Afternoon, were here to hear from mr. Chris fabricant. Who is the director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project and one of the nations leading experts on Forensic Sciences and the criminal Justice System. Mr. Fabricants book junk science and the american criminal Justice System chronicles the prosecution of individuals who were found guilty of capital murder. And the fight to overturn those Wrongful Convictions he weaves together the courtroom battles from mississippi to texas to new york. And beyond and mr. Fabricant takes the reader on a journey into the heart of a broken racist justice Justice System and the role that Forensic Science plays in maintaining the status quo. And joining mr. Fabricant for this conversation and moderating. It is allison Leota Montgomery countys own. She is a former federal prosecutor turned author who has been dubbed the female john grisham and also serves on the board of directors for the mystery writers of america and what i actually enjoy about listening to them in a few moments and the journeys that they have been on before becoming a lawmaker here in montgomery county. I used to be a journalist. I worked at cnn for 12 years and its conversations like this that help inform me and help inform the public about what we need to do better to make our community a more fair and equitable place and to build the movements to make that change possible and so without further ado i would like to turn over the conversation to these two. So, thank you very much. Thank you evan, and i would like to just add that im working on making john grisham called the awesome leota. Im really excited to be here today with chris fabricant. He has written not just an important book and when i think you should all read because of what it talks about and how it critiques our system. But also its a thriller it reads like a thriller like all of my colleagues are trying to make happen. I listen to it on tape with my 15 year old son. It was appropriate for him. Its its a little graphic, but its good. I recommend you all buy it. I am gonna give a little content warning there are tents out there that have ponies and sparkles. This is not that tent were gonna be talking about capital punishments Death Penalty bite marks rapes murders. So buckle up chris welcome to dc. Thank you to be here you have you do such important work. And your book hold me in from the very. Moment you start with the story of Keith Allen Harward and you start with every womans Worst Nightmare scenario. Tell us what happened to Teresa Perron. Yes, Teresa Perron in the summer of 1982 was living with her husband jesse in newport news virginia near the Navy Shipyard thats there. He jesse parone was a welder on the ships. He was working on the uss carl vinson, which was dry docked in newport news at the time and she was 22 year old mother of three. She had three kids. Theyre all under five years old. She spent a late sunday afternoon in september. Taking your kids to the pool doing laundry and during the course of that day. She was in a car and she passed a sailor hitchhiking on the side of the road, which wasnt unusual at that time. There were a lot of sailors in newport news or in fact thousands of sailors in newport news. And she didnt start to give him a ride and he yelled at her and threw the window and it was kind of unsettling and but she didnt think much more about it when im through the course of her day. Later that night. She put her children to bed and she went to bed upstairs and then down the hall she went to bed in her own room, and she felt uneasy and she was kind of had this memory of what had happened earlier in the day and also let me go back a little bit and later that afternoon. There had been a moment where she was out in her backyard, and she was hanging up the laundry to dry. And another sailor suddenly was in at her back gate making eye contact with her kind of staring at her and her instincts told her that this was not a friendly stare. And so she called her children back in the house and then later that night. She was having these memories of the day and it was making your own settle so she went downstairs. And she bolted the back door with the two by four. Just slid that over and that was her husbands usual entry into the house. And she went to lay down on the couch and just kind of wait for jesse to come home and he doesnt come home until around midnight. He works the late shift. Heres or not. She hears a knock on the door around one in the morning and she runs the door and it is jesse. Shes relieved he spent some time together. They go upstairs to bed. She finally falls asleep. Sometime between one in the morning and two maybe three in the morning. Shes woken again by the sound of a loud thumping or noise and a sailor standing over their bed. With the crowbar waved above his hand above his shoulder and he brought it down on jesse perons head and beat him to death of the crowbar while she was lying on the floor next to him and he had his boots under she was under his boots and he held her down why he killed her husband. And then spent the next three hours actually torturing her on various locations around the house and warranted that if she made any sound that her children would be next. So she never made a noise she endured this torture both upstairs next to her dying husband and then downstairs in their living room on the couch and on the couch with the final assault occurred the perpetrator had bitten up and down her thighs very painful deep injuries. Finally, he was finished he put her in the bottom of a sleeping bag and asked her for directions to norfolk. He rummaged through her purse stole whatever money she had. And left the teresa went back upstairs. She got her rifle and called the police her children had slept through the entire ordeal. And then at the hospital they took whats known parochially as a rape kit and many many photographs of the the bite marks on. But during the course as assault the sailor had put a diaper over her head to prevent her from looking at his face and when he walked around the house he held her from behind and so she couldnt see his face. And downstairs it was dark and so she really never got to look at him so she couldnt identify the person who had done this except for that. He was a sailor apparently of low ranking judging from the chevrons on his sleeve. And there were no fingerprints. There was no blood evidence of any to speak of there was no eyewitnesses. There was no particular suspect other than somebody that was white was about five ten weighed about 170 pounds, and that was really the only evidence that they had half the guys in this right and at the time it just accurately described generally about 3,000 sailors on the uss carl vinson at the time. So, where do you go from here . Right is that they have one of the most sensational rape murders in the history of our news they have no suspects. Well, they have a thousands of suspects. And so what they did is that they decided that they would bite mark evidence had just been introduced in the american criminal legal system made very famous by the ted bundy trial and Something Else that i go into at some length in the book is how ted bundy really made bite marks, you know a mainstream science. And they decided what they were going to do is they were going to flag everybody every sailor on the uss carl vinson who matched the description generally they were going to get outlines of their teeth their dentition. And theyre going to try to compare those teeth to the bite marks on teresa perons thighs. So a dental dragnet if you will which had never been accomplished before and never been tried before and this is really the only lead that they thought that they had to go on. And keep that one heartward was stationed. He was a sailor in the us navy he served on honorably. He was 27 years old. His teeth were flagged as a potential biter, but the two dentists that examinated at that time had excluded him as a potential source of the bite marks. Another month went by us senators two us senators including the senator from virginia and senator from new york alfons tomato, some of you my age and older would remember who he is putting pressure on newport news in the navy to make an arrest. So there was a tent activity in this investigation, but it really wasnt getting anywhere until you see this in a lot of Wrongful Conviction cases is that therell be one fact one thing that will change the course of an investigation and suddenly you have a suspect and suddenly you start painting a bulls eye around the target and thats what happened to keith harword. Keith harword was in a drunken dispute with his girlfriend. He she hit him with a frying pan and he bit her on the shoulder and ended up getting arrested. So the police get wind of this sailor roughly matching. Corruption, they ignore the fact that Keith Harward had a mustache at the time and the perpetrator was clean shaven, but apart from that. He looked good for it because he was a known biter now and so what they did is they get a very famous forensic dentist and ascendant celebrity at the time who had also testified in the ted bundy case. To come down to newport news and see whats what see if we can match this this sailor who was the biter and probable killer to this bite mark low, levine did after about 24 hours of study then he contacted another forensic dentist to concurred. The prosecution went back to the original dentist who had excluded him and they had all this new information right that these two other, you know Board Certified forensic odontologist, which is what the forensic dentist called themselves when theyre in court because it sounds sciencey. They both changed their minds and decided that Keith Harward was good for the biter. The defense went to two more experts and because those experts also knew that four forensic dentists had all come to the same conclusion. They agreed with the prosecution experts. So keith owen harword went to trial for capital murder and had no defense expert not that it would have mattered and many many most almost all the Wrongful Convictions that i talked about there were defense experts that were disputing the prosecuting experts, but the defense experts are usually not credited and they werent or they werent available and mr. Hardware space. And really the only reason that he was an executed was because his parents got on the witness stand and begged for his life, and it was the only time that keith Allen Harwood had ever seen his father weak in his entire life and then he went away for the next 34 years. Fast forward i started at the Innocence Project in 2012. And the strategic litigation department, and i think were going to talk about some of the beginnings of this department at the Innocence Project a little bit. Later. Was tasked with litigating the leading contributing factors to Wrongful Conviction. So what we know from dna exonerations is that eyewitness misidentification is the leading contributing factor and number two right behind that is the missed of Forensic Sciences. Junk science if you will. And so what we decided when we were going to begin this type of litigation because wed always done only dna litigation right that were going to take cases and if we could find biological evidence and test it at that would prove innocence then we would take the case. That was our soul criteria. No matter how many witnesses there might be or confessions or whatever just that dna was this truth serum that peter newfell been very shack recognized and when they started the Innocence Project here were going to do something a little bit different. Were going to look for prisoners that have been convicted on junk science, and i tasked my paralegals my brilliant paralegals with finding every case in the country where bite mark evidence had been used and so we took capital cases. We took misdem. Cases, we took pretrial cases. We took posthumous cases and during the course of that search, which was nationwide and continues to this day because were still finding them. A my paralegal came across keith owen hard words appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court you could look up this appeal on online if you wish and he put it on my desk at the Innocence Project when were looking for these cases and i read this, you know most appeals and you would be familiar with this too. Is that if theyre affirming it conviction particularly a brutal crime like this they tended to dwell on the suffering of the victim and just all how obvious it is that the defendant is guilty and dismissing these claims and this wasnt that it was strange in that it wasnt this fullthroated endorsement of his conviction and if you were skeptical about bite mark evidence, which of course i was he seemed innocent just from reading the appeal that affirmed his conviction. He seemed like there was almost evidence against him teresa never identified him as the perpetrator. She in a very suggestive context in a courtroom. There had been nothing else tying him to the scene except for those bite marks. Is it fair to say he was convicted almost entirely based on the bike mark testimony entirely, you know, i mean there was one you know and you see this in a lot of the cases that i write about and a lot of the work that i do is that theyll be the main component which will be Something Like by marx and then theyll have some extra some throw in and in this case what they did and is they hypnotized a they hit tries Teresa Perron and they hit in the ties the night watchman outside of the uss carl vinson. Because he had seen a sailor coming back from the it was saturday night. No sunday night. There was a came back late and a blood spattered uniform. And so to make this but the timing hadnt worked the first time they went for him like that. That sailor was probably not. The perpetrator because it would have been too early. So they hypnotized him after hypnosis the time train the frame changed. He identified Keith Harward as somebody that was coming back from a very late night out in a blood spattered uniform and they had used dog sent evidence, which has been implicated in a bunch of Wrongful Convictions, too to track the perpetrator from the house to the uss. Carl vinson said the convince him that it was probably this person and that that was keith howard. And so those were that was it, you know me and that was enough to do it. You know, i mean, and and i think that had we not found dna evidence he be in prison still today and dead. So lets back up then and talk about the bite mark evidence. This thing that i think was presented almost like fingerprints like weve made a match we can tell i think they use the term to a reasonable degree of dental certainty. Whatever like that means hes right. What does that mean . That Keith Harwood is the guy who bit teresa from thighs. Tell us about what does that mean and how tell us about the guild of dentists . Who . Came forward and were presenting themselves as experts who could use bite marks the same way that fingerprint analysts use fingerprints. Yeah. So one of the both in for litigation and for writing this book, i was very interested in the kind of the origin of bite mark evidence. Like where did this come from who invented it . How did it get into the criminal Justice System to begin with . I actually had to file a lawsuit against the department of justice to get into the american board of forensic odin talajis archive, which is in silver spring, maryland. Because they werent gonna let me in and because im a critic right and so they i filed the First Amendment claim to get into the archive and i found a trove of documents that kind of illuminated what they were doing and what was happening. Or in the 70s is that forensic scientists were becoming celebrities . Becoming a field that you could aspire to be forensic scientist. That didnt really exist before there wasnt really an organized effort to have a guild, you know the structure or a board certification for Something Like friends that go to intology. But the forensic dentists where always with us, theyve been with us for hundreds of years and what theyve been doing is identifying dead bodies, right . So if you hear about a body thats burned beyond recognition thats identified by dental records. Thats your friendly neighborhood for friends that go to intologist doing good work, you know, basically valid work, you know, identifying human remains. Usually it works with notable exceptions where people have showed up alive that were pronounced dead, but the but they werent and they were working in mortuaries and in medical examiner offices next to Forensic Pathologists, and the Forensic Pathologists were becoming stars, right . It was the era of quincy, you know that you know has been the the probably the leading miss. You know the misleading use of forensic. Begins with quincy and extends all the way to csi today, but it was becoming something that people wanted to do and the dentist definitely wanted to get into court and be testifying his Expert Witnesses and they started looking at bite mark evidence as a way to do it that this could be used to identify the bider and therefore the perpetrator we could become Expert Witnesses and we could be in court, you know solving crimes, you know pursuing justice, you know and making some money and lets set this in time. When did this kind of guild of dentists start . So in 1972 a group of about eight forensic dentists went to a meeting at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, which is a huge organization that has over 5,000 members worldwide. Thats kind of like the aba for lawyers. This is the aba for forensics scientists. And what they managed to do is establish a forensic odontology section. You know me right shoulders shoulder with fingerprint experts and and pathology and all the other, you know leading forensic fields. Which gave them an anchor credential . And then they decided they were going to invent something called the american board of forensic odontology and start giving themselves board certifications and you never had to prove that you could identify a bite mark as such or that you could match somebody to a bite mark or demonstrate that you could actually do this. Well you had to do is memorize the methodology, right . So, how do we do it . How do we take the mold . How do we match them to teeth . You know, i mean that kind of thing even though there was no evidence any but it worked. But they would start board certifying each other. And so then you would get into court and youre president of the american board of forensicoontology and your Board Certified forensic dentist, and that youre a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and thats very impressive sciency sounding credentials. So if youre a judge and youre considering whether or not youre going to emit Expert Witness testimony like a lot of us they look at credentials. Say oh this guy. A Board Certified forensic gordontologist. Member of this organization and that organization. We dont have gone beneath the layer. And so what they did and and two of the forensic dentists were lawyers. So they knew the value of precedent and they found the perfect first case and from that first case they managed to get it into court and then it spread like a virus around the country without any research to back up any of the claims and about four years after the first bite mark case was used ted bundy came along. And the research that i did into the bundy case, which i didnt know that much about of course. I knew who ted was but the i i read every article that had reported on ted bundys crime spree from seattle to when he got to the coyote Omega Sorority house in Florida State university and committed a series of atrocities. And what was really mindblowing is how little evidence they ever had against ted bundy in particularly in that crime. There was a terrible identification that was made by denieri who is a sorority sister. I guess you call them at the time. And they under hypnosis because they broke out their hypnosis again. She had identified an employee of a kyo mega as a person that she had seen fleeing the house right after the crimes. And then when ted bundy got arrested she changed her mind. It was like, i dont know chris. I think youre good, but i dont think youre gonna exonerate ted bundy here. No, and im not suggesting. Hes innocent. Like a broken clock thats right twice a day. I think they got bundy right . But what was interesting was that they didnt have an id. They didnt have any fingerprint. They didnt have any other evidence at all, but they had this injury that was looked like a bite mark on one of the victims bodies. The sheriff who was investigating the crime was asked about what evidence you have when he was first arrested. Nothing hes like thats what thats our problem and then he mentioned something about by marx and said well, you know, this is really the really vague and i dont think theyd be very good evidence. You know, i mean, thats a probably not going to work. By the time you get to trial when thats all the evidence that they had he was calling it bundy signature that he left on this crime victim and then this was the first nationally televised trial in our countrys history. And the dentist where the stars because the case rose and fell on bite mark evidence. Its really what they had. The judge himself had called the evidence short when they had moved for a direct divert when the defense had moved the directive verdict he kind of reluctantly denied the motion to for an acquittal because they didnt really have much evidence. And that became and also because ted bundy famously represented himself. So you had this madman crossexamining a dentist on national tv about whether he had left this bite mark on somebody it was you know, it was like johnny depp and amber heard, you know, everybody was gonna tune in right, you know, i mean and they became stars and as a result a lot of people suffered, how much do you think this hollywood incentive played into you got these dentists who are like filling crowns back in their hometown and now theyre getting hbo documentaries made about them. How much of that played into this. I have to believe quite a bit. You know me is that if you look at one of the the some of the articles that i found in this archive, including from magazines that had interviewed, you know, this is the era where people were reading them for the articles. Right . And the they had so they had interviews with dentists and they would always be describing them as you know, brilliant and mens men and crime solvers and it was like they were like almost advertising for board middleaged dentists that wanted to get into something exciting and exciting new field. And out the rules for how expert testimony should be considered which i think we would both agree was a game changer and and has changed whether or not this testimony would be accepted today or any testimony like that. Well, i write about the doward decision in the book and what was happening during this era where forensic scientists became a big deal. So something happening on the civil side of our legal system and as the explosion of personal Energy Litigation and mass tort litigation and class action litigation something that you remember the ford pintos or taking off the road at the time. And a lot of this like the Cottage Industry that that sprung up to support plain and politigation was really speculative and there was a lot of junk science being used to sue corporations. Incorporations, were getting tired of it. Theres a lot of righteous litigation, but theres a lot of junk science being used against them as well. And what the corporate defense bar wanted was more rigor brought to the science that was being used in court. So they teed up the the dabber case to get to the Supreme Court it got there and and prior to that the previous 80 years. The general rule had been that you defer to the relevant Scientific Community if its generally accepted in the relevant Scientific Community, then courts will defer to the experts to the scientists and they will admit that evidence. What was really frustrating is that they would define the relevant Scientific Community for example, forensic dentists like so if you ask somebody whos livelihood depends on the continued admissibility of this technique whether its generally accepted your answer is going to be obvious, right . You know mean you run into the the problem of selfinterest, right . And the so with the Supreme Court decided is that judges are no longer going to defer to the relevant Scientific Community. Theyre going to have to eat their broccoli and theyre gonna have to actually think about whether or not this is real science or this is junk science, and they set out a series of like questions to ask that are related to foundational principles of science, you know, Something Like does it have an error rate is it testable does have a testable . I thought this is right. These types. Its been peer reviewed. And it worked the civil side. Judges began excluding unreliable evidence in ways that they had never before empirical evidence demonstrate that my boss Peter Neufeld had done an empirical. Study about 10 years after dabbard that showed that it had been working as intended in the civil side, but in the criminal side nothing had changed. And i did a study with professor Brandon Garrett in 2018 that showed the same thing even after Wrongful Conviction to demonstrated how many of these techniques are unreliable and nothing had changed as a result of dabber and this is the theme that i explore in the book called poor people science. And the reason that i call it that is because this is the science that were used in the criminal legal system because we dont care enough about who we prosecute in the system to get the science, right . Id see that were like we have 10 minutes. We i know that we should have some questions that was. No, no, we have 10 minutes until the question. Okay, so i know it does it goes fast, right . But yeah, so lets talk about the bike marks for a second because a lot of your book is about the bite marks. Do you think they work at . All right. Can you ever match bite marks based on whats on skin on the body . No. Never i was like, so they one of the things and this is true with all junk signs junk science has very strong superficial appeal, right . You know, i mean you think about bloodletting bloodletting lasted for thousands of years, right . Because people made some intuitive sense that if you cleanse the blood they would cleanse what else you but and nobody really thought critically about doing a test that would demonstrate whether that was true or not. Right . And so if you think about bite marks, for example if you have a deceased person a body that has an alleged bite mark on it that by mark has changed from the time that it was inflicted and you have no idea what it was like what shape or what position the body was in that time. You dont have idea how much its changed since it was first inflicted, right . Its decomposed. You know, i mean, so it might match one day and not the next right and if its a living victim, its healed and wont match and i never saw a crossexamination that went into this basic issue. That would make undermine the entire field. Nobody really even thought about that and thats this like very very basic and then on the threshold matter. Can you identify a bite market such probably all of you have in your minds right now. What a bite mark looks like right because you had kids and they came home from preschool and somebody bit them and johnny baby. I see that right and then you can see all the little teeth. Thats never case work you get diffused bruises that were photograph days later, you know even look at and i have some photographs of the bite marks that were used in my clients cases in the center of the book so judge for yourself, but you never actually see something that looks like that, you know, i mean in the research thats been done demonstrates that the forensic dentist and no better than you and i would be flipping and coin its either even in bite mark, you know, so no the junkiest of the junk that i talked about okay there in your book. Theres three Main Elements three main junk sciences that you mostly focus on the bite marks the hair microscopy and kind of arson techniques techniques used to see if a house that went up in flames was lit on fire or if it was an accident a lot of this so after dowbert and and after there was a in 2009. There was a National Academy of science report and investigation into these types of sciences and a lot of and a lot of this was kind of put to a halt but based on those two prongs and i as a prosecutor, i just want to put a a good word out here for the department of justice. I was a federal prosecutor. My dad was a federal prosecutor. My husband was the federal prosecutor and let me tell you like no one wants to convict a guilty. Im innocent man like that would be the worst. That would be the absolute worst thing. To have happen and i think that was shown in 2012 when after this National Academy of sciences. Did this investigation james comey . Who was then the head of the fbi put a halt to using this type of science or put the brakes on it and also opened up the files to the Innocence Project allowed a review of cases that use that kind of evidence and stopped any sort of procedural hurdles that the doj could have put up because i i mean i would argue that doj has no interest in convicting innocent people either certainly not i am so my dad was a public defender. I was a public defender. My mom was his one of clients. So the were obviously coming at it from very different perspectives the right in the yeah, actually i read about it in the book is like the first half the book. Im not really a character and the second half. I really am. I started in 2012 and right at the same time that this case audit that youre talking about and to be clear. This was in 2012 and at that moment in time there had already been at least 72 Wrongful Convictions associated with the use of hair microscene 72, right . So nothing was done until what happened was that there was a series of Wrongful Convictions right here in dc the pedia Public Defender Service lawyer and sandy levick had overturn there are three men three black men accused and convicted of assaulting white women that the evidence that was most central to all three convictions was hair microscopy and it was three different experts all from the vaunted Fbi Crime Lab that had testified that hair was very probative to their fact that they were at the crime scene. All three were innocent and all three were obviously innocent and spencer sue from the washington post. Had relentlessly reported on these mens odysseys through the legal system and a lot of pressure became started to bear on the department of justice and the fbi and to their credit to their credit. They honored their duty to correct they came to us. And said, okay. Well we need to do a case on it. We need to find if there are other victims of this. Type of junk science out there locked away and it was you know, the largest forensic scandal in our nations history. Nothing like that had ever been had happened. There are a couple other audits of compared to bowl that analysis and some bad apples and that lab before but nothing like this had happened because prosecutors actually have a special duty unlike defense unlike any other attorney who is out there prosecutors have a duty to justice a duty to not convict innocent people a duty to not bring tainted evidence and duty to try to evidence. Violates the constitution so we cant just like go for the win we have to be also gatekeepers for the evidence that is used. And i think that people like chris and Innocence Project you do a great job of holding all of our feet to the fire because we do come at it from different perspectives, and im out there trying to make sure that this serial rapist who likes to abduct women and rape them in front of their children that i had a guy who did that that was his thing. Im out there like i dont want that guy to do that again to another woman in the community, but youre making sure that were getting the right guy and that were using the right methods and that is such an important part of our system. So thank you for your work. Thank you. So ive gotten the signal that weve got about 14 minutes left now for questions from you guys. I am sure theres yes plenty of questions. So well just kind of go down the line here. Well start with you sir. Oh the microphone, wheres the mic . Do we have any water for the speakers . From the bottom of my heart. Thank you for the work you do and your career. That work in my career is healthcare. So my question was going to be you know medicine say cardiology had to go from being a trade guild to professional society with standards. Qualifications my question was going to be could you do that with forensic . Odontology, it sounds like the answer is no youve disabused me of that. You know, its interesting that you say that i draw a parallels between medicine and the Forensic Community writ large in the book because as you probably know im sure you know, and they it wasnt really until the 80s that we started doing evidencebased Decision Making in medicine and there was something called the cochran report. That was very similarly received by the medical community that the National Academy of sciences report was received by the Forensic Science community in 2009. And theyre like, what the hell are these statisticians getting up in our business . Theyve never been to a crime scene. Related to fingerprint what they possibly tell us about our business. So i think that my hope is my expectation and my job is is to get the Forensic Community to adopt the recommendations of mainstream scientists and that thing so there are very very significant parallels between there. Thank you. Its a great question. Hello, you briefly touched on hypnosis earlier. I was a i was a big ufo abduction buff when i was a kid and later in life. I read some skeptical literature, you know like with one of the strongest claims and support of abductions wasnt so many people remembered this under hypnosis and then philip class demonstrated, you know, the problems with hypnosis and in particular the one researcher who was conducting a lot of these abduct the hypnosis sessions already had developed this idea about aliens harvesting genetic material for some experiment and he unintentionally infected the people he was consulting with have you seen something analogous and the use of hypnosis and investigations. Yes. I am. You know one of the things that all the lawyers in my department they have a lot of focus on is the science of memory and percept which that relates to eyewitness identification evidence and other ways that you know, people are remembering crimes and what the science says is that our memories arent like videotape say you dont just recall them and like call it up and that it plays in your mind what we recall even every time we recall a memory. Were not recalling the memory itself. Were recalling the memory of the memory and it gets a little bit more corrupted every time and its easily susceptible to influence and change and memory that is you know, sought to be like kind of elicited through hypnosis. The only thing thats capable of doing is corrupting a memory and planting a false memory into it. It doesnt clarify anything and yet its still used today. I have two clients on death row today that hypnosis was used and the witnesses against them Charles Flores in texas right now. Thank you for question. Hello. I remember reading an article about a detective. That was an expert in. Blood spray patterns, you know as a result of a shooting. Have you come across that as something thats been used to convict people . Oh, yes. Lets batter evidence is notoriously unreliable. There was a recent study leave it might have been this that did a blood spatter study john butler from this here is in the crowd is keeping me on my my ps and cues gonna report back to the community. The blitz batter evidence in notoriously unreliable. There was a woman in san diego last week. It was exonerated after 19 years in prison largely based on bloods better evidence of forensic dentist testified in her case too. Is it joe brian case and texas very fairly wellknown of a High School Principal who is wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Despite it now by being 120 miles away. So its been used in a number, you know, there is a there there with blood spatter evidence. But the amount of education and science that you have to understand including trigonometry and being able to account for things like gravity which they dont account for often in these types of like that they do. Is the essential problem so if you had the educational background to really and new fluid dynamics in a sophisticated way you could Say Something about it, but the way that its typically used. Is that a Police Officer will have a 40hour training and then let it rip. So in a case where the prosecution only has testimony and misapplied forensic evidence. What is the sort of defense that you would build in a case like that . How do you convince the jury that its misapplied forensic evidence . Its really really, you know difficult to crossexamine your way out of a junk science conviction, you know, i mean, then what we at the Innocence Project to advocate it for for a long long time is a governmental entity likeness, perhaps the National Institute of allergy to do Validation Research and demonstrate that these techniques are reliable outside of the adversarial system because trying to suss out sense from nonsense in the course of a trial doesnt work and i write a lot about you know, how those failures, you know, i mean and layering on top of that is problem of Scientific Literacy in the Legal Community in our country. Generally, thats true for defense lawyers. Its true for prosecutors. Its true for judges. Its true for juries, right . So were all in there, you know talking about things that we dont understand and theyre the lawyers are supposed to be biased on behalf of their side, right . So youre gonna take this science. Youre gonna twist it in front of the jury to make it tell the story you want to tell and thats a problem with junk science because thats the value of it to the people that are using it is that it can be used to tell any story you want to tell so you got to have upstream fixes too late once you get into trial. Thank you for the question. Have you seen a difference between if a corner versus a medical examiner testifies to convict individuals and one of the real court quick short question . Dcs i think Forensic Science department was sort of discredited. Are you seeing that around in a bunch of different ones around the country and does that concern you greatly . You wont be surprised by my answer to your last question. Yes, it does concern me and crime lab scandals are lesion if you go to the Innocence Project website, weve tracked many of them from dc to houston to Orange County more recently and in california to they their list of of crime labs candles as long and a horrible history there the so thats nice that seem really junk scientists like incompetence. Its lack of standards. Its sloppiness. To resource. Its poor supervision. Its lack of standard operating. There are a lot of things that go into that. The the other question about medical examiners versus corners, you know many people dont realize that corners dont have to have any medical training whatsoever. Right . You just got to get elected right . So michael west one of the most notorious friends like experts who i write about in my book was a coroner right . So when these were a political entity and not a scientist, you know, so they shouldnt be testifying as experts in trials at all. So if you have a medical doctor that happens to be a friendship pathologist, youre likely to get you know, more reliable opinions chris. Is it fair to say that Innocence Project believes in dna testing though . Its the Gold Standard a hundred percent. You know the nobody no organization relies on ballot science more project. Yeah. And what ive seen as a doing sex crimes once there was dna the the defense from it wasnt me . To consent, so thats a lot of the battleground in the sex crimes area now from where i sit right is we know who it was and then it becomes well, she wanted it and that has nothing to do with what happens in the scientist office. Everybody agrees. The two people were together. They were intimate and then a lot of the burden in my view shifts then to the victim usually a woman to prove that she did not want what happened and ive seen that in cases from serial rapist who break into womens homes and never met them before saying oh no. No, it was all consensual. She wanted it. This is actually funny because my next question was gonna be about the fact that now with the dna science, so im a scientist and i am aware of how sometimes easy it is to contaminate with small trace dna a sample and now ive seen a couple of cases where weve gone from exonerating people based on dna to accidentally incriminating the wrong person because of is contamination dna which wasnt properly investigated so that kind of scared me because obviously dna is one of the most sciency Forensic Science. What what path do you see forward to deal with this do we do we maybe need to train the jury in advance like you cant be a juror unless you take some classes on basic science. I know it sounds horrible, but how do we prevent this many population of where you put your finger on a significant issue probably see genotyping software and and we can detect such tiny amounts of dna now that it becomes paradoxically somewhere less reliable because youre assume its almost its hard to be excluded from those at that point. So whether or not somebodys a major contributor or not or when it came into contact with this and so easy to be contaminated, so there are issues with that and nonetheless it remains the Gold Standard what we advocate for is transparency in the software and that we have to have the is open so defense experts have an opportunity to examine the claims that are being made and this is a problem with using proprietary software and other types of programs in the criminal Justice System because corporations are in business to make money not necessarily to advance justice, right . And so that theyre not going to be transparent with their proprietary software. They have no business in my view operating in the Justice System. I dont think were gonna im sorry two minutes here. Yeah. I was just gonna say were never gonna get away with training tours. Like we cant even get them to like miss their soaps, right . So youve got the last question, sir . Okay. I i think its a reformulation of the same question, but am i right in thinking that if a particular forensic evidence is not found to be inadmissible than a jury is obligated to consider that as valid no, the jury is, you know and jurors are told this all the time, you know, youre the decider of the facts right . You know me in the the problem with like led Scientific Evidence is that its so persuasive, but it doesnt have to be jurors are free to accept or reject any opinion thats offered in trial. Chris here. I wish we had more time to talk about this. I had so many more questions. I wanted to ask you your book is fascinating and raised so many issues. But heres i think the most important question that id like to know from your perspective because we all have an interest in having a fair system any of us could end up as defendants any of our friends could end up as victims we all are in this together. What what are the things we should be looking at now . What whats the bite mark of today . What can and what can we do to help make this a more face . I know youve got a long list, but like a more fair system for everyone. Well, i think that we need Something Like the fda for forensics that we have to do this Validation Research outside of the adversarial system. We do this for toothpaste we do it for aspirin. You can be you know, sent straight to death row and bite marks, you know. But youre asking will be safe. So we have to start there. Im in terms of emerging techniques. Theres you know, a lot of like what digital evidence is being used like shots Spider Technology and facial Recognition Technology and some of the other kind of Digital Technologies that are sold to municipalities in the states and theyre touted for their affectedness really usually for sandy Police Resources in particular area or Something Like that, but youre seeing them kind of leak in from investigative techniques and to trials without being appropriately validated. So its one thing to get start on you know, because the shot spot are alerted on, you know a gun, you know or a gunshot right . And then oh you didnt have a gun thats you know, its a violation every fourth memorized but its another thing to bring that into trial and say that there was in fact a gunshot here because shots spider said so and we see this misuse of technology. Thats that maybe appropriate for basic policing but not appropriate for cases in chief to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and so i think that that, you know investigative techniques leaking into criminal trials so you could name a laundry list of many of them a lot of dogs sniff evidence is like this where it may be appropriate and cadaver dogs, right . They have these dogs now the claim the ability to detect human beings. That theres no dna. No evidence. No eyewitness. Theres nothing else. This is a dog who comes to an area sometimes years later and barks and says, well there is a human being there right . And so these dogs, you know have been introduced this evidence has been introduced in trials as evidence that not a dead dog. Not a dead deer not a bloody nose not a dying human but a dead human being within this location. Because we know because this dog barked right which is absurd and i litigated personally litigated a daubert hearing two years ago in colorado where they allowed this evidence in its really one of the most significant pieces of evidence in the case a lot of you know, circumstantial evidence like, you know me but nothing of solid and so they brought this in and got a conviction, you know, i mean that may be who knows that dog might have been right that time. I have no idea neither does the dog neither does the dog handler and what we do know is that its very likely to create more clients for the Innocence Project going forward. So i ask you all to be skeptical. Retain your skepticism and serve on a jury. Public library. By way of quick introduction or not so quick introduction because, its quite the impressive bio journalists and author ernie suggs has been a reporter for the Atlanta Journal constitution since 1997, currently covering a variety of breaking new