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[Michaelangelica]

Picked From a Lineup, on a Whiff of Evidence


By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: November 3, 2009

HOUSTON — A dog’s sniff helped put Curvis Bickham in jail for eight months. Now that the case against him has been dropped, he wants to tell the world that the investigative technique that justified his arrest smells to high heaven.
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As Mr. Easley examined the case, he sought the opinion of animal investigation experts who reviewed Deputy Pikett’s work and responded with incredulity. Robert Coote, the head of a British canine police unit, reviewed videos of Deputy Pikett’s scent lineup in the Buchanek case and stated, “If it was not for the fact that this is a serious matter, I could have been watching a comedy.”

Mr. Easley shared his findings with colleagues at the Innocence Project of Texas, a legal defense organization, which released a report last month that excoriated dog scent lineups as a “junk science injustice.” Jeff Blackburn, the chief counsel for the group, said Deputy Pickett merely gave the police the match they had hoped for.

Mr. Myers, the animal behavior expert, suggested that handlers like Deputy Pikett might believe in the dogs and the methods, but might allow samples to become contaminated or inadvertently allow the dogs to pick up on subtle, even unconscious signals from handlers or detectives.

“They just don’t realize they’re doing it wrong,” he said.

Randall Morse, an assistant Fort Bend county attorney who is representing Deputy Pikett, said the dogs provided information, not conclusions o , , ,
We believe in this stuff,” Mr. Morse said.

Mr. Blackburn of the Innocence Project noted that the Whitaker case involved a great deal of corroborating evidence beyond the dogs.

“Our estimate right now is we’ve got 15 to 20 people who are in prison right now based on virtually nothing but Pikett’s testimony,” he said. “That’s a big problem.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/us...ml?ref=science