The Ledger

12.7 Myth of Fingerprints

In this episode (12.7), the brother of a man jailed for 12 years for a crime he didn't commit is the suspect in the real killer's death. Lt. Van Buren was the original lead detective in the case that led to the conviction of the wrong man. Green and Briscoe try to straighten it all out.

The episode appears to be based in part on the case of Joyce Gilchrist, an Oklahoma police chemist who falsified evidence and sent innocent people to prison. The episode begins with some Staten Island-y party girls discovering the body of the victim, James Foley, in his apartment. The murder weapon, apparently, was the victim's large tv set, which landed on his head with some force. Forensics reports that there are 53 sets of fingerprints in the apartment, which means a headache for the detectives. They focus on a different angle at first, looking into a custody dispute between Foley and the mother of his child. The mother's new boyfriend has a manslaughter conviction of his record, but the boyfriend sends the detectives in a new direction when he tells them that Foley was dealing drugs. The detectives look into it and see that Foley was once busted with a large quanitity of drugs, but walked away from the charges. A narcotics detective who worked on the case tells Briscoe and Green that Foley flipped and rolled on 6 other dealers. There's a new motive for his murder! They visit one of the cons Foley put away at Sing Sing. The con, named Martin, tells them that Foley told him he once killed somebody. They look into it, and find that the murder he had supposedly committed had been solved, and that someone else -- a man named Campbell -- was convicted of it. Looking through the file, Green notices that the lead witness in the case was unreliable (because of a criminal record) and that, more importantly, the lead detective on the case was none other than Anita Van Buren, his current boss and lieutenant.

Van Buren recalls the case and says the Campbell had been spotted at the scene. The detectives learn that Campbell's brother, Luke, had visited Campbell and Martin in prison. Perhaps he got the info from Martin about the Foley, and took it upon himself to kill him? It's beginning to seem like it.

The detectives confront Luke, who denies any knowledge, but then his prints turn up in the victim's apartment. They arrest him, and Briscoe tells him, "Prints don't lie." "Everyone lied," he shoots back, referring to his brother's conviction. Under pressure, Luke confesses to Foley's murder, saying he went to talk to him, but things got out of hand, and he pushed him and the tv fell on his head.

Before they can bring Luke to trial, they have to straighten out the facts of the original murder. Was Campbell indeed falsely convicted? Southerlyn and Van Buren talk to the original eye-witness, who was working as a prostitute at the time. Having begun her new life with a husband and everything, she is reluctant to talk. Their quest into the past also suffers a blow because a lot of forensic evidence has been lost since the original trial, due to several moves and a flood. So that leaves the forensics tech who originally matched Campbells fingerprints to those found on the murder weapon. The tech and Van Buren have been friends for many years, so Van Buren delicately asks her about her work on the case. McCoy says he wants the tech's original files sent to the FBI for analysis. FBI forensics tells Southerlyn that the fingerprints only matched in 6 points, which is comparatively few, and the NYPD tech should have pointed this out during the investigation.

The implications of the forensic tech's sloppiness are far reaching, and DA Nora Lewin points this out. She orders an investigation into all the cases the tech worked on. The FBI determines that 7 out of 20 cases they looked at contained "false positives": the tech had exaggerated the quality of evidence against the people in many of the cases she worked on. Uh oh.

This puts Van Buren on the defensive, both because of her friendship with the forensic tech, and also because, she says, the case "made her" and got her noticed in the department. Without it, she doesn't think she would have become a lieutenant. The FBI's review of the evidence leads to a new suspect/accomplice in the original murder, a man named Russo. Lewin tells her staff to go after both Russo and the fingerprint technician. Van Buren, Green, and Briscoe arrest the fingerprint tech. McCoy argues that her lies led to the death of an innocent person in prison who had been convicted because of her testimony.

McCoy wants to charge her with Manslaughter 2. So let me ask you something: sending someone to jail has the forseeable consequence that the person will be killed? According to McCoy, yes. Give me a break!

Anyway, somewhat unbelievably, the jury returns a guilty verdict against the technician. Van Buren is emotional, and Briscoe tells her she's still a good cop, etc., etc. Van Buren visits the convicted technician in jail, who rips her a new one and tells her that she, Van Buren, is complicit in the whole results-based mentality, too, and that this leads to false convictions.

Posted by adm at April 9, 2004 06:12 PM

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