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Monthly Archives: November 2016
Hair matching went away due to the efforts of the Innocence Project – Bitemarks next
In 2013, FBI began its post conviction review in collaboration with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project. By 2015, it had mined through hundreds of cases and identified errors in 90 percent of the testimony … Continue reading
Creepy Politics Goes After the Dead and Buried – Exhumation
The body of the Philippine dictator, Fernando Marcos, may get disinterred and maybe rexamined in some manner, if various politicians get their way in court. http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/848626/sc-asked-to-order-exhumation-forensic-exam-of-marcos-remains
Utter silence from over 400 individual US crimes labs after @PCAST forensic report
The US crime lab communities that receive public funding were said to number over 400 (see below) in the 2009 Bureau of Justice Statistics report. Its striking to me that NOTHING has been in the news about what they think … Continue reading
Posted in criminal justice, criminal justice reform, CSI
Tagged criminal justice, CSI, Forensic science, PCAST
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Steven Avery: Close Look at DNA testing and re-testing and non-testing for @ZellnerLaw
Social media is never a good place to divine what’s happening fact-wise in “Making A Murderer” (or in any forensic case for that matter) but here is a collection of the latest. Claims about what the DNA testing list agreed … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged criminal justice, CSI, Forensic science, making a murderer
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A science-based blast at Prosecutors’ belief in alchemy, voodoo and bitemarks
Oxford University Press’ Journal of Law and the Biosciences just published an amicus curiae (i.e. friend of the court) anti-bitemark treatise which empirically debunks the recent PCAST deniers such as the National DA Association, the IAI, a ‘congress’ of crime labs, the US Department … Continue reading
Bu****it info to Young Forensic Scientists about bitemarks – AAFS
This is a current AAFS educational profile talking about disciplines within forensic “science.” It is in the “choosing a career in forensic science” section and amongst other activities, explains “scientist-dentists” role in performing bitemark identification analysis. It seems the AAFS hasn’t put … Continue reading
Calling current forensics “error prone” includes mixture DNA evidence
Law professor David Kaye and statistical science blogger sums things up nicely: Analyzing mixtures of DNA is “not like a Ouija board — it’s not junk science in that sense,” said David Kaye, a law professor at Penn State University and author … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged criminal justice, CSI, error prone forensic sciences, Forensic science
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Testing the crime lab testers comes to Houston’s crime lab
I’m not surprised that police crime labs generally avoid stringent internal evals of its personnel. I know of one “blinded” bitemark study, a means of catching perpetrators of crime concept accepted by US District Attorneys. It involved a notorious dentist … Continue reading
More legal argument pro and con to TrueAllele reliability and peer review
Who sets the standards for admissibility of science in courts is the core issue. The history of science in courts contains rules (Frye, Daubert, Kunho) talking about the need for peer review. In one telling remark, the DA in this … Continue reading
Chummy crime labber gets close scrutiny.
Not exactly PC in today’s hyper sensitive awareness of cognitive bias in police crime lab environments http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2016/11/19/do-thank-you-notes-hint-at-impropriety.html
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