Scene Of The Crime

Early last year, an Idaho murder trial crossed into new technological turf. The question was how 11-month-old Casey Whiteside had died. Was his skull viciously fractured by his mother's boyfriend? Or did Casey accidentally fall down a flight of stairs to his death? Carl Adrian, the FBI's top expert at using computers to re-create crime scenes, prepared a 10-minute demonstration that transfixed the jurors. Adrian sent a computer-generated likeness of a baby tumbling down an image of the staircase. Then Saami Shaibani, a Temple University physicist, used Adrian's simulation to explain that a fall could not have produced such massive injuries. A Boise jury convicted the boyfriend, Edward Stevens. He's serving life without parole.

Last week the software, called Maya and made by SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics Inc.), moved to a much bigger stage in Cleveland. That's where the late Dr. Sam Sheppard was first found guilty--and then, in a second trial, not guilty--of killing his wife, Marilyn, in the murder case that inspired "The Fugitive." The Sheppards' son, Sam, now wants a civil court to go beyond "not guilty"--which technically means prosecutors couldn't prove guilt--and take the unusual step of declaring his father innocent. Clearing his father's name would entitle the younger Sheppard to file a damage claim against the State of Ohio, which, he says, ruined his father's life. Cuyahoga County prosecutors who oppose Sheppard are using Maya to show jurors, on video monitors, 3-D images of the house where the killing occurred. Jurors are "traveling back to 1954 in a time tunnel," says Dean Boland, one of the lawyers. They'll also be led on a ghostly tour of a virtual house created from old police photos; the real murder house was demolished nine years ago.

The use of software for what's called forensic animation has been common for a decade. Typically, an expert studies all the data from, say, an auto crash; he then asks a computer jockey to do basic calculations of the objects in motion and create a visual reconstruction of the event. What's new--especially in criminal cases, where a defendant's life may be at stake--is Maya's ability to go much further in helping the expert figure out what probably occurred at a crime scene where the evidence is too sketchy to yield an obvious explanation.

In the Idaho case, the FBI fed into the software data such as the baby's shape, weight and dimensions as well as precise measurements and characteristics of the staircase. When Adrian asked Maya to make the likeness of a child fall, the software first applied the laws of physics to determine what might happen to the child-like object, and then produced a visual simulation that can be as polished as a 70mm movie. The key physics question in the Idaho case involved the effects of gravity. But Maya is so packed with scientific calculations that it can also replicate the effects of other forces, such as the way smoke cuts a pilot's visibility in a crashing aircraft, or how flames spread in a house fire.

Some legal scholars say no software should have the power to influence juries. James Starrs, a professor of forensic science and law at George Washington University, says high-quality simulations can give jurors a false sense that they're actually witnessing the crime. "The simulation that jurors see makes one version of events appear very certain," Starrs says. "Then jurors can conveniently forget all the other possibilities." "Even stick figures on a video screen can be overwhelmingly persuasive," says Samuel Guiberson, a Houston attorney who cochairs a technology committee of the American Bar Association. "We empathize with the figure."

Maya's makers don't disagree that the software, used improperly, can be misleading. Adrian was so concerned about the Idaho simulation's looking too theatrical that he intentionally toned down the quality of the images. But not everyone who has $5,000 for SGI's hardware and software package may be that ethical. Then there's the possibility that an unscrupulous investigator, attorney or scientist will feed a computer only the data that will yield whatever scenario he or she wants. "Data can become propaganda," Guiberson says. "Software is subject to persuasion and manipulation."