Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Jeffrey MacDonald: Paul Teetor reviews book in which Errol Morris claims "evidence was lost, misinterpreted and wilfully ignored" - and that MacDonald was "railroaded" in a vendetta. LA Weekly.


STORY: "Books: Errol Morris takes on the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case -- before Joe McGuinniss gets the last word," by Paul Teetor, published by LA Weekly on December 6, 2012.

GIST: "Film director Errol Morris is, as they say in Hollywood, bankable. He's made some of the best, most critically acclaimed documentaries of the last 25 years, including The Thin Blue Line, in which Morris proved that a convicted Texas cop killer was innocent and got the real murderer to confess. In his new book, A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, Morris recounts how he pitched several studios on a film that would raise the possibility that MacDonald, the Green Beret doctor convicted of killing his pregnant wife and two daughters back in 1970, was innocent. He met a stone wall of resistance. "We can't make that," he recalls one studio exec telling him. "He's guilty. The man killed his family." Such is the enduring power and influence of Fatal Vision, the 1983 best-seller by Joe McGinniss that delved deep into the MacDonald murders"..........After more than 500 pages of a dense slog dissecting the forensic evidence that led a jury to convict MacDonald after only six hours of deliberation, Morris concludes: "We may never be able to prove with absolute certainty that Jeffrey MacDonald is innocent. But there are things we do know: that the trial was rigged in favor of the prosecution, that the CID, the FBI and the Department of Justice pursued an unethical vendetta against Jeffrey MacDonald, that evidence was lost, misinterpreted and willfully ignored. We know that Jeffrey MacDonald was railroaded."

The entire story can be found at:

http://blogs.laweekly.com/arts/2012/12/jeffrey_macdonald_case_errol_morris.php

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses several thousand posts. The search box is located  near the bottom of the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and myself get more out of the site.

The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:

http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith

Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:

http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html

Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com

Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.