Kulbicki v. State
| Decision Date | 27 August 2014 |
| Docket Number | No. 13, Sept. Term, 2013.,13, Sept. Term, 2013. |
| Citation | 99 A.3d 730,440 Md. 33 |
| Parties | James KULBICKI v. STATE of Maryland. |
| Court | Court of Special Appeals of Maryland |
Edwin J. Kilpela, Jr., Assigned Public Defender (Del Sole Cavanaugh Stroyd, LLC, Pittsburgh, PA; Robert M. Cary, Assigned Public Defender, Williams & Connolly, LLP, Washington, DC), on brief, for petitioner/cross-respondent.
Mary Ann Ince, Asst. Atty. Gen. (Douglas F. Gansler, Atty. Gen. of Maryland, Baltimore, MD), on brief, for respondent/cross petitioner.
Argued before HARRELL, BATTAGLIA, GREENE, ADKINS, McDONALD, JOHN C. ELDRIDGE (Retired, Specially Assigned), and LAWRENCE F. RODOWSKY (Retired, Specially Assigned), JJ.
The Petitioner, James Kulbicki, was convicted in 1995 of first-degree murder and the use of a firearm in the commission of a felony in the Circuit Court for Baltimore County,1 based, in part, on the testimony of Agent Ernest Peele of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Agent Peele testified that a bullet fragment found in Kulbicki's truck and a bullet found inside the victim were “what you'd expect if you were examining two pieces of the same bullet,” and moreover, that a bullet recovered from a handgun found in Kulbicki's home “could have been in the same box” as the bullet taken from the victim, relying on Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis (“CBLA”).2 We determined, however, in 2006 that under the Frye–Reed standard,3 CBLA evidence was not generally accepted by the scientific community. Clemons v. State, 392 Md. 339, 896 A.2d 1059 (2006). One of the major flaws of CBLA, we observed in Clemons, was that it had been predicated on the assumption that each source of lead from which bullets were derived was unique, allowing bullets that come from different batches to be distinguished from one another, an assumption that we determined to be questionable; “The assumption that each molten lead source is unique is also being questioned by analytical chemists and metallurgists.” Id. at 369, 896 A.2d at 1077.
Kulbicki was convicted before Clemons was decided. Nevertheless, within a few years of his conviction, he sought post- conviction relief under the Uniform Postconviction Procedure Act,4 arguing not only that the admission of “unreliable” CBLA evidence was a due process violation, but that his attorneys rendered ineffective assistance of counsel for failing to adequately cross-examine Agent Peele.5 The Circuit Court Judge denied relief, opining with respect to Kulbicki's ineffective assistance of counsel claim that “questions concerning the reliability of that science didn't even surface until long after Mr. Kulbicki's trial”, and therefore, Kulbicki's attorneys could not be faulted for not challenging the CBLA evidence:
With CBLA, ineffective assistance is not a legitimate argument. The questions concerning the reliability of that science didn't even surface until long after Mr. Kulbicki's trial. The reputation for reliability of the FBI laboratories, which performed the analysis in this case, was well known and there is no evidence in this record to demonstrate they could have been effectively challenged at trial. And the undisputed evidence was that no private laboratories routinely performed this service at that time. Thus counsel was faced with the unquestioned expert in this field, which was generally accepted as competent evidence at the time of trial. That expert was appropriately cross-examined. Counsel cannot reasonably be faulted concerning their approach to CBLA evidence at the time of trial.
The Court of Special Appeals affirmed in a reported opinion, without addressing Kulbicki's ineffective assistance of counsel claim as it related to Kulbicki's attorneys' exploration of CBLA evidence. Kulbicki v. State, 207 Md.App. 412, 450–53, 53 A.3d 361, 383–85 (2012). We granted certiorari to consider the following questions, which we have renumbered:6
Kulbicki v. State, 430 Md. 344, 61 A.3d 18 (2013). We also granted the State's conditional cross-petition to address the following question:
Kulbicki did not argue that his attorneys were ineffective for failing to challenge the State's CBLA evidence before the Court of Special Appeals and the intermediate appellate court did not address the issue. Ineffective assistance of counsel with respect to the CBLA evidence, moreover, was not addressed in Kulbicki's brief before us; during oral argument, however, after the State argued that the admission of CBLA evidence was not a due process violation because Kulbicki's attorneys should have been able to test the flawed assumptions upon which CBLA was based at trial, questions were raised by the Court regarding ineffectiveness of counsel.7
We shall hold that Kulbicki's attorneys rendered ineffective assistance when they failed to investigate and cross-examine the State's CBLA expert, Agent Ernest Peele, based upon a report he co-authored in 1991, which presaged the flaws in CBLA evidence, and therefore, will reverse Kulbicki's conviction and order a new trial.8
The present case began when, during the course of a homicide investigation by the Baltimore County Police Department, a bullet was recovered from the victim's body. Thereafter, two bullet fragments were recovered from Kulbicki's vehicle in addition to six bullets taken from a handgun found in Kulbicki's home. The bullets were then analyzed by the FBI laboratory and the results were interpreted by Agent Ernest Peele, who testified for the State at Kulbicki's trial.
Agent Peele testified that the CBLA process permitted him to analyze the chemical composition9 of the lead contained within bullets and, using the chemical composition numbers, determine if the composition in the bullets were the same or substantially similar to each other. Based on the compositional similarities of the bullets he tested, Agent Peele drew a number of conclusions that purported to connect Kulbicki to the homicide.
Agent Peele testified, first, that a bullet fragment taken from the victim's autopsy, designated “Q–1”, and one of the bullet fragments taken from Kulbicki's truck, “Q–2”, were “what you'd expect if you were examining two pieces of the same bullet”:
Agent Peele then compared Q–6, one of the bullets recovered from the handgun, and the samples taken from the victim and Kulbicki's truck, stating that, compositionally, they were “extremely” and “unusually close” so that “there's some association” between the bullets:
is slightly different and the amount of arsenic is slightly different. All the other elements are the same and, certainly, those are types of things that you wouldn't expect to occur unless there's some association, such as being made by the same manufacturer on or about the same time, that kind of association. They are close enough that I have seen those differences, even in the same larger piece but, certainly, they are also different enough that I can't really include uhm [sic] as well as I would Q–1 and 2 to each other.
During re-direct, Agent Peele explained that, although it was not conclusive, the closeness in composition of the three bullets—the autopsy fragment, the truck fragment, and one of the bullets found in the handgun—was consistent with having originated from the same box of bullets, because in each box, he asserted, you would expect to find a number of distinct chemical compositions:
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