Firearms Identification Work at SBI Under Question As Well

It seems that blood pat­tern recog­ni­tion isn’t the only area at the North Carolina SBI crime lab that is under scrutiny.

Beth Desmond looked through a micro­scope at two man­gled bullets.

It was the start of a 2006 mur­der trial in Pitt County, and pros­e­cu­tors needed her help to fix a poten­tially crip­pling weak­ness in their case. They asked Desmond, an SBI firearms ana­lyst, to deter­mine whether the two bul­let frag­ments had passed through the same gun, a Hi-Point 9mm she had already linked to a clus­ter of cas­ings at the crime scene.

Desmond’s answer was quick, sure and pleas­ing to the pros­e­cu­tion. But her work in the case has threat­ened the integrity of yet another unit of the State Bureau of Investigation.

A (Raleigh) News & Observer inves­ti­ga­tion of the SBI has revealed more than a dozen instances in which agents cheated or bent the rules to secure an answer pros­e­cu­tors sought. At the crime lab, exam­in­ers have bypassed accepted tech­niques, despite push­back in the wider sci­en­tific com­mu­nity. Even when their bosses learn of mis­steps, they often do nothing.

Attorney General Roy Cooper has asked his new direc­tor, Greg McLeod, to review the work of the firearms iden­ti­fi­ca­tion unit, cit­ing con­cerns raised by The N&O this sum­mer. Cooper, a Democrat, removed pre­vi­ous direc­tor Robin Pendergraft, who in an N&O inter­view strug­gled to explain flawed lab work.

With Desmond’s Pitt County assign­ment, the stakes were high. A 10-year-old boy had caught a bul­let dur­ing a street fight between two groups of rival teens. His death rocked the small town of Ayden. Her analy­sis would make or break the case against Jemaul Green, the man they believed acci­den­tally killed Christopher Foggs.

Desmond would turn to firearms and tool­mark iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, one of the old­est and most con­tro­ver­sial dis­ci­plines of foren­sic sci­ence, to har­ness these clues into proof that Green was the only gun­man. Green had insisted from the start that another man had fired first and that he shot back in self-defense. The gun — or guns — had van­ished, leav­ing only a smat­ter­ing of cas­ings and bul­let fragments.

Desmond exam­ined a bul­let found in the eaves of a nearby house; the other was col­lected from the yard near where Christopher collapsed.

The day after get­ting the request from pros­e­cu­tors, she tes­ti­fied that she was absolutely cer­tain both bul­lets were fired from a Hi-Point 9 mm Model C hand­gun, the same type she had matched to cas­ings scat­tered about the ground where Green stood that day. Her report elim­i­nated doubt about another shooter.

But what Desmond actu­ally saw when she looked at the bul­lets through a micro­scope that day in 2006 is a mys­tery and a grow­ing con­tro­versy. Desmond took no pho­tographs. She scrib­bled down the mea­sure­ments of the lands and grooves — the raised por­tions between the lands — on each bullet.

Desmond’s exam­i­na­tion gnawed at David Sutton, a Greenville lawyer who rep­re­sented Green’s girl­friend in charges stem­ming from Christopher’s death.

Sutton wanted to see what Desmond saw. This spring, Sutton asked a for­mer FBI crime lab ana­lyst to pho­to­graph the bul­lets under a microscope.

Butt to butt, ampli­fied seven times, the bul­lets look starkly different.

Independent firearms experts who have stud­ied the pho­tographs ques­tion whether Desmond knows any­thing about the dis­ci­pline. Worse, some sus­pect she fal­si­fied the evi­dence to offer pros­e­cu­tors the answer they wanted. They said it is vital that the bul­lets be exam­ined inde­pen­dently under a microscope.

“This is a big red flag for the whole unit,” said William Tobin, for­mer chief met­al­lur­gist for the FBI, who has tes­ti­fied about poten­tial prob­lems in firearms analy­sis. “This is as bad as it can be. It raises the ques­tion of whether she did an analy­sis at all.”

DNA wor­ship­ing aside, like any foren­sic dis­ci­pline, incor­rect results can be obtained by ana­lysts with insuf­fi­cient train­ing, expe­ri­ence, and qualifications.

It’s also OK for qual­i­fied foren­sic sci­en­tists to come to dif­fer­ing opin­ions. There are cer­tainly gray areas in foren­sic sci­ence. But there is no excuse for one firearms iden­ti­fi­ca­tion expert to say “the two bul­lets were fired from one gun”, and another expert to say “there is no way they were fired from the same gun”. That means some­one made a big mis­take, and shouldn’t be per­form­ing this kind of analysis.

Forensic sci­en­tists should be just that, sci­en­tists — not law enforce­ment offi­cers who are trans­ferred to the lab in between patrol and nar­cotic assignments.

Labs should be inde­pen­dently inspected, inde­pen­dently run, and ana­lysts in var­i­ous dis­ci­plines should belong to pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tions spe­cific to their area of work. Analysts should attend train­ing put on by those orga­ni­za­tions, and pro­mo­tions should be sub­ject to meet­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tion by pro­fes­sional organizations.

Taking a beat cop off the street, giv­ing them a cou­ple of weeks of train­ing, and telling them “You’re now a sci­en­tist, go do sci­ence” that can be highly influ­en­tial in sen­tenc­ing some­one to death isn’t a good idea. Well maybe in a James Cameron movie like Avatar, but not in real life.

Read more on the Charlotte Observer.com.