Speaker 1: It's five pm, and you call your spouse. You say,
Speaker 1: don't wait up, I'm gonna be working late. I love you,
Speaker 1: I'll see when I get home. You've been married for
Speaker 1: seven years and you have a good relationship. You bicker
Speaker 1: from time to time. It's not perfect, but what marriage is.
Speaker 1: You get home around eleven o'clock at night and the
Speaker 1: front door is open, which is strange. It's always locked
Speaker 1: when you come home late from work. You walk in,
Speaker 1: toss your keys on the kitchen table, and call out
Speaker 1: for your spouse. No response. You walk through the living
Speaker 1: room towards your bedroom and you notice that the lamp
Speaker 1: has been knocked over. The power cord has been pulled
Speaker 1: from its socket. You walk down the hall and shove
Speaker 1: your bedroom door open, and you're greeted by a scene
Speaker 1: that is so horrific your mind can barely comprehend what
Speaker 1: your eyes are taking in. There's blood everywhere. It's on
Speaker 1: the carpet, the bed, on the wall, above the dresser.
Speaker 1: Your spouse is on the floor, mouth open. There's a
Speaker 1: large pool of blood coming from their head. It's dark
Speaker 1: and thick, and as you move closer you see that
Speaker 1: it's still pulling. The blood is still flowing from somewhere.
Speaker 1: At this point, your body has gone into some state
Speaker 1: of shock. You're drifting between consciousness and some paralyzing, dreamlike state.
Speaker 1: You managed to call nine one one. You plead, you scream,
Speaker 1: You cry for them to come right away. You reach
Speaker 1: down and touch your spouse. You feel for a pulse.
Speaker 1: You put your ear to their chest. There's no movement,
Speaker 1: there's no sign of life. You lean down and try
Speaker 1: to give them CPR. You don't even know how long
Speaker 1: you've been doing it. You lose sense of time, but
Speaker 1: eventually you hear sirens. They're blaring, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: there's chaos. The room is filled with people. A paramedic
Speaker 1: puts a hand on your shoulder and says, let us
Speaker 1: start working here, and pulls you into another room. Then
Speaker 1: they tell you what you already know but don't want
Speaker 1: to admit. Your spouse is dead. You're not crying, You're heaving,
Speaker 1: trying to catch your breath. The police try to console you.
Speaker 1: They tell you they're sorry, but that you have to
Speaker 1: try to calm down. They need to figure out what happened,
Speaker 1: and they need your help. You're in no state to drive.
Speaker 1: You're put into the back of a police car. When
Speaker 1: you get to the police station, a detective comes in
Speaker 1: with a sweatshirt and sweatpants, and he says, take off
Speaker 1: your clothes and put these on. You're somewhat relieved to
Speaker 1: get out of your clothes, which are soaked with your
Speaker 1: spouse's blood. A different detective comes in and she asked
Speaker 1: you how you got blood on the back side of
Speaker 1: your pants. Where were you standing when you got blood
Speaker 1: on the cuff of your shirt, on your sock. You
Speaker 1: don't know the answer to these questions. It was all
Speaker 1: such a blur. Over the next several weeks, you're asked
Speaker 1: to come down to the police station over and over again.
Speaker 1: The detective's questions become more aggressive, and it's becoming quite
Speaker 1: obvious that they suspect you did this. You were eventually
Speaker 1: charged with the first degree murder of your spouse. At
Speaker 1: your trial, the prosecution calls to the stand a blood
Speaker 1: stained pattern analysts. That expert gets on the stand and
Speaker 1: tells the jury that the story of the murder of
Speaker 1: your spouse is soaked into the blood of the clothes
Speaker 1: you were wearing on the night the crime was committed.
Speaker 1: The blood stained patterned analyst walks the jury through each
Speaker 1: and every stain on your clothing, droplet by droplet, you
Speaker 1: see that stain. The defendants swung the weapon at a
Speaker 1: ninety degree angle twice right into the victim's head, which
Speaker 1: created the splatter pattern you see here on his shirt.
Speaker 1: High velocity projected spatter. They tell the jury no other
Speaker 1: explanation for it. They say that the stain on your
Speaker 1: sock was dropped from your bloody hand as you held
Speaker 1: the murder weapon. They never tell the jury what the
Speaker 1: murder weapon actually was, and they never recovered that object.
Speaker 1: They just tell the jury that you must have gotten
Speaker 1: rid of it right before you stage the nine one
Speaker 1: one call. The expert says that they've examined the blood drops,
Speaker 1: the stains, the puddles, the pools, and they're able to
Speaker 1: reconstruct precisely how you committed this murder, the angle at
Speaker 1: which you swung the weapon, the force with which you
Speaker 1: inflicted the blows, and where your spouse was standing when
Speaker 1: they were beaten to death. The stains proved that you
Speaker 1: did not perform CPR. You did not check for a pulse,
Speaker 1: because if you had, there would not be this spray
Speaker 1: pattern that's projected onto your shirt. These stains all indicate
Speaker 1: that you committed this murder. You glance over at the jury.
Speaker 1: Most are taking rigorous notes. One is so taken, so
Speaker 1: wrapped that he stopped taking notes altogether and just sits
Speaker 1: staring at the expert, covering his mouth with his hand.
Speaker 1: You look over at your defense attorney and think, how
Speaker 1: in the world is this happening. I'm Josh dubin civil
Speaker 1: rights and criminal defense attorney and innocence ambassadors in the
Speaker 1: Innocence Project in New York. Today, on wrongful conviction junk science,
Speaker 1: We're going to explore blood stained pattern evidence. Like other
Speaker 1: forms of junk signs used in criminal trials, blood stained
Speaker 1: pattern evidence falsely claims that it can identify the culprit
Speaker 1: of violent crimes. But blood stained pattern evidence has no
Speaker 1: grounding and any verifiable science. So how did this kind
Speaker 1: of junk science become admissible? It turns out that blood
Speaker 1: stained pattern analysis was born in the basement of one
Speaker 1: man's home in a small town named Corning, New York.
Speaker 1: When I think of Herbert McDonald, I wonder what his
Speaker 1: neighbors must have thought of him. I imagine one of
Speaker 1: his curious neighbors startled by the sound she's hearing from
Speaker 1: next door, tiptoeing over to his red house. I imagine
Speaker 1: the neighbor crawling on her hands and knees to pear
Speaker 1: into herbs basement through a small window that peeks out
Speaker 1: from underground. She finds herself going over there day after day,
Speaker 1: half horrified, half intrigued by what she sees. One day,
Speaker 1: she sees her aiming a gun at a dog. He
Speaker 1: pulls the trigger, then walks over to examine the blood
Speaker 1: sprayed onto the wall. Another day, Herb isn't alone. There
Speaker 1: are some young women in lab coats in the basement.
Speaker 1: They dip their hair into a thick red substance. Then
Speaker 1: they swing their heads around to make Jackson Pollock asque
Speaker 1: splatters onto the paper covered walls. The next week, the
Speaker 1: neighbor sees what appear to be dead bodies, and she's
Speaker 1: got to be mistaken, But then she sees her take
Speaker 1: aim shoot the lifeless body and blood slowly oozes onto
Speaker 1: the basement floor. Herbert McDonald actually used these techniques in
Speaker 1: his basement, giving birth to the forensic science of blood
Speaker 1: stained pattern analysis. Herb was a chemist who worked for
Speaker 1: Corning glass Works, which makes corning wear of casserole dishes.
Speaker 1: But his passion was crime scenes, and so he doubled
Speaker 1: as a forensic professor at a local community college. For Herb,
Speaker 1: every crime scene, and particularly the blood stains left behind,
Speaker 1: told a story. Not only did he believe that blood
Speaker 1: stains provide clues, he took a much further than that.
Speaker 1: He believed that he could re engineer the choreography of
Speaker 1: the crime just from analyzing the blood stains. Herb styled
Speaker 1: himself as a sort of modern day Sherlock Holmes. He
Speaker 1: even posed for the cover of one of his books
Speaker 1: and the trademark Dear Stalker Hat and a Pipe. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three, Herbs started an unaccredited school right out
Speaker 1: of his basement. He named it the Blood Stain Evidence Institute.
Speaker 1: It took twelve years for Herb to get his moment
Speaker 1: to shine. In January nineteen eighty five, four people were
Speaker 1: found dead in their home. Twenty one year old Reginald
Speaker 1: Lewis was accused of shooting his older brother, his younger
Speaker 1: thirteen year year old brother, and his parents. Reginald's father
Speaker 1: was discovered on fire in a hallway, having been shot
Speaker 1: and strangled before being set ablaze the Sherlock Holmes of
Speaker 1: Corny to York. Herb McDonald testified as an expert witness
Speaker 1: in this case. He claimed that dozens of tiny specks
Speaker 1: of blood on Reginald's clothing placed him at the scene
Speaker 1: of the crime. Reginald Lewis was convicted and sentenced to
Speaker 1: four years sentences. Herb's recognition continued to grow, even testified
Speaker 1: for the defense at the O. J. Simpson trial. But
Speaker 1: blood stained patterned analysis was never proven to be a
Speaker 1: reliable scientific method, and yet it continued to be admitted
Speaker 1: in case after case after case, spreading its tentacles into
Speaker 1: the criminal justice system in our country. This is a
Speaker 1: entirely interpretive form of forensics. This involves somebody viewing a
Speaker 1: pattern and then stating that, with their training, that they
Speaker 1: are able to tell you how that pattern was created,
Speaker 1: what the trajectory was of the blood, where the wound was,
Speaker 1: where the bullet or knife was in the room, and
Speaker 1: therefore who was wielding it and how, which is a
Speaker 1: pretty incredible claim if you think about it. Joining us
Speaker 1: today is Pamela colof And Pam's a senior reporter at
Speaker 1: Pro Publica and a staff writer from New York Magazine. So, Pam,
Speaker 1: when you really look into these forensic sciences and see
Speaker 1: how they originated, I have to say that in all
Speaker 1: of my work and researching various disciplines of forensic science,
Speaker 1: blood spatter analysis has easily the craziest story of them all.
Speaker 1: And you've researched this intensely. Um, I want you to
Speaker 1: tell us more about her McDonald, the so called grandfather
Speaker 1: of blood spatter analysis. His belief was, and what he
Speaker 1: sort of told generations of police officers was that yes,
Speaker 1: bloodstained pattern analysis was based on highly complex trigonometry and
Speaker 1: fluid dynamics, but that they could master the skills to
Speaker 1: this and as little as a forty hour class. And
Speaker 1: he began to teach these classes all over America at
Speaker 1: local police departments and did so for decades and in
Speaker 1: turn turned police officers with no training in physics or
Speaker 1: high level of mathematics into quote unquote experts. So he
Speaker 1: turns these people with no training in physics or mathematics
Speaker 1: into experts. You don't have any training in physics or mathematics,
Speaker 1: and you took the class and became an expert. Right.
Speaker 1: I went to Yukon, Oklahoma, where the police department was
Speaker 1: offering a week long class. I took it with about
Speaker 1: twenty law enforcement officers, and I was stunned at at
Speaker 1: what I saw. We were sort of rubber stamped through
Speaker 1: just the most basic basic concepts of blood stained pattern analysis,
Speaker 1: and we would have to identify stains according to this
Speaker 1: taxonomy that the discipline has these particular kinds of spatters
Speaker 1: and drips and spurts and swipes and smears. They have
Speaker 1: all these different names for things. The final day of
Speaker 1: the course where our instructor set up these sort of
Speaker 1: mock crime scenes and he used blood too on sort
Speaker 1: of like butcher paper to um show us what blood
Speaker 1: stains would look like at a crime scene. And then
Speaker 1: our job, and this is part of our final grade,
Speaker 1: was to come in and just by looking at that
Speaker 1: no other clues, no other context clues, use that to
Speaker 1: say what had happened at the crime scene, and and
Speaker 1: then to learn how to say it on the stand
Speaker 1: in a way that sounded like a scientist and like
Speaker 1: someone with scientific certainty. And and that to me was
Speaker 1: extremely disturbing. Aside from what you witness in the class,
Speaker 1: tell me, like, what is one thing that stood out
Speaker 1: to you as something that seemed off about, you know,
Speaker 1: what he did or what he had students do. I
Speaker 1: know of several students who have shot cadavers and controlled
Speaker 1: situations to look at the way that blood moves. Now,
Speaker 1: think about the way that blood operates within a cadaver
Speaker 1: versus a living person with a beating heart. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's so many things about that that don't make sense, right,
Speaker 1: So with a dead body or cadaver, it should be
Speaker 1: common sense. There's no more blood flown through the veins, right,
Speaker 1: the person isn't moving anymore, and there's a different viscosity
Speaker 1: or thickness to the blood when someone is dead. So
Speaker 1: all of this makes a difference in first how the
Speaker 1: blood travels once the body is hit with an object,
Speaker 1: whether it be a bullet or a bat, and then
Speaker 1: the blood will also look different once it lands, doesn't
Speaker 1: It all come down to there are a lot of
Speaker 1: different ways that blood can get on a surface, and
Speaker 1: you can't say definitively which way it happened. That's exactly right,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right. The surface that blood falls onto makes
Speaker 1: a tremendous difference in what you can tell if you
Speaker 1: had a white all linoleum or marb bowl room, like
Speaker 1: a very controlled atmosphere like that, you might be able
Speaker 1: to make some determinations about some things possibly, But in
Speaker 1: real life, in a real crime scene usually have blood
Speaker 1: falling onto porous things, carpet, clothing, things where it becomes
Speaker 1: increasingly difficult to tell the angle that blood fell onto
Speaker 1: those surfaces at because they're so diffused when they land
Speaker 1: on that material. Yeah, I mean, there are some cases
Speaker 1: where blood spatter analysts have been on video trying to
Speaker 1: recreate a stain pattern from a crime and it takes
Speaker 1: them ten or fifteen tries to get the stain to
Speaker 1: look similar to how it looks at the crime scene
Speaker 1: or on the close of the accused. I mean, I
Speaker 1: saw one video where they finally get it right right,
Speaker 1: They get it to look like it did at the
Speaker 1: crime scene, after try after try after try, and they
Speaker 1: start cheering and high fiving. So if it's so hard
Speaker 1: to tell how a blood stain got where it did,
Speaker 1: then what kinds of consequences will that have for someone
Speaker 1: that's been accused of a violent crime. A common example
Speaker 1: I've seen this many times is there's a spouse who
Speaker 1: commits suicide, who uh, shoots themselves, and the other spouse
Speaker 1: discovers the person who is shot, rushes over to the person,
Speaker 1: cradles them, tries to give them first aid, and in
Speaker 1: the process gets blood on them. And what I saw
Speaker 1: again and again is if someone who's injured expels blood
Speaker 1: from their mouth or their nose onto another person's clothing,
Speaker 1: right they're coughing, they're they're struggling to breathe, that pattern
Speaker 1: of blood looks very similar to the kind of atomized
Speaker 1: blood that sprays when someone shot Hut. And then an
Speaker 1: analyst for the state will be brought in and we'll
Speaker 1: give this very convoluted logic as to why that happened
Speaker 1: during the commission of the crime. And then there becomes
Speaker 1: this divergence of opinion of did the victim hold the
Speaker 1: gun and fire this upon him or herself or was
Speaker 1: it the spouse who fired the gun? And the claim
Speaker 1: is that by looking at the way that the blood
Speaker 1: is distributed at the crime scene, you know what the
Speaker 1: answer to that is. All right, Pam, you wrote a
Speaker 1: two part story entitled Blood Will Tell And by the way,
Speaker 1: to our listeners, if you haven't read about this case,
Speaker 1: you absolutely should. Will link to the article in our
Speaker 1: show notes. It is a fascinating, fascinating piece that Pam
Speaker 1: wrote for Pro Publica and again it's entitled blood will
Speaker 1: tell the Joe Brian Story, and it tells the story
Speaker 1: of various ways blood stained patterned analysis can go off
Speaker 1: the rails. And I want to say that it has
Speaker 1: a happy ending, but it's a tragedy really right. I mean,
Speaker 1: you have a man that was loved by everybody, he's
Speaker 1: a high school principal. He spent thirty three years in
Speaker 1: prison for the murder of his wife, and you know
Speaker 1: your story. Pam was like the driving force, if not
Speaker 1: the critical driving force behind getting him out of prison.
Speaker 1: So please tell us about the Joe Briant case. Joe
Speaker 1: Brian was a beloved high school principal in a little
Speaker 1: Texas town called Clifton, Texas, and in when he was
Speaker 1: by all accounts, out of town a hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: miles away in Austin and an education old conference, his
Speaker 1: wife was shot and killed in their home and this
Speaker 1: was initially investigated as a robbery gone wrong. And about
Speaker 1: a week after the murder, a flashlight was discovered in
Speaker 1: the trunk of Joe's car that had tiny, tiny specks
Speaker 1: of blood on it, and there was no blood found
Speaker 1: in the car or anything like that. And who this
Speaker 1: blood belonged to, whether it was even human blood, all
Speaker 1: of this was was unknown. But the state took this
Speaker 1: and they brought in a blood stained pattern analyst, a
Speaker 1: local cop who had had forty hours of training, and he,
Speaker 1: through his testimony, connected that flashlight and the spatter pattern
Speaker 1: on the flashlight to the crime scene. He said this
Speaker 1: could only have happened at the crime scene, and his
Speaker 1: theory of the case was that Joe had held the
Speaker 1: flashlight in one hand a gun and the other he
Speaker 1: had shot his wife, Mickey. The blood had gotten onto
Speaker 1: the flashlight and this was proof that he was guilty
Speaker 1: of murder. How this man, who would have been bloodied,
Speaker 1: how did he drive off in this car that was
Speaker 1: absolutely pristine was explained away by the expert, who said
Speaker 1: things like, after he killed her, he completely changed his
Speaker 1: clothes and he changed his shoes, and that's why the
Speaker 1: interior of the car was clean. But he made this
Speaker 1: error and put this in the truck, and that was enough.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a man. There was no motive,
Speaker 1: no physical evidence. He was many counties away he was
Speaker 1: in a different place the night of the crime, but
Speaker 1: that expert testimony from that cop was enough to get
Speaker 1: a murder conviction and life sentence. I mean, it's so
Speaker 1: difficult to listen to this, and I wish I could
Speaker 1: say that I'm I'm sitting here, you know, shocked, and
Speaker 1: and was able to tell you what. I've never heard
Speaker 1: of a case like that before, where you know, the
Speaker 1: accused is actually in a different town altogether. But unfortunately
Speaker 1: I've heard this before. UM, this happens to many defendants
Speaker 1: or or people that are accused of crimes they didn't commit.
Speaker 1: Was Joe ever exonerated? So Joe was not exonerated, He
Speaker 1: was paroled and the state of his case. Uh, he
Speaker 1: had an evidentiary hearing in twenty nineteen with some really
Speaker 1: really compelling testimony that suggested not only his innocence but
Speaker 1: a possible other perpetrator. In Texas, we have something called
Speaker 1: a junk science writ which is fairly unusual, but it
Speaker 1: allows somebody to take bad evidence, junk science that's been
Speaker 1: allowed into their case and uh to try to get
Speaker 1: the courts to take a second look at their case
Speaker 1: because of that. And so he's been paroled and is
Speaker 1: still fighting to prove his innocence. Joe turns eighty later
Speaker 1: this year. He's had congestive heart failure for numerous years.
Speaker 1: His health is not good, and the Texas Sport of
Speaker 1: Pardons and Pearls finally decided to release him in in
Speaker 1: March and Um he is now at home with his brother.
Speaker 1: He's got an ankle monitor for a couple more months
Speaker 1: and then he'll go back to life as much as
Speaker 1: it can be normal after thirty three years behind bars.
Speaker 1: I mean a lot of people always say they hear
Speaker 1: about this, you know, work of helping the wrongfully incarcerated,
Speaker 1: but they hear about it when it's too late, you know,
Speaker 1: after they have lost decades and decades of their lives.
Speaker 1: Oftentimes their lives have been utterly destroyed. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: you read the stories about them getting out, but take
Speaker 1: it from me, having worked with UM scores of axonorees,
Speaker 1: not only my clients, but some of the innocence projects
Speaker 1: other clients, they're just never the same. UM. The psychological
Speaker 1: damage of being you know, confined to this narrow space,
Speaker 1: and all of the horrors of prison that you hear
Speaker 1: about that happened to these people, and then on top
Speaker 1: of it, being in there for something you didn't do.
Speaker 1: I mean, there have been studies about how it inflicts
Speaker 1: even more psychological damage on people to be in there
Speaker 1: for something that you didn't do, and the lost years
Speaker 1: just can't be replaced. No amount of money is going
Speaker 1: to make that pain go away, no matter how much
Speaker 1: compensation they get. And yet these wrongful convictions just continue
Speaker 1: being propelled by junk science. It's just astounding, ex actly
Speaker 1: I was. I was flabbergasted when working on the story
Speaker 1: and trying to find, well, where where is the research
Speaker 1: that backs up all these claims that people are making
Speaker 1: on the stand, Where is the academic work that's been done,
Speaker 1: Where is the anything? This is a discipline that when
Speaker 1: when you look at sort of the fundamentals of how
Speaker 1: do you prove reliability? Uh, no one can quote an
Speaker 1: error rate, There are no markers that show that this
Speaker 1: is something that holds up under any kind of scrutiny.
Speaker 1: And so this idea that we can not just look
Speaker 1: at blood as a clue as we would at many, many,
Speaker 1: many things in a crime scene to help us figure
Speaker 1: out what happened, but as something in which you can
Speaker 1: entirely independent, even if any other evidence reconstruct the crime
Speaker 1: itself quickly leads you into wrongful conviction territory. I want
Speaker 1: our listeners to be rest assured that we're not just
Speaker 1: throwing around this term junk science haphazardly. Just to be
Speaker 1: crystal clear, there has been extensive research on the effectiveness
Speaker 1: and the accuracy of blood stained pattern analysis. And this
Speaker 1: will become somewhat of a drumbeat in our series. We're
Speaker 1: going to continue to go back to this study that
Speaker 1: was done in two thousand nine by the National Academy
Speaker 1: of Sciences, and they issued a report after examining various
Speaker 1: disciplines of forensic science that are used in courtrooms across
Speaker 1: the country, everything from fingerprints to footwear impressions, to bite
Speaker 1: marks and of course blood stains. Right PAM. The National
Speaker 1: Academy of Science is actually made up of scientists who
Speaker 1: published pure reviewed work and who were involved in research
Speaker 1: with real scientific integrity, and they set the bar very
Speaker 1: very high, and they have long been extremely critical of
Speaker 1: blood stained pattern analysis and really caution in courts to
Speaker 1: not consider this a science with the sort of accuracy
Speaker 1: as for example, some DNA testing um or toxicology where
Speaker 1: you really have you have numbers and certainty to work with.
Speaker 1: So outside of d n A, the n A S
Speaker 1: study was really critical of all of these other disciplines
Speaker 1: of forensic science. And what it's said about blood spatter
Speaker 1: analysis is this quote, the capable analysts must possess an
Speaker 1: understanding of applied mathematics, physics, fluid transfer, wound pathology, and
Speaker 1: that this blood spatter analysis is more subjective than substantive.
Speaker 1: So this report should have been a bombshell in the
Speaker 1: forensic science community, and it really should have changed our
Speaker 1: court system. I mean, why do you think it is
Speaker 1: that you have some of the leading scientists in the
Speaker 1: country so critically rebuking all of these forensic disciplines, but
Speaker 1: courts don't seem to pay any attention to it. Judges
Speaker 1: are looking backward at precedent, and science is supposed to
Speaker 1: be looking forward each year. We understand through scientific inquiry
Speaker 1: things like forensic science and its accuracy better and better
Speaker 1: and better. But the courts never looked at that. They
Speaker 1: just kept looking back blood saying pattern analysis, like so
Speaker 1: many of the disciplines that are identified in that report,
Speaker 1: is being problematic. We're so deeply entrenched in crime labs,
Speaker 1: and across the country you had experts in crime labs
Speaker 1: that were under local police departments where this was just
Speaker 1: this was the way it was done. So there was
Speaker 1: no effort on the part of law enforcement to change that.
Speaker 1: And for prosecutors, there was no incentive because a good
Speaker 1: blood stained pattern analyst on the stand who's a phenomenal
Speaker 1: witness really connects with the jury and makes things sound
Speaker 1: very simple. Um, that's gold that can make your case,
Speaker 1: and that can take a circumstantial case and move it
Speaker 1: from gray to black and white. So, like you said,
Speaker 1: many judges rule on a case based on precedent, and
Speaker 1: the precedent provides essentially the license for judges to accept
Speaker 1: bloodstains spatter analysis as evidence. But there was at least
Speaker 1: one judge who did pay attention to this study, and
Speaker 1: that was a federal judge that I very well in
Speaker 1: Boston named Nancy Gartner. Um, Nancy and I are actually
Speaker 1: co authors on a textbook together. I'll give a nice
Speaker 1: plug gear for the law of juries and case anybody
Speaker 1: is aching to read a legal textbook. But tell us
Speaker 1: about what Judge Nancy Gartner did. I mean, she was
Speaker 1: and and really sadly remained sort of a lone voice
Speaker 1: in the in the wilderness, she came out swinging and
Speaker 1: said that judges had to take a more active stand
Speaker 1: in being gatekeepers to this kind of evidence, and that
Speaker 1: they could not be letting junk science into the courtroom.
Speaker 1: And if we're going to continue to see some of
Speaker 1: the disciplines that the n AS report has identified as
Speaker 1: unreliable in our courtrooms, I want to hold admissibility hearings
Speaker 1: before we ever get to trial to decide whether we
Speaker 1: should allow this in. And that shouldn't have been a
Speaker 1: revolutionary idea, but it really was. And she was an
Speaker 1: outlier in this and got a lot of pushback from
Speaker 1: from prosecutors about that. I mean, it's really shocking that
Speaker 1: she got pushed back, not just from prosecutors but also
Speaker 1: from you know, her colleagues or fellow judges. She's a hero,
Speaker 1: and I think that her insistence on something is basic
Speaker 1: as fairness being controversial is really disturbing. Life doesn't always
Speaker 1: imitate art, especially when it comes to blood stains. It's
Speaker 1: important to remember that shows like Dexter and c s
Speaker 1: I are just entertainment. It isn't real life. And many
Speaker 1: of the techniques that we think our science are far
Speaker 1: from it. You might be listening to this wondering what
Speaker 1: you can do to make sure that junk signs like
Speaker 1: blood stained patterned analysis stop is being admitted into courts.
Speaker 1: In our show, notes were attaching a link to the
Speaker 1: National Academy of Sciences report that we spoke about in
Speaker 1: this episode. Send it to your local criminal court judges.
Speaker 1: Give them something to think twice about before admitting this
Speaker 1: evidence in their courtroom. Something else you can always do
Speaker 1: is make sure that when you get called to jury service,
Speaker 1: you don't try to get out of it. You do it,
Speaker 1: and do it as a conscientious juror. When I pick
Speaker 1: a jury in a criminal case, one question I always
Speaker 1: ask is how many of you believe that my client
Speaker 1: must have done something wrong because they've been arrested and
Speaker 1: accused of a crime. More than half the hands in
Speaker 1: the room always go up. Remember these principles, let the
Speaker 1: presumption of innocence only work if we breathe life into them.
Speaker 1: Someone that is accused of a crime ought to be
Speaker 1: considered innocent all the way through the trial, all the
Speaker 1: way through your deliberations. They are wrapped in a cloak
Speaker 1: of innocence Like a warm blanket, it can never be
Speaker 1: torn from them unless the prosecution overcomes the highest burden
Speaker 1: in our justice system, which has proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
Speaker 1: You give the benefit of the doubt to the accused. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: as I've seen time and time again, the presumption of
Speaker 1: innocence in this country is not a given. It is
Speaker 1: an ideal that we talk about but we don't live
Speaker 1: up to. But by uncovering the lack of credibility of
Speaker 1: junk signs and our courts, we hope to get one
Speaker 1: step closer. Next week, we'll explore the junk signs of
Speaker 1: Arson with Innocence Project co founder and famed civil rights
Speaker 1: and criminal defense attorney Barry Scheck. Wrongful Conviction Junk Science
Speaker 1: is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association
Speaker 1: with Signal Company Number One. Thanks to our exact get
Speaker 1: A producer Jason Flom and the team, it's Signal Company
Speaker 1: number One executive producer Kevin Wardis and senior producers Karen
Speaker 1: korn Haber and Brit Spangler. Our music was composed by
Speaker 1: Jay Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram at dubin
Speaker 1: dot Josh followed the Wrongful Conviction podcast on Facebook and
Speaker 1: on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Twitter at wrong Conviction.