Terry Wayne Smith Cover Up and Feb 2-3 Hearing

After an hour or so of observation at the two-day Feb 2, 3 hearing, Michael Kiefer wrote a police-sided article, typical of the Arizona Republic and local media. He eagerly quoted lead PPD dic Alex Femenia who said Wayne Smith couldn’t even plan his own lunch much less a crime. He seemed to miss the full day of testimony of Office Rusty Stuart who said Femenia’s conduct at hiding the Smith evidence was derelict in his basic duties as a PPD detective and, in fact, a “felon.”
Well, the judge’s decision is in and it is to allow the Smith evidence into the trial, that the evidence is relevant, therefore admissible.

Not only that, Judge Granville goes on to state that the only “real issue in the trial is identity.” “Despite its projected length and the number of the disparate crimes and crime scenes, the only issue in this trial will be identity. That said, no one crime scene had a complete combination of eyewitness, biological, and ballistic evidence. The witness accounts were not identical. The descriptions of the male suspect varied. The biological evidence was scant.”

What?? Where is the “mountain of evidence” PPD spokesperson Andy Hill reported there is. (Andy Hill is a small guy so I suspect everything is a mountain to him.) Even Judge Granville refers to the biological evidence as “scant.”

County deputy attorneys Susan Cohen, William Clayton, and now Patty Stevens; PPD dics Alex Femenia, Mike Polombo, Mike Meishlish, Lt. Pina, et all CONCEALED the Terry Wayne Smith, nearly 200-page report, for years. Even allowing Mark to go to trial in 2007 while they withheld evidence of this other very viable suspect.

Officer Stuart made FOUR attempts to get Alex Feminia, the Baseline case agent, to take the report and follow up on his investigations. He was met with racial slurs in reference to Mark and ordered to put the report in a format making it virtually un-retrievable.

Stuart made a final attempt to have the report followed up on and he when four other members of PPD and Phoenix Law Enforcement Association took the report to Andrew Thomas’s right hand man Keith Manning, who then also concealed it. (Small wonder Thomas’s recent investigated into unrelated corruption charges resulted in a recommendation that he lose his license to practice law.)

Only after covert sources approached me and Mark’s attorneys did we learn of this report. And when Mark’s attorneys started shaking trees to get to the bottom of it, Susan Cohen requests an emergency hearing producing the Smith binder, first saying “we just got it” and then says “it’s not exculpatory.” So which is it Cohen? Did you just get it or did you not turn it over because you deemed it not exculpatory.  More double speak from this prosecutor desperate to hide the fact she unlawfully withheld exculpatory evidence.