Murray v. State
| Decision Date | 17 April 1997 |
| Docket Number | No. 83556,83556 |
| Citation | 692 So.2d 157 |
| Parties | 22 Fla. L. Weekly S203 Gerald D. MURRAY, Appellant, v. STATE of Florida, Appellee. |
| Court | Florida Supreme Court |
Fletcher N. Baldwin, University of Florida, College of Law, Gainesville; and Wm. J. Sheppard, Richard W. Smith and D. Gray Thomas of Sheppard and White, P.A., Jacksonville, for Appellant.
Robert A. Butterworth, Attorney General and Sara D. Baggett, Assistant Attorney General, West Palm Beach, for Appellee.
We have on appeal the judgment and sentence of the trial court imposing the death penalty upon Gerald Delane Murray. We have jurisdiction. Art. V, § 3(b)(1), Fla. Const. Because we find that the trial court erred in admitting DNA evidence at trial, we reverse Murray's convictions and sentence and remand for a new trial.
Murray was convicted of first-degree murder, burglary with an assault, and sexual battery in 1994. The facts surrounding this murder are essentially set forth in Taylor v. State, 630 So.2d 1038 (Fla.1993), a case involving the direct appeal of Murray's co-defendant.
Murray raises twenty-three claims of error on appeal. 1 We find claim 3, concerning the
admissibility of the DNA typing results, to be dispositive of this case. For purposes of remand, we also address claim 2, concerning the trial court's denial of Murray's motion to suppress hair evidence. Murray's remaining claims of error are rendered moot by our decision here.
For purposes of remand, we address Murray's claim that the trial court, following a hearing on the matter, erred in denying defendant's motion to suppress hair evidence and allowing the state to introduce this evidence against Murray at trial because the hair samples were taken from Murray in violation of his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Specifically, Murray argues that (1) the state did not have probable cause to support the search warrant which authorized the taking of Murray's hair samples because the supporting affidavit did not mention the need for hair, and, alternatively, (2) Murray never consented to the seizure, but merely submitted to the apparent lawful authority of the police officers.
A trial court's ruling on a motion to suppress comes to us clothed with a presumption of correctness and, as the reviewing court, we must interpret the evidence and reasonable inferences and deductions derived therefrom in a manner most favorable to sustaining the trial court's ruling. McNamara v. State, 357 So.2d 410, 412 (Fla.1978). In this case, Detective O'Steen testified at the suppression hearing that on February 15, 1991, Murray was read his Miranda rights and immediately waived them before the police requested his consent to seize physical evidence. Thereafter, Detective O'Steen asked Murray for his consent to give blood, saliva and hair samples, and Murray told him to go ahead, saying, "You won't find nothing." Detective O'Steen further testified that Murray never withdrew his consent. At the bottom of Murray's motion to suppress physical evidence, the trial court wrote, and signed it, "Alban E. Brooke." 2
At trial, the State offered DNA evidence which was premised on the evaluation by an expert witness that Murray's DNA matched one of the five hairs recovered from the crime scene. 4 This evidence was particularly important to the State's case in light of the fact that Murray was eliminated as the donor of all the other seminal and blood stains found at the crime scene.
In his motion in limine to exclude scientific DNA evidence, Murray claimed that Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) DNA testing, the method of testing employed by the State in this case, was not generally accepted in the scientific community and therefore did not meet the Frye test for admissibility at trial. In addition, Murray maintained that the probability calculations used by the State's expert to report the frequency of a match between Murray's DNA and the evidence sample recovered from the crime scene also failed to meet the Frye test for admissibility. At the pre-trial suppression hearing on the motion, Murray renewed his two-pronged objection and the State called its expert witness, Mr. Daniel Nippes, to testify about the PCR method of DNA typing as well as the population frequency statistics that he used to calculate the probability of a match between the two DNA samples.
As to the PCR methodology, Nippes performed the PCR method of testing the DNA samples in this case with a commercial kit purchased from Cetus Corporation in California and summarily explained that there is "a tremendous amount of built-in constraints to ensure that [the scientists] don't incur contamination that exists more than normally in samples that are recovered from scenes," and vouched that PCR analysis of DNA is generally accepted in the scientific community. 5 As to the admissibility of his population frequency statistics, Nippes testified that his probability calculations were based on the Hellmith Study Manual, which was published by Cetus Corporation in 1989 or 1990; and were not founded upon any database generated by his own laboratory. Nippes could not testify as to how the Hellmith database had been created. In fact, Nippes affirmatively admitted--both at the suppression hearing and at trial--that he had absolutely no knowledge of how the database he used in drawing his probability conclusions was assembled.
At the conclusion of Nippes' testimony, the trial court denied Murray's motion to suppress the DNA evidence, concluding:
I think all of this, from the three documents, from this [1992 NRC report] ... [a]nd from the testimony of Mr. Nippes, I'll deny your motion in limine. It appears to me that this is one of the clearer matters of not being an admissibility question but a weight [question]. You're certainly going to argue extensively the weight that the jury can give to whatever weight and conclusions he draws based upon the database, I presume through other matters, such as the question about whether or not the database of Caucasian is somehow corrupted by not knowing whether they're from a particular area or from a general group. There are a number of things, but every one of those goes to weight, not admissibility.
(Emphasis added). At trial, Nippes was qualified as an expert witness and testified as to his conclusions concerning PCR testing of Murray's DNA and the crime scene sample. Most importantly, Nippes explained to the jury that Murray's DNA sample matched the DNA sample recovered from the crime scene, and "91.8 percent of the population would be anticipated to have different DNA types."
We have addressed the admissibility of DNA evidence at trial on several occasions in recent years as this area of forensic science has rapidly developed. In Hayes v. State, 660 So.2d 257, 264 (Fla.1995), we relied heavily on the National Research Council's report, DNA Technology in Forensic Science (1992), and took judicial notice that DNA test results are generally accepted as reliable in the scientific community, provided the laboratory has followed accepted testing procedures that meet the Frye 6 standard to protect against false readings and contaminations. In utilizing the Frye test, we have emphasized that:
[T]he burden is on the proponent of the evidence to prove the general acceptance of both the underlying scientific principle and the testing procedures used to apply that principle to the facts of the case at hand. The trial judge has the sole responsibility to determine this question. The general acceptance under the Frye test must be established by a preponderance of the evidence.
Ramirez v. State, 651 So.2d 1164, 1168 (Fla.1995) (emphasis added). Recognizing the difficulty of an inquiry such as this one where cutting-edge science often becomes the dispositive factor in resolving critical questions of law and fact, we set out in Ramirez a step-by-step analysis that a trial court must make before admitting into evidence the testimony of an expert witness concerning a new scientific principle. We explained that a trial court must determine (1) whether such expert testimony would assist the jury in understanding the evidence or in deciding a fact in issue; (2) whether such testimony is based on a scientific principle which has gained general acceptance in that particular scientific community; and (3) whether the expert witness is sufficiently qualified to render an opinion on the subject. Finally, if these criteria are met, the expert witness may testify at trial, and the jury can assess the expert's credibility. Id. at 1166.
Most recently, in Brim v. State, 22 Fla. L. Weekly S45, --- So.2d ---- (Fla. Jan. 16, 1997), we reaffirmed our adherence to the Frye test for the admissibility of DNA evidence, and clarified that each stage of the DNA process, i.e., the methodology for determining DNA profiles, as well as the statistical calculations used to report the test results--both of which are at issue in the instant case--are subject to the Frye test. Because our decision in Brim is so critical to the issues before us in this case, the substance of that opinion warrants extensive reiteration again today. As we explained in Brim,
the DNA testing process consists of two distinct steps. In Hayes v. State, 660 So.2d 257 (Fla.1995), we took judicial notice...
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