False confessions are a strange animal. Most people just can’t conceive of why anyone would ever confess to a crime they didn’t commit, particularly serious crimes like homicide or rape. But when you look closely at the many cases where exactly that has happened, you see a familiar recurring pattern: defendants in custody are simply […]

If you don’t yet believe that individual liberties are being continually eroded, wait till you hear this one. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (otherwise known as the Future Supreme Court Justices of America), in its infinite wisdom, recently upheld an FCC regulation that requires providers of Voice Over IP […]

I was asked recently to write an article on Fingerprints and while doing research I came across the story of Victor Reyes, a Florida man who was put on trial for murder based on a fingerprint found at the scene and ultimately linked to him. What caught my eye was the fact that the latent […]

An interesting new case out of Pennsylvania portends some real conflict ahead. When a Pennsylvania man was tried for murder, prosecutors created a Computer-Generated Animation (CGA) movie depicting their version of the murder. The short film was generated with software commonly used by animators and was based on actual forensic evidence offered at the trial. […]

In a very close decision, the US Supreme Court took the unusual step of overruling the Court of Appeals and granting a deathrow inmate the opportunity to raise new claims of actual innocence through habeas corpus proceedings that the lower court ruled were precluded under existing legal doctrine. Prisoners in such cases are required to […]

I’ve written here about defendants using technology to convict themselves, but this one takes the prize. Justin Barber is on trial in Florida for murdering his wife. He claims that a mugger accosted him and his wife as they walked along a beach, shooting them both. Unfortunately for Mr. Barber, forensic computer experts found evidence […]