19 posts tagged with crime and forensics.
Displaying 1 through 19 of 19. Subscribe:
comparing bluejeans seams is relatively useless
A Key FBI Photo Analysis Method Has Serious Flaws, Study Says After ProPublica’s reporting last year, scientists at UC Berkeley tested one of the FBI Lab’s photo analysis techniques, identifying bluejeans by the pattern on their seams, and found flaws that challenge the method’s reliability. [ProPublica]
Actually she is the fashion police
"Underwear dates well." Fashion historian--and now crime-solver--Amber Butchart, interviewed for the Guardian.
Framed for Murder by His Own DNA
When the DNA results came back, even Lukis Anderson thought he might have committed the murder. Traditional police work would have never steered police to Anderson. But the DNA hit led them to seek other evidence confirming his guilt.
maybe we should throw an exception here??
ProPublica sought and got access to the source code for the Forensic Statistical Tool, or FST, that NYC's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner created and used till early 2017 to analyze complex DNA evidence in "about 1,350 cases over about 5 1/2 years." Now that a judge has unsealed the codebase, ProPublica's put it on GitHub, and "two newly unredacted defense expert affidavits are also available." From Exhibit C, October 2016: "I have seen no code indicating that any test code has been written for, or automated software testing has been performed on, FST." [more inside]
California v. Johnson
Kern County got a $200,000+ grant and started using closed-source software to perform a new kind of DNA testing for criminal forensics. Now, the principle at stake in California v. Johnson (California's 5th district court of appeals): does due process require that the defendant be able to examine the evidence used to convict them, which includes auditing forensics software to check for bugs? The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others, have filed amicus curiae briefs. [more inside]
Keeping Up with the Bones
Police in Missouri found four coffins and 15 skeletons inside an archaeologist's house. Establishing their origin illustrates some new developments in forensic Anthropology.
false testimony occurred in hundreds of trials, incl. 32 death penalty
Forensic Pseudoscience
This past April, the FBI made an admission that was nothing short of catastrophic for the field of forensic science. In an unprecedented display of repentance, the Bureau announced that, for years, the hair analysis testimony it had used to investigate criminal suspects was severely and hopelessly flawed.[more inside]
How private DNA data led Idaho cops on a wild goose chase
... and linked an innocent man to a 20-year-old murder case. Analysis by the EFF of the case of Michael Usry, a New Orleans filmmaker whose father's DNA profile in a non-profit DNA database, which he had been assured would remain private, dragged him into a grisly unsolved murder case. [more inside]
Something cold about this investigation
Locals couldn’t understand why police hunting the murderer of a 13-year-old girl were taking DNA samples of elderly women. A high profile Italian murder investigation exposes the secrets of more than one family, with controversial collateral damage. [more inside]
CSI: The MOOC
Welcome to Introduction to Forensic Science, the murder mystery that doubles as a university course. Enrol here.
Forensic Topology
Forensic Topology. "In his 2003 memoir Where The Money Is: True Tales from the Bank Robbery Capital of the World, co-authored with Gordon Dillow, retired Special Agent William J. Rehder briefly suggests that the design of a city itself leads to and even instigates certain crimes—in Los Angeles’s case, bank robberies. Rehder points out that this sprawling metropolis of freeways and its innumerable nondescript banks is, in a sense, a bank robber’s paradise. Crime, we could say, is just another way to use the city."
"Interestingly, she advanced in a male dominated field by co-opting the feminine tradition of miniatures."
"The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death": an exploration of a collection of eighteen miniature crime scene models that were built in the 1940's and 50's by a progressive criminologist Frances Glessner Lee (1878 – 1962). The models, which were based on actual homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths, were created to train detectives to assess visual evidence. This seven-year project culminated in an exhibition and a book The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (The Monacelli Press, 2004). [Image Gallery]
Does digital writing leave fingerprints?
"When legal teams need to prove or disprove the authorship of key texts, they call in the forensic linguists. Scholars in the field have tackled the disputed origins of some prestigious works, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers."Decoding Your E-Mail Personality Ben Zimmer, of Language Log discusses the Facebook case and forensic linguistics in the NY Times. [more inside]
Frank Bender and the "team of experts whose consultative skills and talents are always free"
When forensic sculptor Frank Bender, Esquire's Man of the Month in April 2004, died this week the world mourned one of the foremost skull-to-face recreationists. What fewer people knew was that his passing created an opening in The Vidocq Society a members-only crime-solving organization he co-founded in 1990, dedicated to working on long-unsolved murders. Membership is limited to 82 members, one for each year of Inspector Vidocq's life. The organization does have a newsletter available online and guests and associates sometimes tag along to their monthly luncheons, Cuisine & Crime Solving.
You just never know what you're stepping into when you hit up a random car on a random street
When a thief stole a backpack and a GPS unit from Amanda Enayati's car, he picked the wrong target to mess with. [more inside]
DNA’s Dirty Little Secret
I sense you want to plead the 5th
For the first time in the Indian state of Maharashtra, life sentences were meted out based on the findings of Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature(BEOS) profiling. [more inside]
Sketchy Evidence
One day while crossing an empty field, fifteen-year-old Tim Masters happened to see a dead body. Twenty years later, he remains in prison, serving time for a crime that he almost certainly did not commit.
A haunting, bizarre tale of a murder investigation gone wrong.
Skeletons in the closet
Police find skeleton in Oddfellows lodge. Turns out, they'd already found it, 6 years before (your guess is as good as mine why no one did anything then). Even more interesting, it's not the only one that's been found and subsequently investigated by the police around the country. Makes you wonder about those Oddfellows.
Page:
1