“The bottom line is that everyone is looking bad” in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, former federal prosecutor Annemarie McAvoy...
Read full entry »As science continues to play a larger role in crime solving, St. Louis Police Department scientists are getting out of the lab and into the streets, while other area departments are expanding their facilities, says the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. St. Louis police civilian scientists, with special training in DNA and biological analysis, have been accompanying evidence technicians since May to get a firsthand look at blood splatter, shell casings, soiled clothing, or any of the other signs that can be the key to unlocking the mysteries of crime scenes.
The department credits the new on-call-scientists idea, combined with a new mandatory quick-hit forensics class for all officers, with helping police crack cases quicker. On-scene scientists have helped with important contributions in such high-profile cases as the ATM Solutions robbery and the shooting of St. Louis officer Lucas Roethlisberger, police said. Officers and scientists also said the new practices are improving communication among investigators, street officers and the lab, while streamlining evidence analysis. Kyra Lienhop, one of the on-call DNA scientists, says scientists benefit from getting to see the layout of crime scenes in person. It can make a big difference, she said, to know the specific surroundings of where someone was shot, the entry point to an apartment, or how the pieces of a multiple-site drive-by fit together. "To physically be there and see the layout of the streets" is key, Lienhop said. And when evidence is brought back to the lab, having had a scientist at the scene can help prioritize evidence processing. Since the practice was started in the spring, scientists receive pages summoning them to crime scenes about once a week, usually to help evidence technicians at particularly tricky homicides, burglaries or the sites of sex crimes.
Read full entry »Forensic science, it would seem, is a glamorous profession where sharp-minded scientists use state-of-the-art technology to unwrap the mysteries that often lie behind a person's death, says The Oklahoman. That's how the television version goes. The reality is those scientists can work long hours, perform tedious work, and labor under less-than-ideal conditions with aging equipment in a deteriorating building.
The mission for forensic toxicologists remains the same: find out what substance or substances may have killed someone. And getting it right — for the sake of a deceased person's loved ones — is paramount, even if it takes time. "It's a time-eater,” said Byron Curtis, chief toxicologist for the state medical examiner's office. “But it has to be done right. If it's wrong, it's meaningless.” Television programs like “CSI” and “NCIS” have given the public a view of forensic toxicology long on drama but short on accuracy. The programs show laboratory staff testing substances in high-tech machines, which instantly spit out information that help police solve crimes or other mysteries. The reality is that the science of toxicology is for the patient. "Their capabilities on TV are magical,” Curtis said. In real life, samples must be taken. Tests ordered and performed, their results verified. When answers don't come easily, more lab work lies ahead. “That gets difficult because there's an infinite number of chemicals” that can be tested for, Curtis said.
Read full entry »The "biometric" recognition technologies like fingerprints and eye scans that solve so many crimes on TV cop shows are "inherently fallible," according to a blue-ribbon panel report cited by USA Today. The report was released by the National Research Council. "A lot of things possible on a TV series just don't work that way in real life," says panel member Bob Blakley of Gartner, a computer security firm in Stamford, Conn. "While there are lots of good uses for biometric recognition, there are lots of ways to create systems that waste time, cost too much and don't work very well."
Federal agencies such as the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are funding research in improved biometric screening, but the report cautions they're not doing basic research into whether the physical characteristics involved are truly reliable or how they change with aging, disease, stress or other factors. None look stable across all situations, the report says. Deployment of biometric screening devices at airports, borders or elsewhere without understanding the biology or the population being screened will lead to long lines, false positives and missed opportunities to catch criminals or terrorists, the report says.
Read full entry »At North Carolina's State Bureau of Investigation, most forensic scientists are cops. So are their bosses. Their bosses' bosses are prosecutors, the chain stopping at Attorney General Roy Cooper. The Raleigh News & Observer, in the third of a series, says this arrangement often forces analysts to become advocates, in lock step with police and prosecutors, shaping evidence needed to deliver a conviction.
Inside the lab, which produces forensic science analysis for police and sheriffs, analysts push past the accepted bounds of science. The problem is prevalent, a review of lab policy, procedures and questionable decisions in at least a dozen cases shows. The lab's work has been under fire since February, when Greg Taylor, an innocent man, was freed after judges learned an lab serologist withheld crucial evidence that proved a stain on Taylor's SUV wasn't blood. Problems run deeper than blood. State law puts scientists at the lab on the prosecution's team, instead of assigning them as independent seekers of fact. Analysts sometimes don't run DNA or blood tests that might threaten prosecutors' theories. And they shield themselves from scrutiny, fighting against turning over records and forbidding defense experts from observing their work.
For years. cities have tried to predict where criminals will strike by studying neighborhood crime trends, using what has happened in the past to determine what might happen in the future. Now, reports the Florida Times-Union, researchers believe they have developed a math model to help police identify and eliminate emerging crime hot spots. "We can actually define where you get hot spots and where you won't," said Jeffrey Brantingham, a UCLA associate professor of anthropology who has been working to define crime patterns.
The research, called predictive analysis, is an area of wide interest now, said Joe Ryan, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office crime analysis administrator. Ryan's unit does some of that now, collecting information including vacant housing numbers to bus stops and shopping center locations, then applying that to other parts of the city that are similar in makeup. "It's community data, it's other types of data that we can look at in relation to crime events and come up with our own types of models," Ryan said. The UCLA work is intriguing, but the next step will be critical, he said. It is important that the research, which is based on data from Los Angeles and Long Beach police departments, can be replicated in other cities, Ryan said. At the heart of the system is the development of mathematical formulas that fold social patterns of criminals and victims together with other conditions to show whether an area is a brew pot for crime. By digging deeply into the data, the system improves on a long-standing approach that uses historical information about past crimes to predict where criminals are apt to hit next.
Read full entry »The U.S. Justice Department will offer grants next year in a new program to study the nation's public defender system. Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor now running a Justice Department "Access to Justice" program, announced the grants in a keynote address yesterday at the National Institute of Justice's annual conference. Tribe said the nation faces a "justice crisis" that could be helped if more good research can be done on better ways of representing the poor and middle class in criminal cases. "A great deal comes down to being smart about criminal and civil justice rather than being 'tough' just to prove a point," Tribe said.
Earlier at the conference, Assistant Attorney General Laurie Robinson, head of the Office of Justice Programs, said that Attorney General Eric Holder would name a science advisory board for her agency. As Robinson explained it, "This body would be made up primarily of academics, but also of practitioners and other leaders outside of OJP. The board would help inform our program development activities and make sure we’re adhering to the highest level of scientific rigor." Robinson said "evidence-based programs are reflected throughout" President Obama's budget proposal for the next federal fiscal year, including "Stopping Crime: Block by Block,” which would fund multi-site field experiments and research. Robinson also cited proposals for an online "What Works" clearinghouse and a diagnostic center – or “Help Desk” – to aid jurisdictions as they apply evidence-based approaches. The request includes a 3 percent set-aside across OJP's budget for research, evaluation and statistics.
Read full entry »The Davis County, Utah, Sheriff's Office is using a new iris-scanning technology to track and identify convicted criminals, reports the Salt Lake Tribune. It also could be used to find missing children or senior citizens. The office is the first of 45 sheriff's agencies nationwide to receive the technology, which uses a camera to take a high-quality image of the colored portion of the eye that surrounds the black pupil.
Images are scanned into a computer and become part of an online national database to which Davis County has access. A $10,000 U.S. Department of Justice grant through the National Sheriffs' Association paid for the technology. Iris scanning will help public-safety agencies identify and track criminals more quickly and easily than traditional methods of fingerprinting or testing DNA, said BI2 Technologies President Sean Mullin, whose company makes the equipment. Iris scanning produces more precise biological information than fingerprinting, he said, adding finger pads can be altered to change the print.
Read full entry »Cops call him the bug man. Joe Keiper of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History is working on one of the most puzzling cases in the city's history: the discovery of 10 bodies in a duplex. The Los Angeles Times says Keiper is one of fewer than 20 people in the U.S. who do this sort of forensic work on a regular basis. He tracks the life of insects to solve the mysteries of human death. He has helped police and federal investigators solve 32 cases since 2001.
The clues he finds from maggots, flies, beetles, and other insects rarely paint the whole picture of death: They are only bits and pieces. But there are usually thousands upon thousands of pieces available, each contributing to the whole story. The remains of 10 women have been found at the duplex on Imperial Avenue. A skull was found in a bucket in the house's basement. The duplex's sole resident, Anthony Sowell, 50, has been arrested and charged with five counts of murder. Investigators continue to search for more bodies. Keiper has yet to find anything conclusive in the case. After searching through the home, he has settled in for the grueling laboratory work involved in analyzing all the bugs he collected.
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Questionable forensic testimony has kept Joseph Ramirez behind bars in Florida for 25 years. Will a fifth trial finally set him free?
When the National Academy of Sciences issued a report earlier this year saying that courtroom identifications made by forensic scientists based on evidence such as bite marks, ballistics and other tool marks are frequently overstated and without scientific basis, the academy could well have pointed to the 25-year-long prosecution of Joseph Ramirez in Florida to illustrate its point.
Dade County prosecutors have repeatedly won convictions against Ramirez, for the Christmas Eve 1983 robbery and murder of Mary Jane Quinn, a Federal Express courier who was stabbed to death. The most recent—and fourth—conviction came in 2007, but prosecutorial persistence once again was undermined by doubts about the quality of the forensic evidence against him.
Lawyers for Ramirez, who worked as a cleaner in the company’s northwest Dade offices have won a motion for an evidentiary hearing this fall (no date has been set) challenging the state’s forensic evidence as unsound.
Earlier attempts to nail Ramirez on the basis of scientific “evidence” –matching stab wounds found on the victim to a knife recovered from his girlfriend’s car—had already failed.
This time, the controversial evidence hinged on an alleged shoeprint.
At Ramirez’s fourth trial in 2007, prosecutors introduced a photograph of carpeting from the crime scene and elicited testimony from a detective that a mark on the carpet was the “same” as the defendant’s shoeprint, according to the defense motion for a hearing.
The defense motion argues that Ramirez’s original trial lawyer provided ineffective assistance by failing to object to the shoeprint testimony and by failing to object to a prosecutor’s closing argument that relied upon that testimony. Prosecutors, not surprisingly, contended that the shoeprint evidence was proper.
In the defense motion that prompted the order for an evidentiary hearing, William Bodziak, a former FBI agent and nationally recognized in state and federal courts as an expert on shoeprint evidence, declared that the mark in a photograph of the carpet is not even identifiable as a shoeprint, but only as “faint reddened areas, possibly including some linear areas or lines.”
Moreover, Bodziak said in an affidavit that no one “qualified to conduct a proper forensic examination of footwear impressions would have testified that it was the defendant’s shoeprint.” (Click here to download Bodziak's deposition)
That the evidence was significant to the jury was reflected in a post-verdict article in the Miami Herald entitled, “Shoe Print Convicts Killer.”
But if past experience is any guide, the newest forensic “evidence” should have rung alarm bells.
Ramirez was convicted and sentenced to death in three separate trials after prosecutors presented forensic testimony that purported to prove that the knife recovered from the car of his girlfriend was the murder weapon. The forensic analysts claimed it was the only knife –to the exclusion of all other knives ever made – that could have left the stab wounds found on the victim’s body.
And three times the Florida Supreme Court overturned the convictions and ordered new trials because the testimony was improper and not scientific.
Ramirez a suspect in Christmas Eve murder
Almost immediately after Quinn’s body was discovered on Dec. 25, 1983, Federal Express officials offered a $25,000 reward for information about the attack—believed at the time to be the first attack of its kind in the then-10-year-old company’s history. The attack came after 11 p.m. the previous evening, as Quinn, 27, was preparing to deliver packages and the day’s receipts of $430 to the company office at the Ft. Lauderdale airport.
Ramirez, who has consistently denied committing the crime, came under suspicion a few days later. Then 25, he had cleaned the offices the afternoon of the murder and police had found his fingerprint on a doorjamb. The fingerprint, they theorized, contained a mixture of Ramirez’s and Quinn’s blood types.
A defense expert, however, said that given the miniscule amount of blood present, it was more likely that only Ramirez’s blood was present. The expert added that the blood was probably left prior to the murder since he had no cuts on his hands when police questioned him afterwards.
Nevertheless, the forensic evidence seemed to justify the initial conclusions of police that they had nabbed the right man. According to investigating officers, Ramirez’ conduct under questioning raised serious doubts. Asked to produce a sweater that he was wearing the day he cleaned the offices, he said he had taken it to a cleaners. When that was exposed as a lie, Ramirez produced a sweater for authorities, but police determined he had purchased that sweater after the murder.
Ultimately, Ramirez said that after cleaning the office, he spent the evening with a friend drinking and smoking marijuana and came home after midnight. His girlfriend said that she did not hear him come home, but saw him asleep before 6 a.m.
Police seized Ramirez’s watch, which appeared to have traces of human blood on it. The knife in his girlfriend’s car—the car Ramirez drove on Christmas Eve to get to work at the Federal Express office—tested positive for blood, but tests to determine its type have been unable to establish if it was human blood.
No blood was found on any of Ramirez’s clothing or either pair of his Converse Chuck Taylor tennis shoes—the only shoes he owned.
Defense attorneys for Ramirez noted that there was blood on the computer in the office and records showed the computer was used to contact Federal Express headquarters in Memphis the night Quinn was killed—once at 1 a.m. to report that she had not yet arrived at the Ft. Lauderdale airport and again at 1:30 a.m., to report that she had arrived safely at the airport, even though she hadn’t. Ramirez had no access to and did not know how to use the computers there, according to the evidence. The hard drives were not seized and there was no evidence introduced to try to establish who might have used the computer.
The manager of the Federal Express office, Marcus Gaines, gave a sworn statement to police shortly after the crime that there was “nothing unusual about his conversation with Ramirez” that afternoon when Ramirez came to clean the offices. But at trial, Gaines testified that Ramirez complained about his salary, asked how much money came through the office and what key was needed to open the adjacent warehouse where Quinn’s truck was parked, according to the defense post-trial motion.
The defense also noted that Gaines “had reason to deflect police attention” because he was the last known employee at the office before Quinn arrived and said he had placed the missing mailbag with the day’s receipts in her truck and put her truck keys (which were never found) in the ignition. Police did not check Gaines’ alibi—that he had spent the night of the murder several hours away in Tampa—nor did they take his hair, blood or fingerprints or search his car or home, according to the defense motion.
Novel knife identification theory ridiculed on appeal
At his first trial, the state’s lead witness was Robert Hart, a criminalist at the Metro-Dade Police Department, who said he had compared the knife to striations found on a wound left in the victim’s rib cartilage.
He testified to a “scientific certainty” that if there were two million identical knives produced, he was able to conclude that the one-half-inch mark on the cartilage was made by Ramirez’s knife to the exclusion of all others—the first time in Florida court history that such evidence was allowed.
After Ramirez was convicted and sentenced to death, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a new trial, declaring Hart’s testimony was “self-serving” and scientifically unsound.
When the case came back for a second trial, Hart testified at a pre-trial hearing to the reliability of his identification theory and presented an article he had written about it. After Ramirez was barred from presenting any opposing evidence, the judge ruled Hart’s testimony admissible, and Ramirez was convicted and sentenced to death once more.
The case was reversed a second time, with the Florida Supreme Court ruling that Ramirez had been denied a fair hearing on the admissibility of the knife evidence. So another hearing was held to determine the legitimacy of the evidence under the Frye v. United States decision—a 1923 court case that requires testing be generally accepted within the scientific community. After the state presented six experts supporting Hart and the defense presented an expert debunking Hart, the judge allowed Hart to testify a third time.
Ramirez was convicted and sentenced to death a third time. And again, the Florida Supreme Court reversed, saying that Hart’s identification procedure “cannot be said to carry the imprimatur of science.”
Although the court noted that prosecution experts testified that the underlying principle employed by Hart was generally accepted in the field, it concluded “that this testimony standing alone is insufficient to establish admissibility under Frye in light of the fact that Hart’s testing procedure posses none of the hallmarks of acceptability that apply in the relevant scientific community to this type of evidence.”
The court also noted that Hart’s methodology “and particularly his claim of infallibility” had never been formally tested or verified and that the record failed to show that it had ever been subjected to meaningful peer review.
Calling it “a classic example of the kind of novel ‘scientific’ evidence that Frye was intended to banish—i.e., a “subjective, untested, unverifiable identification procedure that purports to be infallible,” the court said Ramirez could no longer be sentenced to death if tried a fourth time, and harshly criticized Hart’s method.
"The criminal justice system utterly failed"
The shoeprint evidence has raised similar doubts. After reviewing the documents filed in the case, Peter Neufeld, a forensics expert and co-founder with Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, concluded in an interview for this article, “The detective's assertion that a crime scene photograph revealing a faint reddened area matched the tread on Ramirez' sneakers is junk science layered on junk science. A mere detective, without proffering appropriate qualifications and without any scientific basis for his conclusions offers damning -- albeit false -- evidence against the defendant.”
Neufeld added, “The criminal justice system utterly failed: the prosecutor unfairly exploited the ridiculous evidence in his closing argument, the defense never objected, and the court apparently relied on it. That is precisely why the National Academy of Sciences determined that the reforms to fix forensic science need to be implemented upstream of the courts. If federal oversight were in place, this evidence would not have seen the light of day. But if you wait until it gets to court, you can sit back and watch the train wreck in slow motion."
But the NAS report, issued in February, seemed to justify the doubts about the knife evidence. Discussing this type of impression analysis, it noted, “Because not enough is known about the variabilities among individual tools and guns, we are not able to specify how many points of similarity are necessary for a given level of confidence in the result. Sufficient studies have not been done to understand the reliability and repeatability of the methods.”
Nevertheless, prosecutors were determined to press science into their case once again. At the fourth trial, prosecutors Flora Seff and David Gilbert presented detective William Saladrigas as a witness. Saladrigas told the court he had been told that a photograph was taken of a shoeprint in the carpet, but said he had never seen it. The detective added, according to the defense motion for a new hearing, that he believed such a photo did not exist.
But when Saladrigas was later recalled to the stand, he viewed a four- by-six inch photograph of carpeting and then testified, according to the motion, that he had seen the photograph before and that it reflected “some sort of pattern on the carpeting.” Under redirect examination, Saladrigas testified that the “pattern” depicted in the photograph of the carpet was the “same” as the pattern on the soles of Mr. Ramirez’s sneakers.
Arguing for the hearing on the shoeprint testimony, Assistant Public Defenders Valerie Jonas and Edith Georgi declared in their motion, “Detective Saladrigas’ shoeprint comparison was inadmissible as either lay or expert testimony. There was no foundation for his testimony,” they maintained. “He identified no peculiarities, [nor any] distinctive marks of wear, or even measurements to distinguish the defendant’s Converse sneaker from all the other Converse sneakers in the world; he provided no qualifications or experience to enable him to identify any such peculiarities, nor any verifiable basis for determining a match between the mark in the carpet and the defendant’s Converse sneaker.”
The damage was compounded, the attorneys contended, when prosecutor Gilbert, in his closing argument, pulled out a fluorescent lamp and told the jurors that if they examined the photograph under the lamp, they would see “something amazing:” the pattern of Ramirez’s shoes.
During deliberations, jurors asked for some of the evidence, including the fluorescent light and the photograph of the carpet. In opposing the motion for a post-trial hearing, prosecutor Gilbert and co-prosecutor Penny Brill contended the evidence against Ramirez was substantial and that the failure of Ramirez’s trial lawyer to object to Saladrigas’s testimony was not ineffective work and was of “minimal significance.
However, at Ramirez’s sentencing hearing, Seff—who is now a Dade County judge—characterized the carpet photograph as “most compelling.”
Ramirez was sentenced to life in prison in the Florida Department of Corrections. He can no longer be sentenced to death. If the motion is successful, Ramirez would receive a fifth trial.
Lawyers for Ramirez and the prosecution declined comment because the case is pending in court.
Maurice Possley is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author who left the Chicago Tribune in 2008. He was a visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan Law School in 2009 and in the fall will begin work at the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University School of Law.
The field of forensics is undergoing a self-examination after a report by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences found “serious problems” with much of the work performed by crime laboratories in the United States, reports the New York Times. Recent incidents of faulty evidence analysis were just high-profile examples of wider deficiencies, the committee said. Crime labs were overworked, there were few certification programs for investigators and technicians, and the entire field suffered from a lack of oversight.
But perhaps the most damning conclusion was that many forensic disciplines — including analysis of fingerprints and bite marks — were not grounded in the kind of rigorous, peer-reviewed research that is the hallmark of classic science. DNA analysis was an exception, the report noted. But many other investigative tests, the report said, “have never been exposed to stringent scientific scrutiny.” While some forensic experts took issue with that conclusion, many welcomed it. The report was “basically saying what many of us have been saying for a long time,” said Lawrence Kobilinsky of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “There are a lot of areas in forensics that need improvement.”
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When the National Academy of Sciences released a comprehensive report on February 18 laying out serious shortcomings in forensic science, the nation’s preeminent scientific organization also presented a road map for reform.
The NAS report shows that many forensic techniques which are relied on in courtrooms every day lack adequate scientific support. While DNA testing was developed through extensive scientific research at top academic centers, many other forensic techniques – such as hair microscopy, bite mark comparisons, fingerprint analysis, firearms, tool marks and shoe print analysis – have never been subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation.
Since experts agree that only 5-10% of a crime lab’s work involves DNA testing and that overwhelmingly they rely on other forensic disciplines, it is all the more imperative that these other disciplines be subjected to rigorous evaluation to ensure their reliability.
At the Innocence Project, which assists prisoners who can be proven innocent through DNA testing and works to reform the criminal justice system to prevent wrongful convictions, we’ve seen the consequences of inadequate forensic science first-hand. Of the 232 people nationwide have been exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing, approximately half of the underlying wrongful convictions involved unvalidated or improper forensic science. For background on how forensic problems contribute to wrongful convictions, click here.
For a complete chart of wrongful convictions involving unvalidated or improper forensic science that were later overturned with DNA testing, click here.
The NAS report recommends the creation of a National Institute of Forensic Science that would direct comprehensive research and evaluation in the forensic sciences, establish scientifically validated standards and oversee their consistent application nationwide. This new federal agency would begin to fix the problems upstream and avoid so many wrongful convictions in the first place. As a result, forensic science will play a more reliable role in identifying perpetrators of crime, protecting the wrongly accused and ensuring public safety.
Already, policymakers have responded favorably to the NAS report. Members of the House and Senate, from both sides of the aisle, have signaled that the NAS’s findings are troubling and that Congress and the Administration have an important role to play in strengthening forensic science. And all of us have an important role to play in making sure the NAS report is fully studied and that its recommendations are implemented. As the report itself makes clear, the stakes are too high – and the consequences too stark – to miss this unparalleled opportunity for fundamental reform.
Mr. Neufeld is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with Cardozo School of Law. For more information, go to http://www.innocenceproject.org/.
Read full entry »Several of the 200 people who have been freed because DNA tests performed after their convictions showed they could not have committed the crimes have joined civil rights groups, some current and former prosecutors, and a convicted Alaskan rapist in urging the Supreme Court to apply constitutional protections for the first time to what the prisoners' lawyers call "arguably the most important development in the history of forensic science: the advent of DNA testing," reports the Washington Post. They are opposed by victims rights groups; the vast majority of states, which have a patchwork of laws granting DNA access; and the federal government. The governments say that creating a constitutional right to the testing would infringe on states' rights, overwhelm them with frivolous demands, and create an endless right of appeal.
On Mar. 2, the Supreme Court will hear its first case that confronts the dilemma of how to deal with DNA evidence, which former attorney general John Ashcroft called the "truth machine of law enforcement." The Innocence Project, representing convicted Alaskan rapist William Osborne in the Supreme Court case, says that DNA evidence has helped exonerate 232 prisoners, 17 of whom had been sentenced to death. Osborne was convicted of the brutal rape and assault of a prostitute in a secluded area near the Anchorage International Airport in 1993.
Read full entry »After the release of NAS's report on the future of forensics, we continue forensics week by listening to some of the top experts in the field discuss their thoughts.
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