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Reed v. Maryland9/6/1978
risonment for the remaining crimes. The Court of Special Appeals affirmed the convictions, Reed v. State, 35 Md. App. 472, 372 A.2d 243 (1977). This Court then granted Reed's petition for a writ of certiorari to consider the trial court's admission of voiceprint evidence. We hold that the admission of this evidence was error.
The voiceprint technique, although of relatively recent origin, has been much discussed and described in cases and legal commentaries. The process involves the use of a
machine known as a spectrograph. This machine analyzes the acoustic energy of the human voice into three components -- time, frequency, and intensity -- and graphically displays these components by generating, through an electric stylus, a series of closely spaced light and dark lines, varying in position, on a sheet of electrically sensitive paper. The resulting graphic representation is what is called a spectrogram or "voiceprint." It reveals certain patterns or "formats" which correspond to the sounds which are analyzed. According to the testimony of Dr. Oscar Tosi, the State's principal witness at the suppression hearing and the most widely known proponent of the reliability of the voiceprint technique, spectrography
"consists of comparing both aurally and visually spectrograms of a questioned voice and a known voice, and on the basis of the similarities to decide whether or not the two voices, the questioned and known voice are the same or belong to different persons."
Essentially, therefore, the task of spectrography is one of pattern matching. It is dependent on the individual judgment of the examiner. As stated by Dr. Tosi:
"I consider [spectrography] reliable only if the examiner is reliable and he adjusts to what the
conditions are, and he is an honest person; and he is prone to use no opinion, but probability rather than positive identification in cases of some doubt. Then I consider this good. It is reliable and can be used only . . . under these circumstances. Otherwise it would be a disaster."
The examiner's task is complicated by what is termed "intra-speaker" variability, that is, the fact that individual speakers apparently do not say the same word in precisely the same way each time they utter it, and that spectrograms reflect this difference. According to Detective Sergeant Lonnie Smrkovski of the Michigan State Police, the examiner in the instant case, if a speaker were to utter the same word on fifty consecutive days, he would expect none of the resulting spectrograms to be identical. It is maintained, however, that the differences between the separate utterances of an individual speaker are less than the differences between the utterances of different speakers, so that intra-speaker variations do not render identification impossible.
According to Sgt. Smrkovski, at least ten points of similarity must be noted between two speech samples before a positive identification can be achieved. Apparently, this is independent of the number of the speech samples being compared. In the instant case, Sgt. Smrkovski, after listening to the tapes submitted to him, selected 138 of the 2,162 words spoken for comparison and made spectrograms of these words. In this sample, Sgt. Smrkovski rated one comparison "excellent," twenty "very good," thirty-seven "good," and thirty-five "fair." These comparisons were the basis of his conclusion that Reed's voice and the voice of the victim's caller were the same.
A principal consideration with regard to the admissibility of expert testimony, according to Wigmore, is: "On this Page 380} subject can a jury receive from th
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