People v. Williams

Citation124 N.Y.S.3d 593,147 N.E.3d 1131,35 N.Y.3d 24
Decision Date31 March 2020
Docket NumberNo. 15,15
Parties The PEOPLE of the State of New York, Respondent, v. Cadman WILLIAMS, Appellant.
CourtNew York Court of Appeals

35 N.Y.3d 24
147 N.E.3d 1131
124 N.Y.S.3d 593

The PEOPLE of the State of New York, Respondent,
v.
Cadman WILLIAMS, Appellant.

No. 15

Court of Appeals of New York.

Decided March 31, 2020


OPINION OF THE COURT

FAHEY, J.

35 N.Y.3d 29

Over 150 years ago the science of genetics was born. It grew out of the beloved

124 N.Y.S.3d 596

garden of Gregor Mendel's pea plants. It has come to be as important to our perception of the modern world as the atom or the byte. This revolution in our understanding

147 N.E.3d 1134

of biology extends to most aspects of medical science.

In the criminal justice system, it has provided forensic science with one of the most powerful tools for identification yet seen. DNA testing has become the "gold standard" of this process.

For this reason, more than any other, courts must use the tools available to make sure that the highest standards of reliability are maintained.

The primary issue on this appeal is whether the trial court should have held a Frye hearing (see

35 N.Y.3d 30

Frye v. United States , 293 F. 1013 [D.C. Cir.1923] ) with respect to the admissibility of low copy number (LCN) DNA evidence and the results of a statistical analysis conducted using the proprietary forensic statistical tool (FST) developed and controlled by the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). Under the circumstances of this case, we conclude that the trial court abused its discretion as a matter of law in admitting that evidence without holding such a hearing. However, inasmuch as the error is harmless, and inasmuch as defendant's other contentions lack merit, we ultimately conclude that the judgment of should not be disturbed.

Facts

A.

In May 2008 the victim and his brother had a dispute with several teenagers in the Bronx. That dispute ended in the death of the victim following an incident in which he swung a baseball bat at one of the teenagers. The use of the bat apparently prompted defendant, who was present with the group of teenagers, to grab a gun and fire four bullets at the victim.

Two of those bullets struck the victim, who subsequently staggered into the lobby of a nearby apartment building and died a short time later. The medical examiner determined that one of the bullets entered the left side of the victim's face, and that the second projectile punctured the right side of his back. The examiner also concluded that each of the wounds was fatal.

Defendant escaped the scene of the shooting and had the gun hidden in the apartment of a former girlfriend before he fled to neighboring states. Defendant eventually was arrested in Brooklyn several months later, and the gun in question was recovered from a covered wall cavity in the aforementioned apartment prior to his prosecution. At trial, the People presented evidence with respect to those facts, including eyewitness testimony identifying defendant as the shooter and video footage placing him at the scene of that incident. The People also presented testimony from defendant's former girlfriend explaining that defendant forced her to stow the gun used in the shooting in her apartment immediately after that incident and admitted to her that "he had just shot somebody."

Trial also saw the People present evidence with respect to DNA testing that was conducted with the goal of providing a

35 N.Y.3d 31

scientific link between defendant and the subject gun. That DNA testing revealed that there was a mixture of DNA from at least two contributors on the firearm. OCME initially was unable to link defendant's DNA profile to the DNA found on the gun through "standard" DNA testing.1

124 N.Y.S.3d 597

Eventually, though, what an expert for the People characterized as a "sensitive" form

147 N.E.3d 1135

of traditional DNA review (that is, the LCN testing) and a proprietary "calculator" (that is, the FST2 ) yielded the conclusion that it was millions of times more likely that the DNA mixture found on the gun contained contributions from defendant and one unknown, unrelated person, rather than from two unknown, unrelated people.3

35 N.Y.3d 32

B.

The LCN and FST evidence did not reach the jury without protest. Prior to trial defendant had moved for an order precluding the People from introducing expert testimony regarding any conclusion reached by either the use of LCN testing or the FST on the ground that such methods were not generally accepted as reliable by the relevant scientific community. In the alternative, defendant sought an order directing that a Frye hearing be held with respect to the reliability of any proposed evidence generated through LCN and FST review. That application is the focal point of this appeal.

Defendant's Support for the Frye Motion

The LCN testing process, as noted in the addendum, obtains DNA profiles from a very minute amount of genetic material by increasing the number of amplification cycles (28 in a "standard" test, and 31 using this method) used to copy that DNA. In support of the Frye motion defendant put before the motion court, among other things, evidence in the form of an expert averment that "no generally accepted guidelines for the testing, analysis, or interpretation of LCN [had] been agreed upon by the forensic community," and that "[t]he use of LCN testing [was] still highly debated within the forensic community due to the unreliability of the LCN profiles generated." The same expert did "not believe that profiles generated from LCN testing [were] reliable or valid for the implementation

124 N.Y.S.3d 598

for DNA testing associated with criminal casework" and noted that LCN testing was "not implemented within" the out-of-state laboratory in which he was employed.4

147 N.E.3d 1136

Supplementing that sworn expert submission were ten scholarly articles and comments questioning the validity and robustness of LCN analysis. One of those texts explained that "it is fair to say that LCN typing is the subject of great dispute among some of the leading lights of the forensic community," while another noted "the acknowledged lack of consensus in interpretation" of LCN tests, the "unlikel[ihood] that LCN tests [would] be embraced by crime laboratories in the [United States]," and the likelihood "that such results would be deemed inadmissible if they were challenged." Other parts of those materials discussed the "highly charged debate in the

35 N.Y.3d 33

sciene and law-enforcement communities about [LCN] analysis."

The evidence defendant put before the motion court with respect to the LCN question also indicated that only one publicly funded laboratory—located at the University of North Texas Health Sciences (UNTHS) campus—performed LCN testing. "For purposes of admissibility in a court proceeding," defendant cautioned, "the UNTHS lab only perform[ed] LCN testing for missing persons identification."

Interestingly, the executive director of applied genetics at UNTHS and perhaps "the father of American DNA analysis" ( People v. Collins , 49 Misc.3d 595, 608, 15 N.Y.S.3d 564 [Sup. Ct., Kings County 2015] ), Dr. Bruce Budowle, co-authored one of the scholarly articles tendered to the motion court in support of the Frye motion. That article noted that a "claim[ ] ha[d] been made recently" in People v. Megnath , 27 Misc.3d 405, 898 N.Y.S.2d 408 [Sup. Ct., Queens County 2010] "that LCN typing is generally accepted as being reliable." Dr. Budowle and his co-authors, however, believed that conclusion "difficult to substantiate ... because of the inherent lack of reproducibility of the current LCN method(s)." The conclusion to that article explained that Dr. Budowle and his co-authors would not endorse OCME's "flawed" LCN testing practices, which the writers believed to be "inconsistently applied [to] [overstate] the weight of the evidence." The title the authors chose for that article distilled those points and neatly summarized defendant's case with respect to the LCN question; the authors labeled this piece, "Low Copy Number Typing has yet to Achieve ‘General Acceptance.’ "

Defendant's case with respect to the FST was thinner, but with good reason. Defendant characterized the FST as a program "developed by the OCME itself" that had "not been adequately subjected either to validation or peer review by anyone else in the relevant scientific community." Outside validation, defendant suggested, would have been impossible because OCME had not "shared" the software. That black-box approach, defendant continued, was contrary to the tack recommended by the Committee on DNA Technology in Forensic Science of the National Research Council, which had concluded that "[q]uality-assurance programs in individual laboratories...

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