Some of these federal OSAC documents on everything “forensic” in regards to vernacular and evidence descriptors are free. Others cost $$$. I find it incredible that governmental funded forensic study groups can produce intellectual property for forensic science practitioners and then profiteers (ASTM) step in and charge $41 bucks for a 20 page .pdf document.
https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2018/03/osac-releases-online-lexicon-forensic-sciences
He brings out Mississippi’s “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist” along with other forensic failures in this L.A. Times Op-Ed.
“It’s a maddening indictment of America’s broken criminal justice system, in which prosecutors allowed — even encouraged — flawed forensic testimony because it was molded to fit their theories of guilt. Over two decades, elected judges permitted these two professional testifiers to convince unsophisticated jurors that science was on the side of the state.”
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-grisham-wrongful-convictions-20180311-story.html
So much for “Law and Order” accuracy in field drug testing and law enforcement forensics. The recent USDOJ PR piece on forensic “transparency” and “validity” hasn’t made its way out of the DC Beltway just yet.
The AG’s office declined to recharge Alfred Swinton after his 1991 conviction fell apart due to DNA “touch” analysis of the victim and a bitemark expert who recanted his trial testimony. The praise for the AG in this first article contradicts the objections the state presented to Swinton’s post conviction DNA testing during years of appeal.
https://www.nhregister.com/opinion/article/David-Cameron-Swinton-release-highlights-12731886.php
In 200o, The Hartford Courant had a much different take on Mr. Swinton. The certainly did.
In 2001, Swinton’s appellate attorney states that he is innocent. The state’s “top” forensic dentist is also mentioned.
Click on the above to read about “pattern-matching’ forensics. Of course bitemarks are #1.
The Innocence Project has issued as response to the Deputy Attorney General’s remarks, stating: “We’ve known since 2009 that there are problems with the scientific validity of forensic disciplines used to identify suspects with the exception of DNA evidence. Yet after this administration shut down the National Commission of Forensic Science — the first inclusive and transparent effort to address these fundamental flaws in evidence that is used in countless prosecutions across the nation — there was no mention by Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein of how the Department of Justice plans to address this core validity problem.”
Related: Full Remarks, Memo on Approval of Uniform Language for Testimony and Reports
Researchers from the National Institute of Science and Technology have developed a statistical method of comparing ballistic samples that could enable experts to use a numeric scale when testifying about the strength of a ballistics match in court. (Phys.org)
The Massachusetts Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether all drug cases worked on by former state lab analyst Sonja Farak, who was arrested in 2013 for stealing drugs from active casework, should be dismissed. While state prosecutors have already agreed to dismiss nearly 8,000 cases that Farak worked on, the ACLU and public defenders have asked for blanket dismissal of every case the former analyst touched (MassLive)
Related: Greenfield Recorder
A new study from M.I.T. reveals that facial recognition software programs are 99% correct when used on people with light skin, but have a nearly 35% error rate for people with darker skin. The NY Times notes, “In modern artificial intelligence, data rules. A.I. software is only as smart as the data used to train it…One widely used facial-recognition data set was estimated to be more than 75 percent male and more than 80 percent white, according to another research study.” (NY Times)
The Crown Prosecution Service in the United Kingdom will review all current rape cases involving digital evidence after it was discovered that at least fifteen police departments had outsourced their digital forensic work to unaccredited private labs in the past year (Guardian)
Researchers at Rutgers University have developed a new DNA database that seeks to “help bring more reliability to the interpretation of complex DNA evidence” (Phys.org)
“Researchers have identified fifteen genes that determine our facial features”
(Science Daily)
Related: “Forensic Facial Reconstruction Could Now Look to Your DNA”
“Y chromosome profiling, important in sexual assault cases, can often be presented incorrectly in court. New math could help by taking the ambiguity out of the equation.” (TheWire.in)
This story underlies the devastation to victims of false and misleading forensic lab testing. Motherisk is a hospital chem lab that contracted to Canadian legal authorities responsible for enforcing child protection laws. This story is from Nova Scotia.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/motherisk-nova-scotia-investigation-1.4553531
The Chicago Metro medical system is considered premier-quality regarding treating gun shot wounds and related trauma. The US military trains its trauma physicians in Chicago trauma centers. Combining health care with homicide statistics seems to be absent in this first article about “Chicago gun violence.” Homicides and shooting victims are two separate categories of the same problem. The second article shows how political the subject of trauma centers has become in Chicago’s minority communities. The third has stats on Chicago shooting incidents obtained by the Chicago Tribune in order to look deeper into guns and crime and medical issues.. The final link talks about shooting prevention happening on the streets by civilians.
Police looking at homicides in Chicago.
Chicago trauma centers highlighted and described.
Chicago gun violence costs start at $447 million according to the Chi Tribune.
Ex-gang members program intervening in Chicago gun violence defunded. “Its a health-care problem.”
The AAAS is relatively new to reviewing forensics, but it has taken on pattern-matchers with the full force of its multidisciplinary membership. Its candor is a refreshing look into latent print matching experts. The AAAS has no law enforcement affiliations like the National Institute of Justice which is the primary funding source to forensic investigators. Simply put, they don’t have political affiliations or the NIJ’s prosecutorial culture. Here’s a piece of the AAAS September 2017 look at Latents.
“Drawing on the conclusions of existing literature about scientifically appropriate statements examiners should make in testimony and reports, the report says examiners should convey the high level of scientific uncertainty that underlies the analysis they are presenting in court and make clear the findings are subjective and not grounded in evidence.”
This doesn’t read like the recent blurb from the USDOJ DAG Rod J. Rosenstein’s take on police forensics. His statement carries no mention of its flimsy connections, in some cases, with scientific proofs. They have too many skeletons and cases regarding half-baked opinions used by prosecutors to admit much else. Hence my lede’s use of “denying the obvious.”
https://www.aaas.org/news/fingerprint-source-identity-lacks-scientific-basis-legal-certainty
This is in South Carolina. Police in each county are mandated to collect from suspected felons. Some do and some don’t. Here’s why data collection by law enforcement should contain large numbers of profiles in order to have proper racial diversity.
“A 2017 study done at Stanford University found that state DNA databases “deter crime by profiled offenders, reduce crime rates and are more cost-effective than traditional law enforcement tools.” And the bigger the database, the better the results. A similar study showed that simply adding offenders’ DNA profile to a database reduced recidivism by 43 percent, presumably because they know they are more likely to be caught in the future with a DNA “fingerprint” on file.”
It is well known and discussed that certain law enforcement and District Attorneys have created their own DNA databases which are not linked to national archives. This issue is roundly dismissed by those agencies. Some say it is done intentionally to avoid regulations.
This makes 30 cases the infamous practitioners of “forensic” odontology have contributed to false convictions and indictments.
Needless to say, the few existing adherents to bitemark voodoo are still alive and well as members of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. This bunch still refuses to act on all the past cases where their esteemed members have brought their brand of “trust me I’m a doctor” into criminal courts. Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington’s book, “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist” brings this bitemark bunk into clear perspective.
Incredibly, some DA s are spending $$ to hire ABFOers (that’s their logo above left) to come to evidentiary hearings to talk about how they have met data-research based scientific requirements for admissibility. This is after the NAS 2009 and PCAST blew them up.
Here’s a couple of the go-to bitemarkers showing up at scheduled Daubert hearing in New Orleans. The case is all about bitemarks, its beleaguered past of wrongful convictions, and failed validity efforts.
Paula Brumit from Texas.
David Senn from Texas where both ABFO presidents (one past pres; the other pres-elect) went to the mat for bitemarks during the Texas Forensic Commission’s “scrutiny” of bitemarks and wrongful convictions. They lost their proverbial shorts and soon thereafter Steven Mark Chaney was released from years in prison. Here he is with his Mom.
Here’s THAT story titled “Lives in Balance, Texas Leads Scrutiny of Bite-Mark Forensics. “
On to the Swinton exoneration.
FORENSICS and LAW in FOCUS @ CSIDDS | News and Trends 