March 14, 2023 • 35 mins
Warning: This episode contains details of gun violence.
The gangster era of the 1920s led to breakthroughs in firearms used as evidence in criminal trials. But many studies now show that matching cartridge casings from a crime scene leaves room for human error. And for Odell Adams, the questionable reliability of firearms analysis put him on trial twice for the same crime.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This episode contains details of gun violence. Please take care
where and when you listen. It's a Friday night in
the fall of twenty eighteen in East Portland, Oregon. O'Dell
Adams heads to the Speakeasy Lounge for a drink. It's
(00:32):
a stressful time for him. His mother is losing her
battle with cancer. My mom was a very strong woman.
She took care of all of us by herself. I
watched her struggle, but still like made things happen for
us and still provided and still did everything. And she
always wanted the best for us actually when it was little,
(00:54):
and did everything that she could. O'Dell grew up in
a tough neighborhood. He was charged with his first crime
as a kid at age thirteen. They was treating me
like a grown up, Like I can actually remember a
time where like a officer like went in my draws
actually looking for crack. I was like, what like twelve,
(01:15):
twelve years old. It became like regular for me. Okay,
here come the cops. Okay, well they're gonna do this,
and they're gonna do that. His older sister, Sharnissa, remembers
this time for Odell was hard. I don't want to
say he kind of fell through the cracks, but he
was more so looking for a community. And you know,
(01:35):
the neighborhood that we eventually moved to, it had a
lot of mentors, a lot of gang members, i would say,
but for the young folk, it was their community. He
was a very wise kid, and very strong and a
very protective, you know, and so maybe he felt at
that very young age that he had to prove himself.
(01:57):
But O'Dell is looking to move past all that to
rebuild his future. And at around ten thirty pm, he's
standing outside the bar talking with a couple of buddies
when a gold Buick pulls into the parking lot. Surveillance
footage shows the driver interacting with O'Dell and his friends.
The driver of the car backs up, parks about seven
(02:18):
spaces away from Odell's group, and goes into the bar.
Then O'Dell can be seen walking away Attorney John rob
O'Dell walks off the camera that's facing north, towards the sidewalk,
towards the street and basically into the blackness and off
the camera. Within a few seconds, there's a figure, an
(02:39):
indistinct figure, that enters the south facing camera and the
most that you can tell is the person's wearing white shoes.
Then gunshots. A couple of bullets hit the buick, some
hit an suv nearby, Others hit the building. Some even
went over the roof. Luckily nobody is injured. Whoever fired
(02:59):
the shots flees witnesses call nine one one. Here's the
audio from one of those calls. I just saw a
shot fired towards me. And you're at what corner? Sorry,
I'm still trigging that. Okay, press and talk about what corner? Start?
Did you see who shot at you? I did not?
(03:22):
And could you see the guns? I did not, but
I saw the muzzle flush the collar, tells the dispatcher.
He didn't see the shooter's face, but could describe what
the person was wearing. Black pants, black hoodie, white shoes. Okay,
and who did this? What was the subject? He was? Whitemail? Blackmail?
What was he white? Black, Asian? Or Hispanic? I could
(03:46):
not tell? Its dark. Because O'Dell walked out of the
security camera range just before the shooting started, police target
him as a suspect, even though he was wearing a
completely different outfit. He had a matching camouflage jacket. Camouflage pants,
a black baseball hat, a white tshirt, and these bright
(04:08):
white kind of clean shoes. Police recover ten forty caliber
cartridge casings from the bar's parking lot. About a month later,
at four am, they come for him. Police are outside
O'Dell's mother's home where he is living, detonating two flash
grenades through a loudspeaker. They order everyone in the house
(04:31):
to come out with their hands up. Odell and Charnice's
mother had just passed away a few days earlier. Thank
god that she didn't have a squat team busting her
door while she's sick in bed. I thought I was
dreaming at first, actually when I heard this big bomb
that like a little flash bomb or something. So then
(04:51):
I hear them outside saying come out with your hands
up and all this other stuff. So we came out,
you know what I'm saying, Like me and my brothers
and sisters and stuff. We came out. Police search the
house and find two forty caliber hands guns in an
attic crawl space an ammunition in a downstairs dresser. Odell
is arrested and misses his mother's funeral. Only one of
(05:15):
the two guns found at the home has his DNA
along with DNA from three other people. If you can
create that link, you can link the firearm to the shooting.
You can link Odell's DNA to the firearm, and you
can combine that with the surveillance video that appears to
show Odell walking off one screen, then onto the next
(05:37):
screen and firing all of the shots. From the prosecution standpoint,
you have a pretty clear cut case. Investigators send the
gun with the DNA to a firearms examiner for analysis.
That analysis will result in more than one bitter legal battle,
two different verdicts for the same crime, and more years
(05:58):
of O'Dell's life wasted in the system. I'm Molly her
and this is CSI on trial. Two or three stains
are really not enough to call something an impact better
from gunshot that's going to put someone in prison the
rest of your life. Thought that making up a lie
(06:18):
was gonna get you home center? What is it about
a bite mark that we make a dentist, an expert
in this area, who shot at you? He said, I
will sit in this jail and I will rot before
I take a pleebark. The problem with forensic science in
the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful
(06:39):
lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.
Today's episode Firearms Analysis. Firearms analysis got its start in
a now infamous criminal case. It was even made into
a movie on the Flaming battleground called Chicago. I got
(07:02):
a nice balantine all ready to deliver a balladine, but
Saint Jack does make sure it's a great make red ballantine.
On February fourteenth, nineteen twenty nine, during Prohibition, Chicago gangsters
led by Bugs Moran are waiting for a shipment of
(07:24):
Canadian whiskey when they're gunned down by men dressed as
police officers. It's now known as the Saint Valentine's Day massacre.
Seventy shells were recovered at the crime scene. More than
forty bullets and fragments were extracted from the victims. I'm
Keith bron Morris. Well, that's a bit formal Keith Morris.
(07:45):
Keith is a professor in forensic an investigative science at
West Virginia University. In the late twenties and early cities,
there was a group in Chicago that did work on
the scientific investigation of Crome and one of the leaders
would be Calvin Gondod Eventually, you know, he joined this
(08:05):
group and he promoted it very extensively. They worked on
the Valentine Day massacre and these kinds of cases. So
in the American context he was very sort of pre
eminent in the development of firearms examination. Doctor Calvin Goddard
was an Army colonel and forensics pioneer. He had recently
(08:27):
overseen the invention of a key piece of technology. They
developed the comparison microscope, which is used by firearms examiners
today to do comparisons, which is basically two microscopes which
have a common optical bridge which allows you to look
at two objects simultaneously in a single view. When police
(08:47):
discovered a cache of Thompson's submachine guns belonging to an
associate of Owl Capones, Goddard declared them a match to
the casings and bullets from the scene of the massacre.
The high profile case lent credibility to the growing discipline,
and just like other forensic method we've talked about before,
it developed as a part of law enforcement, and then
(09:10):
it became the development of police officers who took this
over and they sort of developed it further and further
and it became sort of widespread in the nation. Goddard
went on to lead his field, coining the term forensic ballistics,
training police departments and advising the FBI on the establishment
(09:31):
of their crime lab. So how does firearms analysis work.
It starts with a loaded gun and a cartridge casing.
You can think about a cartridge case as the housing
that contains the bullet and the propellant in order to
expellit out of the fire. When a gun is fired,
(09:51):
the bullet is often lost, but the cartridge casing that
held the bullet is kicked out of the side of
the gun. Finding bullets is a lot more difficult. You
can imagine if you in an area where it was
open and there's not thing that's been struck, then you
might not find that. But the cartridge cases are going
to be located somewhere close to where the shooter was standing,
(10:13):
So we have a far greater likelihood of obtaining cartridge
cases from the crime scene. The theory behind firearms analysis
is that no two guns are exactly identical, and that
every gun imprints a unique set of marks onto the
ammunition it fires. So the typical approach would be if,
(10:36):
for instance, we get cartridge cases from a crime scene,
and then at some point detective might come across a
suspect who may have a firearm. Then the firearm would
be provided and we would make test fires from that
particular firearm, and so those test fires would be unknowns.
(10:56):
We know that firearm X leaves these kinds of marks.
Then we would compare those cartridge cases to the ones
that were fired from the crime scene and see if
we find any features which are in correspondence to that
which we typically would find from cartridge cases fired from
the same gun, and also the similarity between cartridge cases
(11:21):
fed from different gun. Those comparisons would lead to the
examiner concluding whether or not the cartridge case was fired
by a specific firearm. The evidence isn't always clear. You
might get cartridge cases for whatever reason, don't have very
good markings on them, or they might be damaged, and
(11:42):
the firearms examiner is not in a position to actually
say whether it came from the same gun or a
different gun, so we'd call those an inconclusive result. Today,
we have more than a century of precedent for firearms
examination evidence being admitted at trial. Firearms and tool marks
is probably one of the most common pieces of evidence
(12:03):
in the United States. Met Julia Layton in episode one.
She's the former general counsel for the Public Defenders Service
in Washington, d C. It impacts a large large number
of cases, and typically cases that carry serious penalties, but
recently a DC murder trial challenged that precedent. I could
(12:26):
write a dozen articles on the weaknesses of firearms that
would not have the impact that testifying in one case
in getting a good decision from a judge has had.
(13:00):
So the case now challenging the precedent of firearms analysis
in court begins on a November afternoon in twenty sixteen.
From the top of the street in southeast Washington, d C.
You can see the Washington Monument. It's there next to
a low rise apartment building that Orlando Silver is shot
(13:20):
to death. A police officer spots a man running from
the scene and tossing a gun into a wooded area.
This suspect is identified as twenty four year old Marquette Tibbs. Tibbs,
a marijuana dealer and business associate of the deceased, is
arrested and charged with murder. Police recover the gun, a
(13:42):
forensic examiner fires it and compares that cartridge with those
recovered from the crime scene their conclusion the gun and
the casings from the scene are a match. In a
pre trial hearing, Marquette Tibbs public defenders argue that there
is no scientific basis for claiming a precise match, and
therefore the judge shouldn't allow that testimony. That's the Dobert standard,
(14:06):
which we talked about in episode one. For their part,
the prosecution offered up research studies they said could back
up the validity and reliability of firearms analysis. Nicholas Scourage
has analyzed dozens of these studies, and he testified about
his findings at the hearing. I'm a professor of psychology
(14:27):
and criminology at the University of California at Irvine. In
order to understand the value of a firearm examiner testifying
in court that two bullets are a match and identification,
you need to know both how accurate they are at
calling identifications when the bullets in fact came from the
(14:48):
same gun. But you also need to know that false
positive rate, how often the examiner gets it wrong when
the two bullets or cartridge cases were not fired by
the same gun. He found a lot of problems. First,
in many of these studies, participants were sent two groups
of cartridges that had been fired and asked to sort
(15:12):
them into matched pairs. So you could kind of analogize
this to a jigsaw puzzle, right, you're kind of putting
the pieces together and figuring out which piece goes where. Now,
from a pure scientific standpoint, that's not a very good
study design in the sense that they're able to exploit
(15:34):
this design to increase their accuracy. So you could look
at two of the unknown bullets and say, well, these
came from the same gun, and then you could compare
one of those unknown bullets to a different known bullet,
and if those are a match, then you know by
implication the other unknown bullet is also a match. Basically,
(15:57):
the process of elimination could conceivably help them get more
correct answers. In twenty fourteen, the AIMS Lab, a national
laboratory affiliated with Iowa State University, tried to resolve that
issue with another study. Participants were given a coin envelope
with two cartridge cases and they were simply asked did
(16:21):
these cases match or not? And the participant makes a
decision and then puts those cases back in that coin envelope.
So it's a much cleaner test of whether a firearm
examiner can look under a microscope and determine whether or
not two bullets or cartridge cases were fired by the
same gun. That makes sense, but it turns out this
(16:44):
one had its own issues. Not only could participants mark
identification for a match or elimination for a non match,
they could also choose a third option inconclusive. About twenty
percent of the participants responded inconclusive to every single one
of those comparisons. So this wasn't oh, a few of
(17:07):
them are inconclusive or not. This was every single response
was inconclusive. And then, to make things worse, this particular
study counted those responses as correct responses. Counting inconclusives as
correct made the examiners seem very accurate, But count inconclusives
(17:29):
as incorrect, and it's a whole different story. The error
rate goes from under one percent, which is the way
it was calculated by Aims, to about thirty three percent.
That's David Fegman from UC Hastings Law School. You met
him in episode one and he also testified in the
TIBs hearing have a seven year old granddaughter, and I said,
(17:52):
you know, if you have a math test, you have
ten questions and you answer I don't know or inconclusive.
But as I don't know to one of the questions,
do you get credit for that? And she looked at
me strangely, a smart seven year old in second graded,
and she said, well, no, that's wrong. And so what
a seven year old understands the researchers at the AIMS
(18:14):
Laboratory don't understand. Despite this pretty major flaw, the study
was used as proof that firearms identification is scientifically valid.
Then there was a follow up study to examine the
issue of reliability, just to quickly explain, validity looks at
how accurate a test is. Reliability looks at how consistent
(18:36):
it is. Will I drive a full block with the
parking break on if someone else parked the car and
put it on every single time? That's reliability. So this
was testing whether or not you can get the same
result multiple times. Participants were mailed sets of cartridge casings
to examine, and what they didn't know was that they
(18:56):
got the same sets twice, so if their analysis was reliable,
they should reach the same conclusions both times. They examine
the same sets, but that didn't happen. The examiners were
reaching the same conclusion about sixty five percent of the time.
And importantly, this doesn't mean they reached the correct conclusion
(19:18):
sixty five percent of the time. It only means they
reached the same conclusion sixty five percent of the time.
These studies are widely used to support firearms analysis, even
though none of them have ever been published in an independent,
peer reviewed scientific journal. The recognized standard for evidence based
(19:38):
research back to that pre trial hearing. After all, this
was presented in the Marquette Tibbs case, a DC Superior
Court judge refused to allow testimony that the cartridge from
the crime scene was a match to the gun found
in the wooded area, and Tibbs, who had maintained his innocence,
(19:59):
was found not guilty of murder. Julia Layton says, cases
like Tibbs doesn't mean we should throw the method out altogether.
We are not suggesting that firearms examination evidence disappears altogether.
There are objective standards for class characteristics. There are objective
(20:20):
standards that are laid out by manufacturers that can allow
a firearms examiner to objectively say that the evidence found
on the crime scene was fired from a making model
of gun with a square firing pit. What we're suggesting
is that the science isn't there for a claim that
(20:41):
they can identify the source, and that what recent studies
have been done suggests that there may be very very
high error rates when they make that claim. While new
precedent is being made in the Tibbs case, Odell Adams,
the man you heard about at the beginning of this episode,
is still waiting for his day in court. It's now
(21:26):
twenty twenty. O'Dell Adams has spent two years in jail
since his arrest, just waiting for his trial. The delay
was first due to some issues with legal representation and
then COVID. I've lost everything actually duped to this situation.
I lost my apartment, I lost my job, I lost
(21:48):
going to see my mother being buried, and just a
whole lot of stuff was just like heavy on me
during that time. It's common in cases like O'Dell's, when
a felon is charged with possession of a firearm, that
federal prosecutors take the case over from the state. Since
the age of sixteen, Odell had a seemingly endless series
(22:10):
of run ins with the law. He'd been pulled over
and charged with fifty traffic violations, mostly things like driving
without insurance or a suspended license. He had fifteen different
felony charges that were either eventually dropped or where he
was found not guilty. He was convicted of a drug
felony and a felony for threatening assault, and then possession
(22:33):
of a gun as a felon, which put him on
supervised release during the time of the incident at the
speakeasy lounge. His record put him on the investigation's radar,
and that's also why federal prosecutors wanted to take over
the case. Those prosecutors might have assumed it would be
an easy win. Defense attorney John Robb from the prosecution perspective,
(22:56):
it's kind of an open and shut case. You have
the video showing Odell walking off the screen, somebody wearing
white shoes which Odell was wearing, walking onto the other screen.
You find this firearm where he was living, and you
have forensic evidence that ties that firearm to the shootings.
You still have that witness there that describes somebody wearing
(23:17):
different clothing, but the idea that that person just got
it wrong. Becomes a lot easier to stomach when you
know that there's something that is connecting the firearm found
down the hallway from the bedroom that Odell was living
in to the firearm found at the scene and be
an awful coincidence for some other shooter to happen to
have done that. But the key evidence are those casings
(23:40):
found outside the speakeasy lounge. Do they match those test
fired by the gun found at his mother's house. First
they run a computerized analysis and it says no match.
The speakeasy evidence was not created by the gun, So
at that point in the investigation, the investigators assumed that
(24:01):
there wasn't a match. And it's not quite clear what
happens at this point. The case doesn't get dropped, the
case doesn't go away. In about four to six months,
they come to believe that there's been some error in
that initial process, and then they redo that process. The
computer gives a different result at this point. At this
point the computer says that they actually do match. The
(24:24):
computer test is followed by a comparison performed by a
human examiner, which is pretty common using a comparison microscope.
The technology that's been around since the nineteen twenties. The
examiner determines that all the cartridges found at the speakeasy
lounge had been fired by the gun from Odell's mother's attic.
(24:44):
Federal prosecutors had their case. They offer Adams a plea deal.
I was like, no way, I'm not accepting something that
I didn't do. I'm like, bro, take the plea. He's
like I'm not. That's where they get you, where you
get tired, you know. And so he's super strong. I
(25:05):
sit back and reflect with him now, like, Wow, you're
so freaking resilient. Like as we're saying, we just want
you home, and you're saying I didn't do it, and
I'm not going to admit to something that I did
not do, just like in the Tibbs case in DC
you heard about earlier. The judge holds a pre trial
hearing about the firearms evidence. Odell's lawyers argue that it
(25:27):
isn't reliable or valid. The prosecution's firearms analyst struggles to
articulate an objective basis or methodology for his exam process. Instead,
the court hears a familiar argument. Here's Nicholas Scourage again.
What you're left with is a firearm examiner getting up
(25:47):
there and saying, based on all of this experience, I'm
right and you should trust me. And just like in
the Tibbs case, the judge agrees with the defense. He
will only allow factual observations that the caliber of the
gun matches the caliber of the casings. At trial, what
Judge Mossman ruled is that they hadn't demonstrated that there
(26:12):
was anything more going on there other than a person
looking at two things and saying I think they match
or I think they don't match. There wasn't any further
scientific pursuit that was underlying them, and he had ruled
that based on that this was not something that he
would be permitted to be called science in the courtroom,
(26:32):
the prosecution is not allowed to present testimony that the
casings matched the specific gun. For the second time in
a year, the science of firearms analysis has been successfully challenged,
and in October of twenty twenty, the jury finds Adams
not guilty, but Odell doesn't go home. Remember how we
(26:54):
told you earlier that federal prosecutors took over this case. Typically,
when the federal government takes over the case like that,
what the state prosecutor will do is they will dismiss
their case. But instead of dropping their case, the state
moved forward. That's unusual when a defendant has been found
not guilty in a federal trial. Through the federal proceedings
(27:16):
from the state kept a case. They went back to
grand jury and substantially increase the severity of the state
case by adding an attempted murder and attempted to assault
one charge. If convicted of these new charges, Adams would
face many years in prison. I never thought that I
would have to go to trial twice for the same as.
(27:38):
It is never in my life. And people that I
was telling that too, like the guards, guards and stuff
that was like telling me, like, you already beat your case.
How come you want to trial again? I don't know.
And they was a shake and ere their heads. I
felt like, oh, hell no, you know you all messed up.
We're gonna pick it up again and get it done right.
(27:59):
So it felt like almost like this good old boy
system and not really about the crime. One interpretation of
the motives behind the state trial has to do with precedent.
Remember what we talked about earlier. Precedent is important because
it can impact other cases in the future. So this time,
state prosecutors brought two new firearms examiners to the pre
(28:22):
trial hearing. One of them claimed his personal error rate
was zero. Adams attorneys, which now included John Robb, took
the same approach as his federal defense team, arguing that
firearms analysis isn't scientifically validated. David Fegman also testified. The
judge ultimately decided, well, I'm going to let the firearms
(28:44):
examiner testify, but defense you can put Fegman on as well,
and he can testify to the limitations and we'll just
let the jury decided. And so in the Adams case,
which was unusual for me, I testify both of the
judges of the criminal matter to exclude it, and then
I testify to the jury on how good a weight
it should be given. At trial, the two firearms examiners,
(29:08):
each with an impressive resume, told jurors the cartridges collected
at the scene were a match to the gun found
at Odell's mother's house. They also openly acknowledged that they
were indeed there, in part as a response to the
precedent set at Adam's federal trial. Here's the trial testimony
from one of those examiners, Kate Todd. As farms and
(29:31):
tool marks examiners and even just forensic scientists, we follow
admissibility hearings across the country. Anytime that there is a
ruling specifically about the science, we always want to go
back and see why a certain ruling was made. She
claimed the issue was not a lack of science, but
a poor explanation of it. I'm not saying that the
United States government did an insufficient job. I'm saying that
(29:54):
the analyst did not explain the actual science correctly. Firearms
examiners like Kate Todd weren't the only ones watching Odell's case.
January twenty twenty one, the Department of Justice issued an
unusual statement criticizing the Peacast Report, a report that had
been issued five years earlier. We've talked about PEACAST repeatedly
(30:18):
throughout this podcast and how it questioned the scientific validity
of several forensic methods, including firearms analysis. The DOJ statement said,
in part quote, formerly addressing Peacast's incorrect claims has become
increasingly important as a number of recent federal and state
court opinions have cited the report as support for limiting
(30:41):
the admissibility of firearms tool marks evidence in criminal cases,
and it references the cases of Marquette Tibbs and Odell
Adams by name Julia Layton. This is unsigned, has no seal.
It doesn't explain who did it, why they did it.
This appears to be sort of an effort by lawyers
(31:05):
didn't like the court's rulings to try and put something
out under DJ's label, saying there was something wrong with
pecast and there's something wrong with these court decisions, rather
than putting their names to it and filing it back
to O'Dell's trial. Aside from the firearms evidence, the state
trial was a repeat of the federal one, although this
(31:26):
time there were no black jurors, which O'Dell felt was
a distinct disadvantage. When they say a jury of your peers,
as people that's living in the same area that you're
living in and seeing the same things that you're seeing
and going through the same things that you're going through.
I got tattoos, I got brais, and I fit the
description of being guilty behind that alone. Ultimately, the jury
(31:50):
acquitted O'Dell of the most serious charges, found that he
was not guilty of the attempted murder and attempted assault one,
but did find him guilty of the unlawful use of
a weapon count and the other less serious charges, which
was a finding that they had believed beyond a reasonable
doubt that he was the individual that fired those shots.
(32:10):
The jury believed he was the shooter. By the time
of the verdict, he had been in jail for three years.
At his sentencing, Adam spoke in court for the first time,
It's not nor the big picture is painted upon me.
It's like I'm just it's bad person, which I'm not.
It's been barriers that I had to climb over and
(32:32):
I'm steady climbing and it's whatever happens today. It happened.
I have been getting a bad end of the stick
all my life, so I am like, like, how much
more to a person has to take. It's hard to hear,
but O'Dell says he's not a bad person. He's just
(32:54):
had the odds stacked against him all of his life.
O'Dell had to serve two more years in prison on
top of his time served. He was finally released into
twenty twenty one, in time to see family at Christmas
and for the first time he was able to visit
his mother's grave. His journey through the legal system represents
(33:16):
both the past and the future. His state trial is
rooted in a century of legal precedent established for firearms
analysis evidence. His federal case represents the prospect for change
and how that evidence is treated moving forward. Whether it's
changed the judicial system will accept remains to be seen.
(33:39):
Odell Adams is appealing his conviction, but if he succeeds
in winning a new trial, there's a chance it could
end with an even harsher sentence. I didn't do this.
I'm innocent. Like I have been accepting a lot of things,
and it's a time where you just get fed up.
So that's why I appeal. And if I have to
(34:03):
appeal again, I'm will appeal and I will keep a pillion.
And it's like when you are fighting the whole United
States by yourself, it's kind of hard. Is hard next time?
On CSI on trial. Blood stain pattern analysis used to
(34:26):
wrongly convict a state trooper of murdering his family. Just repeatedly,
over and over. I'm telling you he's wrong, he's wrong,
he's wrong, he's wrong, he's wrong. I did not do This.
CSI on Trial is a co production of iHeart Podcasts
and School of Humans, based on the Curiosity Stream series
(34:48):
CSI on Trial, created by Eleanor Grant and produced by
the Biscuit Factory. You can watch all six episodes of
the video series right now at curiosity stream dot com.
This episode is hosted and written by me Molly Hermann
and researched by Katie Dunn and myself. Our producer is
(35:08):
Miranda Hawkins. Jessica Metzker is the senior producer. Virginia Prescott,
Jason English, Brandon Barr and el C Crowley are the
executive producers. Sound design in mix by Miranda Hawkins. Special
thanks to John Higgins, Rob Burke, Rob Lyle, and Brandon Craigie.
(35:30):
If you're enjoying the show, leave a review in your
favorite podcast app. Check out the Curiosity Audio Network for
podcasts covering history, pop culture, true crime, and more. School
of Humans
This episode contains details of gun violence. Please take care
where and when you listen. It's a Friday night in
the fall of twenty eighteen in East Portland, Oregon. O'Dell
Adams heads to the Speakeasy Lounge for a drink. It's
(00:32):
a stressful time for him. His mother is losing her
battle with cancer. My mom was a very strong woman.
She took care of all of us by herself. I
watched her struggle, but still like made things happen for
us and still provided and still did everything. And she
always wanted the best for us actually when it was little,
(00:54):
and did everything that she could. O'Dell grew up in
a tough neighborhood. He was charged with his first crime
as a kid at age thirteen. They was treating me
like a grown up, Like I can actually remember a
time where like a officer like went in my draws
actually looking for crack. I was like, what like twelve,
(01:15):
twelve years old. It became like regular for me. Okay,
here come the cops. Okay, well they're gonna do this,
and they're gonna do that. His older sister, Sharnissa, remembers
this time for Odell was hard. I don't want to
say he kind of fell through the cracks, but he
was more so looking for a community. And you know,
(01:35):
the neighborhood that we eventually moved to, it had a
lot of mentors, a lot of gang members, i would say,
but for the young folk, it was their community. He
was a very wise kid, and very strong and a
very protective, you know, and so maybe he felt at
that very young age that he had to prove himself.
(01:57):
But O'Dell is looking to move past all that to
rebuild his future. And at around ten thirty pm, he's
standing outside the bar talking with a couple of buddies
when a gold Buick pulls into the parking lot. Surveillance
footage shows the driver interacting with O'Dell and his friends.
The driver of the car backs up, parks about seven
(02:18):
spaces away from Odell's group, and goes into the bar.
Then O'Dell can be seen walking away Attorney John rob
O'Dell walks off the camera that's facing north, towards the sidewalk,
towards the street and basically into the blackness and off
the camera. Within a few seconds, there's a figure, an
(02:39):
indistinct figure, that enters the south facing camera and the
most that you can tell is the person's wearing white shoes.
Then gunshots. A couple of bullets hit the buick, some
hit an suv nearby, Others hit the building. Some even
went over the roof. Luckily nobody is injured. Whoever fired
(02:59):
the shots flees witnesses call nine one one. Here's the
audio from one of those calls. I just saw a
shot fired towards me. And you're at what corner? Sorry,
I'm still trigging that. Okay, press and talk about what corner? Start?
Did you see who shot at you? I did not?
(03:22):
And could you see the guns? I did not, but
I saw the muzzle flush the collar, tells the dispatcher.
He didn't see the shooter's face, but could describe what
the person was wearing. Black pants, black hoodie, white shoes. Okay,
and who did this? What was the subject? He was? Whitemail? Blackmail?
What was he white? Black, Asian? Or Hispanic? I could
(03:46):
not tell? Its dark. Because O'Dell walked out of the
security camera range just before the shooting started, police target
him as a suspect, even though he was wearing a
completely different outfit. He had a matching camouflage jacket. Camouflage pants,
a black baseball hat, a white tshirt, and these bright
(04:08):
white kind of clean shoes. Police recover ten forty caliber
cartridge casings from the bar's parking lot. About a month later,
at four am, they come for him. Police are outside
O'Dell's mother's home where he is living, detonating two flash
grenades through a loudspeaker. They order everyone in the house
(04:31):
to come out with their hands up. Odell and Charnice's
mother had just passed away a few days earlier. Thank
god that she didn't have a squat team busting her
door while she's sick in bed. I thought I was
dreaming at first, actually when I heard this big bomb
that like a little flash bomb or something. So then
(04:51):
I hear them outside saying come out with your hands
up and all this other stuff. So we came out,
you know what I'm saying, Like me and my brothers
and sisters and stuff. We came out. Police search the
house and find two forty caliber hands guns in an
attic crawl space an ammunition in a downstairs dresser. Odell
is arrested and misses his mother's funeral. Only one of
(05:15):
the two guns found at the home has his DNA
along with DNA from three other people. If you can
create that link, you can link the firearm to the shooting.
You can link Odell's DNA to the firearm, and you
can combine that with the surveillance video that appears to
show Odell walking off one screen, then onto the next
(05:37):
screen and firing all of the shots. From the prosecution standpoint,
you have a pretty clear cut case. Investigators send the
gun with the DNA to a firearms examiner for analysis.
That analysis will result in more than one bitter legal battle,
two different verdicts for the same crime, and more years
(05:58):
of O'Dell's life wasted in the system. I'm Molly her
and this is CSI on trial. Two or three stains
are really not enough to call something an impact better
from gunshot that's going to put someone in prison the
rest of your life. Thought that making up a lie
(06:18):
was gonna get you home center? What is it about
a bite mark that we make a dentist, an expert
in this area, who shot at you? He said, I
will sit in this jail and I will rot before
I take a pleebark. The problem with forensic science in
the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful
(06:39):
lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.
Today's episode Firearms Analysis. Firearms analysis got its start in
a now infamous criminal case. It was even made into
a movie on the Flaming battleground called Chicago. I got
(07:02):
a nice balantine all ready to deliver a balladine, but
Saint Jack does make sure it's a great make red ballantine.
On February fourteenth, nineteen twenty nine, during Prohibition, Chicago gangsters
led by Bugs Moran are waiting for a shipment of
(07:24):
Canadian whiskey when they're gunned down by men dressed as
police officers. It's now known as the Saint Valentine's Day massacre.
Seventy shells were recovered at the crime scene. More than
forty bullets and fragments were extracted from the victims. I'm
Keith bron Morris. Well, that's a bit formal Keith Morris.
(07:45):
Keith is a professor in forensic an investigative science at
West Virginia University. In the late twenties and early cities,
there was a group in Chicago that did work on
the scientific investigation of Crome and one of the leaders
would be Calvin Gondod Eventually, you know, he joined this
(08:05):
group and he promoted it very extensively. They worked on
the Valentine Day massacre and these kinds of cases. So
in the American context he was very sort of pre
eminent in the development of firearms examination. Doctor Calvin Goddard
was an Army colonel and forensics pioneer. He had recently
(08:27):
overseen the invention of a key piece of technology. They
developed the comparison microscope, which is used by firearms examiners
today to do comparisons, which is basically two microscopes which
have a common optical bridge which allows you to look
at two objects simultaneously in a single view. When police
(08:47):
discovered a cache of Thompson's submachine guns belonging to an
associate of Owl Capones, Goddard declared them a match to
the casings and bullets from the scene of the massacre.
The high profile case lent credibility to the growing discipline,
and just like other forensic method we've talked about before,
it developed as a part of law enforcement, and then
(09:10):
it became the development of police officers who took this
over and they sort of developed it further and further
and it became sort of widespread in the nation. Goddard
went on to lead his field, coining the term forensic ballistics,
training police departments and advising the FBI on the establishment
(09:31):
of their crime lab. So how does firearms analysis work.
It starts with a loaded gun and a cartridge casing.
You can think about a cartridge case as the housing
that contains the bullet and the propellant in order to
expellit out of the fire. When a gun is fired,
(09:51):
the bullet is often lost, but the cartridge casing that
held the bullet is kicked out of the side of
the gun. Finding bullets is a lot more difficult. You
can imagine if you in an area where it was
open and there's not thing that's been struck, then you
might not find that. But the cartridge cases are going
to be located somewhere close to where the shooter was standing,
(10:13):
So we have a far greater likelihood of obtaining cartridge
cases from the crime scene. The theory behind firearms analysis
is that no two guns are exactly identical, and that
every gun imprints a unique set of marks onto the
ammunition it fires. So the typical approach would be if,
(10:36):
for instance, we get cartridge cases from a crime scene,
and then at some point detective might come across a
suspect who may have a firearm. Then the firearm would
be provided and we would make test fires from that
particular firearm, and so those test fires would be unknowns.
(10:56):
We know that firearm X leaves these kinds of marks.
Then we would compare those cartridge cases to the ones
that were fired from the crime scene and see if
we find any features which are in correspondence to that
which we typically would find from cartridge cases fired from
the same gun, and also the similarity between cartridge cases
(11:21):
fed from different gun. Those comparisons would lead to the
examiner concluding whether or not the cartridge case was fired
by a specific firearm. The evidence isn't always clear. You
might get cartridge cases for whatever reason, don't have very
good markings on them, or they might be damaged, and
(11:42):
the firearms examiner is not in a position to actually
say whether it came from the same gun or a
different gun, so we'd call those an inconclusive result. Today,
we have more than a century of precedent for firearms
examination evidence being admitted at trial. Firearms and tool marks
is probably one of the most common pieces of evidence
(12:03):
in the United States. Met Julia Layton in episode one.
She's the former general counsel for the Public Defenders Service
in Washington, d C. It impacts a large large number
of cases, and typically cases that carry serious penalties, but
recently a DC murder trial challenged that precedent. I could
(12:26):
write a dozen articles on the weaknesses of firearms that
would not have the impact that testifying in one case
in getting a good decision from a judge has had.
(13:00):
So the case now challenging the precedent of firearms analysis
in court begins on a November afternoon in twenty sixteen.
From the top of the street in southeast Washington, d C.
You can see the Washington Monument. It's there next to
a low rise apartment building that Orlando Silver is shot
(13:20):
to death. A police officer spots a man running from
the scene and tossing a gun into a wooded area.
This suspect is identified as twenty four year old Marquette Tibbs. Tibbs,
a marijuana dealer and business associate of the deceased, is
arrested and charged with murder. Police recover the gun, a
(13:42):
forensic examiner fires it and compares that cartridge with those
recovered from the crime scene their conclusion the gun and
the casings from the scene are a match. In a
pre trial hearing, Marquette Tibbs public defenders argue that there
is no scientific basis for claiming a precise match, and
therefore the judge shouldn't allow that testimony. That's the Dobert standard,
(14:06):
which we talked about in episode one. For their part,
the prosecution offered up research studies they said could back
up the validity and reliability of firearms analysis. Nicholas Scourage
has analyzed dozens of these studies, and he testified about
his findings at the hearing. I'm a professor of psychology
(14:27):
and criminology at the University of California at Irvine. In
order to understand the value of a firearm examiner testifying
in court that two bullets are a match and identification,
you need to know both how accurate they are at
calling identifications when the bullets in fact came from the
(14:48):
same gun. But you also need to know that false
positive rate, how often the examiner gets it wrong when
the two bullets or cartridge cases were not fired by
the same gun. He found a lot of problems. First,
in many of these studies, participants were sent two groups
of cartridges that had been fired and asked to sort
(15:12):
them into matched pairs. So you could kind of analogize
this to a jigsaw puzzle, right, you're kind of putting
the pieces together and figuring out which piece goes where. Now,
from a pure scientific standpoint, that's not a very good
study design in the sense that they're able to exploit
(15:34):
this design to increase their accuracy. So you could look
at two of the unknown bullets and say, well, these
came from the same gun, and then you could compare
one of those unknown bullets to a different known bullet,
and if those are a match, then you know by
implication the other unknown bullet is also a match. Basically,
(15:57):
the process of elimination could conceivably help them get more
correct answers. In twenty fourteen, the AIMS Lab, a national
laboratory affiliated with Iowa State University, tried to resolve that
issue with another study. Participants were given a coin envelope
with two cartridge cases and they were simply asked did
(16:21):
these cases match or not? And the participant makes a
decision and then puts those cases back in that coin envelope.
So it's a much cleaner test of whether a firearm
examiner can look under a microscope and determine whether or
not two bullets or cartridge cases were fired by the
same gun. That makes sense, but it turns out this
(16:44):
one had its own issues. Not only could participants mark
identification for a match or elimination for a non match,
they could also choose a third option inconclusive. About twenty
percent of the participants responded inconclusive to every single one
of those comparisons. So this wasn't oh, a few of
(17:07):
them are inconclusive or not. This was every single response
was inconclusive. And then, to make things worse, this particular
study counted those responses as correct responses. Counting inconclusives as
correct made the examiners seem very accurate, But count inconclusives
(17:29):
as incorrect, and it's a whole different story. The error
rate goes from under one percent, which is the way
it was calculated by Aims, to about thirty three percent.
That's David Fegman from UC Hastings Law School. You met
him in episode one and he also testified in the
TIBs hearing have a seven year old granddaughter, and I said,
(17:52):
you know, if you have a math test, you have
ten questions and you answer I don't know or inconclusive.
But as I don't know to one of the questions,
do you get credit for that? And she looked at
me strangely, a smart seven year old in second graded,
and she said, well, no, that's wrong. And so what
a seven year old understands the researchers at the AIMS
(18:14):
Laboratory don't understand. Despite this pretty major flaw, the study
was used as proof that firearms identification is scientifically valid.
Then there was a follow up study to examine the
issue of reliability, just to quickly explain, validity looks at
how accurate a test is. Reliability looks at how consistent
(18:36):
it is. Will I drive a full block with the
parking break on if someone else parked the car and
put it on every single time? That's reliability. So this
was testing whether or not you can get the same
result multiple times. Participants were mailed sets of cartridge casings
to examine, and what they didn't know was that they
(18:56):
got the same sets twice, so if their analysis was reliable,
they should reach the same conclusions both times. They examine
the same sets, but that didn't happen. The examiners were
reaching the same conclusion about sixty five percent of the time.
And importantly, this doesn't mean they reached the correct conclusion
(19:18):
sixty five percent of the time. It only means they
reached the same conclusion sixty five percent of the time.
These studies are widely used to support firearms analysis, even
though none of them have ever been published in an independent,
peer reviewed scientific journal. The recognized standard for evidence based
(19:38):
research back to that pre trial hearing. After all, this
was presented in the Marquette Tibbs case, a DC Superior
Court judge refused to allow testimony that the cartridge from
the crime scene was a match to the gun found
in the wooded area, and Tibbs, who had maintained his innocence,
(19:59):
was found not guilty of murder. Julia Layton says, cases
like Tibbs doesn't mean we should throw the method out altogether.
We are not suggesting that firearms examination evidence disappears altogether.
There are objective standards for class characteristics. There are objective
(20:20):
standards that are laid out by manufacturers that can allow
a firearms examiner to objectively say that the evidence found
on the crime scene was fired from a making model
of gun with a square firing pit. What we're suggesting
is that the science isn't there for a claim that
(20:41):
they can identify the source, and that what recent studies
have been done suggests that there may be very very
high error rates when they make that claim. While new
precedent is being made in the Tibbs case, Odell Adams,
the man you heard about at the beginning of this episode,
is still waiting for his day in court. It's now
(21:26):
twenty twenty. O'Dell Adams has spent two years in jail
since his arrest, just waiting for his trial. The delay
was first due to some issues with legal representation and
then COVID. I've lost everything actually duped to this situation.
I lost my apartment, I lost my job, I lost
(21:48):
going to see my mother being buried, and just a
whole lot of stuff was just like heavy on me
during that time. It's common in cases like O'Dell's, when
a felon is charged with possession of a firearm, that
federal prosecutors take the case over from the state. Since
the age of sixteen, Odell had a seemingly endless series
(22:10):
of run ins with the law. He'd been pulled over
and charged with fifty traffic violations, mostly things like driving
without insurance or a suspended license. He had fifteen different
felony charges that were either eventually dropped or where he
was found not guilty. He was convicted of a drug
felony and a felony for threatening assault, and then possession
(22:33):
of a gun as a felon, which put him on
supervised release during the time of the incident at the
speakeasy lounge. His record put him on the investigation's radar,
and that's also why federal prosecutors wanted to take over
the case. Those prosecutors might have assumed it would be
an easy win. Defense attorney John Robb from the prosecution perspective,
(22:56):
it's kind of an open and shut case. You have
the video showing Odell walking off the screen, somebody wearing
white shoes which Odell was wearing, walking onto the other screen.
You find this firearm where he was living, and you
have forensic evidence that ties that firearm to the shootings.
You still have that witness there that describes somebody wearing
(23:17):
different clothing, but the idea that that person just got
it wrong. Becomes a lot easier to stomach when you
know that there's something that is connecting the firearm found
down the hallway from the bedroom that Odell was living
in to the firearm found at the scene and be
an awful coincidence for some other shooter to happen to
have done that. But the key evidence are those casings
(23:40):
found outside the speakeasy lounge. Do they match those test
fired by the gun found at his mother's house. First
they run a computerized analysis and it says no match.
The speakeasy evidence was not created by the gun, So
at that point in the investigation, the investigators assumed that
(24:01):
there wasn't a match. And it's not quite clear what
happens at this point. The case doesn't get dropped, the
case doesn't go away. In about four to six months,
they come to believe that there's been some error in
that initial process, and then they redo that process. The
computer gives a different result at this point. At this
point the computer says that they actually do match. The
(24:24):
computer test is followed by a comparison performed by a
human examiner, which is pretty common using a comparison microscope.
The technology that's been around since the nineteen twenties. The
examiner determines that all the cartridges found at the speakeasy
lounge had been fired by the gun from Odell's mother's attic.
(24:44):
Federal prosecutors had their case. They offer Adams a plea deal.
I was like, no way, I'm not accepting something that
I didn't do. I'm like, bro, take the plea. He's
like I'm not. That's where they get you, where you
get tired, you know. And so he's super strong. I
(25:05):
sit back and reflect with him now, like, Wow, you're
so freaking resilient. Like as we're saying, we just want
you home, and you're saying I didn't do it, and
I'm not going to admit to something that I did
not do, just like in the Tibbs case in DC
you heard about earlier. The judge holds a pre trial
hearing about the firearms evidence. Odell's lawyers argue that it
(25:27):
isn't reliable or valid. The prosecution's firearms analyst struggles to
articulate an objective basis or methodology for his exam process. Instead,
the court hears a familiar argument. Here's Nicholas Scourage again.
What you're left with is a firearm examiner getting up
(25:47):
there and saying, based on all of this experience, I'm
right and you should trust me. And just like in
the Tibbs case, the judge agrees with the defense. He
will only allow factual observations that the caliber of the
gun matches the caliber of the casings. At trial, what
Judge Mossman ruled is that they hadn't demonstrated that there
(26:12):
was anything more going on there other than a person
looking at two things and saying I think they match
or I think they don't match. There wasn't any further
scientific pursuit that was underlying them, and he had ruled
that based on that this was not something that he
would be permitted to be called science in the courtroom,
(26:32):
the prosecution is not allowed to present testimony that the
casings matched the specific gun. For the second time in
a year, the science of firearms analysis has been successfully challenged,
and in October of twenty twenty, the jury finds Adams
not guilty, but Odell doesn't go home. Remember how we
(26:54):
told you earlier that federal prosecutors took over this case. Typically,
when the federal government takes over the case like that,
what the state prosecutor will do is they will dismiss
their case. But instead of dropping their case, the state
moved forward. That's unusual when a defendant has been found
not guilty in a federal trial. Through the federal proceedings
(27:16):
from the state kept a case. They went back to
grand jury and substantially increase the severity of the state
case by adding an attempted murder and attempted to assault
one charge. If convicted of these new charges, Adams would
face many years in prison. I never thought that I
would have to go to trial twice for the same as.
(27:38):
It is never in my life. And people that I
was telling that too, like the guards, guards and stuff
that was like telling me, like, you already beat your case.
How come you want to trial again? I don't know.
And they was a shake and ere their heads. I
felt like, oh, hell no, you know you all messed up.
We're gonna pick it up again and get it done right.
(27:59):
So it felt like almost like this good old boy
system and not really about the crime. One interpretation of
the motives behind the state trial has to do with precedent.
Remember what we talked about earlier. Precedent is important because
it can impact other cases in the future. So this time,
state prosecutors brought two new firearms examiners to the pre
(28:22):
trial hearing. One of them claimed his personal error rate
was zero. Adams attorneys, which now included John Robb, took
the same approach as his federal defense team, arguing that
firearms analysis isn't scientifically validated. David Fegman also testified. The
judge ultimately decided, well, I'm going to let the firearms
(28:44):
examiner testify, but defense you can put Fegman on as well,
and he can testify to the limitations and we'll just
let the jury decided. And so in the Adams case,
which was unusual for me, I testify both of the
judges of the criminal matter to exclude it, and then
I testify to the jury on how good a weight
it should be given. At trial, the two firearms examiners,
(29:08):
each with an impressive resume, told jurors the cartridges collected
at the scene were a match to the gun found
at Odell's mother's house. They also openly acknowledged that they
were indeed there, in part as a response to the
precedent set at Adam's federal trial. Here's the trial testimony
from one of those examiners, Kate Todd. As farms and
(29:31):
tool marks examiners and even just forensic scientists, we follow
admissibility hearings across the country. Anytime that there is a
ruling specifically about the science, we always want to go
back and see why a certain ruling was made. She
claimed the issue was not a lack of science, but
a poor explanation of it. I'm not saying that the
United States government did an insufficient job. I'm saying that
(29:54):
the analyst did not explain the actual science correctly. Firearms
examiners like Kate Todd weren't the only ones watching Odell's case.
January twenty twenty one, the Department of Justice issued an
unusual statement criticizing the Peacast Report, a report that had
been issued five years earlier. We've talked about PEACAST repeatedly
(30:18):
throughout this podcast and how it questioned the scientific validity
of several forensic methods, including firearms analysis. The DOJ statement said,
in part quote, formerly addressing Peacast's incorrect claims has become
increasingly important as a number of recent federal and state
court opinions have cited the report as support for limiting
(30:41):
the admissibility of firearms tool marks evidence in criminal cases,
and it references the cases of Marquette Tibbs and Odell
Adams by name Julia Layton. This is unsigned, has no seal.
It doesn't explain who did it, why they did it.
This appears to be sort of an effort by lawyers
(31:05):
didn't like the court's rulings to try and put something
out under DJ's label, saying there was something wrong with
pecast and there's something wrong with these court decisions, rather
than putting their names to it and filing it back
to O'Dell's trial. Aside from the firearms evidence, the state
trial was a repeat of the federal one, although this
(31:26):
time there were no black jurors, which O'Dell felt was
a distinct disadvantage. When they say a jury of your peers,
as people that's living in the same area that you're
living in and seeing the same things that you're seeing
and going through the same things that you're going through.
I got tattoos, I got brais, and I fit the
description of being guilty behind that alone. Ultimately, the jury
(31:50):
acquitted O'Dell of the most serious charges, found that he
was not guilty of the attempted murder and attempted assault one,
but did find him guilty of the unlawful use of
a weapon count and the other less serious charges, which
was a finding that they had believed beyond a reasonable
doubt that he was the individual that fired those shots.
(32:10):
The jury believed he was the shooter. By the time
of the verdict, he had been in jail for three years.
At his sentencing, Adam spoke in court for the first time,
It's not nor the big picture is painted upon me.
It's like I'm just it's bad person, which I'm not.
It's been barriers that I had to climb over and
(32:32):
I'm steady climbing and it's whatever happens today. It happened.
I have been getting a bad end of the stick
all my life, so I am like, like, how much
more to a person has to take. It's hard to hear,
but O'Dell says he's not a bad person. He's just
(32:54):
had the odds stacked against him all of his life.
O'Dell had to serve two more years in prison on
top of his time served. He was finally released into
twenty twenty one, in time to see family at Christmas
and for the first time he was able to visit
his mother's grave. His journey through the legal system represents
(33:16):
both the past and the future. His state trial is
rooted in a century of legal precedent established for firearms
analysis evidence. His federal case represents the prospect for change
and how that evidence is treated moving forward. Whether it's
changed the judicial system will accept remains to be seen.
(33:39):
Odell Adams is appealing his conviction, but if he succeeds
in winning a new trial, there's a chance it could
end with an even harsher sentence. I didn't do this.
I'm innocent. Like I have been accepting a lot of things,
and it's a time where you just get fed up.
So that's why I appeal. And if I have to
(34:03):
appeal again, I'm will appeal and I will keep a pillion.
And it's like when you are fighting the whole United
States by yourself, it's kind of hard. Is hard next time?
On CSI on trial. Blood stain pattern analysis used to
(34:26):
wrongly convict a state trooper of murdering his family. Just repeatedly,
over and over. I'm telling you he's wrong, he's wrong,
he's wrong, he's wrong, he's wrong. I did not do This.
CSI on Trial is a co production of iHeart Podcasts
and School of Humans, based on the Curiosity Stream series
(34:48):
CSI on Trial, created by Eleanor Grant and produced by
the Biscuit Factory. You can watch all six episodes of
the video series right now at curiosity stream dot com.
This episode is hosted and written by me Molly Hermann
and researched by Katie Dunn and myself. Our producer is
(35:08):
Miranda Hawkins. Jessica Metzker is the senior producer. Virginia Prescott,
Jason English, Brandon Barr and el C Crowley are the
executive producers. Sound design in mix by Miranda Hawkins. Special
thanks to John Higgins, Rob Burke, Rob Lyle, and Brandon Craigie.
(35:30):
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