On May 15, 1989, an 83-year-old woman was found severely beaten in her home in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Despite the victim’s denial, a physician concluded that she had been raped. At least twice, the victim described her assailant as having shoulder-length wavy blonde hair,, but in at least two other statements, she described him as having brown hair.
Sometimes the victim described the assailant as being tall, and at other times she described him as being short.
In March 1990, the police arrested Timothy Bridges, who was 22 years old at the time of the crime and had shoulder-length blonde wavy hair. The police said three informants had reported that Bridges had admitted to the crime. Bridges was charged with first-degree rape, assault with a deadly weapon and burglary. In August 1990, the victim died. Bridges was not charged with her death.
Bridges went to trial in Mecklenburg County Superior Court in January 1991. Three witnesses testified that Bridges had told them he had committed the attack and rape. The informants denied they received any benefits for their testimony,and a police officer also denied any benefits were offered or conferred for the testimony.
While processing the crime scene, a technician found a bloody palm print on a wall in the back of the bedroom adjacent to a light switch. The technician also collected hair samples.
Elinos Whitlock III, a state crime laboratory analyst who had been trained in hair analysis by the FBI, testified and explained in general the methodology of analyzing hair samples. He said that “it is possible for two individuals to have hairs which are consistent with each other; that hair is not as unique and identifying as a fingerprint.”
Whitlock also testified that he was familiar with two studies on hair comparison. The first study concluded that there was a one in 4,500 chance of unknown hair matching a random individual from the Caucasian population. The defense noted that the study had been criticized by other experts.
The second study involved 100 individuals in which the testers removed nine or 10 hairs from each of the individuals, but could not find a match from the other individuals, thereby indicating a “very low chance” of unknown hair matching an individual at random. Whitlock said he had examined between 2,000 and 3,000 hairs, but that he had not conducted any statistical analysis. Based upon the two studies and his personal experience, he opined that the “likelihood of two Caucasian individuals having indistinguishable head hair, it is very low. A conservative estimate for that probability would be ... approximately one in a thousand.”
Whitlock testified that two hairs found at the scene came from Bridges. Whitlock said that he could make a “strong identification” that the hair at the scene was Bridges’s hair and that there was only a one in 1,000 chance that two Caucasian people, such as Bridges, would have indistinguishable head hair.
Although the victim had denied she had been raped, a physician who examined her said she found bruising consistent with rape. Even though a rape kit had been taken, there was no indication that it was tested at the time.
Bridges’s attorney argued that a bloody palm print found on a wall in the victim's home was left by the perpetrator. Bridges and the victim were excluded as the source of the print.
On February 2, 1991, the jury convicted Bridges of all charges. He was sentenced to life in prison.
In October 1992, the North Carolina Court of Appeals, in a divided opinion, upheld Bridges’s convictions. One of the judges dissented, saying that Whitlock’s testimony that the mathematical odds of finding two people whose hairs have the same microscopic characteristics were one in 1,000 should not have been allowed and warranted a new trial.
In 2013, after three men who had been convicted on the basis of improper FBI testimony about hair analysis were exonerated by DNA, the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers persuaded the FBI to audit cases where FBI agents had testified about or conducted microscopic hair analysis.
In 2015, the FBI identified 268 cases in which FBI agents linked defendants to crimes through hair analysis and 257 of those cases – 96 percent – involved scientifically invalid testimony, such as saying that hairs were a positive match or giving unsupported mathematical odds of a match. Twenty-seven of 29 analysts either gave faulty testimony or submitted erroneous reports.
In April 2015, the Washington Post reported that flawed testimony by either FBI agents or crime lab analysts trained by the FBI likely affected as many as 2,500 cases across the country.
Bridges’s case was one of the first to be examined that involved an FBI-trained analyst rather than an actual FBI agent. Lauren Miller at North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services had investigated Bridges’s case for years and had been told by Mecklenburg County authorities that the physical evidence in the case no longer existed.
In October 2014, Miller filed a motion seeking to vacate Bridges’s conviction.
Shortly after that, Innocence Project attorneys Chris Fabricant and Dana Delger joined the case as co-counsel. In October 2015, after reviewing the case, Mecklenburg District Attorney Andrew Murray agreed to vacate Bridges’s conviction.
At the time, Murray said, “The criminal justice system is constantly evolving with advances in science, and any time the D.A.’s Office is made aware of cases in which inappropriate scientific testimony contributed to a conviction, prosecutors have an obligation to act.”
Bridges was released on bond on October 1, 2015.
The prosecution said that although the hairs and rape kit had been destroyed, a jacket that was found near the victim at the time of the crime had been discovered. The jacket was submitted for DNA testing and semen was identified. A DNA profile from the semen excluded Bridges as the source of the semen.
Moreover, a review of the police files revealed that the investigators had threatened to bring charges against some of the informants who testified that Bridges confessed to them, and offered to give those informants breaks in their own prosecutions or payments of money in exchange for testimony. None of this evidence had been disclosed to the defense at Bridges’s trial.
On February 16, 2016, Bridges’s convictions were vacated and the prosecution dismissed the case.
In August 2016, Bridges filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Charlotte. In November 2016, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory granted Bridges a pardon based on actual innocence. In December 2017, the city of Charlotte agreed to settle the lawsuit for $9.5 million. Bridges was also awarded $750,000 in state compensation.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 03-07-2016
Last Update Date: 02-08-2018
