After three decades in prison, evidence in dispute

An influential state commission said the blood-spatter analysis used to convict a former Texas high school principal of murdering his wife in 1985 was “not accurate or scientifically supported” and the expert who testified was “entirely wrong.”

The findings of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, a national leader in forensic science reform, called into question the conviction of Joe Bryan, who has now spent more than 30 years in prison.

Bryan was the subject of a two-part investigation by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine in May that questioned the accuracy of the bloodstain pattern analysis used to convict Bryan, as well as the training of the experts who testify in such cases.

The findings, which were released during a commission meeting Friday, give fresh urgency to the pleas of Bryan, now 77 and in poor health, for a new trial. Bryan had been attending a principals’ convention in Austin, 120 miles from where the murder occurred, in the days surrounding the murder. He has always maintained that he was in Austin, asleep in his hotel room, at the time of the crime.

Created by the Texas Legislature in 2005, the commission — made up of seven scientists, one prosecutor and one defense attorney — does not investigate the guilt or innocence of defendants, but rather the reliability and integrity of the forensic science used to win their convictions. Earlier this year, its inquiry into the Bryan case broadened into a re-examination of bloodstain pattern analysis, a forensic discipline whose practitioners regard the drops, spatters and trails of blood at a crime scene as clues that can sometimes be used to reverse-engineer the crime itself.

The commission examined the training of some of the discipline’s practitioners, who have been admitted as expert witnesses in courts around the country despite having completed no more than a weeklong course in bloodstain interpretation.

Robert Thorman, a police detective from Harker Heights, Texas, with 40 hours of training in bloodstain pattern analysis, was a key prosecution witness in the Bryan case.

His testimony about a bloodspeckled flashlight found by the victim’s brother in the trunk of Bryan’s car four days after the murder was the linchpin of the prosecution’s case.

Yet what connection the flashlight had to the crime, if any, was never clear. In 1985, a crime lab technician working before the advent of DNA analysis determined the blood on the flashlight to be type O, which corresponded not only to Bryan’s wife, Mickey, but also to nearly half the population.

To secure a guilty verdict, prosecutors needed to tie the flashlight to the crime scene. Based on his assessment of photographs of the flashlight, Thorman testified that the flecks of blood on its lens were “back spatter” — a pattern that indicated a close-range shooting. With the help of prosecutors, he wove a narrative that suggested the flashlight had been present at the crime scene — specifically, that the killer was holding the flashlight in one hand at the time that he shot Mickey Bryan.

At Friday’s meeting in Austin, bloodstain pattern analyst Celestina Rossi provided a highly critical assessment of Thorman’s interpretation of both the crime scene and the flashlight. “Thorman’s testimony was egregiously wrong,” Rossi said after the meeting. “If any juror relied on any part of his testimony to render a verdict, Mr. Bryan deserves a new trial.”

After the publication of the story by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine, the Texas Forensic Science Commission asked Rossi, a locally prominent bloodstain pattern analyst, to reexamine the case.

The commission had previously retained another analyst, whose findings about the complex case were brief and did not fully answer the commission’s questions.