CLPEX Chat Board

I think that it's very interesting that if you scroll down to the previous week's cases that you see a hearing involving the Judicial Conduct Committee and Judge Patricia Coffee.

Lisa,
Thank you for the link. There are so many good resources out there that individually we often don't know about unless someone shares.

Please keep us posted on the court's decision.
Regards, RLT

We just viewed this video (thanks for the link!) and were wondering if anyone has access to the notes and/or the report involved in this case? Barring that, perhaps the notes/report from another case by the same agency/examiner so we can see what the judges were talking about? At least for me, I think I may be misunderstanding some things based on comments made by one of the justices in this video.

Many thanks for any help on this!

Sandra Wiese

Sandy,

Since this still may go to trial (still an open case) I don't think they can give you that but you can read the original judges decision. That gives you a little more information. You'll find this at the bottom of Detail 285.

Details 285 and 296 both give you more information about this case.

Thanks, Michele. I totally understand that, which is why I asked for a similar case notes/report. They must have an old one in the same format that would be publishable.

One of the judges was mentioning not seeing information in the exhibits/notes presented that are specific as to fingers examined, specific lifts examined, etc. This I thought was rather odd as I would presume that information is standard in any report. So I wanted to see what this agency normally puts in their reports as this might go a long way to helping the rest of us (namely ME) understand all the brouhaha.

I wouldn't assume too much about the documentation from the justices' comments. One frankly had not reviewed the exhibits, and I suspect there wasn't a lot of attention paid to them by the panel since they are clearly concerned exclusively with the distinction between the judge's territory of rulings of law and the jury's reserve of factual findings of credibility. And because their decisions will address this distinction, there was apparently no great effort to educate them on technical matters. They would not, therefore, have read the transcript of the LPE testimony, since they will address judicial roles, not reliability issues.

Of course, latent print examination gets a lot of legal attention, since it's vastly more commonly featured in cases than other comparative disciplines, but I thought it was positive that one justice seemed to argue that latent comparison should not be held to a higher standard than other expert technical evidence.

Not "assuming" is why we wanted to see what an actual report by the agency looks like. Perhaps, based on the personal emails I am getting from this post, I am not making myself understood? We have read the original decision and now this argument before their Supremes. If this were an argument about the prints, I would want to see the actual prints. Since this originally was an argument about the documentation and SOP's, then naturally I would like to see them. I don't think this is really a left field request to want to have all the information.

Sandra

Gerald Clough wrote:One frankly had not reviewed the exhibits, and I suspect there wasn't a lot of attention paid to them by the panel since they are clearly concerned exclusively with the distinction between the judge's territory of rulings of law and the jury's reserve of factual findings of credibility. And because their decisions will address this distinction, there was apparently no great effort to educate them on technical matters. They would not, therefore, have read the transcript of the LPE testimony, since they will address judicial roles, not reliability issues.

At an oral argument, it is normal for the judges to have only read the briefs and appendices to them. The implicit assumption is that everything important to their decision is in the briefs. After the argument, the judges likely had a conference and discussed the issues at a general level. One judge was then picked to write the opinion. He or she will read the whole records (all the transcripts, exhibits, court papers, etc.) and do independent legal research on the issues. He or she will likely read any scientific articles cited by the parties, but is less likely to do independent research of the non-legal issues. Then that judge will circulate a draft opinion, which will be read and (hopefully) approved by the other judges. After all of that, it will be published and we'll know the result.

So, to make a long story short -- the judges may not have read everything for oral argument, but everything will have been read before the decision is published.

To answer Sandra W.'s question about the prints themselves, it depends on what was made an exhibit. In Mass' Patterson case, neither attorney made the prints an exhibit at the motion hearing -- it was all about the admissibility of testimony about allegedly simultaneous impressions -- so the appellate court never saw the prints. If the prints and reports were included in the briefs, they are public records and should be able to be distributed to you or to the list.

The question from the Court's PoV is a procedural one. Did the trial judge make the right legal decision regarding admissibility based on the exhibit and the testimony. The factual decision -- do the prints indeed match, is somewhat outside that question.

Not an image nor the text of the documentation, but a description of what was documented. Page two.

http://www.moiai.org/documents/LangillDecision.pdf

"...the IDU Affidavit highlighted the information that actually was contemporaneously noted in the Langill case file. Criminalist Corson recorded contemporaneous bench notes with regards to: date, submitting agency, chain-of-custody, packaging integrity, package markings, seal integrity, package contents, class characteristics of the friction ridge detail (Level 1, ridge flow and anatomical designation), whether the impression contained sufficient quality and quantity of information (Levels 2 and 3), the orientation of the friction ridge detail, the steps of digital processing (enhancement done in Adobe Photoshop), comparison subject’s name, subject’s date-of-birth, finger number, copies of all known impressions used for comparison, verifying examiner and verification date. Additionally, the actual application of the ACE-V methodology on the impressions in the case was also noted in the case file."

Thank you, Gerald, that is the type of information we were looking for.

-Sandra