The police were fairly certain that Geoffrey Lavar Lawson was the triggerman during an armed robbery of a Genesee County party store.
A video surveillance tape showed that someone jumped up on the store’s counter, put his arm over the bulletproof glass and pointed a handgun at the clerk. The clerk gathered up money from the registers and handed it over. The man on the counter then shot and killed the clerk.
The video apparently wasn’t clear enough to identify Lawson as the man on the counter.
But there was a clear image of the man’s ear.
The prosecution brought in Dr. Norman Sauer, a forensic anthropology expert. Sauer selected various images of ears from the surveillance video. Then he had a videographer film defendant’s left ear. Sauer made side-by-side comparisons of ears from the surveillance video with the images of Lawson’s ear. Sauer could not find any differences between Lawson’s ear and the ear on the surveillance video.
Sauer testified that he couldn’t exclude Lawson as the shooter but declined to make a positive identification.
Based on Sauer’s testimony and other identification evidence, a jury convicted Lawson of first-degree felony murder, armed robbery, conspiracy to commit armed robbery and felony firearm.
On appeal, Lawson faulted Sauer’s testimony because there is no scientific basis to support the hypothesis that every ear is unique. He argued that ear identification is not generally accepted unless there is a unique or individual characteristic. He pointed to a Washington Court of Appeals case, State v Kunze, 97 Wash App 832, 855; 988 P2d 977 (1999), in which a conviction based on a latent ear print was reversed because of the uncertainty in clinically reproducing the conditions that created the latent print.
Lawson’s case is different, ruled the Michigan Court of Appeals.
The same limitations are not present in photographic comparisons. To make an accurate photographic comparison, one must attempt to best duplicate the surveillance images, and that process does not present a risk of distorting an image. Rather, it simply makes a photographic comparison more accurate and reliable by trying to match perspective.
So, Mr. Lawson, listen up, said the COA.
We conclude that the admission of Dr. Sauer’s testimony was neither an abuse of discretion nor a plain error. The methodology employed Dr. Sauer is not new or novel science, and there is nothing inherently unreliable in pointing out similarities in the morphologic features of an ear. Dr. Sauer also did not make a positive identification. As such, defendant cannot show that he suffered plain error, or that his trial counsel was ineffective for failing to object to Dr. Sauer’s testimony.
The unpublished case is People v. Lawson.