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In The News

2018-05-22 | Kansas City rape kit backlog means victims are still waiting for justice
A case against a sexual predator is moving forward in Kansas City, but there are new questions about why 57-year-old Arthur Norman Jr. was left on the streets for 18 months after what's believed to be his latest known attack. As it turns out, Arthur Norman had attacked women and girls before. In the Eudora case, a 23-year-old Norman was convicted after breaking into a home and trying to rape two women, ages 40 and 18, and an 11-year-old girl. Norman went to prison and served 15 years of a 40-year sentence. Almost two years to the day after his release, he molested a 6-year-old girl in Jackson County, Missouri. For that crime he served nearly seven years. Norman is a serial sexual predator. Others like him are kept on the streets during lengthy forensic testing.

2018-05-21 | Wisconsin Man, Casualty Of Flawed Hair Forensics, Latest To Be Exonerated
A Wisconsin man who spent two decades in prison based in part on flawed FBI forensic work has been cleared of rape, battery and burglary charges, the latest in a series of exonerations around the country based on the now-discredited technique of microscopic hair comparison. Dane County Circuit Judge Nicholas McNamara approved a motion by the Dane County District Attorney’s Office on Thursday to dismiss all charges against Richard Beranek, 59. In the motion, the prosecution said while it still has a "strong belief" in Beranek’s guilt, it was dropping the charges to spare the victim of the 1987 home invasion and sexual assault from additional trauma. On Friday, attorneys for Beranek said the dismissal came just days after DNA testing on crime scene evidence "revealed a distinct male DNA profile that was not Mr. Beranek’s."

2018-05-21 | The unconscionable backlog of unprocessed rape kits in California
Yet for years many law enforcement agencies have struggled with enormous backlogs in the processing of those rape kits due to lack of funding or follow-through, or, in many cases, because the identity of the accused isn't in question. Two proposed laws in Sacramento would help create a better understanding of the scope of the backlog in California — no reliable estimate exists — and require local law enforcement and crime labs to process the kits and submit valid DNA samples to a state database. Both bills deserve support. The rape kit backlog is, unfortunately, not a new problem, though some jurisdictions have worked hard to address the issue. The Los Angeles Police Department responded to pressure from Human Rights Watch and other advocacy groups a decade ago and worked its way through a backlog of more than 6,000 kits.

2018-05-20 | In 1983, four people were murdered in a home in Chino Hills, Calif.
Soon sheriff’s deputies were swarming all over the Ryen house in affluent, suburban Chino Hills, east of Los Angeles, that day in June 1983. Several signs, including Josh’s personal account, pointed to three white attackers, and blond or brown hairs were found in the victims’ hands, as if torn off in a struggle. Sheriff’s deputies were also contacted by the woman whose boyfriend was a convicted murderer, recently released from prison, whom she suspected of involvement in the Ryen killings. She not only gave deputies his bloody coveralls but also told them that his hatchet was missing from his tool rack and resembled one of the weapons reportedly used in the attacks. But instead of testing the coveralls for the Ryens’ blood, the deputies threw them away–and pursued Cooper. After a racially charged trial, he was convicted of murdering the Ryens and Chris Hughes and is now on death row at San Quentin Prison. Gov. Jerry Brown is refusing to allow advanced DNA testing that might finally resolve the question of who committed the murders, even though Cooper’s defense would pay for it. Brown refuses to allow even advanced testing of the blond or brown hairs that were found in the victims’ hands.

2018-05-19 | NIST Improving Rolled Fingerprint Technology (Learn More, Videos)
Fingerprint capture technology has advanced to the point where high-quality rolled prints soon might be obtained without the manual assistance of a trained device operator, according to a new report issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). These advancements could help law enforcement collect information-rich prints more rapidly and economically. The document, NIST Interagency Report (NISTIR) 8210, Nail to Nail Fingerprint Challenge: Prize Analysis, details the methods used in a recent IARPA-sponsored challenge whose overall goal was to improve fingerprint capture technology.

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.