Court overturns then-11-year-old boy's conviction in slaying

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Marc Levy, Associated Press
Updated 5:14 pm CDT, Wednesday, July 18, 2018

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania's highest court on Wednesday overturned the conviction of a then-11-year-old boy in the 2009 shotgun slaying of his father's pregnant fiancée, saying prosecutors had not provided enough evidence to support it.

The state Supreme Court's 5-0 ruling clears Jordan Brown of wrongdoing, his lawyers say, in the slaying of 26-year-old Kenzie Houk, who was eight months pregnant when she was found dead in the family's rural western Pennsylvania farmhouse.

It reversed a finding by a juvenile court judge in Lawrence County, upheld by a state appellate court, that Brown was guilty of first-degree murder and homicide of an unborn child.

Justices attacked prosecutors' circumstantial evidence as insufficient, saying among other things that trial testimony pointing to a shotgun in Brown's bedroom as the murder weapon "supported an equally reasonable conclusion" that it wasn't the murder weapon. There otherwise was no eyewitness, DNA or fingerprint evidence pointing to Brown, and no blood or biological material from Houk on Brown's clothing, the court said.



Read more: https://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Pennsylvania-court-overturns-boy-s-conviction-in-13084936.php

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Younger Jordan Brown

[McCamy Taylor]

1. Houk's boyfriend obviously did it. Why did the police cover it up?

Was he a VIP?

[McCamy Taylor]

2. Real murderer may have been Adam Harvey the boy friend

Here is an interesting link.

https://wandervogeldiary.wordpress.com/tag/debbie-houk/

So why were the police so quick to dismiss Adam Harvey as a suspect? The police say that even though he’d returned to Newcastle from where he’d been living and working in North Carolina, Adam had a “solid alibi” on the morning of the murders because he was sleeping at his parents’ home on Boston Avenue and his truck was surrounded by newly-fallen snow. There were no tire tracks when the police arrived, and his father vouched for him.

Yet given his relationships with lowlife friends (and at least one family member who had threatened Kenzie), Adam certainly had the opportunity to hire someone or otherwise arrange with somebody to have Kenzie killed. His background report says he earns between $50,000 and $75,000 a year—so he probably had the means to pay. Everyone knows that such arrangements leave no snow tracks. Given the victim’s own assertion and belief that Adam could have hired a surrogate to do the hit, the police characterization of Adam’s alibi as “solid” is, by any reasonable judgment, an overstatement to say the least.

Why would the police have been so quick to back off?

And remember, more than a year ago Jordan’s lawyers received a tip that Adam had tearfully admitted to a friend at a party, “I killed my old girlfriend,” and this tip was passed on to police in writing—though more than a month later Trooper Jeffrey Martin, who was heading up the murder investigation, denied to reporters any knowledge of this letter which had been addressed to him. So what was really going on? Why did Trooper Martin apparently lie?

Very interesting story, if true. Child sent to jail so VIP's son could go free.

[Snackshack]

3. Wow.

It is amazing that the kid was convicted at all. There is as much evidence or lack of that he did not do this as there is that he did.

Hopefully he did not do this and it is the right decision and that the time he spent in jail did not turn him into a psychopath so he can move on from this in a positive/healthy way.

[DeminPennswoods]

4. This case has been controversial here in western PA for

a long time. The state supreme court probably did the right thing reversing Brown's conviction.