Moore, Solomon. "Science Found Wanting in Nation’s Crime Labs ." New York Times. 25 Mar. 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Science Found Wanting in Nation’s Crime Labs
This coming month, the National Academy of Sciences will be releasing a report criticizing various forensic methods – fingerprinting, firearms identification, blood spatter, and hair – that police and prosecutors have heavily relied on for the past century in order to convict thousands of defendants. The report states that Congress needs to create a federal agency to guarantee proper examination of trace evidence since mediocre lab technicians usually handle the majority of these forensic techniques. To emphasize the necessity for federal takeover, the report includes a series of widely publicized crime laboratory failures including the Brandon Mayfield Case in which a suspect was wrongfully convicted due to the inexperience of people handling the forensic evidence. This report could spell doom for the field of forensics as we know it: lawyers will swiftly discredit forensic procedures as inaccurate in court while judges may raise the bar for admissibility of forensic evidence. But there is an upside to this, the report calls for the establishment of a federal agency to to finance research and training and promote universal standards in forensic science, a discipline that spans anthropology, biology, chemistry, physics, medicine and law. The report also calls for tougher regulation of crime laboratories. With any luck this report will help people realize the critical needs of forensic crime labs and that it is our responsibility to bring them up-to-date.
Moore, Solomon. "Science Found Wanting in Nation’s Crime Labs ." New York Times. 25 Mar. 2009.
Moore, Solomon. "Science Found Wanting in Nation’s Crime Labs ." New York Times. 25 Mar. 2009
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5 comments:
This article was very well written. It provided all the information needed about a newly criticized forensics report. I was unaware of the Brandon Mayfield Case, which was mentioned as one of the examples of a laboratory failure. I also liked how both the pros and cons of the report were mentioned. Overall, Alex did a great job on this article.
this article was very interesting. In class, we learn the importance of handling evidence carefully, so we know how important it is. It will be helpful to have a Federal Agency that unifies the field of Forensics Science so that there are fewer mistakes and the evidence is more justifiable in the future. The author did a good job explaining the situation and both the positive and negative affects.
I thought this was a very interesting article. I liked that it was relevant to everything we have learned about the importance of packaging and handling evidence carefully and properly. It was also interesting that it showed problems with forensic analysis rather than a new, helpful technique. I did not know that there was an interest in creating a federal agency to oversee forensic labs.
This article was interesting to read and was well written. It was interesting to learn the information about a new criticism to a specific fraction of forensics. Considering the work we have done involving the proper handling of evidence, this article grabbed the attention of our class especially. There is not much wrong with the article. Overall, it was very interesting and Alex did a good job with it.
This article was very good. In class handling evidence is stressed as an important item and this article higlighted that. I was unaware of teh Brnadon Mayfield Case which was very interesting.
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