The claim in the headline doesn’t seem to be the same claim his defense attorneys are actually making. From literally this same article:
But his defense attorneys now argue that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ‘was unable to identify the bullet recovered at autopsy to the rifle allegedly tied to Mr Robinson.’
“They can’t prove it matched” and “it didn’t match” aren’t the same thing at all. The stuff that matches a fired bullet to a specific gun barrel, like trying to line up the striations on the bullet with the rifling, is prone to error and differences in investigator judgment (remember they’re working with a bullet that has already been deformed by hitting something). (And I have very little confidence in it; I have, in previous comments, referred to it as “tea leaf reading.”) But to prove it wasn’t fired from a specific barrel, you’d need a (pardon the pun) smoking gun: wrong caliber, rifled in the wrong direction, something like that. If they had that, they’d call it out instead of making the weaker “unable to identify” claim.
That’s because it’s not a bullet, it’s a piece of shrapnel from an undershirt microphone. I wore one when I shot a video for a factory. Just like the exploding pagers.
The claim in the headline doesn’t seem to be the same claim his defense attorneys are actually making. From literally this same article:
“They can’t prove it matched” and “it didn’t match” aren’t the same thing at all. The stuff that matches a fired bullet to a specific gun barrel, like trying to line up the striations on the bullet with the rifling, is prone to error and differences in investigator judgment (remember they’re working with a bullet that has already been deformed by hitting something). (And I have very little confidence in it; I have, in previous comments, referred to it as “tea leaf reading.”) But to prove it wasn’t fired from a specific barrel, you’d need a (pardon the pun) smoking gun: wrong caliber, rifled in the wrong direction, something like that. If they had that, they’d call it out instead of making the weaker “unable to identify” claim.
That’s because it’s not a bullet, it’s a piece of shrapnel from an undershirt microphone. I wore one when I shot a video for a factory. Just like the exploding pagers.