Can you link me a reported/recorded example of when such a situation in terms of ballistics testing being unable to be performed came up?
The Daniel Bias case is a situation where handloads may have complicated the ability to demonstrate how far away the gun was from the victim at the time it was fired.
It is quite difficult to come up with examples like this for reasons that have little to do with the potential issues that can relate to the topic. The following link deals with that specific issue in some detail.
https://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=586732
I saw no court citations of cases that came down against handloads.
See the link above for an explanation, from a lawyer, of why it's very difficult to find such citations, even if handloads have played a part in court cases.
Even if they did play a part, the issue of handloads would almost certainly be buried in the case details, not an obvious part of the verdict or normal coverage.
And it's not nearly so much about "increasing liability" so much as it is creating a potential complication for one's defense in a criminal or civil defense.
Finally, it's not something that's likely to become an issue--in fact it's quite unlikely that it would become an issue. The point isn't that the odds are high that it will come into play--the odds are quite small that it will come into play. The point is that it's a risk that can be avoided extremely easily. Given that the whole point of firearm self-defense is about dealing with unlikely situations where the stakes are potentially very high, it seems to me that there shouldn't be any confusion about this topic--which is nearly identical in that respect. It's dealing with an unlikely situation (handloads come into play in a legal defense) where the stakes are potentially very high. For some reason that I don't understand, people who understand the first situation quite clearly sometimes have trouble with the latter in spite of the obvious parallel.
...is like saying using a weapon that has been in any way modified from factory will increase your liability,
It's not like that at all, or maybe it is, in the sense that nobody I've ever seen actually makes the claim that modifying a weapon "in any way" increases liability. In both cases they are strawmen. They are distorted versions of the actual situation.
I have never seen a good shoot go to a jury. I worked a pile of self defense, justifiable homicides.
Of course. If there are no questionable circumstances at all, why would they go to trial? It's when the are some questions about the circumstances that a trial might result. But the fact that a trial results doesn't mean the shoot was automatically bad. A trial doesn't mean the person is guilty, or they wouldn't need to have trials--as soon as a trial was determined to be necessary they would already know that guilt was established.
In a "good shoot", it's all pointless and meaningless.
1. It is the circumstances of a shoot that make it good or bad. If, for some reason there are questions about the circumstances, or they appear ambiguous, then further analysis may be required and in those situations, even small details could be very important.
2. The statement is based on the idea that all shoots that are good shoots can be immediately determined to be good shoots without a trial. Which is saying that only guilty people go to trial--obviously nonsense.
I think I would rather just move somewhere that has a good D.A.
That's a novel approach to a problem that is so unlikely to occur in the first place. Moving is a better solution than simply not loading your self-defense firearms with handloads?
Look, the topic of handloads for self-defense is pretty nuanced. People who want very simple answers--It's black. It's white. Yes. No. are going to be frustrated or dismissive of the topic. That's fine. The problem is that having that kind of simplistic view of the world doesn't change reality. Where things tend to get sticky is where someone who doesn't want to understand the topic because it doesn't fit a black/white worldview tries to say that the problem doesn't exist. That's simply incorrect.
From a purely practical perspective, if one must have a black/white answer, then I suppose: "It won't matter." may be as close as one can get to satisfactory. More accurate would be: "It's unlikely to matter." Completely accurate is: "It's not likely to be an issue, but fortunately it's extremely easy to totally eliminate that particular risk by simply not using handloads."
Some people won't care about eliminating that particular risk and that's fine--it's their decision to make.