Objects

Darnell Hartsfield was convicted of aggravated perjury for statements he made to a Grand Jury during their investigation into a quintuple abduction-homicide in September, 1983. The five victims were abducted from a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) in Kilgore. Their bodies were found on an oil lease in Rusk County.  The KFC was in “disarray, with blood spattered in various places.”  One of those places was a box spattered with blood that matched Hartsfield’s DNA profile. The box was the only evidence that Hartsfield was present in the KFC. Since he swore to the grand jury he was never present in the KFC, DNA analysis of the blood on the boxes proved he might have lied under oath to the Grand Jury thus making him guilty of aggravated perjury. The box was properly authenticated by police officer Elliott because 1) he recognized the box as the same one he saw at KFC the day he responded (“witness with knowledge,” 901(b)(1)), he recognized the distinctive blood spatter on the box (“distinctive characteristics”…with “other circumstances” (901(b)(4))), and testimony by an employee of KFC established the box was the same type of box the restaurant used at the time of the crime. The Court ruled that the box was properly authenticated even though the State could not prove who removed the box from the KFC (it was not Elliott), nor produce a picture of it from the rolls developed from the crime scene. 

Besides succinctly analyzing the requirements for authenticating the box under Rule 901, Hartsfield is also useful because of the Court’s careful distinction between pieces of evidence that require the proponent to establish a chain of custody and those that do not. If an item is easily identifiable and substantially unchanged (such as the box), the proponent need not establish the chain of custody.  If the item is not easily identifiable or is “fungible,”  authentication can be accomplished by marking the item at the location of its recovery (beginning of the chain) and identifying it at the trial as the same (the end of the chain), a process “conclusively” proven if the officer is able to identify they seized the item, marked it, placed it in the property room, retrieved it, and identified it in Court.

Hartsfield determination about the admissiblity of objects dealt specifically with a KFC box, but the analysis for a knife, gun, receipt, screwdriver or any piece of physical evidence like that would be the same. Hartsfield also tells us that any forensic testing of any materials on that object - be it DNA on a KFC box, a fingerprint, a bullet, a sexual assault kit - is a "fungible item" and therefore, the chain of custody must be proven before the results from any of the forensic testing could be admitted.