State v. Hall

• Decision Date: 17 September 1980
• Docket Number: No. 62176,62176
• Citation: 297 N.W.2d 80
• Parties: STATE of Iowa, Appellee, v. Jeffrey Linn HALL, Appellant.
• Court: Iowa Supreme Court

Page 80

297 N.W.2d 80

STATE of Iowa, Appellee, v. Jeffrey Linn HALL, Appellant.

No. 62176.

Supreme Court of Iowa.

Sept. 17, 1980.

Rehearing Denied Oct. 9, 1980.

Leo E. Fitzgibbons, Richard J. Meyer and Harold W. White of Fitzgibbons Brothers, Estherville, for appellant.

Thomas J. Miller, Atty. Gen., Julie F. Pottorff and Joseph H. Beck, Asst. Attys. Gen., and William B. Ridout, Emmet County Atty., for appellee.

Considered en banc.

LARSON, Justice.

This defendant appeals from a conviction of manslaughter, in violation of section 690.10, The Code 1977. He assigns as error rulings by the trial court (1) in admitting scientific evidence offered by the State and in refusing psychological evidence offered by the defendant; (2) in admitting items of evidence allegedly seized without valid consent or search warrant; (3) in refusing to permit cross-examination of a witness regarding an alleged breach of an agreement with defendant's attorney; and (4) in refusing to dismiss the indictment because of alleged prosecutorial misconduct. We find no merit in defendant's assignments of error and affirm the conviction.

The defendant and Barbara Johnson, the victim, had dated for some time before her death. The State, which charged him with murder, alleged that the defendant had wielded the knife that killed her. The defendant contended he came upon the scene and found Barbara in a pool of blood, and that bloodstains found on his clothing were caused by dragging her body to get help. According to the defendant, a knife, which he was holding when he went to a neighbor's house, had been found by him by the body. The State used an expert witness to show through analysis of the bloodstains and examination of the knife and clothing fibers that the defendant was not a mere passerby but had in fact stabbed the victim.

I. The State's Expert Testimony.

Clothing worn by the defendant and victim on the night of the killing, as well as the murder weapon, were analyzed by Herbert MacDonell, a criminalist. He testified that blood patterns on the defendant's clothing could only have been produced by being in the immediate vicinity where blood was spattered at a great velocity, as in a stabbing or beating, and that it could not have resulted from mere contact with the body. He also testified blood patterns on the defendant's pants were consistent with wiping a bloody knife like the murder weapon. The knife blade had been broken during the attack, and cloth fibers were found on the broken edge, indicating that Barbara had been stabbed with the knife after it was broken. After photographing the knife blade, MacDonell removed fibers from it for testing. He testified certain red fibers were consistent with those of Barbara's blouse; the blue fibers "had similar properties to both garments, but . . . were more similar to those of Jeffrey Hall's corduroys' coarse weave than the tighter weave of Barbara Johnson's." He found "the red fibers . . . physically over the blue fibers, intertwined and physically over them in some locations," indicating that Barbara was stabbed after the knife had come into contact with the defendant's pants.

The defendant assigns the following bases of error as to this testimony: that there was insufficient foundation for MacDonell's expert testimony on the bloodstains; that testimony about the knife and clothing fibers was not admissible because of insufficient chain-of-custody foundation and alleged alteration; and that MacDonell's testimony of the similarity of the blue fibers in the defendant's trousers was irrelevant and prejudicial.

A. Foundation. Witness MacDonell is a professor of criminalistics at Elmira College in New York. Under a grant from the Law Enforcement Assistant Agency, he had conducted experiments on the flight characteristics of blood. His study in the area of blood characteristics, as applied to criminal investigation, was described by him:

(W)e spent two years, myself and an associate, doing just about all we could possibly do with human blood .... We subjected blood to various types of impact conditions and velocities, distances falling and spraying, to study basically the pattern produced under known conditions. This gives us a scale of reference like a ruler. We could then use these patterns to compare to a crime scene.

He was in the process of writing a book about the results of his tests, and had conducted seminars on the subject for crime investigators. He has been involved in over two hundred death investigations and has "testified on the geometric interpretation of bloodstain patterns on forty-two different occasions .... " While he acknowledged being one of the few people in the nation qualified in this field, he said tests similar to those he performed are now being conducted at the University of California at Berkeley.

Professor MacDonell described the study of blood characteristics as one based primarily on the laws of physics and mathematics, and testified that the properties of blood may be measured and its behavior predicted. He added that "(t)he interpretation of the pattern would depend upon the experience and knowledge of the examiner." The defendant seizes upon this language which, he says, puts this sort of evidence in the same category as voiceprint and polygraph tests, which have largely been held to be inadmissible. He asserts that bloodstain analysis was not a proper subject for opinion evidence because it is "scientific" in nature and lacks the foundational requirement of general acceptance in the scientific community.

We discussed the status of the polygraph's "general scientific acceptance," as well as other indicia of its reliability in State v. Conner, 241 N.W.2d 447, 458-59 (Iowa 1976), and concluded that this area of study had not been proven sufficiently reliable for expert testimony, in part because "the breadth, sensitivity and importance of the inference of polygraph evidence demands a higher standard of trustworthiness than is required of other kinds of scientific evidence." Id. at 459.

The rule requiring general scientific acceptance as a foundation for scientific evidence had its genesis in the early case of Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1013 (D.C. Cir. 1923), in which the court said Just when a scientific principle or discovery crosses the line between the experimental and demonstrable stages is difficult to define. Somewhere in this twilight zone the evidential forces of the principle must be recognized, and while courts will go a long way in admitting expert testimony deduced from a well-recognized scientific principle or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs.

Id. at 1014. The rationale of Frye, which also involved the use of polygraph evidence, has since been applied by some courts to determine the admissibility of all scientific evidence. See McCormick's Handbook of the Law of Evidence § 203, at 488-89 (2d ed. 1972).

However, the Frye standard has been frequently criticized. One author has said:

"General scientific acceptance" is a proper condition for taking judicial notice of scientific facts, but not a criterion for the admissibility of scientific evidence. Any relevant conclusions which are supported by a qualified expert witness should be received unless there are other reasons for exclusion. Particularly, probative value may be overborne by the familiar dangers of prejudicing or misleading the jury. . . . If the courts used this approach, instead of repeating a supposed requirement of "general acceptance" not elsewhere imposed, they would arrive at a practical way of utilizing the results of scientific advances.

McCormick, supra § 203, at 491. Other writers have rejected the rule on a variety of grounds. ¹

In determining whether to require general scientific acceptance as a separate prerequisite for the admission of scientific evidence, we make these observations. (1) Such a rule imposes a standard for admissibility not required of other areas of expert testimony, McCormick, supra § 203, at 488-89. (2) It is inconsistent with modern concepts of evidence, such as embodied in the Federal Rules of Evidence, which provide that "(i)f scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine the fact in issue, a witness may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise." Fed.R.Evid. 702. Similarly, it would be inconsistent with our own decisions which have established that we are "committed to a liberal rule which allows opinion testimony if it is of a nature which will aid the jury and is based on special training, experience, or knowledge with respect to the issue in question." Haumersen v. Ford Motor Co., 257 N.W.2d 7, 11 (Iowa 1977). Neither federal rule 702 nor the accompanying advisory committee's comments draw any distinction between foundation requirements for scientific and non-scientific evidence. Moreover, the Supreme Court of Maine, in applying their rule of evidence identical to federal rule 702, held that, if there had been a requirement of general scientific acceptance prior to adoption of its rule, such requirement was abrogated by the rule. State v. Williams, 388 A.2d 500, 503-04 (Me.1978); see United States v. Brown, 557 F.2d 541, 556 (6th Cir. 1972) ("(t)he clear trend in federal court is toward the admission of expert testimony whenever it will aid the trier of fact."). (3) Despite its apparent simplicity, distinguishing "scientific" evidence from other areas of expert testimony is a difficult determination in many instances. McCormick, supra § 203, at 490. The instant case illustrates this difficulty of classifying evidence as scientific or non-scientific. The defendant says the study of blood flight characteristics is itself a science. The witness, on the other hand, testified it was based primarily upon...