In this video, we will discuss a case where a gunshot residue was found. We call the gunshot residues either GSRs, or in English we call them firearm discharge residue, and this is abbreviated FDR. So GSR or FDR that's just the same. This evidence was obviously in relation to a shooting. Again, it is the activities that resulted in this trace that was the crux of the matter. We will take you to the laboratory, so that you can see how these GSR or FDR particles are produced. This video will help you first, to realize that one needs to assess this type of material given two activity level propositions. Second, to understand that if we do not, then the evidence can mislead the Court. Three, we will re-visit the ENFSI guidelines on this particular aspect. But Alex, would you like to expose the case? Yes sure. This is a case that took place in England in 1999. This case as well as the Weller case can be easily found on the website of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute. They are a great source of knowledge. The circumstances of the case are as follows; At about 11:30 AM on April 26th in 1999, a well known TV personality, Jill Dando was killed on the doorsteps of her home in London. More precisely in Fulham. The cause of her death was a single shot in the head. The bullet that caused the fatal injury, and a nine millimeter cartridge were covered on the crime scene. Gunshot residue, also called firearm discharge residues, were also recovered in the victim's hair. What one needs to know is that, some components of these residues are stable with time. But let us see together a video sequence that was filmed in our institute, that shows what these residues are. Okay, we are here in the shooting range which is used by the Forensic Institute. Is a special type of range because we have typical objectives with it. At times, we want to use a gun to show how, what is the speed of a bullet? That will be typically done on a measurement stand like this, where you will shoot through this digital range, and you can measure the speed of the bullet. This is one aspect, but quite often we are also interested to collect, element of reference from seized guns. Might be the bullets, or the cartridge case. Collecting cartridge case is easy, collecting bullets is more difficult. So, when we use handguns, we will shoot in that shooting block which is full of water, so the bullet will be collected down there, it will be just the speed will be decreased due to the effect of water, and that's the way we collect reference bullets from handguns. The other aspect which will be the topic of the case is about shooting range, and gunshot residue, come with me. At times we may need to shoot with a gun. This is a fake gun obviously, but we are not going to want to shoot with a gun in a secure position, and that allows to avoid having a shooter and having to manipulate the gun. Now, today we will shoot with a colleague of mine, Danny. Danny will be our shooter. We will shoot that gun, which is a high caliber gun. This is not the gun but has been used in the case obviously, but we'd like to show you what happen when you shoot at a target with that type of ammunition. So Danny and I, have prepared this mannequin, and we will shoot in the mannequin at short range, to show you that when you shoot with a handgun, you have gunshot residue which will hit the target and be distributed on the target itself, but also and Danny will be the shooter, he will have gunshot residue on his hands. Later on we will sample these gunshot residue for further analysis. The whole issue in the case we're going to discuss is associated with gunshot residues, found in the pockets of the potential shooter transferred in the pocket through the hands bearing these residues, just after the shooting. So we will represent that shooting again, to show you what happen in terms of gunshot residue when you shoot at a target, both on the target, but also on the shooter. So just after the shooting, the hand of Danny will be covered with some gunshot residue. Most of them on this area, and gunshot residue will cover the gun as well. Now, these residue will persist to some degree, but of course if Danny is washing his hands, the gunshot residue will disappear. In between, he may put his hand in the pocket, like this, and gunshot residue from the firearm or from the hands will be transferred inside the pocket. Even by removing the gun, the gunshot residue will remain in the pocket for a certain period of time. These gunshot residue are collected exactly in the same way that we collect gunshot residue on hands, and these are the residues that are at the core of the discussion in this case. So, we'd like to present to you a few of the elements of ammunitions that are important in our discussion. Well, this is a typical box of ammunition. There is indication of the caliber. Here, it's 0.45 auto, and the type of jacketing the bullets received. Here, it's a full metal jackets bullets, you will see it later. So, from that box, you obtain a set of cartridges ready to be fired. As you can see on the back of each of them, you have the place where the firing pin will impact to have the first detonation to propel the bullet out of the fire. Now, let's have a look in more detail about the cartridge itself. It is composed of two key elements here, one is the bullet itself, and the second element is what we call the cartridge case. The bullets will be what will be fired. The cartridge case is holding the powder which is used to propel the bullet. The powder is what is of interest to us today. So, let's open it to see each of it's details. So, when you open the cartridge and we have opened the cartridge without firing it, the first thing you've got is the bullet itself. So, as you can see, the core of a bullet is made of lead, and the outer part is completely covered, hence, the term full metal jacket. This line in the middle show the line where the bullets is associated with the cartridge case. So, you have almost half of the bullet which is inside the cartridge ready to go. The next component is the cartridge case. So, this is the cartridge case. It is composed of the cartridge case itself, but with the primer cap which is sealed here with a little bit of red glue. The primer cap is what will act as a primary explosive to initiate the powder that will propel the bullet. The primer cap is in at the base of the cartridge case, and its power will be delivered by the little hole in the middle down there in the cartridge. Now, the space in between the primer cap and the bullets is occupied by the powder. The powder is here. It's what you have inside the cartridge case. The powder will bring the power to the bullets to be expelled from the gun. Now, for that powder to burn, you need a primer. You need a primer explosion which is obtained by the firing pin knocking on the primer cap which will initiate by its explosion the burning of the powder. The powder will burn in the cartridge case, and its power will force the bullet to come out. So, there's two types of powders used which is mixed together in producing gunshot residues. One is from the primer cap explosive and the second are the residue coming out of the burning, a combustion of the main powder. Now, in the case that we are discussing, when we talk about gunshot residues on the hands, the gunshot residues of interest are the ones coming from that little cap here which is the primer cap we have that will be hits by the firing pin. So, that's the primer cap here. That's a little explosive, will produce specific residues. We will condense into little spheric particles containing lead, antimony, and barium. These three elements combined in the residues will be detected by scanning electron microscopy on the targets that have been hit by these residues. So, in the case we are discussing today, these are the particles of interest are produced by the explosion of this little primer cap. The residue coming from the burning of a main powder of less interest in the case we will discuss. So, everything comes down to the little residues that partly that in fact explosion will produce. It is interesting in this case because this ammunition is not lead free, it's contain lead, and it produced these particles with lead, antimony, and barium mixed together with the spherical appearance on the residue and that's the residues that will be discussed in the case. So, you can observe the cartridge before firing, there's no mark. After firing, we have the impression from the firing pin that impacted on the primer cap directly. This is before. This is after. So, I'm going to present to you a typical gunshot residue collection kit. You will notice that the kit itself presents series of information regarding the case, when the sampling was done, under which condition, who did it, how it was transferred to the authority, and so on. That's part of a chain of a custody. Now, the kit itself contains stubs for the collection of potential gunshot residue. These are the little stabs available. One will be for control. It will be a stamp that will be applied to me as the person take the residue from the person of interest, and that's to show that I'm not contaminated initially and I don't have any gunshot residue on my hands before doing the collection on the person of interest. The others are further respectively from for the right-hand and the left-hand. One for the palm, so the inside of the hand, and the other will be for the external side of the hand on top of the hand. Now, when you fire the gun, most of the residues will come and the on the top of the hand with less in the inside. So, it's interesting to be able to make the contrast between the outside of the hand and the inside of a hand. Obviously between the right-handed people and left-handed people. Hence, the use of these four stabs. So, we will do the collection on the right hand top and the stab itself is covered with adhesive which is made for early detection. We simply apply the adhesive on the hand on all the region of interest. So, if residues are present on his hand, they will be accumulated as we go through on the adhesive tape, and they will pile up on the adhesive tape, that we use for the sampling. Of course, you cannot see them by naked eye and we will use scanning electron microscopy, to scan the entire surface and to look for these particles: The ones specifically containing Lead Barium Antimony. And we'll do this on the five steps that we have here. So once the collection is done on both hands, we seal it, write up the chain of custody, and send it to the laboratory. Let us go back to our case, there was no witness regarding the murder and no immediate suspect. No firearm was ever found, and the police did not have much leads regarding the motive of the murder. In the course of the investigation, a few persons were interviewed. Barry George was among these persons and on April 17, 2000, his flat was searched. What was the evidence? Inside the pocket of his coat that was hanging in the kitchen, and that was Mr. George's, one single particle of firearm discharge residue (FDR) was found. When compared to the firearm discharge residue found in the hair of the victim, it was concluded that both particles could not be differentiated. And, in May 29th, Barry George was charged with murder. Prosecution relied on other evidence, that place Barry George on the crime scene a few hours before the murder. It relied also on the information that Barry George had 'lied' repeatedly during his interview about his knowledge, and interest in Jill Dundo. It also relied heavily on the FDR particle. After deliberation, Mr. George was convicted of murder on July 2, 2001. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Barry George's defense appealed against the verdict, but with no success. On November the fifth in 2002, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, an independent organization set up to investigate suspected miscarriages in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, received submissions made on Barry George's behalf. The ground of the submission was, that, "New evidence called into question the firearm discharge evidence at trial and the significance apparently attached to that evidence." Let us see how we ought to evaluate this single-particle finding in the light of the principles of interpretation and the ENFSI guideline. Because there are aspects of transfer, persistence and background, that is the presence of particles for reasons unconnected to the shooting, one needs to consider activity level propositions. From the case circumstances, one would assess the FDR particle that had no special component given: First, Barry George is the person who shot Miss Dundo; and second, Barry George, had nothing to do with the incident. The case circumstances that are relevant, is mostly the delay between the shooting, and the seizure of the coat. The delay was about one year. As the shooting took place on April 26, 1999 and the coat was seized on April 17, 2000. We then have to assign the probability of recovering one FDR particle, given that Mr. George, shot Jill Dundo and given the case information. This was believed to be a very small probability as one would expect to have lost all particles because of the delay. We then have to assign the probability of recovering one FDR particle, given that Mr. George had nothing to do with the shooting, and given the case circumstances. Again, this would be an event that is very rare. As the probability of the results is of the same order of magnitude given both propositions, the weight of the particle is zero. It supports neither propositions. It is not useful to the case, and does not help the court in deciding whether Mr. George, was or not, the shooter. You will notice here, that there is no question of statistics here. It is about, expert assignments. If we put the result of the FDR in the scale of justice, we see that the scales do not change. The scales of justice don't move, because the probability of the results is the same whatever the propositions. The probability of finding a single FDR particle on Mr George's coat, appears to be much the same. Whether he is the person who shot Miss Dundo, or if he had nothing to do with the incident. To express the value of such results, Innovate, a leading authority in the interpretation of scientific evidence within the context of criminal trial, uses the following words: "In relation to the two propositions the court must consider, the FDR evidence is as much use to you as my telling you that the sun is shining today." Therefore, the FDR evidence does not assist in addressing the issue of which of the two propositions is true. Following the second appeal in November 2007, where the FDR evidence was challenged, Mr. George was retried in June 2008. The FDR evidence was not admitted, and Mr. George acquitted. We see that the principles of interpretation allow us to ask the relevant questions, and while not always based on statistics, allow to avoid the inappropriate use of scientific evidence. So, as indicated in the guideline, when phenomena such as secondary (or tertiary) transfer, pollution or fortuitous presence of such material in the environment affect the case evaluation of the findings, activity level propositions should be considered. This is typically the case, as Alex said, for trace types such as fibers, glass, FDRs, trace DNA, et cetera. In this video, we have seen that if there is natural material, such as in the Barry George Case, one needs to consider activity level propositions. If we do not, the results can mislead the court. This is underlined in the ENFSI guideline where they alert us on the propositions we should consider when there is very little material. Thank you, Tasha and thank you for watching. [MUSIC].
