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.

Brennan's statement was given on camera to WXYZ-TV's Bill Proctor for a January 2009 special report, after reading the trial transcripts. A second, independent account of his view comes from Cooley law professor Ronald Bretz, who wrote the Governor in 2018 that Brennan told him he had never granted a directed verdict of not guilty in his years as a trial judge, and "would have granted the motion in this case." Two sources, nine years apart, the same conclusion from a former chief justice.

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.

Assigned the case after every judge in the Eastern District of Michigan recused, he ruled against Kensu on the strict standard for successive petitions. His opinion still sets out the record plainly: nine alibi witnesses placed Freeman in Escanaba, the prosecution answered with a flight it never proved, the murder weapon was never recovered, and the car seen on campus was never found.

In 2017 the same appeals court that reversed Judge Hood in 2012 authorized a new habeas petition on the lineup photographs. It noted the police department's 2004 written answer, "Photos not in the possession of this department," and found Freeman had made a prima facie showing on the photographs. It also stated the defense's nine alibi witnesses in its own words.

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.

Hardesty wrote Gov. Snyder in August 2018, identifying himself as a retired police lieutenant with homicide and forensics experience who had worked the case "free of charge for about 3 years." After "my month-long review of the evidence," he wrote, he "reached the same conclusion... as did many other retired law enforcement officers who have reviewed and investigated this case." The letter also records something otherwise unpublished: the Parole Board had sent the Governor a July 25, 2018 letter recommending against clemency. His closing: "You have the ability and authority to right the wrong that our criminal justice system has failed to provide."

She and Jim McNeil took the case without pay, 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 Barron’s Real Estate, where reportedly a woman wrote his name on the desk blotter around 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.

In 2001, McCachren wrote to Governor John Engler after spending hours with Kensu in prison, then taking his files and evidence to experienced police investigators, including former Detroit homicide detective William Lamb. He went on to assist Kensu's appellate lawyer "free-of-charge, because I am also convinced without a doubt of Fred's innocence." He asked the Governor to have the conviction reviewed by "an independent, neutral and unbiased agency, preferably your own office or that of the Michigan State Police." The letter is filed in the federal court record.

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.

Testifying under oath in 2014, the eyewitness-identification scientist walked through how Freeman's photograph differed from the four fillers. She called the lineup "highly suggestive." She had evaluated more than a hundred identification procedures in criminal cases, and had never reviewed one where witnesses saw photographs with suggestive features and the jury was then shown versions with those features removed.

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.

Setter managed the airfield from which the prosecution's theorized night flight would have departed. In a 2023 letter to the Governor, he explained why a walk-in night charter from Escanaba was improbable. The trial's only support for an unrecorded departure was a detective's hearsay account of what the airport manager had said. Setter was the airport manager.

Orzel ran the service operation at the field where the theorized flight would have landed, and he knew the state's pilot witness personally for decades. He writes that Evans "had enough experience to know that his testimony about walk-in flights was false." He kept "records of every fuel sale that could have been checked if anyone had asked me," until he purged them about fifteen years before writing. The first person ever to contact him about the case called on behalf of the Innocence Clinic in 2023. His reason for writing: "nobody should be in prison based on false testimony."

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.

Maire practiced law in Lansing from 1965 to 2000, beginning as an assistant prosecutor and serving as a municipal judge. Kensu sent him the case materials around 1995. After reviewing the transcripts, pleadings, police reports and witness statements, he took on the appeal pro bono and argued the 2004 motion for relief from judgment. In his 2006 letter to the Parole Board he wrote: "I know of no one who has bothered to review his case, except for those involved in his prosecution, who have come to any other conclusion." The letter is filed in the federal court record.

Levin wrote Gov. Snyder in August 2018, two years after leaving the Senate. He had worked with the Michigan Innocence Clinic while in office and found it "a very reliable judge of the merits of claims of innocence." Having "personally reviewed the documents from the various court cases," he singled out the flight testimony: the prosecutor's own pilot "was allowed to testify that it was possible" to charter a plane and return in time, "although there was not a shred of evidence that he did so." He enclosed Michelle Woodworth's letter to him with his own.

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.

Chang's statement was collected by Proving Innocence in 2019. Three years later, after the Attorney General's Conviction Integrity Unit closed its review of the case, she joined U.S. Reps. Andy Levin and Rashida Tlaib in a joint statement saying the unit's standard "predetermined the outcome — to us, the wrong outcome," and that "Kensu could not have committed and did not in fact commit the crime." The three asked Governor Whitmer to grant clemency.

Writing to Gov. Snyder in September 2018, Sen. Bieda, who had worked on the state's wrongful-conviction compensation law, called the case "a case where justice was not done" and asked the Governor to use "our Constitution's last failsafe for justice, the executive pardon power." He was appointed to the bench in 2023.

In his January 2018 letter to Gov. Snyder, Bretz wrote that Thomas Brennan, the former Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice who founded Cooley Law School, told him he had never granted a directed verdict of not guilty as a trial judge, and "would have granted the motion in this case." Bretz's own review: no physical or forensic evidence connected Freeman to the crime, and the prosecution "was unable to produce any evidence that Mr. Freeman was on a commercial or private flight that day."

In November 2017, Gun wrote Gov. Rick Snyder in support of Kensu's commutation application, with a copy to the Parole Board. He wrote that he had participated in the post-conviction investigation and that "every impartial and professional assessment of his case has concluded that Mr. Freeman is wholly innocent," that nine disinterested witnesses placed him in Escanaba, and that no physical or forensic evidence connected him to the crime. His reaction to the record, collected by Proving Innocence: "You would like to think that somewhere in the system somebody is going to come forward and say, 'Come on. You're putting away an innocent man here.' It's incomprehensible to me."

Radner wrote the Parole Board in December 2017 as counsel in Kensu's civil rights suits. He noted that a jury had found five MDOC employees deliberately indifferent to Kensu's medical needs and awarded damages, and that his firm had extended "a standing job offer" for a full-time paralegal position on release, with help finding housing. "Believe it or not, I would even call him a friend."

Writing Gov. Whitmer in June 2022, Nichols Cook described a client freed by an Illinois governor's commutation after 26 years, a woman not present at the murder, where "no physical evidence of DNA could exonerate" her. "When one branch of government is unable to correct an injustice, another branch must act. We encourage you to do the same for Temujin Kensu."

The Exoneration Project's June 2022 letter to Gov. Whitmer cites the Supreme Court's description of clemency as "the historic remedy for preventing miscarriages of justice where judicial process has been exhausted," and lists innocence pardons it has won from governors in Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky where courts had refused relief. "Somehow, the wrong outcome is acceptable so long as the proper procedure has been followed."

He is not an advocate, and says so: no horse in the race except the truth, a season built to air the hardest material, 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. What he found in 2,200 pages was an absence: nothing tying the man to the murder. On the drive, his verdict is clear: 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 2023 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.

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.

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.