Joe D. Bryan, a former high school principal who was released from prison in Texas after serving 33 years for a murder conviction based on expert testimony that was later discredited, and whose claims of innocence drew intense media scrutiny, died on Sept. 22 at his home in Houston. He was 84.
The cause was cancer of the pancreas and liver, said his brother James Bryan, with whom he had lived.
Mr. Bryan was granted parole in March 2020 by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. Its decision followed a campaign to free Mr. Bryan by the Innocence Project of Texas, an effort that accelerated after a two-part investigation published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine in 2018.
The reporting, by Pamela Colloff, questioned the soundness of expert forensic testimony about blood splatters, the primary evidence used to convict Mr. Bryan in the death of his wife, Mickey Bryan. One of his supporters was the best-selling novelist John Grisham, who based his 2019 thriller, “The Guardians,” partly on the Bryan case. “I strongly believe Joe is innocent,” Mr. Grisham wrote to the parole board.
The case was held up as an example of the misuse of so-called bloodstain-pattern analysis, a forensic discipline that has long been a staple of courtroom evidence but that has increasingly come to be considered unreliable and misleading.
The case also epitomized the difficulty in persuading judges to reopen murder convictions even when there are credible claims of innocence. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal court in the state, denied Mr. Bryan’s efforts to receive a new trial in early 2020, two months before he was paroled. Though released from prison, his conviction still stood.
On Oct. 15, 1985, Mr. Bryan was attending an educational conference in Austin when his wife, an elementary-school teacher, was shot and killed in their home in Clifton, Texas, about 120 miles north of Austin.
The police originally suspected a burglary gone wrong. But within days they arrested Mr. Bryan, a gregarious and well liked member of the community who had been principal of Clifton High School for a decade and who had no criminal record.
Mr. Bryan maintained that he was asleep in his hotel room in Austin on the night of the murder. He was convicted on entirely circumstantial evidence, chiefly an analysis of what appeared to be blood flecks on a flashlight.
The flashlight was found in the trunk of Mr. Bryan’s car after he lent it to his wife’s brother following the murder. A lab test found that the flecks were Type O blood, the same as Ms. Bryan’s. Mr. Bryan said that the last time he saw the flashlight, it was on a dresser in the couple’s bedroom.
At his trial, a police detective called in by the Texas Rangers said the reddish-brown specks on the flashlight lens suggested that the killer had held it in one hand while shooting Ms. Bryan with a revolver in his other, and that “back spatter” from her wounds speckled the lens.
The detective’s testimony was the linchpin of a narrative that prosecutors laid out, claiming that Mr. Bryan, who had no history of conflict with his wife, left Austin after 9 p.m., drove two hours in the dark through heavy rain, murdered her, changed into clean clothes and returned to Austin — without leaving a drop of blood in his car.
No eyewitnesses placed Mr. Bryan in Clifton that night, and no murder weapon was found. The suggested motive was a life insurance payout.
The detective who testified as a bloodstain expert, Robert Thorman, had minimal experience; his only training had been a 40-hour class he took a few months before Ms. Bryan’s murder.
Mr. Bryan received a 99-year sentence, which was upheld at a second trial three years later.
But in subsequent years there was a cascade of questions about the validity of blood-spatter evidence, about the qualifications of the detective who had testified as an expert, and about holes in the narrative that prosecutors had constructed to tie Mr. Bryan to the murder.
In 2009, a damning study by the National Academy of Sciences reported that bloodstain interpretation was “more subjective than scientific.”
In 2012, a DNA test of evidence — a technology that had been unavailable earlier — found that the spatters on the flashlight could not be proved to be blood.
Two longtime forensic scientists told The Times and ProPublica in 2018 that using the flashlight to tie Mr. Bryan to the murder was profoundly troubling: It had not been recovered at the crime scene, and the prosecution’s theory that the killer held it when he fired could not be assumed from the pattern of tiny stains stippling the lens.
“It’s totally specious, and there’s no evidence to support it,” said one of the scientists, Peter De Forest, a professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
In September 2018, Mr. Thorman, the blood stain expert, who by then was retired, conceded in a sworn affidavit that some of his methodology had been flawed. “My conclusions were wrong,” he said.
The next year, the Texas Forensic Science Commission said that the blood-spatter evidence that helped convict Mr. Bryan was “not accurate or scientifically supported.”
Joseph Dale Bryan was born on Sept. 21, 1940, in Waco, Texas, one of three sons of Andrew and Thelma (Clements) Bryan. His father was a fireman on a railroad, and his mother oversaw the household.
In addition to his brother James, he is survived by another brother, Jerry Bryan.
Mr. Bryan’s first marriage ended in divorce. In 1969, he wed Mickey Blue, whom he first met when they were children; they had begun dating while both were earning master’s degrees in education. The couple moved to Clifton when Mr. Bryan was offered the job of high school principal in 1975. His wife became a fourth-grade teacher.
The Bryans often went on long evening walks, where neighbors observed them strolling hand in hand.
“I’m not a killer,” Mr. Bryan told ABC News after his parole. “I didn’t kill Mickey. I loved Mickey, she was my other self.”
In November 2020, the Innocence Project of Texas filed a petition with the United States Supreme Court to review his conviction. The court declined to hear the case.
“All current legal avenues to prove Joe’s innocence have been exhausted,” the Innocence Project wrote on its website.
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