Amicus Brief: Odell Adams 2026
STate of oREGON V. oDELL adams
Filing Date
March 19, 2026
Charge
Unlawful use of a weapon with a firearm and second-degree criminal mischief
Jurisdiction
The Supreme Court of the State of Oregon
Partners
Forensic Justice Project
Summary
CIFS, the Forensic Justice Project, and forensic science scholars and legal professionals filed this amicus brief on the Supreme Court of Oregon to Odell Adams’ case. This 2026 briefs follows our 2022 brief in the Appeals Court of Oregon which lead to the court ruling 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. This brief asks the Supreme Court to affirm the Appeal’s Court ruling.
PRELIMINARY STATEMENT
Firearms identification (wherein an examiner purports to identify the particular gun that fired a bullet or ejected a casing) based on the subjective “pattern matching” method (the “AFTE Method”) has contributed to wrongful convictions across the country. Misidentifications have resulted in wrongful arrests and crime lab audits. In 2021, the government crime lab in Washington D.C. 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.
The Tibbs court, however, went on to explain that, on closer examination, “these precedents ultimately stand on a fairly flimsy foundation.” That is, “trial courts defer to expert witnesses; appellate courts then defer to the trial courts; and subsequent courts then defer to the earlier decisions.” The Tibbs court, and others like it, recognized the need for a more critical analysis after hearing from impartial scientists outside the law enforcement community of firearms examiners. In each of those cases, the courts came to the same conclusion: the AFTE pattern matching method of firearms identification fails many of the factors required for scientific validity. Those courts excluded or limited opinion testimony that purports to identify a particular gun as the source of a bullet or casing from a scene.