8.Elizabeth Richey — Direct/Cross/Redirect; Trial Scheduling and Jury-Instruction Issues

ELIZABETH RICHEY: well, first, to be hired with FDLE, you have to have at least a Bachelor's of Science in some sort of laboratory science. I have a Bachelor's of Science in marine science with Jacksonville University. When I was promoted to my crime laboratory analyst position, I went through FDLE's 18-month training program.

The first 12 months of that program is spent basically in book work, practical exercises, and examinations, and it covers the history and development of firearms, firearms identification, tool mark analysis, ammunition, serial number restoration, and it also included tours of firearms manufacturers as well as a gunpowder manufacturer. The first phase of my training was done, the second phase was six months of supervised casework where I worked actual cases under the direct supervision of a qualified analyst.

ELIZABETH RICHEY: when I receive bullets in a case with no gun, I will start with doing my general inventory. I will go through the evidence to make sure what I have is matching on our case tracking form, and then I will open it up and I will examine the evidence for class characteristics. Class characteristics are the characteristics that are determined by the manufacturer prior to manufacturing.

So when they go to manufacture a gun, they have to decide what caliber that gun is. They have to decide what kind of rifling it will have, how many grooves that rifling will have, how wide those lands and grooves will be. when a bullet is fired through a gun, it picks up the impressions of the rifling. So I can examine a bullet and determine what caliber class it may be -- may be from, and then I can use the numbers of lands and groves and look at the two items to see if they should be compared to each other.

If those class characteristics match up, then I will move to my comparison microscope. And what that is, is two compound microscopes that sit side by side. There's an optical bridge with a set of eyepieces that allows me to look at two items at the same magnification at the same time so I can examine those two bullets and look for individual characteristics to see if the individual characteristics that come from firing the gun, that come from interacting with the inside of the barrel, match up with bullet one to bullet two, and then I will make my determination based on the level of individual characteristics that I see on my evidence.

ELIZABETH RICHEY: Individual characteristics are the striations on the side of a bullet that come from interacting with defects inside of the barrel. So when a barrel is manufactured, metal is chipped away, and that leaves defects inside the barrel. And because metal is not chipped away in the exact same way from barrel one to barrel two even when you use the same tool to create barrel one and barrel two, there can be microscopic defects inside the barrel that will be unique to barrel one, and there will be microscopic defects that are unique to barrel two.

So when they come out of the factory, they're already microscopically different. And then through use and abuse, depending on how well you care for your firearm, more character, more defects can be added to the inside of that barrel.

So as a bullet passes down the barrel, it is obturating or expanding to fill into the rifling, and the side of that bullet is interacting with those microscopic defects on the inside of the barrel. And what happens is you get scratches on the side of the bullets, and those are the scratches that are unique to that firearm. And I will examine those scratches to determine if a bullet or a set of bullets had been fired from the same firearm.

ELIZABETH RICHEY: when I receive bullets that don't have a gun, I can take the rifling characteristics and enter them into the general rifling characteristics database. At the time, it was a database that was held by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

And what I do is I would input information into the database -- the caliber class, the numbers of lands and grooves, the direction of twist, and the widths of the lands and grooves -- and the database will give me a list of potential manufacturers that may have fired these bullets.

Now, the list is long -- or the list can be very long, but the database is also not totally -- it's not all inclusive. Not every single gun in the world is represented within that database, but many, many, many are. So it's an investigative tool that I can give to investigators that say it could have been these guns, but don't exclude others if you have -- if you think that it may be another one.

ELIZABETH RICHEY: NIBIN is the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network. And what that is, is if I receive a firearm, I can test-fire the firearm and enter cartridge cases into the database. The computer will take photos of my cartridge cases, and it will bring back possible hits to see if potentially that firearm has been used in other crimes.

And I can review the potential hits to come up with, yes, I think it may have been or, no, it may not have been. If investigators submit just cartridge cases, I can also enter just images of those cartridge cases to see if they hit to other scenes as well.

ELIZABETH RICHEY: (witness complies.)

That piece of paperwork is not something that is in my case file, and it's not something that I would routinely run. I think that is a piece of paperwork that would come from our evidence section.