Do Bullets Tell Tales?

US News & World Reports ^ | 11/24/03 | Nell Boyce

[bc2]

Do bullets tell tales?

By Nell Boyce

The ballistics expert left no room for doubt. Testifying November 6 in the trial of accused sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad, he asserted that bullets from victims' bodies matched the rifle found in Muhammad's Chevrolet Caprice "to the exclusion of all other firearms." But the same day, in a Baltimore courtroom, ballistics itself was on trial. There, a federal judge agreed to examine the scientific foundations of bullet matching before deciding whether an expert's assertion of a "match" could be admitted in an upcoming murder trial.

That hearing is just the most recent challenge to bullet "fingerprinting." Forensic science looks little short of miraculous on television shows like CSI, but in the real world, old-time techniques like fingerprint and handwriting analysis have come under fire from critics who say they don't meet the same scientific standards as newer tools like DNA tests. Now, defense lawyers and scientists are leveling the same charge at two mainstays of bullet matching: lead analysis, which links bullets based on chemical traces in the metal, and ballistics, which relies on the distinctive marks that a gun leaves on a bullet. Critics say a bullet lead match can mean little, while claims of a ballistics match often boil down to "I know it when I see it."

Jacqueline Behn, whose brother, Michael, is now in a New Jersey prison, says she's waiting with "bated breath" for a report on lead matching, due out any day now from the National Academy of Sciences. Six years ago, Michael was convicted of murder largely because a box of cartridges he owned had the same chemical fingerprint as bullets found at the murder scene. Experts have testified at hundreds of trials that bullets with matching lead profiles must have been made from the same batch of metal--and thus could have had the same purchaser.

But Behn enlisted outside scientists to look at the technique. They found that batches of lead actually aren't necessarily unique, raising the chance of a random match. These days, researchers like statistician Alicia Carriquiry of Iowa State University say that it's "reckless" to give much weight to a lead match. The technique may soon get an official no-confidence vote: One insider says the upcoming NAS report should put an end to "business as usual" for lead matching.

Ballistics evidence like that introduced in the sniper trial--based on the marks and grooves on bullets and casings--faces a different kind of challenge. Here, the question is: What makes a match?

Bar code. Spent cartridge cases bear impressions from gun parts like the firing pin, and bullets flying down a gun barrel pick up long scratches that look like a bar code. These marks can reveal the gun model, and experts say that the subtlest of them often amount to a "fingerprint" unique to a single gun. When examiners see "sufficient agreement" between cartridges or bullets from the crime scene and ones test-fired from a suspect's gun, they declare a match. For comparison, they also look at "known nonmatches," ammunition fired from other, similar guns.

But what's "sufficient" is often just an examiner's opinion, skeptics say. Deciding which microscopic marks really matter is no mean feat. Nicks and imperfections on gun-making tools can leave the same impressions on multiple guns. The flaws on gun components--and the marks they leave on bullets--can change over time. And proficiency tests show that examiners do make errors; one study of tests from 1978 to 1991 found an error rate of 12 percent. The test-takers almost always erred by saying "inconclusive" instead of the correct answer, and false matches were rare. But examiners know when they're taking a test for a grade. In the real world, they may more readily declare a "match" in a borderline case.

Joan Griffin, a Boston defense attorney with an engineering background, recently questioned the science of ballistics in a retrial of a man previously convicted of shooting at a policeman. The jury acquitted, with one juror later saying the ballistics "match" didn't seem convincing. Other lawyers have followed Griffin's lead. At the hearing in Baltimore, defense attorney Carroll McCabe grilled firearms examiner Karen Lipski about how she had linked two sets of spent casings--one from an incident in which McCabe's client pleaded guilty to firing a gun and the other from a murder scene. In neither case did police recover a gun for firing test bullets.

Lipski said her conclusion was based on "a lot of experience and knowing what you're looking at." She took no photos of the marks and, when asked repeatedly to quantify the correlation needed for a match, replied that McCabe should stop focusing on "the number thing."

Scrambling. That type of testimony is all too common, says Bruce Moran, a firearms examiner with the Sacramento County district attorney's office in California. Now that lawyers have started asking hard questions about the technique's scientific validity, says Moran, "we're all basically caught with our pants down, to tell you the truth. We're all scrambling to address these issues."

Moran sees a place to start. Based on studies of spent bullets from many different guns, firearms experts recently proposed a standard criterion for declaring a match, based on a minimum number of consecutive matching lines left by flaws in the gun barrel. Moran and some other experts are pressing for their colleagues to adopt this universal standard and use it in court, backing up all claims with photographs.

But no such criterion exists for cartridge cases. And even for bullets, experts currently can't determine the chances of a random match--standard practice in forensic DNA analysis. When DNA matching emerged in the 1980s, scientists studied DNA in the general population to quantify the chances of a random match. While often very low, the risk is never zero, so the jury is always told the numerical odds.

Ballistics could someday have that kind of statistical sophistication, says Benjamin Bachrach of Intelligent Automation, who has federal funding to study the uniqueness of the markings guns leave. His company has developed technology that scans a bullet to render a 3-D profile of all the grooves and marks. A computer can then compare bullet scans and calculate the degree of difference. Bachrach says his preliminary work confirms that guns often do create distinctive marks. "The examination of firearms evidence is not a hoax."

Still, "as with everything in life, there's no yes-or-no answer. There's a statistical answer," Bachrach says. When his computer system compares two bullets and comes to a conclusion, "it's not an opinion; it's a number."

[bc2]

I hope this wasn't posted before. I searched and found nothing. More on the waste that is CoBIS.

Here are the stats for New York State:

Total guns registered in NY as of 11/1/03 = 57,006

Number of guns linked to a crime = 0

Money Spent = $11,000,000

Yes, that is $11 MILLION dollars with ZERO guns matched to a crime. In the entire State of New York.

[bc2]

do your ping thing, please!

[bc2]

bang

[blau993]

The Maryland State Police Crime Lab has, according to the Baltimore Sun, recently issued a 40 page report that concludes the Maryland "ballistic fingerprint" data base is sufficiently useless that it should not be expanded. No government bureaucrat is physically capable of saying a program should be eliminated, but this comes pretty close. I would like to read this report, but, so far as I can tell, it is being very closely held.

The article, which I believe has been posted on FR, said there have been four queries to the data base that have resulted in matches, but in each instance the police already had possession of the gun. The data base has yet to solve any crimes.

[coloradan]

The article neglects to mention that the same gun firing different cartriges from different manufacturers don't match, that the bullets a few hundred rounds apart from cartridges from the same manufacturer don't match because of the wear on the barrel from the hundreds of rounds, and that the same bullets from the same manufacturer fired adjacently don't match if the firing pin, extractor, ejector, chamber, and barrel have been replaced or intentionally abraded.

[bc2]

RKBA activists here in NY and MD are working together to get our States to get rid of this crappy and wasteful program.

regards,

[coloradan]

Incidentally, with respect the DC sniper case and ballistic "fingerprinting" (snapshot), the police already had ballistic evidence from the crime gun, namely, from murders in AL (?) committed about a year before the sniper killings. However, even though those bullets had been "printed" and were located in a much smaller database than a full, national one, the police were unable to use it as a means to solving the crime.

[Shooter 2.5]

Ah, yes, it's starting already.

No matter what the govenment will do to prove the accused guilty, there will always be those who mistrust the government so much, they will be convinced the two are innocent.

[B4Ranch]

WE NEED YOUR HELP! Please call your Rep TODAY

Legion Opposes OMB on VA Funding

WASHINGTON, November 14, 2003  -  The morning after President George W. Bush delivered his Veterans Day message at Arlington National Cemetery, the administration’s Office of Management and Budget – in writing – opposed an additional $1.3 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs health care budget and reiterated its call to charge many veterans seeking treatment at VA a $250 annual enrollment fee and to raise the pharmacy co-payment from $7 to $15.

“A veteran is a veteran,” American Legion National Commander John Brieden said. “The law was changed in the ‘90s to allow all veterans to seek treatment at VA. Although OMB is willing to wield the budget to repel veterans from seeking treatment at VA, the men and women of The American Legion as well as Republicans and Democrats in Congress remain determined not to let that happen.”

Brieden made the Legion’s case to Congress perfectly clear Sept. 16 when he testified here before a joint hearing session of House and Senate committees on Veterans’ Affairs. Simply put: Health care for veterans is the delayed cost of war. Therefore, if Congress can meet the president’s request for an additional $87 billion to fund the ongoing war in Iraq, then Congress also can raise an additional $1.8 billion next year, and a $3 billion increase the following year, to meet the health care needs of veterans.

A blueprint passed by the House in April called for a Legion-backed $27.1 billion for the system, but in July the House approved an appropriations bill that called for $25.3 billion. Therein lies the $1.8 billion spending gap that the Legion, the nation’s largest veterans organization, is fighting alongside other veterans groups to close. As the spending bill for VA-HUD and Independent Agencies makes its way through the Senate, an amendment offered by Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri -- an amendment that has bipartisan support -- could fill the chasm by $1.5 billion. Congress is also poised to remove the Senate Appropriations Committee’s “emergency” designation from $1.3 billion targeted for VA health care, and to send the entire increase directly to VA.

How badly does VA need the money? The American Legion’s “I Am Not A Number” survey in May identified scores of the more than 200,000 veterans who had been waiting from six months to two years for their initial primary-care appointments at VA. Recent news media accounts noted veterans of the ongoing war on terror also having trouble accessing the system. Although VA reports tremendous recent success in whittling down the backlog, about 164,000 veterans in the lowest of VA’s eight priority-treatment groups have been suspended from enrolling in the VA health care system since January because VA lacks the resources to serve all of the veterans who are lawfully eligible for treatment.

The American Legion is fighting to switch the VA health care budget from discretionary funding, which Congress must approve each fiscal year, to mandatory funding, just like Social Security and Medicare, whereby federal dollars are allocated by a formula to meet the system’s demands. The nation’s largest veterans organization also wants to end the restriction that keeps veterans from using their Medicare benefits to pay for treatment at VA.

Read the entire Statement of Administration Policy:

Download Statement (PDF file)

--30--

For Media: Steve Thomas, 202/263-2982; Pager 800/759-8888, PIN 115-8679; Joe March, (317) 630-1253; Pager 317/382-7745

[blau993]

The Maryland data base was useless in the sniper investigation because it only contains rounds from handguns legitimately purchased in Maryland. This predictably led to calls by politicians to expand the data base, but the dismal results achieved to date, plus the fundamental conceptual flaws, make it clear this would be a waste of money.

[Joe Brower]

[Blood of Tyrants]

The rifle that was supposedly used to shoot MLK was retested a few years ago. The rifle was practically new and had been fired very few times before Ray used it to shoot King and very few time in the lab.

The tests on this nearly new rifle came back "inconclusive", i.e. the rifle could neither be confirmed or ruled out as the murder weapon.

[from occupied ga]

Yes, that is $11 MILLION dollars with ZERO guns matched to a crime. In the entire State of New York.

Yes, but to the government the program is a smashing success.

1. The taxpayers were bilked of $11,000,000 and the money transferred to state employees.
2. The gun owners of NY were forced to have another barrier added to gun ownership

By government standards a perfect program.

[Puppage]

But it FEELS good. And, isn't it for the children?

[Cobra64]

That's one of the reasons why I moved to NC. After a friendly conversation with a friend of mine. discussing my (unregistered) handgun collection that I acquired over the last 30 years in CO, who was a Sargeant on the local police force in upstate NY told me that I better keep my mouth shut or he'd have to arrest me. He was pretty series.

[neverdem]

Thanks for the article and comment.

[George Smiley]

“The law was changed in the ‘90s to allow all veterans to seek treatment at VA. - - - because the number of veterans with service-connected disabilities [the original purpose of the VA system, remember?] was decreasing rapidly because of death rates among World War I, World War II and Korean War veterans that the justification for the entire system was in jeopardy.

The agency was facing the possibility of having to shut down a large percentage of its facilities (anathema to any organization governmental) if its patient population continued to shrink.

Mission creep.

Just like the March of Dimes shifted its objective from polio to birth defects after polio was virtually eradicated, and the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis (the "Christmas Seals" folks) shifted their mission to lung disease for the same reason.

Frankly, I've seen both sides of the coin and given the choice between health care run by private enterprise or health care run by the government, I'd run screaming from the latter to the former.

[B4Ranch]

As long as there is NO cost whatsoever to the Vets, I'll strongly agree with you.

[sonofatpatcher2]

Did Arland Spector tell the jury that all the victims were killed by one bullet?

[cruiserman]

Why is it that on every L&O show, the suspect is found by linking his registered gun? Does Hollywood really believe criminals register their guns?