Acronyms are F'd Up - part one

Explicit content warning

10/01/19 • 54 min

F'd Up

Acronyms are F’d Up Pt. 1

Recap

Written by Brandi Abbott

In 1992, George Goode was at his home with his brother Chris and friend Eugene DeCastro. The landlord, Leon Batton, came by for rent and a verbal fight broke out outside between Chris, Eugene, and Leon. George was still in his trailer. The argument escalated really quickly - to the point that Chris and Eugene attacked Leon physically and ultimately stabbed him to death. Leon’s wife, Margaret, got a call that someone was attacking her husband and she rushed over – Chris and Eugene turned their attention to her and inexplicably killed this poor woman as well. George who had remained inside for the entire altercation was in shock and terrified but Chris and Eugene snapped him out of it and all three men fled. For whatever reason, Chris handed Leon’s wallet to George at some point - so evidently they had robbed him as well. George was arrested very quickly, shortly followed by his brother, and Eugene the next day. As they had no time to pop home and take a shower or anything, Chris and Eugene were still covered in blood when they were picked up. George had absolutely no blood on him; and the SBI Crime Lab at the time even verified this, but a knife was found near where he was arrested and he had Leon’s wallet and somehow he was charged with murder. George’s trial began in 1993 when Duane Deaver was a young up and comer, and he testified at the trial that there was “invisible blood” on George’s boots. No one asked if this was his initial test or confirmatory test, because at that time, no one knew to ask. No one asked about the coveralls George was wearing which had been tested by a different analyst and received negative results because the defense didn’t have access to the files. George and Eugene were sentenced to the death penalty, whereas Chris received life in prison, but as he was actually covered in blood, we aren’t sure why he received a lighter sentence.

Diane Savage, who has been mentioned a few times so far in the podcast, was born and raised in New York and a bit of a troublemaker. She was kicked out of her family home at a very young age, but she was scrappy and got a job in a lab to provide for herself. After a few years of working there, the lab workers decided to unionize and she helped them. She also helped with community organizing. Stuff like this was what she really enjoyed and wanted to continue helping others. She decided law school was the way to go, and got in to Georgetown. During her time in Washington D.C., she met her now husband who received a job opportunity in North Carolina, so they relocated. When she first arrived in NC, she was told by a local that she had “three marks against her”. 1. That she was a Yankee, 2. That she went to a fancy school and, 3. That she was a woman.

Diane’s first case as an attorney in North Carolina was George’s appeal. As we learned in the last episode, if you’re sentenced to death row, you’re appointed two defense attorneys. He got Diane and Lisa Williams. As Diane was reading through the case file, she noticed that there wasn’t a record of confirmatory tests. She had hired forensic expert, Marilyn Miller, and also had her lab background – and both women found the lack of secondary tests concerning. Note: This case was Marilyn’s first experience with Deaver and his shitty science.

Phenolphthalein was the presumptive test that was used to confirm the alleged blood on George’s clothes. At the trial Diane questioned Deaver about his confirmatory tests, which were standard operating procedure in the SBI lab (even if reporting them was not), and Deaver claimed he didn’t do one. As evidenced throughout the podcast and in the Audit report, he always did a confirmatory test - so this was weird.

The judge in this case didn’t like that Diane Savage was “living up to her last name”, according to Priya, and the DA didn’t like the way she was treating Deaver. According to Diane, Judge Jenkins told her that she engaged in character assassination and maligned elected public officials. He also told her that if she were correct about Duane Deaver, a grand jury should be convened and people prosecuted for perjury. Diane said that the judge struck the pleading over what she said about Deaver and she would have to start over again. He also took what’s called judicial notice to basically declare as “fact” that Duane Deaver was great. To further prove his point, he reported Diane to the state bar for discipline. She was investigated and removed from her cases.Thankfully, she was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing. Priya pointed out that this was in 1997 and if people had listened to Diane then, they may have been able to shave 13 years off of a lot of people’s sentences and maybe even saved some lives (see: Death Row is F’d Up).

ASCLD LAB was the only agency that had accredited the SBI Crime Lab as of 2010, and as the News and Observer stated, had missed ...

Acronyms are F’d Up Pt. 1

Recap

Written by Brandi Abbott

ASCLD LAB was the only agency that had accredited the SBI Crime Lab as of 2010, and as the News and Observer stated, had missed ...

Previous Episode

Death Row is F'd Up

Death Row is F’d Up

Recap

Written by Brandi Abbott

A truck driver named Allen Ray Jenkins was found murdered in his home on April 14th 1995. He had been shot at close range with his own shotgun. Two teenage girls admitted to being in his home at the time of his murder and claimed that a man named James Alan Gell, who goes by Alan, was the murderer. The SBI Special Agent Dwight Ransom and the Chief of Police locked on to Alan pretty immediately. Witness claimed to have seen Jenkins alive after the 3rd of April, but the police needed him to have been killed on the third for reasons that will be covered in a bit, so they pretty much coerced the witnesses into changing their statements to say they were unsure of when they last saw him alive. The police arrested Alan on August 1st 1995, and he was charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, armed robbery, and conspiracy to commit robbery. The girls testified at his trial saying that he had committed the murder, and Alan was convicted and sentenced to the death penalty. Because Alan wasn’t well off financially and had received the death penalty, the state had to supply him with two public defenders. Also, a law was enacted where they had to be supplied with the entire case file, whereas that wasn’t true for pre-convictions. Defense attorneys James Comey and Mary Pollard began working Alan’s case in 2002 and found the original witness statements wherein the witnesses said they had seen Jenkins alive after April 3rd which raised a lot of red flags. They brought in Marilyn Miller to help with this case and she went to the crime scene and examined the evidence and photographs from the crime scene. The bloodstain patterns were initially analyzed by an SBI Special Agent named Dennis Honeycut who was NOT a bloodstain pattern analyst. If he had been trained in bloodstained pattern analysis, like Marilyn, he would have been able to tell that the blood stain patterns did not match up with the girls’ story about where Alan and Jenkins had been standing. They changed their story six different times, getting closer and closer to what the police needed each time. The attorneys also called a professor of entomology who was able to determine that based on the maggots in Jenkins’ body, he died on April 8th, 9th, or 10th, but definitely not April 3rd. The reason the April 3rd date was so important to the investigators was because Alan had ironclad alibis for the 4th ‘til when Jenkins’ body was found. In 2002, Alan’s conviction was vacated and he had to be retried in the murder of Alan Ray Jenkins. Alan’s defense team at the retrial included Mary and James, but also Joe Cheshire and Brad Bannon who were Kirk Turner’s defense attorneys. After another two years, Alan was acquitted of all charges on February 18th, 2004.

The death penalty has been around at least since 18th century BC. King Hammurabi had about 25 different crimes that were punishable by death, and 5th century BC Rome would carry out the death penalty by crucifixion, drowning, beating, burning alive, or impalement. England in 16th century AD incorporated more methods including hangings, beheadings, burning at the stake, and drawing and quartering. Crimes punishable by death included: treason, not confessing to a crime, and more. The first known execution in North Carolina was a Native American man in 1726, likely in the form of a public hanging. Public hangings were treated more like a party than an execution and entire families would travel to attend, possibly with a small feast prepared. By 1910, the State of NC took charge of executions, whereas before, they were handled locally. There seemed to be a need for consistency and a more humane method, so the state decided that the electric chair would be less painful than hangings, and then in the 1930s replaced the electric chair with the gas chamber. In 1972, the US Supreme Court ruled the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment and ruled that the jury would be able to use their discretion when imposing the death penalty. North Carolina enacted a law in response that certain crimes would be mandatory for certain crimes - which led to 120 condemned inmates. Four years after that, the US Supreme Court overturned the mandatory death penalty laws and those 120 condemned inmates had their sentences vacated, commuted, or were re-sentenced to life in prison. By 1977 in NC, the death penalty was reintroduced for first-degree murder. The 80s and 90s were a time recognized as “tough on crime” across the entire US and harsher punishments were handed out more freely. Between the years of 1984 and 2006, 43 people were executed in North Carolina. On October 29th, 1988, North Carolina officially made lethal injection the soul method of execution.

Alan Gell’s removal from death row and ultimate acquittal warranted a review of how death penalty cases were pursued by law enforcement. They should have taken the death penalty...

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Acronyms are F'd Up - part two

Acronyms are F’d Up P. 2
Recap
Written by Brandi Abbott

Continuing from where the last episode left off, George Goode - who was sentenced to death after being convicted of murder - was thankfully granted an additional hearing in 2004. Judge Jenkins, who had filed the complaint against Attorney Diane Savage, recused himself, and Goode’s case was heard by a new judge. Diane obtained the SBI lab notes which revealed that the alleged blood on George’s coveralls was actually grease. Not blood. The case file didn’t include a confirmatory test of the “invisible” blood on George’s boots. DNA testing revealed that profiles were obtained, but it was most likely due to a transfer. All of the evidence from George’s case was crammed together in a bin, including the bloody tailgate from the victim’s truck and the clothes worn by George’s brother and friend which were covered in the victims’ blood. An article from the Winston-Salem Journal stated that DNA testing wasn’t part of the original case against Goode and that, before the hearing, the state asked to have George’s coveralls, which had tested negative for blood in 1992, retested. This time, blood from both of the victims was found, most likely because they had been in a bin with other objects covered in the victims’ blood.

People in the scientific community were shocked by this mishandling of evidence. Some said they might have tested George’s coveralls or boots but would have done control tests and reported the likelihood of contamination. The SBI Crime Lab did not run control tests. They had one of their fiber experts examine the coveralls with a microscope. He concluded that the stains were blood that had soaked into the garment at the time of the crime, but he never used chemicals to confirm that the substance he was examining was actually blood. The deputy director of the SBI’s Crime Lab at that time, William Weis, told the Winston-Salem Journal that what another lab would do in a case described to them may be completely different than what they would do, as the SBI Crime Lab are looking at the evidence and the others are not. He said he believed they should rely on the evidence presented in court. The issue with that way of thinking, is the confirmatory tests were not included in the evidence presented, therefore the evidence presented in court is misrepresented. You may remember from the last episode, Deaver said he hadn’t done a confirmatory test on George’s shoes, which was suspicious and out of character for him. At the trial, he referred twice to the “blood” he found as if he were sure that’s what he had found, and during the hearing, the DA said that they had proved George was “literally up to his ankles in the blood of both victims.” Diane rhetorically asked The Journal how a prosecutor could say someone is up to their ankles in blood if there was never a test for blood. She was extremely upset about everything happening, and she and other attorneys lodged complaints with ASCLD LAB.

Complaints to ASCLD LAB in 2011 needed to be submitted in writing. All complaints of labs were to be directed to their executive director, Ralph Keaton, and receipts of the complaint would be confirmed within 20 days. However according to Marvin Schechter, the New York attorney Priya spoke with, there was no procedure for follow up with these complaints. The complaint ends with an ASCLD LAB board vote. If 2/3 of the vote can’t be reached, the case is dismissed, and the complainant must be notified.

On October 5th, 2004, Diane sent a few letters of complaint about the SBI to Ralph Keaton. She’d called and had a conversation with him and was directed to put her complaints in writing. She wrote one letter detailing everything about George Goode’s case and in another letter mentions that the phenolphthalein test used out of date chemicals. She then wrote about Brenda Bissette’s testimony. Bissette swore under oath that she’d had no knowledge of how the evidence had been stored, but Diane showed Brenda photos of her standing directly next to the evidence in the bin, and she corrected her testimony on the witness stand. This was not the first case Marilyn Miller had encountered Bissette co-mingling evidence on. In the evidence for George’s case, there was a pair of pants with blood in different areas. The cuttings from each area were all packed together in one evidence bag, leaving great potential for cross contamination. This should have rendered the cuttings inadmissible. Diane wrote in her complaint that SBI Crime Lab Deputy Director Jerry Richardson stated that he knew nothing of the condition of the evidence’s packaging, that it was Bissette’s responsibility, and admitted that Bissette saw the evidence before it went to the lab.

In 2009, a judge reprimanded SBI Blood Stain Pattern Analyst, Duane Deaver, for misleading the jury in George’s case by referring to the substance on George’s clothes as blood as if it were fact. After the a...