STORY: "Judges nationwide routinely allow disavowed science as evidence," by Associated Press reporter Denise Lavoie, published by The Times Herald on August 18, 2017.
PHOTO CAPTION: "In this April 30, 2015, file photo, Kirk Odom pauses during an interview with The Associated Press at his home in southeast in Washington. Odom was convicted of a 1981 rape and robbery after a woman identified him as her attacker and an FBI specialist testified that hair on her nightgown was consistent with hair on Odom’s head. But DNA testing some 30 years later affirmed what Odom long had maintained: The hair wasn’t his, nor was the semen left on a pillowcase and robe. A felony conviction that imprisoned him for decades was overturned in 2012 by a judge who declared it a “grave miscarriage of justice.”
GIST: "Two hairs that looked like the victim’s; some
dirt on a truck like that taken from the crime scene; a pattern on the
bumper that resembled a design on the victim’s popular brand of jeans.
The case against Steven Barnes in the rape and murder of a 16-year-old
girl seemed circumstantial, at best. So the guilty verdict shocked him. “I was saying, ‘This can’t be happening. You can’t convict somebody on similarities, perhaps or maybes,’” Barnes said. He
spent the next 20 years in prison before DNA testing exonerated him,
becoming one of hundreds of people convicted in whole or in part on
forensic science that has come under fire during the past decade. Some of that science — analysis of bite marks, latent
fingerprints, firearms identification, burn patterns in arson
investigations, footwear patterns and tire treads — was once considered
sound, but is now being denounced by some lawyers and scientists who say
it has not been studied enough to prove its reliability and in some
cases has led to wrongful convictions. Even so, judges nationwide continue to admit such evidence regularly. “Courts
— like scientists — rely too heavily on precedent and not enough on the
progress of science,” said Christopher Fabricant, director of strategic
litigation for the Innocence Project. “At some point, we have to
acknowledge that precedent has to be overruled by scientific reality.” Defense lawyers and civil rights advocates say prosecutors and
judges are slow to acknowledge that some forensic science methods are
flawed because they are the very tools that have for decades helped win
convictions. And such evidence can be persuasive for jurors, many of
whom who have seen it used dramatically on “Law & Order” and “CSI.” Rulings
in the past year show judges are reluctant to rule against
long-accepted evidence even when serious questions have been raised
about its reliability: A judge in Pennsylvania ruled prosecutors
can call an expert to testify about bite marks found on a murder
victim’s body, despite 29 wrongful arrests and convictions nationwide
attributed to unreliable bite mark evidence since 2000. A Connecticut judge allowed prosecutors to present evidence
that a footprint was made by a specific shoe belonging to a man accused
of murder, despite a 2016 finding by the President’s Council of Advisors
on Science and Technology that such associations are “unsupported by
any meaningful evidence or estimates of their accuracy.” In
Chicago, a federal judge rejected a request to exclude testimony of
government experts to describe firearm and tool-mark comparisons they
performed on bullets collected at crime scenes in the trial of Hobos
gang members. The judge reasoned that defense lawyers were free to
cross-examine the government’s experts. Two reports by scientific boards have sharply criticized the use
of such forensic evidence, and universities that teach it are moving
away from visual analysis — essentially, eyeballing it — and toward more
precise biometric tools. But some defense lawyers fear any progress on strengthening forensic science may be lost under President Donald Trump. In
April, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the Justice Department
would disband the National Commission on Forensic Science, an
independent panel of scientists, researchers, judges and attorneys that
had been studying how to improve the reliability of forensic practices. Some forensic methods have been questioned by defense lawyers for
years, but it wasn’t until 2009 that the National Academy of Sciences, a
nonprofit consisting of some of the nation’s most distinguished
researchers, released a report that found that with the exception of
DNA, many methods had not been tested enough to be considered valid. “The
simple reality is that the interpretation of forensic evidence is not
always based on scientific studies to determine its validity,” the
report said. “That is a serious problem.” The National Registry of Exonerations at the University of
California Irvine has documented more than 2,000 exonerations since
1989. Nearly one-fourth list “false or misleading forensic evidence” as a
contributing factor. And a report last fall from the President’s
Council criticized several “feature-comparison” methods, which attempt
to determine whether a sample from a crime scene is associated with a
sample from a suspect by comparing patterns. The council said those
methods — including analysis of shoeprints, tire tracks, latent
fingerprints, firearms and spent ammunition — need more study to
determine their reliability and error rates. When the reliability of forensic evidence is challenged through
DNA testing or other new evidence, it often results in the granting of a
new trial, even if there is other strong evidence against a defendant. “More
often than not, it undermines confidence in the verdict, which is
enough to get a new trial,” said Daniel Medwed, a law professor at
Boston’s Northeastern University. In 2015, the Justice Department
revealed that FBI agents had overstated the strength of their evidence
for decades in many cases involving microscopic hair analysis. The FBI
now acknowledges microscopic hair analysis is inconclusive and uses it
only in conjunction with DNA testing. Kirk Odom was 18 when he was charged with raping a woman at
gunpoint in Washington, D.C. An FBI agent testified that a hair on the
woman’s nightgown was “indistinguishable” from Odom’s, a conclusion he
said he had reached only eight or 10 times during thousands of analyses. “I just kept saying, ‘They’re lying. That ain’t my hair,’” Odom recalled. Odom spent 22 years in prison but was exonerated after DNA testing of the hair and other evidence excluded him as the rapist. The President’s Council also found that bite mark evidence does not meet scientific standards and is unlikely to ever do so. That didn’t surprise Keith Harward, a former Navy sailor who
spent 33 years in prison for the 1982 killing of a man and the rape of
the man’s wife in Newport News, Virginia. Forensic dentists
testified that his teeth matched bite marks on the woman’s leg. But in
2014, DNA tests matched sperm at the scene to one of Harward’s former
shipmates, who had died years earlier in prison after being convicted of
a different crime. One of the experts was Dr. Lowell Levine, an
odontologist who testified in the case of serial killer Ted Bundy,
linking Bundy to the 1978 murder of a college student. “Here he comes waltzing up in the courtroom with these normal,
everyday people in the jury — ‘I testified in the Ted Bundy case’ —
well, boom! That was the first nail in my coffin,” Harward said. “I was done; the jury was hypnotized,” he said. After
Harward was freed last year, Levine said he was “upset and quite
disturbed” by the mistake. He told The New York Times that he and
another expert had “completely followed” guidelines and that
considerable evidence seemed to point to a match with Harward. But, he acknowledged, “This case should persuade all my
colleagues to agree with the need for more scientific research and
investigation.”........Lisa Wood, who represented a defendant in the Chicago gang trial ,
argued that prosecutors should not be allowed to introduce firearms
identification evidence because of the 2016 President’s Council report. “It
can be very powerful evidence, and it doesn’t seem consistent with the
principles of justice that we would introduce this kind of evidence
without knowing that it’s sound,” she said. In Massachusetts, a
judge ruled that prosecutors could present ballistics evidence in the
double-murder trial of ex-NFL star Aaron Hernandez. He was eventually
acquitted but was already serving a life sentence in a separate killing;
he hanged himself in prison days after his acquittal.........Critical reports, wrongful
convictions and scandals involving unscrupulous lab chemists have
sparked discussion at universities and an increased emphasis on the
language analysts should use in court. Visual analysis is also
increasingly coming under fire, said David Foran, director of the
forensic science program at Michigan State University. “The idea is, instead of a person looking at two things and
saying they are the same, they’re not, or I can’t tell,” Foran said, “is
to actually have computer scans of them, at a digital level, to find
out how similar they are.” For Barnes, those similarities added up to convictions in Utica, New York, on murder, rape and sodomy charges. “I said to myself, ‘The jury has to understand; they won’t convict me on this stuff they say is similar,’” Barnes recalled. “I was wrong.”"
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/c
The entire story can be found at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/c
The entire story can be found at:
