By Jacob Ward
It's 2:30 pm on the fourth day of Michael Serge's murder trial. In a
wood-paneled room of the county court house in Scranton, Pennsylvania,
Judge Terrance Nealon gives the jury a brief speech on the difference
between art and fact, then motions for the prosecution to begin.
At the back of the courtroom,
a crowd of onlookers from the local legal community crane their necks
as a technician cues up a 72-second video. It's an animated re-creation
of Serge, a retired police detective, shooting and killing his wife
of 35 years, Jennifer. The picture appears on a 5-foot screen positioned
near the jury box.
The family's living room comes
into focus around Serge's wife, realistically rendered with sandy-blond
hair and wire-rimmed glasses, and wearing animal-print pajamas. Serge
appears, gun in hand. What follows is a second-by-second breakdown of
the three shots he's alleged 
to
have fired. First, a bright blue line extends from Serge's gun, leaving
behind a frozen rope of red. The blue passes through Jennifer's lower
torso and into a stereo cabinet. Next, Serge fires into the wall. In
a dramatic ending, he again takes aim at his wife, who is crouched on
the floor. The shot pierces her from right arm to left rib in deadly
cartoon green. The screen goes black.
Serge, 55, blinks at the digital
image of himself. His son, seated behind him in the courtroom, weeps
silently. Jennifer's sister clutches a cardboard-backed photograph of
herself with the victim. Standing with the spectators is Paul Walker,
a local defense attorney, who marvels at the effectiveness of the animation.
Walker has worked either with or against most of the lawyers present
and happens to be a close friend of the victim's brother. But today,
like so many others, he's here just to watch. "I've seen a lot
of photos of people lying bloody on the ground," he says later.
"But when I saw the animation, it was eerie. If a coroner says
the victim had a posterior entrance wound, that doesn't mean anything
to a jury. When you see her shot in the back and then down on her knees,
that brings it to life."
"Saying 'posterior exit wound' means nothing to a jury. When you
see her shot in the back and then down on her knees, that brings it
to life."
What the jury saw is known as forensic animation - the computerized
illustration of events recounted by courtroom testimony (in this case,
the coroner's report and the state trooper's on-scene analysis). It's
the newest in a chain of technologies - from lie-detector tests to handwriting
analysis and DNA sampling - that is transforming the world of litigation.
And while it's nothing more than pixels on a monitor, this legal tool
is proving remarkably effective.
David Golomb, a Manhattan attorney
who has served as president of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association,
calls it "devastating evidence," saying, "If you have
a good animation, it's such a difficult thing for the other side to
fight."
The first animation was presented
to a Bronx jury in a 1984 auto accident case. It was crudely done, with
block graphics on an Apple II. Eight years later, the technique was
employed in a high-profile 
criminal
trial for the first time and helped convict San Francisco porn king
Jim Mitchell of murdering his brother. Over the past decade, as computing
power has grown faster and cheaper, forensic animation - used to illustrate
everything from baby shakings to product malfunctions - has become increasingly
common.
In an age when the courts are
clogged with litigation, the acceptance of forensic animation reflects
more than the need to find the truth. Judges seem eager to admit any
valid evidence that can shorten the duration of a trial. In barely a
minute, the jury comes away with information that would otherwise require
two days of overwrought oratory. "This is a video country,"
Golomb explains. "People are used to getting information from the
television." In the half-dozen cases in which he has used computer
animation, opposing counsel settled almost immediately.
The new procedure has spawned
a thriving industry worth about $30 million annually. There are some
100 firms around the country that specialize in forensic animation,
not to mention countless studios that create films as well as provide
other types of litigation consulting - among the biggest: Engineering
Animation, Decision Quest, and Animators at Law.
To make the video as realistic
as possible, the animators begin with raw data culled from the site
by accident reconstructionists. To get a digital representation of the
crime scene, they sometimes use laser-transit survey devices to shoot
beams over every inch of the area. "We present everything to one-thirtieth
of a second on an x, y, and z axis," says Andre Stuart, CEO of
21st Century Forensic Animation, the company that produced the clip
in the Serge case. Then, relying on supplementary data such as photographs,
ballistics information, and a coroner's report, they fill in the holes
and craft a narrative.
Frequently, 21st Century assembles its worlds using libraries of mix-and-match
premodeled people, vehicles, and furniture. The company has roughly
25 cases on its docket, and since its inception in 1989 more than 400
clients have retained its services, among them Johnnie Cochran. Cochran
hired Stuart's firm in two high-profile cases: Anthony Dwain Lee, the
young African-American actor who was shot to death by a Los Angeles
police officer in 2000, and Amadou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant who
was killed in 1999 by plainclothes New York cops. For all of its impact
on judges and juries, forensic animation borders on pseudoscience. Consider
a typical auto accident.
Skid marks, paint samples, and
scattered glass yield reliable and scientifically acceptable computer
images. Still, much of the moviemaking process comes down to guesswork.
How hard did the driver brake? How foggy was the road? As a result,
the quest for accuracy is sometimes compromised. Lawyers will often
act as executive producers, overseeing the making of the film and calling
for changes - in visual tone, for instance - where they believe it may
help the case. By changing a single camera angle, Golomb claims he won
a multimillion-dollar settlement in a car crash.
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