Really. It is called scientific by some courts but its not available for confirmatory testing. What is it? Proprietary DNA mixture software.
http://www.abajournal.com/lawscribbler/article/trade-secret-privilege-is-bad-for-criminal-justice
Autopsy Offers New Details On the Death of A Guatemalan Migrant Child
— Read on www.texasmonthly.com/news/autopsy-details-death-guatemalan-migrant-child/amp/
Pathologists reviewing this and other migrant children deaths include @drjudymelinek. Physical and medical neglect of these innocent children is abhorent and are classic human rights violations.
Law enforcement always goes bonkers for junk forensics. This time it is a twitchy next gen version of a “deception detector.”
https://theintercept.com/2019/07/26/europe-border-control-ai-lie-detector/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/26/st-louis-lamar-johnson-conviction-police-scandal/
The police crime scene “reconstruction” is ridiculous. The jury believed it.
Excellent 8min video expose’ on the recent Stinson $7.5M award for wrongful conviction in Milwaukee. As usual, the city taxpayers take the financial hit. Kudos to all those who helped this case along. Heather Donnell and her staff are incredible
The publisher spans the world for science, medicine and some things forensics. It has one open access (i.e. free) journal about forensics. Good for them. This story covers the larger issue of corporate profiteering (over charging) for information that is derived from grant-funded projects which do not self-publish. Maybe Elsevier needs more competition.
https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-uc-elsevier-20190711-story.html
Oh dear, this is not very good news. Eurofins does this in the UK.
Eurofins deals with over 70,000 criminal cases in the UK each year.
It carries out DNA testing, toxicology analysis, firearms testing and computer forensics for police forces across the UK.
Forensic science work has been carried out by private firms and police laboratories in England and Wales since the closure of the government’s Forensic Science Service in 2012.
The result of this hack. This is just the beginning. Security issues have been around for decades regarding forensic labs. Some time in the 1970’s, a sect of the IRA bunch, bombed out an Irish government crime lab in order to destroy evidence prosecutors needed to charge the crooks with crimes. In 2016, a Belgium crime lab got incinerated by another bunch of crooks.
(Today’s News) An emergency police response to the cyber-attack was led by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) to manage the flow of forensic submissions so DNA and blood samples which needed urgent testing were sent to other suppliers.
It has led to delays in forensic science provision and is understood to have caused some court hearings to be postponed because information on the results of analysis conducted by Eurofins was not accessible.
Recent civil litigation regarding Robert Lee Stinson suing for compensation for his years in prison as an innocent man. Once again, its all about bitemarks.
A broader look at the effects of scientifically inadequate bitemark opinions. (2015)
The scientific fallacies of SBS
This article has a checkered past as the authors’ compelling analysis was initially rejected. It is telling that their story parallels the process of how overreaching expertism, once adopted by the courts and despite scant research, can grow exponentially and persist.
