Forensics Journal - Stevenson University 2013 | Page 62

FORENSICS JOURNAL

West. On December 18th and 19th 1993, Dr. West performed two
post-mortem examinations of a 23-month old girl who died from
drowning in a bathtub while under the care of her mother’s boyfriend
(Balko). The Prosecution alleged the boyfriend raped the little girl,
bit her repeatedly, and then drowned her in the bathtub. Dr. West’s
findings focused on bite marks that he said matched the dental profile
mold (a plaster cast of one’s teeth and bite formations) taken from the
mouth of the mother’s boyfriend who voluntarily submitted to the
casting process. The only piece of physical evidence heard by the jury
was how the bite marks identified on the little girl’s face and elbow
matched the dental mold taken from the boyfriend (Balko). The jury
did not, however, know that Dr. West was actually the one responsible
for creating the bite mark indentations during his second examination of her on December 19th, 1993. Substantiated by video footage
shot as required by the Mississippi morgue where both examinations
occurred, the timed footage visually documents Dr. West’s actions
during both the first and second examination. Radley Balko, investigative journalist from Reason Magazine describes the footage of the
second examination:

of expert witnesses, many of whom are accused of building lucrative
consulting practices by routinely lying on the witness stand (Barry &
Ytuarte’, p. 5). The charge most frequently leveled against expert witnesses is that they are hired guns who manipulate the truth to confuse
or mislead jurors (Fisher, p. 6).
Paul Giannelli categorized three common types of misleading expert
testimony that influence criminal trials and contribute to unjust
verdicts (Giannelli, 2011). The first, withholding information at trial,
can be difficult to detect given the challenge of proving one party
possessed inculpatory or exculpatory information and actively concealed it from the opposing side. The highly publicized 2011 murder
trial of Casey Anthony serves as an example: an expert witness for
the prosecution testified that eighty-six Google searches for the word
“chloroform” were performed on Ms. Anthony’s computer before her
child was discovered dead. Just a few days post-testimony, the expert
discovered that the software used to extract the information was faulty
and the correct number of “chloroform” searches performed was one.
He immediately contacted both the prosecution and the police to
alert them of the error in an effort to have his testimony disregarded.
The trial concluded with no acknowledgement of the error to either
the jurors or the defense (Alvarez, 2011).

(Dr. West) repeatedly presses and jams the front bite plate directly
into Oliveaux’s cheek. Over two minutes, he does this 17 times. At
6:57, he starts dragging Duncan’s mold across Oliveaux’s face, beginning near her lips, then scraping the plaster teeth down her face to her
jaw. He does this for another minute. West next moves to Oliveaux’s
elbow and uses the cast to impress Duncan’s dentition onto an old
bruise hospital records show she suffered weeks before her death
(Balko).

Giannelli identifies a second type of misleading testimony as the
failure to correct overstatements (Giannelli, 2011). Overstatements
go beyond the capability of a specific forensic technique and misleads
others into thinking a higher degree of certainty is established. For
decades, conclusive phrases like “100 percent match” or “it could
have only been the suspect’s hair found at the crime scene” were
commonplace in court rooms because the limitations of each forensic discipline were unknown. However, now limitations are widely
understood and accepted allowing for more accurate analysis through
the application of probability statistics.

The video footage of Dr. West manufacturing inculpatory evidence is
a rare event; this type of fraud can be difficult to detect and even more
difficult to prove.
The second type of forensic fraud is the fabrication of test results.
Usually occurring in a crime lab setting, this type of fraud can include
changing results from tests administered or reporting results from
testing that never occurred; the latter is frequently referred to as drylabbing (Pyrek, p. 55). In addition, failure to run proper control tests
required to rule out the possibility that the testing process itself does
not contaminate evidence is another form of fraudulent behavior.
Jacqueline Blake, an FBI biologist who performed tests on DNA from
crime scenes during the period 2000 to 2002 admitted to falsifying
lab documentation by indicating she completed the proper control
tests as required by the lab. Her misconduct went undetected for over
two years until a lab colleague noticed results on Blake’s computer
were incompatible with the proper processing of control samples
(Office of Inspector General, 1997, p. 2).

The final type of misleadi