Episode 5: How forensic science is used

S1: Look at the blood spatter with the patterns tells a story. You see this big pond of blood right there ? That's from the initial stab.

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S3: This looks like a human bite to me.

S4: There's a small saw. I want you to saw her hands off at the wrist line. We gotta have those cuffs for prints.

S5: A little 3-D magic for clarity. And I give you the killer's incisors.

S6: It's the same tire tread. Coming back is going made about the same time , too. You can see the sides real clear.

S7: And I tell you what. From his footprint , he looks like a big fella.

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S9: Popular culture is obsessed with crime , murder mysteries , true crime documentaries , thriller films. And our culture also loves forensics. There are all the CSI shows law and order , movies , documentaries and podcasts delving into the science of solving crimes. And many of these shows and movies take forensic science as gospel. On screen , the tire tracks , the bite marks , the strands of hair , whatever provide an exact match , pointing unquestionably to the killer. The science proves it , so you don't question it. The same thing happened with Jane Doe before her first trial in 2000. She allowed Erin Moriarty from 48 hours into her home. 48 hours did an entire episode just on Jane.

S10: According to the prosecutor , Bob Dorsett never went out for a jog on that cool , wet Sunday afternoon in February. Instead , she says , he was killed in his own bedroom.

S11: There's plenty of blood in that bedroom , and it's all the victim's blood. But even. Worse.

S10: Worse.

S12: This is the stain I'm talking about.

S11: When the detectives lifted the mattress , there was blood there.

S12: Somebody laid there for a while , bleeding.

S9: The episode didn't go as Jane hoped. It ended up making her look very guilty , using a lot of the bad science that was also used in court. The show recently revisited Jane's case , doing an episode saying that the science was faulty. But Jane's case demonstrates that a lot of this science was basically junk , and more and more cases are showing similar results. Here again is O'Neil Soto , the newspaper reporter who covered the trial for the Union Tribune.

S13: I mean , to set the scene. They found blood almost everywhere. They found blood on the ceiling , the walls , the floors , blood dripping into the room below. Blood. Uh , you know , when they flipped the mattress , they found a bloody spot that where they believe his head was laying. And , you know , this had all been cleaned up very , very well. So that , you know , the detectives were in there for hours before they started , you know , finding this stuff.

S9: In our last episode , we talked about how Jane's first defense attorney just bought all the science and didn't try to argue with it. Then she got new lawyers from the Innocence Project , and they took an entirely different approach. Instead of accepting the prosecution's science , Paula Mitchell and her team challenged it head on.

S14: It would be uncommon for an Innocence Project to need someone like me.

S9: Mike Kovaleski was part of that team. He's a defense attorney based in L.A. he'd never worked with the Innocence Project before.

S14: Because , of course , at this point , Jane had been in prison for 20 years and was indigent. She didn't have any money. Um , so the case absolutely would have been assigned to the public defender's office. And while the public defender's office has extraordinary lawyers. You can't control who gets the case. And certainly anybody at the public defender's office probably would have refused to work with the Innocence Project anymore. They would have just taken over the case and handled it on their own.

S9: Paul Mitchell didn't want that , so she reached out to Carvalho and asked if he'd be the trial lawyer pro bono.

S14: And once I did review their motion and also the trial transcripts , I saw that , um , some really unjust things had happened to Jane. I felt she was , um. Unjustly convicted. I think there was a lot that was wrong with her case , including decisions that were made by her trial counsel. And I just felt like I wanted to get involved in writing that wrong.

S9: So Paula Mitchell had assembled sort of a dream team of her own lawyers , who were much more familiar and comfortable with forensic science , and then this high powered defense attorney , Mike Kovaleski , who would be great at presenting in court. They started systematically challenging each and every piece of scientific evidence. According to Paula Mitchell and Mike Kovaleski , that job was made easier by the sloppiness of the original investigators , especially someone named Charles Merritt , who worked in the San Diego County crime lab. Here's Soto talking about how Merritt made demonstrations in court.

S13: They had a guy , um , demonstrating , you know , throwing paint around , uh , in the courtroom within a kind of a protected area. But they had somebody showing how the spatter would , would fly around And Uh , because that's how they figured out where the the blood came from.

S9: So in Jane's original trial , they were throwing paint around to show how the blood would have splattered when Jane allegedly killed Bob. Very much like that crime show Dexter , where he has string attached all over a room to show where the blood would fly and hit the walls. That's called bloodstain pattern analysis.

S14: It's referred to honestly by a lot of people as a junk science.

S9: Kowalski says they challenged this analysis head on.

S14: I really don't like to disparage people , but I really think Mr. Merit , even at the time , was incompetent to do that work. I just don't think he really had a clear understanding of how to conduct that work and how to draw appropriate conclusions from the work. But in addition to that , um , there just weren't enough bloodstain patterns from which one could very much conclude anything. In Jane's case. And so that was just sort of the immediate target we had of like , there's just something wrong there. And that a jury was not going to be able to follow any real common sense , um , analysis of that , of those bloodstain bloodstains in the bedroom.

S9: He says Jane's original jury never heard anyone challenge this analysis.

S14: They were told about the bloodstains and the original trial. The jurors were told about those blood stains. Nobody ever questioned those blood stains. So they were never , um , called upon the jurors to critically evaluate those stains. And we were very confident that if called upon in a new trial to do that , they were not going to be able to really deduce anything from those stains. And so that was sort of our very initial analysis was that was really bad. And we were going to be able to do a lot with that. As we started to work more and more on the case. We then really found that everything else was bad too.

S9: By everything else , he means things like the tire track analysis , which in Jane's original trial was used to show that tire tracks from the place where Bob's body was found matched Jane's truck and her new trial. They challenged that , saying sheriff's investigators didn't take enough photos so that you could easily see the length of the tire tracks or the blood around the bedroom. That led to all this pattern analysis and Jane's new trial. Her lawyers pointed out that the vials containing blood didn't all have caps on , so blood could have spilled out while investigators were analyzing the crime scene. Or blood could have gotten mixed up. But the biggest thing was the DNA evidence , Kowalski says. When they did more DNA analysis on evidence from the crime scene. It clearly belonged to a third person. Not Bob and not Jane.

S14: There was DNA on the rope that was pretty clearly used to choke Bob. And that DNA did not belong to Bob , and it did not belong to Jane. We found DNA on other parts of Bob's clothing that did not belong to Bob , and did not belong to Jane. And then , very critically , there was DNA under Bob's fingernails that did not belong to Bob and did not belong to Jane. And what's so important about that fingernail evidence is that it illustrated very clearly and compellingly that Bob Dora to put up a fight with whoever was attacking him. He had defensive wounds on him. Clearly somebody else's DNA under his fingernails shows that he was perhaps clawing at them or grabbing at them , and Jane had virtually no defensive wounds anywhere on her body , no injuries on her body , was clearly not engaged in a struggle with anyone. While Bob Dole was. Bob Dole was was struggling with his killer. And that killer wasn't Jane Doe.

S9: But Lucy says it wasn't cut and dry. He still thinks about it now. And there were things that didn't look good for Jane. Tests showed some of the blood in the bedroom did belong to Bob. The rope found around Bob's neck was the same as rope found on Jane's porch.

S14: That's a challenge. That's difficult. Um , the kids said that Bob always took a watch with him when he went jogging. And that watch was found at his bedroom and not with his body. That was a challenge.

S9: But he says this is what it means to be a defense attorney. You will always have questions. Things can always go both ways. For example , they photograph Jane from every angle and didn't find a single mark or bruise on her body except for one little thing.

S14: When she was missing one fingernail , she was missing one fingernail , and we didn't have an answer for why she was missing one fingernail. And that always really bothered me again. Does it make me think Jane killed her husband ? No. Is it a piece of evidence that , if presented to the jury in the right way , could cause problems for us ? Absolutely.

S9: But whenever Kowalski was challenged by something like this , he asks juries to think about their own common sense and life experiences.

S14: You know , so you might think , oh , if I were on a jury , I would want an answer for everything. But in real life you don't get answers for everything in real life. We're constantly called upon to make conclusions based on limited information. We do it with our lives every day. We do it confidently. We even place our lives and other people's lives at risk , doing it in the way that we drive and placing people on airplanes and on all sorts of things. Life is is an imperfect science and an incomplete.

S9: But what about that horse syringe with Jane's fingerprint and Bob's blood ? To me , and to a lot of people. That's the hardest one to explain away. Before the second trial , Paula Mitchell and her team brought in Mehul Injuria , a DNA expert , and he says that evidence can be explained away.

S12: The prosecutor in the first trial says that this is the most this is the single most important piece of evidence that we have Jane Doherty's fingerprint in Bob's blood on this syringe. Well , when you actually look at that syringe , um , you know , there's a pretty clear fingerprint. So it being her fingerprint is probably not an issue , although that's not my department. But when you look at where they actually swabbed to get the DNA , they didn't swab on the area of the fingerprint that has detail. They swabbed in an area where there was apparent blood kind of next to that. So they didn't actually establish that the fingerprint itself was composed of Bob's blood , just that it was in an area near where Bob's blood was.

S9: You might hear that and say , oh , come on. Next to the fingerprint should be the same as the fingerprint itself. But when you're in court , you need to be very clear in your scientific proof.

S12: The devil's in the details here. So really what the prosecutor is saying is not was not 100% established by the evidence that you know that Jane's fingerprint was in Bob's blood. And again , that's maybe splitting hairs. But that's an important fact and that's overstating what the science actually is.

S9: He says a lot of the DNA analysis done originally was very sloppy.

S12: The prosecution in the first trial portrayed it as if all of the blood that was found in that primary bedroom , that all of it was tested and came back to be Bob's DNA in blood. And that wasn't really challenged at the first trial. So when I looked at it , you know , pretty easily , you could notice that less than half of the samples were tested. And also the way that the master bedroom was processed is the the analyst said there's basically 20 observation areas in and around the bedroom. And so the prosecutor , you know , represented to the jury in the first trial that , hey , at every one of these observations there was testing and was shown to be Bob's blood. And that's not true. Not all the observations were tested. And like I say , less than half of the overall samples were tested. So you had the jury having the impression that this this primary bedroom is awash with blood. And yet that's not the case. It wasn't all tested.

S9: Next time there were bigger problems in the San Diego crime lab that went beyond Jane's case. Free Jane is hosted by me , Katie Hazen. It's reported and produced by Claire Trager. Sound design by am FM music. Additional producing by Laura McCaffrey. It was edited by David Washburn and Terrence Shepard , web design by Brendan Nardi. And our news director is Terrence Shepard.