Hey, folks, Kate Judson here. I'm a lawyer and the executive director of the Center for Integrity and Forensic Sciences. We're back with another episode of Junk Science, a series we first released in twenty twenty, but these stories are just as relevant as ever. This week's episode focuses on gunshot residue, a form of forensic science that is still used today. The techniques have improved slightly since the case
in this episode, but they're still pretty unreliable. One of the biggest problems with gunshot residue evidence, or GSR, is that we don't know how long it sticks around. Sometimes analysts talk about GSR as though if you weren't at a firing range in the last four hours, there's no reason for GSR to be found on you. But that's not the case, especially in a country like ours where
firearms are ubiquitous. We don't know enough about transfer to be confident that if you have GSR on your clothing or body, that you got that residue from actually using a firearm. Maybe you got it when you were arrested because the police officer had it on him, or maybe you shook hands with someone earlier who'd recently been to a range. There are too many questions about persistence and transfer for much of our historical testimony about GSR to be trustworthy.
It's Saturday night. You're in your front yard working on your moped. Your dad is sitting on the picnic bench, chatting with you as you install a new starter. You and your friend Alan saved up all year so you could each buy a bike. Neither one of them is in great condition, but now that school is out you have all summer to fix them up. After a little while, your friend Chante arrives at your house and he says, hey, Alan's bike has a flat. He wants us to come
help him fix it. And you're thinking, again, his bike is always breaking down. It's always got some kind of problem. At first, you were a little jealous of Alan's red raz but that guy keeps getting flats. You pat the seat on your brown moped. It's pretty ugly, but at least it's faithful. You ask your dad if it's cool if you go over to Alan's grandmother's to get the bike. He looks at his watch and says, well, it's pretty late, but hurry up, go get it and you can bring
it back here to work on it. When you and Chante get to Alan's, Chante heads inside to help Alan with the bike. Another flat, you say. When Alan comes out of his house, don't even start, Alan says, tossing you a can of soda. You hang out for a bit, and then the three of you start walking Alan's bike towards your house. You're teasing Alan about how often his mopeed has problems when a green sedan coming from the
opposite direction stops right next to you. The man driving the car leans out the window and says, hey, you guys have any dope Nah, and says we don't mess with that shit. Yell at the guy, Hey, man, get out of here, and the green car speeds off. You walk a bit further down the block, and then you hear shots ring out. Oh shit. All three of you start frantically running down the street and don't look back. You don't stop running until you get back to your house.
You look around, making sure no one's shooting at you, and then you catch your breath. You, Shanta and Allen talk about the gunshots for a few minutes. It's not that out of the ordinary in this neighborhood, but still it's totally scariest shit when it happens. The adrenaline finally wears off and you start working on Allen's bike. There's a nail in the tread of the tire. You pull it out, plug the hole, and let the glue set.
After pumping up the tire and giving it a few good pushes, Alan grabs his bike and begins to walk it back down the street toward his grandmother's house. Once Alan gets to his street, he sees the green car that stopped to ask for drugs, but now its front end is just demolished. It's smashed into the side of a house a few doors down from his grandmother's. There's
smoke and chaos and police just everywhere. Over the next few days, you expect to see Alan riding his red raz after all the tire is fixed, but you don't see him around the neighborhood. A week passes, you knock on his door and his grandmother tells you that the man in the green car had been shot. The cops asked Alan to come to the police station to help with the investigation. She expected Alan to be home that same night, but he's being held in jail. She's afraid
and confused, and suddenly so are you. A few weeks later, you're in your backyard, throwing a tennis ball against the side of your house, worrying about Alan, wondering if he's okay. Out of the corner of your eye, you see some people walking towards you, and it's four police officers. At first you freeze, overcome with fear, and then you take off. They took Alan for no reason. What's going to stop them from grabbing you and doing the same thing. But
you're fourteen years old. They're bigger than you, faster, and there's more of them. They catch up, grab you and put you in handcuffs. Your first thought is I'm going to disappear, just like Alan. You're putting an interrogation room. You tell the officers what happened that night, the night the guy in the green car got shot, how you and Alan told him to go away. But they don't want to hear the truth. They don't want to hear anything you're telling them. One of the detectives, Scoots, is
seat closer to you. We know Alan did this. His hands tested positive for gunpowder residue. You know what that is, son, We know he was involved. You're gonna tell us what Alan did. You're gonna tell us that Alan had the gun, that you saw that gun, and that what he did is he went up to that car that stopped and he talked to the guy in the car, and the next thing you knew was you heard gunshots and you saw Alan running. And I'm gonna tell you something you
don't tell us exactly that. Here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna get charged with murder. You got that. You know how much power these guys have. They already have Alan. Who knows what they're gonna do to you. You're petrified. The walls feel like they're closing in on you. You figure, I should just tell these guys what they want to hear. Then my parents can help sort this out later. So you do what they say. You make up a story, one that sounds like what they want to hear, and
they record it. You'll tell them anything just to get out of that room. Before letting you go, the cops tell you you're going to have to testify at Alan's trial. We'll see you.
Then.
A few weeks pass, and you're relieved when school starts again, maybe this will distract you from thinking about Alan, from the feeling that it's your fault. He's still sitting in jail. The day of Alan's trial, you and Chante decide you're not going to show up. You're not going to testify against your friend, lie again and dig a deeper hole for Alan. But the cops show up at your school and they bring you both to court. At Alan's trial, an officer takes the stand and says that he personally
collected samples from Alan's hands. He swabbed the front and back of them with Q tips and then tested those Q tips to see if there was gunpowdered residue present. The officer testifies the defendant's right hand tested positive for antimony and bury them two chemical elements that are present in gunpowder residue. There is no doubt in my mind that the defendant shot the gun that was used in this homicide. This is insane. You think you know Alan didn't have a gun. He was with you when those
shots rang out. How can they just make this stuff up? When you're on the witness stand, you glance over at the jury. They're all sitting forward, staring right at you. Through you. It seems. The prosecutors start asking you all of these questions. Your answers are all over the place. They barely make sense. You were told to tell lies, but it's hard to keep it all straight because none
of what you're testifying to actually happened. But at seventeen years old, Allan is convicted of murder and sentenced to fifteen years to life in prison. The gunshot residue that the police and prosecutor's claim was found on Alan's hand is the only physical evidence linking him to the crime. The story you just heard is based on the true events of Raymond Carl Allan Warren's trial. He was convicted
of murder based on faulty gunshot residue evidence. The police also chorused his two friends, Shanta and Antonio, into giving false testimony saying that Allan committed the crime. Alan is now in his forties and he is still in prison. He's been there for over twenty five years, serving a sentence of fifteen to life for a murder he did not commit. I'm Josh Duben, civil Rights It's in criminal defense attorney and innocent ambassador to the Innocence Project in
New York Today on wrongful conviction junk science. We examine gunshot residue evidence. As listeners to the show, you've probably heard how coerse confessions are used to convict innocent people
on another podcast in our feed wrongful conviction, false Confessions. Now, the coerse confessions of Chanta and Antonio were certainly factors in convicting Allan at his trial, but today our focus is on faulty forensic science, and gunshot residue certainly has its issues that began almost a century ago.
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In nineteen thirty three, a group of American police officers from several departments gathered in a lab at the police headquarters of Mexico City. They were there to observe Tiodoro Gonzales demonstrate his new tech for testing gunpowder residue. The test became known by many names, the dermal nitrate tests, the glove tests, but my favorite might be the paraffin gauntlet test. The officers watched as Gonzales poured white, hot liquid paraffin wax over the fingers, hands, and wrists of
his lab assistant. A glimmer of discomfort flashed across the assistant's eyes as the hot wax coated his skin. Next, Gonzales delicately wrapped the layer of cotton around the assistants fingers and hands. Layer after layer of wax, then cotton were added, until gloves began to form while the paraffin cooled. Gonzales explained that after a suspect fires a gun, the gunpowder residue becomes embedded deep in the pores of the skin.
Even weeks after a gun is fired, the hot melted paraffin will open up the pores, mix with the oils in the skin, and caused the porest to discharge the gunpowder residue trapped within them. Part of this experiment included Gonzalez's assistant firing a gun and then washing his hands prior to them being wrapped. The American officers noted the advantage of this technique. Suspects couldn't simply wash their hands
and avoid detection. Gonzales delicately peeled the gloves from the hands of his assistant and then took them over to the lab table and gently laid them down. He measured a small beaker of a chemical solution that contained sulfuric acid. Drop by drop, he coated the interior of the gloves with the mixture. Minutes later, dark blue specks the size of pinpoints began to form, and Gonzales explained that these blue dots indicated the presence of dermal nitrates from gunpowder residue.
The police officers huddled around the paraffine gloves to see for themselves. After that, it took only a few years for the paraffin test to become widely used in police departments across the United States. Within three years of Gonzalez's demonstration, it was used as forensic evidence in the murder trial of James L. Westwood in Pennsylvania. At his trial, the state called expert witnesses who testified that gunpowder residue was present on Westwood's hands, indicating that it was he who
shot and killed his wife. But Westwood's defense attorney called his own expert witness, a chemist who had conducted his own study and found that thirteen different substances could also cause the blue dots to appear on the paraffin gloves. He cited things like ordinary soot, certain brands of toothpaste, tobacco cigars, cigarette ashes, and different types of matches, but none of that evidence mattered for the jury. Westwood was convicted of the first degree murder of his wife and
sentenced to life in prison. By nineteen sixty seven, a wider study concluded that rust colored fingernail polish and residue from evaporated urine, soap, and tapwater would all test positive. Contact with any of these objects would create blue dots to appear on the gloves in a paraffin test. The paraffine test is no longer being used today, and the science behind testing gunshot residue has changed. By the time Allan was arrested in nineteen ninety four at sixteen years old,
officers used a new version of the test. It's called the atomic absorption test, but that test has many of the same reliability problems as the paraffin glove.
None of the evidence that was used to convict it Alan has withstood the test of time. The test used to indicate that he had gunshot residue on his hands is no longer considered reliable.
So joining us today is Joanna Sanchez and she's from the Wrongful Conviction Project at the Office of the Ohio Public Defender and we're super excited to have her today. She's currently representing Alan, whose story we talked about at the beginning of this episode. Now, Alan's full name is Raymond Carl Allan Warren, and Joanna might refer to him as either Allan or Raymond, but don't get confused, okay,
because Raymond and Alan are the same person. So Joanna, it's great to have you here today, and I'd like you to start by telling us a little bit about Alan. What was he like as a sixteen year old living in Dayton, Ohio.
Alan was, by all accounts, a normal teenager. He had a few brothers and he's very close with them. He's close with his mother, very close to his great and mother had lots of friends in the neighborhood, would spend time with them. Alan loves working on cars, so that was something he spent a lot of time doing, both fixing cars and painting them, playing basketball. And now you know,
I've known him now for six years. He's a very engaging, caring person, very talkative, has strong relationships with his family and friends. Still, okay, So.
I want to get into the details of the crime a little bit. So police officers arrive on Allen Street the night when he had been fixing his moped and this green car had crashed into the side of a house and the driver is shot. So what makes them even decide to go after Allan as a suspect in the first place?
So I think it's a matter of circumstance, the boys they worked on their scooters for a period of time after they heard the gunshots, and then in order to go home, Alan had to essentially go through the crime scene because it happened on the street he was living on with his grandma's. So Alan that night told the police about this encounter with the victim, and the police asked him if he was willing to come down to
the police station to give a statement. So he voluntarily went to the police station and also voluntarily submitted to a gunshot residue test. And the result of that gunshot residue test was that Allen tested negative on his left hand even though he's left handed, and the palm of his right hand, though tested positive for two elements that are known to be in gunshot residue. And I honestly think once that gunshot residue test came back, they just became laser focused on Alan.
So tell us a little bit about that test. What exactly did gunshot residue testing entail at the time when Alan went down to that police station.
So, gunshot residue testing, the idea behind it is that one person shoots a firearm, particles will be admitted that will land on their clothing or their hands or their face, and that those particles can then be tested. You can't see them, but they can be tested and tell to please something about whether the person being tested might have shot a firearm. All gunshot residue testing is not a simple yes or no test. This is gunshot residue or it's not. What it's really testing for is the elements
that are known to make up gunshot residue. So specifically, they test for three elements in most circumstances, and that's lead, barium, and antimony. In Raymond's case, they actually only tested for two of those elements, and what they used was an atomic absorption test, which is now largely out of use, and that's because it has a high risk of producing false positives. So the reason the AA test is unreliable is because it tests for elements that are also present
in items that are completely unrelated to guns. So as a result, a person who's never touched or been near a gun could falsely test positive.
So Joanna, give us an example. What are some things that Alan might have touched that would make him test positive for gunshot residue.
Brake linings are one example of an item that has the same elements as gunshot residue, and on the night of the shooting, as we know, Raymond, who frequently was working on cars, had contact with brake linings while he fixed his motorized scooter. So the AA test as used in Raymond's case is problematic because we can't know if those two elements came from gunshot residue or if they came from brake linings or some other substance that has those same elements as gunshot residue.
So you mentioned that the AA test, the atomic absorption test that was used on Allen, is not really considered any more to be dependable, but they're still using gunshot residue as a form of evidence. With new tests, has signs progressed in any significant way since the AA test.
Gunshot residue testing generally has progressed somewhat. The AA test is no longer really in favor because of its limitations, and there was a switch over in the mid two thousands to a test called sem EDS, and that test was better in that it not only would tell an analyst whether those elements were present, but also could tell them the shape and size of the elements and sort of how they functioned together, whether they were fused, whether they were the shape of a sphere, all things that
would be important for distinguishing between gunshot residue and let's say another substance. And so in order for an analyst to have any confidence that something is actually gunshot resume, they'd need to do that sort of morphological analysis and also compare all of the elements in that gunshot resduce sample with all of the elements and other substances so that they can actually eliminate other items.
Okay, So that sounds like it does have the potential to be more accurate test because you're able to look at the residue under microscope and tell that the molecules actually come from a gun and can't be from anywhere else. But is this a perfect fix?
Even if that's done properly, there's still a second issue with gunshot rescue testing, and that's the reason why the scientific community has really pulled back from this testing, and that issue is contamination. So gunshot residue is incredibly transferable. It's very easy to pick it up by touching a surface that's contaminated with gunshot residue. So if I were to shoot a gun and shake your hand, you could
very likely test positive for gunshot residue. And with that that creates just too big of a risk for environmental contamination. And what it means is that, you know, people who touch the back of police cars, handcuffs, police officers, police stations, there's a good chance they could pick up gunshot residue from those surfaces, even though they themselves never touched a gun.
And we know that happened to Raymond's case because he was transported to the police station in the back of a police car and then held in an interrogation room for several hours before he was actually tested. If on the call before that police officer had taken somebody who shot a gun down to the police station, that person could have left gunshot residue there and then Alan gets in the car and picks it up. And there have been studies across the country that show that kind of
thing occurs. So there was a study in Colorado where they tested I think forty police cars excuse me, twenty six police cars, and they found gunshot residue particles and fourteen of them. So this kind of transference is very common unfortunately, So and.
You know, in hearing this, I got to tell you this is like it's startling, it's scary, and you initially start to see think, well, how many people might have been wrongfully convicted when the evidence in their case was just gunshot residue on their hands. I mean, you have to admit it's pretty compelling evidence for people that don't know otherwise. And I mean what I mean for people
that don't know otherwise, I'm talking about jurors. So with that in mind, how big of a role did faulty gunshot residue evidence plane Allen's case?
The gunshot residue evidence here was critical in Alan's trial. The examiner when he testified, what he said was that this positive test means one of three things. Either Alan shot a gun, Alan was a victim of a shooting, or Alan handled ammunition. But we know he wasn't a victim, and both of the other options still implicate him, whether
he's shooting a gun or handling ammunition. What the examiner left out is the fourth possibility that this is contamination and the fifth possibility, which is that it's not gone shot residue at all. It could just be barium and antimony on Alan's hands as a result of him having contact with Brake Linings earlier that night, and that is the entire scope of the physical evidence in this trial.
So as a result of this bogus gunshot residue evidence, Allan gets sentenced to fifteen years to life. He's only seventeen years old. I mean, what options did he have to seek recourse? How would one go about proving that gunshot residue evidence is false.
It's incredibly difficult for anybody who's incarcerated to collect the evidence or knowledge necessary to file a new trial motion or raise a claim that they are wrongfully convicted. So part of that is he's locked inside, can't go out and conduct any sort of investigation. He lacks the funds, so he doesn't have the ability to hire an attorney or an investigator or an expert witness to go get
this evidence. Alan was challenged and that he couldn't even get the records in his case, So if he wanted to write a motion for a few years, he did not even have a copy of his transcript that would have helped him to do that. So there are so many barriers. He's a smart guy, but he's not an attorney. I mean, that's why we say people should have attorneys. To litigate these complex issues is incredibly difficult, and it's all the more so for somebody who's a teenager and
they're incarcerated. They don't have access to these things. And so he fought on his own for years and years to try to challenge his conviction. The kind of changes and evolution with gunshot residue was happening, but he did not really know that. He didn't have access to forensic science articles or expert witnesses, so he wasn't even aware that that was necessarily an issue in his case. And eventually, in nineteen ninety nine, Chante Hunt gave a statement and said,
I lied because I was scared. Alan was with us when we heard the shots, so he could not have shot the victim. And in two thousand and eight, Antonio gave a very similar statement saying, again, I was scared and this is a lie, and I did not come forward for all these years because I was scared of perjury charges.
Now the Innocence Project has become involved in Allen's case, and you and your co counsel are fighting to get allan justice. But as our listeners know by now, as I'm sure you and I can agree, this problem is so much bigger than Alan's case. What needs to happen, in your opinion, to make sure things like gunshot residue evidence stopped being used to convict innocent people so that this doesn't happen again and again and again.
I think police officers and lab examiners should be careful about when they do gunshot resdue testing and only do it in the very optimal circumstances, if at all. I think there are some police officers who feel that it's just a piece of the puzzle and it's a helpful tool and the investigation. But I think the risk with that is that it leads to tunnel vision. You know, once you have that piece of evidence, you become fixated on a suspect, and our courts, our judges, need to
look at it critically as well. The court is the gatekeeper of expert testimony and forensic evidence that comes in, and what we're seeing is that some courts are limiting what can be said about gunshot rescue evidence, but they're still allowing it in. And I think at some point we hit a breaking point where the risk of prejudice for this evidence outweighs the benefit of it because it
is so unreliable in so many different aspects. That are we risking swaying the jury with evidence that really isn't reliable enough and shouldn't be presented at all.
All Right, So that certainly addresses what people involved in the justice system can do. But what can everyday people do. We have a lot of our listeners asking us, you know, what can I do to help? So please tell them things they can do to make sure that this kind of junk science stops being used and it gets out of our criminal justice system once and for all.
I think the biggest thing is people sharing this information and sharing podcasts like this, sharing when somebody is exonerated based on forensic evidence that we now know has been discredited. Is the more people that know about this, I think
the more the system will improve. I think the impact of sharing this podcast and sharing his story is that more people hear about it, and then they take that knowledge with them when they vote, and they take that knowledge with them when they interact with public officials and ask them, how do you approach wrongful convictions? How do you approach forensic science. Are there laws in place that
allow for these convictions to be challenged appropriately? And I think having the knowledge that's gained from listening to a podcast like this equips people with the sort of the talking points and the ability to ask those questions of public officials.
So tell us a little bit about where Alan is now and what options are left for him at this point.
Now, Alan had litigated emotion asking for a new trial, and we stepped into that litigation on his behalf in twenty fourteen, and it's kind of been up and down through the courts over several years. But earlier this year the Supreme Court of Ohio decided not to take his case. So where we're at is we continue to fight for him, and we believe strongly in his innocence and that he
was wrongfully convicted. And so we're moving forward. We're hoping to find new evidence or hoping that a new avenue of relief opens up that allows Alan to challenge his conviction and hopefully one day go home.
Look, Joanna, I my heart sort of you know, aches for you and for Alan really, because I have been there before. I know that when cases you know, don't work out, you know, on our initial first try or first fifteen tries, and go the way we need them to go, because our clients are innocent, and we know they're innocent. It can be so frustrating. What's your reaction when you have setbacks like this. I know that I've wept on my wife's shoulder before, I know that I
have punched walls. I've had the spectrum of emotions. But you know, tell me a little bit about what it's like for you when you know you're faced with setbacks like this, and you know what it's like with Alan still sitting in prison.
I think the important thing we do is we kind of keep moving forward and keep thinking about our clients, keep thinking about Alan and what he's going through. And it's so important that we stay in the fight and continue to be a voice for those people. And I hope one day it's not this way. But I know for me, I look at all the two thousand plus exonerations that we know about, and I see that those are never easy, right. They come after setback, and people
have to try multiple different times, multiple different ways. And so I hope that at some point in time it doesn't have to be that way. But at least for now, I know that it's absolutely worth it to keep fighting for this person and to keep hoping that one day something we do works and somebody pays attention and that he gets the justice he's do.
You know, I tell people all the time that these wrongful convictions are super difficult. You have to fight tall odds, you have to keep on fighting forward in the face of constant rejection from appellate courts. And if you're not willing to deal with sepacks, if you can't pick yourself up and dust yourself off and keep charging up that steep slope, you're really in the wrong business. And it
really does take a team effort. So the more you can share these stories, the better off we're all going to be, because there's power in numbers, and there's power in a collective message. So I hope you will do
just that. Please share our podcast and take action, whether it be writing your local judges as I often implore you all to do, or ensuring that when you vote, you are voting for those judges and the jurisdiction which you live that actually have the qualifications and the temperament to be open minded and thorough such that they won't blindly accept that legal precedent equates to liability. Sometimes bad science remains in our system of justice because it goes unchallenged.
It's up to all of us to shine a bright light on these junk sciences and force a reckoning. Next week, we'll explore the junk science of tool mark identification with science journalist Tim Recorth. Wrongful Conviction Junk Science is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One. Thanks to our executive producer Jason Flamm and the team at Signal Company Number One executive producer Kevin Wardis and senior producers Karen Kornhaber and Britz Spangler.
Our music was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram at dubin Josh. Follow the Wrongful Conviction podcast on Facebook and on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction on Twitter at wrong Conviction