Fabricated Evidence
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Henry Lee, known for O.J. Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey cases, found liable for fabricating evidence
Forensic scientist Henry Lee, known for his expert testimony in high-profile criminal cases including the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the JonBenet Ramsey case, has been found liable for fabricating evidence that led to a wrongful murder conviction.
Ralph “Ricky” Birch and Shawn Henning were sent to prison for decades for the murder of 65-year-old Everett Carr, who was stabbed 27 times in December 1985.
Their convictions were based partly on Lee’s testimony regarding bloodstains found in the victim’s home. But in 2020, new information on the stains came to light, and a judge vacated the felony murder convictions.
A Connecticut federal judge ruled Lee liable on Friday for his role in the wrongful conviction after tests proved that the stains identified as blood on a towel were not blood, reported the Hartford Courant.
Judge Victor Bolden wrote that Lee failed to provide evidence to support his testimony about forensic tests he said showed the stains were blood.
“Dr. Lee’s own experts concluded that there is no ‘written documentation or photographic’ evidence” that Lee performed a particular scientific blood test on a towel, Bolden said.
“And there is evidence in this record that the tests actually conducted did not indicate the presence of blood,” the judge added.
Bolden’s ruling could make Lee liable for millions in damages at upcoming court hearings. Having been found liable for the fabrications, the main question remaining in his case is how much he should pay.
Other defendants in the case — including the town of New Milford, Conn. and police officers and officials — can face trial on the facts of the case, Bolden ruled.
Lee, 84, is a professor emeritus at the University of New Haven’s Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences, which bears his name.
When Birch and Henning’s murder convictions were vacated in 2020, Lee defended his reputation.
“In my 57-year career, I have investigated over 8,000 cases and never, ever was accused of any wrongdoing or for testifying intentionally wrong,” he told reporters. “This is the first case that I have to defend myself.”
Birch, who served over 30 years behind bars, was released in 2019 after a judge ordered a new trial. Henning, who was 17 at the time of the crime, was granted probation in 2018.
Although the two acknowledged carrying out burglaries in the area where the murder took place, they have consistently maintained that they were not involved in Carr’s death.
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Carr’s murder was exceptionally bloody and blood evidence dominated the separate Henning and Birch trials. Lee’s trial testimony that he found traces of blood on a bath towel — testimony courts have called at best, erroneous and at worst, false — sent Henning and Birch to prison for 50 and 55 years, respectively.
Carr was stabbed 27 times. His jugular vein was slashed and the hallway in which his killers trapped him was so saturated with blood that detectives had to build a makeshift ramp to get to the body.
The two teens argued, among other things, that they couldn’t have killed Carr because not a speck of blood was found on them or any of the cluttered junk in the cramped stolen car where they were living. When the state Supreme Court vacated the two convictions 33 years after the murder, it noted that the car and its contents had not been cleaned between the night of the murder and seizure of the car by detectives.
Lee’s trial testimony was the prosecution’s answer. At the time of Carr’s death, Lee was building a national reputation as a forensic scientist and could be counted on to be present with state police major crime investigators at high profile crime scenes.
Lee testified at both trials that he found the stained towel in an upstairs bathroom and that his repeated tests on the light stains proved they were made by blood. The prosecutor used Lee’s testimony to argue to the juries that the then 17-year-old Henning and 18-year-old Birch could have used the towel to clean themselves of blood.
When it reversed the convictions, the Supreme Court found — and Bolden agreed Friday — that there was no blood on the towel. In addition, the court said Lee had no way of knowing what the stain on the towel was because neither he, nor anyone in his lab tested it before the teens were convicted.
When the stains on the towel were finally tested in 2008 — part of a last ditch appeal by Henning and Birch — the result showed they weren’t made by blood, but some inorganic substance.
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I'm fairly sure that most of these convictions that are overturned, release a guilty party. Actually that's by design. We're supposed to let guilty people free before imprisoning an innocent person.
But it's painful for the victims and their families. I'll never forget the Adnan Syed fiasco. The young man who murdered his 17 year old ex girlfriend, who became the subject of the Serial podcast. The producers of This American Life got caught up in a virtue project, and ended up ripping open the wounds for the girl's parents, eventually getting the murderer of their girl set free.
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I'm not sure how the absence of blood on the towel is exculpatory regarding these two. Prosecution claimed that it was used by the suspects to clean themselves up after the murder.
However, the fact that there was no other forensic evidence linking them to the crime, that's a problem.
