• 
  
  
  Home
• 
  
  Backlog
  Reduction
• Laboratory
  Assessment &
  Enhancement
  Services
• 
  
  Customized
  Training
• 
  
  Biometric
  Identification
  • What is it?
  • Why Is It Important? »
    • Corporate Responsibility
  • What Is It Used For? »
    • Kidnap/Ransom
    • Disaster Situations/
                     Incident Investigation
  • Modes of Identification »
    • DNA
    • Friction Ridge Skin
    • Facial Recognition
    • Iris Capture
    • Dental X-Ray
    • Other Modes
  • Risk Assessment & Custom BI
  • FAQs
• 
  
  Other
  Services
  • Law Enforcement
  • Corporate/Insurance
• 
  
  
  Resources
• 
  
  
  About Us
  • Matt Schwarz
• 
  
  
  Contact

In The News

2018-05-16 | Missouri Man Freed After Judge Slams Homicide Investigation
Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley and the county prosecutor issued statements that holding charges would be dismissed after Judge Darrell Massey, who was appointed to review the case for the Missouri Supreme Court, found in February that there was "clear and convincing evidence" that Robinson "is actually innocent" of killing Sheila Box. She was shot to death in 2000 after leaving a bar she co-owned in Sikeston, in Missouri's southeastern corner, with $300 in cash and checks.

2018-05-15 | Fingerprint Analysis Could Finally Get Scientific, Thanks to a New Tool
There wasn’t anything particularly unusual about the court-martial at the Fort Huachuca military base in Arizona at the end of February. But when the analyst from the Department of Defense forensic laboratory presented a report on fingerprint evidence, it included an element that had never been used with fingerprint evidence in a courtroom in the United States before: a number. That number, produced by a software program called FRStat, told the court the probability that the similarity between two fingerprints in question would be seen in two prints from the same person. Basic as it may sound, using any empirical or numerical evidence in fingerprint analysis is a major addition to a discipline that typically just relies on the interpretation of an individual expert—which opens it up to criticism. Fingerprint evidence isn’t infallible and, like a lot of forensic science, has led to high-profile false convictions.

2018-05-11 | Judiciary Charts Steps Taken to Rectify Crime Lab Irregularities
Alleged misconduct by a New Jersey crime lab technician has prompted charges against 1,160 criminal defendants to be marked for dismissal because purported drug evidence in those cases was destroyed, according to a judge supervising cases impacted by the lab’s problems.

2018-05-10 | Texas Forensic Science Commission Report Prompts ‘Course Correction’ at Private Lab
The prosecution’s expert was Bruce Budowle, former FBI scientist and currently head of the Institute of Applied Genetics at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. Budowle’s interpretation was vastly different than that of NMS. Based off his findings, the state filed a motion to disqualify the NMS findings. Their contention was that the DNA had been amplified and then interpreted improperly, which muddled the results. A Promega expert on the technology also testified about NMS’s “misuse” of the technology, according to court documents. The court agreed, contending that NMS did not follow its own protocols. At the time, the court described the testimony as “incomprehensible,” “uninformative” and “misleading,” and said that the lab “ignored its own validation data.” The court threw out the DNA results produced by NMS Labs, according to the decision in January 2015.

2018-05-10 | Texas Forensic Science Commission Report Prompts ‘Course Correction’ at Private Lab
Now the Texas Forensic Science Commission has cited the laboratory’s failings in an extensive report on the case, touching off a series of reviews and changes at the private lab. The report has prompted a lab-wide review of about 1,500 DNA analyses handled by National Medical Services (NMS), Inc., a Pennsylvania-based forensic and medical facility, to see if “overblown data” may have affected other cases across the country. The NMS lab has agreed to a major “course correction” requested by the Texas forensic watchdog agency.

2018-05-09 | Court Asked to Levy Fines for Misconduct in Lab Scandal
Defense attorneys and civil libertarians in Massachusetts urged the state's highest court on Tuesday to impose fines against the state attorney general's office for the misconduct of two former prosecutors who tried to minimize the scope of a state drug lab scandal. A judge found that two former assistant attorneys general withheld evidence about the scope of the misconduct of former chemist Sonja Farak, who authorities say was high almost every day she worked at the state drug lab for eight years. Farak pleaded guilty in 2014 to stealing drugs from the state crime lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was sentenced to 18 months behind bars.

2018-05-08 | Parabon, Known for Phenotyping, Announces Genealogy Service
Now Parabon, a company known for its composite facial images drawn from DNA profiles, is offering a new forensic genealogy service to those detectives with those nagging unfinished investigations. Already the company has screened samples from 100 agencies around the country, according to Steven Armentrout, the Parabon CEO. Approximately half the cases analyzed so far are solvable, Armentrout says. About 20 percent could be directly solvable with the genealogy methods, and another 30 percent would be likely solvable with law enforcement partnership and detection, he explained.

2018-05-01 | Houston DWI cases being reviewed because of analyst’s history of false testimony
The Harris County District Attorneys Office has been ordered by the state science commission to review DWI cases overseen by a veteran county scientist because of questions about her honesty while testifying under oath. In a report released Friday by the Texas Forensic Science Commission, the state agency said Fessessework Guale, who worked for the medical examiner’s office for ten years, repeatedly testified that she received a different master's degree than what she earned and made other mistakes while testifying in criminal trials.

2018-04-30 | Earlier Search for California Serial Killer Led to Wrong Man
Investigators hunting for the so-called Golden State Killer turned to searching genetic websites in 2017 but misidentified an Oregon man as a potential suspect. A year later, after using a similar technique, they are confident they've caught the serial rapist and killer who eluded capture for four decades. In March 2017, an Oregon City police officer, working at the request of investigators in California, convinced a judge to order a 73-year-old man in a nursing home to provide a DNA sample.

2018-04-24 | Jurors Trust Expert Testimony and Match Probabilities Equally—Up to a Point
Fingerprints were the first linchpin of modern forensic science, providing a century of breakthroughs in identification. Recent efforts to reform forensic science, however, have criticized latent fingerprint analysis as not quantitative enough, and based too much on the subjective comparison of the testifying expert. Recent changes to the uniform language rules in federal courtrooms have attempted to acknowledge the uncertainty in positively making a match, to the exclusion of all others.