25
Defense Experts
Almost twenty-four hours later, on Thursday morning, January 29, they tried again. The weather was much improved and sunglasses were in order because of the brilliance of the sun’s reflection off the snow. After all the fuss the day before regarding the computer expert, Keller did not call him as his first witness. Instead, he called Dr. Francis Gengo.
“I’m a pharmacologist employed by the University of Buffalo,” Dr. Gengo said. He was also an associate professor of pharmacy and neurology and a clinical assistant professor of neurosurgery at the SUNYAB School of Medicine. He’d received his B.S. at Buffalo and his Doctor of Pharmacy degree at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, which happened to be the oldest pharmacy school in the United States. The school had undergone a name change, but for the life of him, he couldn’t recall what the new name was. (The answer turned out to be the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.) He’d spend approximately six to nine months in the classroom, and the rest of the time was spent on clinical rotations at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson Hospital, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He explained that he had also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in pharmacokinetics and biopharmaceutics at Buffalo. And that he had also, since 1982, been a member of the Dent Neurologic Institute in Amherst, New York, where he had been recruited to initiate and develop a research program in clinical neuropharmacology. That program became so successful that Dr. Gengo was awarded the 1993 George Thorn Award, given to superior researchers under the age of forty by the University of Buffalo Alumni Association. He was currently the Dent Institute’s director of clinical research. Over the years, he had published a number of papers on the effects of various drugs on the central nervous system, and his research entailed significant abstraction and statistical analysis of data acquired from several modalities.
“In simple terms, tell the jury what it is that you do,” Chuck Keller said.
“I study drug concentrations in the human body,” the witness replied.
Dr. Gengo’s job as far as Keller was concerned was to make Ashley Wallace look like a liar, to cast suspicion on her story that she took only one drink the afternoon before her hospitalization.
“During the course of your duties, did you study the prosecution’s medical and toxicology reports based on a blood sample taken from Ashley Wallace while in University Hospital, Dr. Gengo?” Keller asked.
“I did.”
“And, based on those medical and toxicology reports, did you come to a conclusion as to how long before her hospitalization she’d last had a drink of alcohol?”
“Yes. I determined that she’d had her last drink at about midnight on the night before her hospitalization,” the witness replied.
“Is it possible that she drank after midnight?”
“Yes, but she couldn’t have had more than one drink after midnight.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because, with the concentration of drugs in her body, another drink would have been fatal.”
“One more drink would have killed her?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, let’s discuss the quantity of drugs in her system,” the defense attorney said. Ashley, the jury recalled, claimed she ingested the drugs through a straw, as they had been mixed into a foul-tasting drink. “When, according to your tests, had Ashley last ingested drugs?”
“In order for Ashley to have the concentrations found in her blood, she had to have taken drugs during the early-morning hours of the day of her hospitalization.”
“I see. It is impossible for her to have ingested all of the drugs she took on the afternoon before?”
“Oh yes.”
“And how much drugs are we talking about? How many pills approximately?”
“There were upward of sixty pills’ worth of drugs in her system,” Dr. Gengo said.
“No further questions.”
“Bill?” Judge Fahey said.
“No questions, Your Honor.”
“Call your next witness, Chuck.”
Gerald Grant was the defense’s computer expert whose job it was to refute the testimony of Frank Brackin—i.e., that the suicide note had to have been written on Stacey’s computer. Grant testified that he was the owner and a consultant at JR Computer Consulting, of Rochester, New York. He was the computer systems administrator for the Western District of New York Federal Public Defender’s Office. As a consultant, he specialized in computer forensics, system installation, and training. He lectured and conducted training programs for many large groups at various companies, and was a graduate of Bryant & Stratton Business Institute (the same school Ashley attended) with an A.S. in computer programming. Grant had extensive knowledge of PCs and had been involved in forensic computer examinations, cell site analysis, cell phone forensics, and litigation support for many federal cases. He was a certified access data forensic examiner.
“Let’s talk about the computer on which the suicide note was written,” Chuck Keller said. “You performed tests on that computer, am I right?”
“Yes. I examined the computer’s activity on the days the prosecution expert ignored, days near the time when the note was written.”
“What did you find?”
“I discovered that even though there were copies of fragments of drafts of the note on the computer’s hard drive, there were no fragments saved of the final version.” His conclusion: “I do not agree that any forensic expert can determine from examining that hard drive when the final draft of the suicide note was written.”
“Not with any accuracy?”
“Not with any accuracy or specificity,” the defense witness said.
The prosecution had tried to show the jury that the so-called suicide note had to have been written when Ashley was not home—and therefore had to have been written by Stacey. This witness said it was impossible to come to that conclusion.