This case has had critics for forty years. Their strongest arguments deserve answers. Here they are.

This is a podcast label, not a finding of any court. No court has ever made a fraud finding about this case or this campaign. The only judge ever to review the full record on its merits found a credible innocence claim and four constitutional violations, and every loss after 2010 rested on procedural rules or on the strictest evidentiary standard in American law; no court has made a fraud finding. The label inverts the factual record.

Sources

The theory has to explain how a man in Escanaba surveilled a schedule in Port Huron. No witness placed Kensu watching Macklem, in Port Huron that morning, or in the car seen leaving the lot. Campus security testified Macklem had no permit for that lot; his presence there was not predictable.

Sources

In 2010 a federal district judge reviewed the full record and found four constitutional violations, then conditionally granted the writ of habeas corpus, ordering that Kensu may apply for release. Ineffective assistance of trial counsel was among the findings. In 2012 the Sixth Circuit reversed, and the ground matters: the reversal turned on the deference federal courts must give state court decisions under the 1996 habeas statute, not on a finding that the trial had been fair. Separately, trial counsel was later suspended from the practice of law. A conviction can survive review without the trial having been sound, and that is what happened here.

Sources

Her trial testimony included an allegation of rape on their first date. Notice what the prosecution did with it. The same office that charged Kensu with murder put the allegation before the murder jury as character context, and never charged it as a crime, then or in the four decades since. It has never been investigated or tested in any court, and the federal court found Kensu was prevented by his own lawyer from testifying, including to answer it. The jury heard the accusation; no jury has ever heard it examined.

She has lived in the shadow of this murder too, and nothing here asks you to disbelieve her. An accusation used as atmosphere but never as a charge, even if credited, says nothing about where he was on the morning of the murder.

He did make calls, the jury heard about them, and the prosecution cross-examined on them at length. The record also shows how the date was actually fixed. Dyer testified that Manalli called her, and she explained why: he “had been approached by someone involved with investigation” and “could not recall precisely if he had seen Mickey Forde on that day.” Asked what day, she answered from her own attendance pattern, “I only come in on Mondays and Wednesday,” and when he noted she had not come in that Monday she concluded, “yeah, it was Wednesday.” Her memory of the visit itself is independent of any call: Manalli was busy on the telephone, so she talked with Kensu instead, asking the nutritionist what to eat for the muscle soreness in her legs, and she learned he could tell her, because he asked what she was studying and she told him, nursing. The prosecution established that Manalli’s call came after the newspaper reported the arrest, and put on witnesses who said Kensu tried to move their dates and they refused. Those witnesses testified for the state and were believed. The four-setting record of positive identifications does not rest on any of the calls.

Sources

Recordings of prison calls and unsealed civil filings from a marital breakdown are, at most, evidence about a marriage under a 40-year incarceration. Civil allegations are unadjudicated. The hosts’ characterizations are their interpretations. And Paula Kensu, the wife whose filings are being read on air, publicly maintains his factual innocence. None of it concerns November 5, 1986.

The harshest recent material comes primarily from Kensu’s own former partners and relatives: statements at a 2010 commutation hearing and podcast interviews decades after the events, never cross-examined at any trial. Some may reflect real grievances. The federal record also contains Kensu’s own bitter words about others. None of it is murder evidence.

Supporters sometimes say the 2010 ruling was undone by “a paperwork error.” The record is narrower than that. The Sixth Circuit held the habeas petition itself was filed years too late and that the evidence didn’t meet the near-impossible legal gateway for excusing the delay.

He lost on procedure, the court never found him guilty and never rejected the constitutional findings, and the procedure was his petition’s timing, not a clerk’s slip.

Sources

Nine alibi witnesses come from five unrelated settings across one day.

The restaurant, after midnight. Jeffrey McNamara, the Big Boy waiter, had no connection to Kensu or the martial arts school. He fixed the time as "a little after twelve, probably five after twelve," and when asked in court whether the defendant was the man he served, he answered, "Yes, it is." Paul DeMars ate with him, helped jump-start his dead car, and left at "twenty after one, one-thirty."

The martial arts school, around noon. Kathie Dyer found him at the front desk after the 11-to-12 class and left at "about ten after twelve." "There's no doubt in my mind," she testified. John Manalli, the school's owner, put him there from shortly after noon for "about an hour and-a-half, hour and 45 minutes or so." Mark Sherman, who trained at the school, left at about 12:05 and did not see Kensu that day. He fixed the date independently, "absolutely positive" it was November 5, and gave the sworn drive time between Escanaba and Port Huron.

Downtown, 3:00 to 3:30 p.m. Dash Diehl and Amy Creten each testified to the same conversation with him on the street.

The broken car, late afternoon. Birkholz sold a fuel pump at the auto parts counter "close to closing. We close at 5:30," and Kennedy dealt with a man and a disabled car in the K Mart lot "between four and five." Neither could say for certain the man was Kensu, so their testimony tracks the car rather than the man.

Six of the nine identified him in person, in three of the settings. Four of those six had no connection to the karate school.

Sources

The claim answers half the problem. The record requires a round trip: he was at the Big Boy a little after midnight, with DeMars until “twenty after one, one-thirty,” and back at the martial arts school around noon. The shooting, shortly before 9:00 a.m. and 450 miles away, sits in the middle of that day.

Start with the return, because no argument about speed can touch it. From a shooting shortly before 9:00 to a sworn sighting around noon is roughly three hours. Four hundred fifty miles in three hours is an average of 150 miles an hour, door to door, with no stop, in a 1986 car on 1986 roads. There is no speed limit in that arithmetic to break; the drive is simply not possible, and no one has ever claimed it is.

The outbound leg fails on its own terms. Leaving after 1:20 in the morning leaves under seven and a half hours to reach a 9:00 a.m. shooting. In November 1986 the national maximum speed limit of 55 mph was in force throughout Michigan (the federal law permitting states to raise it did not pass until April 1987, and Michigan did not reach 70 until 1996); at 55, the 450 miles in the court record is more than eight hours of driving before a single stop for fuel. The witness who had driven the route testified to “close to nine and-a-half to ten hours” including stops.

The prosecution understood all of this, which is why it did not argue that he drove. It argued, in rebuttal, that he chartered a plane.

Sources