Opinion ID: 1890083
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Hal Franklin Sharpe's Testimony

Text: At the § 23-110 hearing, expert Sharpe adopted his February 2000 affidavit, in which he opined that the decedent was not seated in the passenger seat when he was shot. Sharpe testified that, in preparing his expert opinion for the Lopez case, he met with Attorney Shaner on several occasions, reviewed the police reports, all of the crime scene photographs, sketches, the medical examiner's report[,] and the evidence reports, and examined both a sweater and a light-colored shirt which had been collected by the police as evidence and sealed in evidence bags. Sharpe testified that he examined the sweater with a magnifying glass and used a microscope on the parts of the sweater that were closest to the cut area where the entrance wound would have been. In forming his opinion, it appears that Sharpe relied heavily on photographs taken four blocks away from the scene of the shooting, at the location where the decedent was pulled from the Forerunner. [14] When asked to state the basis for his opinion that the passenger door was open at the time of the shooting, Sharpe explained that the location of the broken glass in the photographs was highly significant. As to whether the door itself was open, there's a high probability that the door was open based upon the glass that's on the ground below the vehicle. It was present in the crime scene photographs if you take a look at them. When questioned regarding the basis for his opinion that the passenger seat was empty at the time of the shooting, Sharpe again relied on the photographs. According to Sharpe, if someone had been seated in that car at the time that that glass was broken, then there should have been a lack of glass on the seat, particularly on the bottom seat cushion, because that glass would have landed on the individual as opposed to all over that seat and it was fairly uniform across the bottom seat cushion. .... [T]he fact that there's a fair amount of glass on the running board and also on the ground indicates to me that if it was a bullet that caused that glass to shatter, then the door had to be at least partially open at the time that the bullet hit the glass in order for these patterns of glass that you see on the running board and also on the ground to be here. Sharpe also testified that the absence of glass fragments from the decedent's sweater meant that the decedent was not likely sitting next to the glass at the time of the shooting. Sharpe noted, however, that the lack of glass on the sweater was not determinative of where the decedent was located at the time of the shooting. When asked what conclusion he was able to draw from the lack of glass on the sweater, he replied, Well, none specifically from the sweater itself. The sweater is just one contributing factor. When the trial court asked Sharpe how far from the window the decedent could have been to avoid getting glass on his sweater, Sharpe said [i]ts impossible for me to tell without conducting experiments under similar circumstances. Sharpe did opine, however, that the decedent could have been no nearer than eighteen inches from the window to avoid being showered with glass fragments.