Mindy Morgenstern: the DNA results did not all say the same thing

Start with the sample

Mindy was a Valley City State University student. She was found dead in her off-campus apartment on September 13, 2006. The North Dakota Supreme Court's account describes no signs of forced entry and no known witness to her death. Investigators therefore had to work through physical evidence and the movements of the people involved.[1]

The opinion is explicit about results that did not implicate Moe Maurice Gibbs, who lived in the same apartment complex. DNA recovered from the knives beside Mindy excluded him as a contributor. So did testing of rubber gloves in the apartment. A mitochondrial DNA test of a hair found in her left hand also excluded him.[1]

The results from her left-hand fingernails were different. Both clippings and scrapings contained DNA matching Gibbs's profile. The court reported the amounts and mixture proportions, details that later mattered to the competing explanations of how the material arrived there. The negative results elsewhere did not change what the laboratory reported for these particular samples.[1]

A possible contributor is not a unique identification

A spot on Mindy's shirt produced a more limited finding. Early in the opinion, the judges described Gibbs as someone who could not be excluded. In their later analysis, they specified that the result indicated Gibbs or a relative in his paternal line. That qualification belongs in any account of the shirt evidence.[1]

Calling every result a match would erase this distinction. It would also conceal the samples that excluded Gibbs altogether. The court's account lets readers keep three findings apart: exclusion, the fingernail profile match, and the shirt result that did not distinguish him from a paternal relative. Those were different pieces of evidence, not repeated versions of one test.[1]

The disputed route from person to sample

Gibbs repeatedly denied killing Mindy during his September 20 police interview. According to investigators' testimony summarized in the opinion, he said he had helped carry laundry into her apartment about ten days earlier. On appeal, his explanation for the DNA emphasized possible transfer through a laundry basket or another object.[1]

The prosecution offered a different explanation. Its evidence described the quantity beneath Mindy's fingernails as consistent with forceful physical contact, including a struggle, rather than secondary transfer. This was the State's evidence in this case. The appellate opinion should not be turned into a general rule that every fingernail DNA finding proves when or how contact occurred.[1]

Other evidence mattered to that assessment. Gibbs had injuries to both hands that witnesses described as consistent with fingernail scratches. The opinion also records his explanations: moving boxes and putting his stepdaughter into a car seat on subsequent days. The account preserves both the prosecution's interpretation and the explanations investigators said he gave.[1]

What the appeal decided

The first jury could not reach a verdict. At the second trial, held in Bismarck in October and November 2007, the defense presented witnesses including a DNA expert and specialists in computers and image analysis. That jury convicted Gibbs of murder. The appeal followed a contested trial, not an uncontested laboratory report.[1]

On April 2, 2009, the North Dakota Supreme Court affirmed the judgment. Its review of evidentiary sufficiency favored the verdict and did not involve deciding witness credibility anew. Alongside the physical evidence, the judges considered testimony about a gap in Gibbs's usual phone and computer activity during the period when the State said Mindy was killed.[1]

The court concluded that the combined circumstantial evidence could support the jury's finding. That conclusion did not make every tested object incriminating. The useful detail in the record is precisely the variation: where a sample came from, what its result established, what explanation was disputed, and how the judges assessed the evidence together.[1]