27 Facts About Barry Scheck

Barry Charles Scheck was born on September 19,1949 and is an American lawyer.

Barry Scheck received national media attention while serving on O J Simpson's defense team, collectively dubbed the "Dream Team", helping to win an acquittal in the highly publicized murder case.

Barry Scheck graduated from the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York in 1967.

Barry Scheck was the personal lawyer for the Hedda Nussbaum case, in 1987.

Barry Scheck both defended her and assisted in getting the charges against her dropped, while assisting in ensuring Joel Steinberg's arrest and suing him in the civil case Nussbaum vs Steinberg.

Barry Scheck was associated with the clearing in 1999 of Dennis Fritz and Ron Williamson who had spent 11 years in prison of wrongful murder convictions.

Barry Scheck was lead lawyer who defended British au pair Louise Woodward in her 1997 murder trial.

However, Vincent Bugliosi, Darnel M Hunt, Daniel M Petrocelli, and defense witness Henry Lee all wrote that Scheck made many factually false claims about the physical evidence.

Hunt wrote in O J Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality that Scheck "floated ridiculous conspiracy theories to the jury".

Lee wrote in Blood Evidence that most of the blood evidence was sent directly to the consulting labs and not the LAPD crime lab, where Barry Scheck alleged the evidence was contaminated.

Barry Scheck made three arguments for how this allegedly happened, none of which had any merit: contamination from the reagents used for amplification; cross-contamination from the reference vials to the dna extraction product and contamination from PCR carryover amplification.

Barry Scheck's witness admitted that because two separate DNA labs collected blood from the same spot in the Bronco independently and both returned the same matches, that proves they weren't contaminates.

However, Barry Scheck's witness "conceded the PCR extraction product was not returned to the specific area near the extraction room or evidence-handling area but was taken to a completely separate area located a comfortable distance away making a contamination scenario highly improbable".

For starters Buligiosi notes that Barry Scheck contradicted himself when he claimed it was impossible to distinguish blood from the reference vials from blood from the body despite demonstrating just that the week prior using EDTA.

Barry Scheck claimed that all of this alleged contamination occurred through random carelessness in the lab yet the affected evidence items were clearly not random: the only three valid matches were coincidentally the same three the defense claimed were planted while the remaining 58 matches were all coincidentally false positives despite that never having happened before.

The substrate controls that are used to determine if contamination like he was suggesting occurred were coincidentally all false negatives so Barry Scheck was claiming that the contamination only got on the evidence items despite they and the substrate controls all being handled interchangeably at the same time.

Barry Scheck implied that Vannatter could have planted Simpson's blood at the crime scene when he returned later that evening to Simpson's home to deliver his blood reference vial to Dennis Fung but the crime scene is actually at Nicole Brown's home.

Barry Scheck then suggested that another police officer could have "sprinkled Simpson's blood at the crime scene" but the prosecution demonstrated that the blood was photographed being there prior to Simpsons blood being drawn by the nurse.

Barry Scheck then implied that Vannatter could have planted the victims blood in the Bronco when he returned to Simpson's home but the Bronco had been impounded prior to his arrival and wasn't even there.

Barry Scheck then claimed that the results from the second Bronco collection were unreliable because the car had been burglarized but the DNA matches are the same before and afterwards, disproving that claim.

Barry Scheck then produced two witnesses who claimed there was no blood in the impounded Bronco implying it was planted afterwards but the prosecution produced photographs of the blood in the impounded Bronco, disproving that claim.

Barry Scheck claimed that some of Simpson's blood from his reference vial was missing but the nurse who drew it testified that no blood was actually missing.

Barry Scheck argued that the identification of EDTA in two evidence samples is proof they were planted but his own witness testified that he did not identify EDTA and that his results actually prove those blood stains did not come from the reference vials.

Petrocelli wrote in Triumph of Justice that "Barry Scheck prostituted his skills to get Simpson off with murder" and that he disproved all of his blood planting claims using photos and video that were available at the criminal trial.

Lee wrote in Blood evidence that Barry Scheck was a nationally known skeptic of Forensic DNA matching at the time and none of his arguments against the validity of the DNA evidence in this case had any merit because of the safeguards in place which Barry Scheck simply ignored.

Buligiosi wrote in Outrage that the jury trusted Barry Scheck and quoted his claims verbatim in Madam Foreman as justification for their verdict but when those claims were disproven, the jurors received harsh criticism while Barry Scheck enjoyed a Teflon status from the media and faced almost no criticism despite making those claims himself.

Barry Scheck is Director of Clinical Education for the Trial Advocacy Program and the Center for the Study of Law and Ethics, and a former staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society of New York.