Allegations of Suppressed Evidence in Jeffrey MacDonald Murder Trial

4.2.12 WC: 191694 These dramatic revelations finally came to light because of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald's search for evidence of his own innocence, which he has protested since the beginning of his case. Over many years, he and his lawyers filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking access to the government documents on the case—the documents that contained the facts that were not revealed during the trial. Slowly, they pieced together the amazing scientific and evidentiary story that the jury never heard. It is a story that raises the following disturbing questions; Why would the government suppress such critical evidence? It is impossible to know the mind- set of the chief government lawyer in the case: Brian Murtagh, whose responsibility it was to see that the defense received any evidence in the government's file, which could help the defense. We do, however, know that he was aware of the contents of the lab notes. Since he wrote a memo to a legal assistant asking him whether "the detailed data of a lab report; as distinguished from the conclusions of the report, (must) be disclosed (to the defense)." This question is significant, because the "detailed data" refers to the blonde wig hair, the black wool, and the human hairs, which were described in the handwritten lab notes but somehow not mentioned in the lab's final typed report. Murtagh has refused comment, except for a cryptic statement that "if there were fibers useful to the defense, MacDonald's original trial lawyers should have found them" among the crates of raw evidence to which they had access. Talk about needles in haystacks! How much more exculpatory evidence may be hidden in some government file—or may have been destroyed or lost—we will probably never know. For example, a fragment of human skin was found under one of Colette MacDonald's fingernails. Yet, unbelievable as it sounds, the government claims that it lost this singularly important item of evidence. Prosecutors in several other cases in which I’ve been involved have mysteriously “lost” evidence that could prove innocence. If that skin fragment were now available, it could prove conclusively—through DNA matching—whether or not Jeffrey MacDonald was the killer. Even without DNA testing (which was not available at the time of the original investigation) it could have cleared MacDonald. Will the new evidence finally get Jeffrey MacDonald the new trial he has been seeking since he was convicted in 1979? Ifthe government suppressed the lab notes and other evidence--and if this evidence was material to the issue of MacDonald's guilt or innocence—a new trial should certainly be granted. But several problems remain: First, most Americans who have read the book or seen the TV movie of Fatal Vision already "know" that Jeffrey MacDonald is guilty. They know it because the Jeffrey MacDonald portrayed in those one-sided presentations was guilty. On TV, the actor, Gary Cole, played him guilty. The evidence shown to the audience—like the evidence presented to the real-life jury—did not include the physical evidence that corroborates the Stoeckley confessions. Nor did it include the evidence that the prosecutor pressured Stoeckly to lie about her memory. 198 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017285