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In The News

2015-02-19 | Family faced with digging up body after GBI mix-up
The GBI Crime Lab mixed up the bodies and sent a local funeral home the body of a Clayton County man by mistake. "It is the GBI's mistake. And, I wish they would hurry up and have these remains of this other person moved where I could get my brother buried here," said Lowe. Richmond County Coroner Mark Bowen is rarely speechless, but the mix up has him searching for words. Unfortunately, he says the mix up seems to be a symptom of a more widespread problem with overload at the state crime lab. The Augusta GBI Crime Lab has been without a medical examiner since 2013, so every autopsy has to be done in Atlanta.

2015-02-11 | How to Stop Retracted Papers and Bad Data
In 2011, Bayer Healthcare revealed that, in trying to validate its published research, it was only able to reproduce 25 percent of the data—that is, 75 percent of its data was irreproducible. Just a few months later, Amgen suffered a similar problem, only able to validate 11 percent of its published landmark preclinical studies. Non-related studies have continually demonstrated that an estimated 50 percent or more of published data is actually irreproducible.

2015-02-10 | Starting April 1st, big changes to how the state collects DNA from those arrested, convicted
“Gary Ridgeway was the Green River killer. One of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history. If the rules in place now were in place in the early 80s, literally 60 to 70 women would be alive. Because the only thing he had was a misdemeanor conviction for prostitution,” O’Keefe said.

2015-02-06 | For Police Body Cameras, Big Costs Loom in Storing Footage
"Everybody is screaming, 'We need body cameras.' But nobody is saying, where is the money coming from? What are you going to do with all the data? Who is going to manage it?" said Sgt. Jason Halifax of the Des Moines Police Department, which is struggling to identify a funding source for $300,000 to start a program. "Are we going to cut personnel? Are we going to increase taxes?"

2015-02-03 | APD forensics lab has backlog of more than 3,000 cases
Currently, there are 1,567 cases that need to be analyzed for initial APFIS testing and 1,693 cases that are latent assignments. The majority of the cases are property crimes. Manley said the lab prioritizes violent crimes and aims to test property crime prints before the statute of limitations expires on the case.

2015-02-02 | Math Predicts Patterns in Fingerprints, Raisins
The researchers say the theory, reported this week in the journal Nature Materials, may help to generally explain how fingerprints and wrinkles form.

2015-02-02 | Fingerprint Examiners Found to Have Very Low Error Rates
WASHINGTON - A large-scale study of the accuracy and reliability of decisions made by latent fingerprint examiners found that examiners make extremely few errors. Even when examiners did not get an independent second opinion about the decisions, they were remarkably accurate. But when decisions were verified by an independent reviewer, examiners had a 0% false positive, or incorrect identification, rate and a 3% false negative, or missed identification, rate. The study was released today and funded by the Office of Justice Programs’ National Institute of Justice (NIJ).

2015-01-30 | Next-Gen Sequencing Maps ‘Highly Degraded’ DNA
Researchers obtain a more robust analysis of the DNA samples by analyzing short tandem repeats (STRs), along with other valuable genetic markers, like single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, pronounced “snips”) that regulate physical traits like eye and hair color, in the same data sets. With more information being examined from “highly degraded” samples, NGS technology can be critically important in cases concerning missing persons or unidentifiable human remains and in mass disaster situations, Holt said. With SNPs, the analysis can also determine valuable physical traits that can be useful to police for finding persons of interest, or limiting suspect pools in ongoing investigations. “There’s less money involved, less time and less effort,” Holt said, “with better quantitative and qualitative results at the end of the workflow.” The technology, once accepted in the forensic community, is the next step forward in DNA sequencing, she said.

2015-01-29 | NIST Forensic Science Standards Committees to Hold First Public Meetings
In December 2014, OSAC subcommittees began reviewing a NIST-developed preliminary inventory of forensic science standards, guidelines and related documents. That review marked the start of OSAC’s work toward developing an OSAC Registry of Approved Standards and an OSAC Registry of Approved Guidelines.

2015-01-15 | DNA and case preparation
DNA mixtures introduce a whole new level of complexity, and a recent ‘hot topic’ has been how to interpret complex mixtures from low-level, incomplete samples [2]. Here, the conventional (and transparent) methods of analysis break down. Reporting analysts have been unable to provide any statistical basis for the possible inclusion of a match to a suspect’s profile within such mixtures.