Nushawn Williams, the former Jamestown resident, is believed to have knowingly infected at least a dozen women with HIV in the 1990s before pleading guilty to statutory rape and reckless endangerment. Williams completed a 12-year sentence in 2010, but has remained in custody under New York state law. In July 2013 a jury decided Mr. Williams would stay in jail as he still poses a threat to society due to a mental abnormality.
**You will not find this case listed at Clark Baker’s HIV Innocence Group website. It was such a high profile loss that not even Mr. Baker would dare try to slip this one onto his site as a case that he has won. I am discussing this case because it is a great case study about the tactics of OMSJ. **
Secret Weapon – Electron Microscopy
Clark Baker was involved in this case and decided to put a new spin on one of his staple tactics; proving that the defendant is not now, nor ever was HIV positive. For this case, Baker decided that Electron Microscopy would be the secret weapon. I have to hand it him: this is actually a great idea for creating reasonable doubt. I have said before that Baker is intelligently diabolical and that certainly applies here. There is nothing better to snowball a jury with than throwing extremely complicated science at them. And when extremely complicated science is explained to a relatively intelligent jury in a manipulative way then confusion ensues and reasonable doubt may surface. The problem for the defense in this case is the jury saw right through such flim-flam as evidenced in this article by Eric Tichy of The Post-Journal.
According to juror Bob Edwards regarding the EM testing; “We were told that they kept testing the blood until they got the negative result. The state had the guy on the stand to discuss how he got the results, and we felt there was (sic) some issues there.”
Juror Bob Edwards went on to say; “We ultimately just could not believe a lot of (the defense experts’) testimony,” he said. “They brought in some people during the trial that said someone could not transfer HIV to another person. We just couldn’t believe a lot of it.”
Lastly, the jury did not buy the defense argument that Williams was never infected with HIV: “It was strongly proved, in my opinion, that he was HIV positive and has AIDS,” Edwards said. “It was proved by the doctors who showed us what his viral loads looked liked.”
Of course this does not jibe with Clark Baker’s account of the verdict. At Re-Thinking AIDS facebook page Mr. Baker alludes to a racial element influencing the jury’s decision:
Clark Baker: Nushawn called me a little while ago. The jury deliberated for about 25 minutes before finding him guilty, which tells us that they made their mind up long before they reviewed the evidence from this three-week trial. It was clearly easier for the white jury to find him guilty than to explain to their small white town why they let him go. I reaffirmed that we will appeal – not just on the prosecutorial misconduct, but on the Orwellian law itself. HIV had nothing to do with his conviction. Share · June 28 at 4:38pm near Los Angeles, CA
Mr. Baker also made a similar accusation in the Andre Davis Trial. In the Davis Trial it was the judge and not the jury Mr. Baker felt displayed a racial element:
OMSJ 11/23/2011 6:44:40 PM 12:44 PM
” I doubt that Judge Metz wants to be known as the judge who released a black AIDS-infected man to defile Cincinnati‘s white womenfolk… His opponents in the next election would have a field day!”
These statements could be seen as projections of Mr. Baker’s actual feelings or simply as a diversion from the real reason OMSJ lost and Mr. Baker’s reluctance to accept the facts. The actual words of the juror in the Nushawn Williams case accurately prove why Baker and OMSJ lost this case so badly. According to the juror, it had nothing to do with race and everything to do with HIV and the fact that the defense did not prove its case.
Shooting Blanks – Electron Microscopy
It was a good tactic to potentially sew reasonable doubt, but EM is not an adequate tool for finding HIV in peripheral blood. I firmly believe Baker knew this and that is precisely why he chose this technology. Baker himself discusses the use of EM on his website in a post about the Nushawn Williams case. Baker calls it the “Gold Standard”:
“OMSJ experts contend that, as the ‘gold standard’, EM is the only reliable method that can identify the presence of the virus.”
This is funny because for years Baker and other AIDS Denialists have consistently cried that all HIV Testing modalities are fraudulent because there is no Gold Standard on which they are based. It does not matter if they are discussing antibody testing or PCR. But now that Baker has decided to use EM as a basis for HIV Criminalization Cases in a court of law, he has arbitrarily bestowed the crown of the Gold Standard directly on the head of the Electron Microscope.
In the same post about this case, Baker links to an article by Luc Montagnier, the French scientist credited with the discovery of HIV, to show the magnificence of EM. Unfortunately, as with most documentation Baker links to, this article shows exactly why EM is not used to scan peripheral blood to diagnose HIV. I will not detail the article and try to explain the complexities of using EM to look for HIV in peripheral blood. I will direct the reader to page 278 of said document. Mr. Montagnier discusses the lengths to which he went to get the virus to grow in sufficient quantities so that they could find virus to look at with the EM. It is very difficult, time consuming and expensive. Not to mention the expertise it takes. That complexity is why it is a beautiful strategy. That strategy may not pay off when real experts explain these factors to a jury as highlighted by juror Edwards in the Nushawn Williams Case. “We ultimately just could not believe a lot of (the defense experts’) testimony,” he said. “They brought in some people during the trial that said someone could not transfer HIV to another person. We just couldn’t believe a lot of it.”
In the same article regarding this case, Mr. Baker also links to a document that details the blood drawn from Mr. Williams for the EM. Something highly suspicious on this document caught my eye. It is something that Baker has never advertised nor discussed anywhere that I could find on his website. There were four tubes of blood drawn from Mr. Williams. Three of those were for the EM, but one was specifically for Quantitative RNA PCR HIV-1. It is more commonly known as Viral Load. I find this highly suspicious for two reasons:
1. Why draw blood for a test that Baker claims is fraudulent, useless and worthless?
2. Why did Baker never release the results of this RNA test?
Again, this is suspicious and is one more example of the dubious activities of Mr. Baker. I graciously ask Mr. Baker to explain his reasoning as well as release the results of this Viral Load test. *hearing crickets*
Prosecutorial Misconduct – Baker Contradicts Williams’ Attorney
In the facebook post at Re-Thinking AIDS, Mr. Baker makes a very harsh accusation of Prosecutorial Misconduct. This is simply a repercussion from another case where Baker tried to use the EM Strategy. In that military case the Prosecutor, Captain Rosenow, found out that the laboratory that has the Electron Microscope is not CLIA nor DoD approved and uses this fact to his advantage as any good attorney would.
“When Capt. Rosenow alleged that the U. Mass lab might be involved in “unlawful” practices ten days later, the university launched an internal investigation. Fearing for his professional future, Hendricks withdrew from the USAF case and all other OMSJ cases, including the upcoming civil commitment trial of Nushawn Williams.”
When this first happened, Mr. Baker called this “witness tampering” because Mr. Hendricks withdrew from all OMSJ cases. Now it seems he has changed the allegation to “prosecutorial misconduct”. Neither of these is accurate, of course. It is just one more example of Mr. Baker crying foul when someone employs a better tactic than his.
What is really interesting, however, is that Baker’s statement that Mr. Hendricks, the EM expert, withdrew from the Williams case directly contradicts Nushawn Williams own attorney, John Nuchereno. In the video of this Buffalo news cast at approximately the 1:00 mark, Mr. Nuchereno says:
“Dr. Hendricks, who is from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, he looked at a sample of blood under an Electron Microscope and found no evidence of HIV. The State of New York subpoenaed him to be here. He came from Massachusetts as directed at nine o’clock. And they turned him around and sent him home.”
Whose story is accurate? Did Mr. Hendricks withdraw from the Williams case because he was “fearing for his professional future”? Or did the State of New York turn Mr. Hendricks away as attorney Nuchereno stated on camera?
It probably does not even matter. When dealing with Mr. Baker, accuracy does not necessarily equal the truth and contradictions are the norm.
HIV Innocence Group Truth 