Just buy some special ink jet printer ink that conducts an electrical charge. Now to just match up all the fingerprints stolen from the IRS to the actual person’s iPhone. No gonna happen. Cops might like the idea. Fingerprints are not protected from non-consenting searches.
http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/03/so-thumbprint-thing-your-phone-useless-now/126523/
Former state chemist Annie Dookhan was sentenced to three to five years in state prison after she pleaded guilty in 2013 to tampering with evidence and filing false reports.
9:15 am PDT update at the bottom
Massachusetts is first up in a case of first impression about who to get money damages from a state crime lab’s testing debacles. Her direct supervisors are defendants but…….
“What remained unclear Friday is whether the state, or its insurance carriers, would be liable for any damages. Howard Cooper, a lawyer with the Boston firm Todd & Weld, said there could be a variety of reasons that Jones’s lawyers chose not to name Massachusetts as a defendant, but said the state would likely still be held responsible for the conduct of its employees.”
“Even though the state’s not a party, these people were agents of the state, employees of the states, so it is the failed system that did not catch what was going on that’s on trial,” Cooper said.”
and just as this was posted….
Details into what the Texas Forensic Science Commission is all about. Too bad there are 48 other states without similar legislative produced review boards. The White House needs to become more active in supporting and implementing similar standards. So far the National Forensic Science Commission has produced a languid collection of vocabulary and future “tasks.”
Readers should know that there will be certain prosecutors who will not quietly agree to following the Texas decision to promote a mandate on banning bitemark believers from their cases-in-chief.
The review starts with:
“Texas prosecutors and judges should (italics added) maintain the integrity of the criminal justice system by voluntarily declaring a moratorium on the use of bite-mark evidence in criminal cases as recommended by the Texas Forensic Commission.”
Dr. Gillian Tully, the UK Forensic Science Regulator
The US should take heed of whats happening in the UK in reorganization of its forensic science industry in order to standardize forensic methods and outcomes. In the US, this would circumvent all the agonizing slow and merely “suggesting” National Forensic Sci Commission’s two years of tap dancing with serious forensic science issues.
Having heard Dr. Tully speak at the Plenary meeting of the AAFS in Feb, she personifies an organized approach and seems immune to the back-room backstabbing that accompanies major controversies in forensic “science” as evidenced by this last week UK Shaken Baby expose’. Dr. Waney Squier (a pediatric pathology person )……
Dr. Waney Squier
got slammed with a finding of “dishonesty” by some medical peers for her legitimate criticisms (accompanied by research) of SBS experts who dislike her logic and courtroom presence. The administrative medical licensing “court” finding cites her opposition to specific poorly-researched assumptions (of course not admitted to by the tribunal) used by Prosecutors and some of her colleagues to confirm baby homicide convictions, “as misleading” and offers absurd details to the foundation evidence which she misrepresented “science.” Things like biomechanics, and other aspects of medical science that are multi-disciplinary. They are false preaching that SBS testimonies for years haven’t been brought forward by experts with less than Einsteinian credentials in every aspect of medical practice. There is no medical specialty available in the subject of SBS.
This “justice” comes comes from certain parties who have filed complaints against her to the medical tribunal”who are not responding” to media requests. One of her supporters was more vocal:
“This is clearly a witch hunt against a physician who has done society a great service by levelling the playing field for parents and caregivers who face allegations of child abuse when their infant presents with unexplained brain injury,” says Marvin Miller, professor of paediatrics at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, in a submission to the tribunal supporting Squier. “Regarding her professionalism, she has unimpeachable integrity.”
Sounds familiar. Maybe Forensic Science Regulator Dr Tully can take up a review and bring the critics out of their little professional cubby-holes.
One more article on her professional honesty rankling the prosecutors.
Nothing but eyewitness testimony was used to convict Prade of murdering his wife. The court refuses to concede that neither unknown DNA taken from the “bitemark area” nor the pseudo-science of the prosecution’s bitemark expert would be grounds for a new trial. It uses the off-topic reasons listed in OHIO case law that are silent regarding junk forensic identification (the bitemark on skin) used to identify Prade as the killer. The court says new objections to bitemarks are nothing new. What the judges refuse to consider is that new research supports bitemark identification as being a psuedo-science. In TEXAS, this conviction would be held as compelling evidence of prejudice and considered evidence of an unfair trial.
This chart is from the Chicago-based Center on Wrongful Convictions parallel study on WC costs from about five years ago.
This article is from California. Los Angeles leads with $93.3 million.
“Released Wednesday, the analysis says mistakes in the state’s criminal justice system cost Californians at least $221 million (adjusted for inflation) from 1989 through 2012.
That represents the grand total of incarceration expenses ($80 million), trial and appeal costs ($68 million), legal settlements ($68 million) and state compensation for wrongful imprisonment ($5 million) for 607 people who had their felony convictions overturned, then were acquitted in retrials or had their charges dismissed. The total cost rises to $282 million when the 85 exonerations in the Rampart police corruption scandal in Los Angeles are added.”
BY THE NUMBERS
The number of wrongful arrests and convictions and legal settlements and fees for selected cities and counties, 1989-2012:
Source: Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy, UC Berkeley
Here we go again….
Local media loves PR releases from chief Prosecutors and crime lab directors who talk about improvements to their response times for forensic analyses. It’s titled “The Reality of the Montana State Crime Lab.” It was first posted March 11, 2016 at 1:52pm MST.
Then this comes out the same day at 2:35pm MST. It is titled “Montana crime lab technician suspected of stealing pills for nine months.”
Some days it pays to just stay home.
This comes from West Virginia School of Law’s recent weekend symposium with some heavy hitters of sci evidence law, forensics, innocence litigators, and the media. Thanks to Brandon Garrett.
Entire program on Youtube. Needs some editing.
But, here is the agenda and the players which might help in tracking people you want to observe in action.
Panelists
Panel 1 — True Injustice: A Discussion of Wrongful Convictions
Prof. Russell Covey (Georgia State University)
Prof. Mark Godsey (University of Cincinnati)
Ms. Vanessa Meterko (The Innocence Project)
Ms. Liliana Segura (Journalist)
Panel 2 — The Science of Forensic Evidence: Use and Abuse in the Courtroom
Prof. Kelly Ayers (West Virginia University)
Dr. Simon A. Cole (U.C. Irvine)
Prof. Meghan Ryan (Southern Methodist University)
Prof. Sandra Thompson (University of Houston)
Panel 3 — Crime Labs, the FBI, and Federal Oversight of Forensics
Dr. Suzanne Bell (West Virginia University)
Dr. Glen Jackson (West Virginia University)
Prof. Dave Moran (University of Michigan)
Mr. M. Chris Fabricant (The Innocence Project)
Panel 4 — Litigating Change in Science: Shaken Baby Syndrome and Arson
Mr. Paul Bieber (The Arson Research Project)
Prof. Imran Syed (University of Michigan)
Prof. Keith Findley (University of Wisconsin)
Prof. Kate Judson (University of Wisconsin)
Ms. Maria Cuellar (Carnegie Mellon University)
Dr. Ron Uscinski (Georgetown Medical School and University Hospital)
Panel 5 — Disclosure and Reliability: Forensic Evidence in Pre-Trial and Post-Conviction Proceedings
Prof. Valena Beety (West Virginia University)
Prof. Jessica Gabel Cino (Georgia State University)
Prof. Brandon Garrett (University of Virginia)
Prof. Jennifer Laurin (University of Texas)
Judge Anthony Mozingo (15th Circuit Court of Mississippi)
Here is a narrative by a fellow who spends money on PR releases about forensics. This piece is regarding the speech given last week by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Yates outlined the reasons and logic for continued review of many other forensic “sciences” even after the FBI’s admission to a systemic dysfunction of scientific proofs over it decades of microscopic hair comparison.
Yates strongly implies that the USDOJ does not consider the hair blunder as an outlier. She must have read the 2009 NAS Report cover to cover. This PR-forensics guy has spent years disclaiming its relevance. Whatever. I’m sure this reveal by Yates made some in the forensics-law enforcement industry shudder. On to the subject at hand.
This author does short shrift about bad “hair” and gains momentum for the remainder about doubting the efficacy of “high” costs versus benefit of going past the what he hoped was a closed chapter and scope of forensic reform. Here is a nugget of his predictable scoffery.
One quote:
“Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not spending scarce taxpayer dollars on these case reviews is actually necessary – or whether or not it really helps to identify and rectify miscarriages of justice. What is not acceptable, however, is failing to establish reasonable, responsible criteria for what actually constitutes an error. Unfortunately, when Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates claimed that 90% of hair-testing reviews found some form of error, she may have fallen prey to the same temptation for which forensic science professionals have been criticized in recent years.”
Considering that the Innocence Projects database (almost 350) of DNA exonerations shows a 46% contribution from unvalidated or faulty forensic testimony, this featured article focuses on bullet “matching” and by association extends to tires and bite marks. From my last post, footprint evidence has its own experts leaping at conclusions similarly skewed in numerous cases. Most all stem from the false belief (myth?) of uniqueness being a strong possibility existing in material transferred as trace impression evidence. This might be called the “Locard Fallacy.” (I just made that up. Locard never spoke of “uniqueness.” I’m probably not being original.) Here is an extensive review of Locard by Jerry Chisum and Brent Turvey from 2000.
From Science (AAAS)
Reversing the Legacy of Junk Science in the Courtroom
FORENSICS and LAW in FOCUS @ CSIDDS | News and Trends 