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Category Archives: forensic science reform protecting the innocent
AAFS Board of Directors votes to not put Forensic Sciences in control of Prosecutors
Directly from the American Academy of Forensic Sciences: It favors a forensic relationship with the Center for Diseases Control and Prevention. The alternative was to let the crowd at the US Department of Justice to run things through the National Institute … Continue reading
Suppression of evidence is prosecutor misconduct but not material to the conviction?
The US Supreme Court (the pic is the DC Court of Appeals) is looking at this conviction case. It largely is about testifying eyewitness credibility failures and other available witnesses being known by the prosecution but were hidden from the … Continue reading
Here we go again. Police Chief takes on problems in his Forensics DNA lab
Chief Hank Stawinski (above) is getting outside auditing help for his county crime lab. This article seems to say that an employee of his had previously been working at the Austin TX crime lab that was shut down last year. … Continue reading
Left for Dead: DNA lab closes its doors for Missing and Unknown cases. No $$
Program to identify dead and missing across US put on hold Another example of the inequality towards forensic science (“..in the middle of an upheaval”) being merely a blip on the funding radar of the prancing ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric … Continue reading
Progressive DAs get backlash from their “lock-em-up” peers like Michael Ramos
District Attorney Aramis D. Ayala of Orlando, FL is getting targeted for realizing that the death penalty is only in play in 0.01% of her criminal cases and is much too expensive to pursue. Elected Senior Prosecutors and police chiefs … Continue reading
Leading Australian state DNA analyst seems to be in a bit of a pickle
This one article ( from a large collection) about a very senior Western Australia DNA prosecutorial lab DNA scientist raises a bunch of questions on his decades long case work. Here are some key comments: State’s leading DNA expert sacked. … Continue reading
Forensics: Archaic and scientifically bogus TX mental disability statute ruled unconstitutional
SCOTUS Rejects Texas’s Death Penalty Standards for Disabled Inmates – This could be huge for other states to follow suit regarding mental competence and the death penalty. Texas’s standards for evaluating mentally disabled death row inmates are unconstitutional, the Supreme … Continue reading
Proactive DA takes on issue of 600 cases involving chemist with drug addiction
This DA doing the right thing quickly. “From various parts of the country over the years have come stories about prosecutors and courts reluctant to overturn convictions even when defendants’ rights have been violated or when key evidence subsequently proved … Continue reading
Bitemark pattern used to overturn case against New Orleans defendant
Once again, an ABFO dentist uses bitemark patterns to persuade a judge that there is ‘science’ behind skin injuries and tooth comparisons. This time is to say the defendant’s teeth “didn’t match.” A new trial was ordered. http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/courts/article_49cb7944-13fe-11e7-8dc6-9fe2d1aa4f30.html
Florida ‘dog sniffing’ police ‘science’ cases ignored by DAs and CJ system
Nothing seems more outlandish than dogs being use to track down criminals and being used as eye witnesses to a defendant’s guilt. Read this story about multiple cases of conviction added by another police ‘science.’ I would add another example … Continue reading
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