Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [117]
To show you these stages of denial in action, I need to introduce you to Michael McGrath, the former attorney general of Montana. In 1987, a particularly horrific assault occurred in the city of Billings: late one night, an intruder climbed through the bedroom window of an eight-year-old girl and raped her multiple times. The perpetrator, who left behind semen and pubic hair in the girl’s underwear, was unknown to the victim, and she was able to describe him only in very general terms (blond hair, pale skin, acne). Based on that description, an artist generated a sketch, and a police officer mentioned that it looked like someone he’d busted the week before—a kid who had been fighting with another student in the high school parking lot. That kid was named Jimmy Ray Bromgard, and in short order he was arrested, convicted (on the basis of the girl’s testimony and a state forensic expert who claimed that Bromgard’s hair matched those found at the crime scene), and sentenced to forty years in prison.
In 2000, the Innocence Project took up the case, tested the semen, and determined that it couldn’t have come from Bromgard. Enter Attorney General Michael McGrath. McGrath accepted the DNA results, but he proposed a novel explanation for them. Maybe, he suggested, Jimmy Bromgard is a chimera. In Greek mythology, a chimera is a monster of mixed origins: part lion, part snake, part goat. In modern biology, a chimera is the result of the death, in utero, of one of two non-identical twins, and the subsequent blending of two types of DNA in the surviving individual. Chimerism in humans is extremely rare; a total of thirty cases have been reported, anywhere, ever. Nonetheless, McGrath insisted that Bromgard be subjected to more testing, until his blood, semen, and saliva all proved genetically identical, and unrelated to the material found at the crime scene.
Then things got ugly. The Innocence Project sent the pubic hairs to the FBI to be retested, and those didn’t match either—even though Montana’s own forensic scientist, Arnold Melnikoff, had testified in court that, based on microscopic analysis, the odds of the hairs coming from anyone other than Bromgard were one in 10,000. The DNA mismatch sounded alarm bells throughout Montana, since Melnikoff was no less than head of the state crime lab, and, in that capacity, had testified in hundreds of other cases. When other forensic scientists reviewed his work in the Bromgard case, they concluded that Melnikoff’s testimony “contains egregious misstatements not only of the science of forensic hair examination but also of genetics and statistics…. His testimony is completely contrary to generally accepted scientific principles.” Bromgard was freed after almost fifteen years in prison, and he sued the state of Montana over his wrongful conviction.
As part of that lawsuit, Peter Neufeld deposed Michael McGrath—a deposition that turned out to be an unparalleled case study of denial. (It took place at a law firm on a street called South Last Chance Gully. Dickens couldn’t have done better.) In fact, the deposition turns out to be a case study of many of the themes in this book: the rejection of counterevidence, the spinning of wildly elaborate hypotheses to protect our core beliefs, the use of asymmetric standards of logic and reason, and, above all, the prioritization of our own sense of rightness over truth, fairness, honor, and just about any other value you care to name.
McGrath entered the deposition with one unshakable conviction: that Jimmy Ray Bromgard was still the prime suspect in the Billings rape. Maybe, the attorney general proposed, Bromgard raped the little girl but left no biological evidence behind, and the semen and hair in her underwear had come from somewhere else. Like where, asked Neufeld—and here’s where things get so disturbing and bizarre that it’s worth quoting