E-Mail This Article to a Friend Bad ballistics, continued
	Related Links Association of Firearm and Toolmark Examiners This is the premier trade group for ballisticians. The site provides information and links about the field. AFTE also provides professional certification for firearm examiners, although nobody from the Boston Police Department has it. Laboratory Accreditation Board This is the Web site for the accreditation process that the BPD ballistics lab is going through, run by the American Society of Crime Lab Directors. The only BPD lab currently certified by ASCLD is the Crime Laboratory Unit - the one lab that uses civilian scientists. FirearmsID This is a great site to get up to speed on the ABCs of firearm identification, and to search for information about specific guns. You can also take part in the Eurosimulator shooting contest for prizes! National Firearms Examiner Academy Many ballistics labs - but not Boston's - send their examiners to this training program run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (commonly still called the ATF). Browse this site to see what the rest of the country's ballisticians learn about their craft.

It’s not clear which tests Camper was referring to; the BPD has not provided test results to either the lawyers in that case or to the Phoenix. As part of the new push for accreditation, the BPD began using Comparative Testing Systems (CTS) of Roanoke, Virginia, sometime in the past two years. CTS is a leading provider of independent tests to forensics labs, and failing its firearms proficiency exam is a rarity. Over the past four years, CTS has compiled results of 1079 firearm-identification tests of that type, including many given to trainees, and only 36 contained any mis-identifications.

The BPD would not answer questions or provide any interviews in response to requests from the Phoenix. Doherty and Camper both declined direct requests for interviews. A public-information request for proficiency-exam results submitted two weeks ago was not fulfilled.

In other labs, failure of any proficiency exam would cause near-panic. At the least, the examiner would be immediately placed in remedial training, and the lab would probably conduct a thorough review of his or her recent work, say supervisors of ballistics labs in other states. "It’s an unforgiving field," says Michelle Kuehner, associate crime-lab director for the Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, coroner’s office, where she supervises the county’s ballistics lab. Her four firearms examiners all take two proficiency exams each year, and none have failed yet. "The lab does not want a person who has made a mistake to continue working in the lab."

In New York City, where the 40 ballisticians take annual proficiency tests, the few who fail are immediately taken off case work, says Gannalo, who helped create and oversee that city’s ballistics training and testing program, first as a member of the unit and later as an independent forensic consultant. The ballistician is placed in corrective action, usually including remedial training. The department reviews all of his or her paperwork, and pulls 25 cases at random to review. Only after the department is satisfied with the work, and the ballistician passes at least one new test, does it return him or her to duty.

Not so in Boston.

Whether Camper or any of his colleagues failed remains an open question. The BPD has yet to release evidence of anyone on its ballistics staff having passed a proficiency test, nor have any of them mentioned doing so in court. (Their failure to discuss the matter makes it difficult to determine whether such test results exist.) What we do know is that, if there have been any failures, they have not led to additional training for Camper or anyone else. According to prosecutors in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office, Camper never bothered to inform anyone there that he, their "expert witness," believed he had flunked a test of his abilities.

Camper, who joined the department in 1986 and transferred to ballistics in 1997 after stints as a patrolman, in the drug-control unit, and on the homicide squad, has testified more than 30 times. So has Martin Lydon, who joined the ballistics unit in 2000 after 13 years performing other duties in the department. James O’Shea, a ballistics supervisor since 1998, has testified "hundreds of times," according to his responses in court. All of them were trained solely by the apprentice system.

Many, many people have gone to prison, for many years or for life, based in large part on the claims of Camper, Lydon, and O’Shea, and two others who recently left the ballistics unit. Carl Washington retired earlier this year, and George Foley was transferred out of the unit, for reasons not made available by the BPD. Both men also had testified in hundreds of cases.

In one of those cases, Washington testified against Michael Prochilo in federal court. Prochilo was convicted in 1997 of gun-possession charges and sentenced to 27 years in prison. The conviction was later reversed, and in the retrial Prochilo was acquitted after forensic scientist David Lamagna, of American Forensic Technologies in Andover, rebutted Washington’s claims.

In addition to how unreliable their testimony is at trial, Boston’s ballisticians are clearly not providing much help tracking down shooters, either. Of the 248 BPD investigations into shooting murders since 1998, two-thirds remain officially unsolved.

SEEING WHAT THEY WANT TO

In much, if not most, of the US, firearms matching is conducted by civilian scientists rather than sworn officers — very often in labs completely independent of any law-enforcement department. In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, which covers much of western Pennsylvania including Pittsburgh and McKeesport, the lab is part of the coroner’s office. In Virginia, four labs operated by the state Department of Public Safety and staffed with civilians conduct all the firearm examinations. Illinois’s examiners are civilians, even though the lab itself is part of the state police department.

Even New York City, whose police force can be as territorial and stubborn as Boston’s, is beginning to move toward civilian ballisticians, says Gannalo.

One advantage of going civilian is that it vastly increases the quality of the applicant pool. When Kuehner recently hired a new firearm examiner for her Allegheny County lab, she had an embarrassment of qualified candidates to choose from. "There are so many forensics programs around, there’s no shortage of applicants," she says. She hired a graduate of a firearms-examination masters program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Camper, by contrast, has testified that he joined the BPD’s ballistics unit simply by asking to, even though he had no previous interest in or special knowledge of science or forensics.

Another reason why civilian examiners are better equipped to do this work is that they are removed from the pressure, spoken or implied, to give fellow officers the answer they want to hear. In the forensics field, this falls under the term "confirmation bias," which refers to the tendency, often subconscious, to find a result that you know would be helpful.

But at the BPD, confirmation bias is the modus operandi. Take Camper, who transferred from homicide to ballistics, where his former squad mates and supervisors now bring him evidence they hope will be interpreted in a way that will help build their cases.

In a 1999 murder case, in which the murder weapon was never found, the lead detective gave Camper a cartridge casing found at suspect Roger Dew’s house, to match to the ones found at the crime scene. Camper could not find markings that showed that the casing from Dew’s house was a match, but he testified that it was "consistent with being fired from the same firearm" as the casings found at the crime scene — even though in fact it would also be consistent with having been fired from any of hundreds, if not thousands, of guns in Boston. (The trial transcript also shows Camper claimed that the casing from Dew’s house was "consistent with the spent .380-caliber bullet which was removed [from the victim’s body] at the medical examiner’s office," an impossible claim to support, since a bullet and casing cannot be compared.) The prosecutor emphasized Camper’s findings in his closing arguments, and Dew was found guilty of first-degree murder.