3/24/07 (MD):
Suicide Of 'Expert' Leads To Doubts
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A fake 'expert' recently shot himself when suspicions were aroused about his credentials. Joseph Kopera was a Maryland State Police ballistics expert who had not earned any of the college degrees he had claimed. The case has prompted many lawyers to seek a review of the trials in which he gave testimony, in particular, capital cases such as that of Flint Gregory Hunt, who was executed in 1997.
When she heard the news about the suicide, Denise Barrett went to her office and flipped through piles of court transcripts. Barrett was a federal public defender who handled Hunt's last rounds of appeals before the sentence was carried out. Barrett was right - Kopera was indeed the 'expert' that had testified against her client.
However, prosecutors say Kopera's testimony was not pivotal in the case against Hunt, who admitted to the killing. Still, Barrett said, "No matter what way you cut it, you have a man executed based, in some way and to some degree, on the testimony of a man who committed perjury."
Lawyers across Maryland have said that the revelations about Kopera's falsified credentials could prompt the review of hundreds of cases that he worked on and force new trials for some of those he helped convict during a career that spanned nearly four decades. Prosecutors in Baltimore County and the U.S. attorney's office for Maryland ordered a review of cases involving Kopera, and the state public defender's office sent out letters this week asking prosecutors throughout Maryland, and the Baltimore and state police departments, to help identify cases that included his analysis.
For capital defense lawyers like Barrett, the discovery about Kopera raises particularly troubling questions - whether some of the men who have populated Maryland's death row would have been convicted and sentenced to die if his fraudulent claims had been discovered sooner, and whether the entertaining and engaging witness might have lied about more than just his qualifications with a defendant's life on the line.
As Barrett was sifting through boxes from the Hunt case, a defense lawyer representing a man on Maryland's death row was weighing what to do about a similar discovery. Attorney Fred Warren Bennett said he intends to file new court papers challenging the conviction and death sentence of Jody Lee Miles. The request to reopen the court proceedings, he said, will be based on the revelations about Kopera - who matched a gun linked to Miles with bullets found in the body of a community theater director shot to death in 1997 on the Eastern Shore.
"The legal test is whether or not, based on the newly discovered evidence, there's a substantial probability that the outcome would have been different," Bennett said. "If the jury had heard that he was a liar, that certainly would have impacted sentencing."
Kopera shot himself to death March 1, weeks after being questioned about his false claims from the witness stand that he had degrees from the Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland. Since then, additional perjured testimony has been discovered, defense attorneys say, including Kopera's claims that he taught at several local colleges and that he was certified by a national association.
No one seems to know for sure how many cases he worked on in his 37 years on the job - first with the Baltimore Police Department and then with the state police - or how many were decided, in part, on his testimony. By his own estimate, Kopera examined guns, bullets and other evidence in 1,400 to 1,600 cases a year, and took the witness stand in federal and state courts 100 to 125 times annually, according to transcripts from the Hunt case.
Michele Nethercott, who heads up the small unit of state public defenders who confronted Kopera several weeks ago, said she knew of three capital cases that involved Kopera's testimony.
In addition to the Hunt and Miles cases, she said, Kopera also testified at the trial of Wesley Eugene Baker, who was executed in 2005 for the robbery and murder of a grandmother on a shopping center parking lot 14 years earlier.
Scott D. Shellenberger, the chief prosecutor in Baltimore County, said Kopera's testimony was "not at all" crucial to establishing that Baker, and not another man involved in the robbery, fired the fatal shot.
Gary W. Christopher, who represented Baker in appeals, said another ballistics expert found after the trial that the gun's trigger was uncommonly sensitive, suggesting that the weapon may have gone off accidentally. He said Kopera told him his notes showed the gun's trigger pull was not unusual. Appeals courts did not find the issue worthy of overturning any decisions, Christopher added.
Kathryn G. Graeff, chief of the criminal appeals division of the state attorney general's office, declined to comment on Kopera's role in any capital cases.
Attorneys, judges, police officers and others who worked with Kopera in the state's criminal justice system say there is no reason to believe that his misrepresentations about his background mean he was similarly deceptive in his forensics work. In addition, prosecutors involved in the capital cases in which Kopera testified say that his weapons analysis was but one piece of a larger puzzle put together for jurors.
Miles, for instance, confessed to the 1997 murder of Edward J. Atkinson, a theater director who was shot in the back of the head in a remote wooded area of Wicomico County. Hunt, in the years between his trial in 1986 and his execution in 1997, repeatedly admitted - and apologized for - shooting Baltimore Police Officer Vincent J. Adolfo, attributing his actions, however, to a panicked moment in a drug-induced haze.
Kurt L. Schmoke, who served as Baltimore state's attorney from 1982 to 1987 before being elected mayor, said forensics did not factor into his decision to seek a death sentence for Hunt.
"The facts seemed to me to be very clear. It was Hunt's gun, Hunt shot him and it wasn't a matter of self-defense," said Schmoke, now dean of the Howard University School of Law.
Timothy J. Doory, a former city assistant state's attorney who prosecuted Hunt, said the ballistics evidence was significant, but that the outcome would have been no different if Kopera had been disqualified from testifying.
"Had someone confronted Joe with his educational situation, someone else could have come in to testify to the ballistics," said Doory, now a Circuit Court judge. "Joe's evidence was hard, observable science - another [firearms] examiner could come in and take a look at it and say, 'Yes, this bullet matches this gun.'"
Barrett, the lawyer who worked on Hunt's appeals, acknowledges that it was not Kopera's testimony that convicted her client. Rather, Barrett said, the gun expert likely helped convince jurors that the killing was premeditated - a determination that was necessary for Hunt to be eligible for the death penalty.
Adolfo, a 25-year-old patrolman, was killed Nov. 18, 1985, in an East Baltimore alley while trying to handcuff Hunt, a suspected car thief. The suspect pulled out a gun, put it to the officer's chest and fired, Doory told jurors at the June 1986 trial, according to an account in The Evening Sun.
"The bullet ripped through his right lung and Officer Adolfo spun around and stumbled, screaming in agony," Doory continued. "The defendant then cocked the gun again and shot Officer Adolfo in the back."
Kopera testified about the revolver used in the shooting -- a .357-caliber, single-action Ruger Blackhawk whose hammer needed to be cocked before each release of the trigger, according to transcripts of the court proceedings. And he testified that while the first shot was fired an inch or two from the police officer's chest, the second was fired from about 3 feet away.
Inconsistencies between Kopera's testimony at the 1986 trial and a 1988 resentencing hearing, including the distance from which the second shot was fired, now make Barrett wonder whether there might have been bigger problems with the expert's testimony than college degrees he claimed to have.
Noting that she's almost certain that none of Hunt's lawyers hired an independent expert to review the ballistics, Barrett said, "As I sit here today, I am very unhappy that I don't know whether there were substantive inaccuracies in Kopera's testimony."
© X-Pro 2007
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