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In The News

2017-04-12 | Houston Forensic Center Reports 65 Case Errors by HPD Officer
Sixty-five case report errors by a Houston Police Department officer, including in 26 homicide cases and five officer-involved shootings, were reported to the Texas Forensic Science Commission today by the Houston Forensic Science Center, the city’s civilian-run crime lab. A recent audit of 88 cases handled by the officer, spurred by concerns from the Harris County District Attorney’s Office over the officer’s handling of two crime scenes, found a total of 65 case reports with incomplete documentation, 32 with administrative errors and eight instances of misplaced evidence, according to an HFSC press release and the audit report.

2017-04-10 | Fingerprint challenge aims to automate how best prints get taken
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has launched a challenge that pits security companies and research groups against each other, in a bid to build a device that accurately captures every part of a fingerprint. This “nail-to-nail” scan covers the whole fingertip, from one side of a fingernail to the other. The larger the area captured, the more useful it is. A bigger print gives police officers more chance to match a partial print found at a crime scene, for example. So nail to nail is the gold standard. But capturing prints like this is time-consuming and labour-intensive, says Chris Boehnen at IARPA, who is managing the contest.

2017-04-10 | Sessions orders Justice Dept. to end forensic science commission, suspend review policy
Attorney General Jeff Sessions will end a Justice Department partnership with independent scientists to raise forensic science standards and has suspended an expanded review of FBI testimony across several techniques that have come under question, saying a new strategy will be set by an in-house team of law enforcement advisers.

2017-04-07 | Austin to Pay Police Lab Leader to Resign, After 4 Months of Administrative Leave
Austin police officials hired a new chief forensics officer with a six-figure salary last fall to help resurrect the department’s troubled DNA lab, and he lasted less than a month.

2017-04-06 | Replacing Ninhydrin, Laser Scanning for Race: Two Forensic Philosophies at Albany
Two teams of scientists at the University at Albany are developing novel new tests that are intended to assist investigators quicker. Last month the two teams published separate studies in the same journal, Analytical Chemistry, a journal of the American Chemical Society.

2017-04-03 | Partial Palm Print Leads to Arrest in Unsolved 2011 Double Murder
Investigators had a key clue in the 2011 South Carolina killings of a mother and her 3-year-old daughter — a partial palm print in the girl’s blood. But it took six years of advances in crime solving technology to finally match that print to a suspect in the cold-case killings. Columbia police flew across the county to arrest Kenneth Canzater Jr. near his home in Perris, California, and charge him with murder, Columbia Police Chief Skip Holbrook said Thursday.

2017-03-31 | Leading DNA scientist sacked, 27 criminal convictions in doubt, WA Attorney-General says
Mr Quigley said Mr Webb was sacked in August 2016 following an investigations by Path West, but the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) was not informed of the sacking until two days before Christmas. Mr Quigley, who became the state's Attorney-General two weeks ago, said he was only told on Monday this week. He described Mr Webb's sacking as a disaster that would have serious consequences. "This is as serious as it gets in the administration of criminal justice," he said.

2017-03-24 | Forensic errors trigger reviews of D.C. crime lab ballistics unit, prosecutors say
District crime lab officials are reviewing more than 150 firearm examinations for accuracy after the lab discovered errors by three D.C. forensic analysts who incorrectly matched bullets or shell casings recovered at crime scenes to individual weapons. The examinations date to at least August 2015, according to federal prosecutors in Washington and the three former ballistics examiners.

2017-03-23 | Fingerprints Move Over Months—Could They Be Aged?
Latent fingerprints have been the most consistent biometric identifier at crime scenes for a century, pre-dating the “gold standard” of DNA. But fingerprints are not set in stone—and can move miniscule distances weeks after they are left on certain surfaces, according to a new study in Forensic Science International. Although the new dynamic wrinkle to the trace evidence doesn’t appear to limit its identifying power, it could account for some of the matches that are not made in investigations, or through systems such as AFIS. But the potential to “age” fingerprints does exist in the future, contends the team, from Abertay University in Scotland.

2017-03-20 | Charges to be dropped against three after state forensics department loses evidence
Two Anniston men and an Oxford woman will have drug charges against them dropped after a state forensics lab lost evidence needed to prosecute them, officials said Friday. Calhoun County District Attorney Brian McVeigh received a letter by email from the Department of Forensic Sciences Director Michael Sparks on March 10 stating the evidence was missing.