The forensic scientist Edward T. Blake displayed a miniature balance scale at his lab. The pan on each side held a card.
One read: “The opinions of forensic scientists.” The other: “The opinions of lawyers.”
Dr. Blake’s scale tilted heavily toward the scientists.
“Most of us believe that the opinions of lawyers aren’t worth very much,” he said on an episode of the public radio show Inside Out. “Because lawyers believe that under the umbrella of advocacy they can lie through their teeth.”
To Dr. Blake, the most reliable source of courtroom truth was DNA, and he pioneered a way to make it even more powerful. As the first forensic scientist to use polymerase chain reaction testing on crime-scene DNA, he was able to wring answers from evidence samples that were old, minuscule or severely degraded.
His use of PCR, as the test is commonly known, sparked a movement that has freed thousands of wrongfully convicted people. Dr. Blake’s testing alone helped to exonerate more than 50, including several sentenced to death.
Peter Neufeld, the co-founder of the Innocence Project, told The New Yorker in 2000 that in forensic science “there are a bunch of .300 hitters, and then there’s Ted Williams,” referring to the batter considered to be the best in baseball history.
“Ed Blake,” he went on, “is Ted Williams.”
Dr. Blake died on Aug. 6 at his home in Sonoma, Calif., his wife, Barbara Siegel, said. He was 80. His death, from pancreatic cancer, was not widely reported at the time.
As a nexus between science and justice, Dr. Blake was featured in true-crime shows and consulted on many high-profile cases, including O.J. Simpson’s murder trial in 1995. He was known for a sometimes fiery demeanor, a lack of patience with legalistic spinning and an unwavering insistence on uncovering the forensic truth.
“Those who know Blake believe that a stick of dynamite sizzling under his nose would not cause him to alter a dot or comma in a laboratory report,” the Newsday columnist Jim Dwyer wrote in 1994.
As Mr. Dwyer recalled, Dr. Blake told him, “Lawyers don’t bother with me if they’re looking for a gun for hire.”
Dr. Blake was not the first scientist to use DNA in forensics. That distinction belongs to Alec Jeffreys, a geneticist at the University of Leicester in England. In 1984, Dr. Jeffreys developed a method of DNA analysis known as restriction fragment length polymorphism, or RFLP, and began to consider its use in criminal cases.
RFLP is excellent at identification, but it requires large amounts of biological material. At many crime scenes, there either isn’t enough material or what is collected has degraded over time.
Dr. Blake bumped into a solution.
In the 1980s, his consulting company, Forensic Science Associates, was in the same building in Richmond, Calif., as Cetus Corporation, the biotech firm that invented PCR to diagnose sickle cell anemia. (Kary Mullis, the scientist behind the invention, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993.)
Dr. Blake would occasionally run into Henry Erlich, a molecular geneticist at Cetus, in the hallway.
“We’d see each other on the way to the bathroom or wherever, and we’d chat about our various projects,” Dr. Elrich said in an interview. “I told them I thought this new type of DNA analysis that we were doing might be useful in forensics.”
In 1986, Dr. Blake was examining tissue samples that had degraded to the point that RFLP couldn’t identify the source. He asked Dr. Elrich for help using the PCR method, and it worked.
“We immediately saw the practical implications for criminal justice in identifying people,” Dr. Elrich said.
Two years later, lawyers for Gary Dotson, an Illinois man serving 20 to 50 years in prison for sexually assaulting a teenage girl, approached Dr. Blake for help in proving their client’s innocence. The girl had confessed to fabricating her allegations, but the conviction hadn’t been overturned. Using PCR, Dr. Blake was able to prove that the semen in the girl’s underwear wasn’t Mr. Dotson’s; it belonged to the girl’s boyfriend.
It was the first time DNA had been used to exonerate someone.
In the early 1990s, Dr. Blake conducted DNA testing that proved the innocence of Kirk Noble Bloodsworth, a former Marine discus champion who had been sentenced to death in Maryland for raping and killing a 9-year-old girl. That was the first time DNA was used to free someone on death row.
Other victories followed, and Dr. Blake was relentless.
“Ed was a guy who saw things in black and white,” Maurice Possley, a former reporter for The Chicago Tribune who investigated wrongful convictions, said in an interview. “Like, ‘You can come up with all kinds of different theories about why something doesn’t exonerate this person. But what I’m telling you is this person’s biological material is not present.’ And that’s pretty definitive.”
Edward Blake was born Edward Thomas Carr on July 31, 1945, in Honolulu. His father, Gil Carr, was a supervisor for a fertilizer company. His mother, Carol (Loader) Carr, was a secretary. After his parents divorced when Edward was young, his mother remarried and he took his stepfather’s surname.
As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s, he switched his major from physics to forensics.
“There were just so many things going on in society, and our culture was undergoing a lot of changes,” he told The Associated Press in 1995. “I wanted to be involved in a field that was more practically oriented and societally oriented, and so somehow I just gravitated to the forensic science program.”
After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1968, he stayed at Berkeley for graduate school, earning a doctorate in criminology in 1976. Not long after, he started Forensic Science Associates.
Dr. Blake was briefly the subject of controversy in the mid-1990s, during the O.J. Simpson trial. He had been retained as a consultant for the defense team, which sought to discredit the prosecution’s DNA evidence tying Mr. Simpson to the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald L. Goldman.
Midway through the trial, Mr. Simpson’s lawyers dropped Dr. Blake from their witness list. There was much speculation as to why — including that his testimony might have helped the prosecution.
“There’s obviously something that came up that the defense believes would not be beneficial to their case,” Gerald L. Chaleff, a California defense lawyer, told The Los Angeles Times in 1995. “It should be remembered, though, that as a DNA witness, Ed Blake is not the frosting on the cake. Ed Blake is the cake.”
Dr. Blake told The Times that he was still on the defense team, even if he would not be testifying, and that no inferences should be made about any unfavorable opinions he might hold about Mr. Simpson’s case. (Mr. Simpson was acquitted, but later found liable in a civil trial.)
In addition to his wife, Dr. Blake is survived by their sons, Ben and Daniel, and two grandchildren.
As a result of Dr. Blake’s work, many who were wrongfully convicted have been able to declare their innocence. Mr. Dotson, falsely accused of sexual assault, was the first.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he said after his release, “my name has been cleared.”
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