Court Opinion

ID: 9692163
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 15:44:57.962031+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:19:32.237815
License: Public Domain

MEYER, Justice
(concurring).
I concur in the result reached by the majority but write separately because I would address the substantive issue this case presents: whether Hull was entitled to a full Frye-Mack hearing on the admissibility of the State’s expert testimony regarding handwriting and fingerprints. The majority skips over that analysis, preferring instead to affirm on harmlessness grounds. But because this issue has wide-ranging implications for future cases, we do a disservice to district courts and the administration of criminal justice in this state by declining to decide the issue on its merits.
The State argues that under State v. Roman Nose, 649 N.W.2d 815, 819 (Minn.2002), the first prong of the Frye-Mack test applies only to novel and emerging scientific techniques, and thus the State need never meet its burden to show the reliability of fingerprint and handwriting identification methodology. But lengthy use of a method by law enforcement, and even lengthy unquestioning acceptance by courts, does not exempt expert evidence from scrutiny under the first prong of Frye-Mack. Roman Nose created no such exception for traditional forensic techniques.
Rather, Roman Nose simply stands for the proposition that, once this court has recognized that a technique has satisfied the requirements of the first prong of Frye-Mack, proponents of evidence based on that technique need not present the same reliability evidence over and over to district courts. See Roman Nose, 649 N.W.2d at 819-20. The district court may thereafter limit its admissibility analysis to the second prong, asking only whether the expert’s conclusions in that case were reached by following the proper methods and procedures for that scientific technique. Id.; State v. Schwartz, 447 N.W.2d 422, 428 (Minn.1989) (establishing what later became the second prong of the Frye-Mack test).
The district court here applied Roman Nose in this way, limiting the scope of the *109hearings on the admissibility of fingerprint and handwriting evidence. In so limiting the hearings, the court concluded that both types of forensic evidence meet our standard of scientific reliability under the first prong of the Frye-Mack test. But our precedent does not establish that conclusion. We said in State v. Hodgson, 512 N.W.2d 95, 98 (Minn.1994) (internal quotation marks omitted), that “fingerprint comparisons ... are routinely used to prove that a particular person was present at a particular place or did a specific act.” And in State v. Anderson, 379 N.W.2d 70, 79 (Minn.1985), we said that handwriting analysis is “widely accepted by this court and others as a means to identify a signature as that of a particular signer.” Those statements — both made in dicta — simply reiterated the noncontroversial fact that both fingerprints and handwriting have been used for many years. Neither case held that fingerprint comparison and handwriting analysis is evidence that meets the first prong of the Frye-Mack test. I would therefore hold that the district court erred when it limited the admissibility hearings in this case to the second prong of the test. The court should have conducted a complete Frye-Mack hearing in this case, requiring the State to meet its admissibility burden in full before accepting the evidence.
The State asks us to hold that, even if the district court erred in limiting the hearings in this case, the record demonstrates that the Analysis, Comparison, Evaluation, and Verification (ACE-V) fingerprint methodology and the methods of handwriting analysis pass the Frye-Mack test because they are generally accepted in the relevant scientific communities. Indeed, despite the limitation placed on the Frye-Mack hearings, the record contains considerable evidence from both parties relevant to the first prong question: whether the methodologies of ACE-V fingerprint analysis and handwriting analysis lead to accurate and reliable conclusions about whether a specific individual created a latent print or authored a particular document.
I would not hold on this record that either method meets the reliability requirement of Frye-Mack. Most fundamentally, the issue is not properly before us because the district court limited the development of the record and declined to rule on the first prong. Further, the evidence that Hull was permitted to present on reliability raises serious doubts about the State’s ability to meet its reliability burden under the first prong. For example, one expert testified on behalf of Hull that although “the claim that latent print examiners can reach correct results when they do their analysis is amenable to validation testing,” no such study has so far been conducted to determine whether the technique consistently reaches the correct result. The State presented evidence that a statistical model is currently being developed to assign probability values to fingerprint identification conclusions similar to the values that are currently available for DNA identification, but those studies are still in progress. Regarding handwriting, Hull presented the testimony of an expert who stated that no study has yet established that examiners can accurately match a piece of writing to its author, and that, in the expert’s opinion, handwriting analysis methodology is too subjective to produce reliable results.
The report cited by the majority underscores these points, calling attention to a decades-long absence of scientific studies on these methods. See Comm, on Identifying the Needs of the Forensic Sci. Cmty., Nat’l Research Council, Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward 8, 53 (2009), available at http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffilesl/ *110nij/grants/228091.pdf (hereafter NRC Report). Such studies are necessary to satisfy the accuracy and reliability requirements of this court’s Frye-Mack test. See, e.g., Schwartz, 447 N.W.2d at 425-28 (holding that forensic DNA typing identifications are accepted in the scientific community as reliable). As the majority notes, the NRC Report had not been published at the time of the pretrial hearings in this case. It is thus not part of the record. Nonetheless, the State cites the report in its brief, describes it as “helpful” and states that it “may properly be relied on by this Court.”
The NRC Report states in no uncertain terms that the state and federal courts’ longstanding acceptance of traditional forensic science expert opinions is simply not supported by good science. The report observes that courts “appear to be loath to insist on such research as a condition of admitting forensic science evidence in criminal cases, perhaps because to do so would likely demand more by way of validation than the disciplines can presently offer.” NRC Report, supra, at 12 (internal quotation marks omitted). The report advises that “every effort must be made to limit the risk of having the reliability of certain forensic science methodologies judicially certified before the techniques have been properly studied and their accuracy verified.” Id. at 86. In the report’s chapter on the use of forensic evidence in litigation, the NRC Committee finds
that the existing legal regime — including the rules governing the admissibility of forensic evidence, the applicable standards governing appellate review of trial court decisions, the limitations of the adversary process, and judges and lawyers who often lack the scientific expertise necessary to comprehend and evaluate forensic evidence — is inadequate to the task of curing the documented ills of the forensic science disciplines.
Id. at 85.
The NRC Committee “decided ... that it would not be feasible to develop a detailed evaluation of each discipline in terms of its scientific underpinning, level of development, and ability to provide evidence .... ” Id. at 7. But the report does contain brief summaries of findings regarding individual forensic science fields. In its discussion of fingerprint analysis, the report concludes that such analysis is a “valuable tool” but the ACE-V method described by the State’s witnesses in this case “is not specific enough to qualify as a validated method for this type of analysis” and “merely following the steps of ACE-V does not imply that one is proceeding in a scientific manner or producing reliable results.” Id. at 142. The report’s conclusion about handwriting analysis is that “[t]he scientific basis for handwriting comparisons needs to be strengthened,” and only “limited research” has been done “to quantify the reliability and replicability of the practices used by trained document examiners,” but “there may be some value in handwriting analysis.” Id. at 166-67.
By highlighting these issues, I do not mean to suggest that fingerprint analysis, handwriting analysis, or any other forensic evidence method could never pass muster under our admissibility standards. But in order to present expert conclusions based on these methods to a jury, the proponent of the evidence must first meet its burden under the first prong of Frye-Mack to show that its forensic evidence methods produce accurate and reliable results. The district court erred in this case when it relieved the State of that burden.
I agree with the majority that because the contested evidence was cumulative of other overwhelming evidence of Hull’s intent and premeditation, the district court’s *111error did not significantly affect the jury’s verdict in this case. See State v. Rodriguez, 754 N.W.2d 672, 684 (Minn.2008). We therefore need not remand this case to the district court and Hull’s conviction should be affirmed.