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In The News

2017-09-20 | To catch a paedophile, you only need to look at their hands
The piece of evidence was an eight-second-long digital video clip. Marsh had been working on a case involving a teenage girl who had alleged that her father had been coming into her bedroom at night to molest her. When her mother refused to believe her, the girl left her webcam running all night, pointed at her bed. The camera captured a person's hand and forearm touching her. Her father denied that he was the person in the video. "It was one of the spookiest and scariest things that I have ever seen," explains Black. "A real sort of horror movie."

2017-09-15 | AAAS: ‘Decades of Overstatement of Latent Print Examiners’ Now Mean No Fingerprint ‘Matches’
Forensic Magazine has conducted searches of case histories to find convictions based on erroneous fingerprint matching, but has not yet found an instance of such a problem. Some critics point to the two-week arrest of U.S. citizen Brandon Mayfield for the 2004 Madrid terrorist bombings as an example of the limitations of fingerprint matching (Mayfield was discovered through an error by a computer system, as well as mistakes by FBI examiners. But he was cleared long before prosecutors could build a case against him).

2017-09-14 | Signs of Optimism at Troubled Austin Crime Lab
No mold has been detected inside the 520 rape kits sent out for testing since the Austin Police Department discovered a mold-like substance growing on 849 of their backlogged kits in April. But the crime lab saga is far from over. As APD works to clear the backlog and erase doubts about its still-operating labs, the Capital Area Private Defender Service sits in the thick of its materiality review, as the Travis County District Attor­ney's Office covers its tracks via Brady notices to those convicted in part by DNA evidence analyzed at APD.

2017-09-12 | Fingerprints on Bomb Central to Terror Trial of US Citizen
Muhanad Mahmoud Al Farekh, who was born in Houston and raised in Dubai, was captured by security forces in Pakistan in 2014. His case has drawn extra attention because of reports American officials had debated whether to try to kill him in a drone strike, a step almost never taken against U.S. citizens. The administration of President Barack Obama ultimately decided to try for a capture and civilian prosecution instead. Farehk, 31, has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to murder U.S. nationals, conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and other crimes. There was no response to a request for comment from his defense team. Most the charges against Farehk stem from an attack at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost City, Afghanistan, on Jan. 19, 2009, involving two vehicles rigged with explosives and driven by suicide bombers. An initial blast injured several Afghans, including a pregnant woman, but a much larger bomb failed to go off, sparing the lives of American soldiers. Forensic technicians in Afghanistan recovered 18 of Farehks’ fingerprints on adhesive packing tape used to bind the explosives on the unexploded bomb, prosecutors said in a court filing.

2017-09-12 | Solving Crimes With Soil Bacteria
The goal of this research, supported by the National Institute of Justice, is to develop a “soil individualization technique” that would allow a forensic expert to produce objective, statistical data to conclusively show, for example, that the soil on a shovel possessed by a suspect matches the soil at the burial site where a victim was found. Using next-generation sequencing (NGS) of bacterial DNA, Foran has utilized supervised classification techniques to classify the bacterial makeup of a soil sample and give values that are, he said, “completely objective.”

2017-09-11 | UK, Indian Researchers Debut ‘Better’ Platform for Disguised Facial ID
Current state-of-the-art methods boast a 78 to 81 percent accuracy rating. But researchers from the University of Cambridge (UK), the National Institute of Technology (India) and the Indian Institute of Science have proposed and tested a new platform that can achieve an 85 percent accuracy rating. The new method, called Spatial Fusion Convolutional Network, is two-fold. First, the framework works to detect 14 facial “key points” that literature has identified as essential to facial identification. The novel element is the second part—the introduction of two brand new annotated facial disguise datasets.

2017-09-07 | Constitutional Requirement to Litigate Scientific Evidence
The Supreme Court revised the standards for admissibility of scientific evidence and expert witness testimony through the seminal cases of Daubert, Joiner and Kumho Tire. The controversial issues of reliability, peer review, error and uncertainty rates, and standardization still adversely affect competent use of forensic science.

2017-09-06 | FBI and NamUs Partnership IDs Victims, Killers, Unknown Nationwide
Instead, the breakthrough was made through a new partnership in 2017 between the FBI and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs. The pilot program began in February with a massive backlog of prints which had never before been examined by the FBI. Since then, a steady stream of “hits” from the unidentified deceased have produced hundreds of names, faces—and leads. What began as a pilot program in February has already transitioned into the normal workday routine for the some 35 FBI fingerprint examiners—although the results have proven to be anything but routine.

2017-09-06 | Speaking of Error in Forensic Science
In recent years, high visibility errors have occurred at crime labs in almost every state. These have ranged from simple mistakes, such as mislabeling evidence, to testimony that overstates the scientific evidence, to criminal acts. The latter category includes dry-labbing, which is when an examiner fraudulently claims to have performed laboratory analyses which in fact were never done. Dry-labbing is not an error—it’s a crime—but if it goes undiscovered, there is a problem with error management. The cost of these cases, whether the result of simple mistakes or criminal malfeasance, have been incalculable. Innocent people have spent years behind bars, countless criminal cases have been thrown out due to tainted evidence, and the cost of litigation has soared.

2017-09-01 | Austin Police Partner With UNT Health Science Center
In the aftermath of its lab’s closure, the Austin Police Department will now send a majority of its faulty DNA cases to the University of North Texas Health Science Center to determine if retesting must be done. On Thursday, Austin City Council approved a contract to allow the center to review and analyze DNA cases that were tested by APD’s lab before it shut down in June 2016. Prior to the shutdown, the Texas Forensic Science Commission found APD’s DNA testing procedures were outdated or improper, causing already tested cases to be reanalyzed and creating a backlog.