This is a 50 page UBC Law Review narrative on the inadequacies of courts to recognize junk “forensic” experts. Battling Canadian bitemarkers leave a trail of exaggerated claims and criminal case law that is blind to scientific principles.
Forensics: The timeline of battling junk forensics in the Texas courts – lessons learned – all from bitemarks
“Grits” runs us the story on the enormous effort undertaken in Texas to teach judges and prosecutors that bitemarks are the spawn of the alchemists and soothsayers among us.
Grits for Breakfast legal blog
The timeline of getting TX courts to include “junk forensics” as legitimate grounds for appeal.
- Bill would allow habeas appeal on discredited forensic science (2009)
- ME testimony false according to science but not Texas law (2011)
- CCA laments ‘disconnect’ between changing science and reliable verdicts’ it helped create (2012)
- Bills would bolster Great Writ for the 21st century, expose prosecutor misconduct (2013)
- Governor signs junk-science habeas bill (2013)
- Godsey: ‘Texas now on cutting edge of efforts to free the innocent’ (2013)
- Fran Keller released based on refuted junk science (2013)
- SA4 to walk free: New Texas statute combats injustice caused by junk science (2013)
- Interpreting Texas’ new junk science writ (2014)
- CCA: Junk-science writ covers bad scientists as well as bad science (2014)
- Texas’ new junk science writ called ‘elegant’ and ‘phenomenally important‘ (2014)
- Backstory: Texas Observer on the San Antonio Four (2014)
- San Antonio Four case, Texas junk science writ lauded in national press (2014)
- Neal Robbins writ headed back to CCA after Lege ostensibly passed fix
- Podcast: Tweaking Texas’ junk science writ (2015)
- Previewing oral arguments on Texas’ junk-science writ (2015)
- Difficult-to-read tea leaves from oral arguments on Texas’ junk science writ (2015)
- Abbott signs bill codifying broad reading of Texas’ junk science writ (2015)
- Court of Criminal Appeals judges call out colleagues’ judicial activism on junk science writ (2016)
- Confronting junk science and judicial activism at the Court of Criminal Appeals (2016)
- Texas, California ‘junk science writs’ should stir bills in other states (2016)
- Don’t gloat that Texas is ahead on forensic science reform (2016)
Forensics: Texas becomes the first State to call bitemarks “junk science.”
As usual in these innocence cases, it took decades to overcome the inequities of flawed and exaggerated forensic experts. In this case, Steven Chaney is has been finally declared “actually innocent” and will receive $2.5 million for his decades in prison. The bitemarkers who still sing their practices of “matching” patterns in human skin were hoisted on their own petard by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The Court reaffirmed the findings of the 2009 NAS Report and numerous real scientists which rejected their years of posing as “dental scientists.”
Here is the CCA holding on bitemarks. Chaney CCA
Forensics: Another court bypasses recanted expert testimony and agrees with a DA being “confused” about what junk forensics means.
Lets say again, that almost any excuse can be used by some courts to deny that junk forensic testimony should be a threshold for a successful request for a new trial.
https://www.propublica.org/article/judge-in-joe-bryan-case-rejects-defense-pleas-for-new-trial
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Tagged forensic examiner error, Forensic science, junk forensic science
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Forensics: 1985 trial using junk bitemark evidence not a problem to another appellate court
(Image: the concept of worms causing dental decay)
Yet another confirmation that the “rule of law” used in courts of review supersedes unspeakable injustice of failed expert testimony used to convict. This story indicates the prosecutors philosophy of “once convicted, always convicted” travels up-hill into the judiciary regardless of its known failures to understand bad “science” from “good science.”
http://www.tribtoday.com/news/local-news/2018/12/danny-lee-hill-appeal-for-new-trial-denied/
Forensics: A good look at an expert’s advocacy. Admitted by some courts, but not all.
This story is about a MD who has a strange habit of giving opinion evidence in child abuse cases cloaked as sound science. Works for him. One court called him out on it.
https://www.propublica.org/article/david-ayoub-an-anti-vaxxer-new-crusade
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Tagged expert opinion, forensic examiner error, Forensic science
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Faulty Forensics Put Me on Death Row – VICE Video: Documentaries, Films, News Videos
Another look at bitemark “experts” running amok. Most people are introduced to forensic science through TV and film, and because of this we have come to see forensic techniques as foolproof methods for solving crimes. But many forensic science techniques were not developed by scientists.
— Read on video.vice.com/en_us/video/faulty-forensics-put-me-on-death-row/5bd0a140be4077624e3fc6b9
Forensics: Over a million forensic hair cases need to be reviewed in Virgina
This story reveals that the obstacles and reluctance to review convictions aided by junk sciences can be overcome. State by state. Too bad the bitemarker bunch (http://www.abfo.org ) refuse to make good their promises to do this in Texas. A real bunch of AHs.
Onto Virginia:
“The problem with such a review is that there are about a million case files in the archives from between 1973 and 1994 that need to be digitized and searched. The cases already digitized also need to be scrutinized.
Record keeping involving case transcripts is not uniform in Virginia, meaning in some instances, the written records of examiners’ courtroom testimonies may have already been destroyed or filed away in hard-to-retrieve places.”
https://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/editorials/dp-edt-dna-evidence-1125-story.html
Forensics: When do District Attorneys refuse to test DNA? When the test could be paid by the incarcerated.
This story is from Florida. It could be from any state in the US. DAs always roll towards preserving their convictions. This makes platitudinous statements about “justice” from Attorney Generals and their deputies hollow, pathological mythomania.
Forensics: Harvard murder from 50 years ago. New DNA shows just how wrong initial investigators’ theories can be
This is is commonly what happens once DNA testing is done AFTER a conviction. One of the problems is the cost of post conviction testing that has to be borne by the Innocence Project and other innocence litigators. Donate to the Innocence Project for DNA testing.
Many of the #FreeCA12 clients are stuck in prison because there was no DNA collected by law enforcement. Donate to the Cal Western Innocence Project.
“The case highlights the power of advanced techniques to definitively shut long-unsolved cases. But these new forensic excavations also underscore how far off initial hunches or once-promising leads can be, particularly when the perpetrator is a random actor. Britton’s death was a seemingly single act of violence that now has been threaded into a serial pattern. According to Middlesex County, Sumpter has been connected with five sexual assaults, including three murders.”
Forensics: A response to Trump’s DOJ unabated lies about science and criminal justice
This is written by Betty Lane DesPortes of past AAFS president fame. It is short and to the point. The USDOJ brought out DAG Rosenstein unleashed a load of clap-trap straight from the Inquisition’s Star Chamber. Thanks to Sci Direct for putting this out.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379073818305498
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