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From: charlie
Date: 2/17/02
Time: 10:29:55 PM
I watched 60 Minutes tonight and they were explaining how another type of "expert" testimony is biting the dust. Pardon the pun.
It is teeth mark expert testimony. They told of the top 28 experts being given this test. They had 4 cases that they had 7 sets of teeth imprints to see if they matched. In the test the FAILURE rate was 63% amongst the 28 so called experts which is AMAZING since these guys have sent untold numbers to prison based in large part on their testimony.
Watching that reminded that just this week I watched one of the cop shows with forensics on the cable stations that are about one case. The part I watched was about hair. They were doing this one case and had to find a "match" if they could. They described it in detail and acknowledged that most people's hair is actually very similiar. That if you have 2 hairs to compare that are of the same color it is extremely difficult. In this case the crime scene hair was unusual in the fact that the suspect had some type of hair condition that caused the hairs under the microscope to show up not solid but like a series of dashes with white areas in between (large). It so happened that the suspects hair was like this too which is not that common a condition. They said the best was that the suspect Could be the match to the hair. All it did was up the percentage that they had the right guy. Not exactly what were were told in 1995 is it?
And this got me to thinking about the hair in the knit cap and the wool or whatever the cap was made of. Some kind of yarn. Well, yarn from experience will "grab" hold of hair, fiber, etc.
Well, in the case of the knit cap in this case, it was either worn as a disguise (the alleged reason) or to protect the killer's hair from blood that Might have been hard to wash out once dried.
Well, I taught enough young black children to know that if you have hair like OJ's, it TOO will grab hold of things like string, lint, fiber, etc. Any person's hair will but more so with a black person's hair. Tell me if I am wrong about this Jasper but that was my experience as I combed it out of many a kid's hair for picture taking and other things.
Well, if true and OJ was in a big hurry (thinking like the cops should have been) it might escape his attention that knit fibers were actually embedded in his hair. And if he washed and brushed his hair at home, these fibers might have been in the shower or the brush.
YET, while "testing" OJ on Monday for fingerprints, blood, etc. nobody checked his hair? What about his brush? Shower? Tub? Sink?
To me, with the fibers being so commonly spread around as the cops claimed, there should have been some in the brush, sink, shower, etc. Or the car for that matter.
Now I know the cap was "planted" but the absence of the knit fibers in evidence in any of these places could have been a PLUS for the defense.
I also noticed on Murder in Spokane that they got a search warrant for the killer by sneaking a few strands of the carpet from the Covette while pretending to want to buy it. They got all excited over it being a match! Say what? I know they got the right guy (a body buried in his yard) but as an actual fact ANY carpet from the same make, model and year and color would have been the SAME.
charlie
From: Jasper
Date: 1/30/02
Time: 4:55:37 PM
Charlie,
The ally where Heidstra heard the "Hey! Hey! Hey!" was not an associative error. It was worse. It was a resource error. I repeated someone else's mistake.
I wasn't sure where Heidstra was at the critical moment so I checked with the closest source, a copy of Clifford Linedecker's O.J. A to Z. That's where I got the bad information. I should have made a crosscheck. I usually do. In the process, I found A LOT of bad information that most people accept as fact.
Anyhow, this is a good example to add to your list of how we can get things wrong when we have thousands of bits of information to sift through. Getting the facts straight is like walking through a minefield. We have to be careful where we step.
One warning about minefield's (and sifting through information in a complex murder case). There are different kinds of minds. Some of them you can step on and be all right. But if you run, you'll set them off. Speed kills. --Jasper