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From Force Science Research Center:
Force Science News #33
December 2, 2005
=======================================
The Force Science News is provided by The Force Science Research Center,
a non-profit institution based at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
Subscriptions are free and sent via e-mail. To register for your free,
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click on the registration button. For reprint clearance, please e-mail:
[email protected].
=======================================
HOW FORCE SCIENCE SAVED 2 "GUN COPS" FROM TRIAL FOR MURDER
For the first time, a scientific reconstruction of how an unarmed
suspect must have moved during a confrontation with police has been
successfully introduced into the British criminal justice system,
exonerating 2 officers who were facing murder charges after shooting the
man dead.
The officers, who'd been accused of lying to cover up their "execution,"
were cleared after Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force
Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato, convinced
authorities that the only way the controversial shooting could have
occurred was the way the officers said it did--when the suspect
unexpectedly turned toward them, pointing what they reasonably believed
was a sawed-off shotgun.
Before their release from prosecution, the officers had battled a
devastating pall of suspicion for 2,212 days--6 long years--as they
repeatedly but futilely protested their innocence of wrongdoing. The
London press called the case "one of the most controversial police
shootings of modern times."
"The officers faced the absolute ruin of their personal and professional
lives," Lewinski told Force Science News. "Conventional forensics could
not help them--indeed, was used against them. It took an array of unique
new scientific evidence to unravel what really happened in this situation.
"This case is a perfect illustration of how the findings from FSRC's
studies can be critical in discovering the truth in complex, emotionally
charged, high-profile police shootings. It shows why we need to blend
forensics and other sciences in these investigations."
The challenging case began simply enough. On the evening of Sept. 22,
1999, after a day of pub-crawling, a 46-year-old grandfather and
unemployed painter/decorator named Henry (Harry) Stanley was hoisting a
final few at a watering hole in east London. For reasons that remain
somewhat unclear, at least one other person there got the impression
that Stanley was a dangerous character.
This individual called police and reported that the suspect was inviting
people to join him for his "last meal" and, the tipster believed,
carrying a "sawn-off shotgun" inside a long, blue plastic bag he had
with him. Later, news reports would allude to Stanley being mistaken for
an "Irish terrorist," although the informant said only that he spoke
"with an Irish accent."
Insp. Neil Sharman, then 35, and Cst. Kevin Fagan, 32 at the time, were
dispatched to investigate. They were members of the elite SO19, the
firearms unit of London's Metropolitan Police ("gun cops," in the jargon
of the English media).
At about 7:55 p.m. they spotted Stanley near a T intersection on the
route between the pub and his home. Tests later would show that his BAC
was more than double the legal limit for drivers. He was plodding along
a narrow sidewalk, residences behind a wooden fence on his right, parked
cars on his left.
His right hand gripped the telltale blue bag.
Tactically separated, with Fagan on the sidewalk and Sharman to his left
in the street, partially behind the cover of a parked car, the officers
approached Stanley from the rear, Glock 9mm pistols pointed at him. From
a distance of about 20 feet, Fagan shouted: "Armed police! Armed police!"
According to the officers, Stanley turned to his left 180 degrees in a
"slow, deliberate, fluid motion" and faced them with his feet in a
"boxer stance." The blue bag, tucked into his right hip, was pointed
toward Fagan, and Stanley was moving his left hand toward it,
potentially to brace the barrel of the shotgun presumed to be inside for
firing.
Sharman and Fagan discharged their pistols almost simultaneously, each
squeezing off a single round. The next thing they remembered when
questioned later was seeing Stanley fall to the sidewalk, facing away
from them. He'd been killed by a bullet to the head from Sharman's gun.
In addition, the round from Fagan's Glock had struck him in the left hand.
Problem was, the fatal slug entered the left rear quadrant of his head
near his ear and exited the right at a slightly upward angle, ultimately
grazing a wooden fence. The penetration pattern indicated he'd been shot
while his back was to the officers, not (as they insisted) as he was
facing them.
Moreover, there was no sawed-off shotgun. What Stanley had in the blue
bag was a wooden coffee table leg that he was taking home after his
brother had repaired it.
London's tabloid press kicked into hysterical hyper-drive. Stanley was
lionized as a loving husband and father of 3 and as a kindly
grandfather, a conscientious citizen temporarily down on his luck
without a job. All but unmentioned was his sheet of convictions for
armed robbery, grievous bodily harm and possession of drugs and the fact
that he was believed to have used a sawed-off shotgun in at least one of
his crimes.
Sharman and Fagan, who insisted that they acted in perceived
self-defense, were widely regarded as liars, trying to weasel out of an
unjustified slaying that had been prompted by malice, overexcitement or
grievous misjudgment.
According to protocol, an independent agency, police for the city of
Surrey, were assigned to investigate the shooting. In June, 2000, Surrey
submitted its findings to the Crown Prosecution Service (akin to an
American office of the district attorney or state's attorney).
After a review of the evidence, the CPS advised that there was
"insufficient evidence to bring any criminal charges against the police
officers involved."
However, a dogged family attorney and a quirk in the British legal
system that allows for repeated fresh reviews of such matters kept the
case cooking. In all as the months and years after the shooting dragged
on, there were a total of 2 police investigations, 2 inquests, 3
referrals to the Crown Prosecution Service and 3 judicial reviews.
In October last year [2004], more than 5 years after Stanley's death, an
inquest jury returned a verdict of "unlawful killing," and the CPS
decided once again to review the case. This raised the specter that
before the seemingly unquenchable furor was over Sharman and Fagan might
yet wind up behind bars.
At this time, about one-third of the 400 officers assigned to SO19
handed in their firearms authorizations and effectively went on strike
in protest.
Last January ['05] the case seemed suddenly to take another sharp turn
for the worse. In re-sifting evidence from the shooting, investigators
discovered that the stiff canvas jacket Stanley was wearing the night he
was killed had 2 bullet holes in the top of the left shoulder.
Incredibly, this "significant forensic evidence" had been overlooked in
all the prior raking over of the case!
Now it was concluded that these holes had been made by a single
bullet--Sharman's bullet--boring through puckered fabric on its way to
Stanley's skull, further confirming that his back had been turned toward
the officers when he was shot.
Colleagues were growing increasingly concerned about the physical and
mental health of the 2 gun cops. From the beginning they'd been stripped
of their armed-police assignment and demoted to duty without a firearm.
As the case wore on, their personal relationships were badly battered by
the severe strain of their predicament. As one observer noted, the
officers unremittingly suffered "a veritable lifetime of stress,
heartache, sleepless nights, anger, frustration, wasted job
opportunities--and doubt."
Whenever a London officer is involved in a shooting, the police union,
the London Metropolitan Police Federation, assigns a representative to
act as a "friend" to the officer and accompany him or her through
whatever ordeals may arise in the aftermath. Cst. Mark Williams, a
firearms instructor, was the rep assigned to Sharman and Fagan. Later
another firearms trainer, Cst. Dave Blocksidge, joined in to assist.
As the bad news piled up, Blocksidge began surfing the Internet for
information on critical incidents and their impact on officers. Besides
hoping to find research that could aid Sharman and Fagan in coping with
the emotional toll of their shooting, he sought data on how a
life-threatening event might affect memory. If he could find evidence
that memory gaps or distortions can result from high-stress encounters,
that might at least offer some counter to the claim that the 2 officers
were deliberately lying in their version of the shooting.
Blocksidge's searches eventually led him to the work of Dr. Alexis
Artwohl, a former psychologist with the Portland (OR) Police Bureau,
co-author of the book Deadly Force Encounters, and renowned for her
studies of the impact of critical incidents on sensory and cognitive
perceptions--including the effect on memory.
As they exchanged emails, Artwohl, who's on the National Advisory Board
for the Force Science Research Center, suggested that Blocksidge get in
touch with Lewinski and explore his ground-breaking findings about
action-reaction times, movement of suspects and officers during lethal
confrontations and other physical and mental dynamics of armed encounters.
Lewinski's studies at FSRC, she explained, have been instrumental in
resolving a wide variety of puzzling and controversial police shootings
from coast to coast in the US and have led to the exoneration of
numerous officers accused of criminal behavior or civil liability
because their uses of deadly force were misunderstood and/or poorly
investigated.
Late last May, Blocksidge, Williams and 3 other Federation
representatives traveled to Mankato, MN, for an exclusive 3-day seminar
on Artwohl's and Lewinski's work conducted by the two doctors along with
Dr. William Hudson, the Deputy Director of the Force Science Research
Center, and attorney William Everett, a member of the Center's National
Advisory Board.
During the visit, they briefed Lewinski on what was known about the
troublesome Stanley case.
"I will never forget the day as long as I live," Williams later told a
British police publication. "We were having a cup of tea in Bill's
kitchen. I was explaining the details of the shooting, and Bill just
smiled. Then he demonstrated what he felt had happened."
Based on his extensive studies of human movement, Lewinski suggested
that Cst. Fagan's bullet hit Stanley first, striking fingers of his left
hand. Recoiling immediately and instinctively, the suspect most likely
flung his arm up and simultaneously turned away from the source of the
pain (Fagan's gun), Lewinski believed. This positioned him so that Insp.
Sharman's close-following round then struck him in the back of the head.
Optimistic, the delegates had scarcely returned to England before the
CPS dropped a disheartening bombshell. Originally having deemed the case
against the 2 officers too weak to prosecute, the Service, after
conferring with Surrey authorities, now dramatically reversed itself--5
years and 9 months after the incident.
Sharman and Fagan were arrested by Surrey police on suspicion of murder,
gross negligence manslaughter, perjury and conspiracy to pervert the
course of justice. The officers were released on bail, and their defense
team was granted time to pursue new evidence.
Lewinski was quickly engaged by the Police Federation in hopes his
theory of the shooting could be documented scientifically. "The British
courts are very picky about outside experts," he says. "It was important
that I approach this as a neutral scientist, not as a police advocate."
During the next several weeks, which included 2 trips to London,
Lewinski objectively reviewed the case's myriad reports and photos and
the forensic evidence, particularly Stanley's bullet-punctured jacket.
He interviewed Sharman and Fagan extensively; monitored them walking
through a meticulous reconstruction of the shooting; employed highly
sophisticated laser photography to pinpoint precisely everyone's
position, angulation and movement; and worked with FSRC National
Advisory Board member Parris Ward to construct a computerized animation
of what he determined had actually occurred on the fateful night the
officers and the "shotgun" suspect came together.
You can review the animation at:
http://www.forcesciencenews.com/visuals/20051202
Synthesizing the available evidence with findings from FSRC studies of
subject movement, Lewinski eventually drew these conclusions:
1. The lineup of the bullet holes in the shoulder of Stanley's jacket
with those in his head showed that his left arm had to be raised up with
his head thrust strongly forward and his face turned away at the time
Sharman's fatal shot impacted. "That was the only configuration that
would allow for the jacket to be bunched up and for the bullet to pass
through it and through the head without wounding Stanley's shoulder,"
Lewinski told Force Science News.
2. The arm's extended position had to have been "very elevated and
unusual," and the rest of the body "very unbalanced." This was not a
position the suspect would have been in when turning toward the officers
or when pointing a shotgun, "nor is it a normal position for someone to
be in when simply walking away," Lewinski explained.
Consequently, he concluded that this was a "transition position"-a
single, microsecond frame in "a more extensive, rapid and violent
reaction," a "frozen point in time" that coincided with the passage of
Sharman's bullet.
3. What provoked the reaction was what he had speculated in his kitchen:
Fagan's round hitting Stanley's left hand. "A usual reaction to a shot
in the hand is an immediate and rapid reaction of moving the hand away
from the cause of the pain," Lewinski stated. He calls this "the
withdrawal reflex."
With the suspect facing the officers at the time Fagan fired, as they
said he was, the left arm would have been thrown up and the head would
have tried to turn toward the right, just as the trajectory of Sharman's
subsequent shot suggested had occurred.
4. The fact that the head did not move any farther to the right than it
did during this instinctive reaction further indicated to Lewinski that
the trunk of the suspect's body was indeed facing Fagan when the
officers fired.
>From his studies he knew that in turning from a front-facing position,
Stanley's rising arm would have moved fastest. The slower-moving torso,
hips and legs would have impeded the full movement of Stanley's head,
causing it to be jammed against the left arm, consistent with its
position when hit by Sharman's round. But if the suspect had been facing
away from the officers when first shot, his head could--and most likely
would--have rapidly moved in a much broader range.
5. Not enough time elapsed between Fagan's shot and Sharman's shot for
Sharman to realize that the wounded Stanley was turning away and no
longer presenting a presumed threat.
Neighborhood witnesses said they heard 2 shots that night, extremely
close together, detectable individually. "Auditory research has shown
that shots just 1/10 of a second apart can be distinguished separately,"
Lewinski says. Even supposing that Fagan's and Sharman's shots were as
much as 1/3 of a second apart-more than 3 times the minimum for
distinguishability--that would not have been long enough for Sharman to
perceive the change of circumstances and forestall firing. "Research in
cognitive psychology proves that no one could have caught that movement
before the second gun went off," Lewinski emphasizes.
"In this visually complex, rapidly evolving, dynamic shooting
situation," where the officers thought their lives at risk, there was
simply not enough time to observe and process Stanley's rapid hand, arm,
head and body movement, Lewinski concluded. Indeed, it is likely that
the entire shooting was over is no more than 17/100 seconds.
6. Finally, he stated, "research substantiates the inability to see
anything other than what a person is focused on" in a dynamic event.
What the 2 officers were focused on was the threat that Stanley's blue
plastic package seemed to present. This further explains their failure
to note his movement away from them once the shooting started. Not
noting it, they "therefore could not have reported" it in their
description of the encounter.
Bottom line of the detailed analysis that Lewinski submitted in
mid-September to the CPS: The suspect "was fully facing the officers"
when they reacted to his apparent threat and shot at him. Lewinski
considered this to be "unequivocal"-the only determination that could be
supported scientifically.
What was not included in his report was Lewinski's private speculation
that this was a suicide-by-cop case. A relative had told police earlier
in the investigation that Stanley had recently undergone surgery for
cancer and "wanted to die." He allegedly had talked specifically about
setting himself up "to be shot by police marksmen." The relative "seemed
a credible witness," police said, but they were unable to corroborate
his claims.
After carefully reviewing Lewinski's report, the CPS finally reached the
decision that the London police world had been tensely awaiting. On Oct.
20, prosecutors announced that they would not proceed further against
Sharman and Fagan. "We have concluded," said the formal announcement,
"that the threat which [the officers] believed they faced made the use
of fatal force reasonable in the circumstances....The [new] forensic
evidence...precludes showing...that the officers' accounts were lies."
Given the circumstances, there was no "realistic prospect of conviction"
for any of the accusations against them.
Although Stanley's "devastated" widow has vowed to find ways to keep the
case going, including appealing to European courts on grounds of a human
rights violation, Sharman and Fagan told reporters that they were
"thrilled" at the CPS's decision and "very grateful that a huge weight
has been lifted" from their shoulders. Both continue on the force.
Sharman is a Senior Officer in a London borough and Fagan is currently
undergoing SWAT training.
Mark Williams told Force Science News: "The painstaking research by Dr.
Lewinski and his team has helped to ensure that justice was delivered in
this horrific case. The officers and their families had all but reached
a dead end. It seemed that no one wanted to believe them, until we
discovered the FSRC."
Lewinski told FSN that he considers this case to complete a circle in
his life. "Since I was a kid," he recalls, "I've been hooked on Sherlock
Holmes. His deductive reasoning and application of scientific thought
are what first got me hooked on trying to understand human behavior and
crime. Now with this case I've been able to bring the latest in law
enforcement science back to Holmes' home territory."
NOTE: If you'd like to read another account of this shooting and its
aftermath, check out the recent article "Bulletproof" from the U.K.'s
"Police" magazine:
http://www.polfed.org/1105bullet_proof_p20.pdf
================
(c) 2005: Force Science Research Center, www.forcescience.org. Reprints
allowed by request. For reprint clearance, please e-mail:
[email protected]. FORCE SCIENCE is a registered trademark of
The Force Science Research Center, a non-profit organization based at
Minnesota State University, Mankato.
================
--
Stephen P. Wenger
Firearm safety - It's a matter
for education, not legislation.
http://www.spw-duf.info
