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In The News

2019-06-20 | We need to fix forensics. But how?
Ten years ago, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a groundbreaking study on the use of forensics in criminal trials. The study found that, in the “pattern matching” fields of forensics in particular, expert witnesses had been vastly overstating the significance and certainty of their analyses. For some fields, such as bite-mark analysis, the study found no scientific research at all to support the central claims of practitioners.

2019-06-14 | State Supreme Court blasts renowned forensic scientist Henry Lee and throws out 1989 murder convictions of two New Milford men
In a unanimous decision released Friday afternoon, the state Supreme Court threw out the 1989 murder convictions of two New Milford men and delivered a stinging rebuke to renowned forensic science expert Henry Lee, whose inaccurate testimony put them in prison for decades.

2019-03-21 | Louisiana man released from prison after 36 years for a crime he didn't commit
Archie Williams, was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1983 for a rape and stabbing of a woman in East Baton Rouge Parish. The 19th Judicial District Court of East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, ruling was based on new evidence of Williams’ innocence–a search in the FBI’s national fingerprint database which linked fingerprints left at the crime scene to the true assailant, a man who committed at least five other rapes in the years after the 1982 rape for which Williams was wrongly convicted.

2019-03-20 | The Chemists and the Cover-Up
The twin Massachusetts drug lab scandals are unprecedented in the sheer number of cases thrown out because of forensic misconduct. Between the two women, 47,000 drug convictions and guilty pleas have been dismissed in the last two years, many for misdemeanor possession. Many more are likely to follow, with the total expected to exceed 50,000.

2019-02-06 | How 'Optical Tweezers' Could Address One of Crime Labs' Biggest Challenges
Dawson Cruz, along with Sarah Seashols-Williams, Ph.D., assistant professor of forensic science, and Joseph Reiner, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Physics, have found that an "optical tweezer"—a compact, strongly focused laser beam that uses an immersion objective lens on an inverted microscope to create an optical trap—is effective at separating mixed cells, such as sperm and vaginal cells, within a solution. "In sex assault case work, you'll often have sperm cells mixed with many other cell types," Reiner said. "It's easy to identify a sperm cell under a microscope. So we take our laser tweezers and use them to pick out the sperm cells and isolate them from the other cell types. After this, we can extract them for DNA analysis."

2019-01-17 | The FBI Says Its Photo Analysis Is Scientific Evidence. Scientists Disagree.
The bureau’s image unit has linked defendants to crime photographs for decades using unproven techniques and baseless statistics. Studies have begun to raise doubts about the unit’s methods.

2019-01-13 | Bad forensic science is putting innocent people in prison
On an April night in 1989, Jo Ann Parks survived a house fire in the Southern California city of Bell that claimed the lives of her three small children. Two years later, investigators announced that the seeming accident was actually a monstrous crime in which the 23-year-old waitress had set several fires, then barricaded her 4-year-old son inside a closet so he could not escape. Convicted through the power of forensic fire science, Parks was sentenced to life in prison without parole. She has steadfastly proclaimed her innocence. Nearly 30 years later, a revolution in the understanding of fire has exposed many of the scientific certainties of the era as guesswork in disguise — including forensic evidence used to convict Parks that was flat-out wrong.

2019-01-02 | Illinois mom wrongly convicted of murder
In 2002 she was convicted of first-degree murder, largely based on the testimony of two bloodstain-pattern analysts. However, she was exonerated in 2006 and acquitted at a retrial thanks to the work of a legal team from the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law in Chicago.

2018-12-21 | Lab contamination slows progress on Kentucky's rape kit backlog
Contamination at an out-of-state laboratory that tests rape kits has delayed progress on thousands of backlogged kits in Kentucky. Staff at Kentucky State Police’s central forensic laboratory in Frankfort caught the error in late May as part of their normal data review process.

2018-12-21 | Texas Court: Man Convicted of Murder by Bite Marks ‘Actually Innocent’
The case against a man convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the 1987 murder of a Dallas couple was based largely on a bite mark on one of the bodies. The forensic odontologist testified in court that there was a 1-in-a-million chance that someone other than Steven Mark Chaney left the impressions there. Decades later, the dentist said he was wrong. Chaney went free in 2015. And now, a Texas appeals court has declared him, after 28 years behind bars, “actually innocent.” Could it mark the final turning point for some bite-mark evidence in American courtrooms? The Innocence Project, which counts at least 25 wrongful arrested or convictions due to erroneous bite mark analysis, seems to think so.