SP. My bolds, my italicised comment.
http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060331/NEWS01/60331003Man's sodomy conviction thrown out Accuser later attacked pregnant woman
By Andrew Wolfson
[email protected]
The Courier-JournalSentenced in 2001 to 20 years in prison for sodomizing his daughter Katie, Timothy Smith always insisted he was innocent, that his daughter had trouble telling fact from fiction.
But
nobody seemed to believe him, until Feb. 10, 2005, when police say Katie, then 22 and faking pregnancy -- with padding stuffed under her clothes and a nursery outfitted with diapers and baby clothes -- lured a pregnant woman to her Fort Mitchell apartment and attacked her with a knife, intending to cut the unborn baby from her womb. The woman defended herself by grabbing the knife and killing Katie.
Convinced then that Timothy Smith, 51, had been wrongfully convicted through the testimony of a delusional witness, a Chicago lawyer and the Kentucky
Innocence Project began investigating.
This week, their work paid off: Kenton Circuit Judge Patricia Summe, who had tried Smith, set aside his conviction, ruling Wednesday that he was incompetently represented at trial.
Smith, who has served five years at the Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex in West Liberty, Ky., told Cincinnati television reporter David Wagner yesterday that "there's a light at the end of the tunnel and I will be able to spend time with my kids -- and that's the thing I miss the most. ... I still love Katie even with what she did. I realize she was disturbed."
Innocence Project director Marguerite Thomas said, "We are pleased that we are well on our way to having a wrong corrected."
But Commonwealth's Attorney William Crockett, who has 30 days to decide whether to appeal, said his office is leaning toward that,
or may elect to retry Smith, even though the prosecuting witness is dead.
Although the facts surrounding Katie Smith's death are troubling, Crockett said it's possible that
the sexual abuse, "if it occurred," caused her to become delusional. "It's a chicken and egg thing," he said.
But Thomas said it would be "unconscionable" for Crockett to appeal or retry Smith. "The lack of evidence used to convict him is shocking and troubling," she said.
(SP. This is such wooley thinking. There is absolutly no convincing evidence that prior abuse leads to delusions later in life. It is a femonazi myth. And this dozo is a lawyer? Clutching mythical straws. Well, what does one expect from a lawyer - sorry Zarby)`Repressed memory'
Katie, one of five daughters, was 17 in 2000, when she reported that while performing oral sex on her boyfriend, she remembered her father forcing her to do the same thing between five and 10 years earlier.
Her sisters denied they'd been abused, but after meeting with Katie for five hour-long sessions, a
mental health nurse concluded that she was telling the truth and suffering from "repressed memory syndrome."
(SP. So this 'mental health nurse' has only the words of the girl to go on but nevertheless concludes they are truthful. On what evidentiary basis? It gets worse. See below. Is this woman to be let off scot-free too or should she be on the List for retribution?)That scientific theory,
(SP. It was never a 'scientific' theory. Where was the science? Typical basket weaving bull shit from the Start. Is Ellen Bass going to get it up the jacksy one day too. I hope so. She has so much top answer for.) popularized in the 1970s and '80s, has been discredited since. But when nurse
Kim Wolfe ( SP. A liar. See further below) testified about it at trial, Smith's defense attorney,
Michael Lutes, presented
no rebuttal witness. He also
failed to object when Wolfe told the jury she thought Katie's testimony was truthful, even though expert witnesses are prohibited from making such comments.
Lutes admitted later that he was unaware of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling through which he could have challenged Wolfe's credentials and possibly kept her from testifying.
The Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed Smith's conviction in 2004, saying that while there may have been errors at trial,
it could do nothing about them because Lutes failed to object at the time.
(SP. What a load of evasive crap) Lutes could not be reached yesterday for comment.
As four years passed in prison, Smith missed the births of his first two grandchildren and the chance to see his other daughters grow up. Then came Katie's attack on Sarah Brady, who was nine months pregnant.
Identifying herself as "Sarah Brody," Katie telephoned Brady, whose name she had found in an online store registry. She told Brady, 26, that she had received some of Brady's baby gifts by accident and invited her over to retrieve them, police said.
Faking labor pains, Katie got Brady into her nursery, locked the door and attacked her, police said. Brady, who suffered minor defensive wounds to her hands, turned the knife on Katie. She gave birth a few days later to a healthy baby. Police concluded she acted in self-defense.
After the attack, Wagner, a reporter for Cincinnati television station WLWT, began investigating Timothy Smith's sodomy conviction and interviewed an expert critic of repressed memory syndrome. The expert, in turn, described the case to Patrick Lamb, a Chicago lawyer who represented Smith for free.
Lamb's 32-member firm began pursuing it, inviting the Innocence Project, a unit of the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy, to participate.
The new attorneys found
Wolfe exaggerated her credentials at trial, in part by referring to herself as "Dr." when she had obtained her doctorate from an unaccredited online university.
They presented affidavits from experts rejecting the repressed memory theory on which Smith's conviction was based, and filed an affidavit from a cousin who said
Katie had admitting lying at her father's trial to get him out of the household. In her four-page ruling, Judge Summe did not decide whether Smith was guilty or innocent, but held that if not for Lutes' mistakes, there was a reasonable probability that he would have been acquitted.
Among other errors, she said Lutes' failure to hire a rebuttal expert and "allowing the commonwealth's expert to go virtually unchallenged" was "outside the range of acceptable trial practice."
Yesterday Wagner asked Smith to describe the toll the experience took on him. "It's something that's hard to measure. ... It has been a terrible time. I always believed that eventually I would get out. I was concerned about how long it would take. I'm still concerned about how long it'll take for me to get out."
Reporter Andrew Wolfson can be reached at (502) 582-7189.
