Oklahoma Inquiry Focuses on Scientist Used by Prosecutors
By JIM YARDLEY
| In its paper edition, the NY Times listed the names of 13 inmates on death row in Oklahoma, and 12 already executed, whose cases involved testimony from Joyce Gilchrist. Marilyn Plantz, whose trial included the chemist's testimony, was scheduled to be executed on May 1, 2001, but her execution was delayed. There may well, of course, have been other strong evidence of the guilt of these men and women. |
OKLAHOMA CITY, May 1
—
Her testimony cut through the
fog of doubt with the hard clarity
of science. From 1980 to 1993,
Joyce Gilchrist was involved in
roughly 3,000 cases as an
Oklahoma City police laboratory
scientist, often helping prosecutors
win convictions by identifying
suspects with hair, blood or carpet
fibers taken from crime scenes.
But Ms. Gilchrist is now the
subject of an investigation ordered
this week by Gov. Frank Keating
to re- examine all of her felony
cases after her credibility was
bluntly denounced by a Federal
Bureau of Investigation report that
found she had misidentified
evidence or given improper
courtroom testimony in at least
five of eight cases the agency
reviewed.
The suddenness and broad scope
of the investigation has stunned
many people here, but Ms.
Gilchrist's work has been
criticized for years by judges,
lawyers, colleagues and
professional organizations. Her
own lawyer predicted that she
would be vindicated in the current
investigation.
The case that helped prompt the
investigation involved a man
convicted of rape 16 years ago
after Ms. Gilchrist linked him to
the crime through hair evidence.
But recent DNA testing determined
that semen taken from the crime
scene did not match the man,
Jeffrey Pierce. And the F.B.I.
report contradicted Ms. Gilchrist's
findings on the hairs, determining
that they did not match Mr. Pierce.
Officials say Mr. Pierce could
soon be released.
The immediate focus of the state
investigation centers on the 23
capital trials in which her
testimony helped win convictions. Ten of those inmates have
already been executed; an 11th, Marilyn Plantz, was put to death
this evening for her role in the murder-for-hire killing of her
husband. The other 12 inmates remain on death row.
Mr. Keating's spokesman, Dan Mahoney, said that Ms. Plantz
accepted responsibility for her crime at her clemency hearing
and that her execution would be carried out because the
evidence against her was overwhelming. Mr. Mahoney said
initial assessments of the 11 executed inmates linked to Ms.
Gilchrist also suggested that the evidence against them was also
overwhelming, regardless of her testimony.
"The governor remains comfortable that no innocent person has
been executed," Mr. Mahoney said. "But, of course, it is worth a
review."
Attorney General Drew Edmondson, whose office began
reviewing the capital cases last week, echoed Mr. Mahoney's
confidence, with one exception. He said he still wanted to
review the case of Malcolm Rent Johnson, who was executed in
January 2000 for murdering a woman. He did not offer any
reason to believe that Mr. Johnson was wrongly executed but
said he simply wanted to more thoroughly examine the case.
Mr. Edmondson also said he would not set an execution date for
any of the 12 death row inmates against whom Ms. Gilchrist
testified until her role was reviewed.
"We should all be concerned," Mr. Edmondson said. "It's
obviously a serious situation." He also noted that the Oklahoma
City district attorney's office, the local police department and
his own office shared some responsibility for the situation. "I
think there is enough blame to go around."
The state investigation, which is being conducted by the
Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, could potentially result
in criminal charges against Ms. Gilchrist. The F.B.I. is also
conducting a separate investigation. Ms. Gilchrist has had a
supervisory position since 1994 and has not done laboratory
work since then. She was placed on administrative leave in
March because of the accusations. All of the cases under
review are in Oklahoma.
James Bednar, executive director of the Oklahoma Indigent
Defense System, said there was no basis "at this point" to
believe that anyone had been wrongfully executed because of
her testimony. But he said that the investigation was long
overdue and that it reflected systemic problems in the Oklahoma
criminal justice system.
"For 25 years, people have been testifying with a degree of
certainty that did not exist," Mr. Bednar said. "Ms. Gilchrist
touched 3,000 cases. This is a mammoth deal. We may find 200
in which we feel her testing made the difference. Who knows?
It's going to be very expensive, time consuming and laborious."
Ms. Gilchrist was hired by the Oklahoma City Police
Department in 1980 as a crime laboratory chemist and had
undergone training at the F.B.I. academy in Quantico, Va., as
well as the Serological Research Institute in Emeryville, Calif.
Ms. Gilchrist's lawyer, Melvin Hall, said his client declined to
comment but "stands behind her work and in the end she'll be
totally vindicated."
She has faced controversy for years. In 1987, John T. Wilson,
the chief forensic scientist at the regional crime laboratory in
Kansas City, Mo., complained about her to a professional
organization, the Southwestern Association of Forensic
Scientists. Mr. Wilson had offered conflicting testimony in at
least one of Mr. Gilchrist's cases.
He said that in four criminal trials, Ms. Gilchrist had given
scientific opinions "not justified by the results of examination"
and that her testimony "in effect, positively identifies the
defendant based on the slightest bit of circumstantial evidence."
Ultimately, the association warned Ms. Gilchrist to "distinguish
personal opinion from opinions based upon facts derived from
scientific evidence," but declined to formally censure her or
discipline her in any way.
Another professional association, the Association of Crime
Scene Reconstruction, expelled her for unethical behavior,
according to an internal police memorandum disclosed today to
local news organizations.
Ms. Gilchrist's work has also brought criticism from state and
federal judges. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals
overturned the murder conviction of Curtis Edward McCarty,
partly because they said Ms. Gilchrist testified beyond her
expertise and delayed giving her reports to defense lawyers.
Mr. McCarty, who has since been tried two more times, is on
death row for the 1982 murder of Pam Willis.
In 1999, Judge Ralph G. Thompson of Federal District Court in
Oklahoma City ruled that Ms. Gilchrist had given testimony
about hair and fluid evidence in the case of Alfred Brian
Mitchell that "was terribly misleading, if not false." While
Judge Thompson upheld Mr. Mitchell's murder conviction in the
death of Elaine Scott, he overturned a rape conviction.
"She has always been identified as a problem," said Barry
Scheck, co- director of the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N.
Cardozo School of Law in New York. "She had been criticized
by her peers. It's a real failure of oversight by the district
attorney's office."
Mr. Scheck also cited the case of Robert Miller, who was
sentenced to death in 1988 for murder after Ms. Gilchrist
testified that hairs found at the crime scene were consistent with
hairs taken from his body. However, later DNA analysis of
seminal fluid determined that Mr. Miller was the wrong man.
Another suspect, Ronnie Lott, whom Ms. Gilchrist had excluded
as a possible hair donor in the original case, was identified
using DNA and indicted for the crime. Mr. Miller was
ultimately released.
The Oklahoma County District Attorney's Office failed to return
two telephone calls seeking comment. On Monday, a longtime
district attorney, Bob Macy, who has put 54 inmates on death
row, the most of any active prosecutor in the nation, announced
that he would resign on June 30. He cited a desire to spend
more time with his family and said his decision was not related
to the Gilchrist investigation.
Capt. Charles Allen of the Oklahoma City police offered little
comment on what he described as "a personnel matter."
Mr. Bednar, the director of the state indigent defense program,
said that late last year lawyers representing Mr. Pierce, the man
convicted in the rape case, requested DNA testing under the
state's recently approved DNA law. The testing determined that
fluids found at the crime scene matched another man.
With those results, Chief M. T. Berry of the Oklahoma City
police asked the F.B.I. to review a sample of Ms. Gilchrist's
work. The F.B.I. memo, which was first reported by The Daily
Oklahoman, found that Ms. Gilchrist's laboratory notes "were
often incomplete or inadequate to support the conclusions" that
she reached. The report also studied physical evidence in five
of her cases including Mr. Pierce's and found that "all five
cases reviewed had either errors in identification or
interpretation."
An internal police memorandum leaked to the local media this
week also painted an unflattering picture of Ms. Gilchrist. The
memorandum, written in January by the captain now overseeing
the crime laboratory, said Ms. Gilchrist had been sloppy and
wasteful in trying to establish a DNA testing center within the
department. The memo also said Ms. Gilchrist had allowed
evidence to be damaged or lost, even in cases in which new
trials had been granted or were under review by the attorney
general's office.
|
|
|
| Joyce Gilchrist, an Oklahoma City police laboratory scientist, is the subject of a criminal investigation into her work on 3,000 cases | Bob Macy, a longtime Oklahoma City district attorney, announced that he would resign on June 30, but said it was not related to the inquiry | Jeff Peirce with his aunt and sister-in law, after being freed from 15 years in prison. |
-----------------------
May 8, 2001 NYT
Forensic Expert Under Scrutiny as DNA Test Frees 'Rapist'
By JIM YARDLEY
OKLAHOMA CITY, May 7
—
When Jeffrey Pierce was
convicted of rape in 1986, he lost
his freedom and his family. He and
his wife decided to divorce and
she left Oklahoma to raise their
twin infant sons as if he did not
exist. To survive in prison, he
learned to do two things — to
mind his own business and to lift
weights.
But today, after maintaining his
innocence throughout the 15 years
he spent behind bars, Mr. Pierce,
39, was freed because DNA
testing refuted the crucial
testimony against him from an
Oklahoma City police chemist
long accused of shoddy work and
now the focus of one of the most
wide-ranging investigations into a
police laboratory.
"The citizens of Oklahoma County
have been duped," Mr. Pierce said
outside Joseph Harp Correctional
Center in Lexington, Okla., today
after a state judge, Susan P.
Caswell, vacated his conviction
and 65-year sentence. "The juries
have been lied to for the last 20
years. There are going to be a lot
more victims."
This afternoon, Mr. Pierce left the
prison with his mother and his
brother, Gary, who fought for
years to overturn the conviction.
He will soon meet the two sons,
now 15, whom he has only seen
through photographs since they
were infants.
Mr. Pierce had been a landscaper
who happened to be working near
the scene of the rape. The DNA
test results that cleared Mr. Pierce,
as well as a separate review of his
case by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, set in motion the
larger inquiry into the chemist,
Joyce Gilchrist. Last week, the federal Justice Department
began an investigation while Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma
ordered a review into every felony conviction linked to Ms.
Gilchrist to make certain that no one else has been wrongly
convicted.
Among those hundreds of cases are 11 in which the defendant
was executed and 12 in which the defendant is on death row.
Mr. Keating has expressed confidence that no innocent person
has been executed.
The investigations into Ms. Gilchrist, who analyzed forensic
evidence like blood, hair, semen and fibers from 1980 until she
was promoted in 1994 to a supervisory position, come as other
police laboratory scientists are under scrutiny in Illinois, West
Virginia and Florida. But the scope of the investigation into Ms.
Gilchrist could be unparalleled.
"The truth is finally being known," said Mr. Pierce's lawyer,
David Autry. "Nobody has listened to us for 15 years, and now
science has advanced enough to prove what we've known all
along: that Jeff Pierce is innocent."
The case dates to May 8, 1985, when a woman was raped and
assaulted inside her apartment by a man she described as having
blond hair. Mr. Pierce, who has blond hair, was doing
landscaping work in the complex and a police officer initially
pointed him out to the victim from a short distance. The woman
had only had glances of her attacker, but she told the officer that
Mr. Pierce was not the rapist. But 10 months later, she
identified him in a photo lineup. He had had no prior criminal
record, his brother said, other than a disorderly conduct arrest
in his youth.
Ms. Gilchrist, who has declined to comment about the
continuing investigations, provided the critical evidence to
bolster that questionable identification. She testified in court
that she had collected scalp hairs, pubic hairs and semen
samples from inside the apartment and, after analyzing them
under a microscope, had matched them to Mr. Pierce.
Mr. Pierce's lawyers argued from the outset that Ms. Gilchrist
had overstated the certainty with which hair comparisons could
be used to identify a single person. Also, she violated a court
order by failing to forward any of the hair evidence to a private
laboratory hired by the defense, meaning that the defense could
not fully analyze her work before trial. The evidence she did
send leaked out of the package and could not be analyzed,
defense lawyers said. The state appeals court said her action
"absolutely violated the terms of a court order" but nonetheless
upheld the conviction, saying Ms. Gilchrist's failure to turn over
the evidence was not enough to overturn the conviction.
The Pierce trial came not long before Ms. Gilchrist's work
began coming under criticism from her peers, defense lawyers
and judges. She was reprimanded by one professional
organization and expelled from another. Despite the criticism,
the local police and prosecutors never scrutinized her work.
For Mr. Pierce, the conviction collapsed the framework of his
life. He and his wife, now Kathy Wahl, had recently had twin
sons, but after a few painful prison visits, the couple decided to
divorce. Ms. Wahl's birthday was the same day that the rape
occurred, and Mr. Pierce bought her diamond earrings on a
shopping trip that day with two co-workers. This was his alibi
in the trial, but the jury was not swayed.
Ms. Wahl, who sold the earrings to help pay for her move to
Michigan and once survived on welfare, remarried but then
divorced again seven years ago. She works two jobs and said
her twin sons seemed to know not to ask about their father. They
were never told that he was in prison.
"I just told the boys, `Don't ever let anyone ever tell you that you
don't have a dad,' " she said in a telephone interview today. "He
loves you just as much as I do, but he can't see you right now."
As for the mutual decision to divorce, she added, "Jeff and I
have beautiful kids, and I know that Jeff would not have wanted
them to see their dad in a prison environment."
Mr. Pierce's brother, Gary, became his primary link to the
outside world. He occasionally brought pictures of the twins
sent by their grandmother from Florida. In October 1987, he
mailed a three-page, typed letter to news organizations
nationwide detailing his brother's case and pleading for help.
"I have a very strong feeling that this is not the first time, nor
will it be the last, that Joyce Gilchrist helps to put an innocent
man in jail or even worse, to death," he wrote. He did not get a
single response.
Inside the state prison that had now become his home, Mr.
Pierce met an inmate who gave him plain advice on how to
survive in a world inhabited by convicted killers: get strong and
keep to yourself. He went to the weight room. "He has told me
stories about a guy who got stabbed, a guy who got gang raped,
a guy who died in the cell," Gary Pierce said.
The key break in the case came late last year when, under a new
state law, the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System won approval
to submit the forensic evidence in the case for independent
DNA testing, something Mr. Pierce's lawyers had sought for
years.
Last month, the preliminary results showed that the DNA taken
from the rapist's hair did not match Mr. Pierce. In addition, an
F.B.I. analysis of the hair samples contradicted Ms. Gilchrist's
original hair testimony. In March, Ms. Gilchrist was placed on
administrative leave.
Gary Pierce, who has attributed his brother's troubles not only
to Ms. Gilchrist but to the office of the Oklahoma County
district attorney, Robert H. Macy, said he hoped the entire
criminal justice system in Oklahoma City was scrutinized as a
result of the new evidence. Officials in Mr. Macy's office have
denied accusations that they encouraged Ms. Gilchrist to
sharpen her testimony to win convictions.
"Everybody
asks me, `Why did they keep her?' " Gary Pierce
said. "She got convictions. They didn't care about the methods
she used."
Note: This is an example of what can go wrong with consequentialist ethics: as long as it "works" by getting convictions, it is o.k. In this case, the result was a wrongful conviction, but the police and prosecutors apparently believe Pierce was guilty so any tactics they used to convict him were justified. The best way to prevent this is to present only valid evidence, even if this means that some individuals you believe to be guilty are not convicted. TG
Though plans are not complete, Ms. Wahl said her sons would
meet their father later this week. Three weeks ago, after she
learned that the preliminary DNA report had pointed to Mr.
Pierce's innocence, she told her sons about their father.
Everyone is now nervous but excited about the meeting, she
said. "They are excited but sad to think this could have
happened to Jeff and them," she said. "They've been robbed for
15 years of a wonderful person."
-----------------------------------------
NYT Oped May 11, 2001
Junk Science, Junk Evidence
By BARRY SCHECK and PETER NEUFELD
For much of the 20th
century, prosecutors served up the
forensic scientist as a source of certainty amid fleeting
glimpses, shaky memories and disputed confessions. Or so it
seemed.
This week, Jeffrey Pierce was released from an Oklahoma
prison after DNA tests proved that he had served 15 years for a
rape he did not commit. The case against him had been cinched
by Joyce Gilchrist, a supervisor in the Oklahoma City police
laboratory, who said that samples of Pierce's hair matched
those collected at the crime scene.
In Texas, Michael Blair was sentenced to die for murdering a
little girl in 1993 — incriminated, prosecution experts said, by
hairs found in his car and near the child's body. In March, a new
technique for extracting mitochondrial DNA directly from the
shafts of hair proved the hairs did not come from Mr. Blair or
the girl. If we care about justice, money has to be found to do
such tests everywhere.
Conventional hair analysis, based on looking at one strand of
hair under a microscope and comparing it to another, is
subjective junk science. Hair experts have never been able to
agree on consistent criteria for "associating" a suspect with an
unknown hair, nor have they produced persuasive data showing
the probative value of these "associations." In the early 1970's,
the federal government sponsored a proficiency-testing program
for 240 laboratories. The labs did so poorly on hair analysis
that flipping a coin would have saved a great deal of time, at no
cost to accuracy.
Thousands of prisoners are serving time based on this bogus
science, which often props up wobbly eyewitness testimony or
dubious tales peddled by jailhouse snitches. Among the first 74
prisoners exonerated by DNA testing over the past decade, 26
were implicated, in part, by hair analysis.
Unsound techniques survive because forensic science has been
woven into the culture of prosecution and insulated from routine
quality assurance standards we impose on medical testing labs.
Ms. Gilchrist is now under investigation after the Federal
Bureau of Investigation found that she gave misleading
testimony in five of eight cases that it reviewed. Oklahoma
prosecutors used her work in thousands of cases, including 23
that resulted in sentences of death. Despite complaints from her
colleagues, she was promoted.
In Chicago, a police lab analyst, Pamela Fish, left out
exculpatory serological results in testimony at a 1992 rape trial,
contributing to a wrongful conviction. In 1999, the defendant
was exonerated by DNA tests. Questions have now been raised
about Ms. Fish's conduct in a 1986 murder case.
In West Virginia, the infamous Fred Zain, chief serologist for
the state's crime laboratory, is finally going to trial on fraud
charges after the state's Supreme Court found that he had offered
false testimony in hundreds of cases. An F.B.I. hair and fiber
examiner was castigated by the agency's inspector general for
sloppy science, but there has been no systematic reexamination
of his cases.
Too often, forensic laboratories are run by law enforcement
officers in lab coats. The laboratories cannot be allowed to
operate as arms of police departments and prosecutors' offices.
They need to be independent agencies, serving as fact finders
for both the prosecution and the defense.
There is a model for improvement. The 1988 Clinical
Laboratory Improvement Act provided accountability for
laboratories that perform medical tests. A mistake in health tests
can have dire results — not only for the patient, but also for the
lab, which risks losing accreditation.
In forensic laboratories, by contrast, few are held accountable
for a bad practice or botched results. Under this system, the
innocent pay, not the criminals.