I was contacted this morning by Barry Bradford, a teacher at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, about the work that he and his students have been doing in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, to posthumously exonerate Clyde Kennard of crimes for which he […]

According to the United States Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Van Patten v. Deppisch, 04-1276 (Jan. 24), “No”. This is a case where the lawyer literally “phoned it in”, appearing at a client’s sentencing for reckless homicide via speakerphone. The defendant was given a maximum 25 year sentence by a Wisconsin state […]

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 […]

As I’ve reported often, it’s scandalous how poorly most American crime “labs” are operated. Part of the problem is simply the low priority accorded funding for these labs, and the high credibility given them by folks who simply don’t know any better about the underlying “science”.
In 2004, Congress passed the Justice for All Act, in […]

You might remember my original post on this case, wherein police actually nabbed a suspect by illegally posing as a lawfirm and mailing him a solicitation to join in a class action lawsuit. When the unsuspecting target mailed back his envelope with his request to join in the suit, police retrieved DNA from the […]

I can tell just from the calls that I get that cybercrime is on the rise. Last week the FBI issued results of a corporate survey inquiring into the incidence and impact of cybercrime on American businesses. Some of the key findings:
Frequency of attacks.
Nearly nine out of 10 organizations experienced computer security incidents in a […]

I’ve written about some of the problems associated with GSR (Gunshot Residue) analysis, and how its theoretical foundation is being challenged by courts and commentators alike. It’s a hell of a story because GSR has been one of the fundamental, bread and butter disciplines in most state crime labs for some time.
It’s not surprising, […]

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 […]

Governor Mark Warner of Virginia has taken yet another action in the fight to pursue justice wherever it may take us. In the first move of its kind, the Governor has ordered post-mortem DNA testing to be done to determine if a man executed for murder in 1982 was in fact innocent.
Roger Keith Coleman may […]