More BLAH, BLAH, BLAH from MTG. He ignores some very simple truths.
Both the fragments bullet found in the limo and CE399 were positively matched to Oswald's rifle to the exclusion of all other weapons through well established and accept means that have been accepted as valid evidence by our courts since 1879.
The fragments were found in the same limo that both shooting victims were riding in.
CE399 was found on the stretcher that one of the victims was transported on at Parkland.
NAA testing showed that the lead fragments recovered from the limo matched the metallurgical contend of the lead fragments recovered from JFK's head.
NAA testing showed the fragments from JBC's wrist matched the lead in CE399.
While it has been determined that NAA testing is not 100% conclusive that two fragments came from the same bullet, it is still probative. It would be a remarkable coincidence if just one of these tests produced a false positive. MTG wants us to believe that two remarkable coincidences occurred. It would be highly significant if they did not match. In that circumstance we could conclude that the fragments did not come from the same bullet.
Likewise, it would be remarkable if the striations on the two large copper fragments just coincidentally matched test bullets from Oswald's rifle.
In short, the forensic evidence is exactly what we would expect it to be if the fragmented bullet in the limo, the recovered lead fragments, and CE399 had all come through the barrel of Oswald's rifle. MTG will continue to ignore this and create excuses for not believing that is what happened. MTG would have us believe that the fragments from JBC's wrist and the lead from CE399 just coincidentally had the same make up. MTG would have us believe that the lead fragment from recovered from the limo and the fragments removed from JFK's head just coincidentally had the same make up.
MTG is an airhead. That has been proven conclusively.
LOL! Are you serious? You're still repeating Guinn's refuted NAA claims, even after being presented with two scientific studies done by seven scientists that destroyed those claims?
And you're still citing ballistic matching as concrete evidence that CE 399 and the bullet fragments came from the alleged murder weapon, even after being made aware that numerous scientists have found serious problems with the entire field of ballistic matching?
I should point out for any newcomers that your reference to "well established and accepted means that have been accepted as valid evidence by our courts since 1879" is referring to ballistic matching, also known as forensic firearms analysis.
As I've said before, even when people present you with hard scientific evidence, you will reject it for no valid reason simply because it refutes what you want to believe.
Obviously, until I brought them to your attention, you were blissfully unaware of the scientific objections to ballistic matching. You have clearly been caught off guard by this information, yet you refuse to acknowledge it and just blindly continue to cite ballistic matching because it is the one and only way you can link the bullet and fragment evidence in the JFK case with "Oswald's rifle."
Here are more articles on the scientific community's objections to ballistic matching:
The Myth of the Match: Pattern Matching in Cases Involving Firearms Evidence
https://www.wisbar.org/NewsPublications/WisconsinLawyer/Pages/Article.aspx?Volume=98&Issue=2&ArticleID=30850That “Ballistics Match” on TV Isn’t as Certain as You Think (written by a former prosecutor and an ACS-CHAL forensic lawyer-scientist)
https://www.texasdwisite.com/forensic-science/ballistics-matching/REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT: Forensic Science in Criminal Courts: Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature-Comparison Methods
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/PCAST/pcast_forensic_science_report_final.pdfMaryland Supreme Court Limits Testimony on Bullet-Matching Evidence
https://reason.com/2023/06/22/maryland-supreme-court-limits-testimony-on-bullet-matching-evidence/Takeaways From a Refreshing Rejection of Junk Science
https://kaiserlaw.com/takeaways-from-a-refreshing-rejection-of-junk-science/Motion to Exclude Ballistics Expert Evidence
https://datafordefenders.org/document/motion-to-exclude-ballistics-expert-evidence/Amicus Brief in Support of Excluding Firearm and Toolmark (FA/TM) Identification Evidence
https://datafordefenders.org/document/amicus-brief-in-support-of-excluding-firearm-and-toolmark-fa-tm-identification-evidence/Here is an excerpt from another recent article on the scientific objections to ballistic matching, titled "Devil in the Grooves: The Case Against Forensic Firearms Analysis," authored by investigative journalist Radley Balko:
For more than a century, forensic firearms analysts have been telling juries that they can match a specific bullet to a specific gun, to the exclusion of all other guns. This claimed ability has helped to put tens of thousands of people in prison, and in a nontrivial percentage of those cases, it’s safe to say that ballistics matching was the only evidence linking the accused to the crime.
But as with other forensic specialties collectively known as pattern matching fields, the claim is facing growing scrutiny. Scientists from outside of forensics point out that there’s no scientific basis for much of what firearms analysts say in court. These critics, backed by a growing body of research, make a pretty startling claim — one that could have profound effects on the criminal justice system: We don't actually know if it's possible to match a specific bullet to a specific gun. And even if it is, we don't know if forensic firearms analysts are any good at it.
The problem with pattern matching
To understand why Hooks’s ruling is so important, we need to delve into some background.
Forensic firearms analysis, or ballistic matching, falls under a category of forensics called toolmark identification, which itself falls under a broader category called pattern matching.
In pattern matching specialties, analysts typically look at a piece of forensic evidence taken from a crime scene and compare it to another piece of evidence linked to a suspect. So they might compare a hair from a suspect’s head to a hair found at the crime scene; a bite mark found on the victim’s body to a suspect’s teeth; or shoe prints to a suspect’s loafers.
Pattern matching analysts then typically make one of three determinations: the two items are a match, the evidence from the accused can be excluded as the source of the evidence found at the crime scene (not a match), or there isn’t sufficient data to make a determination (inconclusive).
In the subfield of toolmark identification, analysts attempt to determine if a mark linked to the crime scene was created by a piece of evidence linked to a suspect. Technically, bitemark analysis is a form of toolmark analysis (the teeth are the “tool”). Toolmark analysts might also try to match knife wounds to a specific knife, the marks on a door or door frame to a specific pry bar or screwdriver, or the marks on a bullet or shell casing to a specific gun.
Pattern matching forensics has a dubious history. Perhaps the most notorious example is the Mississippi dentist Michael West, who in the 1990s and 2000s claimed he could use a fluorescent light to find marks on skin that no one else could see. West claimed to have found otherwise invisible bite marks on victims' bodies, or marks on suspects’ hands that could only have come from gripping a specific knife, or from grasping a victim’s specific purse strap. He sometimes claimed to have found these marks weeks after the incident that allegedly created them. West even once claimed he could match the fingernail marks on a suspect’s back to the fingernails of the victim. He “tested” his theory by prying the fingernails off the dead victim, putting them on sticks, using the sticks to scratch fresh skin, and then “matching” the two sets of fingernail scrapes.
Defenders of these fields argue that analysts like West are aberrant rogues, and not representative of analysts today. But West was considered a pioneer in his day, and the fact that courts continued to certify charlatans like him as expert witnesses ought to tell us something about their ability to distinguish credible expertise from quackery.
Some of the problems in pattern matching are specific to particular fields, but two core criticisms apply across the board. The first is that these fields are entirely subjective. Pattern matching largely boils down to an analyst “eyeballing” two pieces of evidence, then deciding if they're a match. Unlike, say, identifying a blood type or matching a car to registration records, there are no objective criteria in pattern matching. There are no ground truths to find. There are no numbers to crunch.
The second overarching problem is that in most of these areas of analysis, we don’t know how often the distinguishing characteristics used to determine a “match” occur across the broader population of the thing being examined. For example, we don’t know what percentage of the human population’s teeth are capable of leaving a certain pattern of marks on human skin. We don’t even know if such a calculation is even possible. And if it were possible, we don’t know that human skin is capable of recording and preserving bite marks in a way that’s useful (the studies that have examined this suggest it isn't). The characteristics of a bite mark could be affected by the angle of the biter’s teeth, whether the victim was pulling away at the time of the bite, the elasticity of the victim’s skin, the rate at which the victim’s body heals, and countless other factors.
Similarly, we can’t say what percentage of pry bars are capable of leaving a series of scratches on a door. In many cases, both the tool and the substance on which it recorded marks could be affected by an almost endless number of variables. The marks on a door frame might have been created by the screwdriver or pry bar found in the suspect’s home, but there’s no scientific basis to claim the perpetrator couldn’t have used a different screwdriver, pry bar, or a boundless list of other items.
To get a feel for the subjectivity of these fields, we can contrast them with DNA. A typical DNA test looks at a number of markers — typically 16 to 20 — and the sequence of genes present at those markers. Because we know how often a particular sequence occurs at each marker across the human population, we can calculate the odds of anyone other than the suspect having the same DNA sequence found at those markers. If a DNA sample has degraded to the point where analysts can’t use all 20 markers, they can adjust the percentages accordingly. We can calculate a specific margin for error — the odds that a particular hair, skin cell, or sperm cell belongs to anyone other than the defendant, and then relay that information to the jury to inform their deliberations.
We can’t generate a margin for error in the pattern matching fields because we don’t know the frequency with which any of these allegedly distinguishing characteristics occur. Therefore, we can’t estimate the odds that anyone other than the suspect may have left that evidence. We can only rely on the opinions of expert witnesses and their ability to eyeball it. (https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/devil-in-the-grooves-the-case-against)Speaking of ignoring "very simple truths," why do you keep ignoring and denying the fact that no "Oswald" rifle test has ever duplicated Oswald's alleged shooting performance, even though the tests did not require the expert riflemen to fire under all the same conditions that Oswald would have faced?
Topic: The Forgotten Rifle Test: The HSCA's Rifle Test (Read 5254 times)