye Maze)
Alex spent the first 13 days of his life in the neonatal intensive care unit. Kaye and Russell roomed with him before he was discharged, taking classes on preemie care and infant CPR. Because he had been diagnosed with supraventricular tachycardia, or an unusually rapid heart rhythm, they were provided a heart monitor and taught to count his heart rate. The Mazes were attentive parents, Eaton could see. In the three weeks that followed his release from the hospital, they took him to doctors and medical facilities seven different times. When they took him to an after-hours clinic on April 18 to report that he was grunting and seemed to be struggling to breathe, a physician dismissed their concerns. “We were told that as long as we were able to console Alex, there was nothing wrong with him, except he was spoiled,” Kaye wrote. The doctor advised them, she continued, “that we, as new and anxious parents, needed to learn what was normal.”
It was the admonition — that they were too vigilant — that discouraged them from seeking medical attention when a bruise emerged on their son’s left temple and then his right temple. Another bruise appeared on his stomach. Russell worried that the tummy massage he had given his son to relieve a bout of painful constipation was to blame. “We are concerned,” Kaye wrote, “but trying not to jump at shadows.”
On May 3, Kaye left their apartment to buy formula. Half an hour later, Russell placed a frantic phone call to 911 to report that Alex had stopped breathing. He performed CPR until paramedics arrived. The baby was rushed to the hospital, where doctors discovered he had a subdural hematoma and retinal hemorrhaging; blood had collected under the membrane that encased his brain and behind his eyes. Preliminary medical tests turned up no obvious signs of infection or illness. With bruising visible on both his forehead and his abdomen, suspicion quickly fell on the Mazes. “We were told Alex had injuries that you only see with shaken baby syndrome,” Kaye wrote. A doctor who was called in to examine the 5-week-old for signs of abuse “told me she thought Russell hurt Alex.”
Kaye Maze
Eaton read the journal knowing that in the years since the infant was taken to the emergency room, shaken baby syndrome has come under increasing scrutiny. A growing body of research has demonstrated that the triad of symptoms doctors traditionally used to diagnose the syndrome — brain swelling and bleeding around the brain and behind the eyes — are not necessarily produced by shaking; a range of natural and accidental causes can generate the same symptoms. Nevertheless, shaken baby syndrome and its presumption of abuse have served, and continue to serve, as the rationale for separating children from their parents and for sending mothers, fathers and caretakers to prison. It’s impossible to quantify the total number of Americans convicted on the basis of the diagnosis — only the slim fraction of cases that meet the legal bar to appeal and lead to a published appellate decision. Still, an analysis of these rulings from 2008 to 2018 found 1,431 such criminal convictions.
When Alex was discharged from the hospital three weeks later, he had been removed from his parents’ custody and placed in special-needs foster care. The DA’s office charged Russell with aggravated child abuse. He was jailed that June and found guilty by a jury the following February.
Alex’s health continued to deteriorate, and on Oct. 25, 2000, over the Mazes’ emphatic objections, he was taken off life support. When Russell’s conviction was later vacated on a technicality, prosecutors charged him again, this time with murder. He was found guilty in 2004 and sentenced to life in prison. By the time Eaton examined the case, he had been behind bars for nearly a quarter-century.
She turned to the journal’s final entry. “My beautiful baby took 20 minutes to leave us,” Kaye wrote about the day of Alex’s death, when she was permitted to cradle him in the presence of his foster parents. “I held him in my arms, rocked him and sang him into Heaven. This is the most horrific thing for any mother to have to endure. The agony that my husband felt at not being allowed to be there is an agony no father should have to endure. What the state of Tennessee has taken from us can never be replaced or forgiven.”
First image: Alex was 19 months old when he was taken off life support. He was buried in the fall of 2000. Second image: Alex’s gravestone inscribed with “Daddy’s little man” and “Mommy’s little angel.” Third image: Russell Maze in 2005, a year after he was convicted of murder.
(First and third images courtesy of Kaye Maze)
Eaton understood that if she decided to take on the Maze case and concluded that Russell did not abuse his son, she was still looking at long odds. She would have to go before the original trial judge — a defendant with an innocence claim typically starts with the court where the case was first heard — to argue that the police, prosecutors and jurors got it wrong. That judge, Steve Dozier, was a no-nonsense former prosecutor and the son of a veteran police officer, who might be disinclined to disturb the jury’s verdict. But it was still early in Eaton’s investigation, and she did not know what she would find — only that she needed to first understand what persuaded jurors of Russell’s guilt.
That evidence included testimony from the diagnosing doctor, Suzanne Starling, who told jurors that the bleeding around Alex’s brain and eyes indicated that he endured a ferocious act of violence by shaking. “You would be appalled at what this looked like,” she testified at Russell’s first trial. So forceful was the shaking, she added, that “children who fall from three or four floors onto concrete will get a similar brain injury.” Eaton also needed to make sense of a set of X-rays suggesting that Alex’s left clavicle had been fractured and a recording of an interrogation that prosecutors characterized as an admission of guilt.
When Eaton listened to the scratchy audio of Russell’s interrogation, she could hear the insistent voice of a police detective, Ron Carter, posing a series of increasingly combative questions. The investigator’s confrontational style had been considered good police work, Eaton recognized, but she observed that Carter would not take no for an answer when Russell denied hurting his child. Carter was mirroring what Starling told investigators; informed that the baby had been shaken, Carter predicated his questions on that seemingly incontrovertible fact. “You had to have shaken the child,” he told Russell. “That’s the only way it could’ve happened.” The detective repeated this idea more than a dozen times. Russell was already in a state of distress; he had just withstood four previous rounds of questioning at the hospital — from the treating physicians, Starling, another detective and a child welfare investigator — and he did not know if his son was going to live or die.
As Eaton studied the interview, she could see that Russell consistently denied harming his son. But he never asked for an attorney, and in unguarded comments, he sought to help the detective fill in the blanks of a situation that he himself did not seem to understand. He agreed that it was “possible” that while picking up Alex or putting Alex in a car seat, he had accidentally jostled the baby. “But as far as physically shaking him to the point of causing injury, no,” he said. Carter warned him that he was getting “deeper and deeper and deeper in trouble” and that his baby boy was “lying up there, and it’s for something that you caused.” The detective continued to insist that Russell was not telling the truth and that only he or Kaye could be to blame because they were Alex’s sole caretakers. Worn down, Russell finally hypothesized that he might have jostled, or even shaken, his son to try to revive him after finding him unresponsive. “I guess I could,” Russell said, sounding bewildered. “It’s possible.”
To Eaton’s ears, this did not amount to a confession. As she understood it, Russell was pressured to either accept blame or point the finger at his wife. He had remained steadfast that he did nothing to cause Alex to become unresponsive but found the baby that way.
The case did not look like the abuse cases she saw as a public defender; rather than hiding their son away, the Mazes put him in front of doctors again and again. But Eaton knew that once investigators and then prosecutors settle on the theory of a case, the state’s narrative calcifies, and DAs will go to great lengths to defend it. DA’s offices often reflexively reject innocence claims and even block defendants’ efforts to have the courts consider potentially exonerating evidence. Their faith in the underlying police work, and their certainty about a defendant’s guilt, can make prosecutors resist acknowledging a mistake. So, too, can the political pressure to protect the office’s record and to appear tough on crime. “It’s ingrained in some prosecutors to fight for the sake of fighting,” says Jason Gichner, the Tennessee Innocence Project’s deputy director, who now represents Russell Maze.
Jason Gichner, deputy director of the Tennessee Innocence Project
When Nashville created a conviction-review unit to try to disrupt this prosecutorial mindset, it was following the earlier lead of another reform-minded DA’s office. In 2007, Dallas’ newly elected district attorney, Craig Watkins, established what he called the conviction-integrity unit. The office he inherited had a long and ugly history of tipping the scales of justice against Black citizens, and Watkins wanted to harness the power of an innovative technology, DNA analysis, to see if he could undo some of the harms of that legacy. The unit reviewed hundreds of convictions in which defendants’ requests for testing had been denied. “When a plane crashes, we investigate,” Watkins told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2012 when he testified about wrongful convictions. “We do not pretend that it did not happen; we do not falsely promise that it will not happen again; but we learn from it, and we make necessary adjustments so it won’t happen again.” By the time he left office in 2015, his conviction-integrity unit had exonerated 24 people, nearly all of them Black men. Since then the office has secured nine more exonerations.
Watkins’ vision for changing the system from inside inspired prosecutors in cities across the country to form their own conviction-review units. But because unraveling complex, long-ago criminal cases is labor-intensive, conviction-review units are unheard-of in the smaller, resource-strapped DA’s offices that dot rural America. Of some 2,300 prosecutors’ offices nationwide, just around 100 have them. In jurisdictions that have the funding and the political will for them — and where they are staffed not with career prosecutors but with attorneys who have defense experience — they can be powerful tools. According to data collected by the National Registry of Exonerations, these units have helped clear more than 750 people. Last year, they played a role in nearly 40% of the nation’s exonerations.
In the years that followed Russell’s murder conviction, doctors who challenged the notion that shaken baby syndrome’s symptoms were always evidence of abuse faced resistance from prosecutors. Brian Holmgren, who led the Nashville DA office’s child-abuse unit until 2015, and who tried the Maze case, built a national profile as one of the most strident critics. While a prosecutor, he served on the international advisory board for the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, a nonprofit advocacy group, and he lectured around the country about how to conduct shaken baby prosecutions. He also was a co-author of two 2013 law-review articles, which lambasted doctors who testified for the defense in such cases as unethical and mercenary, suggesting that they were willing to offer unscientific testimony for the right price.
Holmgren made no secret of his disdain for these doctors when he delivered a keynote presentation at a National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome conference in Atlanta in 2010. Standing before an image of Pinocchio, he read from the testimony of physicians who had refuted shaken baby diagnoses, the puppet’s nose growing longer with each quote. He concluded his talk by inviting a guitar-playing pediatrician to lead the audience in a sing-along to the tune of “If I Only Had a Brain” from “The Wizard of Oz”:
I will say there is no basis for the claims in shaking cases,
My opinion’s in demand.
Though my theories are outrageous, I’ll work hard to earn my wages
If I only get 10 grand.
Holmgren’s impassioned advocacy on behalf of child victims made him a polarizing figure in Nashville. In 2015, The Tennessean ran a front-page article revealing that he told a public defender he would not offer a plea deal in a child-neglect case unless her client, who was mentally ill (she had stabbed herself in the stomach during one pregnancy), agreed to be sterilized.
His dismissal soon after was part of a sea change at the DA’s office that began in 2014, when voters elected Glenn Funk, a longtime defense lawyer, to be the city’s top prosecutor. As a sign of his commitment to reform, Funk created the conviction-review unit in late 2016, when CRUs were virtually nonexistent in the South. But for the first three years, it was by all measures a failure. Hamstrung by its own bureaucratic rules — a panel of seven prosecutors had to agree before any formal investigation could occur — the unit had yet to reopen a case. In 2020, Funk persuaded Eaton to come run the unit with assurances that she would not have to contend with the panel of prosecutors and that she would answer only to him.
Eaton needed qualified medical experts to evaluate the evidence in the Maze case, but she thought the public vilification of doctors might still give pause to one she wanted to talk to: Dr. Michael Laposata, who previously served as chief pathologist at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville.
Laposata had spent much of his career recommending that physicians rigorously search for underlying diseases when evaluating children who are bruised or bleeding internally, rather than leaping to a determination of abuse. His body of work has shown that the symptoms of certain blood disorders can mimic — and be almost indistinguishable from — those of trauma. In 2005, he and a co-author wrote a seminal paper for The American Journal of Clinical Pathology, which acknowledged at the outset that child abuse too often goes undetected. But the fear among clinicians that they might inadvertently overlook a child’s suffering “has produced a high zeal for identifying cases of child abuse,” and that zeal, the paper argued, combined with a lack of expertise in blood disorders, had led to catastrophic mistakes. “It is very easy for a health care worker to presume that bruising and bleeding is associated with trauma because the coagulopathies” — disorders of blood coagulation — “that may explain the findings are often poorly understood.” Such a misinterpretation, the paper cautioned, could result in the false conclusion that a child had been abused.
Now the chief of pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, Laposata was initially guarded when the conviction-review unit asked if he would assess the Maze case, explaining that he was already overcommitted. He agreed to look at Alex’s lab reports and Kaye’s prenatal and birth records, but he made no promises that he could do more. His hesitance fell away after he reviewed the material. One fact leapt out at him immediately: Alex’s blood work was not normal. The infant’s hematocrit, or concentration of red blood cells, was not only extremely low; the size and shape of those cells were also atypical. This suggested a problem with red blood cell production that would have taken time to evolve, making it inconsistent with acute trauma. He put this into simpler language when he spoke with Eaton and her team, and she wrote down and underlined his words: “Abnormal red blood cells are not created from child abuse.” These abnormalities raised the suspicion of an undiagnosed blood disorder.
Recent reexamination of Alex’s medical records suggests the child had an undiagnosed blood disorder that could explain symptoms that were originally attributed to shaken baby syndrome.
(Courtesy of Kaye Maze)
The pathologist also zeroed in on Kaye’s prenatal history. In addition to the health issues she enumerated in her journal, Laposata noticed a positive result for an antinuclear antibody test, commonly associated with an autoimmune disorder. Pregnant women with such disorders often develop antibodies and can pass them to the fetus, he explained. Those antibodies can remain in their infants’ systems for months and may lead to the formation of blood clots. He could see that the treating physicians did not conduct all the necessary tests to determine if Alex carried antibodies that would have predisposed him to clotting abnormalities. “It is surprising that these tests were never performed on the child given the extreme circumstances and the clinical implications of having a clot in the brain,” Laposata later wrote.
The likelihood that Alex suffered from an undiagnosed health condition raised serious questions about the prosecution’s case, and from that point on, Eaton did not look back; this was the conviction on which her team would focus. That there was a plausible medical explanation for Alex’s bruises also had profound implications for Kaye. Prosecutors had pointed to them as evidence that Kaye should have known her husband was abusing their son, and for failing to protect him, they charged her in June 1999 with aggravated assault. After she was told that having an open criminal case would make it harder to regain custody, Kaye took an Alford plea to a reduced felony charge — a plea that allows defendants to accept punishment while maintaining their innocence. She received a two-year suspended sentence and never regained her parental rights.
Eaton often thought about Kaye as she sifted through the case file. If Kaye had been willing to testify against her husband, she might have won back custody of her son, and in return for her cooperation, her criminal charge could have been reduced or dropped. Yet she always stood by Russell. She was unequivocal when she testified at his murder trial, insisting that he was not capable of hurting their child. She moved to rural East Tennessee after he was incarcerated there, so she could visit him as often as possible. She never abandoned their marriage. Eaton knew that such loyalty was rare; long prison sentences often lead to divorce, and the more time a person remains locked up, the more likely the marriage is to fall apart. Kaye’s resolute belief in her husband was not the kind of hard evidence Eaton was seeking, but she filed it away, another data point to consider.
The Mazes during a visit at the Turney Center Industrial Complex around 2019. They have remained married.
(Courtesy of Kaye Maze)
Eaton had noticed a detail in the trial transcripts that she found telling: A police officer named Robert Anderson testified that when he arrived at the apartment as paramedics worked to revive Alex, he saw Russell looking on, impassive. He was acting “rather calmly, just kind of watching,” Anderson told the jury. “He didn’t appear upset, no, not from the outside.” The inference was that Russell was callous, even cold-blooded.
Eaton, having followed the emerging research on trauma, saw something different in his emotionlessness. The encounter with police came just after Russell struggled to resuscitate his son, who had turned blue and gone into cardiac arrest. She was struck by how little the investigators who first interacted with the Mazes understood acute stress and how much that lack of knowledge shaped the investigation that followed.
Eaton had educated herself about the effects of trauma because it had altered not only the lives of her defense clients but also her own. She arrived in Nashville during a tumultuous adolescence, after running away from home in Clarksville, Tennessee, at the age of 16. “I’d experienced a significant trauma, and I didn’t know how to ask for help,” she told me. She was from a peripatetic military family that was not equipped to give her the intensive support she needed. In a Nashville phone booth, Eaton spotted a sticker that read, IF YOU ARE A TEENAGER AND YOU NEED HELP, CALL THIS NUMBER. She dialed the number and, weeping into the receiver, said she had nowhere else to turn.
That phone call, Eaton believes, saved her life. It led her to an emergency shelter for teenagers, where she found counselors who were trained in crisis intervention, and after receiving daily therapy, she returned to Clarksville to finish high school. From that point forward, she knew she wanted to go into a helping profession — a journey that led her first to psychology and then to the law. She was drawn to representing defendants, whom she saw as survivors of trauma too. “No 5-year-old dreams of growing up to become a felon,” she told me. She joined the public defender’s office in 2007, and squaring off against the DA’s office day after day, she proved to be both quick on her feet and tenacious. Three years later, she started her own private practice.
Funk, the district attorney, had always regarded her as one of the brightest stars in Nashville’s criminal defense bar, and as his conviction-review unit foundered, he began talking to her in 2019 about taking the helm. He knew that if he wanted to make the unit effective, he had to put someone with her singular focus and defense experience in charge. Nashville’s CRU was not the only one to fall short of expectations; many conviction-review units have not produced an exoneration. Some are simply overburdened and underfunded, while others have met resistance from local judges. But underperforming conviction-review units have also given rise to suspicion, among defense attorneys, that there is a more cynical calculus at work; they see DAs who want to signal their commitment to justice reform without actually doing the hard work of challenging fellow prosecutors and local police officers.
Eaton meets with District Attorney Glenn Funk and Anna Hamilton, an assistant district attorney, about an upcoming hearing in Russell Maze’s case.
“The C.R.U., as presently constituted, is a complete and utter sham,” the defense lawyer Daniel Horwitz wrote in 2018, when the Nashville DA’s office declined to act on new information that his client, convicted of murder, was the wrong man.
In Funk’s willingness to try to do better, Eaton saw an opportunity to give defendants with credible innocence claims a fair hearing, while using the resources of the state to investigate. The first case she took on, in the summer of 2020, was Horwitz’s client, Joseph Webster. Tennessee law does not give prosecutors any clear mechanism to get back into court if they uncover a potential wrongful conviction. Eaton coordinated with Horwitz, who had already obtained DNA testing of the murder weapon and tracked down eyewitnesses to the killing whom the police had ignored. After conducting her own independent investigation, which built on two years of work by her predecessor, she went to court to jointly argue with the defense that Webster should walk free. His conviction was vacated, and he was released, having served nearly 15 years of a life sentence.
This became the template for how Eaton worked. Conducting her own parallel investigations alongside the Tennessee Innocence Project, she probed more troubled cases. Of the five convictions she helped undo, three relied on forensic findings that are now seen as flawed.
One of those defendants, Claude Garrett, had already spent nearly 28 years in prison when Eaton began looking at his case in 2020. He survived a 1992 house fire only to be charged with murder after fire investigators determined that the blaze, which claimed the life of his fiancée, was intentionally set. He was locked up when his daughter was 5 years old. In the intervening years, many once-accepted tenets of arson science were debunked. The “pour patterns,” or burn marks, that arson investigators saw as proof that someone poured an accelerant around the house had come to be understood as a natural byproduct of fast-burning fires. Several nationally recognized fire experts who reviewed the case testified that there was no evidence the fire was intentionally set. “When stripped of demonstrably unreliable testimony, faulty investigative methods and baseless speculation,” Eaton wrote to the court, “the case against Garrett is nonexistent.”
Garrett’s conviction was vacated, and he was released in May 2022 at the age of 65. He died suddenly, five months later, of heart failure. “When we have advancements in science, why don’t we look at every single case in which that science convicted someone and see whether the evidence still stands up?” his daughter, Deana Watson, says. “People are going to die in prison who don’t belong there — human beings who literally have no reason to be there, who are stuck there based on what we thought was true 30 years ago.”
Deana Watson’s father, Claude Garrett, served nearly 30 years for murder before being exonerated. He died months after his release at age 65.
(Photos of Watson and Garrett courtesy of Watson)
Claude Garrett’s death would always hang over Eaton — a nagging reminder, as she worked on the Maze case, that there was no time to spare. She and Hamilton, who was a former federal defender, threw themselves into their reinvestigation. The lawyers learned about blood disorders and genetic diseases, poring over medical journals and buttonholing doctors. They spoke to experts about police interrogation techniques and the effects of emotional trauma on suspects. They visited the Mazes’ former apartment complex to visualize the sequence of events. They conferred with lawyers at the Tennessee Innocence Project, who were talking to other medical experts around the country. Still, the question remained: What had happened to Alex?
Eaton wanted to stay focused on the specifics of Alex’s case and not get lost in the controversy over shaken baby syndrome. While there is no disagreement that the violent shaking of an infant causes harm, there is fierce dissent over whether the symptoms associated with the diagnosis can be taken as proof that abuse has occurred. (“Few pediatric diagnoses have engendered as much debate,” the American Academy of Pediatrics acknowledged in a 2020 policy statement.) This has left both doctors and the courts divided. Over the past four years, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, nine people whose convictions rested on the diagnosis — five parents and four caregivers — have been exonerated. Last year, a New Jersey appellate court backed a lower-court judge who pronounced the diagnosis “akin to junk science.” But appellate judges in recent years have also upheld shaken baby convictions, including that of a man on death row in Texas, Robert Roberson, whose execution date is set for October.
Eaton reached out to experts in the fields of pathology, radiology, neonatology, genetics and ophthalmology, and over the spring and summer and then fall of 2023, physicians who looked at the medical records independently of one another came to the same conclusion: Alex’s symptoms were not consistent with abuse. They observed that the bleeding in his brain and around his eyes continued to progress during his hospitalization. Such ongoing hemorrhaging “suggests a mechanism other than abusive trauma,” explained Dr. Franco Recchia, an ophthalmology specialist. So, too, did the increased bleeding around Alex’s brain. The doctors were in agreement: This progression of symptoms pointed to an undiagnosed, underlying condition — like a metabolic disease or blood disorder — which most likely resulted in a stroke. After reviewing the autopsy slides and other medical records, Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan, the chief medical examiner in Knox and Anderson counties, determined that Alex “had a systemic disorder that was never properly worked up due to the early fixation on the alleged nonaccidental head trauma.”
The doctors noted the absence of obvious evidence of violence; Alex had no neck injuries, broken ribs, limb fractures or skull trauma. They also zeroed in on what Eaton and Hamilton found noteworthy in Alex’s hospital records: Starling rendered her diagnosis within hours of Alex’s arrival at the ER, before receiving all the results of blood work and other testing. And she did not consult his pediatrician’s records, which documented a sudden increase in his head circumference weeks before he arrived at the emergency room. (Starling did not respond to requests for comment.)
But it was the analysis of one last piece of evidence, a set of X-rays known as a skeletal survey, that helped Eaton understand something that she had been trying to make sense of, but that had remained stubbornly perplexing: the clavicle fracture. A close examination of the medical records showed that chest X-rays, performed when Alex was first admitted to the emergency room, did not detect any breaks. Only after he was diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome was a fracture identified on the skeletal survey, on his second day in the hospital.
Interpreting radiological images like a skeletal survey can be subjective, and when evaluating a curved bone like the clavicle, radiologists may disagree about whether a tiny abnormality is a fracture or not. When Dr. Julie Mack, a Harvard-trained radiologist, reviewed the images last fall for the Tennessee Innocence Project, she said she saw no evidence of a bone break. She left open the possibility that a slender hairline fracture was present, which she could not detect in her copy of the original images. But, she explained, “He underwent CPR, which, if a clavicle fracture was present, is a sufficient explanation for such a fracture.” Mack’s review of the records, which included several CT scans and an MRI of Alex’s brain, led her to conclude that the infant had suffered not from abuse but rather from “an ongoing, abnormal, natural disease process.”
In coordination with the conviction-review unit, Russell’s attorneys filed a motion in state court in December, seeking to reopen State of Tennessee v. Russell Lee Maze. “Physicians who suspect abusive head trauma can no longer stop their analysis with the identification of the shaken baby syndrome triad,” it read. “Instead, they must seriously consider all other etiologies that may plausibly explain the constellation of symptoms and eliminate them as causes.” Horwitz — the attorney who once called the CRU a sham — and one of his law partners, Melissa Dix, also filed a motion on behalf of Kaye, petitioning the court to vacate her felony conviction. The decision about whether to reopen the case was in the hands of the judge, Dozier; he had been on the bench since 1997, having won reelection or run unopposed in every election since his appointment.
Judge Steve Dozier in his chambers
Eaton walked over to the courthouse that day with Hamilton to file the unit’s 71-page report, which detailed their investigation. Eaton and her team wrote a report each time they went before a judge to ask that a conviction be overturned. It was imperative, she believed, to establish trust with judges before asking them to take the weighty, and sometimes politically perilous, step of tossing out a jury’s verdict, and to signal that they had the full backing of the DA’s office. “While it was reasonable for the treating doctors to consider abuse,” the report read, “every other medical possibility was either overlooked or completely ignored. Law-enforcement officers blindly followed the course set out by Dr. Starling and failed to consider any other explanation for Alex’s condition. After an investigation comprised of a hasty medical determination, an interrogation of traumatized parents and little else, the case was considered closed.”
The lawyers recommended that the court vacate Russell’s and Kaye’s convictions. “The tragedies in this case cannot be overstated,” they concluded. “What every single expert the C.R.U. consulted with agrees upon is that Alex Maze did not die from abuse.”
Shortly after they filed their report, Dozier agreed to set a hearing so that he could evaluate the findings from the state’s and defense’s expert witnesses.
When Russell was led in handcuffs into the courtroom on a drizzly morning this past March, he bore little resemblance to the ruddy-cheeked new father paramedics found in 1999, struggling to revive his infant son. At 58, his careworn face was framed by thick, prison-issued glasses. He walked with a cane, which he had to maneuver with both hands manacled together, and as he took his seat at the defense table, he winced. Beside him sat Kaye, her expression guarded, her shoulder-length hair shot through with gray. The husband and wife, who last lived together when Bill Clinton was president, were instructed not to have physical contact. Wordlessly, they gazed out at the courtroom and waited for the hearing to begin.
Kaye and Russell Maze sit together in silence at the start of a two-day hearing in which medical experts rebut the original diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.
Eaton had not slept well. She knew that the experts who were slated to testify would be good witnesses, but she worried that their testimony would not be enough to satisfy Dozier. It was Dozier who signed off on Kaye’s plea deal and Dozier who presided over not only Russell’s trials but also his appeals and postconviction proceedings. It was Dozier who sentenced Russell to life in prison.
She studied him as he sat on the dais before them, quietly conferring with his clerk, and tried to read his mood. Eaton appeared before him when she was a public defender, and she was well aware of how tough he could be. But some of her biggest victories came in his courtroom, including the Joseph Webster case, her first exoneration. That case had included the persuasive power of DNA evidence, something she was painfully aware, at that moment, that the Maze case lacked.
The state’s opening statement would be delivered by Funk. District attorneys seldom appear in court to throw their weight behind their prosecutors, but both Funk and Eaton thought it would send the right message to Dozier. Funk struck a note of deference as he underscored his support of the CRU’s findings, playing not to the local TV news cameras in the courtroom but to an audience of one. “Every single medical expert, using current science, confirms that Russell and Kaye Maze are actually innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted,” he told the judge. “It is my duty as district attorney to ask the court to vacate these convictions.”
But Dozier appeared unreceptive from the start. When Russell’s lead attorney, Jason Gichner, gave his opening statement outlining the defense experts’ findings, Dozier grew impatient, interjecting, “Do they factor in that there’s a history of a statement that the child was jostled?” When it was time for the physicians to testify, he remained obstinate. He grilled them about granular aspects of their testimony, repeatedly breaking in to interrogate them and questioning whether their opinions were grounded in any kind of new scientific thinking. He wondered aloud if different experts, evaluating the same evidence, might reach a completely different conclusion. Even when he said nothing, he radiated disapproval; he arched his eyebrows, pursed his lips and shot exasperated glares at whoever was sitting in the witness box. He grew more skeptical as the hearing went on, accusing Russell’s attorneys of only presenting experts who had been “picked and chosen” to best suit the defense’s narrative.
Neuroradiologist Dr. Lawrence Hutchins was one of seven experts who testified at the Maze hearing.
During breaks, the lawyers conferred with one another, unsure how to interpret the judge’s intransigence. Dozier was always prickly, and in the absence of an adversarial party, he seemed to have decided to take on the role of adversary himself. Perhaps the judge was just putting them through their paces, pushing back on them to elicit answers that would only strengthen their arguments. Or maybe, Eaton feared, they had lost him. For months, her team worried that Dozier would balk at the fact that their experts had not coalesced around a single diagnosis that could explain all of Alex’s symptoms, and yet without new blood and tissue samples to test, it was all but impossible to agree upon a definitive cause of death. When she called Dr. Carla Sandler-Wilson, a neonatologist, to the stand on the second day of the hearing, she had the doctor inform the court that newborn screening tests — which can identify genetic, blood and metabolic abnormalities — were so limited at the time of Alex’s birth that he was screened for just four disorders. “There are over 50 tests on the Tennessee State Newborn Screen now,” Sandler-Wilson explained.
The Mazes remained composed throughout hours of graphic testimony about the condition of their son’s body and the details of his autopsy. All told, seven experts from around the country took the stand to attest to the fact that Alex’s symptoms resulted from natural causes, not trauma.
In the weeks leading up to the hearing, Eaton had written and rewritten her closing argument. She paced her house for hours, practicing until she could recite it from memory. She rehearsed it in the shower, and in her car, and in the quiet of her home office. She delivered it for friends and colleagues so she could gauge whether the most important lines were resonating, and she recited it to her therapist. Her closing argument was a very different narrative from the one prosecutors presented at trial. “If Alex Maze could speak to us,” the argument she had prepared began, “he would tell us his parents loved him, cared for him and, to his last breath, did not give up on him.”
As Eaton watched Gichner deliver his closing argument, which Dozier cut into with rapid-fire questions, she realized that she needed to change course. An emotional plea was not going to win the judge over. She set aside the speech she knew by heart. She would have to improvise.
Eaton on the first day of the Maze hearing
When her turn came to speak, Eaton rose and walked across the courtroom to face the judge. Gripping the lectern, her face rigid with concentration, she tried to find the right words. “Our office receives hundreds of applications for review per year,” she began. “Out of those hundreds, we take on less than 5%. And of that 5%, sometimes we have to ask experts to review the information in the case.” She continued: “We’ve had experts look at cases and tell us, ‘No, you got this right — this was trauma, this was abuse.’ And we turn down those cases. But sometimes, your honor, a case is different.”
She spoke quickly, as if by racing forward, she could prevent the judge from interrupting her. “Over the last two years, this unit has analyzed every detail of this case,” she said. “We’ve read every record. Every line of testimony. We’ve consulted expert after expert. And we did not just rely on the petitioner’s experts. We got baby Alex his own independent experts, including the chief medical examiner for Knox and Anderson county, who more typically testifies for the state. Including a local practitioner trained at Vanderbilt, who we trust with our babies every single day. Including the former chief pathologist for Vanderbilt University. And one by one, expert after expert, told us this was not abuse —”
Dozier leaned forward in his high-backed chair. He wanted to know about the doctor who had diagnosed Alex with shaken baby syndrome, Starling, and whether she had been consulted. “But she wasn’t?” he asked sharply.
Eaton was startled by the question because it showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the work that the conviction-review unit did. Her duty was not to double-down on the state’s original trial theory but rather to investigate whether there was new evidence to consider, and whether that evidence was consequential enough that it should change the outcome of the case. Just as she did not ask the original prosecutors to evaluate the soundness of the conviction, so she did not ask Starling to review the accuracy of her diagnosis. Eaton had sought out physicians who did not have a record to defend.
“No, she was not,” Eaton said. “But we consulted experts in every possible field that could be relevant to this case. And one by one, they told us that the science presented to this court was outdated. One by one, they told us that our understanding of things has changed. And one by one, they told us that Russell and Kaye Maze did not abuse their son, and they did not cause his death.” She looked directly at the Mazes as she spoke. Then she turned to the judge and raised her voice to signal the importance of the point she wanted to make, drawing out each word: “The state got this wrong.”
When she finished, Dozier offered no reaction as he looked down from the dais. “All right,” he said flatly. “I will take this under advisement.” Court was adjourned for an indeterminate period of time — as long as it took for him to make his ruling. There was nothing more to do but wait.
After court adjourned, Dozier would decide whether to grant Maze a new trial.
A few days after the conclusion of the hearing, the two prosecutors who originally tried the case wrote to the court voicing their opposition to the effort to clear Russell Maze. Brian Holmgren and Katrin Miller expressed outrage that they had learned of the hearing only from local media coverage, and they pushed back against the notion that the science behind shaken baby syndrome had grown weaker in recent years. That idea had been promulgated, they asserted, by a “small cadre of medical witnesses” and shaken baby “denialists.” They went on to suggest that the push to exonerate Russell was part of a concerted, nationwide campaign to discredit the diagnosis. The hearing, they wrote, had given “denialist medical witnesses another opportunity to publicize their false scientific claims.”
Dozier informed the two lawyers that they could not insert themselves into the proceeding, and he denied them the opportunity to file a brief with the court that would have formalized their opposition. He did not, however, hand down his ruling. One week passed, then two. A third week came and went without any word. As the days dragged on, Eaton had trouble focusing. Briefly, she entertained a bit of magical thinking; maybe the judge was drafting such a sweeping ruling in the Mazes’ favor that it was just taking him a little extra time. She stared at her phone, checking her messages again and again. “I’m worried,” she told me on April 23. “I’m worried for Russell. I’m worried for Kaye. I’m worried for the morale of my team and worried that if we lose this case, it will make it a million times more difficult to help anyone else.”
Two days later, Eaton was working on her laptop when she spotted an email from the court. She could see that it landed in her inbox a half-hour earlier. The silence of her phone — no calls, no texts — signaled bad news.
The decision leaned heavily on the findings at Russell’s preceding trials. “Substantial evidence presented at two trials is not sufficiently overridden by the new scientific evidence,” it read. Dozier did not give the witnesses’ testimony at the hearing any more weight than the original testimony of witnesses like Starling. The present-day testimony did not represent a new scientific consensus; in the judge’s estimation, it was nothing more than “new ammunition in a ‘battle of the experts.’” He went on to find fault with the hearing itself, which he criticized for lacking “the adversarial role of the prosecutor” — a weakness, in his eyes, that rendered experts’ testimony less credible. With no opposing counsel to cross-examine the witnesses, he argued, “fresh opinions were offered but not probed.” Ultimately, Dozier wrote, “The court does not find an injustice nor that the petitioner is actually innocent based on new scientific evidence.”
An emotional Maze on the second day of the hearing in March
Bewildered, Eaton tried to grasp what she had just read: The judge was penalizing them because everyone — the state, the defense, the witnesses — agreed that the Mazes committed no crime. As she wrestled with the implications of the ruling over the days that followed, she began to ask herself increasingly absurd questions. By the judge’s logic, should she have been performatively combative with the defense’s witnesses? Would Russell have stood a better chance if the DA’s office had fought the defense’s efforts to prove his innocence? Did the “adversarial role of the prosecutor” leave no room for the state to right a wrong — or worse, did it require prosecutors to uphold a bad conviction? Dozier’s ruling went to the heart of what a conviction-review unit is supposed to do, and it seemed to eviscerate it.
Never had there been a day, since taking on the Maze case, when Eaton did not know that losing was a possibility. But the implications of Dozier’s ruling made her worry for the future — both for the chilling effect it might have on other judges at the courthouse and, more broadly, for the system as a whole. Her own office filed the original criminal charges against the Mazes, but the same office could not undo them. If the DA’s office could not fix this, who could?
Russell remains one of many defendants who have been behind bars for decades based on the testimony of expert witnesses who believed in the inviolability of shaken baby syndrome. In April, Starling — who, by her own account, has testified in court more than 100 times — was a state witness at a hearing for a case in Atlanta that was similar to Russell’s. Danyel Smith, who was convicted in 2003 of the shaking death of his 2-month-old son, was asking for a new trial, asserting that the infant died from trauma sustained during childbirth. Starling, who was not involved in the original prosecution, testified that the only explanation for the baby’s symptoms was abuse. During cross-examination, Starling was asked about Tennessee v. Maze. “I’m not familiar with this case,” she told Smith’s attorney. The lawyer then produced hundreds of pages of testimony bearing her name. “That does prove that I was there,” she allowed. But the facts of the case had escaped her, she said. “If you say he was convicted, then I will take you at your word.”
“He has served 25 years in prison?” the lawyer pressed.
“Again, not in my personal knowledge,” she replied.
Russell’s case is currently before the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, which must decide whether to grant him permission to appeal the ruling. “The Tennessee Innocence Project fully believes in Russell’s innocence, and we will not stop fighting until he is released from prison,” Gichner told me. (Kaye’s appeal to vacate her felony conviction will proceed separately.) The case now faces a new challenge: Lawyers working for Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti of Tennessee, a conservative Republican, are handling the appeal. That office is often at odds with Funk’s; in late June, it called on the appellate court to deny Russell permission to appeal.
Russell is now back at Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, a notoriously rough private prison northeast of Nashville, where five men were stabbed in the course of three weeks earlier this year. Kaye has returned to her home in the mountains of East Tennessee, where she moved when Russell was incarcerated nearby, before his transfer to Trousdale. She lives alone, her brief time with her son preserved in photos that stand alongside her collection of framed family portraits. Her, beaming, with Alex in her arms; him, wearing tiny overalls, his gaze unfocused.
Kaye Maze and her dog, Chloe, at home after Russell Maze was denied a new trial
Eaton’s powerlessness, as an assistant DA, to rectify what she sees as a wrongful conviction felt more crushing than any failure, as a public defender, to prevent a client from facing an unjust punishment. “The weight is heavier because we did this,” she says. She wakes up in the night thinking about the Mazes — of how Kaye stepped out one afternoon to buy baby formula and returned home to find her life irrevocably broken. Of how Russell, as of this June, has endured 25 years of imprisonment. Of how the Mazes lost their son and then each other. And she agonizes over whether her decision to take on the case caused them harm. “We gave them a whole fresh set of trauma, and I’m haunted by that,” she says. “Before we got involved, I imagine Russell was trying to make peace with his situation and live the best life he could behind bars. He and Kaye had their visits together. And then we came along and disrupted all that. Teams of lawyers! Doctors! The elected DA! More than losing, what is weighing on me is that we gave them hope.”
A landmark bill aimed at standardizing and improving the way police treat victims in the aftermath of a sexual assault has become law in Connecticut.
The new law establishes a council that will create a model policy for police responding to sexual assault, and it received unanimous, bipartisan support. The law also requires that officers refer victims to a victim advocate, distribute information about services available, and help the victim and any children present obtain medical care. Every law enforcement agency in the state will have to meet or exceed the model policy by September 2025, and the council will collect data about police and the overall criminal justice response to sexual assault statewide.
Democratic state Rep. Eleni Kavros DeGraw, a co-sponsor of the bill, cited an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting in her testimony about the need for sexual assault victims to be treated better by law enforcement. The investigation, featured in Victim/Suspect, a documentary film by Center for Investigative Reporting Studios, found dozens of cases, including several in Connecticut, in which women reporting sexual assaults were ultimately charged with crimes after law enforcement doubted their stories or zeroed in on behavior common for victims of trauma.
“This isn’t just a bill that victims and survivors want, it’s a bill that law enforcement also wants and needs in order to serve the public to the very best of their ability,” Kavros DeGraw said.
Kavros DeGraw attended a screening of Victim/Suspect sponsored by the Bipartisan Women’s Caucus last fall. There, she met Nicole Chase, who was featured in the film and an episode of Reveal and a constituent of Kavros DeGraw’s.
Chase told an officer in the Canton Police Department in 2017 that her boss had sexually harassed her and ordered her to perform oral sex. When she acknowledged weeks later in a formal interview that the sex act had occurred, the detective concluded she’d lied by omission and charged her with making a false statement.
“I was unaware that (this phenomenon) was happening, not just all over Connecticut, but also all over the country,” Kavros DeGraw said.
Prosecutors later dropped the case against Chase, and the city of Canton eventually settled a civil lawsuit. Her boss was never charged with any crime. Kavros DeGraw vowed she would do something about Chase’s treatment.
During a public hearing on the bill, Kavros DeGraw used Chase’s case as an example of why the new bill is needed. “While the case was eventually settled in court in favor of the survivor, it does not erase the trauma the survivor experienced,” she said.
Our investigation into sexual assault cases found that police routinely deploy interrogation techniques meant for criminal suspects on alleged victims, including lying about evidence. When reporting victims recant or backtrack, it can lead to false reporting charges: Of 52 cases involving false reporting charges that we analyzed closely, nearly two-thirds involved a recantation. In nine cases, the recantation was the only evidence cited by police.
About half of the 52 cases we analyzed came from Connecticut, where a statewide court system allowed us to more easily locate false reporting cases tied to sexual assault. Our analysis found four Connecticut cases in which the reporting victim was arrested or charged with a crime within 24 hours; in two cases, a recantation was the only evidence police cited. In one prominent Bridgeport case, an 18-year-old reported she was raped by two men at an off-campus college party. Detectives concluded that the sex was consensual and charged her with false reporting and felony tampering with evidence.
But the detectives’ conclusion was based largely on her recantation during a 45-minute recorded interview-turned-interrogation. The audio recording showed that a detective lied to her about nonexistent evidence, told her that she wasn’t telling the truth, interrupted her frequently, and repeated questions again and again until she agreed with him that the sex was consensual. She was not aware that she had become the suspect of a crime and was interviewed alone. She pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree falsely reporting an incident and one count of interfering with police and was sentenced to a year in prison.
While the new law doesn’t specifically mention the use of false reporting charges against alleged sexual assault victims, it aims to address the circumstances under which victims often fall under suspicion. Chase endured a long police interview alone, and she thinks an offer for support from a victim advocate could have changed the entire trajectory of her case, had the police specifically mentioned it, as they’ll now be required to do.
“You’re sitting with somebody that’s not judging you, that knows what trauma does,” she said. “It is just somebody there to be there for you.”
Chase said having an advocate might have made her feel safe enough to disclose more details earlier in the process – and maybe prevent the arrest that followed.
She hopes the model policy will more clearly define what a false report is, since she was charged based on not being forthcoming enough.
“That’s not lying,” Chase said. “That’s not falsely reporting something. That is just not being willing to open up to you yet because I don’t feel comfortable with you.”
Kavros DeGraw said she intends for the newly created council to specifically address the use of false reporting charges against victims in its model policy and to mandate trauma-informed training for police to combat misconceptions about missing details or inconsistent statements.
“There are so many pieces to the trauma of these incidents,” she said. “You may not have all of the details in that first meeting, and not because of omission or purposeful lying, but because you have just experienced a trauma, and often it comes back over time.”
Saudi Arabia’s human rights record continues to be deeply concerning. This report includes the four most alarming points at present in Saudi Arabia; including the killing of migrants, repression of dissidents and systemic discrimination against women. The following sectors covered by this report violate international Human Rights standards and demand urgent attention.
Criminal Justice, Arbitrary Arrests and Repression of Dissidents
Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system lacks transparency and fairness, which has a detrimental effect on the safeguarding of human rights. The country’s criminal justice system is ruled by ambiguity1, lacking written laws and granting a degree of autonomy to judges.
The misuse of vague provisions of the law also impacts cybercrime, allowing online activities to be deemed contrary to public order or other lax terminology, and being criminalised.
Trials in Saudi Arabia often fail to meet international standards of fairness. Convictions are reportedly handed down based on coerced confessions and evidence obtained through torture. Particularly prevalent in cases of political dissent, freedom of expression or association. Saudi authorities have detained peaceful dissidents, intellectuals and activists and sentenced them to decade-long terms or death2, for their posts on social media. Furthermore, the abuse of “catch-all” charges violates human rights. “Catch-all” sentences, such as the terrorism penalty3, allow for the criminalisation of peaceful opposition and the defence of human rights.
Extraditions to Saudi Arabia often result in arbitrary detention and unfair trials, with a high risk of torture for the detainees. The mistreatment of detainees, from solitary confinement to incommunicado detention, further violates their right to a fair trial and their human dignity. Such practices highlight the urgent need for reforms to ensure that the criminal justice system complies with international human rights standards and safeguards the rights of all individuals.
Death Penalty
In 2024, Saudi Arabia continues to impose and carry out death sentences. They can be handed down for different crimes, including non-violent ones, which contradicts international standards that reserve the death penalty for the most severe cases.
Hussein Abu al-Khair4 was executed in March 2023. He received the sentence for a drug offence, and after a trial in which he denounced the use of torture to obtain a coerced confession. His execution highlights the continued use of capital punishment despite international protests.
The death penalty is also applied to individuals who were minors when they committed the alleged crimes, even when the Saudi Human Rights Commission5 has assured that the death penalty would have no repercussions on minors. Cases such as Jalal Labbad6 are still at risk of imminent execution right now, after Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court secretly upheld his sentence.
Execution sentenced by the Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system is also at risk of having been handed down in irregular trials. These practices reflect a broader pattern of human rights abuses, in which defendants are denied fair processes and could be victims of torture and harsh sentences for non-violent crimes.
This penalty, not reserved for the most severe crimes, is also handed down in freedom of expression related crimes. In July of 2023, Muhammad al-Ghamdi7, a retired professor, was sentenced to death for his peaceful activity on the Internet. Convicted under Saudi Arabia’s anti-terrorism law, this case exemplifies the extreme measures taken to repress dissent.
In spite of international pressure, Saudi Arabia continues applying capital punishment for a wide range of crimes, including activities preserved by international human rights standards. The continued executions of individuals following unfair trials call for urgent international scrutiny and action to uphold human rights in Saudi Arabia.
Migrants and Detention Centres
Saudi Arabia’s treatment of migrants is a human rights concern. The crackdown by the Saudi authorities on individuals accused of violating residency, border or labor regulations has resulted in many arbitrary arrests and deportations.
There have been reports of Saudi border guards using explosive weapons and shooting migrants at close range. Attacks directed against the migrant population attempting to enter the country. These actions, reported over the past year, have resulted in hundreds of deaths and serious human rights violations. Human Rights Watch 8has noted that these attacks may appear to be systematic and deliberate, raising the alarm of human rights violations. According to reports9, there were risks for migrants and asylum seekers attempting to reach the country through Yemen. Saudi artillery and sniper fire on the Yemeni border resulted in at least 794 deaths and 1,703 injuries in 2022.
On the other hand, Saudi Arabia’s migrant detention centers also become a point of interest when assessing the quality of human rights. Harsh conditions characterize these centers10. Migrants and asylum seekers often suffer prolonged and arbitrary detention without access to legal recourse. Detention conditions are appalling; inadequate food, poor water quality and lack of hygiene encourage the spread of disease. There are reports of abuses and deaths at the hands of detention center officials, which is a blatant violation of human rights.
In addition, the kafala system in place in Saudi Arabia also encourages the exploitation of migrant workers. Despite recent reforms, the system remains one of the strictest11, giving employers excessive control over the mobility and legal status of their migrant workers. This imbalance of power leads to situations of abuse, such as passport confiscation, wage delays and forced labor.
Women’s Rights and Guardianship System
Saudi women are violated and suffer significant discrimination, both in law and in practice
Despite the introduction of the Personal Status Law in 202212, Saudi women continue to suffer significant discrimination, both in law and in practice. This law has codified male guardianship, formalizing a tradition that undermines women’s rights and perpetuates systemic inequalities across Saudi society.
Under the Personal Status Law, fathers are appointed guardians of their children by default. Mothers are still granted custody in the case of separation, but the child’s legal guardian is always the father’s role. This law does not safeguard the interests of the child, and usually disregards them, limiting the mother’s role when it comes to making binding decisions in her children’s lives. Limiting the mother’s influence on their children’s social and economic well-being, disregarding her and her child’s rights.
The Law perpetuates gender discrimination13 when it comes to divorce. It limits a woman’s freedom to divorce, requiring must prove harm that makes continuation of the marriage impossible. This law is also ambiguous and does not specify what constitutes “harm” or what evidence is admissible, leaving the law up to the judge’s discretion.
Women’s rights activism in Saudi Arabia is being targeted by local authorities14. Saudi Arabian campaigners for women’s rights are subjected to harsh persecution, and harsher sentences of charges that include peaceful activism as a form of terrorism. Women’s rights and freedoms are still severely restricted by Saudi Arabia’s overall legislative structure, even with minor advances like permitting women to drive and expanding employment prospects. Protecting the rights of all women in the kingdom and ensuring gender equality requires comprehensive reforms that tackle these fundamental issues.
Recommendations
The immediate release of all persons detained for exercising their right of expression. And the establishment of a transparent legal code that adheres to international Human Rights standards.
The reservation of this penalty for the most severe crimes. And the suspension of the execution of those convicted of crimes committed when they were minors.
To immediately revoke any policy to deliberately use lethal force on migrants and asylum seekers. To improve the conditions in migrant detention centers.
To update the Personal Status Law to ensure the end of discrimination against women
Endnotes
World Report 2024: Saudi Arabia. (2024). Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/saudi-arabia?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
Amnesty International. (2023). Human Rights in Saudi Arabia 2023. https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/middle-east/saudi-arabia/report-saudi-arabia/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
Ibid.
Amnesty International. (2023). Human Rights in Saudi Arabia 2023. https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/middle-east/saudi-arabia/report-saudi-arabia/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
Amnesty International. (2024). Saudi Arabia: Two young men at imminent risk of execution: Abdullah al-Derazi, Jalal Labbad – Amnesty International. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde23/7363/2023/en/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
Ibid.
Amnesty International. (2023). Human Rights in Saudi Arabia 2023. https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/middle-east/saudi-arabia/report-saudi-arabia/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
Hardman, N. (2023). “They Fired on Us Like Rain”. En Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/08/21/they-fired-us-rain/saudi-arabian-mass-killings-ethiopian-migrants-yemen-saudi?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Saudi Arabia. (2024, abril). United States Department Of State.
Ibid.
World Report 2024: Saudi Arabia. (2024). Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/saudi-arabia?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
In the summer of 2021, New York Police Department officer Willie Thompson had sex at least twice with a witness to a Harlem carjacking that he was investigating. When a prosecutor questioned Thompson about his relationship with the witness, Thompson first lied, denying the relationship, before recanting and confessing the next day, according to an internal discipline report. About a week later, the woman, sounding upset, called the prosecutor and said Thompson had cornered her at a bodega, blaming her for getting him in trouble and threatening that officers from the precinct would be coming to her home, the document shows.
Thompson, who declined to comment, was found guilty by the NYPD on two misconduct charges and was placed on probation.
ProPublica has found the NYPD site for allowing the public to track officers’ misconduct is shockingly unreliable. Cases against officers frequently vanish from the site for days — sometimes weeks — at a time. The issue affects nearly all of the officers in the database, with discipline disappearing from the profiles of patrol officers all the way up to its most senior uniformed officer.
ProPublica examined more than 1,000 daily snapshots of the database’s contents and found that, since the fall of 2022, the number of discipline cases that appear in the database has fluctuated often and wildly. Try to pull up the record for a disciplined officer and the site sometimes spits back, “This officer does not have any applicable entries.”
Since May 2021, at least 88% of the disciplinary cases that once appeared in the data have gone missing at some point, though some were later restored. As of this week, 54% of cases that had at one point been in the system were missing.
“It is really disconcerting to see that there are records that are there one day that are not the next,” said Jennvine Wong, a supervising attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project.
In the NYPD’s Officer Database, Discipline Records Frequently Vanish
A ProPublica analysis of more than 1,000 daily snapshots of the NYPD’s Office Profile database found that, since fall 2022, cases have repeatedly disappeared and the number of publicly accessible cases fluctuates often and wildly.
The NYPD did not respond to repeated requests for interviews or comment.
Because the department’s database is designed to show discipline only for active officers, some cases relating to former officers might have been removed from the data over time. Yet that would only explain a fraction of the missing cases. For most of the past year, at least a third of cases that had previously appeared in the database were missing.
These missing cases have included Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, the force’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, and six deputy chiefs whose assignments include the department’s transit bureau and the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
The allegations against these high-ranking officers include being “discourteous” to a suspect, drinking while on duty, improper use of department property, and wrongful searches, frisks and uses of force.
In the chief of department’s case, Maddrey was docked 45 vacation days over a 2015 incident in which he impeded internal affairs officials who were investigating an altercation with an ex-lover and fellow officer. The incident ended with the officer brandishing a gun at Maddrey. When a reporter looked up Maddrey’s discipline record on Wednesday, the department’s system reported no disciplinary cases against him.
In interviews, several advocates for police reform and accountability said the issues raised by ProPublica’s analysis renewed their concerns about the NYPD’s competence, legal compliance and accountability.
“It just continues to undermine the public confidence in that they care at all about discipline and police accountability,” said Lupe Aguirre, a senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “Their track record shows that they are both unwilling and unable to hold their officers accountable.”
While people across the country rallied against police brutality in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis officers in 2020, reform advocates in New York scored a major victory. Capitalizing on the groundswell of public demand for accountability, they pushed lawmakers to repeal a state statute that, for more than four decades, prohibited the release of personnel information about police officers.
Early the next year, the NYPD published a searchable database of its uniformed officers, allowing the public to look up cops and see their training histories, departmental awards and, for the first time, internal discipline records. In a department-wide memo, agency brass reportedly touted the move as a “step that increases transparency and improves accountability.”
Despite a 2012 local law that requires agencies to publish their data on the city’s open-data platform, the police department chose a vendor best known for selling “athlete management” software for sports teams to run the officer lookup system.
The source code of the officer profile website reveals it runs on software from RockDaisy, a New York-based software company. A blog post on its site, first published in 2017 and updated last year, says it has been licensed to several teams in the NFL, NHL and NBA and “the world’s largest police department,” an apparent reference to the NYPD.
RockDaisy’s founders did not respond to ProPublica’s inquiries about the company’s relationship with the police department. While RockDaisy does appear in a database of qualified vendors, a spokesperson for the city comptroller, which audits agency spending and reviews city contracts, said her office could not find any contracts with or payments to the company.
Aguirre and Wong, the Legal Aid Society attorney, cited the department’s habit of resisting oversight to argue that disclosure of officer misconduct data should not be entrusted to the department itself.
A schedule of upcoming releases shows that the NYPD’s officer profile data was supposed to be added to Open Data by the end of last year, but that still has not happened.
A spokesperson for the city’s chief technology officer, whose agency operates the Open Data platform, did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.
Adrienne Schmoeker, who led the city’s Open Data program from 2016 to 2019 and served as New York City’s deputy chief analytics officer under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, said it was not unusual for data releases to fall behind schedule. But failing to publish quality data reliably, she said, risks losing the public’s trust, especially when New Yorkers assume the worst: that agencies are hiding unflattering information.
“That’s extremely problematic, even if it’s wrong,” Schmoeker said, “because it erodes the trust that is essential between New Yorkers and their government.”
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
Federal authorities are investigating the involvement of Chinese organized crime rings in gift card fraud schemes that have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars or more from American consumers.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has launched a task force, whose existence has not previously been reported, to combat a scheme known as “card draining,” in which thieves use stolen or altered card numbers to siphon off money before the owner can spend it. The initiative has been dubbed “Project Red Hook,” for the perpetrators’ ties to China and their exploitation of cards hung in store kiosks on “J-hooks.”
This marks the first time that federal authorities have focused on the role of Chinese organized crime in gift card fraud and devoted resources to fighting it. Homeland Security began prioritizing gift card fraud late last year in response to a flurry of consumer complaints and arrests connected to card draining.
Over the past 18 months, law enforcement across the country has arrested about 100 people for card draining, of whom 80 to 90 are Chinese nationals or Chinese Americans, according to Adam Parks, a Homeland Security assistant special agent in charge based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Parks, who is leading the task force, estimates that another 1,000 people could be involved in card draining in the U.S., mostly as runners for the gangs.
“We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially billions of dollars, [and] that’s a substantial risk to our economy and to people’s confidence in their retail environment,” he told ProPublica.
Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. The crooks then repair the packaging, return to a store and place the cards back on a rack. When a customer unwittingly selects and loads money onto a tampered card, the criminal is able to access the card online and steal the balance.
The DHS team in Baton Rouge led an investigation that resulted in the conviction and 2023 sentencing to prison of a Canadian man who stole more than $22 million by operating an illicit online gift card marketplace that victimized American consumers and businesses. As arrests for card draining began piling up around the country, Parks and special agent Dariush Vollenweider saw the need for a national response.
Last November, they convened a two-day summit at DHS headquarters in Washington, D.C., attended by many of the country’s top retailers and gift card suppliers, including Walmart. Federal authorities pushed the industry to share information and help thwart the gangs. The agency then issued a bulletin in December alerting law enforcement across the country about the card-tampering tactics. Parks said about 15 Homeland Security agents are now spending most of their time on Project Red Hook.
“It’s not just a one-store problem,” Vollenweider said. “It’s not just a Secret Service or DHS or FBI problem. It’s an industry problem that needs to be addressed.”
The Illinois State Police found hundreds of altered gift cards in the back of a car during a traffic stop in January 2023.
(United States District Court)
Americans are expected to spend more than $200 billion on gift cards this year, according to an industry estimate. Retailers love gift cards because they drive sales and profit: Consumers typically spend more than a card’s value when they shop, and chains like Walmart and Target earn a profit when someone buys a third-party gift card, such as those from Apple or Google.
Data from retailers and consumers shows that card draining has skyrocketed in recent years. Target alone has seen $300 million stolen from customers due to card draining, according to comments last June from a company loss prevention officer contained in a Florida sheriff’s office report. A recent survey by AARP, the nonprofit advocacy group for people over age 50, found that almost a quarter of Americans have given or received a card with no balance on it, presumably because the money had been stolen. More than half of victims surveyed said they couldn’t get a credit or refund. (Apple, Walmart and Target say, in their terms and conditions, that they are not responsible for lost or stolen gift cards.)
More broadly, almost 60% of retailers said they experienced anincrease in gift card scams between 2022 and 2023. Between 2019 and 2023, Americans lost close to $1 billion to card draining and other gift card scams, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
Target and Walmart have faced class-action suits from consumers who bought or received gift cards only to discover the balance had been stolen. In each case, the plaintiffs alleged that the companies have failed to secure the packaging of gift cards and to monitor their displays. “The tampering of Gift Cards purchased from Target is rampant and widespread and Target is well-aware of the problem, yet Target continues to sell unsecure Gift Cards susceptible to tampering without warning consumers of this fact,” reads the complaint in the Target case.
The Walmart case was resolved in 2022 with an undisclosed settlement, and Target is engaged in settlement talks. Apple settled a similar card-draining class-action case in January, agreeing to pay $1.8 million. Walmart and Apple did not admit liability.
Apple declined to comment about card draining and the DHS investigation. In court filings in the class-action, Apple said that since the cards were purchased at Walmart, “the fraud occurred as a result of Walmart’s security protocols, rather than Apple’s.” A Walmart spokesperson told ProPublica, “Although we will not comment on ongoing investigations, we are proud of our routine work with federal law enforcement to stay ahead of these fraudsters and help keep customers safe.”
Target denied in court filings that its gift card security practices were inadequate and that its cards were susceptible to third-party tampering. “We are aware of the prevalence of gift card tampering and take this issue very seriously,” Target said in a statement to ProPublica. “Our cyber fraud and abuse team uses technical controls to help protect guests, and our store teams inspect cards for physical signs of tampering.” Target said it encourages employees to watch for people buying “high dollar amounts or large quantities of gift cards, or tampering with gift cards in stores.” LIke Walmart, Target said it works closely with law enforcement.
Gift card scammers linked to Chinese criminal organizations trick their victims in many ways besides card draining. Some scams dupe victims into unwittingly paying criminals with gift cards. Whatever the ruse, the crime rings make use of low-level “runners” in the U.S., who are almost exclusively Chinese nationals or Chinese Americans. In card draining, the runners assist with removing, tampering and restocking of gift cards, according to court documents and investigators.
A single runner driving from store to store can swipe or return thousands of tampered cards to racks in a short time. “What they do is they just fly into the city and they get a rental car and they just hit every big-box location that they can find along a corridor off an interstate,” said Parks.
In a 24-hour period last December, an alleged runner named Ming Xue visited 14 Walmarts in Ohio before being arrested, according to court documents. Police said they found 2,260 Visa, Apple and Mastercard gift cards in his car. Xue entered the U.S. illegally months before his arrest, according to a prosecution motion. He has pleaded innocent.
DHS is looking at whether Chinese criminal organizations bring people into the U.S. to use them as card-draining runners. John Cassara, a retired federal agent and the author of “China-Specified Unlawful Activities: CCP Inc., Transnational Crime and Money Laundering,” said Chinese criminal enterprises often smuggle workers across the border for other enterprises such as prostitution or growing marijuana.
Parks said investigators are aware that “some of the individuals who were arrested were within weeks to months of being encountered illegally crossing the southern border.”
Other alleged card-draining runners entered the U.S. legally and told police they were hired via online postings. Donghui Liao was arrested at a Florida Target after employees noticed him removing gift cards from a bag and placing them on racks. Through a translator, he told police that his employer hired him online and mailed gift cards to him, according to court documents. He was paid 30 cents for each card he returned to the rack. Police said they found $60,000 worth of tampered cards in his possession. Liao remains in custody and his case was recently transferred to federal court. The DOJ did not respond to requests for comment and Liao has pleaded innocent.
In New Hampshire, police arrested three people between December and March for, among other alleged crimes, using stolen gift card balances to purchase millions of dollars worth of electronics such as iPhones. An apartment used by two of the suspects contained “a large quantity of Apple brand devices, cash, and a computer program that appeared to be running gift card numbers, in real-time,” according to a police report. (Criminals use software to automatically check gift card balances so they can be alerted when a customer buys and loads money onto a tampered card.) The fraudsters typically export the electronics back to China to resell them, according to Vollenweider.
Parks said Red Hook is recommending anti-fraud measures to retailers, such as closer scrutiny of gift card displays, while also heightening awareness of the problem among merchants and local law enforcement. Store security and local police have sometimes treated runners as small-time annoyances and booted them from stores, rather than arresting and prosecuting them, according to Parks. The task force hopes to work with local police to locate and charge previously released runners.
“It’s important for us to start delivering consequences,” he said.
Last year, 25-year-old Carlee Russell called 911 in Hoover, Alabama, reporting that there was a child on the interstate. Then Russell vanished, and no child was found. A massive search effort followed, along with a national media frenzy. Two days later, she returned home, seemingly unharmed but claiming that she had escaped a kidnapping.
After about a week, sympathy for Russell turned to anger as investigators concluded that she had faked her disappearance and charged her with two misdemeanors for false reporting. She pleaded guilty, and a judge ordered Russell to pay nearly $18,000 in restitution and to serve probation and community service – a sentence deemed far too lenient by those outraged by Russell’s actions. Nothing less than jail time would satisfy them.
“The biggest thing was just the impact it had,” said Alabama state Rep. Mike Shaw, a Republican from Hoover. “I mean, hundreds of people showed up to search, and it was a pretty damaging thing for the community.”
Emboldened by the community outrage, Shaw and other state lawmakers proposed legislation that was designed to deter, or at least more severely punish, the next Carlee Russell. The bill, which has cleared the House of Representatives and is poised for a vote in the Senate, would create a new class C felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison for a false report that “alleges imminent danger to a person or the public.”
“One of the real problems with that false report is that it hurts the next person who actually experiences something,” Shaw said. “If you have a false report, it kind of makes everybody skeptical on the next one.”
As anyone who has been told the fable of the child who cried wolf knows, Shaw is right that false reports lead to more skepticism. But the outsized attention they receive obscures the fact that they’re relatively rare. And this legislation doesn’t consider a prevalent problem: the troubling track record of police in Alabama and across the country when it comes to framing reports of violence as having been made up.
Kijana Mitchell is an Alabama-based advocate for survivors of domestic violence who’s also worked as a 911 dispatcher. She said she’s encountered law enforcement officers who suspect a victim is lying simply because they make the common and complicated decision to return to an abusive relationship.
And she fears this bill could work in the favor of abusers – “master manipulators” who will use it to convince victims not to report an assault to skeptical officers. “A law like this can scoop up a lot of innocent victims” if people aren’t able to prove their case to the police’s satisfaction, Mitchell said. “This added factor that our lawmakers are trying to bring into the equation will really bolster a lot of (abusers’) ability to keep victims from speaking up.”
For the last six years, I’ve been collecting and researching cases in which people – mostly young women and sometimes children – were charged with falsely reporting a rape or sexual assault. I’ve amassed more than 230 cases that span the country, an investigation we first shared in the documentary “Victim/Suspect,” streaming on Netflix. In our first-of-its-kind qualitative analysis, we found a pattern of police turning their suspicions to the reporting victim before thoroughly investigating the alleged crime.
Academic studies consistently estimate that 2% to 8% of reports of sexual assault and rape are false. But police officers presume reporting victims are lying much more frequently: In one 2010 study, a majority of sex crimes detectives with less than seven years of experience believed that anywhere from 40% to 80% of rape reports were false. And a 2018 study found that officers’ estimates of false rape reports go up the more they believe in popular myths about rape, like the idea that women lie about rape after regrettable sex or they bear responsibility if they were drunk.
In case after case I reviewed, detectives didn’t interview suspects or send rape kits to the lab. Instead, they interrogated the reporting victim, seizing on the moment when they backtracked or buckled under the pressure, framing it as either a recantation or a confession.
In one-quarter of the 52 cases we analyzed, it took investigators less than 24 hours after the report was made to conclude the victims were lying.
Tangled up in these reports are complicating factors: gaps in memory due to trauma, delays in reporting and a lack of physical evidence. I’ve watched or listened to more than a dozen recorded interrogations and interviewed women who were charged with false reporting.
What I heard again and again were police officers clumsily or aggressively questioning alleged victims, who were typically interviewed alone, in the same manner in which they interrogated suspects. One detective lied to a teenager, saying videos proved her account of being raped at a party wasn’t true. She was left confused and desperate to end the interaction. Another detective told a 12-year-old who insisted she was raped by a family member that she would have to return to foster care. A college student facing harsh questioning about an allegation of sexual assault eventually agreed when police said it wasn’t true, wanting to drop the case.
All of them saw the police conclude their reports were intentionally fabricated and were charged with crimes.
Emma Mannion is all too familiar with this dynamic. In 2016, when she was an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Alabama, she told police that a man she’d met earlier that night had raped her in the back of a car while his friend stood guard.
“Knowing what I know now, I would absolutely not report,” said Mannion, now living in her home state of New Hampshire.
Tuscaloosa investigators concluded within a few days that she lied because she was ashamed that she had sex with a stranger. Under questioning for two and a half hours, Mannion never backed away from her allegation that she was raped – and still hasn’t. But there was a moment in her interrogation when everything seemed to change. A detective chided her for wasting police resources. She had distracted him from working with “true victims,” he said.
“I’m so sorry,” she responded.
“Well, if you’re sorry, then that makes me feel better,” the detective said, softening his tone.
Police records summarized that Mannion confessed to lying about the assault and she was charged with making a false report to law enforcement.
Shortly before Mannion had to decide whether to fight the charge, she heard about what happened to University of Alabama student Megan Rondini, who was also interrogated by Tuscaloosa police after reporting a rape. Similarly, detectives quickly turned the focus of their investigation against Rondini. While a grand jury considered criminal charges against her in February 2016, Rondini took her own life.
Mannion said she wasn’t mentally stable enough to go through a trial and relive the incident again and again. She pleaded guilty to a youthful offender charge, a generic label used for nonviolent crimes. Mannion faced only a misdemeanor. But other young women seeking justice after being sexually assaulted could face felony charges.
“I already have a hard time comprehending and understanding how they did what they did,” Mannion said. “I cannot fathom (Tuscaloosa police) looking at 18-year-old Emma and going, ‘Yes, this is a felony charge, and she should go to prison.’ ”
There is no evidence that false reports in Alabama – or nationwide – are increasing or creating a measurable strain on police resources. Nonetheless, this isn’t the first time Alabama has tried to make false reporting penalties more severe. In 2019, then-Rep. Dickie Drake, a Republican, introduced a similar bill, aiming to make a false report of sexual assault or rape a class C felony. At the time, advocates and survivors testified against the measure, saying it would only deter legitimate reports of assault. It didn’t make it out of the Judiciary Committee.
Sen. Merika Coleman, a Democrat based in the greater Birmingham area, spoke out against the bill back then and intends to do the same when the new proposal goes to a vote in the Senate. “I think that it can make our communities less safe,” she said. “If someone is afraid to report because they may face up to 10 years in prison if they are not believed, and then you would have a monster still on the streets.”
She also said the racial dynamics of Carlee Russell’s case can’t be ignored. Russell is a young Black woman who received the type of sympathetic media treatment usually reserved for blond-haired, blue-eyed women. “I think people got pissed off,” Coleman said. “White folks got pissed off.”
The proposed bill includes a qualifier that the false report must allege “imminent danger” to a person or the public, a provision a sponsor said is intended to account for only the most egregious false reports: someone falsely reporting a bomb threat, for instance, or a report similar to Russell’s that launches a big police response. But could a report of a stranger rape or an abusive spouse with a gun also be considered an imminent threat? After Mannion reported rape, her university issued a public safety notice to warn other students.
Best estimates suggest that only about a third of sexual assaults are reported to police, and advocates worry this bill could further exacerbate already existing police and victim mistrust.
“My greatest fear is that this bill will cause victims of sexual violence to read this as another reason NOT to report,” Brenda Maddox, executive director of the Tuscaloosa SAFE Center, a sexual assault crisis center, wrote in an email. “These types of crimes are significantly underreported because by nature they are shrouded in secrecy, not to be talked about in the light of day, and often turned back on the victim as being culpable in their own crime.”
Shaw, the state representative who proposed the House version of the bill, said he spoke to constituents, law enforcement officers and his fellow legislators while drafting this legislation. But he said he didn’t reach out to anyone who works with victims, the community that is most likely to ask police for help and at risk of being accused of false reporting.
He acknowledged the bill is in response to the Russell case – a “sample size of one,” he said. “I think it’s somewhat reactive. But we’re really trying not to be.”
If this bill passes and law enforcement officers in Alabama pursues felony charges for a rape or domestic violence case and there are questions about the quality of the investigation, Shaw promised that he would look into it.
