The experts who examined this case, in their own words.

After full merits review, she found (1) that trial counsel obstructed Kensu’s right to testify in his own defense, despite his doing “all that he could do” to exercise it; (2) that counsel’s failure to call Michelle Woodworth, the witness covering the murder minute itself, was “so serious that it deprived Petitioner of a fair trial”; (3) that the prosecution failed to disclose its arrangements with the informant, and “should have known his testimony was untruthful”; and (4) that his first appellate lawyer was ineffective for never raising trial counsel’s active substance abuse.

The condition of her order: a new trial within ninety days, or release. Michigan appealed instead; the 2012 reversal was on the petition’s timeliness, and no court has ever rejected these findings on their merits.

Writing separately in 2015, Shapiro enumerated the federal court’s four grounds and added that the habeas petition “also raised credible arguments regarding the utter lack of evidence to support the prosecution’s theory that he traveled by private plane from Escanaba to Port Huron and back on the day of the murder.” A sitting Michigan appellate judge, in a published opinion, describing the state’s central theory as supported by an utter lack of evidence.

Welser spent thirty-one years at the Port Huron Police Department, the department whose investigation convicted Kensu, much of it as a homicide investigator. He did not sign a statement; he re-investigated the case himself, at length, against his own department’s work, at real cost to his standing in that community.

It was Welser who, in 2008, located the original lineup photographs that had been unavailable for two decades, the discovery behind the photographic litigation that followed. When the state’s 2022 review closed the case, the “voluminous materials” its own letter says it relied on were largely his.

He and Molly Rebels took the case without a client, in the county where the alibi lives, and their appeal runs on Escanaba’s own airwaves: anyone who remembers Nov. 5, 1986, and anyone who knows who worked at Baron’s Real Estate, where a woman wrote his name on the desk blotter at noon and has never been found. His reading of how it happened is the stereotype itself: the wild boyfriend with the motorbike, the leather jacket, and the karate. Two private investigation practices now work this case for free; that fact is its own kind of evidence about what the file looks like to people whose job is reading files.

Her show exists to examine offenders’ behavior, and its consultants are retired FBI profilers reviewing cases they did not work as advocates. The Consult built its analysis of this murder from the crime itself, examining the scene, the autopsy, and the record across a multi-part series that centered Scott Macklem rather than the man convicted of killing him. Her conclusion, restated in March 2025: the behavioral profile of the killer does not match Fred Freeman as he was in 1986 or Temujin Kensu as he is now, and the person who shot Scott Macklem is likely still out there, “probably local to either Croswell or Port Huron, that area they were familiar with.” She holds the conclusion the way a professional should, adding that if new information emerges, she wants to take another look. An unsolved murder is exactly what her profession says this still is.

Retained in 2002 to review the case, Boggs read the reports and interviewed jurors and witnesses himself. Court-qualified as an expert in death investigations, he had helped prove six defendants innocent before trial across his career. His written conclusion asked for a new trial, a commutation, or a pardon. It has been in the federal court record since 2008.

Their podcast exists mostly to defend convictions, and they say so. Working from the full trial transcripts, they walked the case through the rules of evidence they practice under: the character evidence that should never have reached a jury, the five-photo array with one mismatched photo, the informant the judge improperly vouched for, and a rebuttal witness who proved a flight was mathematically possible and nothing more. Their conclusion went further than reasonable doubt, and further, by their own account, than they had ever gone before: “I think this is the first time we’ve gone so far as to say someone is completely innocent.” Her verdict was the same: “I don’t think he’s the one who killed Scott Macklem.” Both episodes end with the same sentence this site ends with: the Governor of Michigan can fix this.

Their May 25, 2022 statement expresses respect for the Attorney General and her office, then concludes that “the standard used by the CIU in its review of the Kensu case predetermined the outcome — to us, the wrong outcome.”

They state that their view rests not on technicalities or procedure but on the fact that Kensu “could not have committed and did not in fact commit the crime.”

And they close by naming the remedy this entire site is built around: Article V, Section 14 of the Michigan Constitution, which confers on the Governor the power to grant reprieves, commutations, and pardons.

He is not an advocate, and says so: no horse in the race except the truth, a season built to air the hardest material including the accusations from Kensu’s own daughter, and a stated belief that most people in prison earned their way there. His method was the transcripts first, everyone’s claims tested against them, including Kensu’s own. What he found in 2,200 pages was an absence: nothing tying the man to the murder. On the drive, his verdict is flat: it cannot be done in the time, at any speed. On the theory that nine witnesses were intimidated into an alibi: “that’s giving him too much credit.”

He has no connection to this case or this campaign, and his channel analyzes hundreds of cases without adopting causes. Working only from the public record, he reached actual innocence on his own, and his independent arithmetic on the return trip, an average near 145 miles an hour to make the state’s timeline work, matches the court record’s math almost exactly. His conclusion matters precisely because nobody asked him for it.

Ali took up the case publicly in 2025 alongside Jason Flom, lending it a national profile at a moment when the remaining path runs through a single office. Her father spent his life on exactly this kind of fight; she has said plainly that she is in this one until Kensu is home.

Sanders has worked the case since the mid-2000s for Proving Innocence: the correspondence with two attorneys general, the FOIA campaign for the withheld records, the compilation of the expert statements quoted on this page. Interviewed in 2026 for a national fellowship series on conviction-integrity units, his conclusion after twenty years had not moved an inch.

His show exists to examine exactly one kind of case, and by the time this episode aired it had examined hundreds of them. His comparative judgment is therefore the point: the alibi here is as good as any his project has ever seen, and the one piece of physical evidence excluded the man convicted. He opens the episode calling the case “a masterclass in the failings of our criminal legal system,” in Michigan but possible in any state, and closes it with the question the campaign asks the Governor: “How in the world can setting the innocent free be seen as anything other than a moral imperative?” His commitment did not end with the hour; the case became family work, with Khaliah Ali, who works cases alongside him, taking it up through the years since.