D.C. Appeals Court Rules Exclusion of Fingerprint Expert Merits New Trial

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals reversed (PDF) a gun possession conviction Thursday morning, finding that the trial judge made a mistake in barring testimony from the defendant's fingerprint analysis expert.

A jury convicted Michael Smith of carrying a pistol without a license in Feb. 2009. Smith argued on appeal that District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Gregory Jackson violated his Sixth Amendment right to present a defense by refusing to allow his expert to take the stand and call into question how police handled evidence.

Police arrested Smith in 2008 after responding to a call for “a six foot tall black male with a gun, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt,” according to the opinion. One officer reported seeing Smith, who matched the description, holding or sitting on a bicycle. Smith dropped the bicycle and began to walk away as the officers approached, but he was eventually arrested after officers found a gun inside a pouch underneath the bicycle seat.

As Smith was taken away, one officer rode the bicycle in question for processing at a nearby station. The forensic scientist at the station found one fingerprint on the gun using an ultraviolet blue powder, but couldn’t process the bike because the officer had contaminated it by riding it to the station.

The fingerprint was deemed unusable. At trial, the forensic scientist testified that while police guidelines dictated that she use another type of fingerprint extraction, known as the Superglue fuming method, she used the powder because she preferred it. She also testified that only between five and ten percent of fingerprints recovered from guns are usable.

Smith’s attorney asked to call his own fingerprint analysis expert to talk about why the Superglue fuming method was more effective than powder at retrieving fingerprints; the expert would have testified that close to 50 percent of fingerprints are recovered using the Superglue method.

Although fingerprints were only part of the case, Smith's attorney argued that the expert’s testimony would have gone to a broader defense theory that the investigation was inadequate and that the jury should have more reason to doubt the government’s case, which Smith’s attorney had said was already thin.

The trial judge sided with prosecutors, excluding the expert’s testimony because the fingerprint in question was already unusable and the testimony wouldn’t address facts that were in dispute in the case.

In a unanimous decision, the three-judge appellate panel – Judge Stephen Glickman, Judge Inez Smith Reid and Senior Judge Frank Schwelb – sided with Smith, reversing the conviction and ordering a new trial. By relying on the fact that the fingerprint was already unusable, they wrote, “the trial court apparently inadvertently missed the essence of defense counsel’s argument” that the Superglue dispute pointed to deeper problems with the police investigation.

Schwelb wrote in a concurring opinion that he found “this case considerably more difficult than my colleagues do,” writing that he didn’t see how the expert’s testimony would be relevant to Smith’s guilt or innocence. But because the prosecution was allowed to introduce testimony on the fingerprint evidence, he wrote, the defendant should have had a right to present his own expert.

The U.S. attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case, declined to comment through a spokesman. A representative for the Public Defender Service, which represented Smith, could not immediately be reached.

Comments

[Mark Schamel]

How do we know that the defendant is a "dead-eyed soulless killer and lifelong burden on society" from this article or from this case? That type of ignorance is what leads to bad police work (which this apparently was), bad prosecutions (which this became) and bad convictions (which this was before being overturned). Hoorah for the Constitution and for the court for upholding it.

[ColorBlindJustice]

Three cheers for the appellate panel! Now we productive, taxpaying residents of the District are at risk of harm by yet another dead-eyed soulless killer and lifelong burden to society who's been freed on a technicality.