2016 Conviction based on Mistaken Witness ID, False/ Misleading Forensic Evidence, Official Misconduct, Inadequate Legal Defense — NRE
Michigan Innocence Clinic researched case, presented to newly-formed Macomb County ‘Conviction Integrity Unit’
Store clerk who testified as eyewitness positively ID’s Howell, testimony called into question due to police coercion, cross-racial issue, et. al.
(Videos, photos added by Voice of Detroit.)
From left: Student-attorneys Eugene Lee and Lauren Jung, Mack Howell, student-attorney Rob Harrington, and Dave Moran, co-director of Michigan Innocence Clinic (Photo: Michigan Innocence Clinic)
By Maurice Possley
March 28, 2023
Mack Howell – National Registry of Exonerations (umich.edu)
Mack Howell (center) with nephew Dwayne Howell at right during press conference on release.
Shortly before 1 a.m. on April 3, 2014, 46-year-old Roselyn Gaston was the only employee on duty at the 7-Eleven convenience store at 10 Mile and Kelly Roads in Eastpointe, Michigan, when a man dressed in black and a ski mask covering all but his eyes burst through the front door. The man was holding a cardboard Frappuccino box in one hand which he said was covering a gun.
“Give me the money!” he shouted. “I don’t want to hurt you. I have a gun. Give me the money under the drawer.”
Gaston, who had been stacking coffee cups and lids, opened the cash register and pulled out the drawer to show that there was no money underneath the drawer. She said the man grabbed money from the drawer and ran out the front door. Gaston pressed a silent alarm and called 911.
Gaston, who was white, told police that the robber was a Black man, about 6 feet tall and weighing 180 pounds.
Among the officers who responded was Brian Dobrzycki, from the nearby Roseville police department. Dobrzycki was close by on patrol with his German Shepherd scent dog, Cato. Dobrzycki brought the dog into the store where a $20 bill had apparently been dropped by the robber. The dog circled around and was not given anything the robber had handled. The dog started tracking outside the front door which had been trafficked by police, the robber and perhaps customers.
A Roseville PD K-9 dog was used to ID ‘skin raft’ particles at 7-11 store
Several feet from the front door, next to a garbage can, the dog alerted to a paper bag. Inside the bag was a nearly empty Milwaukee’s Finest beer can with a drinking straw inserted into the opening. The dog then continued on, heading to the rear of the store where it stopped next to a concrete wall.
About 7 a.m., the owner of the 7-Eleven, Fazal Abbas, arrived. He viewed store surveillance video from the inside of the store, and created a compact disc of the 86-seconds from the entry to the exit of the robber. He turned that disc over to the police. Abbas also viewed video from an exterior camera, but did not save it, and a week later it was taped over.
Eastpointe police detective Matthew Hambright sent the paper sack, beer can and straw to the Michigan State police crime lab. A fingerprint on the beer can was deemed suitable for comparison. DNA testing was conducted on the beer can. In June, 2014, the profile of DNA found on the lip of the beer can was submitted to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) and was identified as that of 53-year-old Mack Howell. The DNA profile of a female was found on the straw and could not be linked to anyone. Howell was excluded as the source of the fingerprint on the beer can.
Based on the DNA finding, Howell became the primary suspect, even though he was 5’6” tall and weighed 213 pounds.
‘Suggestive line-up’ conducted by Eastpointe P.O. Matthew Hambright
Detective Hambright would later testify that he did a frame by frame analysis of the interior store video to capture the moment when the robber left the 7-Eleven, and passed by a measuring stick next to the front door designed to help clerks assess the height of robbers.
Hambright said he compared his own height of 6’4” to the measuring stick, and determined that it was an accurate gauge. He said that based on the surveillance video, the robber was 5’6” tall. Hambright called Gaston and asked if she could be wrong about the height and weight. Hambright later testified that she said that the robber was a bit taller than her and she was 5’4 1/2 inches tall.
On September 19, 2014, Hambright took a photographic lineup to Gaston’s home. This lineup would later be criticized as suggestive. Four of the six photographs showed Black men with their eyes half-closed. The other two – Howell, who was in the #1 position, and another Black man, who was in the #5 position – had brighter eyes.
After looking at the photographs, Gaston selected #5, who was a filler. Hambright asked, “Are you sure?” Gaston said she was not. Hambright asked her to look again. Gaston used her fingers to cover up all of the faces of the individuals in the lineup so that only their eyes were visible. She then selected Howell, and said she was 100 percent sure that he was he robber.
Nearly a year later, on August 7, 2015, Howell was arrested. During questioning, he denied being involved in the robbery. He was charged with armed robbery.
At a preliminary hearing in September 2015, Gaston, who was 5’4” tall, changed her description of the robber. She said the robber was 5’8” tall and had a “medium build.” She said she was 100 percent certain of her identification of Howell.
Trial Judge Edward Servitto
On August 23, 2016, Howell went to trial in Macomb County Circuit Court. Gaston testified and again said she was 100 percent sure that Howell was the robber. She said she would “never forget” the robber’s eyes.
Abbas, the owner of the 7-Eleven, testified that he viewed the surveillance video of the exterior of the store. He said the robber stopped briefly at the dumpsters and then continued to the rear of the property. He said he did not provide the video to the police because no one asked him for it. He also said the video quality was not good enough to identify the robber.
Dobrzycki testified about how he and his “canine partner,” Cato, came to the scene. He said he brought the dog into the store where the dog “scented” into the area. Asked by the prosecutor, Sunita Doddamani, to explain, Dobrzycki said, “People drop skin rafts when they are doing something; when their adrenaline is going, they drop more skin rafts [than] a normal person that walks around.” “What’s a skin raft?” Doddamani asked.
Trial AP Sunita Doddamani
“It’s skin follicles that actually fall that you can’t even see from your body,” Dobrzycki said. “The skin rafts are falling from everyone’s body on an everyday basis, and when you’re doing something you’re not supposed to, you’re dropping more than…a normal person.”
Howell’s defense attorney, Arlene Woods, objected, arguing that Dobrzycki was not qualified to testify about skin droppings. Judge Edward Servitto Jr. agreed. “Under certain circumstances he’s not qualified to say that more droppings are going to occur under certain circumstances, but otherwise there are droppings from the human body, the dog’s olfactory has the ability to pick up those rafts,” the judge said.
Dobrzycki testified that the dog was allowed to roam inside the store where the robbery occurred and then was taken to the front door. Tracking began just outside the front door, Dobrzycki said. “He begins tracking…and he, what we call downs or alerts on a beverage container that’s right outside the front door.”
“What do you mean to down and alert?” Doddamani asked.
“He is basically telling me that [it] has fresh human odor and that’s part of the track,” Dobrzycki testified. The dog will actually lie down with its front paws in front of the alerted item, Dobrzycki said. “He’ll just down until we tell him to begin to track again from that item.” Continue reading
Lynn added, “In October 2021, I sent a letter to all the jurors in Nancy’s 2004 trial, which included a study of Nancy’s case written by a domestic violence expert at Michigan State University. Within a few days, one male juror called me, and we spoke for two hours. He said he went through the detailed report with a fine-tooth comb. The juror was upset that none of the information about Nancy’s trauma from years of abuse and how it affected her actions was presented at trial. As a result, he did a complete turnaround from being quoted in the Detroit Free Press in 2005 as wanting Nancy to serve a life sentence to signing an affidavit supporting her immediate release.
In August 2005, Judge McDonald ordered that Seaman be resentenced to second degree murder, but the prosecution appealed that order and it was overturned. Then in 2010, U.S. Eastern District Court Federal Judge Bernard Friedman overturned Seaman’s conviction, saying the prosecution failed to prove premeditation and deliberation, and that, combined with ineffective assistance of counsel and the omission of critical BWS evidence denied her a fair trial. He granted her habeas petition and ordered either a new trial or immediate release. The prosecutor again appealed.
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Carl Hubbard’s case has been covered since 2019. He has a good chance of victory now! After battling virtually on his own, pro se, for decades, he is at the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has appointed an attorney to represent him. His case is one of the most egregious of those Wayne County residents targeted by police and prosecutors in the 1990’s, using a Ring of Snitches. He and another lifer, Andre Nelson, were framed up by DPD Sgt. Joann Kinney and others in 1992 and 1993, with no forensic evidence, only coerced witness statements and a confession written by the police although the defendant could not read or write.
I love telling her stories of my journey here in prison. I would tell her stories about Abner,(my brother in -law), how he would squeeze a penny until the rust color would fade; she would crack up and that would make my day. Her and Cat told me how Abner had to go to the hospital due to eating good food at home after eating prison food for the past 45 years. I told MOMMALOVE that Abner ate cat head for 45 years, that all they had to do was feed him food out of the garbage can and he would have been straight. She and Cat got a chuckle out of that.
I know it is not well to weep because of death, that it is selfishness to wish to call back departed souls. But it hurts so hard. My greatest fear came to reality when I called home and Cat told me she was at the hospital with MOMMALOVE , that she had a stroke. MOMMALOVE passed three days after her born day. I have never been to the zoo. We had plans to go to the zoo together. I will still go in remembrance of her, yet we all know and understand it will not be the same.
Hubbard’s conviction was primarily due to “especially critical” testimony by Curtis Collins, 19, that he saw Hubbard in the area of the murder, according to his attorney at trial, Ronald Giles (now a Judge at Detroit’s 36th District Court.)
Sgt. Kinney, by then a detective with the Wayne Co. Prosecutor’s Office, testified regarding similar DPD practices in the case of Moore v. City of Detroit, USDC 2:07-cv-11787. She claimed they were legally valid police actions used routinely during the now infamous “Ring of Snitches” era in the 1990’s and continuing into the next century. She said police BELIEFS constituted “probable cause” for witness “detentions” in the Wayne County Jail, denying they were “arrests.”
Do not talk to us today about potential for “violence” from protestors, to do so is to appropriate the language and framing of white supremacy. 
President Joe Biden said in a written statement “Violence is destructive and against the law. It has no place in peaceful protests seeking justice.”
These oppressive systems wreak both physical ills and psychological destruction on our minds. With every outburst of violence as a result of policing, we shrug it off, we keep going with our day in hopes of not being worn down by the reality of our country becoming increasingly unlivable.
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The Macomb County prosecutor focused on the lurid text messages at trial, with the alleged texters never taking the stand. The Macomb Daily prominently featured the details of the texts again on Jan. 10 this year.
“The search warrant for Mr. Rider’s vehicle, Ex. 2 [obtained after the seizure], further shows that these officers appears to have a habit of seizing phones without making arrests or having warrants authorizing the seizure,” Pagac writes.
“Those in Detroit who remember Foster, known on the street as DoDo, say he owned several other properties in and around Brush Park and was known in the neighborhood as a paternal figure of sorts, despite his alleged drug trade involvement,” Reindl wrote. Rider has similarly been characterized as an “urban folk hero” by newspaper publisher Scott Burnstein, who has covered the case extensively, including in stories by Ricardo Ferrell.
Geller, however, claimed in his report that a guardian has the right to determine who can and cannot visit. He said a guardian must approve visits from Bukowski and others who previously attempted to visit.
Nursing homes must also have written policies and procedures regarding visitation rights. During attempts to visit by Bukowski and others, copies of such policies were requested, but the requests were ignored. Those denying the visits refused to identify themselves, but claimed Ms. Powell’s guardian did not want them visiting.
My first encounter with abuse by a guardian was when I was clerking in a legal aid program while in law school. I helped a Pro-Bono attorney on a case where the guardian had moved the person out of the only home she had known, held a garage sale, and sold all her possessions, even toys that she had treasured for over 60 years. The client simply wanted her dolls back and we struggled to get the money back.
Exculpatory evidence suggests the prosecutor in Mumia’s trial bribed star witnesses to testify, wrongly excluded Black jurors.
“The newly discovered evidence supports a Batson claim,” Boghosian said. “It must be reviewed, not only in fairness to Abu-Jamal, but also to redress the city’s racially discriminatory tradition.”
