Wonder if the DT was aware of the Rachel Tolleson Case here in TX; where
LIBS was used by Oak Ridge Scientist to identify chemical elements of tree wood, for the 1st time. Some of the same names have came up in Vass' testimony this morning.
Outcome: Guilty - sentenced to death
In fact, Madhavi Martin (mentioned this morning) is the same physicist who performed the LIBS on the wood logs.
<snip>
In March 2004, a woman who had been missing for a week was found strangled and stabbed to death in a field in Collin County, Texas. Around her body lay pieces of partially burned logs. Her murderer apparently had tried to ignite the wood pieces in an attempt to burn her body. The attempt failed because the wood was too green.
Madhavi Martin, a physicist in ORNL's Environmental Sciences Division...had begun studies of the chemical composition of wood, using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy.
Martin was not told that, of the 14 logs she was asked to analyze, 10 were retrieved from the crime scene and 4 from another place the suspect had been. "I analyzed all 14 pieces and found they had an identical spectrum," she says. "They all came from the same tree or from trees found in the same geographical area.
I examined the burned parts of the logs and the unburned parts. The data revealed that the wood pieces had the same elemental content."
LIBS is a technique that produces a chemical "fingerprint" of wood or any other material, based on heavy metals and other trace elements.
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/v38_3_05/article19.shtml
http://prc.utk.edu/martin.htm
<snip>
The
scientists working on this technique were able to compare certain elements of each remaining log of wood from both the crime scene and the party. The Collin County Sheriffs Office was 99.99 percent confident the logs were identical, being from the same tree or at least from the same stand of trees.
This resulted in the suspect being found guilty of capital murder. He is now on death row at the Institutional Division of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/...n=display_arch&article_id=1718&issue_id=12009
<snip>
The wood [from both fires] was from the same d*** tree! He says.
It was also the first time tree ring science had ever been applied to a murder investigation.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...&gl=us&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com