Jul 13 2009
Criminal Investigations Thrown to the Dogs in Texas
The Victoria Advocate released a story last night that takes an in depth look at the use of dog-scent lineups in Texas. Specifically, the article addresses two cases where men were arrested and incarcerated based on canine testimony and later released when proof of their innocence emerged. The evidence in these cases was subjected to bloodhound scent lineups conducted by Sheriff’s Deputy Keith Pikett, a man whose practices are currently under rigid scrutiny as a result of two recently filed federal lawsuits. The story explains:
Michael Buchanek’s federal lawsuit in January 2008 was the first complaint about Pikett’s work, said Randy Morse, an assistant Fort Bend County attorney representing the deputy. A scent lineup and trail identified Buchanek as a suspect in the high-profile murder of Sally Blackwell.
Pikett’s dogs, Quincy and James Bond, walked from the site where Blackwell’s body was found, along Zac Lentz Parkway, to her home more than five miles away. From there, they went to Buchanek’s house nearby.
The hounds also picked the former Victoria County sheriff’s captain’s scent in a series of lineups. The identifications were used to get a search warrant for Buchanek’s home.
His lawyer, Rex Easley, represents Calvin Miller in another civil suit that names Pikett.
In one motion, Easley wrote Pikett’s lineup was “so recklessly flawed that it violated the constitutional rights of the plaintiff. First, the dogs were leashed during the lineup, which fails to exclude handler input. Second, the site, the pads and the cans were contaminated with countless other scents so as to render it unreliable and impermissible to base a warrant upon.”
Easley hired Bob Coote, who led a police-dog force in the United Kingdom and worked with scent dogs guarding the British border, to review Pikett’s work in Buchanek’s case. The lineup was “the most primitive evidential police procedure I have ever witnessed. If it was not for the fact that this is a serious matter, I could have been watching a comedy,” Coote wrote.
The Innocence Project of Texas recently took an interest in Pikett’s use of dog-scent lineups and is currently evaluating several potential wrongful convictions brought about, at least in part, by the use of these flawed “investigation” procedures. In his comments to the Victoria Advocate, IPOT Chief Counsel Jeff Blackburn noted that although dog scent lineups are commonly regarded as junk science, “this isn’t even science. This is just junk.” Even the National Police Bloodhound Association has regarded the lineups as “unreliable” and no longer edorses the practice.