JUDGE DOUBTS LIP PRINT, ORDERS RETRIAL IN MURDER

A Kane County judge has ordered a new trial for a man serving 45 years in prison for murder after finding a "grave question of reliability" about a lip print used to link him to the crime.

Judge Timothy Sheldon wrote this week that Lavelle Davis, convicted in the 1993 shotgun slaying of an Elgin man, was denied his constitutional right to effective counsel because his attorney did not properly challenge the questionable forensic evidence.

At Davis' 1997 trial, police said Patrick "Pall Mall" Ferguson was slain outside an Elgin apartment complex in a botched holdup. Davis never admitted to a role in the slaying, but prosecutors used a set of lip prints police found on a roll of duct tape at the murder scene to convince the jury of his involvement.

Citing work done by the FBI, crime lab scientists from the Illinois State Police testified that lip prints are as unique to an individual as are fingerprints and can be identified in a similar fashion. But Stephen Meagher, a latent-print expert with the FBI, recently told the court the FBI has never conducted any independent validation studies of lip-print identification.