BALTIMORE — A television in Baltimore Circuit Court showed a magnified picture of spent cartridge casings taken through the lens of a microscope. If a juror didn’t look closely, they might confuse two rounds for one.
Half the image showed a casing found on a sidewalk in Southwest Baltimore, where a man and woman were killed early on a frigid morning in November 2019; the other half showed a casing test-fired from a handgun confiscated later that day from one of the defendants.
Tiny, nondescript dents and scratches in the metal, a city firearm examiner testified at the man’s trial in August, were left by the gun that fired those rounds. Look carefully, Christopher Faber told the jury, at “lines, or striations, that are continuously flowing from one cartridge casing to the next.”
