Practice to Deceive

A witness for the defense that he was counting on. Dr. Jon Nordby’s fee to conduct tests on the way human blood drips, pools, spatters, and is otherwise emptied from a body after death by gunshot was well over thirty-five thousand dollars.
    I have known Nordby for more than thirty years. When I first met him, he was working as an assistant to the Pierce County, Washington, medical examiner. A Scandinavian originally from Minnesota, Nordby is tall with thick blond hair, now turning to gray, and a “walrus mustache.” There is no question that he is very intelligent—so smart, in fact, that he sometimes has difficulty communicating his expertise to laymen.
    Nordby heads Final Analysis Forensics, and gives his areas of expertise as: “Medical-legal death investigations; blood stain patterns; trace evidence analysis; crime-scene processing and investigation; reconstruction of crime scenes; ballistics; firearms and gunshot residue testing.”
    He has written or contributed to three textbooks on forensic techniques. Dr. Nordby, however, is not a medical doctor, but holds a PhD.
    On July 19, 2012, Dr. Nordby took the witness stand. His testimony on blood spatter to come was so esoteric that he took it upon himself to give the jurors some education in the way blood behaves. He spoke of forward spatter, back spatter, impact spatter, and two kinds of sprays. And then there were stains: drip, swipe, wipe, soaking, wicking, saturation, transference.
    Although Jon Nordby knew well what he was discussing, most of the jurors had trouble following his testimony.
    The gist of the hours he spent testifying was that he did not acknowledge that Russel Douglas had been shot while he sat behind the wheel of his car. Nordby suggested that the blood patterns were inconsistent with that conclusion.
    If he was shot outside the Tracker, how would that be significant in this case? Russ weighed about two hundred pounds, and after he was shot, he would have been, quite literally, dead weight and very difficult to lift and put back behind the wheel.
    Detective Mark Plumberg felt that an attempt to move Douglas was possible, because of the slight shift of blood in his hand, but if that succeeded, the blood movement on the victim’s shirt and hand would have been far more noticeable.
    And where was this line of testimony going? Since the gun wasn’t there, there wasn’t any chance that Russ’s death had been a suicide.
    As Greg Banks cross-examined Nordby, he began by quietly questioning the witness to suggest that his education and experience were not those of a true forensic expert.
    “Are you a medical pathologist?”
    “No.”
    “Do you have a medical degree or a medical residency?”
    “No.”
    “What was your bachelor’s degree in?”
    “Arts and philosophy.”
    “Your master’s?”
    “Philosophy and math.”
    “PhD?”
    “Philosophy.”
    After a break for lunch, the cross-examination continued and the courtroom was filled with thoughts and scenarios involving blood for the rest of the afternoon.
    To offer a movie parallel to the back spatter in the actual murder, Dr. Nordby even brought in a gunshot scene from the film Pulp Fiction starring John Travolta and Samuel Jackson, explaining that Travolta was “drenched in blood,” while Jackson had simulated brain matter on him after the shots were fired.
    Greg Banks suggested that the hefty witness fee had relevance to possible bias on Dr. Nordby’s part. He asked him what his fees were for his testimony on the behalf of Jim Huden’s defense.
    “Thirty thousand dollars. That’s three thousand dollars per day—in court at five hundred dollars an hour. In general, I charge two hundred and fifty dollars an hour, plus travel.”
    Asked by Matthew Montoya why he hadn’t read narratives about the homicide, Dr. Nordby said he hadn’t wanted to taint his own impression.
    “Why did you include information about Pulp Fiction [the movie] in your report?”
    “To mention a current example—that back spatter is a natural phenomenon.”
    The afternoon lengthened and Nordby apologized that tests on another case had been inserted by mistake into the appendix of his long report on the Douglas case.
    The jurors were tired, and some of them complained that they hadn’t been able to hear some of Jon Nordby’s testimony. In the end, the day hadn’t gone well for the defense.
    There was another witness subpoenaed by Montoya that afternoon. He was Ron Young, one of Jim Huden’s