This episode contains details of gun violence. Please take care where and when you listen. It's a Friday night in the fall of twenty eighteen in East Portland, Oregon. O'Dell Adams heads to the Speakeasy Lounge for a drink. It's a stressful time for him. His mother is losing her battle with cancer. My mom was a very strong woman. She took care of all of us by herself. I watched her struggle, but still like made things happen for us and still provided and still did everything. And she always wanted the best for us actually when it was little, and did everything that she could. O'Dell grew up in a tough neighborhood. He was charged with his first crime as a kid at age thirteen. They was treating me like a grown up, Like I can actually remember a time where like a officer like went in my draws actually looking for crack. I was like, what like twelve, twelve years old. It became like regular for me. Okay, here come the cops. Okay, well they're gonna do this, and they're gonna do that. His older sister, Sharnissa, remembers this time for Odell was hard. I don't want to say he kind of fell through the cracks, but he was more so looking for a community. And you know, the neighborhood that we eventually moved to, it had a lot of mentors, a lot of gang members, i would say, but for the young folk, it was their community. He was a very wise kid, and very strong and a very protective, you know, and so maybe he felt at that very young age that he had to prove himself. But O'Dell is looking to move past all that to rebuild his future. And at around ten thirty pm, he's standing outside the bar talking with a couple of buddies when a gold Buick pulls into the parking lot. Surveillance footage shows the driver interacting with O'Dell and his friends. The driver of the car backs up, parks about seven spaces away from Odell's group, and goes into the bar. Then O'Dell can be seen walking away Attorney John rob O'Dell walks off the camera that's facing north, towards the sidewalk, towards the street and basically into the blackness and off the camera. Within a few seconds, there's a figure, an indistinct figure, that enters the south facing camera and the most that you can tell is the person's wearing white shoes. Then gunshots. A couple of bullets hit the buick, some hit an suv nearby, Others hit the building. Some even went over the roof. Luckily nobody is injured. Whoever fired the shots flees witnesses call nine one one. Here's the audio from one of those calls. I just saw a shot fired towards me. And you're at what corner? Sorry, I'm still trigging that. Okay, press and talk about what corner? Start? Did you see who shot at you? I did not? And could you see the guns? I did not, but I saw the muzzle flush the collar, tells the dispatcher. He didn't see the shooter's face, but could describe what the person was wearing. Black pants, black hoodie, white shoes. Okay, and who did this? What was the subject? He was? Whitemail? Blackmail? What was he white? Black, Asian? Or Hispanic? I could not tell? Its dark. Because O'Dell walked out of the security camera range just before the shooting started, police target him as a suspect, even though he was wearing a completely different outfit. He had a matching camouflage jacket. Camouflage pants, a black baseball hat, a white tshirt, and these bright white kind of clean shoes. Police recover ten forty caliber cartridge casings from the bar's parking lot. About a month later, at four am, they come for him. Police are outside O'Dell's mother's home where he is living, detonating two flash grenades through a loudspeaker. They order everyone in the house to come out with their hands up. Odell and Charnice's mother had just passed away a few days earlier. Thank god that she didn't have a squat team busting her door while she's sick in bed. I thought I was dreaming at first, actually when I heard this big bomb that like a little flash bomb or something. So then I hear them outside saying come out with your hands up and all this other stuff. So we came out, you know what I'm saying, Like me and my brothers and sisters and stuff. We came out. Police search the house and find two forty caliber hands guns in an attic crawl space an ammunition in a downstairs dresser. Odell is arrested and misses his mother's funeral. Only one of the two guns found at the home has his DNA along with DNA from three other people. If you can create that link, you can link the firearm to the shooting. You can link Odell's DNA to the firearm, and you can combine that with the surveillance video that appears to show Odell walking off one screen, then onto the next screen and firing all of the shots. From the prosecution standpoint, you have a pretty clear cut case. Investigators send the gun with the DNA to a firearms examiner for analysis. That analysis will result in more than one bitter legal battle, two different verdicts for the same crime, and more years of O'Dell's life wasted in the system. I'm Molly her and this is CSI on trial. Two or three stains are really not enough to call something an impact better from gunshot that's going to put someone in prison the rest of your life. Thought that making up a lie was gonna get you home center? What is it about a bite mark that we make a dentist, an expert in this area, who shot at you? He said, I will sit in this jail and I will rot before I take a pleebark. The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. Today's episode Firearms Analysis. Firearms analysis got its start in a now infamous criminal case. It was even made into a movie on the Flaming battleground called Chicago. I got a nice balantine all ready to deliver a balladine, but Saint Jack does make sure it's a great make red ballantine. On February fourteenth, nineteen twenty nine, during Prohibition, Chicago gangsters led by Bugs Moran are waiting for a shipment of Canadian whiskey when they're gunned down by men dressed as police officers. It's now known as the Saint Valentine's Day massacre. Seventy shells were recovered at the crime scene. More than forty bullets and fragments were extracted from the victims. I'm Keith bron Morris. Well, that's a bit formal Keith Morris. Keith is a professor in forensic an investigative science at West Virginia University. In the late twenties and early cities, there was a group in Chicago that did work on the scientific investigation of Crome and one of the leaders would be Calvin Gondod Eventually, you know, he joined this group and he promoted it very extensively. They worked on the Valentine Day massacre and these kinds of cases. So in the American context he was very sort of pre eminent in the development of firearms examination. Doctor Calvin Goddard was an Army colonel and forensics pioneer. He had recently overseen the invention of a key piece of technology. They developed the comparison microscope, which is used by firearms examiners today to do comparisons, which is basically two microscopes which have a common optical bridge which allows you to look at two objects simultaneously in a single view. When police discovered a cache of Thompson's submachine guns belonging to an associate of Owl Capones, Goddard declared them a match to the casings and bullets from the scene of the massacre. The high profile case lent credibility to the growing discipline, and just like other forensic method we've talked about before, it developed as a part of law enforcement, and then it became the development of police officers who took this over and they sort of developed it further and further and it became sort of widespread in the nation. Goddard went on to lead his field, coining the term forensic ballistics, training police departments and advising the FBI on the establishment of their crime lab. So how does firearms analysis work. It starts with a loaded gun and a cartridge casing. You can think about a cartridge case as the housing that contains the bullet and the propellant in order to expellit out of the fire. When a gun is fired, the bullet is often lost, but the cartridge casing that held the bullet is kicked out of the side of the gun. Finding bullets is a lot more difficult. You can imagine if you in an area where it was open and there's not thing that's been struck, then you might not find that. But the cartridge cases are going to be located somewhere close to where the shooter was standing, So we have a far greater likelihood of obtaining cartridge cases from the crime scene. The theory behind firearms analysis is that no two guns are exactly identical, and that every gun imprints a unique set of marks onto the ammunition it fires. So the typical approach would be if, for instance, we get cartridge cases from a crime scene, and then at some point detective might come across a suspect who may have a firearm. Then the firearm would be provided and we would make test fires from that particular firearm, and so those test fires would be unknowns. We know that firearm X leaves these kinds of marks. Then we would compare those cartridge cases to the ones that were fired from the crime scene and see if we find any features which are in correspondence to that which we typically would find from cartridge cases fired from the same gun, and also the similarity between cartridge cases fed from different gun. Those comparisons would lead to the examiner concluding whether or not the cartridge case was fired by a specific firearm. The evidence isn't always clear. You might get cartridge cases for whatever reason, don't have very good markings on them, or they might be damaged, and the firearms examiner is not in a position to actually say whether it came from the same gun or a different gun, so we'd call those an inconclusive result. Today, we have more than a century of precedent for firearms examination evidence being admitted at trial. Firearms and tool marks is probably one of the most common pieces of evidence in the United States. Met Julia Layton in episode one. She's the former general counsel for the Public Defenders Service in Washington, d C. It impacts a large large number of cases, and typically cases that carry serious penalties, but recently a DC murder trial challenged that precedent. I could write a dozen articles on the weaknesses of firearms that would not have the impact that testifying in one case in getting a good decision from a judge has had. So the case now challenging the precedent of firearms analysis in court begins on a November afternoon in twenty sixteen. From the top of the street in southeast Washington, d C. You can see the Washington Monument. It's there next to a low rise apartment building that Orlando Silver is shot to death. A police officer spots a man running from the scene and tossing a gun into a wooded area. This suspect is identified as twenty four year old Marquette Tibbs. Tibbs, a marijuana dealer and business associate of the deceased, is arrested and charged with murder. Police recover the gun, a forensic examiner fires it and compares that cartridge with those recovered from the crime scene their conclusion the gun and the casings from the scene are a match. In a pre trial hearing, Marquette Tibbs public defenders argue that there is no scientific basis for claiming a precise match, and therefore the judge shouldn't allow that testimony. That's the Dobert standard, which we talked about in episode one. For their part, the prosecution offered up research studies they said could back up the validity and reliability of firearms analysis. Nicholas Scourage has analyzed dozens of these studies, and he testified about his findings at the hearing. I'm a professor of psychology and criminology at the University of California at Irvine. In order to understand the value of a firearm examiner testifying in court that two bullets are a match and identification, you need to know both how accurate they are at calling identifications when the bullets in fact came from the same gun. But you also need to know that false positive rate, how often the examiner gets it wrong when the two bullets or cartridge cases were not fired by the same gun. He found a lot of problems. First, in many of these studies, participants were sent two groups of cartridges that had been fired and asked to sort them into matched pairs. So you could kind of analogize this to a jigsaw puzzle, right, you're kind of putting the pieces together and figuring out which piece goes where. Now, from a pure scientific standpoint, that's not a very good study design in the sense that they're able to exploit this design to increase their accuracy. So you could look at two of the unknown bullets and say, well, these came from the same gun, and then you could compare one of those unknown bullets to a different known bullet, and if those are a match, then you know by implication the other unknown bullet is also a match. Basically, the process of elimination could conceivably help them get more correct answers. In twenty fourteen, the AIMS Lab, a national laboratory affiliated with Iowa State University, tried to resolve that issue with another study. Participants were given a coin envelope with two cartridge cases and they were simply asked did these cases match or not? And the participant makes a decision and then puts those cases back in that coin envelope. So it's a much cleaner test of whether a firearm examiner can look under a microscope and determine whether or not two bullets or cartridge cases were fired by the same gun. That makes sense, but it turns out this one had its own issues. Not only could participants mark identification for a match or elimination for a non match, they could also choose a third option inconclusive. About twenty percent of the participants responded inconclusive to every single one of those comparisons. So this wasn't oh, a few of them are inconclusive or not. This was every single response was inconclusive. And then, to make things worse, this particular study counted those responses as correct responses. Counting inconclusives as correct made the examiners seem very accurate, But count inconclusives as incorrect, and it's a whole different story. The error rate goes from under one percent, which is the way it was calculated by Aims, to about thirty three percent. That's David Fegman from UC Hastings Law School. You met him in episode one and he also testified in the TIBs hearing have a seven year old granddaughter, and I said, you know, if you have a math test, you have ten questions and you answer I don't know or inconclusive. But as I don't know to one of the questions, do you get credit for that? And she looked at me strangely, a smart seven year old in second graded, and she said, well, no, that's wrong. And so what a seven year old understands the researchers at the AIMS Laboratory don't understand. Despite this pretty major flaw, the study was used as proof that firearms identification is scientifically valid. Then there was a follow up study to examine the issue of reliability, just to quickly explain, validity looks at how accurate a test is. Reliability looks at how consistent it is. Will I drive a full block with the parking break on if someone else parked the car and put it on every single time? That's reliability. So this was testing whether or not you can get the same result multiple times. Participants were mailed sets of cartridge casings to examine, and what they didn't know was that they got the same sets twice, so if their analysis was reliable, they should reach the same conclusions both times. They examine the same sets, but that didn't happen. The examiners were reaching the same conclusion about sixty five percent of the time. And importantly, this doesn't mean they reached the correct conclusion sixty five percent of the time. It only means they reached the same conclusion sixty five percent of the time. These studies are widely used to support firearms analysis, even though none of them have ever been published in an independent, peer reviewed scientific journal. The recognized standard for evidence based research back to that pre trial hearing. After all, this was presented in the Marquette Tibbs case, a DC Superior Court judge refused to allow testimony that the cartridge from the crime scene was a match to the gun found in the wooded area, and Tibbs, who had maintained his innocence, was found not guilty of murder. Julia Layton says, cases like Tibbs doesn't mean we should throw the method out altogether. We are not suggesting that firearms examination evidence disappears altogether. There are objective standards for class characteristics. There are objective standards that are laid out by manufacturers that can allow a firearms examiner to objectively say that the evidence found on the crime scene was fired from a making model of gun with a square firing pit. What we're suggesting is that the science isn't there for a claim that they can identify the source, and that what recent studies have been done suggests that there may be very very high error rates when they make that claim. While new precedent is being made in the Tibbs case, Odell Adams, the man you heard about at the beginning of this episode, is still waiting for his day in court. It's now twenty twenty. O'Dell Adams has spent two years in jail since his arrest, just waiting for his trial. The delay was first due to some issues with legal representation and then COVID. I've lost everything actually duped to this situation. I lost my apartment, I lost my job, I lost going to see my mother being buried, and just a whole lot of stuff was just like heavy on me during that time. It's common in cases like O'Dell's, when a felon is charged with possession of a firearm, that federal prosecutors take the case over from the state. Since the age of sixteen, Odell had a seemingly endless series of run ins with the law. He'd been pulled over and charged with fifty traffic violations, mostly things like driving without insurance or a suspended license. He had fifteen different felony charges that were either eventually dropped or where he was found not guilty. He was convicted of a drug felony and a felony for threatening assault, and then possession of a gun as a felon, which put him on supervised release during the time of the incident at the speakeasy lounge. His record put him on the investigation's radar, and that's also why federal prosecutors wanted to take over the case. Those prosecutors might have assumed it would be an easy win. Defense attorney John Robb from the prosecution perspective, it's kind of an open and shut case. You have the video showing Odell walking off the screen, somebody wearing white shoes which Odell was wearing, walking onto the other screen. You find this firearm where he was living, and you have forensic evidence that ties that firearm to the shootings. You still have that witness there that describes somebody wearing different clothing, but the idea that that person just got it wrong. Becomes a lot easier to stomach when you know that there's something that is connecting the firearm found down the hallway from the bedroom that Odell was living in to the firearm found at the scene and be an awful coincidence for some other shooter to happen to have done that. But the key evidence are those casings found outside the speakeasy lounge. Do they match those test fired by the gun found at his mother's house. First they run a computerized analysis and it says no match. The speakeasy evidence was not created by the gun, So at that point in the investigation, the investigators assumed that there wasn't a match. And it's not quite clear what happens at this point. The case doesn't get dropped, the case doesn't go away. In about four to six months, they come to believe that there's been some error in that initial process, and then they redo that process. The computer gives a different result at this point. At this point the computer says that they actually do match. The computer test is followed by a comparison performed by a human examiner, which is pretty common using a comparison microscope. The technology that's been around since the nineteen twenties. The examiner determines that all the cartridges found at the speakeasy lounge had been fired by the gun from Odell's mother's attic. Federal prosecutors had their case. They offer Adams a plea deal. I was like, no way, I'm not accepting something that I didn't do. I'm like, bro, take the plea. He's like I'm not. That's where they get you, where you get tired, you know. And so he's super strong. I sit back and reflect with him now, like, Wow, you're so freaking resilient. Like as we're saying, we just want you home, and you're saying I didn't do it, and I'm not going to admit to something that I did not do, just like in the Tibbs case in DC you heard about earlier. The judge holds a pre trial hearing about the firearms evidence. Odell's lawyers argue that it isn't reliable or valid. The prosecution's firearms analyst struggles to articulate an objective basis or methodology for his exam process. Instead, the court hears a familiar argument. Here's Nicholas Scourage again. What you're left with is a firearm examiner getting up there and saying, based on all of this experience, I'm right and you should trust me. And just like in the Tibbs case, the judge agrees with the defense. He will only allow factual observations that the caliber of the gun matches the caliber of the casings. At trial, what Judge Mossman ruled is that they hadn't demonstrated that there was anything more going on there other than a person looking at two things and saying I think they match or I think they don't match. There wasn't any further scientific pursuit that was underlying them, and he had ruled that based on that this was not something that he would be permitted to be called science in the courtroom, the prosecution is not allowed to present testimony that the casings matched the specific gun. For the second time in a year, the science of firearms analysis has been successfully challenged, and in October of twenty twenty, the jury finds Adams not guilty, but Odell doesn't go home. Remember how we told you earlier that federal prosecutors took over this case. Typically, when the federal government takes over the case like that, what the state prosecutor will do is they will dismiss their case. But instead of dropping their case, the state moved forward. That's unusual when a defendant has been found not guilty in a federal trial. Through the federal proceedings from the state kept a case. They went back to grand jury and substantially increase the severity of the state case by adding an attempted murder and attempted to assault one charge. If convicted of these new charges, Adams would face many years in prison. I never thought that I would have to go to trial twice for the same as. It is never in my life. And people that I was telling that too, like the guards, guards and stuff that was like telling me, like, you already beat your case. How come you want to trial again? I don't know. And they was a shake and ere their heads. I felt like, oh, hell no, you know you all messed up. We're gonna pick it up again and get it done right. So it felt like almost like this good old boy system and not really about the crime. One interpretation of the motives behind the state trial has to do with precedent. Remember what we talked about earlier. Precedent is important because it can impact other cases in the future. So this time, state prosecutors brought two new firearms examiners to the pre trial hearing. One of them claimed his personal error rate was zero. Adams attorneys, which now included John Robb, took the same approach as his federal defense team, arguing that firearms analysis isn't scientifically validated. David Fegman also testified. The judge ultimately decided, well, I'm going to let the firearms examiner testify, but defense you can put Fegman on as well, and he can testify to the limitations and we'll just let the jury decided. And so in the Adams case, which was unusual for me, I testify both of the judges of the criminal matter to exclude it, and then I testify to the jury on how good a weight it should be given. At trial, the two firearms examiners, each with an impressive resume, told jurors the cartridges collected at the scene were a match to the gun found at Odell's mother's house. They also openly acknowledged that they were indeed there, in part as a response to the precedent set at Adam's federal trial. Here's the trial testimony from one of those examiners, Kate Todd. As farms and tool marks examiners and even just forensic scientists, we follow admissibility hearings across the country. Anytime that there is a ruling specifically about the science, we always want to go back and see why a certain ruling was made. She claimed the issue was not a lack of science, but a poor explanation of it. I'm not saying that the United States government did an insufficient job. I'm saying that the analyst did not explain the actual science correctly. Firearms examiners like Kate Todd weren't the only ones watching Odell's case. January twenty twenty one, the Department of Justice issued an unusual statement criticizing the Peacast Report, a report that had been issued five years earlier. We've talked about PEACAST repeatedly throughout this podcast and how it questioned the scientific validity of several forensic methods, including firearms analysis. The DOJ statement said, in part quote, formerly addressing Peacast's incorrect claims has become increasingly important as a number of recent federal and state court opinions have cited the report as support for limiting the admissibility of firearms tool marks evidence in criminal cases, and it references the cases of Marquette Tibbs and Odell Adams by name Julia Layton. This is unsigned, has no seal. It doesn't explain who did it, why they did it. This appears to be sort of an effort by lawyers didn't like the court's rulings to try and put something out under DJ's label, saying there was something wrong with pecast and there's something wrong with these court decisions, rather than putting their names to it and filing it back to O'Dell's trial. Aside from the firearms evidence, the state trial was a repeat of the federal one, although this time there were no black jurors, which O'Dell felt was a distinct disadvantage. When they say a jury of your peers, as people that's living in the same area that you're living in and seeing the same things that you're seeing and going through the same things that you're going through. I got tattoos, I got brais, and I fit the description of being guilty behind that alone. Ultimately, the jury acquitted O'Dell of the most serious charges, found that he was not guilty of the attempted murder and attempted assault one, but did find him guilty of the unlawful use of a weapon count and the other less serious charges, which was a finding that they had believed beyond a reasonable doubt that he was the individual that fired those shots. The jury believed he was the shooter. By the time of the verdict, he had been in jail for three years. At his sentencing, Adam spoke in court for the first time, It's not nor the big picture is painted upon me. It's like I'm just it's bad person, which I'm not. It's been barriers that I had to climb over and I'm steady climbing and it's whatever happens today. It happened. I have been getting a bad end of the stick all my life, so I am like, like, how much more to a person has to take. It's hard to hear, but O'Dell says he's not a bad person. He's just had the odds stacked against him all of his life. O'Dell had to serve two more years in prison on top of his time served. He was finally released into twenty twenty one, in time to see family at Christmas and for the first time he was able to visit his mother's grave. His journey through the legal system represents both the past and the future. His state trial is rooted in a century of legal precedent established for firearms analysis evidence. His federal case represents the prospect for change and how that evidence is treated moving forward. Whether it's changed the judicial system will accept remains to be seen. Odell Adams is appealing his conviction, but if he succeeds in winning a new trial, there's a chance it could end with an even harsher sentence. I didn't do this. I'm innocent. Like I have been accepting a lot of things, and it's a time where you just get fed up. So that's why I appeal. And if I have to appeal again, I'm will appeal and I will keep a pillion. And it's like when you are fighting the whole United States by yourself, it's kind of hard. Is hard next time? On CSI on trial. Blood stain pattern analysis used to wrongly convict a state trooper of murdering his family. Just repeatedly, over and over. I'm telling you he's wrong, he's wrong, he's wrong, he's wrong, he's wrong. I did not do This. CSI on Trial is a co production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans, based on the Curiosity Stream series CSI on Trial, created by Eleanor Grant and produced by the Biscuit Factory. You can watch all six episodes of the video series right now at curiosity stream dot com. This episode is hosted and written by me Molly Hermann and researched by Katie Dunn and myself. Our producer is Miranda Hawkins. Jessica Metzker is the senior producer. Virginia Prescott, Jason English, Brandon Barr and el C Crowley are the executive producers. Sound design in mix by Miranda Hawkins. Special thanks to John Higgins, Rob Burke, Rob Lyle, and Brandon Craigie. If you're enjoying the show, leave a review in your favorite podcast app. Check out the Curiosity Audio Network for podcasts covering history, pop culture, true crime, and more. School of Humans

This episode contains details of gun violence. Please take care where and when you listen. It's a Friday night in the fall of twenty eighteen in East Portland, Oregon. O'Dell Adams heads to the Speakeasy Lounge for a drink. It's a stressful time for him. His mother is losing her battle with cancer. My mom was a very strong woman. She took care of all of us by herself. I watched her struggle, but still like made things happen for us and still provided and still did everything. And she always wanted the best for us actually when it was little, and did everything that she could. O'Dell grew up in a tough neighborhood. He was charged with his first crime as a kid at age thirteen. They was treating me like a grown up, Like I can actually remember a time where like a officer like went in my draws actually looking for crack. I was like, what like twelve, twelve years old. It became like regular for me. Okay, here come the cops. Okay, well they're gonna do this, and they're gonna do that. His older sister, Sharnissa, remembers this time for Odell was hard. I don't want to say he kind of fell through the cracks, but he was more so looking for a community. And you know, the neighborhood that we eventually moved to, it had a lot of mentors, a lot of gang members, i would say, but for the young folk, it was their community. He was a very wise kid, and very strong and a very protective, you know, and so maybe he felt at that very young age that he had to prove himself. But O'Dell is looking to move past all that to rebuild his future. And at around ten thirty pm, he's standing outside the bar talking with a couple of buddies when a gold Buick pulls into the parking lot. Surveillance footage shows the driver interacting with O'Dell and his friends. The driver of the car backs up, parks about seven spaces away from Odell's group, and goes into the bar. Then O'Dell can be seen walking away Attorney John rob O'Dell walks off the camera that's facing north, towards the sidewalk, towards the street and basically into the blackness and off the camera. Within a few seconds, there's a figure, an indistinct figure, that enters the south facing camera and the most that you can tell is the person's wearing white shoes. Then gunshots. A couple of bullets hit the buick, some hit an suv nearby, Others hit the building. Some even went over the roof. Luckily nobody is injured. Whoever fired the shots flees witnesses call nine one one. Here's the audio from one of those calls. I just saw a shot fired towards me. And you're at what corner? Sorry, I'm still trigging that. Okay, press and talk about what corner? Start? Did you see who shot at you? I did not? And could you see the guns? I did not, but I saw the muzzle flush the collar, tells the dispatcher. He didn't see the shooter's face, but could describe what the person was wearing. Black pants, black hoodie, white shoes. Okay, and who did this? What was the subject? He was? Whitemail? Blackmail? What was he white? Black, Asian? Or Hispanic? I could not tell? Its dark. Because O'Dell walked out of the security camera range just before the shooting started, police target him as a suspect, even though he was wearing a completely different outfit. He had a matching camouflage jacket. Camouflage pants, a black baseball hat, a white tshirt, and these bright white kind of clean shoes. Police recover ten forty caliber cartridge casings from the bar's parking lot. About a month later, at four am, they come for him. Police are outside O'Dell's mother's home where he is living, detonating two flash grenades through a loudspeaker. They order everyone in the house to come out with their hands up. Odell and Charnice's mother had just passed away a few days earlier. Thank god that she didn't have a squat team busting her door while she's sick in bed. I thought I was dreaming at first, actually when I heard this big bomb that like a little flash bomb or something. So then I hear them outside saying come out with your hands up and all this other stuff. So we came out, you know what I'm saying, Like me and my brothers and sisters and stuff. We came out. Police search the house and find two forty caliber hands guns in an attic crawl space an ammunition in a downstairs dresser. Odell is arrested and misses his mother's funeral. Only one of the two guns found at the home has his DNA along with DNA from three other people. If you can create that link, you can link the firearm to the shooting. You can link Odell's DNA to the firearm, and you can combine that with the surveillance video that appears to show Odell walking off one screen, then onto the next screen and firing all of the shots. From the prosecution standpoint, you have a pretty clear cut case. Investigators send the gun with the DNA to a firearms examiner for analysis. That analysis will result in more than one bitter legal battle, two different verdicts for the same crime, and more years of O'Dell's life wasted in the system. I'm Molly her and this is CSI on trial. Two or three stains are really not enough to call something an impact better from gunshot that's going to put someone in prison the rest of your life. Thought that making up a lie was gonna get you home center? What is it about a bite mark that we make a dentist, an expert in this area, who shot at you? He said, I will sit in this jail and I will rot before I take a pleebark. The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. Today's episode Firearms Analysis. Firearms analysis got its start in a now infamous criminal case. It was even made into a movie on the Flaming battleground called Chicago. I got a nice balantine all ready to deliver a balladine, but Saint Jack does make sure it's a great make red ballantine. On February fourteenth, nineteen twenty nine, during Prohibition, Chicago gangsters led by Bugs Moran are waiting for a shipment of Canadian whiskey when they're gunned down by men dressed as police officers. It's now known as the Saint Valentine's Day massacre. Seventy shells were recovered at the crime scene. More than forty bullets and fragments were extracted from the victims. I'm Keith bron Morris. Well, that's a bit formal Keith Morris. Keith is a professor in forensic an investigative science at West Virginia University. In the late twenties and early cities, there was a group in Chicago that did work on the scientific investigation of Crome and one of the leaders would be Calvin Gondod Eventually, you know, he joined this group and he promoted it very extensively. They worked on the Valentine Day massacre and these kinds of cases. So in the American context he was very sort of pre eminent in the development of firearms examination. Doctor Calvin Goddard was an Army colonel and forensics pioneer. He had recently overseen the invention of a key piece of technology. They developed the comparison microscope, which is used by firearms examiners today to do comparisons, which is basically two microscopes which have a common optical bridge which allows you to look at two objects simultaneously in a single view. When police discovered a cache of Thompson's submachine guns belonging to an associate of Owl Capones, Goddard declared them a match to the casings and bullets from the scene of the massacre. The high profile case lent credibility to the growing discipline, and just like other forensic method we've talked about before, it developed as a part of law enforcement, and then it became the development of police officers who took this over and they sort of developed it further and further and it became sort of widespread in the nation. Goddard went on to lead his field, coining the term forensic ballistics, training police departments and advising the FBI on the establishment of their crime lab. So how does firearms analysis work. It starts with a loaded gun and a cartridge casing. You can think about a cartridge case as the housing that contains the bullet and the propellant in order to expellit out of the fire. When a gun is fired, the bullet is often lost, but the cartridge casing that held the bullet is kicked out of the side of the gun. Finding bullets is a lot more difficult. You can imagine if you in an area where it was open and there's not thing that's been struck, then you might not find that. But the cartridge cases are going to be located somewhere close to where the shooter was standing, So we have a far greater likelihood of obtaining cartridge cases from the crime scene. The theory behind firearms analysis is that no two guns are exactly identical, and that every gun imprints a unique set of marks onto the ammunition it fires. So the typical approach would be if, for instance, we get cartridge cases from a crime scene, and then at some point detective might come across a suspect who may have a firearm. Then the firearm would be provided and we would make test fires from that particular firearm, and so those test fires would be unknowns. We know that firearm X leaves these kinds of marks. Then we would compare those cartridge cases to the ones that were fired from the crime scene and see if we find any features which are in correspondence to that which we typically would find from cartridge cases fired from the same gun, and also the similarity between cartridge cases fed from different gun. Those comparisons would lead to the examiner concluding whether or not the cartridge case was fired by a specific firearm. The evidence isn't always clear. You might get cartridge cases for whatever reason, don't have very good markings on them, or they might be damaged, and the firearms examiner is not in a position to actually say whether it came from the same gun or a different gun, so we'd call those an inconclusive result. Today, we have more than a century of precedent for firearms examination evidence being admitted at trial. Firearms and tool marks is probably one of the most common pieces of evidence in the United States. Met Julia Layton in episode one. She's the former general counsel for the Public Defenders Service in Washington, d C. It impacts a large large number of cases, and typically cases that carry serious penalties, but recently a DC murder trial challenged that precedent. I could write a dozen articles on the weaknesses of firearms that would not have the impact that testifying in one case in getting a good decision from a judge has had. So the case now challenging the precedent of firearms analysis in court begins on a November afternoon in twenty sixteen. From the top of the street in southeast Washington, d C. You can see the Washington Monument. It's there next to a low rise apartment building that Orlando Silver is shot to death. A police officer spots a man running from the scene and tossing a gun into a wooded area. This suspect is identified as twenty four year old Marquette Tibbs. Tibbs, a marijuana dealer and business associate of the deceased, is arrested and charged with murder. Police recover the gun, a forensic examiner fires it and compares that cartridge with those recovered from the crime scene their conclusion the gun and the casings from the scene are a match. In a pre trial hearing, Marquette Tibbs public defenders argue that there is no scientific basis for claiming a precise match, and therefore the judge shouldn't allow that testimony. That's the Dobert standard, which we talked about in episode one. For their part, the prosecution offered up research studies they said could back up the validity and reliability of firearms analysis. Nicholas Scourage has analyzed dozens of these studies, and he testified about his findings at the hearing. I'm a professor of psychology and criminology at the University of California at Irvine. In order to understand the value of a firearm examiner testifying in court that two bullets are a match and identification, you need to know both how accurate they are at calling identifications when the bullets in fact came from the same gun. But you also need to know that false positive rate, how often the examiner gets it wrong when the two bullets or cartridge cases were not fired by the same gun. He found a lot of problems. First, in many of these studies, participants were sent two groups of cartridges that had been fired and asked to sort them into matched pairs. So you could kind of analogize this to a jigsaw puzzle, right, you're kind of putting the pieces together and figuring out which piece goes where. Now, from a pure scientific standpoint, that's not a very good study design in the sense that they're able to exploit this design to increase their accuracy. So you could look at two of the unknown bullets and say, well, these came from the same gun, and then you could compare one of those unknown bullets to a different known bullet, and if those are a match, then you know by implication the other unknown bullet is also a match. Basically, the process of elimination could conceivably help them get more correct answers. In twenty fourteen, the AIMS Lab, a national laboratory affiliated with Iowa State University, tried to resolve that issue with another study. Participants were given a coin envelope with two cartridge cases and they were simply asked did these cases match or not? And the participant makes a decision and then puts those cases back in that coin envelope. So it's a much cleaner test of whether a firearm examiner can look under a microscope and determine whether or not two bullets or cartridge cases were fired by the same gun. That makes sense, but it turns out this one had its own issues. Not only could participants mark identification for a match or elimination for a non match, they could also choose a third option inconclusive. About twenty percent of the participants responded inconclusive to every single one of those comparisons. So this wasn't oh, a few of them are inconclusive or not. This was every single response was inconclusive. And then, to make things worse, this particular study counted those responses as correct responses. Counting inconclusives as correct made the examiners seem very accurate, But count inconclusives as incorrect, and it's a whole different story. The error rate goes from under one percent, which is the way it was calculated by Aims, to about thirty three percent. That's David Fegman from UC Hastings Law School. You met him in episode one and he also testified in the TIBs hearing have a seven year old granddaughter, and I said, you know, if you have a math test, you have ten questions and you answer I don't know or inconclusive. But as I don't know to one of the questions, do you get credit for that? And she looked at me strangely, a smart seven year old in second graded, and she said, well, no, that's wrong. And so what a seven year old understands the researchers at the AIMS Laboratory don't understand. Despite this pretty major flaw, the study was used as proof that firearms identification is scientifically valid. Then there was a follow up study to examine the issue of reliability, just to quickly explain, validity looks at how accurate a test is. Reliability looks at how consistent it is. Will I drive a full block with the parking break on if someone else parked the car and put it on every single time? That's reliability. So this was testing whether or not you can get the same result multiple times. Participants were mailed sets of cartridge casings to examine, and what they didn't know was that they got the same sets twice, so if their analysis was reliable, they should reach the same conclusions both times. They examine the same sets, but that didn't happen. The examiners were reaching the same conclusion about sixty five percent of the time. And importantly, this doesn't mean they reached the correct conclusion sixty five percent of the time. It only means they reached the same conclusion sixty five percent of the time. These studies are widely used to support firearms analysis, even though none of them have ever been published in an independent, peer reviewed scientific journal. The recognized standard for evidence based research back to that pre trial hearing. After all, this was presented in the Marquette Tibbs case, a DC Superior Court judge refused to allow testimony that the cartridge from the crime scene was a match to the gun found in the wooded area, and Tibbs, who had maintained his innocence, was found not guilty of murder. Julia Layton says, cases like Tibbs doesn't mean we should throw the method out altogether. We are not suggesting that firearms examination evidence disappears altogether. There are objective standards for class characteristics. There are objective standards that are laid out by manufacturers that can allow a firearms examiner to objectively say that the evidence found on the crime scene was fired from a making model of gun with a square firing pit. What we're suggesting is that the science isn't there for a claim that they can identify the source, and that what recent studies have been done suggests that there may be very very high error rates when they make that claim. While new precedent is being made in the Tibbs case, Odell Adams, the man you heard about at the beginning of this episode, is still waiting for his day in court. It's now twenty twenty. O'Dell Adams has spent two years in jail since his arrest, just waiting for his trial. The delay was first due to some issues with legal representation and then COVID. I've lost everything actually duped to this situation. I lost my apartment, I lost my job, I lost going to see my mother being buried, and just a whole lot of stuff was just like heavy on me during that time. It's common in cases like O'Dell's, when a felon is charged with possession of a firearm, that federal prosecutors take the case over from the state. Since the age of sixteen, Odell had a seemingly endless series of run ins with the law. He'd been pulled over and charged with fifty traffic violations, mostly things like driving without insurance or a suspended license. He had fifteen different felony charges that were either eventually dropped or where he was found not guilty. He was convicted of a drug felony and a felony for threatening assault, and then possession of a gun as a felon, which put him on supervised release during the time of the incident at the speakeasy lounge. His record put him on the investigation's radar, and that's also why federal prosecutors wanted to take over the case. Those prosecutors might have assumed it would be an easy win. Defense attorney John Robb from the prosecution perspective, it's kind of an open and shut case. You have the video showing Odell walking off the screen, somebody wearing white shoes which Odell was wearing, walking onto the other screen. You find this firearm where he was living, and you have forensic evidence that ties that firearm to the shootings. You still have that witness there that describes somebody wearing different clothing, but the idea that that person just got it wrong. Becomes a lot easier to stomach when you know that there's something that is connecting the firearm found down the hallway from the bedroom that Odell was living in to the firearm found at the scene and be an awful coincidence for some other shooter to happen to have done that. But the key evidence are those casings found outside the speakeasy lounge. Do they match those test fired by the gun found at his mother's house. First they run a computerized analysis and it says no match. The speakeasy evidence was not created by the gun, So at that point in the investigation, the investigators assumed that there wasn't a match. And it's not quite clear what happens at this point. The case doesn't get dropped, the case doesn't go away. In about four to six months, they come to believe that there's been some error in that initial process, and then they redo that process. The computer gives a different result at this point. At this point the computer says that they actually do match. The computer test is followed by a comparison performed by a human examiner, which is pretty common using a comparison microscope. The technology that's been around since the nineteen twenties. The examiner determines that all the cartridges found at the speakeasy lounge had been fired by the gun from Odell's mother's attic. Federal prosecutors had their case. They offer Adams a plea deal. I was like, no way, I'm not accepting something that I didn't do. I'm like, bro, take the plea. He's like I'm not. That's where they get you, where you get tired, you know. And so he's super strong. I sit back and reflect with him now, like, Wow, you're so freaking resilient. Like as we're saying, we just want you home, and you're saying I didn't do it, and I'm not going to admit to something that I did not do, just like in the Tibbs case in DC you heard about earlier. The judge holds a pre trial hearing about the firearms evidence. Odell's lawyers argue that it isn't reliable or valid. The prosecution's firearms analyst struggles to articulate an objective basis or methodology for his exam process. Instead, the court hears a familiar argument. Here's Nicholas Scourage again. What you're left with is a firearm examiner getting up there and saying, based on all of this experience, I'm right and you should trust me. And just like in the Tibbs case, the judge agrees with the defense. He will only allow factual observations that the caliber of the gun matches the caliber of the casings. At trial, what Judge Mossman ruled is that they hadn't demonstrated that there was anything more going on there other than a person looking at two things and saying I think they match or I think they don't match. There wasn't any further scientific pursuit that was underlying them, and he had ruled that based on that this was not something that he would be permitted to be called science in the courtroom, the prosecution is not allowed to present testimony that the casings matched the specific gun. For the second time in a year, the science of firearms analysis has been successfully challenged, and in October of twenty twenty, the jury finds Adams not guilty, but Odell doesn't go home. Remember how we told you earlier that federal prosecutors took over this case. Typically, when the federal government takes over the case like that, what the state prosecutor will do is they will dismiss their case. But instead of dropping their case, the state moved forward. That's unusual when a defendant has been found not guilty in a federal trial. Through the federal proceedings from the state kept a case. They went back to grand jury and substantially increase the severity of the state case by adding an attempted murder and attempted to assault one charge. If convicted of these new charges, Adams would face many years in prison. I never thought that I would have to go to trial twice for the same as. It is never in my life. And people that I was telling that too, like the guards, guards and stuff that was like telling me, like, you already beat your case. How come you want to trial again? I don't know. And they was a shake and ere their heads. I felt like, oh, hell no, you know you all messed up. We're gonna pick it up again and get it done right. So it felt like almost like this good old boy system and not really about the crime. One interpretation of the motives behind the state trial has to do with precedent. Remember what we talked about earlier. Precedent is important because it can impact other cases in the future. So this time, state prosecutors brought two new firearms examiners to the pre trial hearing. One of them claimed his personal error rate was zero. Adams attorneys, which now included John Robb, took the same approach as his federal defense team, arguing that firearms analysis isn't scientifically validated. David Fegman also testified. The judge ultimately decided, well, I'm going to let the firearms examiner testify, but defense you can put Fegman on as well, and he can testify to the limitations and we'll just let the jury decided. And so in the Adams case, which was unusual for me, I testify both of the judges of the criminal matter to exclude it, and then I testify to the jury on how good a weight it should be given. At trial, the two firearms examiners, each with an impressive resume, told jurors the cartridges collected at the scene were a match to the gun found at Odell's mother's house. They also openly acknowledged that they were indeed there, in part as a response to the precedent set at Adam's federal trial. Here's the trial testimony from one of those examiners, Kate Todd. As farms and tool marks examiners and even just forensic scientists, we follow admissibility hearings across the country. Anytime that there is a ruling specifically about the science, we always want to go back and see why a certain ruling was made. She claimed the issue was not a lack of science, but a poor explanation of it. I'm not saying that the United States government did an insufficient job. I'm saying that the analyst did not explain the actual science correctly. Firearms examiners like Kate Todd weren't the only ones watching Odell's case. January twenty twenty one, the Department of Justice issued an unusual statement criticizing the Peacast Report, a report that had been issued five years earlier. We've talked about PEACAST repeatedly throughout this podcast and how it questioned the scientific validity of several forensic methods, including firearms analysis. The DOJ statement said, in part quote, formerly addressing Peacast's incorrect claims has become increasingly important as a number of recent federal and state court opinions have cited the report as support for limiting the admissibility of firearms tool marks evidence in criminal cases, and it references the cases of Marquette Tibbs and Odell Adams by name Julia Layton. This is unsigned, has no seal. It doesn't explain who did it, why they did it. This appears to be sort of an effort by lawyers didn't like the court's rulings to try and put something out under DJ's label, saying there was something wrong with pecast and there's something wrong with these court decisions, rather than putting their names to it and filing it back to O'Dell's trial. Aside from the firearms evidence, the state trial was a repeat of the federal one, although this time there were no black jurors, which O'Dell felt was a distinct disadvantage. When they say a jury of your peers, as people that's living in the same area that you're living in and seeing the same things that you're seeing and going through the same things that you're going through. I got tattoos, I got brais, and I fit the description of being guilty behind that alone. Ultimately, the jury acquitted O'Dell of the most serious charges, found that he was not guilty of the attempted murder and attempted assault one, but did find him guilty of the unlawful use of a weapon count and the other less serious charges, which was a finding that they had believed beyond a reasonable doubt that he was the individual that fired those shots. The jury believed he was the shooter. By the time of the verdict, he had been in jail for three years. At his sentencing, Adam spoke in court for the first time, It's not nor the big picture is painted upon me. It's like I'm just it's bad person, which I'm not. It's been barriers that I had to climb over and I'm steady climbing and it's whatever happens today. It happened. I have been getting a bad end of the stick all my life, so I am like, like, how much more to a person has to take. It's hard to hear, but O'Dell says he's not a bad person. He's just had the odds stacked against him all of his life. O'Dell had to serve two more years in prison on top of his time served. He was finally released into twenty twenty one, in time to see family at Christmas and for the first time he was able to visit his mother's grave. His journey through the legal system represents both the past and the future. His state trial is rooted in a century of legal precedent established for firearms analysis evidence. His federal case represents the prospect for change and how that evidence is treated moving forward. Whether it's changed the judicial system will accept remains to be seen. Odell Adams is appealing his conviction, but if he succeeds in winning a new trial, there's a chance it could end with an even harsher sentence. I didn't do this. I'm innocent. Like I have been accepting a lot of things, and it's a time where you just get fed up. So that's why I appeal. And if I have to appeal again, I'm will appeal and I will keep a pillion. And it's like when you are fighting the whole United States by yourself, it's kind of hard. Is hard next time? On CSI on trial. Blood stain pattern analysis used to wrongly convict a state trooper of murdering his family. Just repeatedly, over and over. I'm telling you he's wrong, he's wrong, he's wrong, he's wrong, he's wrong. I did not do This. CSI on Trial is a co production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans, based on the Curiosity Stream series CSI on Trial, created by Eleanor Grant and produced by the Biscuit Factory. You can watch all six episodes of the video series right now at curiosity stream dot com. This episode is hosted and written by me Molly Hermann and researched by Katie Dunn and myself. Our producer is Miranda Hawkins. Jessica Metzker is the senior producer. Virginia Prescott, Jason English, Brandon Barr and el C Crowley are the executive producers. Sound design in mix by Miranda Hawkins. Special thanks to John Higgins, Rob Burke, Rob Lyle, and Brandon Craigie. If you're enjoying the show, leave a review in your favorite podcast app. Check out the Curiosity Audio Network for podcasts covering history, pop culture, true crime, and more. School of Humans