I'm going to beg the group's forgiveness for adding one last comment here, because I think it's important and I think it keeps being overlooked.
Well, we've all kind of skipped a step here. Obviously, the particular rounds that you fire in SD will be gone. Bullet deformed (if it can be found), powder burned, etc. So the lab will have to test "exemplar evidence" which ordinarily has to be substantially identical (or maybe substantially similar? I'll have to look) to the rounds fired. That means getting some records from someone to show the composition of the rounds fired. In the case of handloads, those will have to come from the SD shooter's (the defendant's) own records. That makes them somewhat suspect, as nobody in the world has a bigger motivation to fudge those records than the defendant. Remington or Speer, on the other hand, has no such motivation. As part of the trial (civil or criminal) process, I can subpoena their records on how their rounds are constructed, and those records do not suffer from the same problem.
The end result is that there's a danger of the SD shooter/defendant hiring an expert to test rounds, but then the expert never gets to testify as to his findings, because the other side argues that his or her tests are based on unreliable data.
I understand what your saying about not trusting the shooter since he/she is the one with everything to loose, but if the remaining rounds in your firearm and every other round that you have are all the same, not to mention your load books all show you loading the same data, is it not going to be kinda hard for the prosecution to prove other wise?
Maybe I am alone in this, but I don't have random loadings of bullets around my house. Not to say I don't have a lot of loaded ammo, but I only have a few profiles and I cast all of my hand gun bullets, and once I develop a load for that bullet that works, that's all it gets loaded for.
The proponent of evidence bears the burden of showing that said evidence is admissible. IOW, if you want it in, you've got to show it meets the relevant criteria. You would have to show that the rounds are all the same. The prosecution doesn't have to prove otherwise.
These last few posts have hidden within them the BIGGEST chunk of food for thought to come out of the
Bias case (even though the exact events we're predicting did not actually happen in that case).
If you are in a shooting and it goes to trial, and there is SOME reason for the prosecution to think that gun shot residue evidence will be important to proving or disproving the opposing claims about what happened, YOUR HANDLOADS WILL BE TAKEN AND TESTED. In fact, if you look at what really happened in the
Bias case, all of his various handloads were tested, other ammo was tested, other handloads were made up and tested, and none of them supported his claim.
The state labs will accept the ammo they find as exemplar testing materials pertinent to the case, and the prosecution will get that data entered as evidence.
We all would like to think that the evidence collected will show that we acted exactly as we said we did -- i.e.: in perfect compliance with the legal principles of self defense. We trust the state labs (who DON'T work for the prosecution, but for the people/court) to do their jobs professionally and without any bias (no pun intended).
BUT HERE'S THE CRUX OF THE MATTER: IF you end up feeling that the labs were wrong, or missed something, or were (heaven forbid) slanted against you, you may want to have your own expert forensic testing done and those results entered into evidence.
In this situation, where you are going outside of the state's crime lab and chain of evidence, to try and have your own hired experts prove something different from what the crime lab found, THEN your handloads may not be considered credible. If you used factory ammo, your hired experts could get the records from that lot number of Federal JHPs (or whatever) and test it and the court would find no reason to distrust the veracity of those results. If your hired experts are testing your reloads there might be some way that false results may be produced by using the ammo you made yourself.
(Exactly how is quite a mental exercise to puzzle out, but suffice it to say that the rules of evidence may not be sufficiently appeased by this, subject to the ruling of the judge.)
So, understand that the most truly compelling argument against using handloads for self-defense comes down to this point (editing the list given above):
1) There has to be a shooting;
2) The shooter has to have used handloads or reloads in the shooting;
3) The shooter must be prosecuted or sued civilly;
4) There must be a difference of opinion on the distance at which the shooting occurred important to proving or disproving the truth of the self-defense claim;
5) That difference of opinion must be subject to resolution by GSR evidence;
6) The State Crime Lab will test whatever ammo remains of what was used, what else was found on site/at the home, and possibly other ammo they buy or make themselves to try to reproduce the GSR patterns found at the scene.
7) The defendant must disagree with those findings and feel other testing will prove him/her validated.
8) The defendant has to have a GSR expert to testify on his/her behalf.
9) The defendant's GSR expert has to use the defendant's own reloading records and/or ammo tested as a basis for his opinion;
10) The State (or the plaintiff's lawyer) has to object to the admission of the expert's testimony;
11) The court must rule against the admissibility of the GSR expert's testimony. (more often that not, this will mean that the evidence is excluded and the defendant appeals)
By the time you're at step four or five, this is a pretty unusual case. By the time you get to step 7 or 8, we've pretty much just got the
Bias case to look at and it is not a perfect test case, in that had Daniel Bias used factory ammo, and his own experts had been allowed to test it and submit findings, he'd have been damned by those findings anyway.
Again, I do apologize for the
coda but I hope it sums things up well and gives us a worthy answer to this question when it comes up in the future.