Problems with Stephen Singular's "Legacy of Deception"

Author Stephen Singular is often cited by those who support the OJ-didn’t-do-it narrative as someone who has proved that the police tampered with evidence. I disagree with him on a number of issues, and believe that his popular book “Legacy of Deception” contains serious mistakes. Singular is very important in his role in pushing the EDTA theory, which I have long thought is an incredibly misguided claim. I was re-reading his book today and something stuck out at me. Singular makes the argument that Martz, who did the only EDTA testing for the trial, at first claimed to have found EDTA and then “changed his mind and said he’d definitely detected no EDTA on the back gate or on the socks.”

But this isn’t what actually happened. Martz never admitted to identifying EDTA early in the trial. What he said was that he had found the 293 parent ion and 160 daughter ion for the compound in his tests. He then said this is consistent with the presence of EDTA, but that it warrants “further testing” and responded like EDTA (note: three different ions were needed for identification with this particular test, not just two). And later in his testimony, Martz clarified:

“When something is consistent with something else, it is not a positive identification.It could be something else. With preliminary tests that you do in the laboratory, there is a lot of chemicals that could be consistent, but in order to identify something, you have to have something unique associated with that chemical before you can positively identify it and that is what a mass spectrum does.”

Of course, Singular did not put this quote in his book. So, is this a semantic flip-flop from Martz’s prior testimony? No, because Martz actually explained the difference to Blasier prior to his testimony (meaning the defense team knew he wasn’t identifying the compound, but was acknowledging that two of the three ions needed were consistent). I have a hard time understanding why Singular would believe that this is “changing his mind.” Because other than the obvious difference between consistency and identification, in late February or early March before his testimony Martz had already provided the prosecution with his report that concluded that he couldn’t identify EDTA! Martz was, for a lack of a better word, “consistent” on this issue from the beginning, and Singular is wrong to suggest the he had reversed his opinion.