Blood Spatter Battle of the Experts in Indiana

[John Vanderkolk]

I will be watching the television show 48 Hours, on:

CBS, Saturday, Dec. 9, 9 p.m. ET/PT

Murder On Lockhart Road
A mother and two kids are murdered. There are bizarre clues, 11 eyewitnesses, eight drops of blood and a killer with a foot fetish. Correspondent Richard Schlesinger reports, at a special time, 9 p.m. ET/PT.

Just by the quote from the CBS web page, I am interested in how much they will put into the show and how much they will leave out. This is a case in Indiana in which many blood spatter experts testified. Multiple experts were called by the prosecution and multiple experts were called by the defense. There have been two trials for the husband/father and one trial for a co-defendent. Other evidence included DNA, palm prints, and the co-defendent had a palm-print Daubert hearing before his trial.

I have already asked the prosecutor and most recent investigator in preparation for the 2006 trials to present this case at the Indiana IAI seminar in Evansville, Indiana in October 2007, and then the IAI seminar in Louisville, Kentucky 2008, as the crime happened just north of Louisville in New Albany, Indiana. So remember the show, then come see the prosecutor in Louisville.

[Michele]

This was a great show but I didn’t realize it was 2 hours long and I couldn’t stay awake until the end (even on a Saturday night). I probably missed the best parts.

I did like that the medical examiner didn’t state that she was 100% confident in her conclusions. She stated that her conclusions were the only reasonable conclusion she could come to unless someone could show her another plausible explanation (that isn’t a quote, it’s my interpretation of what she said).

This same philosophy was used with the blood spatter evidence. One expert testified that the only way this sort of blood spatter could happen is from high velocity blood spatter (making it sound absolute), yet another expert showed that these types of marks could have easily been made another way.

Both expert who didn’t state a conclusive conclusion (the ME, and Bart Epstein) weren’t afraid of how this would later be attacked. They made a conclusion and backed it up with logic and testing. Yet the expert who made his conclusion sound absolute ended up being shown he was wrong.

The term ‘leaps of faith’ has been used a lot lately. It seems like respected scientists have faith in their science, their methods, and the research that has been done but they aren’t using faith in their personal abilities, personal thoughts, or other outside details of the case to arrive at their conclusions. I remember a few years ago reading a post where someone said we all had the same goal….to get the bad guy. Watching this show made me realize see that the people I respected the most on the show were the people who didn’t seem to care about the guilt or innocence of the subject, they were objectively looking at the evidence and then telling the courts what ‘science’ could conclude from it (not what ‘they’ would personally conclude from it).