Mickey and Joe Bryan in 1982. In 1985, she was found dead in her bedroom. Photo / YouTube
Mickey and Joe Bryan in 1982. In 1985, she was found dead in her bedroom. Photo / YouTube
Joe Bryan has maintained his innocence since his sentencing for the 1985 murder. The highest criminal court in Texas this week denied a last-ditch effort to obtain a new trial.
In the decades since he was convicted of murdering his wife, Mickey Bryan, in 1985, Joe Bryan has maintained his innocence.
As Bryan aged behind bars — he is now 79 and has congestive heart failure — the case attracted intense scrutiny. Key evidence has been questioned, and one man who delivered expert testimony on the blood splatter in the room where Mickey Bryan was killed — a pivotal moment in her husband's 1986 trial — has conceded that some of his conclusions at the time were wrong.
Despite two appeals, one retrial and several attempts to make parole, Bryan's 99-year sentence stands. And Wednesday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal court in the state, denied his application for a writ of habeas corpus.
The writ was something of a last-ditch effort to appeal the case. Now Bryan's options to have his conviction overturned are significantly limited.
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His lawyer, Jessica Freud, said the court's decision came down without an explanation. "This is absolutely disappointing and makes our options limited,'' she said Thursday. "We're going to keep trying."
The Bosque County District Attorney's Office, which prosecuted the case, did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.
Bryan's case is often held up as a warning about bloodstain pattern analysis, a forensic discipline that is increasingly considered unreliable and misleading, especially given the scant scientific training that many investigators receive before applying it.
Lynn Robitaille Garcia, general counsel of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, said Bryan's case had a significant role in inspiring the state to develop a new licensing program for analysts doing crime scene reconstruction.
"Everyone now recognises that was unsupportable work, including the expert himself," she said Thursday.
Obtaining a new trial requires more than proving that expert testimony relied on faulty science, however. "You have to show they wouldn't have been convicted if jurors knew this information," Garcia said. "That's not easy."
Mickey Bryan, a fourth-grade teacher, was found in her bedroom with four gunshot wounds October 15, 1985, in Clifton, Texas. She initially appeared to have been the victim of a burglary turned homicide. Her husband, a school principal, had been attending an education conference about 190km away in Austin, Texas, at the time of the killing.
Sometime after he returned from Austin, he let his wife's older brother, Charlie Blue, use his vehicle. Blue would later tell authorities that when he opened the trunk, he found a flashlight with what appeared to be bloodstains on the lens.
It was among a series of details that led authorities to focus more on Joe Bryan; they arrested him eight days after his wife was found dead. And as lawyers squared off in the State of Texas v. Joe D. Bryan, the stains on the flashlight and in the bedroom appeared to help prosecutors substantially.
They called Robert Thorman, a police detective who was trained in bloodstain pattern analysis, as an expert witness. Pointing to the patterns of blood as evidence, Thorman tied the strands of the case together in a narrative that involved Bryan driving from Austin to Clifton, shooting his wife at close range, changing his clothes and driving back to the conference.
But in the years since, many key pieces of evidence, including the blood splatter analysis methods used by Thorman, have come under suspicion. The case was investigated extensively by Leon Smith, a longtime reporter and newspaper editor in Texas, and other journalists.
And it was the subject of a two-part investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine in May 2018.
In July 2018, the Texas Forensic Science Commission — a nationally influential organisation that investigates complaints about forensic evidence — said that the blood spatter analysis used to convict Bryan was not supported by science.
In a September 2018 affidavit, Thorman said that there had been faults with his methodology in the case and that some of his testimony "was not correct."
And in October 2018, the forensic science commission found that a Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab chemist had "exceeded her expertise and engaged in speculation" when she testified in 1989.
Barbara O'Brien, a professor at the Michigan State University College of Law, said that Bryan's case illustrated just how difficult it can be to persuade judges to revisit factual matters — even when they are later shown to be false.
"Some would argue it's a big flaw in our system," she said. In general, judges "don't want to go back," she said.
Peter De Forest, a forensic scientist and professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said he believed that part of the issue with bloodstain pattern analysis cases is that there are no clear guidelines about what is scientifically valid.
"It's disgusting, really," he said. "Judges are not in positions to be arbiters of what's good science."
As a field, De Forest said, bloodstain pattern analysis still has the potential to be informative, but only when practised correctly by those with adequate scientific education.
Part of the reason that bloodstain patterns are so prone to mislead, according to a 2009 report from the National Research Council on improving forensic science, is that complex patterns may appear deceptively simple.
The writ of habeas corpus denied Wednesday included references to modern critiques of the bloodstain analysis methods used in the case; new DNA evidence that could help Bryan; and evidence pointing to another murder suspect, according to Freud, his lawyer. The response she received was a single sentence.
Bryan's options are now limited. One hope is for parole, Freud said. Her client has previously been denied parole seven times.
