Lawsuits follow wrongful convictions

Two former state prison inmates say they were denied fair trial

Two men imprisoned for 30 years after being wrongly convicted of murder as teenagers filed lawsuits Wednesday for what could be millions of dollars in damages, claiming their prosecutions were based at least in part on evidence contrived by a group of police officers that included world-renowned forensic scientist, Dr. Henry C. Lee.

The state Supreme Court reversed the convictions of Shawn Henning and Ricky Birch a year and a half ago, holding that the two, who were 18 and 19 years old when the crime was committed, had been denied a fair trial by Lee’s inexplicably erroneous trial testimony about blood evidence.

But the men assert in separate civil rights suits in U.S. District

Court that Lee’s testimony was just one element in an array of false or misleading evidence fabricated by state and local detectives under pressure to close the exceptionally bloody, 1985 murder of Everett Carr in NewMilford. With no solid suspects after months of investigation, the suits claim the authorities concocted a case against Henning and Birch, who were troubled, drug-abusing, teenaged burglars — even though there was no physical evidence tying them to the crime, including the blood Carr’s killers spattered, smeared and tracked throughout his home.

The suits name retired state police detectives Andrew Ocif, Scott O’Mara, Joseph Quartiero, John Mucherino, H. Patrick McCafferty, Brian Acker and Michael Graham; New Milford police officer Steven Jordan; Lee; and the Town of New Milford. All those named in the suits are believed to have retired and were not immediately available Tuesday night. Lee in recent months has defended his work in the Henning and Birch cases, as well as others.

“This is a case that these individual officers put together that was always absurd,” Birch lawyer David Lebowitz of New York said. “It is a case I think that any competent investigator would have known was absurd, that it was impossible for Ricky and Shawn to commit this murder without leaving any physical evidence at the scene or on their belongings. It was a case where these individual officers were desperate to arrest someone. And so they pinned this crime on two down and out teenagers. And they robbed them of the prime of their lives based on false evidence and the suppression of exculpatory information.”

TheHenning and Birch cases are notorious among defense lawyers because of the lack of evidence from a particularly savage attack — Carr was beaten, stabbed 27 times and his jugular vein was slit. The Supreme Court was critical of Lee when it reversed the convictions. Organizations devoted to freeing the wrongly accused — The

Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries — were behind years of litigation, reinvestigation and forensic testing that produced the reversal.

Lee’s work has been questioned since in other cases in Connecticut and elsewhere. Accused Connecticut killer David Weinberg was freed in 2017 after decades in prison for a stabbing murder in Southbury in 1985 that was similar to that of Carr. As was the case with Henning and Birch, Innocence Project lawyer Darcy McGraw determined that testimony by Lee about blood evidence in the Weinberg case — testimony that sealed Weinberg’s conviction — was again inaccurate.

Lebowitz said he and Henning lawyers Craig Raabe and James Cousins intend to press the legal discovery process associated with the suits to obtain records of Lee’s work on still other cases. The Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory, which Lee once ran, has denied public requests for the records, saying that in manycases they do not exist.

“We certainly intend to explore every aspect of how something like this could have happened, Lebowitz said. “And that undoubtedly will include looking into the procedures and policies that the lab used that could allow an egregious mistake like this to go on for so long.”

In the Henning and Birch cases, Lee provided the prosecution with material it used to answer the question that haunted the case. How could two teens provoke a blood bath, yet walk away without a trace on them, their clothing or all their possessions stuffed into the stolen car in which they were living? Lee testified the twosome dodged most of the blood spatter during the fight and that his tests discovered blood on a towel the prosecution argued the teens could have used to clean up. Decades later, the Innocence Project discovered that the towel had never been tested, by Lee or anyone at his lab. When it was finally tested, the stain was proven not to be blood.