I have been involved in mummy identification with the Los Angeles J Paul Getty Villa “Red Shroud” collection in Malibu, so I have a soft spot for looking into the past health issues and skeletal conditions of those long past individuals. My mummy even has a name. Its “Herakleides.” Here he is:
Short article from the Getty Villa about Herk who lived circa 200AD.
Giving mummy a face from ancient Egypt who live around the time of Tut and Nef.
Unusual Connecticut Exoneration Centers on Coerced Confession, Not DNA Evidence
excerpt:
Rosenthal [defense lawyer], citing the University of Michigan Law School National Registry of Exonerations, said this is the 17th Connecticut exoneration and the sixth in the past two years. Previous exonerations, including those of accused rapist James Tillman and accused killer Kenneth Ireland, hinged on modern DNA testing overriding faulty witness statements. With advances in scientific testing, “we’re not going to have the line of exonerations we had in the past that were DNA-driven, but we still have a problem with wrongful convictions. This is a case that illustrates that,” said Rosenthal. “We all know about false eyewitness identifications but we’re learning all about false confessions.”
From reading the tabloids, government lawyers and “experts” since the case originated she would have been executed only a few decades ago.
Italy’s Court of Cassation has issued a final, formal opinion on the resolution of the Amanda Knox case.
It is a resounding exoneration of Knox and Sollecito, and a scathing indictment of a sloppy, inadequate, hastily contrived prosecution case.
See the ABC News story here.
This data leads one to answer the question: “Why does the US leads in numbers and percentages of incarcerated populations?” Here’s another one: “Why are the numbers of exonerations increasing every year?” and so forth.
By Tina Peng
NEW ORLEANS
The Orleans Public Defenders are facing a million-dollar deficit as a result of statewide budget cuts. For a small office like ours, that’s devastating. To avoid layoffs, the entire staff will see the equivalent of four unpaid weeks per year in furloughs, increased caseloads and a hiring freeze — and the submission to the Louisiana Public Defender Board of a plan to cut services to the people of New Orleans. We are already stretched thin: Our office represents 85 percent of the people charged with crimes in Orleans Parish but has an annual budget about a third the size of the district attorney’s. The American Bar Association recommends that public defenders not work on more than 150 felony cases a year. In 2014, I handled double that.
Full article from the Washington Post
Thanks to the WrongfulConvictionsBlog
Peter Neufeld, co-founder of The Innocence Project, will speak at the University of St. Thomas as part of a symposium on forensic science this month.
“When the Gavel Falls…Limitations of Scientific Testimony”
Thursday, September 17, 2015 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM
Full-day Symposium, brought to you by The Houston Forensic Science Center.
In recent years, many wrongly convicted individuals have been exonerated thanks to advances in forensic science. At the same time, innocent people have been convicted because forensic scientists have provided incorrect, inadequate, unscientific or faulty testimony in court proceedings. Article and registration.
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San Francisco Law enforcement forensic specialists and detectives will be taking a course given by well-known and well published social scientist Itiel Dror on the various types of bias existing in LEO culture. Article. The SFO police chief has had it with problems described in the news article. I suppose there will be follow-up sessions and eventual inclusion in police training curriculum. There is nearly 4,000 independent LEO’s in the US.
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Big wigs to talk about untested rape kits in the US.
Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance planto gather in New York City next week to address the nation’s backlog of untested sexual assault kits, according to public advisories issued Friday.
After a 1947 internment from the battleship Oklahoma, skeletal remains experience new ID attempts.
North Carolina has two newly compensated exonerees. 30 years in prison while innocent of murder. Once again, false confessions prove to be largely coerced from vulnerable suspects.
More bullshit about microscopic hair comparisons in an otherwise competent article from LA about identifying skeletons damaged by fire. DNA from teeth is the best.
I have no idea what this piece from India on “forensic journalism” is trying to say but it can’t be good. This quote is boggling:
“If summarized, forensic journalism reports a crime in more legally, pseudoscientific, dramatic, fascinating, systematic and forensically creative and innovative way based on solid facts and evidences.” Read the rest.
Here is another example. India’s police battling with their own forensic experts
Scotland. This an another example where deaths in police custody get the “excited delirium” treatment as a substitute cause of death when compression asphyxia would lead to charges against the officers. If one looks at the medical lexicon (police commissioners are exempt of course) excited delirium seems to only occur in street arrests, police stations and jails. The term was coined by a single pathologist from Florida.
These decidedly un-literary PR pieces from DNA companies boggle the mind regarding what they don’t say about reliability safeguards during the use of their “printer sized” machines located at the aptly named CSI style ” point of action.”
Maybe they aren’t interested in telling the entire story about the ample concerns regarding how sloppy working environments, under-trained techs, and over zealous interference from law enforcement can do to mess things up.
The classic case is the perp and the unknown evidence both being processed by the same people at the same time, with the same equipment while at the “point of action.”
I would like its supporters in Texas to take some effort to elaborate all of us on those topics. One supporter is:
“As one of the investigator sites for the RapidHIT ID, we are excited about this new instrument format and its facile and expeditious capabilities for generating a DNA profile,” said Bruce Budowle, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Institute of Applied Genetics at the University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC). “The DNA profiles generated with the RapidHIT ID were comparable with those generated with the standard current laboratory-based platform.”
Why not create a standing commission on Forensic Science Integrity in New York as well? One exists in Texas and is auditing the effects of flawed microscopic hair and bitemark matching in past cases. Much to the chagrin and ire of a few Texan bite mark matchers. The recent hearing in Texas had two renowned Texas Medical Examiners quoting their position on bitemark evidence.
“Commenting on the broad scope of the investigation, Presiding Officer Dr. Vincent DiMaio said, “we’re talking about the whole field, the validity of the field of bite marks.”
“Dr. Nizam Peerwani, a commission member and the chief medical examiner in Tarrant County, said his agency abandoned the practice more than two decades ago. He recalled one instance in which a dentist identified a bite mark that turned out to be an injury from a crow bar. “We have no respect, absolutely no regard for bite marks,” Peerwani said.”
Onto the prosecutors in NY.
From the The Daily Beast.
“Plagued by misconduct, New York is considering the establishment of independent review boards for prosecutors, just like the one for judges. Its about time.
American prosecutors are powerful officials. They have the power to deprive people of their liberty, destroy their reputations, and even take away their lives. They have virtually unlimited discretion in how they exercise their powers.”
Comment: This theme runs parallel to a recent csidds post on the same subject of pros misconduct the feds are working on. Some DAs wandering afar from their ethical guidelines
The California Dental Association Journal, in its July 2015 publication presented a multi contributor article on forensic dentistry. Having good PR for the efforts of largely volunteer dentists doing human identification cases and being trained and available in mass disaster responses is gratifying. The only hitch in the piece was the portion from a bitemark reader of this California contingent praising the method’s contributions to criminal justice and society in general. Needless to say, I had some objections to that part which I published here.
It’s only a handful within this California forensic dental group (30 in all of 32,000 dentists in CA) whom are bitemark dentists. To put a context to what shows up in the media about bitemark’s “relevant scientific community,” the number in the United States and Canada purveyors of bitemark dental services can be determined to be 39. This is based on the number of participants taking a recent reliability test administered by the ABFO (out of a total of 100 members of the “elite” ). The 2015 test results were embarassing. The numbers of bitemark readers become even more scarce in Europe and Australia as media accounts indicate only a handful of cases occur. One Aussie dentist advised a journalist last week that a 1954 bitemark in cheese is the “best case in forensic dentistry.”
That said, an experienced dentist in both clinical and forensic dentistry wrote a response to the CDAJ about statements contained in its July article. Here is his letter to the editor in the September 2015 edition.
“I always look forward to the Journal’s occasional entry into the world of forensic odontology. From John Doe identification to mass disaster assistance and victim identifi cations, these dedicated practitioners are accomplishing many worthwhile things. The one facet of this specialty that I was most interested in reading about in the June 2015 issue, however, was bite-mark analysis. Considering the many exonerations recently of persons whose convictions were based solely or partially on bite-mark evidence, I was anxious to see how this practice would be presented to our membership. While “Bite-Mark and Pattern Injury Analysis: A Brief Status Overview” did initially at least acknowledge that there have been some instances where bite-mark evidence has led to false convictions, its author, Gregory Golden, DDS, seemed to spend a good portion of his article belittling the Innocence Project and its proponents as a fringe group to whom no one should pay any attention. The Innocence Project is an admirable group of individuals dedicated to correcting false convictions, regardless of the reasons. They are not trying to get guilty people out of prison. I think it would have been prudent for CDA to have had an opposing viewpoint alongside Dr. Golden’s piece in view of how controversial bite-mark evidence has become. JAMES KENT HOLLENBACK, DDS Santa Paula, Calif.”
The author of the CDAJ bitemark section responds:
Comment: in this following response, the author (a past president of the ABFO and a long-time Fellow of the AAFS) is trifling about the number of cases where District Attorneys use of bite mark evidence contributions have led to convictions which later became exonerations based on DNA. He should re-read this Washington Post article from Feb 2015. The number is 24.
“Thank you, Dr. Hollenback, for your response to the article on bitemark and pattern analysis — fi elds that by nature are controversial and deserve discussion on their respective roles in forensic investigation. What you described as a “belittling” of the Innocence Project (IP) was a compilation of my experience working with that organization at its request and its subsequent contempt for the forensic sciences in general. Every statement in the article about the IP is accurate and verifi able. In May of 2015, an IP lawyer sent his letter of resignation to the board of directors of the Innocence Project of Texas, saying that the national outfi t “… went from being a small nonprofi t to an organization with a multimillion dollar budget. As its size grew, so did its appetite for money …”2 In November of 2014, the Chicago Innocence Project was investigated by the Cook County State’s Attorney who found coercive and unacceptable tactics were used to unlawfully acquire a confession from a man who had served 15 years for the same crime for which an IP exoneree was released from death row.3 On the IP’s website, one of the most interesting statistics provided shows that 235 of the 325 exonerations to date were from eyewitness misidentifi cation. 4 Its data also shows that of the 154 “invalidated/improper” forensics cases cited, bite marks were tagged for only 1.7 percent (fewer than three cases), yet the IP claims at least two dozen cases exist where faulty bite-mark evidence was part of the conviction process. I don’t expect IP lawyers to change their views on bite-mark evidence in the near future. The American Board of Forensic Odontology will hopefully continue to search for ways to improve the science through validation testing and research.”
[references omitted] but are here within the CDAJ article on page 6.
Going to reach 20,000 for 2015.
