I’ve reported here regularly about the many post-conviction exonerations that have followed questionable convictions originally based on junk science. A lot of them have happened in Texas. So many so, that even the Houston City Council decided to hire a professional investigator to come in and take a look at their crime labs and assess […]
As I’ve reported here in the past, even the reliability of such forensic mainstays as fingerprint analysis has come under attack, mostly because of abuses that can occur whenever zealous crusaders get it in their head to zero in on a focused suspect at the expense of actual science. In the heat of the Madrid […]
Back from the holidays!
I continue to see examples of a growing national trend toward institutional skepticism of the forensic sciences, including ones we’ve all come to rely on. For example, troubling new questions are being raised about common practices surrounding fingerprint analysis and gunshot residue (GSR) analysis. And now a Federal District court in […]
It’s truly scary how many ugly stories of sloppy forensics are emerging under the white hot light of real, peer-based scientific scrutiny. A lot of the credit for the movement toward hyper-scrutiny has to go to Barry Scheck’s Innocence Project (as of this writing, they are up to 163 exonerations), whose group is probably single-handedly […]
As I reported here regarding a recent Florida case, the quest to obtain the software code behind the curtain of most breath test machines has started to pick up steam. In the Florida case, the deadline for turning over the code passed yesterday, and no code materialized. Accordingly, the defense is moving for sanctions today, […]
Nationally recognized DUI guru Lawrence Taylor has one of the best blogs on the net focused on DUIs. I make The DUI Blog a standard stop on my daily tour through the blogosphere. One of the recurring themes you’ll find there is the inherent unreliability of the Breathalyzer machine regularly used by police to “confirm” […]
The kind of science that’s erroneously convicting innocent people for things like drunk driving and sexual assault knows no limits, and has now infected arson investigators too. In one of the most chilling stories I’ve read lately, Texas has executed a man who went to his lethal injection deathbed swearing his innocence of the death […]
If you think fingerprints are an infallible source of unique identification, you should read this. It’s just one of many recent stories raising serious questions about a technology so established in this country, no one’s ever bothered to actually scientifically validate it. Although serious questions are surfacing about the reliability of this technology, a more […]
The machine pictured above (often referred to as “an instrument” by police in lab coats) is used by police to test the amount of alcohol present in a drunk driving suspect’s blood. How do you test blood alcohol taking a breath sample? Well, this machine attempts to do this by taking a sample of a […]