Rant of the Week

Reader's Digest Backhand

In the May 2003 edition of mediocrity in verse, Reader's Digest, tribute is paid to one Skip Palenik, "Micro Man", a forensic microscoptist.

Listen carefully to that word: microscoptist. You are on a jury. True or False-- a microscoptist is smarter than a lawyer?

True or false-- "microscoptist" isn't even a real word? My dictionary says no.

Judy Burgin was murdered in Alaska in April 1993. Her body was found in the woods, her head bashed in. She had a boyfriend named Carl Brown who allegedly dealt drugs. Police were stumped. Who could have murdered Judy Burgin? Who could have done it? Is there anybody out there we should investigate? Hmm. Anybody?

With the body, they found a strand of fibre.

That's when Skip Palenik entered the picture. Skip analyzed the strand of fibre and then compared it to fragments of carpet found in Carl Brown's house. He declared them a match. He told the jury: I am a microscoptist and with all the authority invested in that title, I proclaim that Brown is guilty. Brown was convicted.

His conviction was overturned on appeal because his lawyers had not been permitted to argue that other people had motivation and opportunity to murder Judy Burgin, who was, after all, a drug addict. In 1998, a second jury found him guilty after four days of deliberation.

There is almost no other information about this case on the Internet.

Now, I can't swear to it, but I kind of doubt that there exists a sense of definitive standards and procedures that have been thoroughly researched and developed for the positive forensic identification of particular microfibres. That is, though we know there are all kinds of scientific procedures out there that can be applied to the analysis of microfibres and to the science of "comparison", there probably is no text book that, for example, lists almost every type of fibre, how they were manufactured, who made them, where they were sold, how many are in circulation, how they react to substances in the environment, how unique they are, etc., etc., etc.

I don't believe such a body of knowledge exists.

Instead, we have Skip. Skip is given some material by the police and probably is aware of the fact that they need to match. The police don't go to Skip and say, golly, we have no idea of who could possibly have committed this crime. Here are ten fibres and ten samples of carpets belonging to suspects. Can you match any of them?

We do know that that is not what happens. Skip will receive a couple of samples. Do they match, yes or no? I'll bet that Skip knows which sample came from a suspect. I'll bet Skip knows that the police think this is the guy who did it but need some evidence to show in court. It doesn't matter.

And I'll bet that there is no scientific definition of what a "match" is, in terms of synthetic fibres.

I don't think Skip thinks he is giving the jury a distorted picture of the reliability of the evidence because the police seem sure that Mr. Brown did it. I don't think the police feel that they are manipulating evidence because Skip doesn't have to manipulate anything. He just has to present some "true" but relatively meaningless "scientific" evidence in a selective and suggestive manner. He never has to lie at any point, because the jury doesn't understand science. They just understand the word "matches" and "same" and "microscoptist".

I don't know how compelling the other evidence was, but I fear that the carpet sample was the decisive evidence in this case. I don't know if Brown killed Judy Burgin or not, but if the carpet was the most important piece of evidence at the trial and I had been on the jury, I know I wouldn't have voted for 'guilty'..