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.
ok please tell me there wasa lot more eveidence that got one convicted than questioable hand load
The defendant's name was Daniel Bias. The case is NJ v Bias. If you're curious enough you can look up the whole thing but the part germane to the topic is pretty much summed up by this quote from John Lanza, the defense att in the first* case:
�When a hand load is used in an incident which becomes the subject of a civil or criminal trial, the duplication of that hand load poses a significant problem for both the plaintiff or the prosecutor and the defendant. Once used, there is no way, with certainty, to determine the amount of powder or propellant used for that load. This becomes significant when forensic testing is used in an effort to duplicate the shot and the resulting evidence on the victim or target. With the commercial load, one would be in a better position to argue the uniformity between the loads used for testing and the subject load. With a hand load, you have no such uniformity. Also, the prosecution may utilize either standard loads or a different hand load in its testing. The result would be distorted and could be prejudicial to the defendant. Whether or not the judge would allow such a scientific test to be used at trial, is another issue, which, if allowed, would be devastating for the defense. From a strictly forensic standpoint, I would not recommend the use of hand loads because of the inherent lack of uniformity and the risk of unreliable test results. Once the jury hears the proof of an otherwise unreliable test, it can be very difficult to �unring the bell."
*There were actually 4(!) trials. The first and second trials both ended in hung juries. So after giving up on trying to get him on murder charges the state fell back and on the third attempt, though falling short of the Agg Manslaughter charge they did manage to make a Reckless Manslaughter stick in the third trial. There were enough questions to actually get him a 4th trial but he got RM in that one too.
