Pretty good over-view on “secondary transference” of epithelial cells being used in criminal cases that some deny happens and others use as a defense strategy. Clearly, it’s all in the “eye” of prosecutors and police.
Michelle Mankin’s blog.
Plus a very good, heavy with major forensic authors, professional journal article on the subject of “trace biological evidence” asking “how did it get there.” A co-author is renowned Swiss statistician Christophe Champod.
A telling expose ‘from Reason’s latest article on the sad (to some) state of resistance from the police forensic, LEO and prosecutor communities looking towards safeguards in police use and misuse of science in the US courts. This resonates with the growing list of police crime lab scandals and wrongful convictions in the United States
Bitemarks lead to way in the article, which in its’ larger sense, exposes entrenched denial of substantive evidence supporting systemic problems. Various problem levels exist, depending on each subject PCAST reviewed. PCAST contains common scientific expectations courts’ should use in their “gatekeeping” power in order to recognize and dismiss exaggerated or outright “voodoo” (according to 9th Circuit Judge Kozinski) forensic expertise.
Here is Reason’s response to USDOJ Loretta Lynch and by implication, to the incoming Jeff Sessions. The history of prosecutorial misconduct arguments within his old jurisdiction just came out today on CNN.
“One of those “sound” methods she’s defending is bitemark analysis. But the PCAST report found that “available scientific evidence strongly suggests that examiners not only cannot identify the source of bitemark with reasonable accuracy, they cannot even consistently agree on whether an injury is a human bitemark.”
The year’s most read posts from Forensics in Focus. Happy New Year.
This is a real war on drugs being fought at the DEA and forensic crime labs. Fentanyl is 50 stronger than heroin.
Here is a lede from the New York Legal Aid Society about the slowly trending use of racially skewed DNA bases being LEO searched for relatives of suspects. (More news below).
The limitations of familial DNA also made headlines in 2014 after Idaho police used familial searching on a private DNA database owned by Ancestry.com in an attempt to solve a 1996 murder case: the results falsely implicated an innocent man in New Orleans whose father had volunteered his DNA to a private, church-sponsored research database decades prior that was later bought by Ancestry.com.
More NYLegal Aid forensic info:
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NIST is the uber-arm of science in the world of the federal government and has a wide view on most things in our physical world. Its holiday post reflects on 2016’s triumphs and removal of some obsolete methods in forensics and traditional science disciplines.
They rave about forensic DNA profiling going to 20 genetic markers from 13.
I had to mention to them in the ‘comments’ that they left out bitemark identification’s failure to pass the science stress-test done by the President’s Council on Science and Technology.
NIST giving forth praise and scientific pride for the Xmas season. ‘Ideas Whose Time Has Come and Gone.’
Interesting look at separating fly DNA from human DNA at a messy crime scene. Hopefully the fly crap can be separated out after the research is completed. There are cases where flyspecks (regurg and poop) are mis-identified as blood spatter and the flies can redeposit human blood sucked up from elsewhere (this National Geographic article on blow flies is gross and funny at the same time).
Looking back on the most popular articles published this month in Forensics in Focus. Thank you all for following!!
An insider look about genetic ‘counselors’ selling imperfect testing services and exaggerating results in order to stay employed. Hmm, the same might be said for police using junk drug testing kits from Kmart.
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