The last day of Jeffrey Wogenstahl’s evidentiary hearing was short, but significant: the testimony of a Forensic Science consultant shattered the State’s myth about a speck of blood lifted from Jeff’s car.

The prosecution had argued that the speck, later linked to Amber Garrett by DNA testing, provided definitive proof that Jeff murdered the child.

But according to consultant Marc Taylor, this blood could have been transferred to the car during the crime investigation. An earlier Forensics expert witness at the hearing, Brian Clark, had noted with concern “the lack of documentation and photographs of the suspected bloodstain collected… on the door handle of [Jeff’s car] during the first search of the vehicle”. The same expert confirmed that there was no evidence of Jeff’s car being involved in the murder:
“The laboratory conducted approximately 242 presumptive tests for blood on evidence collected from the vehicle… All tests were negative…”

In their book about the history of DNA testing, The Truth Machine*, the authors insist,
‘“DNA” does not transcend mundane, organizational practices or the possibilities that reside in stories of a crime’.

In Jeff’s case there are ‘stories’ aplenty for Judge Jenkins to consider. Stories of the State’s failure to disclose Eric Horn’s arrest for marijuana trafficking†; of a jailhouse informant falsely testifying against Jeff in return for favors; of police files withheld; of an FBI expert’s testimony that he found a hair on the victim’s underwear, when previously none was there.

As The Truth Machine authors remind us,
‘Police and prosecutorial motives and practices … come into play when DNA evidence is treated less as an abstract source of “truth” than as material that is collected, handled, labeled, and possibly planted’.

We trust the judge will take note.

*Michael Lynch, Simon A. Cole, Ruth McNally and Kathleen Jordan   The Truth Machine: the Contentious History of DNA Fingerprinting (The University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 345-346

†State v. Wogenstahl. B-926287. Defendant Wogenstahl’s Motion for leave to file a Motion for New Trial, based on newly discovered evidence from the U.S. Department of Justice, filed in the Court of Common Pleas, Hamilton County, Criminal Division. Filed January 28, 2014. Pages 10 – 11.