PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Forensic science is a slow, unglamorous, and constantly changing field that is often anything but definitive. In fact, it’s such an amorphous discipline that new ways of testing forensic evidence — or debunking it — can flip old convictions entirely, in either direction. Junk forensic science, along with delays in evidence gathering and mistakes in processing, put Richards behind bars, but these problems are not unique or uncommon. From massive rape-kit backlogs to under-funded coroners’ offices, a national lack of resources and standards mean that such dubious science can easily fill the cracks."
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "During Richards’s 1997 murder trial, Norman “Skip” Skerber, a then-prominent forensic odontologist, testified under oath that he believed a bite mark on Pamela Richards’s hand was almost certainly made by her husband’s “highly unique lower dentition.” Skerber claimed that Richards’s bite pattern was so unique, similar ones only occurred in one to two percent of people. Bite marks weren’t considered admissible evidence in California until 1975, when evidence of a bite mark in the cartilage of a murder victim’s nose was admitted into court. Dentists like Sperber started giving expert testimony on bite mark evidence in court almost immediately, and his work as a forensic dentist across the country contributed to the contested practice becoming widespread for decades. While forensic testing of saliva or blood left by biting would yield a more definitive DNA test, the absence of DNA evidence led many forensic dentists to look at bruise patterns left on victims and compare them with molds taken of suspects’ teeth. On top of the facts that flesh is malleable, people bruise differently, and bruises change shape and color rapidly (even in death), Michael Semanchik, the managing attorney for the California Innocence Project, told me that most bite-mark experts would only examine photos of the body — not the real thing. Richards never stopped maintaining his innocence. In 1999, he became one of the first clients of the California Innocence Project. Two years later, the organization motioned the court to DNA test the murder weapon, Pamela Richards’s fingernails, and other pieces of evidence that had been ignored in favor of the bogus bite-mark claim made by Skerber. The DNA that the organization found revealed that, almost two decades later, Pamela was killed by a totally different man who was never caught."
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STORY: "The dangerous shortcomings of forensic science," by P. Leila Barghouty, published by 'The Outline' on January 23, 2020.
SUB-HEADING: "Junk forensic science is responsible for putting many innocent people behind bars. Can the field be advanced to prevent this?"
GIST: "Bill Richards came home from work on an August night in 1993 to find
his wife lifeless and half-naked on the ground outside their San
Bernardino, California home. It took three 911 calls
before the police showed up at Richards’s property, but homicide
detectives didn’t arrive until almost three hours later. Pamela
Richards’s body lay outside all night during a time of year in which
temperatures could reach the triple digits and the area faced a growing
coyote problem. Exposed to the elements and desert wildlife, her body
wasn’t processed by the homicide team until dawn. The police later
admitted they believed Bill Richards was guilty before they even
arrived. While homicide detectives waited till morning to gather
evidence and the body, animals ran freely around the crime scene and
left Pamela’s body mangled. Despite his alibi, statements from neighbors
and coworkers, and his insistence that he didn’t kill his wife,
Richards’s guilt was signed and sealed, in large part because an
“expert” testified on a single piece of forensic evidence that has now
been debunked as junk science: the bite marks found on his wife’s body.
Richards was quickly and confidently convicted of his wife’s murder. Forensic
science is a slow, unglamorous, and constantly changing field that is
often anything but definitive. In fact, it’s such an amorphous
discipline that new ways of testing forensic evidence — or debunking it —
can flip old convictions entirely, in either direction. Junk forensic
science, along with delays in evidence gathering and mistakes in
processing, put Richards behind bars, but these problems are not unique
or uncommon. From massive rape-kit backlogs to under-funded coroners’ offices, a national lack of resources and standards mean that such dubious science can easily fill the cracks. This month, the Department of Justice announced $145 million in awards
for research programs and grants to advance the field of forensic
science and help prevent the mistakes and shortcomings that put people
like Richards in prison. The money is set to give local jurisdictions
resources to improve forensic analysis, but will fund research and
development for “more accurate, reliable, and cost-effective and rapid
methods of analyzing physical evidence.” While the funding is certainly a
step toward preventing lapses in the quality of forensic investigation
nationwide, it’s unclear whether it will patch the hole left by the
Trump administration’s 2017 termination of Obama’s National Commission on Forensic Science, an initiative set up in 2013 to address this very problem. During
Richards’s 1997 murder trial, Norman “Skip” Skerber, a then-prominent
forensic odontologist, testified under oath that he believed a bite mark
on Pamela Richards’s hand was almost certainly made by her husband’s “highly unique lower dentition.” Skerber claimed that Richards’s bite pattern was so unique, similar ones only occurred in one to two percent of people. Bite marks weren’t considered admissible evidence in California until 1975, when evidence of a bite mark in the cartilage of a murder victim’s nose
was admitted into court. Dentists like Sperber started giving expert
testimony on bite mark evidence in court almost immediately, and his
work as a forensic dentist across the country contributed to the
contested practice becoming widespread for decades. While forensic
testing of saliva or blood left by biting would yield a more definitive
DNA test, the absence of DNA evidence led many forensic dentists to look
at bruise patterns left on victims and compare them with molds taken of
suspects’ teeth. On top of the facts that flesh is malleable, people
bruise differently, and bruises change shape and color rapidly (even in
death), Michael Semanchik, the managing attorney for the California
Innocence Project, told me that most bite-mark experts would only
examine photos of the body — not the real thing. Richards
never stopped maintaining his innocence. In 1999, he became one of the
first clients of the California Innocence Project. Two years later, the
organization motioned the court to DNA test the murder weapon, Pamela
Richards’s fingernails, and other pieces of evidence that had been
ignored in favor of the bogus bite-mark claim made by Skerber. The DNA
that the organization found revealed that, almost two decades later,
Pamela was killed by a totally different man who was never caught. Semanchik
began working at the California Innocence Project while a law student
in 2008. That year, Skerber recanted his testimony. He admitted that the
statistic he had given about how “unique” Richards’s bite was wasn’t
actually scientific. Richards’s legal team had additional dentists
analyze the bite mark that had put him behind bars; ultimately the new
dentists and Sperber concluded that they weren’t even sure the bite was human. “It could have actually just been bruising left from the dogs or the coyotes that were there that night,” Semanchik said. In
addition to being driven by a science now accepted as all but
completely unreliable, the Richards case was filled with errors and
contamination that are sadly common. Contamination, both at the scene of
the crime and during analysis, is one of the biggest factors that
affects the veracity of forensic investigations, according to John
Butler, a fellow and assistant to the director for forensic science at
the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Butler told me that
the lack of control that forensic experts face when obtaining
uncompromised samples from crime scenes is a major factor in why
forensic science isn’t as black and white as Hollywood might make it
seem. “That's just the reality of it,” Butler said. “There may not
be evidence that can be found by the investigators or it may have been
washed away in the course of something occurring outside. Environmental
conditions could lead to a degradation of the sample that’s available to
you, and you only have a partial set of information you can compare to
that. That's where the biggest challenges lie.” Butler says that
contamination happens all the time, by both human error, and simply
because it’s a fact of life. Because there aren’t uniform standards
enforced in forensics labs across the country, samples all too often get
switched or tampered with. In addition, people who live together are
likely to have each others’ DNA all over each others bodies and
possessions. Butler uses the example of a mother driving a car; even
though a mother’s infant is not likely to touch the steering wheel of
her car, the steering wheel will likely have both their DNA on it simply
because the mother has touched both the baby and the steering wheel.
The summation of these challenges, along with mistakes in interpretation
and constantly burgeoning research are why even forensic science can’t
solve most cases “The
reality is that many cases never come to closure,” Butler said. “You may
have 50 percent to 60 percent of cases that never get solved.” In
addition to the faulty bite-mark evidence, a single blue fiber matching
Richards’s shirt was alleged to have been found under his wife’s
fingernail. However, in photographs of Pamela Richards’s fingers taken
before she was moved by police, no blue thread is visible. “It's
unclear whether or not the fiber was planted, or how it ended up under
her fingernail, but it's not there until later down the road,” Semanchik
said. The new evidence
and Skerber’s recanting of his testimony weren’t enough to get Richards
out of prison. Expert testimonies like Skerber’s are treated like
evidence; they’re used by lawyers to sort of connect the dots and
interpret what an innocuous or minor detail found at a crime scene might
mean. But Butler said the way analysts interpret and present forensic
evidence to a jury is just another potential kink in the chain. “You may
be able to measure data very well, but then extrapolating and making a
stronger statement like, “This is definitely from that
person,” he said, “and offering an opinion like that without having the
data behind it to support it…that's one of the big challenges.” And
another huge stumbling block? Experts often get paid for their
testimonies. As forensic odontology grew in popularity, dentists saw an
opportunity. An odontology group formed in the Academy of Forensic
Science, and lawyers started calling on dentists like Sperber to testify
in their cases. A 1988 profile of Sperber in the San Diego Reader called him “the tooth detective,” venerating work he did as a forensic dentist, including bite mark analysis. “Dentists
started testifying and saying that they could, to the exclusion of all
others, make these determinations,” Semanchik said. “They were getting
paid big bucks for it. But I don’t think it was just a money thing — I
think they thought they were doing the good of society.” Semanchik
and his team had to push for a bill to change the California state
penal code to classify so-called expert testimonies that are recanted or
disproved as “false evidence” in 2015. “‘False evidence’ includes
opinions of experts that have either been repudiated by the expert who
originally provided the opinion at a hearing or trial or that have been
undermined by later scientific research or technological advances,” the criminal code now reads. The “junk-science” legislation
created a domino effect. Since 2015, 30 bite-mark related convictions
have been overturned. “I think we can safely say that bite mark evidence
is just junk,” Semanchik said.
New law enforcement tools have also helped cull some of the red-letter flaws of forensic investigation. In 1990, the FBI introduced the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. A digital catalogue of DNA samples from around the country, the database was meant to help local jurisdictions identify serial criminals who left DNA trails across state lines. However, a lack of training among law enforcement means that the CODIS system was and continues to be underused. But Butler thinks tools like CODIS and an overall improvement in the standards and scientific backing of forensic investigation will help prevent cases of people getting wrongfully convicted or let off. Still, even forensic efforts on the federal level are burdened with low reliability. In 2015, the FBI admitted that examiners in one of their forensic units had been giving flawed testimony in hundreds of trials in the ’80s and ’90s. Exoneration organizations like the California Innocence Project, however, still have their work cut out for them. Semanchik said that major shortcomings exist in several forensic subfields that need to be addressed, particularly in infant death and arson cases, and at all levels of criminal justice. “This goes to the top level of law enforcement and forensics in the United States, where we’ve just relied on junk-science to convict people,” he said. “And we don't have a better way of confirming the forensic science that we're trying to rely on when somebody's life is in the balance.” Richards was released from prison on June 21, 2016. Semanchik described seeing Richards walk out of prison as one of the highs of his career. Though he joins the ranks of more than 2,300 exonerees in the U.S., Richards reportedly developed terminal cancer while incarcerated. He filed a lawsuit against the county in 2017, which is ongoing.""
New law enforcement tools have also helped cull some of the red-letter flaws of forensic investigation. In 1990, the FBI introduced the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. A digital catalogue of DNA samples from around the country, the database was meant to help local jurisdictions identify serial criminals who left DNA trails across state lines. However, a lack of training among law enforcement means that the CODIS system was and continues to be underused. But Butler thinks tools like CODIS and an overall improvement in the standards and scientific backing of forensic investigation will help prevent cases of people getting wrongfully convicted or let off. Still, even forensic efforts on the federal level are burdened with low reliability. In 2015, the FBI admitted that examiners in one of their forensic units had been giving flawed testimony in hundreds of trials in the ’80s and ’90s. Exoneration organizations like the California Innocence Project, however, still have their work cut out for them. Semanchik said that major shortcomings exist in several forensic subfields that need to be addressed, particularly in infant death and arson cases, and at all levels of criminal justice. “This goes to the top level of law enforcement and forensics in the United States, where we’ve just relied on junk-science to convict people,” he said. “And we don't have a better way of confirming the forensic science that we're trying to rely on when somebody's life is in the balance.” Richards was released from prison on June 21, 2016. Semanchik described seeing Richards walk out of prison as one of the highs of his career. Though he joins the ranks of more than 2,300 exonerees in the U.S., Richards reportedly developed terminal cancer while incarcerated. He filed a lawsuit against the county in 2017, which is ongoing.""
The entire story can be read 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/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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