Court Opinion

ID: 9720981
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 08:45:58.54425+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:22.620780
License: Public Domain

BOEHM, J.,
concurring in result.
I have no doubt that the State has established that Williams was properly convicted of these murders. However, the blood on Williams's shorts was cited as evidence that Willams was the shooter, not merely a participant in these executions. As I explained in dissenting from the Court's July 27, 2008, order denying Williams's request to present additional evidence, if it could be established that the blood was not from either victim, it would *669undermine my confidence that the jury would have recommended the death penalty.
We now have a report of DNA testing, but no explanation from Williams as to its significance. The State, also without elaboration, claims the test is "not as favorable as Williams hoped." The DNA test results establish that the blood on the shorts could not have come from Mrs. Rease, but report that Mr. Rease is "not excluded" as a possible source. Although it is common in reports of DNA tests to assign a probability to the likelihood of a match, this report included no probability that the sample was Mr. Rease's blood. We are given no explanation what inability to "exclude the possibility" as used in this report means in practical terms. The report's language as a matter of ordinary English could mean everything from there is only one chance in a very large number that the blood came from Mr. Rease, to there is a high probability it did come from Mr. Rease, but absolute certainty is not established. The only inference I can draw from Williams's silence on these points is that the State is correct in its assertion that the test does not support Williams's claim.
In an apparent attempt to minimize this test result, Williams says that the testers could not make "a firm scientific conclusion" that the blood was Mr. Rease's. I do not believe this is a meaningful proposition. I take the report's "inability to exclude" to. mean that the test did not yield absolute certainty that the blood was Mr. Rease's. It is true that the test did not demonstrate to a scientific certainty that the blood was Mr. Rease's. Indeed, as I understand mitochondrial DNA testing, it can establish that a person is not a source, as it did with Mrs. Rease, but it never establishes to a certainty that a person is the source of a sample. MM. Holland & T.J. Parsons, Mitochondrial DNA Sequence Analysis-Validation and Use for Forensic Casework, 11 Forensic Science Review 31 (1999).
A match may, however, yield a very high probability that a given individual is the source of a sample. Williams has not provided any meaningful analysis of this test result or its significance to his case. Here the test did show that Mr. Rease's profile was one of 65,586 that matched the sample. Sixteen sites had nucleotides from two sources that had been mixed. Because sixteen sites produced two nucleotides, 2 to the 16th or 65,586 possible profiles were matched. We are given no information as to the frequency with which any of these profiles is found in any population. Williams merely claims that this test casts "enormous doubt" on the State's case, but does not explain why this is true. Given that Mr. Rease's type is among the relatively small number of possible profiles (65,536 out of an astronomical number), Williams has not shown why this claim is correct. It is his burden to show a ground for overturning the result reached by the trial court, and he has not done that. Moreover, as explained below, on its face, the DNA evidence is less favorable to Williams than the evidence at trial.
As I see it, the DNA test is considerably less favorable to Williams than what was presented at trial based on the then-current technology of blood type matter. To the extent it is relevant, the DNA test showing the blood to be from either Mr. Rease or Mrs. Rease would support the State's contentions. At trial the jury was told the blood was the same blood type as both Mr. Rease's and Mrs. Rease's, and that type is found in 45% of the general population. Blood from a type found in nearly half the population is consistent with its source being Mr. Rease, but hardly persuasive on that point. Williams attacked the blood evidence at trial by not*670ing the State's failure to produce an expert to testify about how the blood came to be on the shorts, and by pointing out that the blood could have come from "millions of people" other than the victims or from some place other than their house. T.R. at 2550, 2594-95 (quoted in Williams v. State, 706 N.E.2d 149, 156 (Ind.1999)). The raw data from the DNA test seems to me to be far more persuasive that the blood was from Mr. Rease, and therefore that Williams was in proximity to the vice-tims at the time they were executed.
In short, I was persuaded that a DNA test should be conducted because it could exclude both Reases and if so would warrant reconsideration of the death penalty. The test did not exelude both Reases and therefore did not establish what Williams contended it would or could. I agree with the majority's analysis of the non-DNA evidence and therefore concur in the result reached by the majority.