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At North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation, most forensic scientists are cops. So are their bosses. Their bosses’ bosses are prosecutors, the chain stopping at Attorney General Roy Cooper. The Raleigh News & Observer, in the third of a series, says this arrangement often forces analysts to become advocates, in lock step with police and prosecutors, shaping evidence needed to deliver a conviction. (more…)
For years. cities have tried to predict where criminals will strike by studying neighborhood crime trends, using what has happened in the past to determine what might happen in the future. Now, reports the Florida Times-Union, researchers believe they have developed a math model to help police identify and eliminate emerging crime hot spots. “We can actually define where you get hot spots and where you won’t,” said Jeffrey Brantingham, a UCLA associate professor of anthropology who has been working to define crime patterns. (more…)
The U.S. Justice Department will offer grants next year in a new program to study the nation’s public defender system. Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor now running a Justice Department “Access to Justice” program, announced the grants in a keynote address yesterday at the National Institute of Justice’s annual conference. Tribe said the nation faces a “justice crisis” that could be helped if more good research can be done on better ways of representing the poor and middle class in criminal cases. “A great deal comes down to being smart about criminal and civil justice rather than being ‘tough’ just to prove a point,” Tribe said. (more…)
Questionable forensic testimony has kept Joseph Ramirez behind bars in Florida for 25 years. Will a fifth trial finally set him free?
When the National Academy of Sciences issued a report earlier this year saying that courtroom identifications made by forensic scientists based on evidence such as bite marks, ballistics and other tool marks are frequently overstated and without scientific basis, the academy could well have pointed to the 25-year-long prosecution of Joseph Ramirez in Florida to illustrate its point.
The field of forensics is undergoing a self-examination after a report by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences found “serious problems” with much of the work performed by crime laboratories in the United States, reports the New York Times. Recent incidents of faulty evidence analysis were just high-profile examples of wider deficiencies, the committee said. Crime labs were overworked, there were few certification programs for investigators and technicians, and the entire field suffered from a lack of oversight.
But perhaps the most damning conclusion was that many forensic disciplines — including analysis of fingerprints and bite marks — were not grounded in the kind of rigorous, peer-reviewed research that is the hallmark of classic science. DNA analysis was an exception, the report noted. But many other investigative tests, the report said, “have never been exposed to stringent scientific scrutiny.” While some forensic experts took issue with that conclusion, many welcomed it. The report was “basically saying what many of us have been saying for a long time,” said Lawrence Kobilinsky of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “There are a lot of areas in forensics that need improvement.”
When the National Academy of Sciences released a comprehensive report on February 18 laying out serious shortcomings in forensic science, the nation’s preeminent scientific organization also presented a road map for reform.
The NAS report shows that many forensic techniques which are relied on in courtrooms every day lack adequate scientific support. While DNA testing was developed through extensive scientific research at top academic centers, many other forensic techniques – such as hair microscopy, bite mark comparisons, fingerprint analysis, firearms, tool marks and shoe print analysis – have never been subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation.
Several of the 200 people who have been freed because DNA tests performed after their convictions showed they could not have committed the crimes have joined civil rights groups, some current and former prosecutors, and a convicted Alaskan rapist in urging the Supreme Court to apply constitutional protections for the first time to what the prisoners’ lawyers call “arguably the most important development in the history of forensic science: the advent of DNA testing,” reports the Washington Post. They are opposed by victims rights groups; the vast majority of states, which have a patchwork of laws granting DNA access; and the federal government. The governments say that creating a constitutional right to the testing would infringe on states’ rights, overwhelm them with frivolous demands, and create an endless right of appeal.
On Mar. 2, the Supreme Court will hear its first case that confronts the dilemma of how to deal with DNA evidence, which former attorney general John Ashcroft called the “truth machine of law enforcement.” The Innocence Project, representing convicted Alaskan rapist William Osborne in the Supreme Court case, says that DNA evidence has helped exonerate 232 prisoners, 17 of whom had been sentenced to death. Osborne was convicted of the brutal rape and assault of a prostitute in a secluded area near the Anchorage International Airport in 1993.
