Amicus Brief: Odell Adams
STate of Oregon v. Odell Adams
Filing Date
August 23, 2022
Charge
Unlawful use of a weapon with a firearm and second-degree criminal mischief
Jurisdiction
Court of Appeals of the State of Oregon
Partners
Forensic Justice Project and other scholars
Summary
Kate Judson of CIFS and various other legal scholars filed this amicus brief in the Court of Appeals of the State of Oregon to Odell Adams’ case to argue that the court should properly apply the preponderance standard for admissibility and find that opinions based on the pattern matching method that purport to identify the particular weapon from which a bullet or casing was fired are not scientifically valid and therefore inadmissible.
PRELIMINARY STATEMENT
Firearms identification (wherein an examiner purports to identify the particular gun that fired a bullet or casing) based on the subjective “pattern matching” method has led to wrongful convictions across the country. Misidentifications have resulted in wrongful arrests and crime lab audits. The government crime lab in Washington D.C. recently lost its accreditation as a result of multiple firearms misidentifications. At least 35 likely or known misidentifications have been documented. Those numbers likely represent only a small fraction of the total number of misidentifications and wrongful convictions attributable to firearms identification. Firearms examiners have, in fact, admitted as much, acknowledging the existence of an unknown number of largely undocumented and untraceable misidentifications.
Some courts continue to admit firearms identifications based on precedent, mistakenly assuming that, because judges have admitted firearms opinions for decades, the underlying method must have been proved scientifically valid in the past. Recently, however, more and more courts have begun to doubt the validity of the method. Courts that have conducted an extensive review of the studies and heard from impartial scientists have concluded that the “AFTE” pattern matching method for firearms identification is not scientifically valid. Those courts exclude opinion testimony that purports to identify a particular gun as the source of a bullet or casing from a scene.