Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (32 page)

On appeal, Bloodsworth’s attorney said that the police had shown him the bloody rock during interrogation, and the incident to which he had referred regarding trouble with his wife was that he had failed to purchase food as she had requested. In addition, there had been another suspect, but the police had failed to inform the defense about this development. The conviction was overturned, which gained Bloodsworth a new trial.

But the same witnesses testified in this second trial and in 1988 the same result ensued: Bloodsworth was once again convicted, but this time received two life sentences, to run consecutively. Bloodsworth assured everyone that he was innocent and read everything he could find about legal procedure, seeking something that might provide a way to clear his name and free him. He came across Wambaugh’s book,
The Blooding,
about Colin Pitchfork and genetic fingerprinting, noting that the first suspect, who had given a confession, had been exonerated. Bloodsworth called an attorney who then contacted attorney Bob Morin, who specialized in death penalty cases, and Bloodsworth asked Morin to try to get DNA testing for him. Centurion Ministries helped him to acquire court approval for the test, granted in 1992. Morin contacted Cellmark, the second private lab in the country to offer the method, but their RFLP method required more material for analysis than was available. Morin then looked to Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR, but he had left Cetus Corporation, which owned the rights and had exclusively authorized Dr. Edward Blake of Forensic Science Associates (FSA) to utilize it. Morin sent the victim’s shorts and underwear, the stick used on her, and an autopsy slide of a semen sample to Blake, who after three months indicated that there was semen on the panties, despite the FBI’s report that there was not. Using PCR-based DNA testing, FSA determined that the amount of spermatozoa on the slide had proven insufficient for testing, but analysis of the stain on the panties excluded Bloodsworth.

Morin and Bloodsworth were thrilled, but the ordeal wasn’t yet over. The FBI wanted to run its own tests. Morin got Barry Scheck involved, who confirmed Blake’s findings, so he resumed his confidence, but it meant more time in prison for Bloodsworth. Finally, the FBI let him know what their tests indicated: Bloodsworth was excluded as the source of the semen.

On June 28, 1993, after nearly nine years served in a dangerous hellhole for an act he did not commit, Kirk Noble Bloodsworth was released from prison. Later that year he was granted a pardon and the State of Maryland paid him $300,000, based on ten years of lost income. Despite the collective eyewitness testimony, offered twice, Bloodsworth became the first person to be exonerated with DNA technology from death row. And there would be more, eventually shocking the governer of Illinois so much that he placed a moratorium on the death penalty in his state for further review. Scheck and Neufeld set up the Innocence Project in the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in Manhattan to assist falsely imprisoned people to acquire post-conviction DNA testing.

While Bloodsworth was walking free, another man who probably believed he’d never be caught became part of the first case in which the practice of DNA data banking solved a crime. The victim was Jean Ann Broderick, and she had recently moved into the neighborhood of Lowry Hill in Minneapolis, Minnesota. One night in November 1991, she and her roommate walked home, passing a halfway house for sex offenders, most of whom had been required to provide blood samples for the state’s new DNA data bank. The next day, Broderick was found in her room, raped and strangled. There were no leads, aside from semen left behind on her body. The authorities went through the data bank and found a DNA profile for an illegal immigrant, Martin Perez, which matched the semen. He had a record for rape, burglary, and assault in several states, and in fact should have been in jail at the time of the murder for a burglary, but he had used fake credentials to elude conviction.

A student who had lived in the apartment just prior to Broderick identified Perez as a burglar who had broken into the place that summer. Perez was arrested and tried, and it was the DNA from the data bank that proved to be the most compelling evidence against him. Had there been no such collection of samples, Perez would not have been apprehended for this crime. The identification via DNA had allowed the police to develop a case with other types of evidence. By the end of 1993, twenty-one states had passed laws that required sex offenders to provide blood samples for similar data banks.

There was another first for DNA that same year in Phoenix, Arizona. Denise Johnson was found on May 2, 1992, strangled and left nude near a cluster of palo verde trees in a remote part of Maricopa County. She had been bound with a cloth tied around her neck. A pager belonging to Earl Bogan was found nearby and a witness had seen a specific type of white truck leave the area—the same type driven by Earl Bogan’s son, Mark. The truck was seized for a search, which turned up seed pods in the back from a palo verde tree, but nothing that indicated that Johnson had been inside. Nevertheless, Mark Bogan admitted that he’d picked her up for consensual sex, but after they’d argued, he had dropped her off. He denied being anywhere near the area where she had been found, but when confronted with the pager, he said that she had stolen it from him. It seemed a tough story to break, but the seeds provided a possible avenue. Investigators looked for a way to use this potential lead.

Dr. Timothy Helentjaris, a professor of molecular genetics agreed to test the pods from the truck. Using Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA (RAPD), a technique known for several years among plant geneticists, he compared the various trees in the area against one another and managed to match the crime-related pods to a specific tree. This finding tied Brogan’s truck to the place where this plant grew—exactly where the body was found. That same tree showed a recent gash in its trunk, which was precisely where the truck’s bumper would have hit had Bogan backed into the tree. With all this evidence against him, Mark Bogan was convicted of first-degree murder. An appeal challenged the uniqueness of the RAPD method, but it failed and the conviction was upheld.

Then a court case that reexamined the nature of scientific evidence affected the entire field of forensic science. Jason Daubert and Eric Schuller were born with serious birth defects. Their parents alleged in a suit against the pharmaceutical company that the mothers of both children had ingested Bendectin to fight nausea while they were pregnant. The suit ended up in federal court, where the pharmaceutical company attorneys insisted that the drug did not cause birth defects in humans. Dr. Steven Lamm offered testimony as their expert that upon reviewing more than thirty published studies involving more than 130,000 patients, he found no evidence that the drug caused malformations in fetuses.

But the petitioners offered eight experts of their own who concluded that the drug can indeed cause birth defects. They had used test tube and live animal studies, as well as chemical studies of drugs that bore a structural similarity to Bendectin and that did cause birth defects. They also reinterpreted earlier studies that had found no link to give those studies a different spin. The court was faced with setting forth conditions under which scientific evidence is admissible. They decided that “scientific” means having a grounding in the methods and procedures of science that are sufficiently established as to have general acceptance in the field, and any claim of having “knowledge” must be stronger than subjective belief. The petitioners’ evidence was deemed to have fallen short of this mark. Their experts did not sufficiently show causation between the drug and the defects with proven methods, and their approach had not been subjected to peer review. In addition, their methodology diverged significantly from that which was generally accepted in the scientific community. Thus, it could not be considered reliable.

In its 1993 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court gave a nod to the
Frye
test from 1923, stating that while the notion of “general acceptance” had some problems, most courts still relied on it. They also noted the Federal Rules of Evidence, which superseded the
Frye
test, did not make an issue of general acceptance. In federal courts, then, the
Frye
test would no longer apply to novel scientific evidence. It was now up to the judge to evaluate scientific reliability. When faced with a decision to admit evidence or not, a judge had only to focus on the methodology, not on the conclusion, and also on whether the scientific evidence applied to the facts of the case. In other words, judges now had to determine whether the theory could be tested in accordance with scientific criteria, the potential error rate was known, the method had been reviewed by peers and had attracted widespread acceptance within a relevant scientific community, and the testimony was relevant to the issue in dispute.

The
Frye
standard was replaced as well in many states by the
Daubert
standard, as cited in
Daubert
v.
Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Two cases later in the decade,
General Electric Co.
v.
Joiner
in 1997 and
Kumho Tire Co.
v.
Carmichael
in 1999, would clarify the appellate process from a
Daubert
decision and would apply the same criteria to specialized knowledge involved in other types of technical evidence and expertise.

EVIDENCE ANALYSIS AND CAMERAS IN THE COURTROOM

By the 1990s, forensic science had become a high-tech arena, with more exacting ways to analyze evidence in many areas. With fiber analysis, for example, examiners could use a high-powered microscope to measure the precise diameter and color of a fiber from a crime scene, shine a beam of infrared light to get the absorption spectrum, use polarized light to find refractive indices, or turn to various forms of chromatography to separate dye compounds into specific chemicals. In 1991, Walsh Automation developed an automated ballistics system, and the following year the FBI commissioned the
Drugfire
computerized database to store details about the markings on spent bullets and cartridge cases. Computers were networked to statewide and national databases (even international), similar to an AFIS system for fingerprints. The BATF promoted
Bulletproof
for bullet images and
Brasscatcher
for cartridge cases, while
IBIS,
by Forensic Technology, also offered automated comparisons of evidence images.

However, even as technology improved, the way it was utilized became an issue in a lengthy and highly publicized trial in 1995. DNA was back in the spotlight, as was serology, evidence handling, and crime scene protocol. Called the “trial of the century,” it certainly captured the largest audience of any trial to date.

A whimpering dog alerted Sukru Boztepe to the first signal that something was amiss in Brentwood, a wealthy neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. He followed it toward a scene of horrendous bloodshed, so he urged his wife to phone 911. Two blood-covered bodies lay outside the front door of the condominium at 875 South Bundy Drive, occupied by Nicole Brown Simpson, the former wife of actor and former football celebrity O. J. Simpson. The police had been here before, responding to a 911 call concerning domestic abuse. This time they had to deal with something far worse.

Late in the evening of June 12, 1994, someone had attacked Nicole and slashed her to death. Next to her was the body of a man, twenty-five-year-old Ronald Lyle Goldman, who’d been stabbed multiple times. As the story unfolded, it turned out that he may simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, bringing Nicole a pair of eyeglasses that her mother had left behind at the restaurant where he worked as a waiter.

Although Nicole was no longer married to Simpson, the police wanted to contact him right away. Going to his home at 360 North Rockingham, detectives found locked gates and no response, so Detective Mark Fuhrman scaled the walls to get into the yard. As he passed by Simpson’s white Ford Bronco, parked in the driveway, he noticed a bloodstain on the door. A trail of blood also led up to the house, but Simpson appeared to be gone. It turned out that he had just flown to Chicago. He was notified immediately of what had happened, so he returned to Los Angeles and agreed to answer questions. Investigators noticed a cut on a finger of his left hand. Simpson seemed disturbed by that and told several conflicting stories about how he had gotten it. Yet when the crime scene indicated that the killer had cut his left hand and trailed blood, the two incidents hardly seemed coincidental. In fact, these drops did not match either of the victims’ blood types, but an analysis proved they had factors in common with Simpson’s blood, with mathematical odds that only one person in 57 billion could produce an equivalent match. In addition, the bloody size-twelve footprints nearby were made by an expensive shoe, a Bruno Magli—a type Simpson owned, in size twelve.

Next to the bodies was a knit hat that turned out to have hair strands consistent with Simpson’s hair and a bloodstained black leather glove that bore traces of fiber from Goldman’s jeans. The glove’s mate, stained with Simpson’s blood, was found on his property, and they were similar to the type of gloves sold in a store where Nicole had purchased gloves for Simpson. In addition, the serology associations were strong. Traces of both victims’ blood were found inside Simpson’s car and house, along with blood that contained his own DNA. His blood and Goldman’s were found together on the car’s console, and on the carpet was a faint outline of a bloody shoe impression. Socks inside the home showed traces of Simpson’s and Nicole’s blood.

Then a limousine driver hired to pick Simpson up that evening for the ride to the airport reported that he’d not seen the Bronco and had been unable to get Simpson on the intercom, but had then spotted a black man cross the driveway and go into the house. At that point, Simpson answered the intercom and said that he’d been asleep.

As prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden built their case, based on a history of abuse and the notion of Simpson’s extreme need to control Nicole, they located photos of a battered Nicole and diary entries that attested to Simpson’s stalking behavior. They also found a photo of Simpson wearing a pair of gloves similar to those found at both locations. The clothing he’d worn on the night of the murders had disappeared, as had a bag that he’d refused to let a friend help him with as he’d loaded it into his car that night.