Draft:Peter Duane Deaver

Peter Duane Deaver is a former forensics investigator for the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI). At the SBI, Deaver specialized in the field of forensic serology. He came to prominence during the Michael Peterson trial, where his testimony and alleged experience were crucial in convicting Peterson of first-degree murder in 2003. Since 2010, Deaver has received extensive and sustained publicity for multiple allegations of biased investigative practices and selective reporting of test results, leading to overturned convictions, new trials, and commuted sentences.

Peterson was granted a new trial in 2011 when the original trial court found that Deaver had misrepresented his qualifications, withheld evidence from Peterson's legal team, and lied on the witness stand.

Challenges to Deaver's testing and reporting methods led to the 2010 exoneration of Greg Taylor, who served 17 years in prison for alleged murder before a three-judge panel ruled unanimously that he was factually innocent of the crime for which he had been convicted. Like Peterson, Taylor was convicted in part based on Deaver's misrepresentations of blood evidence.

Consequent to Taylor's exoneration, an investigation of the SBI's forensic serology laboratory turned up a range of improper practices, pro-prosecution bias, suspect scientific conclusions, and improper reporting of lab results; the report found that the five most egregious cases all involved Deaver.

Deaver was subsequently fired by the SBI ; supporters have contended the grounds for his dismissal were shaky and that Deaver was scapegoated for broader SBI problems.

Michael Peterson Trial
In 2003, Michael Peterson was convicted of the first-degree murder of his wife Kathleen, who died in the home they shared in 2001. Peterson claimed to have found his wife lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of a back staircase, unresponsive. He was soon charged with her murder. Peterson's defense contended she had likely fallen on the stairs, hitting her head multiple times; the prosecution contended she had been beaten to death, with Peterson the only possible suspect.

The SBI's Deaver was a pivotal witness for the prosecution. At trial, Deaver alleged he had worked about 500 bloodstain cases, written about 200 reports, and testified in 60 cases. Deaver also alleged he had personally investigated crime scenes involving alleged falls 15 times.(These numbers were later ruled to have been gross overstatements.) Prosecutors presented Deaver's testimony as crucial to their case, citing Deaver's expertise and reliability repeatedly in their closing arguments.

The jury found Peterson guilty of first-degree murder, whereupon the trial court sentenced Peterson to life in prison without possibility of parole.

In 2011, Peterson's defense team sought a new trial for him. Judge Orlando F. Hudson vacated Peterson's murder conviction and granted him a new trial, based on what he assessed to be "perjured testimony" from Deaver.

Kirk Turner Trial and Video "Recreation"
On September 12, 2007, dentist Kirk Alan Turner killed his wife Jennifer at their home in Clemmons, NC. He did not dispute his responsibility for his wife's death, but claimed he had acted in self-defense after she had attacked him with a spear and inflicted near-fatal injuries. As in the Peterson case, law enforcement rapidly developed a theory that Turner should be charged with homicide in his wife's death; among the law enforcement agents drawn in to help develop this theory of the case was Duane Deaver.

Crucial to the prosecution theory of the case was a contention that a bloodstain on Turner's T-shirt was not a print from his own hand, but was instead a transfer pattern consistent with Turner having wiped a knife on the shirt. Deaver and Special Agent Gerald Thomas undertook to perform recreations (which Deaver at times called "experiments") with the intent of demonstrating that the prosecution's theory of the cause was plausible. Deaver and Thomas videotaped their numerous attempts to duplicate with a knife the blood smear on Turner's T-shirt. After a success, Deaver can be heard on the video saying: 'Oh, even better! Holy cow, that was a good one!' and 'Beautiful! That's a wrap, baby!'" Thomas had originally written a report stating that the stain was consistent with a hand being wiped. After the "successful reconstruction," Thomas changed his report to read that the print was "consistent with a pointed object being wiped on the shirt." He misdated the report, did not indicate it was the result of a second look at the evidence, nor that it was not the original report. A jury acquitted Turner; the foreman said jurors were "stunned by the SBI's conduct" and referred to the agents' actions as "fraud."

Turner later sued Deaver, Thomas and others for malicious prosecution and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The SBI agreed to settle the case in 2018 at a cost of $200,000.

Deaver's approving remarks on the videos were later a key element of the SBI's case for dismissing him in 2011.

Gregory Taylor conviction and exoneration
In 1993, a jury convicted Gregory Flynt Taylor of the murder of Jacquetta Thomas. In 1991, Taylor and a friend had being doing drugs near the cul-de-sac where Thomas' body was found. When their car got stuck in the mud, they walked away from it, noticing Thomas' nearby body but not reporting their discovery. When the two returned to Taylor's car the next day, police arrested them for Thomas' murder.

At Taylor's trial, as would later be the case at Peterson's, Deaver's blood analysis represented some of the most apparently damning evidence. Deaver's report indicated that Taylor's car presented "chemical indications for the presence of blood." Omitted from Deaver's report were the results of additional tests he had performed, which did not conclusively show blood: tests that might have been exculpatory of Taylor, and were never included in SBI reports or shared with Taylor's defense team. These omissions were arguably a violation of the prosecution's Brady disclosure obligations.

Greg Taylor was jailed for 17 years, during which period he maintained his innocence and launched multiple appeals, all of which failed. In 2009, another inmate confessed to Thomas' murder. Taylor's legal team resolved to put together an appeal to the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission. In the course of discovery for their appeal, they gained access to Deaver's lab notes. At Taylor's trial, the prosecution had offered testimony that samples taken from Taylor's car had passed a "presumptive positive" phenolphthalein test for the presence of blood. Deaver's notes showed that the samples had been subject to additional confirmatory testing (both Takayama and Ouchterlony), and that those results had been negative, failing to positively confirm the presence of blood on Taylor's vehicle. These negative findings had never been revealed, either to Taylor's defense, or to the prosecution.

Subsequently, the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission held hearings on Taylor's innocence. The first hearings were held September 3 and 4, 2009. Here, Deaver gave conflicting answers when questioned about the preliminary and confirmatory blood tests; at one point he indicated that a confirmatory Takayama test had been negative, while at other points he maintained that confirmatory testing had been rendered impossible by the lack of additional sample to test.

On February 17, 2010, a three-judge panel proclaimed Taylor innocent of wrongdoing and ordered him freed. Deaver was among the witnesses called at Taylor's February 2010 exoneration hearing He admitted that, contrary to his testimony at the September 2009 hearing, he had been able to perform additional confirmatory testing on the samples, and had withheld notice of the negative confirmatory test results. His assertion was that the SBI's policies mandated that negative confirmatory results be withheld, a practice that one of Taylor's attorneys, Mike Klinkosum, likened to "institutional obstruction of justice."

As the North Carolina Law Review noted, "by the end of Deaver’s testimony, the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case—the blood evidence—had not only effectively disappeared, but had revealed implicit deception by the state’s forensic officials." The testimony in Taylor's 2009-2010 innocence proceedings, particularly the revelations of Deaver's misconduct and his claims about the lab's prejudicial practices, was directly responsible for a wider audit of the SBI lab's serology testing and reporting practices.

Greg Taylor was pardoned by the governor of North Carolina. He sued Deaver and several other agents for their misrepresentation of blood evidence ,and eventually was awarded over $5,000,000 in compensation for wrongful imprisonment.

In the wake of the panel's exoneration of Gregory Taylor, the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission served and filed a Motion for Order to Show Cause directing Deaver to appear and show cause why he should not be held in criminal contempt for providing "false and misleading" testimony during Taylor's innocence hearings. The committee ultimately concluded that Deaver's conflicting statements before the Commission and the three-judge panel did not rise to the level of criminal perjury.

The panel's contempt charge against Deaver for his misleading testimony was a second key element of the SBI's case for dismissing him in 2011.

Role in SBI Crime Lab Scandal
In 2010, after Greg Taylor's exoneration and pardon, and facing scrutiny from news media such as The News & Observer, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper announced a series of significant changes at the SBI. Initially, Cooper removed Robin Pendergraft from her post as SBI director, a post Cooper had selected her for 10 years previously, and halted all work in bloodstain pattern analysis. Earlier in 2010, Pendergraft had defended Duane Deaver and denied any widespread problems at the Bureau.

August 2010 Reporting from the News & Observer detailed a wide array of improper practices at the SBI, including coerced or fabricated confessions , unscientific 'experiments' designed to bolster prosecution theories, overstatement of unreliable bullet analysis, cutting corners in testing for prescription drugs and lab practices with a strong bias towards prosecution and law enforcement.

Attorney General Cooper had ordered a review of the SBI's serology practices. The results of this report too were released in August 2010. The report acknowledged the pivotal role of Greg Taylor's exoneration hearings in bringing to light both Deaver's misleading reporting practices, and the broader pattern of improper practices at the SBI. In total the report identified 230 cases in which results were reported in a fashion similar to the Taylor case. In some of those cases, no charges were brought. In other cases people were sent to jail or death row; three were executed. As the report noted, "This review did not conclude, and the reader should not assume, that each case resulted in a wrongful conviction." The report goes on to state that "This report raises serious issues about laboratory reporting practices from 1987-2003 and the potential that information that was material and even favorable to the defense of criminal charges filed was withheld or misrepresented."

The report focused specifically on the SBI's and Deaver's practice of omitting or de-emphasizing the results of confirmatory tests that cast doubt on initial "presumptive positive" tests for the presence of blood. In some cases, analysts admitted that the results of testing for the presence of blood were "inconclusive," without revealing that a second, more reliable test had been conducted after the presumptive-positive result. In a second category of mishandling, the negative or inconclusive results were omitted, while in a third category, reports stated positively that no further confirmatory testing had been done, even when such tests had indeed been performed and yielded negative or inconclusive results. Finally, the report identified a fourth and "most serious" category of misstatements, consisting entirely of cases handled by Deaver: "The fourth and most serious category involves cases in which the reported actual results of the confirmatory tests were over reported or not reflective of the results contained in the lab notes. There were five such cases in this category, all handled by S[pecial] A[gent] Deaver. One of these cases involved a defendant who was executed. In two instances the words “revealed the presence of blood” were used when in fact the results of the confirmatory test were reflected in the notes as negative. This language was only used by Analysts when the presence of blood was confirmed by a positive confirmatory test. In three other instances the report stated that further tests were “inconclusive” or “failed to give any result” when the lab notes reflect negative results. It should be noted that the Analyst, SA Deaver, advised reviewers that he was trained that confirmatory tests had only two possible results, negative or positive. SA Deaver’s lab files, however,revealed these two instances in which SA Deaver used the words “inconclusive” in connection with Takayama test results despite his notes reflecting a negative result in one cases and three tests and three negative results in the other case. In the remaining four cases, one defendant received probation in 1988 and two defendants completed their sentences. The fifth involved two defendants. One defendant’s charge was dismissed and the other served his sentence and was released."

- Swecker and Wolf

The report noted it was impossible to determine, without a detailed case-by-case review, whether the omissions were material to defendants' cases or conclusively violated discovery standards. The report went on to note that such omissions had at least the potential to violate state and federal discovery laws.

The report further found that "SA Deaver’s testimony before the Innocence Commission Three-Judge Panel with respect to the SBI and ASCLD/LAB policies [i.e. Deaver's claim that his omissions represented standard SBI lab policy] was inaccurate because neither the SBI nor ASCLD/LAB had written policy regarding report language until 1997 and 2004 respectively" Then-SBI director Robin Pendergraft also stated that Deaver's testimony about SBI policies was false.

In its conclusions, the report outlined an array of suggested reforms to lab policy, procedure, and reporting. It specifically recommended an internal review of the most serious cases, including Deaver's five "category 4" misstatements. The report suggested the SBI consider whether action was warranted against any of the analysts involved in the most serious misrepresentations.

Shortly after the report's release, Greg McLeod, on his fifth day as new SBI director, fired longtime lab director Jerry Richardson, and suspended the three analysts whose work was most heavily critiqued in the report. These analysts included Deaver and Suzi Barker, who had played a supporting role in Deaver's work on the Peterson case.

In the months during and after the Observer reporting and the Swecker/Wolf report, North Carolina political leaders, lawyers, and senior law enforcement officials called for a range of reforms at the SBI, and at least one county District Attorney announced his intention to review all past homicide cases in his district to assure that none had been tainted by mistakes at the SBI crime lab.

Suspension, Disciplinary Proceedings, and Firing From SBI
In the wake of the Swecker/Wolf report, Deaver was placed on several months of consecutive administrative and investigatory leave. On January 7, 2011, Deaver was terminated from his post at the SBI. The SBI offered three grounds for Deaver's dismissal: the innocence commission's contempt charge and Deaver's misleading testimony to that body; Deaver's violation of SBI rules in revealing a confidential criminal analysis in the course of becoming improperly involved in a complaint about another law officer; and Deaver's unprofessional remarks, captured on video, at the conclusion of an "experiment" designed to reinforce a prosecution theory in the murder trial of Kirk Taylor.

Deaver resisted his dismissal; his case wound its way through a multi-level grievance system, and was ultimately resolved in 2014 by the NC State Human Resources Commission. A ruling on August 26, 2014 by Administrative Law judge James Conner upheld Deaver's dismissal in full, on the stated grounds, finding further that Deaver "exhibited a distasteful disregard for the judicial system of this state". The case was still subject to further review, and on November 5, 2014, the state Human Resources Commission issued a final decision in Deaver's case. The final ruling, though it upheld Deaver's dismissal, took issue with a number of Conner's conclusions, and modified the previous ruling's language in many places (including striking the language concerning disregard and contempt for the judicial system). The final ruling concluded that the state had not proven that the three alleged grounds were sufficient to justify Deaver's dismissal, finding that only one of the three grounds were sustainable. The deciding body added a consideration that was not part of the state's original complaint; a positive judicial finding of fact that Deaver had committed misconduct during the Peterson trial, misconduct severe enough that Peterson had been granted a new trial by his original court (see next section). That finding, per the final HRC decision, was sufficient to justify Deaver's dismissal. The final ruling reversed the previous ruling and asserted that Deaver had in fact been improperly dismissed in 2011; he should have been demoted with a 10% reduction in pay, said the board. The ruling further determined that Deaver should instead have been dismissed as of the July 26, 2013 Court of Appeals opinion that found that Deaver presented false or misleading information in the Peterson case. The court symbolically reinstated Deaver for the purpose of receiving 18 month's back pay at his reduced salary, and otherwise upheld his dismissal, given that the appeals court had "conclusively established misconduct."

Peterson Granted New Trial Based on Deaver Revelations
During his imprisonment, Michael Peterson had filed several appeals, alleging an array of trial court errors and improper admission of evidence. These appeals were unsuccessful. In 2011, Peterson's counsel filed a Motion for Appropriate Relief (MAR), focused on Deaver's misrepresentations of his experience and on the 2010 revelations surrounding Deaver's conduct and SBI lab policy generally, as well as Deaver's firing in early 2011. The MAR requested that Peterson's 2003 conviction be vacated. Like Peterson's earlier MARs, the motion was heard before Superior Court Judge Orlando F. Hudson, who had presided over Peterson's 2003 trial and sentenced Peterson to life in prison without parole.

The motion was heard in December 2011. During the proceedings, SBI officials testified that Deaver had significantly exaggerated his expertise during Peterson's trial. Versus Deaver's claim that as of 2003 he had worked on 500 bloodstain cases, written 200 reports, and testified in 60 cases, SBI Assistant Director Eric Hooks, head of internal investigations, testified that Deaver had written only 47 reports in his SBI career. The trial court further determined that Deaver had not been mentored by senior SBI analyst David Spittle, as he had claimed; that he had written 36 reports, not 200; that prior to visiting the Peterson home in 2001, Deaver had not done bloodstain analysis at a potential crime scene since 1997; that he had not been qualified as an expert witness 60 times; that prior to visiting the Peterson home in 2001, Deaver had never been to the scene of an alleged accidental fall.

Hudson, presiding over the motion, found that the evidence of Deaver's misrepresentations demonstrated that Peterson's original trial had been marred by "due process violations and perjured testimony." The judge further expressed his concern that Deaver might have offered misleading testimony in other cases, and suggested that Peterson's attorney might look into the question of whether Hudson could appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Deaver further. Though declining to vacate Peterson's earlier conviction, the court determined that Peterson was entitled to a new trial. Among Hudson's findings were that Deaver "deliberately and intentionally misled this Court at Mr. Peterson's trial about the scientific basis and acceptability of his opinions, methods, and experiments," that Deaver "exhibited a pattern of bias in favor of the State and against criminal defendants that was repeated over the course of twenty years," and that Deaver had "committed perjury." The ruling characterized Deaver's testimony as "materially misleading" and "deliberately false," and opined that "Mr. Peterson's conviction was obtained in violation of the Constitution of the United States." Former North Carolina Attorney General Rufus L. Edmisten said that any evidence gathered after Deaver arrived at the Peterson home might be deemed inadmissible in a new trial.

The state appealed Hudson's finding, arguing to an appeals court in 2013 that Deaver's testimony had not been as central as Hudson's ruling portrayed it, alleging that there was sufficient other evidence to have convicted Peterson without Deaver's testimony, or with the jury aware of his lesser qualifications. The appeals court disagreed, ruling that "Due to the importance of Agent Deaver's testimony, the evidence concerning his qualifications would have completely undermined the credibility of the State's entire theory of the case." In late 2013, the state Supreme Court turned down a request from the state to review the Court of Appeals ruling, paving the way for Peterson to receive a new trial.

Peterson's legal saga continued to unfold for a further four years; in 2017, facing the uncertainty and expense of a new trial, he entered an Alford plea to manslaughter and was released after being credited for time served.

Deaver and his Defenders
During the period from Greg Taylor's acquittal through the upholding of Deaver's own dismissal, he consistently maintained that he was innocent of intentional wrongdoing. Two former SBI assistant directors agreed that the grounds the agency used to justify terminating Deaver were insufficient. As noted above, the final HRC report also found that the SBI's grounds for dismissing Deaver in 2011 were weak; for the HRC, it was the 2013 finding of perjury in the Peterson trial that justified his removal.

In Popular Culture
Clips of Deaver's testimony were a focal point in two French documentaries about the Michael Peterson case, The Staircase and The Staircase II. In the HBO Max 2022 dramatization of the Peterson case, Deaver was played by actor Myke Holmes.