SCENT LINEUPS UNDER FIRE AFTER TEXAS K-9 THOUGHT DEPUTY WAS SUSPECT
CNN.com
October 5, 2009
VICTORIA, Texas — The interrogation room inside the Victoria County Sheriff's Office is sterile and cold. There's a table in the middle, a one-way mirror and a hidden video camera that lets investigators watch suspects.
Michael Buchanek knows the room well. He was part of countless investigations. Buchanek spent more than 25 years with the Sheriff's Office as a commander of operations.
But on March 16, 2006, Buchanek found himself sitting in the interrogation room. This time, he was on the other side of the table. The day before, his neighbor and friend, Sally Blackwell, was found strangled to death with a rope. Her body was left in a field five miles from her home.
Buchanek sat in the interrogation room with three homicide investigators, former brothers on the force. But the investigators were no longer friends. Buchanek was now the prime suspect in Blackwell's murder.
"They told me they knew I did it and that I was going to spend the rest of my life on death row," Buchanek told CNN.
The story of how a veteran law enforcement officer became a murder suspect is at the heart of a controversy over an investigative forensic tool called dog-scent lineups.
The Innocence Project of Texas calls the practice "junk science that's being used by prosecutors and judges to convict people." The nonprofit group, which is dedicated to discovering and overturning wrongful convictions, wants state governments to ban the use of dog-scent lineups. It says an unknown number of people have been wrongly accused or convicted from the dog-scent lineups.
Supporters say dog-scent lineups are a powerful crime-fighting tool helping investigators crack cases across the country.
Buchanek was identified as a murder suspect, not because of crime-scene evidence but because of two bloodhounds, "Jag" and "James Bond."
The dogs belong to Fort Bend County Sheriff's Deputy Keith Pikett. He and his team of dogs have become celebrities in Texas law enforcement circles for their work on hundreds of cases across the state.
In Buchanek's case, homicide detectives in this county southwest of Houston had Pikett's bloodhounds sniff crime-scene evidence, such as the rope used to strangle the victim. The dogs matched the scent to Buchanek.
Despite repeated denials, Buchanek lived under a cloud of suspicion for five months. His former Sheriff's Office colleagues believed the dogs over him and his pleas of innocence. But the dogs were wrong.
DNA evidence implicated another man, who pleaded guilty to the murder.
2 comments:
I was a Jury Foreman in a burglary case involving 3 teens in 2007and the key evidence was the scent lineup from the very same dogs of Deputy Pikett. These teens also had the misfortune of having a state provided attorney in Harris County in Texas. The lawyer assigned asked no questions about the scent lineup, such as ensuring that the evidence had not been tainted. There were many questions that I wanted answers too but of course we could not ask them, and the horrible defense attorney asked random questions as if he had never tried a case. On top of that, the judge was a hangman's judge and any time a witness tried to provide information that was not specifically asked he cut off the witness and threatened them with "contempt of court."
My primary concern was that the very same police officials that arrested and touched the teens also collected the scent evidence. On the one hand, Mr. Pikett during his testimony was making grand statements about how infallible his dogs were, what an expert witness he was and how everyone came to him for his dogs expertise, and how sensitive the dogs noses were but his scent lineup and processing of evidence seemed shoddy. The prosecutor showed us a video of the dogs at work, we watched either a training exercise or an actual scent lineup and the people assisting were either his wife or a friend to set up the lineup (I can't remember which, but it bothered me). Instead of making me feel comfortable about how scientific it was it did the exact opposite.
I used to work in HR and feel like I am okay at reading people, but Mr. Pikett testimony also bothered me on a different level, he seemed to enjoy the notoriety, his status appeared to be wrapped up in his dogs and his conviction that they were infallible really scared me because he appeared to have lost his objectivity.
I was actually one of two jurists that held out for a while about convicting the teen, but eventually we consented to a guilty verdict. I even made special requests of the judge during deliberation about what information we could consider, but based on his directions and the very small box of what we could consider both us went along with a guilty verdict. In hind sight I really wish I had held out longer.
I felt like the trial was a kangaroo trial and this teen was not going to get a fair shake. It validated my thoughts that If I ever found myself cross with the law, I would sell everything to get a decent attorney. It also further convinced me that poor people that have state provided attorneys in Texas should not be executed because they can be so shoddy. This really opened my eyes to the court system and that it was not as fair as I had hoped.
Bubba, that is why I have argued for years that Texas needs to adopt a Public Defender system (with its own investigators and funds to hire expert witness) in place of the court appointed attorney spoils system.
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