United States v. Alexander

Dr. Victor Alexander (defendant) was charged with bank robbery. The only evidence connecting Alexander to the crime was photographs and a video of the crime. After being shown an enlarged picture of Alexander’s driver’s-license picture, three bank employees identified Alexander as the man in the photographs and the man who robbed the bank. Alexander claimed that he was not the man in the photographs and video. To prove this mistaken identity, Alexander sought to call two expert witnesses who would have testified that in their opinion Alexander was not the person in the photographs. The first witness was Dr. Marshall Gottsegen, an orthodontist who specialized in cephalometry, the scientific measurement of the head. Dr. Gottsegen sought to testify to his scientific analysis of the photographs, which revealed differences between the man in the photographs and Alexander’s face. The second expert witness was Lyndal Shaneyfelt, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who specialized in pictorial comparisons. Shaneyfelt was to testify about distortion in photographs and how the distortion would affect objects and people in the photographs. The trial court, however, excluded the testimony of both experts on the ground that the jury members were equipped as laypersons to compare the photographs to Alexander. Alexander was convicted, and he appealed.