guys are currently doing hard time because they weren't using factory ammo. One of them involved shooting the defendant's wife, he said suicide, prosecutor said murder.
I'm curious as to what jurisdiction it's okay to shoot your wife, as long as you use factory ammo?
It was an enormous clusterhump of a case. To cut it short the problematic part was what DD alluded to a few posts up. The rounds were super-soft handloads intended for his wife to shoot with almost no recoil. The result however was a load that left practically no GSR on the "victim" at a range that, the prosecution's argument went, should have had at least some GSR. The court ruled that handloads weren't admissable since it's essentially impossible to provide a testable/repeatable exemplar. You don't KNOW what THAT cartridge did until you fired it, basically destroying the evidence. Sure, you can testify that it's POSSIBLE to create a load that left the GSR signature in question but there's no way verify that the one used in the actual shooting was the same. (don't try to argue it, that's what the case said)
I don't particularly like this case since any SD ammo I can imagine anyone here would load would be roughly a factory analogue so the above wouldn't have happened with anything I, for instance, would have loaded in a SD weapon. Still, there IS the issue of factory ammo providing a vetted exemplar for forensic testing that is on MUCH firmer ground than anything a court is likely to accept from handloads.
I'm sticking with my "death by meteorite" position. You would have to be one SERIOUSLY unlucky bastage to have things turn out where the fact you were using handloads mattered...but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen.
