PSU Magazine Spring 2002

Jesperson, 40, of Selah, Washington, was arrested for murder. The body of another woman had been found in the gorge. Detectives found a letter Jesper– son had written to his brother confess– ing to eight murders in all, including Bennett's. The handwriting was an exact match to the letter the Oregon– ian had received. However, authorities were still convinced that Pavlinac and Sosnoviski were guilty of Bennett's murder. "The forensic evidence in the case was woefully inadequate, but there were some blood and fiber examina– tions, hair comparisons, the e types of things," Grimsbo says. "Finally Jesper– son took police to Bennett's Walkman, her identification, and her wallet, which had never been found. They believed him then." b ast year Grimsbo established the Oregon Innocence Project, Inc., becau e he believes he can help some people-like Pavlinac and So noviski-who have been wrongly convicted of crimes by re-examination of the evidence. Usu– ally, he says, there isn't much he can do, but once in a while he can make a real difference. That's what happened when the phone rang one afternoon last year. "I got a call on a Thursday from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation out of South Carolina," he says. "They asked me if I could review expert wit– ness testimony from a trial that happened nine years before. The man was scheduled to die on the next Tuesday, o I said sure, and they sent me the transcripts." It was a complicated case. The man had been accused and convicted of both murder and rape. Each crime occurred in a different part of town at about the same time on the same night. He admitted the rape, but denied having committed the murder. As Grimsbo read through the tran– scripts he found that even the experts who testified at the trial disagreed about the facts of the case. "If I was confused, I was pretty sure a jury would have been," he says. He called the attorney back Sunday evening, sugge ting he ask for a stay of execution based on his findings. The attorney asked Grimsbo to be available to answer the governor's questions if there were any. He agreed. He didn't hear anything on Monday or all day Tuesday. "By Tuesday night I figured the appeal wasn't successful," he recalls, "but then on Wednesday morning the attorney called back to say the gover– nor had agreed." The man's sentence was commuted to life in prison, but the evidence in the case was not re-examined nor was the case ever retried. Even so, it is the ability to review and test the evidence that allows citi– zens to have confidence in the system, says John Connors, director of the Multnomah County section of the Metropolitan Public Defenders office. In his years as a public defender, he's gotten to know Grimsbo and depends on him to give him the straight scoop. "Ray is helpful and he's smart," says Connors. "He likes to teach. He' always willing to take lawyers up to the lab or out to the field so they can really under tand the results. He'll tell you the truth and what that means, whether it's good or bad, for the client." rimsbo's search for truth isn't limited, however, to criminal · cases. Recently a PSU doc- toral student in archeology, Julie Schablitsky, came to him with a ques– tion of an entirely different nature. She'd been digging at a site in Virginia City, Nevada, and wanted to find out more about a syringe, some hand– rolled copper needles, and a male urethra irrigator she'd found under the floorboards of the house she was excavating. She told him she thought the needles might contain morphine, but since the syringe had been under– ground for 125 years, it would be almost impossible to confirm her assumption. A test that could detect such a highly degraded, aged, and weathered sample had never success– fully been conducted. Though it took almost a year of Saturdays, Grimsbo successfully tested the syringe using a mass spectrometer and provided 1c 0 ti , :i: 0. Schablitsky with positive results. Then he turned his attention to one of the copper needles. Using DNA analysis he was able to show that several people had used one of the needles, that the users were both men and women, and that one of them was most likely of African descent. Thanks to the tests, Schablitsky now believes that the home she has been excavat– ing was also used at one time as a medical clinic, possibly for treating cases of venereal disease, which was rampant in the mining camps of the time. "You know, forensics work isn't like it's portrayed on television," Grimsbo says, "or if it is, it's more like MASH than CSL You try to be good at what you do, and you take it seriously, but you have fun doing it." D (Merlin Douglass, a Portland freelance writer, wrote the articles "Who Are Our Students?" and "The Enigmatic Smile" in the winter 2002 PSU Magazine.) SPRING 2002 PSU MAGAZINE 19