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Nov. 20, 2024 - Dr. Oz Podcast
40:50
Dr. Oz Exclusive: The Untold Story of Army Ranger Gary Smith | Dr. Oz | S7 | Ep 116 | Full Episode
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Time Text
The making of a murderer case, you haven't heard.
Sentenced to 35 years in prison for killing his roommate.
I did not kill my friend.
Can new medical technology clear his name?
Proponents say they can use it to determine if someone is telling the truth.
Can we look into someone's mind and tell if they're guilty of a crime?
Coming up next...
Today, a Dr. Raj show like you've never seen before.
We have obtained exclusive footage that goes behind the scenes of a murder case.
The video was brought to us by a doctor who believes new medical technology can look inside the mind of an accused killer and determine if they're lying.
It's another making a murderer story, one you haven't heard.
And we're about to take you through the case step by step, asking the tough questions.
Where do medicine and the law come together?
Can science help us tell the truth from a lie?
And can we, and should we, look inside someone's mind to know if they're guilty of a crime?
By the end of the show, you'll decide for yourself.
This is former Army Ranger Gary Smith.
Six months after returning from his last tour in Afghanistan, he was accused of shooting and killing his roommate, fellow Army Ranger Michael McQueen.
Take a look at what happened in their Maryland apartment on the night Michael lost his life.
Michael McQueen and Gary Smith, both ex-Army Rangers who served together in Afghanistan, begin the night of September 25th, 2006, smoking marijuana and bar hopping.
The two veterans are also roommates and later that night end up back at their apartment.
What happens next ended one life and changed the other forever.
Just after midnight, Smith places what has been described as a panic call to 911. He tells the operator that he and McQueen were drinking and that he dropped McQueen off at their house.
When he returned home, he found McQueen with a hole in his head.
Police respond to the call and find Smith outside the apartment, hysterical and covered in blood.
I didn't know what to do.
Under interrogation, Smith changed his story.
But Smith's lawyers say post-traumatic stress disorder accounts for the former Army Ranger's changing stories and paranoid behavior that night.
The autopsy reveals that the shot fired into McQueen's head went from right to left.
There was no blowback residue or blood splatter on his right hand.
Consequently, the state's forensic pathologist calls it homicide.
Experts for the defense disagree, arguing the gun was held in a place and angle consistent with suicide.
Gun residue samples were found on both Smith's and McQueen's hands, but that evidence is considered inconclusive.
After a 12-day jury trial, Smith is convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Smith maintains his innocence.
He appeals and on a technicality is granted a retrial.
In preparation, Smith's legal team turns to a new medical technology they hope will convince the next jury that Smith is telling the truth.
Up next, what happened when the case went back to court?
And what if a brain scan could tell if Gary was lying?
We'll be right back.
Coming up next, out of options, Gary's defense team is about to take a big risk, going inside the convicted killer's brain in an attempt to clear his name.
But is it even possible?
And later, the moment our audience never saw coming.
Gary's here today.
Only you know the truth.
Did you kill Michael McQueen?
Tomorrow.
30 days, 30 ideas to fix your biggest body problems.
Our fix or fail lab tests what works and what doesn't.
Plus, is gluten leaving you wiped out?
That's coming up tomorrow on Dr. Oz.
*applaudissements* We're back going inside the murder case against former Army Ranger Gary Smith, who in 2008 was sentenced to 35 years in prison for killing his roommate and fellow soldier Michael McQueen.
But then the case went back to court and Gary's team turned to a new medical technology in an attempt to clear his name.
September 2012. Gary Smith has been in prison for six years.
Now, he's out on bond, ready to go back to court in hopes of winning his freedom.
I want to vindicate myself.
I want to prove my innocence.
I did not kill my friend and my roommate Michael McClellan.
The arguments will be the same.
Was McQueen's death a murder or a suicide?
Is Smith telling the truth?
But this time, Smith's legal team decides to take a chance on a different, new kind of evidence.
An fMRI lie detector.
The first test is the test that relates to your court case.
So they're really going to be just straightforward, simple, short questions.
An fMRI maps brain activity.
Proponents say they can use it to determine if someone is telling the truth.
Why?
Because your brain activity can look different when you lie compared to when you tell the truth.
What we see is that to intentionally lie is hard work, and it requires a lot more of the brain to be active than when you are telling the truth.
This is the button box.
With this index finger, you're going to press yes, and with your middle finger, you're going to press no.
So there's only two answers.
Okay, now we're ready to perform the first part of the first test.
Basically we're going to be asking questions about your port case.
The test complete.
Smith and his legal team now wait for the results.
Dr. Robert Huizenga joins me now.
That was your footage, your technology.
What was it like when you joined Gary going into that device?
I was very scared, I have to admit.
I've done a lot of interviews, and I'm thinking to myself, here's a trained killer, an army ranger, who was convicted of murder, and I've agreed to interview him a couple days later to give him the results.
He claims he's innocent.
Of course, lots of convicts might say that in jail.
And like, what was it going to be like to look a guy in the eye and say, you're a cold-blooded murderer.
You did it.
You've been lying all along.
And I was panicked.
Dr. Zenga and his brother have a business that's trying to market fMRIs for use in the criminal justice system.
You've become very passionate about this area.
Why is it so important?
I believe this could change the way that we see each other.
I mean, we can call people's bluff, and it's the first unbiased, scientifically-backed way to differentiate a lie from truth-telling.
There's 102 articles about it, over 500 authors, multiple machines, multiple countries.
It's very robust scientifically.
I know you're a scientist at heart.
This is not some fly-by gimmick.
So polygraphs, the lie detector tests that everyone knows about, they're sort of the standard for detection, but they're not allowed in court either, right?
They're not allowed in court because they're totally inaccurate.
Even the CIA says they only work 60% of the time.
So why do you think this technology offers a solution where they fail?
Well, this offers a solution because everything else hasn't been studied.
Ballistics, blood spatter that you heard mentioned there, toxicology, even fingerprinting.
They're grandfathered forensic techniques, never been scientifically validated.
Now we have, short of DNA, the first scientifically validated forensic study, and I think it's going to be crucial if we're interested in a better judicial system going forward.
Let's talk about functional MRIs for one second, just to get you all on the same page.
They're used right now for checking memory, diagnosing Alzheimer's, chronic pain.
It's something that we can tell if you truly have it or not based on fMRIs.
It's a great tool to image the brain, but it's a big step to go beyond that because it's largely experimental when used for things like, for example, telling you someone's telling you a lie or not.
Well, it's been out for 15 years.
So, yes, it's experimental.
Yes, more studies always have to be done.
But even at this stage, it's a far more reliable technique than a lot of the stuff we're using.
Let's show everybody what we're talking about.
Dr. Zenger believes that it can help you detect a lie.
So I want you to take an opportunity to explain to everybody how this might work.
So let's start off with a polygraph.
Absolutely.
Here you can see, they're just basically testing peripheral nervous function.
What's your heart rate?
What's your breathing rate?
How much are you sweating?
These are peripheral nervous functions, but as you know, some innocent people are very anxious, they fail.
Some guilty people, calm as a cucumber, they pass.
Not a great test.
Now, when you look at the functional MRI, you're going inside the brain.
This is a paradigm shift in how we analyze truth-telling.
And they go inside this machine, and they can't move a muscle.
If you move, it invalidates the test.
And you just, yes, no, to very critical questions.
And we ask 20 questions.
Five of them are simple truths, you know.
What car do you drive?
Things that we can validate.
Then in this case, we would say to Mike McQueen, to Gary Smith, did you share an apartment with Mike McQueen?
That's an emotional truth.
Then we tell him, lie on everything related to your military experience.
And then we see what his brain does there.
Then we ask the questions we're interested in.
And we're looking, what goes on in the brain when he tells the truth?
What goes on in the brain when he lies?
And I'd like to do an example with you.
I'm going to ask you, To honestly tell me, are you a physician practicing in New York City?
I am.
Okay, this is what the MRI would look like if you answered that inside that machine.
And you can see a series of areas light up.
The color is a function of the delta, the change in blood flow to those areas.
Which areas are working harder?
And the shocking thing is not that we see a picture of your brain, but that every one of different ethnicities, ages, and even languages has the same pattern for truth-telling.
That's a shock.
No one ever expected that.
So now I'm going to ask you a question.
I want you to intentionally lie.
When you were a medical school, when you were a medical student, were you class president?
I was not.
That's a lie.
I know that.
And so if we asked you that question under the machine, a totally different but yet reproducible area of the brain lights up.
Because when you tell the truth, that's relatively simple.
But when you have to massage the truth and you have to come up with a lie That requires a lot more brain power and different areas of the brain light up.
But again, the shock is that different people, even people with psychiatric disease, that the same areas light up when you're telling a lie.
And that's the basis of this whole new technology.
Alright, so just to go over this one more time because we're going to cover this again.
There's not one truth section of the brain, right?
There's not a truth area and a lie area.
You're looking at how the brain copes with trying to tell the truth or lie.
So now that we know that, up next, did the results of Gary's brain scan bring anyone closer to finding out what really happened to Michael McQueen?
Plus, the big question, the big one out there, would you trust a test like this enough to determine whether an accused killer should walk free?
Think about that.
We'll be right back.
When we come back, inside the brain of convicted killer Gary Smith.
But will it prove his innocence in a second trial?
I want you to read and tell me whether you think this matches up best with the truth or whether Gary has, in fact, been lying all along.
And later, Dr. Oz's one-on-one with convicted killer Gary Smith.
What the heck happened that night?
I want to hear it from you with no strings attached.
And in Gary's own words, why he wants to prove his innocence.
If I could spend the rest of my life trying to convince her that I didn't kill her son, I would.
His desperate plea.
But Michael's mother has the last word.
coming up next.
You're about to see exclusive footage brought to us by a doctor who claims a brain scan can determine whether or not someone is lying.
Accused killer Gary Smith hoped his results would clear his name.
Take a look.
How's it going, Doctor?
Good, good.
Nice to finally meet you.
You too.
What we did with your brother is we asked him 20 questions, and they all randomly popped up every four or five seconds, so he didn't get a chance to even think about them.
So based on these questions, we got a very good, very clear idea about what Gary's brain does when he lies, and what Gary's brain does when he's telling the truth.
So then we asked him five questions that had to do with this criminal case.
We didn't know what the answer was.
You've been one of Gary's biggest supporters, so I want you to read and tell me whether you think this matches up best with the truth, or whether Gary has in fact been lying all along.
It's definitely the truth.
It's definitely the truth.
Yeah.
You were telling the truth.
I'm back with Dr. Robert Huzanga, who we just saw give Gary Smith his fMRI results.
I'm also joined by David Moisey, Gary's defense attorney.
Thank you both for being here.
Thank you.
So...
Were these FMI results we just saw delivered to Gary admissible at that second trial?
No.
Unfortunately, the judge on the second trial excluded the results, and we expected that going in.
You expected it?
We did.
It was a tough road to get them in.
So if you didn't think it would be part of the trial, why did you bother getting the test?
Multiple reasons.
I mean, number one, we knew Gary was innocent and we wanted to shine a light on that.
We wanted the prosecutor, the judge, the victim's family to see these results and hopefully have some small impact on their thoughts.
And as well, we believe in the technology and it's got to start somewhere.
You've got to try and hopefully get progress in getting these kinds of things admitted.
So, Mr. Moyes, what happened at the second trial?
What was the outcome?
Well, it was over two weeks.
The jury deliberated for a while.
And unfortunately, they convicted Gary, not of second-degree murder this time, but of involuntary manslaughter and use of a handgun.
So the case was lowered in charge, but he was sentenced to 28 years in jail.
28 years?
Yes.
It was devastating.
But it was not the end of the road, and we kept fighting.
So Dr. Zenga felt so passionately about Gary's FMR results that he actually tracked down the jurors of that trial after the sentencing to see if it would have changed their minds if they'd seen the results.
I think it was unjust that we were not able to hear anything about the new technology.
If this had been presented, it definitely raises questions in my mind.
I knew that, you know, he wasn't guilty.
I felt Mr. Smith was not guilty.
And I'm ashamed.
I'm ashamed of this justice system.
She said she was ashamed.
I was so angry sitting in that court and seeing the injustice.
Number one, we have a method.
Why does a judge get to take the power out of the hands of the people?
Let's let the jurors decide if this is accurate or inaccurate like they do for every other forensic test.
Why can a judge just out of hand throw out one of the most accurate techniques we have out there?
We're looking at the brain.
You know, I could say that those jurors that you spoke to would have changed their mind.
The question is, is it the right thing to do?
And you've seen lots of evidence now, right?
We've all heard it all.
We've presented it pretty clearly.
But not everyone is convinced that brain scanning can show the difference between the truth and the lie.
Up next, an expert neurologist weighs in, plus the twist in the case you never saw coming.
Be right back.
Thank you.
Coming up next, Gary's defense team had to convince the courts to allow this unorthodox medical evidence.
But would they accept it?
I know that polygraphs have been criticized because savvy people can game them, right?
You can figure out ways of tricking the machinery.
You think it's possible with an fMRI we're actually looking inside the brain?
Coming up next.
Tomorrow.
30 days, 30 ideas to fix your biggest body problems.
Our fix or fail lab tests what works and what doesn't.
Plus, is gluten leaving you wiped out?
That's coming up tomorrow on Dr. Oz.
Thank you.
Welcome back.
We've been taking you inside a true crime case with a medical twist.
And before the break, you saw accused killer, Gary Smith, undergoing a brain scan called an fMRI.
The footage was brought to us by Dr. Zenga, who believes this technology is more accurate than a polygraph, the traditional lie detector test you always see.
So I asked my colleague at Columbia, neurologist Dr. Randy Marshall, to be here today to weigh in on the science.
Thanks for being here.
So, you study these fMRIs.
You're a world expert in them.
Based on your research and looking at all this information, where do you stand on this fMRI being a lie detector tool that we could use to exonerate criminals who claim they're innocent?
Honestly, I don't think we're there yet.
A fMRI is a great tool for identifying patterns of activity in the brain, as we've seen.
Reading versus listening to music, for example, or identifying a familiar face versus a face of a stranger.
But the research that led to the development of the technique, the lie detector technique, was college students, basically, in a laboratory environment, being instructed to lie or to tell the truth about something like a particular card in a deck of cards.
It's a whole different ballgame to apply this technology in a real-world situation like a court of law.
You've got the emotions, you've got not to mention the high stakes of the consequences of what the person might say, like what Gary went through.
So I know that polygraphs have been criticized because savvy people can game them.
You can figure out ways of tricking the machinery.
Do you think it's possible with an fMRI, we're actually looking inside the brain?
Yeah, no, same idea.
I mean, certainly with the brain, you've got more information you can work with, but it's been shown that certain countermeasures like Moving one's toes while you're in the scanner, or even more importantly, thinking about moving your toes, may produce a pattern of activity that overlaps or disrupts or obscures a difference in regions of the brain, a pattern that detects a difference between lie and truth.
Give me one second because I want to explain this so people are clear on this.
This is a big issue because if you can use this test, it makes it a lot easier to tell what's going on, but is it reliable?
So the pitfalls of fMRI as a lie detector come back This basic concept, and I'm going to remind you about this.
Now, remember, if I told a lie, a part of my brain would have to light up, in theory, because I was confabulating, making stuff up.
So more of my brain lit up when I was asked a question earlier that I purposely told a lie to.
But what if I, as Dr. Marsh said, curled my toes, or more importantly, just thought about curling my toes so you couldn't tell my body what was happening?
Maybe the brain, instead of looking like this, would be thrown off, and I might come back with a test with nothing or something very similar to telling the truth.
The brain isn't a simple map.
We don't know exactly what part of the brain is responsible for every thought.
This is sort of similar to how CIA agents would always bite their tongue to fake a polygraph test.
With an fMRI, just thinking about butting your tongue or focusing on something else could affect the quality of these results.
So, Dr. Marshall, let me come back to this issue of whether these tests could become admissible.
I know, for example, in scenarios where people have chronic pain, You're a workman compensation case and you say it hurt your back at work.
They can use an fMRI to prove that you either have pain or don't have pain.
So it's already entered the legal system.
What has to happen for this to become a tool for telling if you're truthful or not about having murdered somebody?
Well, I think really what it comes down to is the amount of error that we can allow.
And the ways in which this might become an errorful might, in Gary's case, be a situation, for example, of the concept of false memory.
Where you, I mean, the memory doesn't work just like a videotape recorder, right?
We look back on an event and emotions come in.
We see things certain ways.
We create what we think happened and we solidify it over time and we go back and we think about it might change over time.
And over and over it becomes our truth, our reality.
And so if you put someone in a scanner who is thinking they are going to report the truth as they see it and it's going to look like a truth pattern.
So if you have PTSD because you fought in Afghanistan, then you might not actually be able to tell what happened.
Right.
Well, that's one example.
Another example, a great study that was done about what do you do if someone is a skilled liar?
I got their attention.
None of those out there, I'm sure.
But there was a great study that was done on patients with antisocial personality disorder.
And they showed that the better they were at deception, the closer the pattern between the lie pattern and the truth pattern.
So it could be hard to tell.
Dr. Zenga, you spent a lot of time researching this.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Well, it's really interesting because the simple countermeasures like moving your hands and feet, obviously you can see.
And what he's describing, these are tests where they didn't look at the motor strip.
So the minute you look at the whole brain, you can't hide.
So we can see when you're doing those countermeasures.
So the countermeasure thing, interesting, was 100% when you didn't do countermeasures, and you can see when they're doing countermeasures.
So that's really not an issue.
The thing about real-life emotion, it's really interesting.
When we ask somebody like Gary Smith, Unemotional truths, really emotional truths, there's no difference in that pattern.
And so this is something that's brought up by people that are used to the old polygraph, where unemotional and emotional makes a huge difference in your peripheral system.
But curiously enough, it doesn't appear to in the central system.
And lastly, people with different thought processes and consolidating truth in different ways.
We've done this study on schizophrenics, and shockingly to me, It still works.
So I think that I respectfully disagree and I think that this is something that is close to getting the right studies to make it a legit, totally life changer in this country and in our judicial system.
Instead of having Randy respond, let me, if I can, ask someone who was involved in the court case to respond.
We reached out to Liz Phelps.
She's a neuroscientist, and she testified against Gary's fMRI results being admissible, being used in the case.
Here's what she said.
This is a quote.
She said,"...the science behind fMRIs for lie detection in the real world has failed to address critical issues that undermine its reliability." And I'm going to ask one more little bit of patience here.
There's something in the legal system called the Fry Standard.
That means that to allow forensic tests, any kinds of forensic tests, the test has to be generally accepted within the scientific field.
Is this fMRI generally accepted among world-class neurologists?
There's nothing generally accepted in anything and the problem is all the other forensic techniques have been grandfathered in and we know are poor.
This one has its problems and you can elaborate further on them, but what we're using now, blood spatter, ballistics, even fingerprinting has never been rigorously tested and at least this has 102 studies, all of which are positive.
Dr. Marshall?
I would just say that, you know, ultimately this is a testable question.
And we're learning more and more about the brain.
It's fascinating stuff.
New techniques of learning connections and different region techniques and analytic techniques.
What we need to do is apply this technique and test it in the courts.
I mean, I think we need to do these series of clinical trials almost.
That's what you need to do is see whether you're really corroborating with other evidence.
I have my skeptic view, and there's a lot of science that still needs to be done.
Ultimately, I don't think it'll ever reach the level of DNA evidence from a blood sample.
But it could become some corroborating evidence.
I think it's potential, but it needs to be tested further.
So for today, it doesn't meet this criteria, this fry criteria we spoke about.
But that brings us back to the question, what really happened to Michael McQueen?
And the twist that no one saw coming.
Music September 2012. Gary Smith is retried and convicted of manslaughter.
The judge sentences him to 28 years in prison.
In August 2014, after yet another appeal, Smith is again granted the opportunity for a new trial.
But this time, something nobody foresees.
Smith's legal team negotiates a plea to involuntary manslaughter.
As part of the deal, Smith does not have to admit guilt.
He receives no additional jail time.
After six years, Gary Smith is free.
Surprising, isn't it?
Let's go over this again one more time.
At the first trial, Gary Smith was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
In his second trial, that's four years later, he was sentenced to 28 years in prison.
But then, in 2014, to avoid a third trial, Gary took a plea deal that set him free today.
And you know what, everybody?
Gary Smith, he's here today.
He's backstage.
I want you to hear what he has to say in his first ever television interview when we come back.
Coming up next, Gary speaks out for the first time on television.
How did Michael get the gun?
I gave it to him that night.
People at home and in the studio audience are watching your every move.
They're trying to pick up on a towel, something that you're doing that might give away that you're lying.
How can we tell if you're telling the truth?
Did you kill Michael McQueen?
Coming up next...
On the night of September 26, 2006, Michael McQueen was found shot dead in the apartment he shared with fellow Army Ranger Gary Smith.
Smith was twice convicted of killing his roommate.
Although he served six years in prison, both convictions were overturned on appeal.
Throughout, Smith maintained his innocence.
At one point, he even tried to present an fMRI brain scam in court as evidence that he was telling the truth and did not kill McQueen.
Before he went to trial for a third time, Smith's lawyer successfully negotiated a plea bargain.
And today, Gary Smith is a free man.
Gary Smith is here today for his first ever television interview.
So Gary, only you know the truth.
Did you kill Michael McQueen?
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
So when you spoke to the police that night, when you were interrogated, you lied?
Yes, yes I did.
What was the story you told them?
I originally told them that, you know, I came home and found them that way.
And then, through talking to them, at one point in the interrogation, they mentioned the gunshot residue, and I finally calmed down and realized, you know, that'll prove I didn't do it, and I told them what really happened.
If you're innocent, why would you lie?
I just panicked.
I just made one mistake after another.
On top of that, I'd been drinking.
So my thought process at the time wasn't a good one.
You know, I'd been drinking and smoking marijuana and just a mixture of panic and bad choices.
In the course of the stories you were telling, this gun You know, it disappeared.
It was thrown in the pond.
You claimed it wasn't yours.
Then it was.
How did Michael get that gun?
I gave him access to it.
I gave it to him that night.
You came home and just handed it to him?
I believe I set it down next to him and he wanted to...
It was your decision to go after this fMRI scan that would look inside your brain And try to figure out if you're telling the truth or lying.
Why'd you want to go to that extreme measure?
Because I wanted to use every avenue possible to prove that I didn't kill my friend.
I loved him.
I'd never hurt him.
Can I go to your mom for a second?
Oh, absolutely.
Gary's mother, Rosemary, is in the audience.
So, Rosemary, I know that Gary took a plea deal to stay out of prison.
What's it like to have him back at home with you?
It's wonderful to have him back home, but it's been a long nine years.
Did you ever doubt his innocence?
Never, not for a second.
Did you ever talk to him about why he lied when he was first interrogated?
Yes, we did discuss it.
So, this plea deal you took allows you to be here with us, but it doesn't exonerate you.
It sort of leaves you in a little bit of limbo.
Yes.
What's that like?
It's hard, but...
I wanted to move on with my life.
And a big decision in taking this plea deal was, you know, should I put my family through a third trial?
Should I put his family through a third trial?
And ultimately, you know, through the advice of different people, I decided to take it.
So, Mr. Morris, he's out of prison now and he's not going back to prison?
He's completely out.
Okay, so can we just leave all that behind us?
Yes.
I want to actually hear from you now that you're free.
Yes.
What the heck happened that night?
I want to hear from you with no strings attached.
There's so much confusion in my mind still and I've studied your case.
With no strings attached, after a night of drinking and doing drugs, which were two things I shouldn't have been doing anyways, I made the bad decision to give a gun, a loaded gun, to my friend.
And as a result of that, he died.
But why would he pull the trigger at his head?
Same thing.
I told the police.
I have no clue.
He could have been playing around.
It's possible he could have done it on purpose, but still to this day, I think he was just playing around with the gun, and it went off.
And why wouldn't you have said that to the police?
Well, they kept asking me for a reason, like, why.
And I told them, I said, I don't know why.
And as they kept pushing me and pushing me, they said, well, there has to be a reason.
There has to be a reason.
And finally, I just gave him a list.
I said, I don't know.
His girlfriend had just broken up with him.
His girlfriend of six years had just broken up with him.
He just came back from deployment.
He doesn't have a job.
You know, I gave him those, but that was only after they repeatedly asked the question.
And I prefaced it with, you know, I don't know.
Maybe it was these things.
Did you see him pull the trigger?
No, I didn't.
Where were you?
I was in the hallway, which is behind the living room.
What were you doing there?
I was walking out from my room.
Well, my bathroom is back in my room, which is all the way at the end of that hallway.
And I was walking out back towards Mike.
And when you heard the shot?
When I heard the shot, I didn't really...
There was about maybe a second or two before I actually saw him.
And...
When I heard the shot, I really didn't know what to think.
I knew something happened.
But it was so quiet.
It wasn't a regular gunshot.
It was so quiet.
So a couple things might have gone through my head as to what happened.
But I rounded the corner and saw what had happened rather quickly right after that.
Just made one bad decision after the next.
So, it leaves a young man dead this evening, and we haven't talked as much about him, but I want to hear what you have to say to Michael McQueen's mother, who lost her son that night.
I'm very, very sorry for her loss.
He was my friend, but he was your son.
I didn't kill him, and I truly wish from the bottom of my heart that she gets peace.
He was just a great guy.
That's all I want to say about him.
Just let her know that he was a great guy.
I loved him with all my heart.
And Rosemary, you still have your son.
Years of his life were taken in prison, but he's still with you.
What would you say to Michael McQueen's mom who will never have her son in his arms again?
My heart breaks for her.
I can't even imagine the grief and pain that nine years of trials put her through.
But I can understand some of it.
I've buried a son as well.
And it's not something you ever get over.
You just move on.
So I hope that she finds peace.
So up next, we're going to hear what Mrs. McQueen has to say.
You won't want to miss it.
Coming up next, we reach out to Michael McQueen's mother.
What she has to say to Gary about his claim of innocence.
Does she believe him?
One thing I do know is that there is no machine that can prove that he is telling the truth.
Even though they say that the mind needs to work harder to lie, it all depends on who lies.
Coming up next.
Tomorrow.
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That's coming up tomorrow on Dr. Oz. .
On today's show, we've gone through a real murder case, from evidence presented in court to the controversial medical test results that claim to be able to detect a lie.
We've even heard from the accused killer himself.
But in every true crime case, it's important to remember and honor the victim and to give a voice to the family left behind.
So we reached out to Michael McQueen's mother, Glenda McQueen.
She did not wish to be here today, but she sent us a statement.
Here's part of what she had to say.
Thank you Dr. Oz for allowing us to respond to Gary Smith's claim that this fMRI technology has proven that he is innocent of the crime of murdering my son Michael McQueen.
Michael was a young man who was trusting of folks.
He was a young man who was very kind.
He had a wonderful sense of humor.
People loved him.
He had lots of friends.
And Gary Smith claimed to be one of those people who was his friend.
Yet, when he found his body, instead of calling for help, he took the gun, threw it in the lake, took the bullets out before he did that, and threw the bullets in separate places We will never know why he killed Michael.
The one thing I do know is that there is no machine that can prove that he is telling the truth after he has been found guilty twice.
We know that he is a pathological liar.
He is a young man whose family has been able to financially support his case.
He has had some of the best lawyers in the state to defend him.
And obviously he has lied well enough to get past this machine.
Even though they say that the mind needs to work harder to lie, it all depends on who lies.
And so this technology should not be used for him.
Or for anyone else who will try to use this to get off from murder or any other crime.
Thank you.
So Gary, Mrs. McQueen just called you a pathological liar.
Yeah.
How do you respond?
It hurts, but I know that's coming from a place of pain from her, and there's nothing I can do to bring her son back.
And I do bear some of that responsibility because I gave him the gun.
So I failed him, and if I could spend the rest of my life trying to convince her that I didn't kill her son, I would.
If I could convince one person in this world, it wouldn't be a judge or a jury, it would be her that I didn't kill her son.
What's your life like now?
My life now is really good after getting out of prison.
It's hard, but every day I have excitement because I don't have a 35- or 28-year prison sentence.
I can move on with my life.
I'm going to school, I have a job, and everything's going really well.
Rosemary, Mom, let me give you the final word here.
Your son is going to be thought of as being guilty for the rest of his life by a lot of people.
How are you going to deal with that?
One day at a time.
Supporting him.
Never, ever doubting that he was innocent all along.
And just through the grace of God.
We'll be right back.
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Oh my goodness, what is going on here?
That's coming up Friday on Dr. Oz.
In 2006, former Army Ranger Gary Smith was accused of shooting and killing his roommate, Michael McQueen.
We spent the last hour examining the case.
But only one person really knows what happened in their Maryland apartment the night Michael lost his life.
Gary Smith.
But the attempt to use a brain scan to go inside Gary's mind to prove his innocence in a court of law raises some interesting questions that have the potential to affect all of us.
Where do medicine and law come together?
Can science help us tell the difference between the truth and a lie?
And can we, frankly, should we, be able to look inside someone's mind to know if they're guilty of a crime?
So here are my thoughts.
The fMRI technology in question is a fascinating tool that allows us to see inside people's brains.
But looking at something and understanding it are two separate and different things.
Right now, the way we use the fMRI and how we control for cheating needs to be improved before its use becomes part of our legal system.
But, as an example, in workman's compensation cases, the fMRI has already been accepted in courts to identify if someone's chronic pain is really there.
So I'm hopeful that with more research, the fMRI may eventually play a role in helping us identify the truth, what really happened.
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