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In The News

2015-10-01 | EJI WINS RELEASE OF INNOCENT MAN WRONGLY IMPRISONED FOR 20 YEARS
EJI took on Mr. Dandridge's case and filed a new challenge to his conviction in November 2014. In those proceedings, EJI presented evidence from independent forensic experts who testified that their examination of the fingerprint evidence conclusively excluded Mr. Dandridge. The ABI's examiner had used unreliable procedures to compare the fingerprints and had ignored obvious differences that clearly showed the prints did not belong to Mr. Dandridge. Excluding Mr. Dandridge, the experts found that the fingerprints instead matched the victim's son, eliminating the State's most significant evidence against Mr. Dandridge. Earlier this week, the ABI acknowledged its examiner's error. The Montgomery County District Attorney asked Circuit Court Judge Truman Hobbs to order Mr. Dandridge's release, and the judge ordered Kilby Prison to release him immediately.

2015-10-01 | Lost evidence: Fingerprints rarely used in Oklahoma cases
Oklahoma police rarely fingerprint crime scenes, except for the most serious of cases, such as rape, murder, and arson. And even in those cases, evidence is sometimes handled by police, without gloves, before being shipped to a lab for analysis. The vast majority of felonies, however, are not fingerprinted at all. Fingerprinting is especially rare in rural areas.

2015-09-29 | Who Should Have Access to DNA Evidence?
Next week, the West Virginia Supreme Court will hear a case in which 30 former prosecutors from around the country have taken the unusual step of siding with the defense. It’s a battle over a DNA test, and whether prosecutors must turn the results over to a defendant when they point to his innocence — even if he has made the decision to plead guilty.

2015-09-25 | Ethics at the Crime Scene
First, it’s important to remember that, as a CSO, when you’re called to a crime scene, you’re there because something has gone wrong. Whether you’re dealing with a burglary or a missing child or a major crime, your role, first and foremost, is to help the public. While each situation may vary in its specifics, your job is to approach each scene with the attitude that you’re there to help the victim(s) and to solve the case. In order to do your job well, you must assume each case is going to jury trial. With that assumption in mind, you must act professionally and take the time to process each scene properly. Let’s take a closer look now at what that means.

2015-09-24 | Forcing suspects to reveal phone passwords is unconstitutional, court says
The decision comes amid a growing global debate about encryption and whether the tech sector should build backdoors into their wares to grant the authorities access to locked devices. Ars reported today that an Obama administration working group "considered four backdoors that tech companies could adopt to allow government investigators to decipher encrypted communications stored on phones of suspected terrorists or criminals." Without this capability, the authorities are trying to get suspects to cough up their passwords instead. The Supreme Court has never ruled on the constitutionality of the issue. There's been a smattering of varying court rulings nationwide on the topic. In 2012, a federal appeals court said that forcing a child-porn suspect to decrypt password-protected hard drives would amount to a Fifth Amendment violation.

2015-09-24 | Forensic Failures at IL State Crime Labs May Jeopardize Cases
The ABC7 I-Team uncovered a pattern of forensic failures that could put criminal cases in jeopardy and risk thousands of charges and convictions being thrown out. Unreliability in science is like a bull in a china shop: it can wreck everything. The Illinois state crime lab is under fire by a criminal defendant who may have been wrongly charged- using evidence with inaccurate or unreliable test results - and under fire by defense attorneys and experts alarmed by what they see as shoddy science.

2015-09-23 | Austin Police revisiting 123 crimes following technician lapse
How did this go unnoticed by lab managers? Unlike police officers’ reports which are part of a computer-aided call dispatch system, crime scene techs self-generate their own reports in a separate system. Until Thornton’s alleged lapses, there was no regular auditing system. That is about to change.

2015-09-22 | Oregon Lab Analyst Allegedly Stole Prescription Pills from Evidence Locker
Further details about Larsen and the investigation have not yet been released by authorities. However, the Oregon State Police did confirm that a second analyst is under investigation for possible misconduct dating back over a decade.

2015-09-22 | DNA Sequencing Improved by Slowing Down
DNA sequencing is a technique that can determine exact sequence of a DNA molecule. One of the most critical biological and medical tools available today, it lies at the core of genome analysis. Reading the exact make-up of genes, scientists can detect mutations, or even identify different organisms. A powerful DNA sequencing method uses tiny, nano-sized pores that read DNA as it passes through. However, "nanopore sequencing" is prone to high inaccuracy because DNA usually passes through very fast. EPFL scientists have now discovered a viscous liquid that slows down the process up to a thousand times, vastly improving the method's resolution and accuracy. The breakthrough is published in Nature Nanotechnology.

2015-09-21 | Fingerprint ID issues hit Oklahoma
Background fingerprint checks conducted by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation were unreliable 117 times last year, a report has uncovered. "This current system is not designed to handle the volume of cards that are being submitted,” the OSBI said in its Open Records response. “Due to its age, the system requires regular attention from information technology personnel to keep it functioning. Technology in regards to searching algorithms and matchers has increased tremendously in the past decade.”