Amicus Brief: Keith Winfield
COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS v. Keith Winfield
Filing Date
September 14, 2020
Charge
Rape, assault and battery of a child causing serious bodily injury
Jurisdiction
Supreme Judicial Court for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Partners
CPCS, Brandon Garrett, Jessica Henry, Boston College Innocence Program
Summary
CIFS, Boston College Innocence Program, the Committee for Public Counsel Services Innocence Program, the Exoneration Project, the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Professor Brandon L. Garrett, Professor Stephanie Roberts Hartung, Professor Jessica S. Henry, and Professor Jeff Kukucka filed this letter in support of granting further review for Keith Winfield. This brief, filed in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, argues that the appeals court erred in denying Winfield’s petition based on ineffective assistance of counsel due to not consulting with or obtaining a defense expert.
PRELIMINARY STATEMENT
In this case, the jury was presented with an unrebutted medical diagnosis of a crime so gruesome it is difficult to imagine. Yet imagined it was. The prosecution’s theory—that Mr. Winfield, with no motive or prior criminal history, raped a child with a hot curling iron during a 45-minute babysitting episode during which he was simultaneously caring for his own infant—was based entirely on the medical diagnosis of a doctor, Dr. Alice Newton, who had no expertise in recognizing or treating burns. That medical diagnosis was never tested by subsequent doctors, by the police, or even by Mr. Winfield’s own trial lawyer, and was presented to the jury as incontrovertible fact.
But the unexamined, uncontested medical diagnosis presented to the jury that convicted Mr. Winfield was wrong. Post-conviction analysis of the medical evidence by a renowned burn specialist, whose expertise is undisputed, has revealed that, instead of a horrific contact burn from a hot curling iron, this child likely suffered from an erosive diaper rash, a condition with which she had previously been diagnosed. Indeed, the medical evidence—the physical condition and healing pattern of the child’s skin—were wholly inconsistent with the Commonwealth’s unchallenged theory. As demonstrated at the hearing on Mr. Winfield’s motion for new trial, the expert opinion that had never been sought by trial counsel and was, therefore, never presented to the jury, establishes that the injury assumed to come from a gruesome crime was not the result of any crime at all. Upon hearing the post-conviction medical analysis, the motion judge found, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” that this new evidence would have “likely affected the outcome of [Mr.] Winfield’s trial.”