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Imagine it’s 1994. A woman is found murdered in her home in a small Oregon town. The case against her neighbor, let’s call him “Dale,” is thin: no eyewitnesses, no DNA, no fingerprints. But the prosecutor calls an expert.
A doctor and professor of “forensic haruspicy” takes the stand. With great authority, he explains that he examined the liver and intestines of a goat slaughtered the morning of the murder, a practice once used by ancient priests to divine truth. The color striations in the liver’s left lobe, the doctor tells the jury, are consistent with guilt. He offers his opinion “to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty”: Dale committed the murder. The jury convicts. Fourteen years later, DNA evidence identifies the real killer.
No one would accept that outcome. The idea that a court would rely on goat entrails to determine guilt sounds like medieval superstition dressed up in a lab coat.
And yet, for decades, American courts admitted forensic techniques that leading scientists later found to be nearly as unreliable, and juries convicted people based on them. Oregon Senate Bill 1515, signed this year by Gov. Tina Kotek with bipartisan support from state Sens. Floyd Prozanski and Kim Thatcher, takes an overdue step toward addressing that problem.
The now-discredited techniques at issue were once staples of criminal prosecutions: microscopic hair comparison, comparative bullet lead analysis and bite-mark analysis or comparison methods. Experts testified with confidence that the science didn’t justify — often in capital cases.
For example, after a three-year review conducted with the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the FBI acknowledged that its hair examiners overstated forensic matches in more than 95% of reviewed cases, typically in ways that favored prosecutors. Thirty-two of those cases involved defendants sentenced to death; 14 had already been executed or died in prison.
Bullet lead analysis played a role in the wrongful conviction of Oregonian Philip Scott Cannon in Polk County in 2000. The technique claimed to match bullet fragments to bullets in a suspect’s possession based on chemical composition. It sounded precise. But the National Academy of Sciences later concluded that the claimed matches were statistically meaningless. Cannon spent 11 years in prison before being exonerated.
The broader numbers tell a troubling story. Nationwide, about 29 percent of more than 3,783 documented exonerations involved faulty forensic evidence. In Oregon, the percentage is even higher: 40% of the state’s 43 documented exonerations involved flawed forensic science, according to testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee from the Forensic Justice Project.
Nearly half of wrongfully imprisoned Oregonians were convicted, at least in part, because an expert overstated what the science actually showed.
Before Senate Bill 1515, passed in the recent legislative session, Oregon law offered little recourse. The state’s post-conviction relief statute imposed a strict two-year filing deadline after a conviction became final. If the forensic technique used to convict you in 1998 wasn’t discredited until 2005 — as happened with comparative bullet lead analysis — you were out of luck.
SB 1515 creates a new pathway for post-conviction relief when a conviction rests on specific, discredited forensic disciplines. It removes the filing deadline for those claims. The bill is narrowly tailored. It is not an invitation to relitigate every old case, but a targeted fix for a documented problem. It also strengthens Oregon’s Justice for Exonerees Act, which provides $65,000 per year of wrongful imprisonment, but left exonerees facing procedural hurdles that made compensation difficult to obtain.
Finality matters in criminal cases. But it only makes sense when the verdict rests on reliable evidence. As Janis Puracal of the Forensic Justice Project told state lawmakers, finality is meaningful only if the state has the right person in custody.
Dale, our fictional neighbor convicted by a goat’s liver, would have a remedy in any reasonable justice system. SB 1515 helps ensure that Oregonians convicted using the forensic equivalent of haruspicy finally do, too.
