MORE FAKE SCIENCE

Ronnie Lee Bowling sits on death row at the Kentucky State Penitentiary for two murders he claims he didn't commit -- convicted in part through forensic analysis that scientific experts now say is deeply flawed. No eyewitnesses or direct physical evidence tied him to the execution-style slayings of two gas station attendants in Laurel County a month apart in 1989. There were no fingerprints, no DNA. But at Bowling's trial, an FBI examiner testified that tests showed some of the .38-caliber bullets recovered from both bodies -- and from bullets in an attempted murder at a third station in Rockcastle County -- came from the same batch of lead.

More crucially, FBI Special Donald Havekost said, they matched some of the cartridges found in Bowling's mobile home. Havekost told the jury he'd never seen a bullet match in crimes that weren't related. Asked about the likelihood of finding another bullet matching Bowling's, Havekost said, "I'd spend a good part of my life looking and probably never find it." But last year, a National Research Council panel found that FBI examiners repeatedly had failed to tell juries that such bullet matches might be mere coincidence. The bureau responded by suspending lead analysis, which it had used in 2,500 cases over 40 years. Then in March, the first conviction in the nation was reversed based on concerns about the reliability of bullet-lead analysis. Ordering a new trial for a man convicted in New Jersey of murder, an appeals court said "the integrity of the criminal justice system is ill-served by allowing a conviction based on evidence of this quality … to stand."

The prosecutor in the Kentucky case said there was plenty of other evidence to convict Bowling, now 36. But Bowling is staking his life on the argument that he wouldn't have been convicted without that forensic evidence -- arguing on appeal that the new disclosures about such testing demand that he get a new trial. "If there is any truth and justice in this country, my wrongful conviction shouldn't be allowed to stand," he said in a two-hour interview at the penitentiary, where he has been held since Dec. 24, 1992, for the murders of Ronald L. Smith, 28, and Marvin Hensley, 48.

After a yearlong study, a research council panel reported in February 2004 that FBI analysts repeatedly overstated the significance of bullet-lead matches and underplayed the likelihood of a false match. "FBI examiners should not rely on bullet lead analysis to testify in criminal cases about the statistical probabilities that a crime-scene bullet originated with the defendant," concluded the report of the Washington-based council, the operating arm of the private, nonprofit National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering.

Bowling cited that report and other attacks on bullet-lead testing in motions seeking a new trial that he's filed in Laurel Circuit Court and U.S. District Court in London. No execution date is pending, although he is entering the last phase of his appeals. One of his lawyers, Vince Aprile, likened bullet analysis to hypnosis and Victorian-era phrenology -- the abandoned belief that intelligence could be determined by the shape of the head. Aprile said the national council's report "exposes it as an insidious endeavor to clothe biased speculation in the impressive robes of science."

But relatives of the victims say Bowling is just grasping for straws. And former Commonwealth's Attorney Tom Handy, who won Bowling's conviction and has since retired, said, "I don't have any doubt that he was the perpetrator." Handy concedes that bullet evidence was important to his case -- he told the jury in his closing statement that the trial came down to "cold, analytical facts … tested by an FBI agent." But he said that stronger proof came from Ricky Smith, owner of the third station, a Sunoco in Rockcastle County. Smith, who is not related to Ronald Smith, testified that three days after Hensley was murdered, Bowling came into his station and opened fire, then fled, leading police on a 32-mile chase that ended with Bowling's capture outside his home in Clay County.

State police who pursued him later found a gun along the road and determined, through traditional ballistics testing, that it was the same weapon used in the murders. Bowling claimed that he hadn't shot at Ricky Smith and that the gun wasn't his. Bullets found at the Sunoco station were too mangled for conventional ballistics tests, in which marks on bullets from the crime scene are compared with marks on test bullets fired from the same gun.

That is where Havekost came in. He testified that one of the bullets from the Sunoco station had the same chemical makeup as five of the bullets found in a partially filled box of ammo at Bowling's home, meaning, he said, that they originated from the same manufacturer's batch of bullet lead. He also said that one bullet from each of the two murders matched and that three of the bullets that killed the second victim, three of the bullets found at the scene of the third shooting, and 16 of the 24 bullets found in Bowling's home all matched.

The FBI did bullet-lead analysis in cases where no weapon was found or where ballistics analysis was impossible. Since 1986, five examiners testified 521 times about bullet-lead tests, the bureau has said, although it's also said it doesn't know where or against whom. The Washington-based Forensic Justice Project, part of the nonprofit National Whistleblower Center, has sued the FBI to get that information, contending the government won't release it for fear it might trigger hundreds of new trials. No one knows how many times bullet-lead analysis has been presented in Kentucky courts, but it figured in the case against Shane Ragland, whose conviction for the murder of a former football player was reversed on other grounds last year by the Kentucky Supreme Court.

Another defendant, Tyron Anton Wilcox, was acquitted of murder in a 2002 trial in Jefferson County in which an FBI examiner presented bullet-matching evidence.

In an interview, Havekost, who retired from the FBI soon after Bowling's trial and now lives in Nebraska, said that if he'd been asked, he would have testified that many people could have bought matching bullets in a rural area like Laurel County. But nobody asked, he said.....

But Bowling said there is nothing that connects him to the Laurel County crimes other than bullet-lead analysis. "The link doesn't exist," he said. "They misled the jury in my trial by presenting evidence that was flawed, unreliable junk science."


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