I’ve been waiting to see signs of this and, after seeing airline security alert levels raised today, the stories are starting to emerge. Here’s a story about a technology that uses video cameras to scan luggage for suspicious items by monitoring the electromagnetic energy given off by different objects. So explosives can be theoretically be […]
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 […]
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 […]
In apparent recognition of the CSI Effect, the American Judicature Society has finally convened a Commission on Forensic Science and Public Policy, co-chaired by former Attorney General Janet Reno, former FBI Director William Webster, and Carnegie Mellon University Statistician Stephen Feinberg. The Commission includes 38 high profile scientists, law professors, defense attorneys, prosecutors, cops […]
Justice Alito has been pro-prosecution most of his professional life, serving as a Federal Prosecutor in New Jersey before taking the bench. But in a move no doubt designed to balance his image in the public eye, his first Opinion assignment was to write for a unanimous Court reversing a South Carolina conviction in a […]
I’ve been in jury trial these last few days but I’ve got some free time now. This morning my jury came back with their verdict. There were many issues in the case, but one point I drove home in cross examination and final argument was that, of the five police cars that pulled up to […]
I’ve talked about it here and seen it in action in my own practice. The “CSI Effect” is entrenching itself into mainstream public perceptions of the criminal process. With DNA exonerations becoming as newsworthy as tomorrow’s weather, and the utter saturation of crimeshow television, public expectations have set the technology bar high: if you don’t […]
With all the reporting going on about exonerations of innocent people, legislatures are finally starting to ask the question: why? The answers are many and varied: poor quality control in crime labs (see other stories on this site), inappropriate reliance on faulty eye-witness identification, and — let’s face it — overworked police who desire nothing […]
For 24 years Robert Clark was emphatic that he was innocent of rape and kidnap charges brought against him in 1981. After the victim “identified” Clark, however, a jury convicted him and off he went to begin a life in prison. His mother died while he was in jail, and his 3 year old son […]