• 
  
  
  Home
• 
  
  Backlog
  Reduction
• Laboratory
  Assessment &
  Enhancement
  Services
• 
  
  Customized
  Training
• 
  
  Biometric
  Identification
  • What is it?
  • Why Is It Important? »
    • Corporate Responsibility
  • What Is It Used For? »
    • Kidnap/Ransom
    • Disaster Situations/
                     Incident Investigation
  • Modes of Identification »
    • DNA
    • Friction Ridge Skin
    • Facial Recognition
    • Iris Capture
    • Dental X-Ray
    • Other Modes
  • Risk Assessment & Custom BI
  • FAQs
• 
  
  Other
  Services
  • Law Enforcement
  • Corporate/Insurance
• 
  
  
  Resources
• 
  
  
  About Us
  • Matt Schwarz
• 
  
  
  Contact

In The News

2019-09-13 | Fingerprint Technology Helps Solve Cold Case
In the years following the crime, the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division launched the Next Generation Identification system to enhance its biometric capabilities. Now, the system’s search algorithm can pick up the most minute detail on fingerprint friction ridges. The new system leads to faster and more accurate results. So although no match could be found in 1999, the FBI’s advancements in fingerprint technology helped investigators solve the case after almost 20 years. “For months and years after this crime, people were afraid,” said Robert Allan Jones, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh Field Office. “Working these cold cases allows us to bring some closure to the victim and the community.”

2019-09-01 | Supreme Court Decisions and Upcoming Cases reflect the growing need for electronic search warrants in impaired driving cases
By 2016, as a result of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Missouri v. McNeely5 and Birchfieldv. North Dakota,6 the judicial landscape changed significantly. In these cases, the Court noted that advancements in technology made it far easier for law enforcement officers to obtain war-rants expeditiously and ruled that the natural dissipation of alcohol in one’s blood did not create a per se exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement based on exigent circumstances. The Court held that officers could compel blood samples from DUI suspects only if they have probable cause to believe the driver operated his or her vehicle while impaired and either (a) they obtain a warrant to seize one’s blood; or(b) the driver voluntarily consents to a blood draw; or(c) one of the traditional exceptions to the warrant requirement, including exigent circumstances, exists. The Court ruled that officers could continue compelling breath tests with-out a warrant because breath testing is non-invasive.

2019-08-18 | Prosecutors say St. Louis man innocent, but still in prison
In the three weeks since the St. Louis city prosecutor’s office announced in a motion for a new trial that police and prosecutorial misconduct had led to the framing of an innocent man, the case has stalled as questions remain over whether Missouri law even permits a judge to review a prosecutors’ contention of a wrongful conviction. All the while Johnson sits in prison where, he said, “It’s not something that gets better.”

2019-08-06 | How do we reconcile law and science?
There seems to be an inescapable tension between the fields of law and science. Law strives for consistency and finality, so courts tend to look to precedents for guidance. Science is always changing with new evidence and new research. But of course science is an important tool in the search for justice. We’ve also entered the era of “alternative facts,” in which the courts pick and choose between expert testimony that’s not only contradictory, but also irreconcilable.

2019-07-16 | How much should juries rely on expert testimony?
Many different fields of forensics have come under attack in recent years, including blood-spatter analysis, hair-fiber analysis, ballistics testing and fingerprint analysis. Even outside of forensics, there has long been research showing that eyewitness testimony is far less reliable than most people think, and that juries give it far too much consideration. A skeptic might wonder: What, other than single-source DNA testing, can be used in a criminal trial? Are critics of modern forensics saying that none of these fields has any value in front of a jury?

2019-06-20 | We need to fix forensics. But how?
Ten years ago, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a groundbreaking study on the use of forensics in criminal trials. The study found that, in the “pattern matching” fields of forensics in particular, expert witnesses had been vastly overstating the significance and certainty of their analyses. For some fields, such as bite-mark analysis, the study found no scientific research at all to support the central claims of practitioners.

2019-06-14 | State Supreme Court blasts renowned forensic scientist Henry Lee and throws out 1989 murder convictions of two New Milford men
In a unanimous decision released Friday afternoon, the state Supreme Court threw out the 1989 murder convictions of two New Milford men and delivered a stinging rebuke to renowned forensic science expert Henry Lee, whose inaccurate testimony put them in prison for decades.

2019-03-21 | Louisiana man released from prison after 36 years for a crime he didn't commit
Archie Williams, was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 1983 for a rape and stabbing of a woman in East Baton Rouge Parish. The 19th Judicial District Court of East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, ruling was based on new evidence of Williams’ innocence–a search in the FBI’s national fingerprint database which linked fingerprints left at the crime scene to the true assailant, a man who committed at least five other rapes in the years after the 1982 rape for which Williams was wrongly convicted.

2019-03-20 | The Chemists and the Cover-Up
The twin Massachusetts drug lab scandals are unprecedented in the sheer number of cases thrown out because of forensic misconduct. Between the two women, 47,000 drug convictions and guilty pleas have been dismissed in the last two years, many for misdemeanor possession. Many more are likely to follow, with the total expected to exceed 50,000.

2019-02-06 | How 'Optical Tweezers' Could Address One of Crime Labs' Biggest Challenges
Dawson Cruz, along with Sarah Seashols-Williams, Ph.D., assistant professor of forensic science, and Joseph Reiner, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Physics, have found that an "optical tweezer"—a compact, strongly focused laser beam that uses an immersion objective lens on an inverted microscope to create an optical trap—is effective at separating mixed cells, such as sperm and vaginal cells, within a solution. "In sex assault case work, you'll often have sperm cells mixed with many other cell types," Reiner said. "It's easy to identify a sperm cell under a microscope. So we take our laser tweezers and use them to pick out the sperm cells and isolate them from the other cell types. After this, we can extract them for DNA analysis."