TruTV is currently covering the trial of Jerome Sydney Barrett for the February 1975 sexual assault and murder of 9-year-old Marcia Trimble. The little girl was selling Girl Scout cookies when she disappeared from her home’s kitchen while her mother was cooking dinner. The body was found a little over a month later, dumped in a neighbor’s garage.

The media are presenting this as another suspenseful prosecution involving questions of the validity of DNA evidence. I can’t believe there’s really any chance the jury will quibble the way the legal commentators are. One lawyer said yesterday that the trial was about the “integrity” of the justice system when evidence is so skimpy. Please, we know it only takes a fraction of a nanogram of DNA to identify a killer. And that’s the definition of “skimpy.”

• Sidebar: I almost said (above) “split hairs” rather than “quibble.” Then I realized the better metaphor for DNA analysis is "debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” This latter phrase is associated with medieval scholasticism, by the way. I am preparing a blog on how modern lawyers resemble scholastic monks.

Of course, one never knows. Barrett’s attorney may be very clever. However, I would suggest that it really doesn’t matter whether or not this defendant is convicted of this crime. He’s already convicted of the rape/murder of Sarah Des Prez (only two months before he murdered Marcia Trimble) and is serving a life sentence for that crime. Because Tennessee did not have a death penalty in 1975 (because the U.S. Supreme Court had temporarily suspended executions throughout the country), he was not eligible for the death penalty in the Des Prez case and also will not be in the Trimble case.

• In fact, when Barrett was arrested for the Des Prez murder, he was already in prison, serving a 26 year sentence for raping another college student in February 1975 within days of the Des Prez and Trimble murders. (I wonder if DNA collected in the rape case was what eventually led to Barrett’s arrests for murder. In 1975 the living victim of a rape gave eye-witness testimony against a defendant. Evidence from seminal fluid could only identify rapists with a few blood types, so victim testimony was always the key. Take a look at Traver’s Anatomy of a Murder for a great courtroom drama.)

Even if the jury finds Barret not guilty, eventually they will learn about his prior crimes, the family will know he did it, and so will everyone else. Regardless of the verdict, the only unanswered question will be, “How many others did he rape and murder?”

Another reason I believe the jury is unlikely to dismiss the DNA evidence as insubstantial is that most jurors aren’t idiots (as so many lawyers seem to believe). If I were on that jury, it would be crystal clear to me that the only way the cops could have matched this man’s DNA to the DNA collected in 1975 is that his DNA was in a database of criminals already. That would mean he has a prior record—even if the judge keeps every hint of his priors out of the courtroom.

• (Incidentally, the TruTV commentators seem to think the DNA was actually found on the victim rather than on the swab. I’m amazed, as always, at how little attention the on-camera commentators seem to pay to trial testimony.)

Another DNA “issue” of interest to legal commentators in this case seems to be that the 1975 swab has a mix of DNA on it, including DNA that could not be identified. The defense is expected to suggest that this unknown male is as likely to have been the killer as the defendant.

But here again, the juror’s intelligence will probably analyze the situation correctly. The medical examiner explained that in 1975 forensics investigators were not concerned with DNA contamination, because DNA was not yet used in crime investigations. He made it clear that someone in the lab could have contaminated the swab, for instance, could have sneezed on the swab. There were many opportunities for cells containing DNA of uninvolved people to be deposited on the swab, even years later when the case was several times reopened. The point is that the defendant’s DNA is on the swab—and he was not a forensics lab worker at the time.

The Barrett trial is undoubtedly interesting. The original investigation was dramatic. White teenagers were believed to have been seen talking to Marcia Trimble shortly before she disappeared. The FBI profilers pointed to a young, white male. An eye-witness had to be hypnotized in order to describe these young men. The body appeared to have been concealed for more than a month in an unknown place before it was dumped in the neighbor’s garage. Then cold-case detectives tried to resurrect the investigation several times before the case was solved.

But that doesn’t mean that this non-lawyer, former juror thinks a Tennessee jury is likely to “hang” itself or to find this defendant not guilty.

I’m curious, though, about the laws concerning trials of serial criminals, especially serial murderers like Barrett. I believe that several trials have involved more than one murder victim. Why wasn’t Barrett tried for both the Des Prez and the Trimble murders at the same time? They both occurred in the same jurisdiction (Nashville). A quick Bing search produced this interesting Sentencing Law and Policy blog posting on another serial killer in court this month. In the case described, a prosecutor and judge have grouped several murders together for sentencing purposes.