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In The News

2021-03-16 | New app to help researchers identify people through knuckle creases
Knuckle creases are an increasingly prevalent biometric used in forensic science and could have a significant impact in assisting police to link suspects to crimes from images of their hands alone.

2021-02-10 | Did Tennessee Execute an Innocent Man?
Many people on death row in the United States have gone to their death protesting their innocence. In at least a dozen and a half cases, strong evidence supports such a claim, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. But to date, no case has emerged in which DNA or other evidence has provided definitive proof that the state executed an innocent person. A case like that “could accelerate the end of the death penalty in America,” said Barry Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project. Mr. Scheck teamed up last week with a prominent conservative litigator, Paul Clement, a former solicitor general for President George W. Bush, before the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals on behalf of the estate of a Tennessee man, Sedley Alley, who was executed for a 1985 murder.

2021-02-08 | Austin Officially Moves Forensics Lab Out From Under Police Department
In a move long advocated for by survivors of sexual assault, the Austin City Council voted Thursday to officially transfer its forensics bureau out from under the police department. It will now function as an independent entity.

2020-01-24 | FBI, federal prosecutors investigate District’s forensic firearms lab
Federal authorities are investigating the conduct and oversight of a firearms analyst for the District’s Department of Forensic Sciences, an agency that has come under scrutiny in two other instances for problems with its handling of crime scene evidence. The investigation involves an allegation that the examiner falsely indicated that his analysis of evidence had been verified by a colleague, when it actually had not undergone a required review, according to one person familiar with the investigation. When a complaint was made, a supervisor allegedly instructed the colleague — whose name had essentially been forged — to play down his concerns.

2019-11-11 | ‘The Nature of Life and Death’ spotlights pollen’s role in solving crimes
The combination of pollen and spores at a site can be as distinct as a fingerprint, especially when dealing with rare plants or fungi, or pollen that isn’t spread far and wide by the wind, Wiltshire explains. By studying the material, she has, for example, determined where and during which season crimes have occurred. In one murder case, Wiltshire used pollen and spores from a gardening tool, the tennis shoes of the murderer and the foot pedals of the victim’s car to identify the woodland locale in northern England where the victim’s body had been dumped.

2019-11-10 | Responsible genetic genealogy
“Absent best practices...confidence in forensic DNA analysis could be undermined.”

2019-11-08 | Your DNA Profile is Private? A Florida Judge Just Said Otherwise
Privacy experts say a warrant granted in Florida could set a precedent, opening up all consumer DNA sites to law enforcement agencies across the country.

2019-11-07 | Exploring the degrees of distortion in simulated human bite marks
The properties of the skin and the posture of the body during photographic recording are factors that cause distortion in the bitemark injury. This study aimed to explore the degree of distortion between a‘touch mark’(method 1) and a‘bite mark’(method 2)on the left upper arm at three different positions (arm relaxed; arm flexed in two different positions). A pair of dental casts withbiting edges coated in ink was used to create a mark in 30 subjects (6?,24?)aged20–50 years old.

2019-11-07 | Evaluation of the Performance and Hematocrit Independence of theHemaPEN as a Volumetric Dried Blood Spot Collection Device
Dried blood spots (DBS) are often used as a lessinvasive alternative to venous blood sampling. Despite its numerousadvantages, the use of conventional DBS suffers from the hematocrit(hct) effect when analyzing a subpunch. This effect could be avoidedby using hct-independent sampling devices, of which the hemaPENis a recent example.

2019-11-06 | Laboratory contamination over time during low?biomass sample analysis
Bacteria are not only ubiquitous on earth but can also be incredibly diverse within clean laboratories and reagents. The presence of both living and dead bacteria in laboratory environments and reagents is especially problematic when examining samples with low endogenous content (e.g., skin swabs, tissue biopsies, ice, water, degraded forensic samples or ancient material), where contaminants can outnumber endogenous microorganisms within samples. The contribution of contaminants within high? throughput studies remains poorly understood because of the relatively low number of contaminant surveys. Here, we examined 144 negative control samples (extraction blank and no?template amplification controls) collected in both typical molecular laboratories and an ultraclean ancient DNA laboratory over 5 years to characterize long?term contaminant diversity.