Firearms Examiner May Not Testify That Bullet Was Fired From a Particular Gun With Absolute Certainty, Plus Some Other Errors, But No Harm

Eric Gardner v. United States (decided June 23, 2016)

Players: Chief Judge Washington, Associate Judge Glickman, and Senior Judge Reid. Opinion by Judge Reid. Benjamin Brooks for Mr. Gardner. Trial judge: Robert I. Richter

Facts: A taxi driver was shot and killed.  Police canvassing the area went to a nearby motel, and received a report that a man, who turned out to be Mr. Gardner, had just recently returned to room 114.  Officers standing outside the room heard a male voice saying he "need[ed] to get this stuff off of me, I'm very amped up right now," a shower running, and what one officer claimed was the distinctive sound of a gun being racked. Another officer outside the motel saw Mr. Gardner climb out of a window.  When the officer approached, Mr. Gardner dropped his jacket and a black gun, and he ran. The jacket had a blood stain, and DNA analysis could not exclude the taxi driver as one of two different contributors of the DNA.   Police later found, in an alley where a witness had seen a man running from the taxi driver's cab, a silver and black gun.  A witness claimed Mr. Gardner had shown her a silver and black gun shortly before the shooting.  A firearms examiner testified that the silver and black gun found in the alley was the gun that fired the fatal shot. A jailhouse informant testified that Mr. Gardner had admitted that he tried to rob the taxi driver and shot him when he refused to give up his money.  

Mr. Gardner testified in his defense that he had been a passenger in the taxi and was about to pay his fare when a third person with a gun attempted a robbery of the taxi.  Mr. Gardner struggled with the robber, and the driver accelerated the car, and then a shot rang out.  The robber ran off, and the taxi continued driving some distance before it crashed.  Mr. Gardner then ran to the motel, admitting that he had gone through the alley in which the silver and black gun was found.

Issue 1:  May a ballistics expert testify that a bullet was fired from a specific gun with 100% certainty?

Holding 1: No.  The Court adopted Judge Easterly's position in her concurring opinion in Williams v. United States, 130 A.3d 343 (D.C. 2016), which we blogged about here, and held that "a firearms and toolmark expert may not give an unqualified opinion, or testify with absolute or 100% certainty, that based on ballistics pattern comparison matching a fatal shot was fired from one firearm, to the exclusion of all other firearms."  The Court did not preclude firearms examiners from offering an opinion that a bullet or casing came from a gun, but they cannot opine that it did with absolute certainty.  The Court also expressed "doubts as to whether trial judges in this jurisdiction should permit toolmark experts to state their opinions 'with a reasonable degree of certainty.'"

However, the Court held the error was harmless, calling the remaining evidence "strong and compelling."

Issue 2:  Did the court err in allowing a government DNA expert to testify that DNA from the silver gun matched Mr. Gardner's DNA at only two of the thirteen loci that are typically analyzed?

Holding 2:  No.  Given the low bar for evidence to be relevant, the match at only two loci was relevant even if it was not uncommon for different people to match at those locations.  The evidence was also not more prejudicial than probative, given the analyst's testimony that there was insufficient DNA to obtain a profile, and it was common for different people to match at a single locus.

Issue 3:  Did the court err in preventing Mr. Gardner from testifying about his knowledge that the jailhouse informant had a reputation as a "snitch," allowing the defense to argue that Mr. Gardner would not have confessed to a known snitch?

Holding 3:  Assuming this was error, it was harmless.  The informant had admitted during cross-examination that he was a known snitch, and his credibility was otherwise substantially impeached.  Mr. Gardner's testimony that he know of the informant's reputation "would have been, at most, a small addition to the impeachment of [the witness], and not a significant contribution to enhancing Mr. Gardner’s own credibility."

Issue 4:  Did the court err in refusing to give a "plea agreement" instruction, cautioning the jury that testimony of a witness who has entered into a plea agreement should be considered with caution?

Holding 4:  No, because the informant did not have a plea agreement with the government.

Issue 5:  Did the court err in restricting the defense's cross-examination of a police officer about two investigations targeting the officer, one for harassment and the other for excessive force?

Holding 5:  Assuming this was error, it was harmless.  The officer was effectively cross-examined, and his testimony was a small piece of the government's evidence.

Issue 6:  Were Mr. Gardner's post-arrest statements to police voluntary?

Holding 6:  Yes.  Although he had been held for some time, he was sleeping for the first ten hours.  Although he was not immediately given food when he asked for it, he was not told that food be withheld unless he gave a statement.  Mr. Gardner initiated his conversation with police, and he signed a waiver form.  At one point during his statement when Mr. Gardner was shivering, officers "turned the vent off."  Mr. Gardner's will was not overborne in such a way as to render his statements the product of coercion.

Issue 7:  Did trial counsel provide ineffective assistance by failing to cross-examine the firearms examiner using a specific report; failing to object to post-arrest police statements to Mr. Gardner about multiple witnesses to the shooting, and failing proffer a basis for the admissibility of Mr. Gardner's testimony about his knowledge of the jailhouse informant's reputation as a snitch?

Holding 8:  Assuming trial counsel's performance was deficient, there was no prejudice.

Of Note:

• Although the opinion's holding bars only testimony that an expert is absolutely certain a bullet or casing came from a particular gun,the opinion leaves the door open to further limitations on the testimony of firearms examiners.  Defense attorneys should continue to fight for limits on this testimony, using the reports and articles cited in the opinion as ammunition.

• The court's harm analysis leaves much to be desired.  The defense presented a plausible account of the shooting that the jury might have credited, particularly given the government's apparent inability to explain why Mr. Gardner's jacket had blood from two different (and unknown) individuals, and the failure of police to preserve a bloodstain on the right rear passenger window -- evidence which could have corroborated Mr. Gardner's account of a third person's presence.  The fact that the apparent murder weapon was found on Mr. Gardner's flight path and the purported confession he made to the jailhouse informant were thus critical pieces of evidence.  Given that the errors went to those aspects of the government's evidence, the finding of harmlessness from the cumulative prejudice is dubious.  DG

Read full opinion here.  

OBJECT if a Firearms Examiner Testifies with Any Degree of Certainty That Markings on Recovered Bullets Were Produced By a Specific Gun

Marlon Williams v. United States (decided January 21, 2016)

Players: Associate Judges Thompson and Easterly, Senior Judge Nebeker. Opinion by Judge Easterly. Concurrence by Judge Easterly. Enid Hinkes for Mr. Williams. Trial Judge: Russell F. Canan.

Facts: Soon after Min Soo Kang was found shot to death in Southeast D.C., police used the OnStar navigation system installed in his Cadillac Escalade to recover the vehicle. From a digital database of known fingerprints, they identified Marlon Williams as a possible source of fingerprints found on and inside the Escalade. A subsequent search of Williams’s home turned up a gun in his bedroom. A firearms and toolmark examiner test-fired the gun and compared the resulting bullet markings to markings on bullets recovered from Kang’s vehicle. At trial, the examiner testified that every gun leaves “unique” marks on the bullets it fires, and that based on his comparison, there was not “any doubt in [his] mind” that the bullets recovered from Kang’s vehicle were fired by the gun recovered from Williams’s room. On the basis of this evidence—along with a cooperating witness’s testimony that Williams made incriminating statements and eyewitness testimony that someone matching Williams’s description was opening and closing the hood of the Escalade around the time the OnStar service remotely disabled it—a jury convicted Williams of first-degree felony murder while armed, attempted robbery while armed, PFCV, and CPWL.

Issue: Should the firearms and toolmarks examiner have been permitted to testify that the markings on the bullets recovered from Kang’s Escalade were “unique” and that he was without “any doubt” that they were fired by the gun recovered from Williams’s room?

Holding: The majority opinion strongly implied — and Judge Easterly’s concurrence expressly concluded — that the examiner should not have been permitted to testify with such absolute certainty that the recovered bullets matched Williams’s gun, but the Court declined to reverse on that ground because the unobjected-to testimony did not rise to the level of plain error. Although the same issue was presented in an earlier case, Jones v. United States, 27 A.3d 1130 (D.C. 2011), the government had at that time assured the Court that its policy was “to only elicit firearms examiners’ opinions [of a match] to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty,” not “100% certain[ty].” In light of this assurance, the Court in Jones merely “assume[d], without deciding, that [firearms and toolmark] experts should not be permitted to testify that they are 100% certain of a match, to the exclusion of all other firearms.” Id. at 1139 (emphasis added). Thus, there was no controlling precedent in this jurisdiction at the time of Williams’s trial, nor was there sufficient weight of authority from other jurisdictions to say that the trial court “plainly” erred in allowing the examiner’s testimony. And while the government concededly violated its own policy in this case, the Court held that such a policy is not binding law and cannot by itself form the basis of a plain error determination.

Concurrence: In addition to authoring the majority opinion, Judge Easterly wrote a separate and forceful concurrence in which she concluded that D.C. courts should “preclude a firearms and toolmark examiner from testifying with unqualified, absolute certainty.” The reason, Judge Easterly explained, can be found in two reports published by committees of the National Research Counsel (NRC), an arm of the publicly chartered National Science Foundation. The first, a 2008 report commissioned by the Department of Justice, found that there is simply not enough scientific research to establish that “firearms-related toolmarks are unique: that is, [that] a particular set of toolmarks can be shown to come from one weapon to the exclusion of all others,” and that experts’ commonplace testimony to that effect “cloak[s] an inherently subjective assessment of a match with an extreme probability statement that has no firm grounding and unrealistically implies an error rate of zero.” The second NRC publication, a 2009 report commissioned by Congress, similarly concluded that there is no statistical basis to say with any particular degree of certainty that toolmarks on a bullet match a specific gun or other bullets fired from that gun. In light of these findings, Judge Easterly concluded, “[c]ertainty statements” like those at issue in this case are not only not helpful to juries, they are misleading, and they create an “alarming” risk of wrongful convictions. As Judge Easterly put it, “a certainty statement regarding toolmark pattern matching has the same probative value as the vision of a psychic . . . .” As such, they are not admissible as expert testimony.

Of Note:

• So misleading is testimony that an examiner is certain of a match to a specific gun—and likewise, testimony that each gun leaves a “unique” mark on bullets it fires—that Judge Easterly suggested defense counsel is constitutionally ineffective if he or she fails to object, and the government is in violation of its obligation under Napue v. Illinois, 360 U.S. 264 (1959), to avoid knowingly presenting false or misleading evidence if it elicits or allows such certainty statements to go uncorrected.

• Judge Easterly’s concurrence could provide substantial support to argue that an examiner’s claim of any degree of certainty in a match, even if not 100% certainty, is impermissibly misleading. The concurrence specifically notes that firearms examiners should not be permitted to claim “a reasonable degree of scientific certainty” about a toolmark match, because the 2009 NRC report found it impossible to say “how many points of similarity are necessary for a given level of confidence in the result.” It also cites with approval cases from federal district courts that have prohibited an examiner from saying he reached his conclusions with any degree of certainty and limited an examiner to describing the observed toolmark similarities without stating any conclusion of a match.

• The majority opinion rejected, for lack of plain error, an unpreserved claim that the firearms examiner failed to present the images or other “documentation” underlying his opinions for the jury to evaluate for itself. It nevertheless left the door open for a future argument that toolmark pattern-matching testimony must include “sufficient documentation to permit the jury to meaningfully evaluate the expert’s subjective conclusions,” noting one federal district court had so held, and another had urged, but not required, supporting documentation.

• Williams also raised several other issues on appeal, including sufficiency of the evidence for attempted armed robbery; a hearsay and Confrontation Clause challenge to the firearms examiner’s report, which bore the signature of a second, non-testifying examiner; an unpreserved challenge to the admission of fingerprint evidence; an unpreserved argument that he was entitled to a hearing based on Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154 (1978), because of a discrepancy between the fingerprint examiner’s testimony and the search warrant issued for his home; and a claim that his attempted robbery and corresponding PFCV conviction must merge with his felony murder conviction. The Court rejected all but the merger argument. FT.

Read full opinion here

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