Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [49]
For obvious reasons, I thought the Pitchfork case could be very applicable to my work as a prosecutor. At that point in my career, I had been involved in cases where the traditional study of human fluids—blood typing and protein antigen typing—was occasionally being used, but the ability of science to characterize specific blood or semen stains from a crime was very, very limited. If you were able to get a number that limited the possibilities to 10 percent of the population, you were ecstatic. That was about as much information as blood was going to give you. After hearing about the case in England, I thought it was clear that there was a lot more we could learn from blood. But though this technology would obviously be of use in the United States, there was no lab in the United States that did it, so I just filed it away as an interesting bit of trivia.
A year or so later, in 1987, I was flipping through a newspaper put out by the Florida Bar Association when I came across an advertisement that caught my attention. The ad featured a picture of a baby with a caption that read: “He is wearing his father’s genes.” The ad was for a lab in New York that was doing paternity testing. I remembered the Pitchfork story in England and wondered if this was the same science, even though used in this case to determine paternity. I contacted someone at the lab in New York to find out if it was the same kind of work Jeffreys was doing. I asked the lab’s director if they did criminal cases, and he told me they were just starting to do forensics testing.
At the time I didn’t have any rape cases, but I went to Tim Berry, one of the state’s sex crimes prosecutors, and asked if he had any cases with semen that could be tested. Indeed he did—Tommy Lee Andrews. Andrews had been charged in six cases of rape, but the witness IDs were not great in any of them. Andrews would break into the home of a young woman, put a pillow over her face, rape her, and rob her. At least one of the women had picked him out of a photo lineup from having seen him the moment before he grabbed her, but the light had not been very good. The other victims had not seen him.
We had six samples from six cases, along with a sample from the defendant. The lab in New York was able to get results in two of the six, and matched them to the defendant. We added the names of the lab personnel who had done the testing to the witness list. Nobody else in the United States had ever used this kind of evidence in a case, but even so, I don’t think we fully realized how earth-shattering this DNA evidence would be for prosecutors and defense attorneys alike. The bottom line was that we thought it was cool, and we were excited to be the ones giving it a shot.
We decided to get an expert not affiliated with the lab to testify, choosing David Housman, a molecular biologist and a professor at MIT, to explain the science behind what we’d done. Fortunately for us, the judge who happened to be assigned to the Andrews case, Judge Rom Powell, had experience in judging trials that hinged upon cutting-edge forensic evidence. He had been the first to rule on a case that was used a new science called voice print identification. We had a Frye hearing, which is a specialized process to determine whether a new scientific tool is based on generally accepted, established scientific principles.
“Frye hearing” comes from a 1923 case in which a fellow by the name of James Alphonso Frye was being tried