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In The News

2015-11-17 | Oxygen Isotopes Offer New Details in 30-Year-Old Multiple-Murder Case
One November morning in 1985, hunters came upon the 55-gallon drum in the New Hampshire woods. They opened it, and made a horrifying discovery. Stuffed inside were the bodies of a woman and a young girl. Fifteen years later, investigators combing the woods for clues on the long-unsolved case came upon the unthinkable, just a short distance away: yet another barrel. This one contained the bodies of two more little girls.

2015-11-16 | DNA Mixture Calculation Method Just ‘Random Number Generator,’ Says New Study
The method used at crime labs nationwide for 15 years, the Combined Probability of Inclusion (CPI), is not accurate, according to a new study published by a company that says they have the big-computing solution to analyze the data more accurately. Both prosecutors and defense attorneys could benefit by using their software, more than a decade in development by the Pittsburgh-based company Cybergenetics. “CPI’s a random number generator,” said Mark Perlin, the company’s founder, told Forensic Magazine in a phone interview. “The culture in forensic science makes it normative to spend an hour or two ‘normalizing’ data… But (in medicine) you don’t hear of X-ray techs playing with an image for hours on end.”

2015-11-16 | Not so fast with that rapid DNA
In the United States, the FBI is currently seeking to use the rapid DNA technology in law enforcement, particularly in police stations and at crime scenes. Unlike in Canada, many American jurisdictions allow for collection of DNA samples from arrestees, which then get added into a national DNA databank. Samples collected on arrest are checked against DNA evidence in open investigations — such as those collected from break-and-enter or sexual assault crime scenes — to see if that particular arrestee is implicated in unsolved cases.

2015-11-10 | It's Time to Take 'The Bite' Out of Court Convictions
The popular criminal forensic investigation television shows portray every forensic science investigation tool and technique as infallible and always accurate. But, in real life, this is not true. Some of the forensic science procedures used in criminal investigations are very controversial. One example is whether or not the bite marks left on a human body by another human being should be used as evidence in court during criminal trials. This has been debated for decades, with some scientists, dentists and legal scholars claiming that using bite marks left by a human being on the body of another human being, as criminal evidence in court, is junk science. Other scientists, dentists and legal scholars say human bite marks are solid criminal evidence if the investigator knows what he/she is doing when they analyze them.

2015-11-10 | Why Post-Conviction DNA Testing Works: An Interview with Kirk Bloodsworth
After being exonerated in 2003, Bloodsworth devoted his life to reforming the justice system and ensuring that the accused have adequate access to a proper defense. But most importantly that they have the means to test significant evidence for any traces of DNA that may not have been tested during the trial. Called post-conviction DNA testing, the technique eventually helped Bloodsworth prove his innocence.

2015-11-09 | Secondary Transfer a New Phenomenon in Touch DNA
The results won’t cause a wholesale reevaluation of criminal convictions, contends Cynthia Cale, the lead author of the study forthcoming in the January issue of the Journal of Forensic Science. Cale told Forensic Magazine that now is a crucial time to begin understanding how touch DNA needs to be interpreted and analyzed – not just by forensic analysts, but also by prosecutors and defense attorneys. The new technology means we have to relearn how to think about DNA, she said in the phone interview. “With the increased sensitivity, we’re going to be detecting more DNA regardless,” Cale said. “It could be any DNA left on that object, and it’s going to cause interpretation to be more complicated. I don’t think it’s calling into question old cases – it’s now and into the future,” she added. Cale’s experiments began with a two-minute handshake between two people then handling a knife led to the DNA profile of the person who never touched the weapon being identified on the swab of the weapon handle in 85 percent of the samples, according to a new study by University of Indianapolis researchers, entitled “Could Secondary DNA Transfer Falsely Place Someone at the Scene of a Crime?” In one-fifth of those experiments, the person who had never directly touched the knife was identified as the main or only contributor of the DNA on the handle, according to the study. Cale called the results potentially “scary,” in a school statement announcing the results.

2015-11-02 | Medical-Marijuana Patient Alleges Prosecutors Swayed Crime Lab Drug Tests
"Michigan State Police laboratory policy was changed to include the statement “origin unknown” when it is not possible to determine if THC originates from a plant (marihuana) or synthetic means," Banner wrote to Forensic. "This change makes it clear that the source of the THC should not be assumed from the lab results."

2015-11-02 | Super-Sensitive Techniques Make DNA Evidence Lie Sometimes, Expert Says
DNA found under the fingernails of murdered California millionaire Raveesh Kumra led police to Lukis Anderson of San Jose. But after Anderson spent five months in jail, investigators found out that Anderson, a homeless alcoholic, had in fact been drunk and passed out in a hospital at the time of the attack. He couldn't have committed the murder. But investigators discovered that two paramedics who had picked up and moved Anderson also responded to the Kumra murder scene. Police determined that DNA from Anderson somehow got transferred to Kumra's body by the paramedics.

2015-10-30 | Forensic DNA evidence is not infallible
Research done by me and others at the University of Indianapolis in Indiana has highlighted how unreliable this kind of evidence can be. We have found that it is relatively straightforward for an innocent person's DNA to be inadvertently transferred to surfaces that he or she has never come into contact with. This could place people at crime scenes that they had never visited or link them to weapons they had never handled.

2015-10-29 | Crime Lab Scandals Just Keep Getting Worse
Earlier this year, I wrote about a sprawling prosecutorial scandal in Orange County, California, involving a long-standing program of secret jailhouse snitches that had tainted prosecutions in cases almost too numerous to count. This story has only continued to worsen. One of the prosecutors at the heart of the case simply packed up and left California last month, and just this week the news emerged that Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas had been told that his office might have a jailhouse informant problem all the way back to 1999, a full 16 years before the current allegations about the misuse of jailhouse snitches had surfaced.