How much of a trackers testimony is accurate and how much of it is "Junk Science."

Joel Hardin can tell a lot about a person by following his or her footsteps.

Or so he says. But you’ll have to take his word for it, Hardin says. Aside from a handful of people he has trained and still works with, there is nobody else in the world who is doing what he does.

The retired U.S. Border Patrol agent runs a private training and consulting business where he teaches tracking, goes on search-and-rescue missions, and consults with prosecutors and defense lawyers as an expert in criminal cases.

Hardin once claimed he could tell that a murder suspect was a young Mexican male by the way the suspect maneuvered his way through a raspberry patch.

Hardin himself won’t say whether he thinks what he is doing is scientific, only that the courts have decided that it is. Carlstrom allows that tracking may not be scientific in the same way DNA testing is, but says it is specialized knowledge that goes back hundreds of years and is useful in certain scenarios, such as the Groth case.

Julie Lawry, Groth’s public defender, thinks Hardin might be a great tracker—the kind she’d want on the case if one of her own kids was missing in the woods. But she thinks Hardin’s evidentiary value is something less than scientific. In fact, she thinks it’s bunk.

She brought in retired FBI agent William Bodziak, one of the world’s leading authorities on footwear impression evidence. Bodziak, now of Palm Coast, Fla., has spent 37 years evaluating footwear impressions, 29 of them with the FBI. He reviewed the crime scene photos in the Groth case at Lawry’s request and was outraged by Hardin’s claims.

Bodziak says he could make out a partial print in a few of the photos of a very common sole design that has been used on a wide variety of footwear, including work boots, hunting boots and the boots worn by many police and emergency responders since 1937.

But he says there’s no way that Hardin or anybody else could tell from a set of 34-year-old crime scene photos—many of which were dark, out of focus or taken at weird angles—exactly whose shoes had made the prints or when they were made.

Hardin says he doesn’t keep track of his success or error rates, except to ask some of the people he’s successfully tracked whether his observations about them had been correct. And his work has never been subjected to peer review mostly because he doesn’t have any peers outside of his students. But rest assured, he says: He never draws any conclusions about a case without first running them by two of his senior trackers, or sign cutters.

Link: http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/he_tries_mens_soles/