On November 20, 2010, Laurie Bembenek died, following a brief battle with liver cancer. Her pardon application had languished before Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle's pardon advisory board for two years. When public pressure mounted on Doyle, in the closing days of his administration, to do the right thing, Doyle's lack of a spine and a conscience became obvious. First, he claimed that she had to appear at a pardon hearing. Then he announced he was doing away with pardon hearings during the last six weeks of his term, only to change his mind the next day and reinstate hearings. The next lame excuse was a claim that Laurie's pardon application was incomplete, that she had failed to notify the DA and the judge and get forms completed by them. But Laurie's steadfast investigator, Ira Robins, had personally served notice on both the DA and the judge. So while Florida's Gov. Charlie Crist pardoned the late Jim Morrison of the Doors for exposing himself at a concert 40 years ago, Wis. Gov. Jim Doyle grasped at one bogus excuse after another, to avoid pardoning a woman who was sacrificed to protect so many law enforcement, crime lab and legal careers.
The state's intent, of course, is to shovel the dirt covering Laurie's grave over the unconscionable crimes committed under color of law and in the name of "justice" to frame her for a murder she didn't commit. They presume they are safe from exposure now. They are wrong. Ira Robins has undertaken the task of making public all the evidence of Laurie's innocence and the guilt of everyone from the trigger man who committed the crime to the crooked cops who planted evidence, the prosecutors who hid evidence of Laurie's innocence and the crime lab analysts who altered tests to back up the prosecution. Find out what really happened. Why? Because it can happen to YOU.
Laurie Bembenek Information
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Friday, November 19, 2010
Lawrencia Bembenek: Innocent?
Editor's Note: Laurie Bembenek is dying of liver cancer. Thirty years ago, she was framed for the murder of her husband's ex-wife. A former Milwaukee police officer, Laurie was passing information about official corruption on the force to the FBI, which made her a perfect target. Two years ago, Laurie filed a pardon application with the Wisconsin governor. Gov. Jim Doyle leaves office at the end of 2010. He has been hiding behind his pardon advisory board and a string of excuses as to why he can't grant Laurie's pardon before she dies. Read Mike Jacobs' article. Then help Gov. Doyle grow a spine before he leaves office. Tell him to PARDON LAURIE BEMBENEK NOW.
By Regular Mail:
Gov. Jim Doyle
State of Wisconsin
P.O. Box 7863
Madison, WI 53707
Or send him a message via his website. Use the form at http://www.wisgov.state.wi.us/contact.asp?locid=19
by Mike Jacobs, WTMJ-TV, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Could Lawrencia Bembenek be innocent? As she clings to life outside of Portland, Oregon, we explore the evidence.
Bembenek was convicted of killing her husband's ex-wife. She later escaped from prison, was captured in Canada and was brought back to Wisconsin. She pleaded "no contest" to second degree murder, was sentenced to time served and released.
But before she dies, she wants to clear her name.
Back in the late 70's, Lawrencia Bembenek gave pictures of Milwaukee police officers cavorting naked at a local park to Internal Affairs at the MPD. That made her enemy number one with the police department, where she was an officer. She says that prompted detectives to focus on her as the primary suspect, when Christine Schultz was killed in 1981.
But we have learned another man came forth. Chuck Kroeger vividly remembers the night Schultz was killed. Kroeger was a city electrician working near the crime scene. He saw a man jogging late that night. Kroeger reported it to the police the next day, and was shocked by the response he says he got.
"I called right away, and they told me that they had their suspect and they didn't need any more information," he recalled. "They said, they had their suspect, so...."
Kroeger's recollection adds credence to Bembenek's claim that police and prosecutors ignored leads and withheld evidence, unless they pointed to her.
"Oh they ignored anything exculpatory," Bembenek told Mike Jacobs. "And we didn't get access to anything that was in my behalf."
What's more, Bembenek says police tampered with evidence.
An off-duty gun was found in Bembenek's apartment. Bembenek's husband, Detective Elfred Schultz, retrieved the gun. He testified that it could not have been the murder weapon.
"After examining other things on the gun, it was my opinion it was not fired," Schultz testified.
Bembenek says, as a former police officer, she would not have been so stupid as to leave a murder weapon in her own closet. But prosecutors were able to convince a jury the off-duty gun was used to kill Christine Schultz.
Ten years later, in 1991, a forensics expert compared the muzzle of the gun to the contact wound on the victim's back. He found they did not match.
"The alleged murder weapon can be eliminated," he said.
The Milwaukee County medical examiner at the time, Dr. Chesley Irwin, had another reason to rule out the off-duty gun: There was no blood on it.
"One always gets blowback and you sometimes get hair but you always get blood and serum, and it simply wasn't there," Dr. Irwin said.
Then, there was the bullet removed from the victim. Prosecutors said the bullet matched the off-duty gun, but Bembenek maintains someone switched the murder bullet with another bullet that had been test-fired from the off-duty gun.
Police also say they found two of Bembenek's blond hairs on the bandana used to gag the victim. But Dr. Elaine Saumels, the deputy medical examiner who conducted the autopsy on Christine Schultz, said someone must have planted those hairs in an evidence bag, after the autopsy was done.
"I'm suggesting that somebody in the police department framed her....by planting a blond hair that was obviously hers. But was not found on the body at the time of the autopsy," Samuels said.
Then there was the red wig. Hairs from the wig were found on the victim's body. The wig was found in the plumbing of Bembenek's duplex. Bembenek says she would not have been dumb enough to try to flush an entire wig down a toilet without cutting it into little pieces. Her duplex shared a sewer pipe with the adjacent apartment. Bembenek believes a former roommate, turned adversary, flushed the wig down the neighbors' toilet.
"She asked them if she could change her clothes in the bathroom. And right after she got out of the bathroom, the toilet got plugged up. And that's all we know," Bembenek told us.
The controversy over Bembenek's conviction flared up after she was captured in Canada. Her lawyers there made a strong case that Bembenek was framed.
So in 1992, Milwaukee County launched a John Doe investigation. Among the findings, Judge William Haese said, "Significant mistakes were made in the investigation of the murder of Christine Schultz."
However, Judge Haese and Campion Kerston, a special prosecutor, found no evidence that Bembenek was framed.
"There simply is no evidence of criminal misconduct," Kerston said. "There were mistakes, but they didn't rise to the level of criminal wrong doing."
The John Doe did not try to determine if Bembenek was guilty or innocent. But the deputy medical examiner had her own theory on that.
"I think all the evidence points to her innocence, rather than her guilt," Samuels said.
Despite the circumstantial case, a jury convicted Bembenek of first degree murder.
Since then, Bembenek's defense team has learned more about the gun, the bullet, the gag, and the wig, but her attempts to appeal her conviction have all been denied.
A few months after the John Doe, Bbembenek pled "no contest" to second degree murder, was found guilty by a judge, and was released from custody. She has since appealed that conviction, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Each time, the appeal has been denied, not on the merits of the case, but on a legal technicality. When Bembenek pled "no contest", she gave up her right to appeal her conviction.
Unless she gets a pardon from Governor Doyle, she will forever remain convicted of second degree murder in the death of Christine Schultz.
By Regular Mail:
Gov. Jim Doyle
State of Wisconsin
P.O. Box 7863
Madison, WI 53707
Or send him a message via his website. Use the form at http://www.wisgov.state.wi.us/contact.asp?locid=19
by Mike Jacobs, WTMJ-TV, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Could Lawrencia Bembenek be innocent? As she clings to life outside of Portland, Oregon, we explore the evidence.
Bembenek was convicted of killing her husband's ex-wife. She later escaped from prison, was captured in Canada and was brought back to Wisconsin. She pleaded "no contest" to second degree murder, was sentenced to time served and released.
But before she dies, she wants to clear her name.
Back in the late 70's, Lawrencia Bembenek gave pictures of Milwaukee police officers cavorting naked at a local park to Internal Affairs at the MPD. That made her enemy number one with the police department, where she was an officer. She says that prompted detectives to focus on her as the primary suspect, when Christine Schultz was killed in 1981.
But we have learned another man came forth. Chuck Kroeger vividly remembers the night Schultz was killed. Kroeger was a city electrician working near the crime scene. He saw a man jogging late that night. Kroeger reported it to the police the next day, and was shocked by the response he says he got.
"I called right away, and they told me that they had their suspect and they didn't need any more information," he recalled. "They said, they had their suspect, so...."
Kroeger's recollection adds credence to Bembenek's claim that police and prosecutors ignored leads and withheld evidence, unless they pointed to her.
"Oh they ignored anything exculpatory," Bembenek told Mike Jacobs. "And we didn't get access to anything that was in my behalf."
What's more, Bembenek says police tampered with evidence.
An off-duty gun was found in Bembenek's apartment. Bembenek's husband, Detective Elfred Schultz, retrieved the gun. He testified that it could not have been the murder weapon.
"After examining other things on the gun, it was my opinion it was not fired," Schultz testified.
Bembenek says, as a former police officer, she would not have been so stupid as to leave a murder weapon in her own closet. But prosecutors were able to convince a jury the off-duty gun was used to kill Christine Schultz.
Ten years later, in 1991, a forensics expert compared the muzzle of the gun to the contact wound on the victim's back. He found they did not match.
"The alleged murder weapon can be eliminated," he said.
The Milwaukee County medical examiner at the time, Dr. Chesley Irwin, had another reason to rule out the off-duty gun: There was no blood on it.
"One always gets blowback and you sometimes get hair but you always get blood and serum, and it simply wasn't there," Dr. Irwin said.
Then, there was the bullet removed from the victim. Prosecutors said the bullet matched the off-duty gun, but Bembenek maintains someone switched the murder bullet with another bullet that had been test-fired from the off-duty gun.
Police also say they found two of Bembenek's blond hairs on the bandana used to gag the victim. But Dr. Elaine Saumels, the deputy medical examiner who conducted the autopsy on Christine Schultz, said someone must have planted those hairs in an evidence bag, after the autopsy was done.
"I'm suggesting that somebody in the police department framed her....by planting a blond hair that was obviously hers. But was not found on the body at the time of the autopsy," Samuels said.
Then there was the red wig. Hairs from the wig were found on the victim's body. The wig was found in the plumbing of Bembenek's duplex. Bembenek says she would not have been dumb enough to try to flush an entire wig down a toilet without cutting it into little pieces. Her duplex shared a sewer pipe with the adjacent apartment. Bembenek believes a former roommate, turned adversary, flushed the wig down the neighbors' toilet.
"She asked them if she could change her clothes in the bathroom. And right after she got out of the bathroom, the toilet got plugged up. And that's all we know," Bembenek told us.
The controversy over Bembenek's conviction flared up after she was captured in Canada. Her lawyers there made a strong case that Bembenek was framed.
So in 1992, Milwaukee County launched a John Doe investigation. Among the findings, Judge William Haese said, "Significant mistakes were made in the investigation of the murder of Christine Schultz."
However, Judge Haese and Campion Kerston, a special prosecutor, found no evidence that Bembenek was framed.
"There simply is no evidence of criminal misconduct," Kerston said. "There were mistakes, but they didn't rise to the level of criminal wrong doing."
The John Doe did not try to determine if Bembenek was guilty or innocent. But the deputy medical examiner had her own theory on that.
"I think all the evidence points to her innocence, rather than her guilt," Samuels said.
Despite the circumstantial case, a jury convicted Bembenek of first degree murder.
Since then, Bembenek's defense team has learned more about the gun, the bullet, the gag, and the wig, but her attempts to appeal her conviction have all been denied.
A few months after the John Doe, Bbembenek pled "no contest" to second degree murder, was found guilty by a judge, and was released from custody. She has since appealed that conviction, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Each time, the appeal has been denied, not on the merits of the case, but on a legal technicality. When Bembenek pled "no contest", she gave up her right to appeal her conviction.
Unless she gets a pardon from Governor Doyle, she will forever remain convicted of second degree murder in the death of Christine Schultz.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
This Week in Innocence: Why the Hell is Kenny Hulshoff Still Practicing Law?
Reposted from Radley Balko's blog at Reason.com
Radley Balko | November 10, 2010
Last week, Missouri Circuit Court Judge Judge Warren McElwain declared Dale Helmig innocent of killing his mother in 1993. Helmig was convicted in 1996. In his ruling, McElwain declared Helmig to be "the victim of a fundamental miscarriage of justice."
Many factors contributed to Helmig's conviction, including an inept public defender, false police testimony, and snitch testimony from inmates. But McElwain went out of his way to criticize the behavior of former Missouri prosecutor Kenny Hulshoff.
In his opinion, McElwain cited numerous instances where either Hulshof or Schollmeyer presented testimony that was later shown to be false and that they should have known was false. One section is titled “Kenny Hulshof knew or should have known that the testimony presented was false that Dale Helmig tacitly admitted killing his mother.”
In another section, McElwain states that Hulshof made improper use of unsupported testimony that Dale Helmig and his mother had been in a fight in which Helmig allegedly threw hot coffee in his mother’s face. That altercation, at a restaurant, actually involved Norma Helmig and Ted Helmig, her estranged husband.
“Even though the prosecution could not find a witness to substantiate this allegation, that did not stop them from trying to put the unproven and very inflammatory fact before the jury,” McElwain wrote.
This is the second case in two years in which Hulshoff has been cited by a judge for misconduct that helped convict an innocent person. In February 2009, Missouri Circuit Court Judge Richard Callahan declared Joshua Kezer innocent of the 1992 murder of college student Angela Mischelle Lawless. Kezer was convicted in 1994. From the A.P. report last year:
[Callahan's] 44-page decision included a stinging rebuke of Hulshof, saying he withheld key evidence from defense attorneys and embellished details in his closing arguments.
Other than a statement Tuesday in which he affirmed his belief that Kezer is guilty, Hulshof has declined to comment.
The state's prosecution was based on the testimony of another suspect in Lawless' death who said he saw Kezer at a nearby convenience store on the night of the killing. But he gave conflicting testimony and three jail inmates who claimed Kezer had confessed to the killing later acknowledged lying in hopes of getting reduced sentences.
Back in 2008, the A.P. found five other cases in which Hulshoff was accused of prosecutorial misconduct. So what has happened to Hulshoff? For starters, he parlayed his tough-on-crime record as a prosecutor into a run for Congress, where he served for six terms. In 2008, he was the GOP nominee for governor of Missouri. He nearly became the president of the University of Missouri at Columbia. Currently, he has offices in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. as a lobbyist for the white shoe law firm Polsinelli Shughart.
A couple weeks ago, a Reason commenter wrote that convicting an innocent person of murder ought have a similar effect on a prosecutor's career that, say, amputating the wrong limb would have on a doctor's. That sounds about right. At minimum it demonstrates a degree of negligence that ought to bar a prosecutor from ever prosecuting a case again. He has destroyed an innocent person's life, prolonged suffering for the victim's family and, of coruse, allowed the actual murderer to get away with the crime. If it can be shown that a prosecutor's deliberate misconduct contributed to a wrongful conviction, he should lose his license to practice law.
Hulshoff has done it twice. That we know of. And it's not like no one in Missouri knew about his aggressiveness. Yet he not only gets to continue practicing law as a jet-setting lobbyist, thanks to absolute immunity he'll never have to pay a dime of the fat salary those aggressive tactics won him to Joshua Kezer or Dale Helmig.
Radley Balko | November 10, 2010
Last week, Missouri Circuit Court Judge Judge Warren McElwain declared Dale Helmig innocent of killing his mother in 1993. Helmig was convicted in 1996. In his ruling, McElwain declared Helmig to be "the victim of a fundamental miscarriage of justice."
Many factors contributed to Helmig's conviction, including an inept public defender, false police testimony, and snitch testimony from inmates. But McElwain went out of his way to criticize the behavior of former Missouri prosecutor Kenny Hulshoff.
In his opinion, McElwain cited numerous instances where either Hulshof or Schollmeyer presented testimony that was later shown to be false and that they should have known was false. One section is titled “Kenny Hulshof knew or should have known that the testimony presented was false that Dale Helmig tacitly admitted killing his mother.”
In another section, McElwain states that Hulshof made improper use of unsupported testimony that Dale Helmig and his mother had been in a fight in which Helmig allegedly threw hot coffee in his mother’s face. That altercation, at a restaurant, actually involved Norma Helmig and Ted Helmig, her estranged husband.
“Even though the prosecution could not find a witness to substantiate this allegation, that did not stop them from trying to put the unproven and very inflammatory fact before the jury,” McElwain wrote.
This is the second case in two years in which Hulshoff has been cited by a judge for misconduct that helped convict an innocent person. In February 2009, Missouri Circuit Court Judge Richard Callahan declared Joshua Kezer innocent of the 1992 murder of college student Angela Mischelle Lawless. Kezer was convicted in 1994. From the A.P. report last year:
[Callahan's] 44-page decision included a stinging rebuke of Hulshof, saying he withheld key evidence from defense attorneys and embellished details in his closing arguments.
Other than a statement Tuesday in which he affirmed his belief that Kezer is guilty, Hulshof has declined to comment.
The state's prosecution was based on the testimony of another suspect in Lawless' death who said he saw Kezer at a nearby convenience store on the night of the killing. But he gave conflicting testimony and three jail inmates who claimed Kezer had confessed to the killing later acknowledged lying in hopes of getting reduced sentences.
Back in 2008, the A.P. found five other cases in which Hulshoff was accused of prosecutorial misconduct. So what has happened to Hulshoff? For starters, he parlayed his tough-on-crime record as a prosecutor into a run for Congress, where he served for six terms. In 2008, he was the GOP nominee for governor of Missouri. He nearly became the president of the University of Missouri at Columbia. Currently, he has offices in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. as a lobbyist for the white shoe law firm Polsinelli Shughart.
A couple weeks ago, a Reason commenter wrote that convicting an innocent person of murder ought have a similar effect on a prosecutor's career that, say, amputating the wrong limb would have on a doctor's. That sounds about right. At minimum it demonstrates a degree of negligence that ought to bar a prosecutor from ever prosecuting a case again. He has destroyed an innocent person's life, prolonged suffering for the victim's family and, of coruse, allowed the actual murderer to get away with the crime. If it can be shown that a prosecutor's deliberate misconduct contributed to a wrongful conviction, he should lose his license to practice law.
Hulshoff has done it twice. That we know of. And it's not like no one in Missouri knew about his aggressiveness. Yet he not only gets to continue practicing law as a jet-setting lobbyist, thanks to absolute immunity he'll never have to pay a dime of the fat salary those aggressive tactics won him to Joshua Kezer or Dale Helmig.
Thursday, November 04, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
