DNA will let a Montana man put prison behind him, but questions linger.
By Adam Liptak, NY Times National Report, Tuesday, October 1, 2002.
This article reports the news of a Montana man's release from prison, after serving 15 years of a 40 year sentence for raping an eight year old girl. Jimmy Ray Bromgard was wrongly convicted based on the testimony of the manager of the state's crime laboratory, who assigned a quantitative value to the possibility that hairs found at the scene belonged to the defendant, when such quantitative measurement had not been scientifically established. The victim was not able to say with any certainty that Mr. Bromgard was the man who raped her, and there was no other evidence to link him to the crime. .
The laboratory manager, Arnold Melnikoff, testified that the hair found at the scene was indistinguishable from the defendant's sample hair, and the possibility of that occurring was 1 in 10,000. Mr. Melnikoff has acknowledged that there has never been a thorough study that would allow the kind of quantification he used, and that his figures were based on his personal experiences. .
Mr. Bromgard's attorney has asked for an audit of the cases in which Mr. Melnikoff testified. The danger that he gave similar misleading testimony in other trials, or that because he set the tone for the rest of the lab employees, others under his supervision might have given misleading testimony, is troubling. .
Mr. Bromgard was also the victim of careless lawyering. His court appointed lawyer only met with him once, never prepared him for testimony, nor challenged any of the state's evidence. He promised to appeal the decision, but did not. The state of Montana and several of its counties have been sued by the American Civil Liberties Union for failing to spend enough money to ensure that poor defendants receive adequate representation. Since Mr. Bromgard's trial, some of the counties have responded to this criticism by financing a public defender system, but each county is responsible for meeting its individual needs.
