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In The News

2017-10-05 | DNA Mixtures Topic of ISHI Talks, NIST Testing—and ‘Conflict of Interest’ Accusations
DNA mixtures are a growing concern in the world of forensic science. The detection of even miniscule touch DNA in a pool of blood, or the skin cells left behind on the handle of a kitchen knife that later becomes a murder weapon, is now more possible than ever before with hypersensitive instruments. Forensic experts contend detectives and scientists need to be able to understand how the invisible ATCG alphabet soup at a crime scene may implicate a murderer, an innocent person—or both.

2017-10-02 | Albuquerque Fingerprint Backlog Increases to 6,000 Cases
At the Albuquerque Metropolitan Forensics Science Center, 6,000 latent fingerprint packets are waiting to be processed. The backlog has increased 20-fold since 2014, according to APD data. In 2014, there were five forensic scientists and approximately 300 backlogged cases. Back then, prints took one to two months to process. Now, latent fingerprints can wait anywhere from one week to 16 months to be processed depending on the Bernalillo County Case Management Order.

2017-09-28 | Sheriff, Forensic Experts Say Convicted Murderer is Innocent, Based on DNA Analysis
But after testifying at trial, Burton did an unusual thing. Instead of filing away all the samples that were collected, she put some blood samples right in the investigative file. She had done so on other cases, which have led to high-profile exonerations over the last two decades based on the DNA preserved in those small swaths. In this case, there were 42 blood samples taken from the house. From the samples preserved by Burton the DNA experts were able to cull 11 partial profiles. All of them had less than 16 CODIS loci, since the genetic material had deteriorated without proper preservation. But those partial samples were exculpatory, said the experts revisiting the case. Instead, it shows two men were bleeding in that house where the two Haysom bodies were found, they added.

2017-09-25 | First Large Scale Study of Cocaine Users Leads to Breakthrough in Drug Testing
The study involved taking fingerprints from a group of patients seeking treatment at drug rehabilitation centres, as well as a larger group not known to be drug users. All of those taking part washed their hands before the test in a variety of ways, and then samples were collected on the prepared chromatography paper. The fingerprint is developed using chemicals, so that the ridges of the fingerprint (and therefore the identity of the donor) can be established prior to analysis. When someone has taken cocaine, they excrete traces of benzoylecgonine and methylecgonine as they metabolise the drug, and these chemical indicators are present in fingerprint residue. Importantly, the traces can still be detected even after handwashing.

2017-09-21 | Court Asked to Dismiss Cases Tied to Former Drug Lab Chemist
A petition submitted Wednesday to the state’s highest court seeks the dismissal of every case connected to a convicted former state chemist who authorities say was high almost every day she went to work at a state drug lab for eight years. The petition was filed with the Supreme Judicial Court by the state’s public defender agency, called the Committee for Public Counsel Services, and by two women whose drug possession convictions are tied to evidence handled by chemist Sonja Farak.

2017-09-20 | To catch a paedophile, you only need to look at their hands
The piece of evidence was an eight-second-long digital video clip. Marsh had been working on a case involving a teenage girl who had alleged that her father had been coming into her bedroom at night to molest her. When her mother refused to believe her, the girl left her webcam running all night, pointed at her bed. The camera captured a person's hand and forearm touching her. Her father denied that he was the person in the video. "It was one of the spookiest and scariest things that I have ever seen," explains Black. "A real sort of horror movie."

2017-09-15 | AAAS: ‘Decades of Overstatement of Latent Print Examiners’ Now Mean No Fingerprint ‘Matches’
Forensic Magazine has conducted searches of case histories to find convictions based on erroneous fingerprint matching, but has not yet found an instance of such a problem. Some critics point to the two-week arrest of U.S. citizen Brandon Mayfield for the 2004 Madrid terrorist bombings as an example of the limitations of fingerprint matching (Mayfield was discovered through an error by a computer system, as well as mistakes by FBI examiners. But he was cleared long before prosecutors could build a case against him).

2017-09-14 | Signs of Optimism at Troubled Austin Crime Lab
No mold has been detected inside the 520 rape kits sent out for testing since the Austin Police Department discovered a mold-like substance growing on 849 of their backlogged kits in April. But the crime lab saga is far from over. As APD works to clear the backlog and erase doubts about its still-operating labs, the Capital Area Private Defender Service sits in the thick of its materiality review, as the Travis County District Attor­ney's Office covers its tracks via Brady notices to those convicted in part by DNA evidence analyzed at APD.

2017-09-12 | Fingerprints on Bomb Central to Terror Trial of US Citizen
Muhanad Mahmoud Al Farekh, who was born in Houston and raised in Dubai, was captured by security forces in Pakistan in 2014. His case has drawn extra attention because of reports American officials had debated whether to try to kill him in a drone strike, a step almost never taken against U.S. citizens. The administration of President Barack Obama ultimately decided to try for a capture and civilian prosecution instead. Farehk, 31, has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to murder U.S. nationals, conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and other crimes. There was no response to a request for comment from his defense team. Most the charges against Farehk stem from an attack at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost City, Afghanistan, on Jan. 19, 2009, involving two vehicles rigged with explosives and driven by suicide bombers. An initial blast injured several Afghans, including a pregnant woman, but a much larger bomb failed to go off, sparing the lives of American soldiers. Forensic technicians in Afghanistan recovered 18 of Farehks’ fingerprints on adhesive packing tape used to bind the explosives on the unexploded bomb, prosecutors said in a court filing.

2017-09-12 | Solving Crimes With Soil Bacteria
The goal of this research, supported by the National Institute of Justice, is to develop a “soil individualization technique” that would allow a forensic expert to produce objective, statistical data to conclusively show, for example, that the soil on a shovel possessed by a suspect matches the soil at the burial site where a victim was found. Using next-generation sequencing (NGS) of bacterial DNA, Foran has utilized supervised classification techniques to classify the bacterial makeup of a soil sample and give values that are, he said, “completely objective.”