Opinion ID: 2159325
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 8

Heading: Was the defendant prejudiced by the State's expert testimony on the issues of the sexual assault charges?

Text: Defendant raises three objections to the testimony of the State's expert on serology, or the identification of bodily fluids: (1) that the expert was allowed to support his opinion on the basis of data undisclosed prior to trial; (2) that these data were gathered informally and were scientifically unreliable; and (3) that the expert was wrongfully permitted to offer an opinion beyond his expertise on an ultimate issue of fact  the alleged sexual penetration of the victim. As noted, the defendant was convicted of aggravated sexual assault. N.J.S.A. 2C:14-2a(6). The State found no evidence of injury to the organs of the victim and detected no semen in her genital or other cavities. Consequently, the State sought to prove sexual penetration of the victim by noting, in connection with all other circumstantial evidence (her unclothed body, bound and spread-eagled; the defendant's underwear found under her pillow) the apparent presence of saliva in her genital cavity. The defendant had been aware that analysis of a vaginal swab was to be offered in evidence to support the State's charge of aggravated sexual assault, an offense involving some form of sexual penetration: the State had introduced the same evidence before the grand jury. At trial, however, the defendant's main complaint was that he had been caught by surprise when the State's serology expert, Andrew Nardelli, offered his own informal studies to buttress his opinion that the elevated level of the digestive enzyme amylase found in the vaginal sample indicated the presence of saliva. Mr. Nardelli, principal forensic chemist with the State Police, had adapted for his forensic purposes a test originally designed for clinical measurement of amylase in bodily fluids: the major difference between the two applications is that the original test operates on a known and relatively large volume of the fluid, while the modification is used to analyze stains or other residues. Nardelli added to each sample a starch coupled with a dye; any amylase present would react with the starch, releasing the dye into solution. The amount of dye released, as indicated by the resulting color of the solution, was measured instrumentally, producing a numerical value that reflected the activity of the amylase present in the sample. The average salivary amylase level found by this procedure was 1.627; the amylase level of the sample taken from the victim's own mouth was 1.845. Before trial Nardelli had reviewed the approximately 1,644 samples of bodily fluids that he had previously analyzed for amylase activity, and had noted the origins of those whose amylase level was equal to or exceeded 1.685, the victim's vaginal amylase level. He found that saliva had been present in all samples containing such an elevated amylase level, with the possible exceptions of forty-nine samples whose origins were not revealed by his records. By contrast, the amylase level of vaginal fluid would not be expected to exceed 0.422, which average Nardelli had derived from an unspecified number of samples donated by his female co-workers. Nardelli did admit on cross-examination that the elevated amylase level in this sample might possibly have been produced by the process of autolysis, i.e., by enzyme action on dead or decaying tissue. The defendant did not object to Nardelli's testimony that the amylase level measured in the vaginal sample taken from the victim indicated the presence of saliva. Nor did defendant accept the trial court's offer of an Evidence Rule 8 hearing outside the presence of the jury on the admissibility of the expert's amylase results or conclusions: during a sidebar after the State had attempted to elicit Nardelli's opinion on the significance of saliva in this environment, the court had asked whether either party desired such a hearing. Defendant objected instead to certain surrounding aspects of the scientific process that had led the expert to conclude that saliva was present in the sample.
After concluding his cross-examination of Nardelli, defendant complained that he had not been given notice or granted discovery of the expert's 1,644 amylase measurements. Many of these analyses had been performed on evidence from other criminal cases; the record is unclear on whether this total number of measurements includes analyses of samples provided by Nardelli's female co-workers. The prosecutor indicated that he himself had not been aware of the master log book in which the expert had recorded these amylase results. He argued that Nardelli might in good faith have interpreted the defense's discovery request for his laboratory notes and those of a co-worker as not including the master log book; recall that Nardelli had disclosed the results of testing the victim's swabs for fluids relating to this alleged crime. On the following day, defendant requested a mistrial or alternatively the striking of Nardelli's testimony concerning the amylase, on the basis that defendant had not been provided with all the backup material. The trial court denied both motions but offered defense counsel the opportunity to examine the log books further and to recall Nardelli. We find that while these data preferably should have been disclosed in discovery proceedings, the serology expert's reference to them on the seventh day of a fourteen-day guilt phase (four-day penalty phase) trial did not have the capacity to prejudice the defendant. Concededly, given the exigencies of trial scheduling it would have been difficult for the defense to examine the logs and to recall Nardelli, or to prepare its own expert witness with respect to these previously undisclosed data; but these courses of action were not foreclosed to the defense. Moreover, at oral argument the defense contended that the other amylase tests performed by the expert should not have been introduced at trial, because defense had not been given proper notice that these raw data would be offered to support the State's charges of sexual penetration of the victim. This argument is strained because the expert's grand jury testimony had clearly addressed this point; the defense was able to foresee the essential duplication at trial of this testimony and underlying prosecutorial strategy. Defendant's expert agreed to the central question  that the measurement of a sample's amylase content was a valid test for the presence of saliva  and further acknowledged that the significant level of amylase that Nardelli had detected in the sample was consistent with the presence of saliva in the victim's genital cavity; finally, he concurred that ordinary levels of amylase in genital fluid were possibly several thousand times less than those found in saliva. However, the defense expert insisted that this evidence could not be taken as proof to a reasonable scientific certainty that saliva was present. This expert's challenge to the State's thesis was that Nardelli had not tested the sample taken from the victim for the presence of other characteristic components of saliva (i.e., thiocyanate and alkaline phosphatase) and therefore had not proven conclusively that saliva was present in the victim's sample. Thus, the central forensic question was not the validity of Nardelli's amylase measurement, but the weight to be given to his suggestion, in the absence of corroborating tests for saliva, that the victim's vaginal cavity contained saliva. Here, since defendant's discovery difficulty was peripheral to that main element of the scientific debate, and since defendant was given the opportunity (although belatedly) to examine these data and to question the State's expert, we would not reverse on the discovery issue.
We have had recent occasion to explore the criteria for determining reliability of a scientific measurement offered in evidence at a criminal trial. In Romano v. Kimmelman, 96 N.J. 66, 80 (1984), we noted that the breathalyzer test's general acceptance within the scientific community demonstrated its scientific reliability. We expressed specific concern for general acceptance of a scientific methodology when the results of that test, without any additional inference, establish the crime itself. For example, a breathalyzer device can determine, without further proof, a driver's sobriety or drunkenness; a radar gun detects, without the need for corroboration, a driver's speeding. By comparison, the amylase results at issue here established only that there was a reasonable inference that fluids consistent with saliva were found in the victim's vagina; these findings did not in themselves establish defendant's guilt or innocence of sexual assault. We find a sufficiently reliable basis for the court to have permitted the State's serologist to testify that the amylase level observed scientifically indicated the presence of saliva in the sample. The measurements in this case were derived by that expert's modification of a standard chemical test for the presence of amylase; the defense did not dispute the expert's qualifications, the efficacy of the test modification, or the validity of the results. It disputed the certainty of the modified test but not the principle on which it was based. It said not that the test was unreliable, but that a better one could have been done. The basic amylase testing at issue here meets the Romano criteria for admissibility. Defendant also objected to the informality of the expert's compilation of approximately 1,644 amylase samples supplied to him at the State Police forensic laboratory. In fact, the expert was unable to identify the sources of forty-nine of his highest amylase readings. However, nothing else in the record suggests that the readings obtained from the remaining samples were in any way unreliable. Many of the expert's samples were not, and indeed could not have been, provided to him simultaneously; instead, he added to his own responsibilities by not only analyzing the evidentiary materials from various cases as they came into his hands but by also requesting fluid samples from co-workers. The organization of his results in the master lab notebook, arranged by case, undoubtedly reflects the variety of other measurements that were being performed on samples in addition to the amylase testing. However, given the reliability of the test itself and the opportunity provided the defendant to examine the notebook to bolster his assertions of fatal informality, we do not find the manner by which this expert gathered data to be so haphazard or careless as to render his results inadmissible. Nor do we find that this expert's impartiality is endangered by his possible interest in judicial acceptance of the analysis he developed ( cf. State v. Cary, 49 N.J. 343, 352 (1967) (something more than bare opinion of one man, however qualified, required for acceptance of voiceprint identification technique)).
Defendant objected at trial to the State's line of questioning that led the expert to speculate on an ultimate fact, the source of the alleged saliva found in the victim's vaginal sample; the expert suggested that defendant had introduced his or the victim's saliva into that environment. Initially, we recognize the limited role that expert testimony has in the trial of any case. Such testimony is required only to assist juries in determining that which they could not determine of their own ability: admissibility is predicated not on whether the subject matter is common or uncommon or whether many persons or few have knowledge of the matter; but [on] whether the witnesses offered as experts have peculiar knowledge or experience not common to the world which renders their opinions founded on such knowledge or experience any aid to the court or jury in determining the questions at issue. [ Rempfer v. Deerfield Packing Corp., 4 N.J. 135, 141-42 (1950), quoted in Butler v. Acme Markets, Inc., 89 N.J. 270, 283 (1982).] The necessity for, or propriety of, the admission of expert testimony, and the competence of such testimony, are judgments within the discretion of the trial court. Obviously the expert's analysis of the vaginal swab and his conclusion that saliva was indicated to be present were admissible under Evidence Rule 56(2), which allows an expert witness to offer such testimony [as] will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or determine a fact in issue; the indications of saliva on the swab were relevant to a fact in issue, the condition of the victim. Subsequently the court prevented the State from asking its expert to assume for a moment that the amylase found in Barbara Berrisford's vaginal swab was left there by Mr. Zola. However, the court then allowed the expert to answer the more general question, can you account for the finding of amylase activity of this kind in a woman's vagina? Here the State was preparing to rebut the defense's contentions that the sample did not contain the defendant's blood type and that the amylase detected could have been produced by autolysis, or decay of the victim's tissues. To meet that defense the court allowed the expert to aid the jury in determining what the scientific facts might indicate. As the expert witness went on to testify, both the defendant and the victim were secreters, whose blood grouping substances (Zola's type A; the victim's, type B) were also present in their other bodily fluids. Thus, if defendant's saliva had entered the victim's genital cavity, normally marked by type B compounds, the analysis of the sample would also have been expected to contain defendant's type A compounds. However, only type B compounds were detected. At trial, over the objections of defense counsel, the court allowed the prosecutor to ask the State's expert why the vaginal sample, whose elevated amylase content indicated the presence of saliva, had been found to contain only the victim's blood compounds and not the defendant's blood compounds. In a response substantially similar to his testimony before the grand jury, Nardelli suggested that in the course of sexual contacts the defendant might have transferred the victim's own saliva to her vagina; even a small amount of the saliva could have made a large contribution to the observed amylase levels. Alternatively, defendant could have introduced his own saliva but its identifying components might have been masked out by the victim's blood group substances normally present in that environment. (Or, as the expert testified before the grand jury only, the victim's bodily processes after the possible introduction of Zola's saliva substances might have diluted them so much that analysis of the sample would have detected the increased amylase due to Zola's saliva but would not have revealed Zola's blood typing compounds from his saliva.) Finally, Nardelli noted that the sample might not have contained the defendant's blood group substance at all. We are especially concerned about the use of expert testimony to interpret matters that could be considered commonplace or conduct that could be accounted for commonsensically. A. Handler, The Judicial Pursuit of Knowledge, Part I, 121 N.J.L.J. 882, 883 (May 5, 1988). We have no sense that this expert's suggestions were counterintuitive. Indeed, here it is hardly debatable that the subject of the saliva's source posed no matter of scientific complexity. However, we believe that just as the serology expert shed light for the jury on the arcane subjects of amylase levels and blood type detected in the sample, so too did he offer an opinion, rationally based on the relationship of the scientific to the circumstantial evidence in this case, on a scientifically possible source of that material. Indeed, while the expert offered no scientific tests to support his hypotheses of the saliva's origin, he had previously testified that his records revealed that samples taken from cases where the case report indicated that there was some type of oral sex involved had produced amylase levels comparable to that observed in the victim's vaginal sample. Moreover, by his suggestions that on their face reinforced the commonsensical explanations for the saliva's origin the expert testified by omission that there was not a more esoteric explanation for his scientific findings. In this regard the expert assisted the jury's understanding that there was not necessarily an answer other than those that their own common sense suggested. In admitting into evidence that common-sense interpretation of the relationship between scientific fact and the inference it sustained, the trial court's ruling did not infringe on the jury's capacity to determine an ultimate fact: the source of the saliva in the sample.