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Reed v. Maryland9/6/1978
erior ballistics. Elsewhere Prof. Gunther has said: 'Ballistics now is in the same stage that finger printing was in the days when data on the probability of duplication was being accumulated. And it is fully as promising.'" Id. at 468. The court quoted, not the "twilight zone" language of Frye, but rather the more receptive language of the New Jersey fingerprint case, State v. Cerciello, 86 N.J. L. 309, to which we have previously alluded, that "'the law, in its efforts to enforce justice by demonstrating a fact in issue, will allow evidence of those scientific processes which are the work of educated and skillful men in their various departments, and apply them to the demonstration of a fact, leaving the weight and effect to be given to the effort and its results entirely to the consideration of the jury.'" The court said in holding the evidence admissible:
"Without, therefore, assuming to say that a particular fired ball will bear so distinctive a mark upon it, due to the structure of the gun from which it has been fired, as to enable one to identify the gun, we do hold that this is a proper field of evidence, and, it being certainly a field with which the ordinary juror is unfamiliar, the opinion of trained, educated, and skillful men along that line may be received for what it is worth. Evans v. Commonwealth, 230 Ky., 411, 19 S.W. (2d), 1091, 66 A.L.R., 360." Id. at 469-70.
By the time our predecessors first ruled upon ballistics evidence in Edwards v. State, 198 Md. 132, 81 A.2d 631 (1951), the science was well established. Judge Delaplaine said for the Court there, "For many years ballistics has been a science of great value in ferreting out crimes that otherwise might not be solved. . . . Testimony to identify the weapon from which a shot was fired is admissible where it is shown that the witness offering such testimony is qualified by training
and experience to give expert opinion on firearms and ammunition." Id. at 142. This Court found no error in admitting the opinion of the firearms expert that the bullets had been fired from the gun of the accused, even though the expert said that "it was . . . possible that the bullets could have been fired from a [different gun]." Id. at 144.
c. Blood
Moenssens et al., supra, at 288 n. 85 indicate that the first appellate decision on the admissibility of blood grouping evidence was State v. Damm, 62 S. D. 123, 252 N. W. 7 (1933), aff'd, 64 S. D. 309, 266 N. W. 667 (1936). By that point in time there was no dispute as to the accuracy of these tests.
Writing in 1937, Muehlberger and Inbau stated, "Blood grouping tests have become accepted by the medical profession not only as possessing a 'reasonable measure of precision in their indications' -- all that the law requires [citing 2 Wigmore, Evidence (2d ed. 1923) § 990] -- but also as producing exact and irrefutable results." The Scientific and Legal Application of Blood Grouping Tests, 27 J. Crim. L. & C. 578, 586 (1937).
Although the accuracy of these tests was not disputed, there was controversy as to the probative value of such evidence when the tests showed two persons to have the same blood type. Muehlberger and Inbau wrote:
"While logically relevant as concomitant evidence, it seems that the possibility of prejudicial inference against the defendant is too great in return for the remote evidence of capacity. For that reason scientific authorities advocate that the results of blood grouping tests be admitted in evidence only when they conclusively establish a fact, i.e., that the accused could not possibly be the parent. And it was so held in the case of Flippen v. Meinhold, on th
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