Decision here.
As two tellers were opening the Security Bank of Kansas City, the bank was robbed at gunpoint. The suspect was wearing a mask, and he bound the tellers hand and foot with plastic ties, and got away with more than $200,000.
One of the tellers got divorced a year later. After the divorce, her ex-husband told the police that he thought the bank robber was Brooks, the guy his ex-wife had been sleeping with at the time. Police obtained a DNA profile for Brooks, which turned out to match the suspect DNA which had been recovered from one of the plastic ties (the defense would try unsuccessfully to convince the jury that this was because Brooks and the teller had had sex the night before). Other evidence also suggested Brooks' guilt: he was flat broke before the robbery, but was seen in possession of large sums of cash in the months following the robbery. He matched the physical description of the suspect. And he was in constant phone contact with his lover in the weeks leading up to the robbery (right up to the moment of the robbery), then stopped for three months, and then resumed constant phone contact.
Brooks was convicted of the robbery. He appealed his conviction. The arguments relevant to this blog are: 1- the chain of evidence for the plastic ties was broken, and therefore the DNA should have been suppressed; 2- the testimony of the government's DNA expert should have been suppressed; 3- evidence that he possessed large amounts of cash should have been suppressed because it was irrelevant; and 4- the evidence was insufficient for a reasonable jury to convict him.
As far as the chain of custody goes, the first responding officer cut the zip ties off of the tellers, and let the ties fall to the ground. He didn't guard them afterwards, and didn't know who eventually collected them. The officers who did collect them also testified at the trial, though. Brooks' argument was that the zip ties could have been unintentionally tampered with during the time between cutting them off of the tellers and collecting them. The court noted that the chain of custody need not be perfect for evidence to be admissible. Where the chain of custody has deficiencies, those speak to the weight of the evidence rather than its admissibility. So the zip ties were admissible.
Regarding the government's DNA expert (the one who testified that it was extremely unlikely that the DNA on the zip ties was there because of the teller's sexual contact with Brooks), Brooks argued that her testimony should be supressed because she said that she did a "general swab" of the zip ties in her report but testified that she only swabbed the tips of the zip ties because she wanted to obtain suspect DNA rather than victim DNA. She acknowledged in court that the phrase she used to describe the test might cause a different technician to misunderstand what test she had performed. The court held that this minor semantic difference didn't merit suppression.
And the large amounts of cash... Brooks' argument was that his possession of lots of cash months after the robbery was irrelevant because he could have got the money from somewhere else. Not that there was any evidence presented that he got the money from somewhere else, but he could have. The court noted that since the robber got away with a pretty substantial amount, it was likely that he would still have a lot of money a few months later. This evidence was also admitted.
And although Brooks argued that the evidence against him was insufficient for a conviction, the court described the evidence as "pretty compelling." His conviction was upheld.
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