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In The News

2015-10-08 | Review of old forensic hair cases begins
Massachusetts State Police began reviewing cases where its crime lab analysts conducted the kind of pre-DNA forensic hair analysis that has since been widely discredited, a review that parallels one by the FBI that has already led to wrongful convictions being reversed.

2015-10-08 | The Dark Side of DNA Databases
As news of these unexpected pairings swept the nation, lawyers in other cities pressed for similar searches. If there were 122 matches in a 65,000-person sized database, how many such matches might be found in the 11 million-person national database? But rather than embrace the inquiry, the FBI called the Arizona results “misleading” and “meaningless,” and suppressed the findings. FBI leaders reprimanded the Arizona lab, claiming that disclosing the results violated its agreement with the FBI. They further threatened to cut off access to the national database to any lab that independently conducted their own such studies.

2015-10-07 | Forensic backlogs threaten speedy trial rights, says DA
The backlog at the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences is forcing them to wait, and one North Alabama district attorney is calling the situation "catastrophic." Colbert County DA Robert Bryce Jr. says this problem doesn't just affect him, it affects all of Alabama. He says if it gets worse, it could lead to an accused criminal walking right out of jail.

2015-10-05 | Did New York State Police scapegoat its crime lab scientists?
"There was no statistical significant difference on the examinations between any of these three groups," he said. "It's clear that they did talk and they did share, but over 90 percent if not more of what they were doing was their own work. ... The bottom line is they actually learned it quite well."

2015-10-05 | 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.

2015-10-01 | 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.