‘She had that vibration some women got. Next thing you know they’re dead … Women like that out to destroy you.’ The Night Of VI: Samson & Delilah, Undertaker
Our golden boy – he lied to us again. ibid. Stone
Prosecutor: Any chance you could be wrong?
Expert: Yes. One in five billion. ibid.
An animal did that. Did I raise an animal? The Night Of VII: Ordinary Death, mother to brief
Look what he has done to all of us. ibid. cab partner to father
I like her a lot. She was fun just to be with. The Night Of VIII: The Call of the Wild, Naz on stand
Prosecutor: Did you kill her?
Naz: I don’t know. ibid.
All of Life is ‘what if’. Long Shot, opening scene, 2017
Juan [Rodriguez] was in jail charged with the May 12th 2003 murder of Martha Pueblo. ibid.
‘That’s all they would say, This is him.’ ibid. Rodriguez
‘I wasn’t supposed to be at that game [Braves v Dodgers May 2003].’ ibid.
‘We had an eye-witness who identified him.’ ibid. Beth Silverman, deputy district attorney
‘I was able to find Juan sitting in those seats.’ ibid. defence lawyer
‘Dude, you’re on the tape.’ ibid. defence lawyer to client
Juan Catalan received a $329,000 settlement in a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles and its police force.’ ibid. caption
Fred Holroyd is a former Army captain and intelligence officer who served in Northern Ireland from January 1974 until May 1975.
Based in County Armagh, he worked for the Army’s Special Military Intelligence Unit and with the security service MI6.
His role included recruiting and handling informers within republican and loyalist paramilitary groups and liaising between the Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Special Branch.
He resigned from the Army in September 1976, 16 months after being treated for a psychiatric condition.
Mr Holroyd has insisted the diagnosis was part of a conspiracy to discredit him because of claims he made about illegal activities by some Army units.
These included allegations of collusion with loyalist paramilitaries, and that some soldiers were operating a shoot-to-kill policy.
He was admitted to the military wing of Musgrave Park Hospital in south Belfast in May 1975 after being told his wife at the time had made serious allegations about his behaviour.
Three days later he was taken to a psychiatric unit at in the Royal Victoria Hospital Netley, an Army hospital near Southampton.
He has claimed on many occasions that he was falsely imprisoned and forced to leave as the result of a ‘malicious conspiracy’ between the Army and security service MI5.
The former intelligence officer says he was targeted because of the allegations he made about some Army units.
The police in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have investigated the allegations Fred Holroyd made about collusion and a shoot-to-kill policy, but they were not substantiated and no action has ever been taken against a serving or former member of the Army.
They included claims that:
Members of the British Army colluded with loyalist paramilitaries who killed 33 people in bomb attacks in Dublin and Monaghan in May 1974.
British Army units were conducting illegal cross-border operations, including assassinations.
SAS-trained Captain Robert Nairac, who was abducted and murdered by the IRA in May 1977, assassinated senior IRA member John Francis Green in County Monaghan in January 1975.
In 1987, Fred Holroyd gave evidence to an inquiry by an Irish judge into allegations of British security services collusion with loyalists in attacks in the Republic of Ireland.
In a report presented to the Irish government in December 2003, Mr Justice Henry Barron said there were grounds for suspecting those who bombed Dublin and Monaghan may have had help from members of the British security forces, but there was no conclusive proof.
The judge noted that the allegations by Fred Holroyd had been the subject of a number of reports by the RUC and Garda (Irish police).
He said the RUC had discounted the allegations while the Gardaí ‘regard him as a liar and not worth further investigation’.
But he added that ‘the inquiry considers this portrayal to be unfair’.
Fred Holroyd insists that his allegations are true, and that a copy of his medical records obtained from the Ministry of Defence in 2016 support his claim that he was wrongly diagnosed with a psychiatric condition to discredit him. BBC news online article 27 February 2018, ‘Who is Fred Holroyd?
Texas has paid 101 men and women who were wrongfully sent to prison $93.6 million over the past 25 years, state data shows. The tab stands to grow as those wrongfully imprisoned individuals age and more people join the list.
Freed after a decade on Texas death row for a murder he says he didn’t commit, Alfred Dewayne Brown thinks he’s entitled to compensation from the state, but Comptroller Glenn Hegar is saying no.
Although a Dallas County district judge decided he was innocent eight years ago, Ben Spencer remains behind bars for a 1987 aggravated robbery he insists he did not commit. The Texas Tribune article 13 August 2016, ‘How Michael Morton’s Wrongful Conviction has Brought Others to Justice’
We leave our DNA in the world as we walk through it … The problem with DNA is that is you have science that is misunderstood, that science becomes like magic … and that’s what makes it very very dangerous. Exhibit A s1e4: Touch DNA, expert’s opening commentary, Netflix 2019
When you start talking about mixtures, it starts getting a little complicated. There’s always going to be a problem of latent DNA on any surface we’re testing. ibid. DNA expert #2
Do you think you could identify four songs if they are all playing at different volumes? ibid.
I’m working for the drug lab in Amherst … mostly to perform chemical analysis if suspected narcotics. Though I also help maintain some instrumentation. Do quality control. Testify in court. How to Fix a Drug Scandal I, Farak to rozzers, Netflix 2020
In the United States, if you’ve been arrested on illegal drug charges, the evidence against you is sent to a laboratory for testing. In Massachusetts, two labs handled most of the drug cases in the state. This is the story of what went wrong. ibid. captions
25-30,000 cases have been dumped in our laps. ibid. state attorney
In Massachusetts tonight a drug lab scandal … A state police chemist is suspected of altering drug samples, faking test results and listing some drug samples as positive even though she never tested them. ibid. television news
People were in prison based on drugs certificates signed by Sonja Farak. ibid. lawyer
I knew the Amherst lab was underfunded and didn’t have sort of basics. ibid. insider
35-year-old Sonja Farak was arrested on two counts of evidence tampering and two counts of drug possession. How to Fix a Drug Scandal II
Annie Dookhan: classifications that were going on that weren’t completely accurate. ibid. lawyer
Dookhan: she was faking, she was cheating … she was simply signing off and getting these cases out the door. ibid. dude
[Judge] Kinder decides that these criminal acts of Farak’s only go back to July 2012. ibid.
2011: I’d already exhausted the methamphetamine, amphetamine and ketamine standards, and then I did start trying to smoke crack cocaine … There was not a lot of it … and quickly became very addicted … I actually smoked in the evidence room. How to Fix a Drug Scandal III, Farak
She began cooking powdered cocaine into crack at her work station. ibid. dude
Chemist Annie Dookhan was sentenced to a three-to-five year prison term for falsifying drug tests affecting tens of thousands of criminal cases. But there has been little movement to deal with all of the convictions based on the lab’s testing. ibid. news report
Northampton chemist Sonja Farak gets 18 months in jail. ibid. newspaper headline