Andy Beutler | Mentor

The PROBLeMS wiTh

ProveN TheORyThe Flaws of Forensic Science

Rethink the way you think NOV‘12 ISSUE

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MENTOR

CHINAAn Economic ForcE to rEckon with

MEDIABIASUndErstAnd, it’s only thEir

MARKET WATCH

FACT CHECKthE BiggEst nAmEs in Politics

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MENTORRethink the way you think

MARKET WATCH | economyM

The Power of The Chinese eConomyThe inevitable shift in power

IN FACUALITY | fact checkF

PoLiTiCAL TrAnsPArenCySee through the spin

SOCIALITY | societyS

inTeLLeCTUALs & The TrAnsformATion of ACAdemiAThe “Anointed” school of thought

POLITISCAPE | politicsP

UndersTAndinG oPinion,deTeCTinG BiAsesThe best and worst things about freedom of speech

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PHOTO CREDITS

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TECHNOLOGY | tech statsT

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LosinG hUmAniTy: The CAse AGAinsT UsinG kiLLer roBoTs

Editor & ChiEf Brian nye AssitAnt Editor Justin smith

Editor Andy Beutler CrEAtivE dirECtor Ashley roth

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MENTORThe PROBLeMS wiTh

ProveN TheORyThe Flaws of Forensic Science

Rethink the way you think NOV‘12 ISSUE

CHINAAn Economic Force to Reckon with.

MEDIABIASUnderstand, it’s only their opinion!

MARKET WATCH

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FACT CHECKthe Biggest Names in Politics

CovEr

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stAff

novEmBEr 2012 issuE

November 2012 MENTOR

PHOTO | CBS News,

THE FLAWS OF PROVEN THEORY PG 5

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POLITISCAPE | politicsP

UNDERSTANDING OPINION,DETECTING BIASES

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“I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no m

an is born perpendicular.”

- E.B. WhitE

The best thing about freedom of speech, is the worst thing about

freedom of speech

BYJORDY LAFORGESyndicated Columnist | Washington Post

PHOTO CREDIT media|Associated Press,

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MARKET WATCH | economyM

the Power of the

Chinese eConomy


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How China will inevitablyshift to world powerChinese eConomy

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ContriBution& GroWth

Consumption Investments Net exports

BYJAMES T. KiRKSyndicated Columnist | Washington Post

photo - china|JeanLuc Pickard

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BYJAMES T. KiRKSyndicated Columnist | Washington Post

IN FACUALITY | Fact CheckF

“over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90 percent of that is as a consequence of President george w. Bush’s policies and the recession.”

“in one year, (President obama) provided $90 billion in breaks to the green energy world … into solar and wind, to solyndra and Fisker and tesla and Ener1.”

“hispanic unemployment has been ticking down from an all-time high of 13.9 percent because of the poli-cies we’ve implemented.”

“the president went on a stimulus fueled spending binge that stuck every American man, woman and child with a $50,000 share of this $16 trillion debt.”

BArACk oBAmA

hArry ried

John Boehner

miTT romney

Understanding all sides of every truth

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POLITICAL TRANSPARENCY

PHOTO CREDITS - politics|George Michael


The ProBLems wiTh PROVEN THEORY

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The ProBLems wiTh PROVEN THEORYBY MICHAEL HALE

Weird ScienceTestimony from forensic experts can be the most persuasive evidence presented at tr ial, but often juries don’t realize that the analysis of hair, fire, and even

fingerprints may not be so scientific. And as the story of deputy Keith Pikett, master of the dog-scent lineup, shows, investigations can sometimes lead to the greatest crime of all: putting innocent people behind bars.

Quincy, the amazing bloodhound, sniffed the air around the body of Sally Blackwell, who lay half-naked in a field just outside Victoria. Blackwell, a supervisor for Child Protective Services, had been missing for a day when a county-road crew found her in a brushy field on March 15, 2006. She had been strangled with a rope, which was still on her body. Quincy’s handler, Deputy Keith Pikett, held the leash and surveyed the scene, which was teeming with officers from the Vic-toria Police Department, the Victoria County Sheriff’s Office, the Department of Public Safety, and the Texas Rangers. It was almost seven o’clock and would be getting dark soon.

A few hours earlier, Sam Eyre, a sergeant with the Victoria police, had called Pikett, who lived in Hous-ton and worked out of the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office. Pikett (pronounced “Pie-ket”) was something of a star in law enforcement circles. For years he and his dogs—Quincy, James Bond, and Clue—had helped find missing children and escaped convicts, and they had investigated murders all over the state, including

one in Victoria in 2003. They had worked with the FBI, the ATF, the Texas Rangers, and the state attor-ney general’s office, and they had helped solve hun-dreds of crimes with Pikett’s version of a technique called a scent lineup, in which his dogs matched an odor found at a crime scene to the person who left it. His dogs were so good at sniffing out the bad guys, he said, that they had made only five mistakes in fifteen years.

Standing in the field, Pikett, a lean man of 59, took out a couple of gauze pads. He knelt down and wiped one on Blackwell’s body; the other he wiped on the rope. Then he held the first up to Quincy’s nose. “Seek,” the deputy said.

Quincy took off, with Pikett on the other end of the leash. An excited cry went up from the other investi-gators, who jumped in their vehicles. Eyre ran along-side Pikett, while Pikett’s wife, Karen, followed in an SUV with James Bond. They cruised down Hanselman Road, a two-lane blacktop, for about half a mile, then took a hard left at Loop 463. Quincy loped along, her head bobbing between the air and the pavement. She crossed under U.S. 59 and led the officers up a wide overpass that went over Business 59.

By this point they were inside the Victoria city lim-its. James Bond, younger and faster than Quincy, took a left at Airline Road into a suburban neighborhood called Cimarron. The twenty-month-old bloodhound jogged through the quiet streets, finally stopping on Laguna Drive at Blackwell’s house. A truck from a lo-cal TV station was parked across the street. It and had

ofTen JUries don’T reALize ThAT The AnALysis of hAir, fire,

And even finGerPrinTs mAy noT Be so sCienTifiC

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MENTOR | November 2012


some experience with police dogs, rising to the rank of captain before retiring, in 2004, and taking a job with a contractor training police officers in Iraq. He had asked O’Connor to care for his children if anything happened to him while he was overseas and even left his friend a signed document granting him power of at-torney. Buchanek had returned in late 2005, but only after being injured when a suicide bomber attacked his hotel.

The law enforcement officers all reconvened at ten o’clock at Cimarron Express, a nearby convenience store, buzzing with excitement about the break in the case. What was next, they asked the deputy? To be cer-

tain of the connection and to have probable cause for a search warrant, Pikett suggested a scent lineup. All he needed was a scent sample from Buchanek. O’Connor told Pikett about the document Buchanek had signed two years earlier; it was still sitting in an envelope in O’Connor’s desk drawer. Pikett said that that would do, so O’Connor retrieved it. Pikett wiped a pad across the signature and put the gauze in a bag.

Some time before midnight, at Pikett’s direction, detectives set up six paint cans twenty feet apart in the parking lot of the police station. Five of the cans contained scent samples from five other white males

PHOTO -George Michael

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James Bond “alerted” on the one that held Buchanek’s scent. Pikett did the same with Quincy, using the scent pad from Blackwell’s body, and Quincy also matched Buchanek’s scent to the victim. Though Buchanek had denied having anything to do with Blackwell’s murder, he officially became a suspect, and officers obtained a warrant to search his home and car. He was barred from his home.

Six days later Pikett and Eyre conducted another lineup, this time with a scent taken directly from Bu-chanek’s arm, in a grassy area of the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office. The three dogs did fourteen lineups using various scents from the crime scene. In every one, according to Pikett, the dogs picked Buchanek’s scent. They did it again a year later, when in the summer of 2007 Pikett helped Houston police nab Ronald Curtis for a string of cell phone store burglaries. It wasn’t long before Houston investi-gators called again, asking for help in solving a brutal triple slaying; Pikett and his hounds matched two men to the crime, Cedric Johnson and Curvis Bickham, both of whom were charged with capital murder. In March 2009 an officer with the Yoakum Police Depart-ment took a scent pad to Pikett after two women, on two separate Sunday mornings, had been attacked—one was raped and the other robbed. The pad had come from the hand of Calvin Miller, a mechanic who, an informant told police, had been buying a lot of cocaine lately. Pikett ran a series of scent lineups using all three dogs. Each one picked Miller.Their report, released in February 2009, was a detailed summary of

the “serious problems” of the forensic science system. Most disciplines had no standardized protocols, oversight was inconsistent or nonexistent, and education and training requirements varied across jurisdictions. There was too much room for human error. The report slammed techniques like bite-mark and hair comparisons, but it also went after fingerprint analysis, which the NAS said was essentially subjective. In fact, except for biolog-ical disciplines, like DNA (which has a standardized methodology in which scientists examine a person’s genetic profile by comparing thirteen specific locations on the chromosome), the report found that “forensic science no matches—they did find, on the floor of the children’s bedroom, strange marks that they identified as “pour patterns,” which indicated that an accelerant had been used. They also found “crazed glass,” pieces of bro-ken window suffused with spiderweb cracks, which suggested that an acceler-ant had been used.

DELETED COMPUTER FILES AREN’TALWAYS GONE

Savvy forensic scientists may be able to find evidence that’s been deleted from a computer. every time you “delete” a file from a computer, the file is simply set aside, hidden, and marked as data waiting to be rewritten.

THE NOSE KNOWS

Dead bodies emit certain smells when they die, often to the revulsion of many. These pungent aromas are actually a combination of chemical gases emitted by the corpse, like ammonia and sulphur. Scientists are currently working on machines that will be able to detect these chemical gases, thereby determining where a corpse may be found.

DNA TESTING MAKES MISTAKES

Unfortunately, the reverse can also happen. DNA testing has never been 100% accurate. There have been more than 50 false incriminations based on faulty testing. DNA testing is a precise science, and a single mistake can lead to the wrongful conviction of innocents.

FORENSIC SCIENCE WASN’T INVENTED bY SCIENTISTS

Although its methods are highly scientific, forensic science owes its beginnings to cops who relied heavily on observation and com-mon sense. Police officers using fingerprints to identify culprits led to forensic science as we know it today. The most impressive advances, such as DNA testing and Uv light screening, came into the picture much later, when tech-nology was more advanced.

FINGERPRINTS ARE NOT FOOLPROOF

A fingerprint seems to be the most damning piece of evidence that can be used against an individual. real-life forensic scientists will tell you, however, that while each person does have unique fingerprints, matching them can be difficult, even for experts.

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PHOTO - George Michael

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TECHNOLOGY | Tech StatsT

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GLOBAL MARKET SHAREMOBILE other

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954,200,000 873,612,000 224,220,000CHINA INDIA RUSSIA154,211,000

AUSTRAILIA


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Andy Beutler | Mentor