Some might have been put off by the fact that this steaming pile of crap appeared in no less a newspaper that was supposed to keep a critical eye on the doings of junk forensic science than the New York Times. After all, had the failings not been made abundantly clear?
Once seen as crime scene detritus, bullets and ejected shell casings — which have unique sets of scratches, grooves and dents — are recognized these days as vital pieces of evidence. More officers are now taking the time to collect shell casings from petty crimes and nonviolent shootings, like when joy riders use stop signs for target practice, because they may eventually help solve more dangerous acts of violence.
As the feds dearly love to do, they gave their database a cool name, National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, and fed a story of their glory to a willing “journalist,” who duly reported it.
“This case would likely have gone unsolved” if not for the bullet match, said Jason Grenell, an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia. He successfully prosecuted Mr. Ackridge last year for the 2015 robberies and shootings, which injured four people, including a man who tried to intervene and is now paralyzed from the waist down. Mr. Ackridge was sentenced to 178 years in prison.
Notably absent are the guys sentenced to 178 years in prison for bullets that matched, except they weren’t guilty and the match was forensic nonsense. Should one blame the investigative reporter, Ian Urbina, for ignorantly promoting junk science at the same time so many others have been trying to eliminate crap from the courtroom?
Maybe that would be unfair, as he was just doing his job, writing, and has no competency whatsoever in forensic science, or any science for that matter. Maybe Urbina got an assignment and completed it, even if what he wrote was little more than a law enforcement puff piece. After all, what can one reasonably expect from the New York Times?
But then came the validation.
“By connecting these dots, police aren’t just solving past shooting murders, they’re preventing the next ones from happening.”
More at @nytimes: https://t.co/vlrwobVSen
— The Marshall Project (@MarshallProj) November 23, 2018
The Marshall Project says it’s legit, and they are, so they say, our criminal law saviors. Unlike the New York Times, the Marshall Project is not merely dedicated to the cause of criminal law accuracy, but to filling the void in criminal law reporting. It’s not as if blogs by criminal defense lawyers didn’t exist, or that reporters like Radley Balko and Brad Heath hadn’t written anything before. But this was a dedicated project, the one that wouldn’t get it wrong. Of course, it got it wrong right out of the box.
It’s hard enough to try to fight junk forensic science, given the general scientific illiteracy of the bench and bar, not to mention the public. We love our black boxes, our experts, who fill the gap of desperately desiring not to convict the innocent by taking the burden of making mistakes off the shoulders of judges and juries and replacing them with “trust the black box,” “trust the expert,” “trust the algorithm.” It allows us to sleep easy at night, knowing that we are doing our best to replace the vicissitudes of human frailty with the certitude of science.
And this is how junk science becomes validated in the squishy minds of believers. People may not trust the FBI. They may not even trust the New York Times. But when the self-proclaimed Messiah of criminal law reporting adds its seal of approval, can its efficacy be doubted? That it’s wrong requires one to have some tiny bit of subject matter knowledge plus a lot of skepticism, and that’s too much to ask of people who mean well but rely on others to do their vetting for them.
The Marshall Project says that Urbina’s story about bullet marks is the real deal.
When a semiautomatic weapon is fired, a small hammer slams into a firing pin that strikes the back of the bullet cartridge, igniting gun powder that propels the bullet down the barrel. The recoil from the shot forces the casing to be ejected, and it is usually found on the ground nearby. Every gun leaves a unique etch on the casings it expels, marks that are like a firearm’s fingerprint.
As we’ve come to learn, many decades and wrongful convictions later, even fingerprints aren’t as good as fingerprints. Yet, the mark here is “unique” enough to put a guy in prison for 178 years. The New York Times says so. The Marshall Project approves. It can’t get any more clear than that.
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It’s even better than when the authorities killed Montag in Fahrenheit 451 — since evil gun owners are fungible, any evidence that incarcerates one is good evidence.
Treacherously close to the edge, you are.
“Fungible” means “tasty in mushroom sauce”. The root is fung, as in “fungus”. The Italian for “spaghetti with mushrooms” is “spaghetti con i funghi“.
I knew this was heading south. I just knew it.
From The Marvelous Land of Oz (L. Frank Baum’s first sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz):
This may be going down a rabbit hole, but discussion on this point has been bouncing around the gun blogs for a while, especially dealing with micro stamping.
Some criminals aren’t stupid. A bit of sandpaper and a couple of minutes work on the firing pin and chamber will change the marks on the shell casing. Plus, they will wear gloves when loading the magazines so they won’t leave fingerprints on the brass.
They can pick up fired brass from a range and scatter it at the scene to add some confusion. I can see someone that was miles away from the action getting pulled in to explain why his fired brass was at the scene of the shooting.
And finally, they could use a revolver which doesn’t leave brass behind.
Is the project useful? Maybe, but I can see some problems with it.
You went down that rabbit hole and completely ignored the Marshall Project’s wholesale ignorance of striker-fired handguns?
Yep, because I was addressing brass left at a crime scene. Striker or hammer fired firearms will still leave marks on casings.
Yeah, it doesn’t matter what slaps the firing pin into the primer, so long as it happens.
Solution: Blockchain!
If I was a young lawyer trying to establish a practice, I would call it “Blockchain Law” and just sit back and count the loot.
A good start, but not enough. The kiddie lawyers so like cool firm names, your firm (even if a solo) should be The Blockchain Gang.
If I was trying to pander to youngsters, I might consider Blockchain Crüe. But they have no money, so why bother?
This in particular struck me as mendacious:
Both states cancelled their programs because they failed to solve cases. Maryland at least never solved a single case with their system over the course of 15 years. It would spit out hundreds of matches for each suspect casing. This is in line with California’s experience with a similar system. I find it hard to believe that Urbana could have simply missed this fact as if it had never been widely reported at the time the programs were shut down.
The entire claim is ridiculous, as anyone with even a passing knowledge of firearms should realize. Some guns may leave distinctive marks on cases, but not all do. And those distinctive marks change over time — a little grit in the chamber or on the breech face and you have an entirely different set of marks. And changing parts in the gun — the extractor, the ejector, the barrel, the breech block — will certainly change the markings on the case, as will changing brands of ammo.
This is about as reliable as bite-mark evidence — not at all.
This reminds me of the Backster effect. Backster a CIA polygraph expert in 1966 claimed that plants that had witnessed a murder could pick out the murderer from a line up. The Wall Street Journal found out about this and published an article that put an end to it.
Sic transit bitemarks?
Kurt
I found this quote from Jerry Buting’s book on the Avery case, The Illusion of Justice (p. 329)
“Studies have shown only 21-38 percent of the marks will match up on bullets fired from the very same gun, yet when an analyst like Newhouse compares a bullet and rifle he may declare it a “match” when only 21 percent of the markings on the bullet match the gun. In other words, almost 80 percent of the marks do not have to match.”
Biasotti, A.A., “A statistical study of the individual characteristics of fired bullets” J Forensic Sci 4(1), Pages 34-50. In his cross-examination of Mr. Newhouse, Mr. Buting made specific reference to this paper. From a quick reading of the testimony, I infer that the paper above quoted the 21-38% and found a similar result (Mr. Buting used some form of the word “echo”).
FORMER WRITING-TUTOR says:
PLEASE do not use the over-used, cliche-phrase “abundantly clear”! Writers think they’re strengthening their writing by using phrases like that, but they actually invite the reader to tune out and go to sleep.
I’m sorry to burst your bubble, and I don’t mean to get on a high horse or jump down your throat, but indiscriminate overuse of cliches and stockroom-phrases will make your writing as dull as dishwater; it really gets my goat and makes me sick as a dog, and that’s where I draw the line, when the rubber meets the road. So I’m putting my foot down and talking like a Dutch uncle at this point in time. Take the bull by the horns and think outside the box, when you write! Just my two cents.
A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.