The Truth, Revealed by Bugs

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/12file-fly.html

This article is about Christine Smith, a women who disappeared and was found in a dumpster three years later. After she was found, the doctor in charge of the autopsy said he was unable to figure out the cause of death. While being interviewed, the daughter of Christine Smith said her mother died a peaceful death, most likely from natural causes. The daughter would have gotten away with it had it not been for Neal Haskell’s expert testimony. He figured out that no blowflies had been on the body which meant the dumpster story could not be true. He then figured out that coffin flies, flies that eat on flesh after initial decomposition, were on feeding on her corpse. The daughter’s story didn’t match up with the evidence and she is currently serving a life sentence for murdering her mother.

Submitted to Ed-line by M. McCarthy

Experts say landfill forensics search isn't easy: It's hard to preserve and gather clues even under the best conditions.

http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=4&did=1884219761&SrchMode=1&sid=3&Fmt=3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1256822954&clientId=7184

Last Tuesday criminal investigators began looking for the missing 7-year-old girl missing since Monday from Orange Park. They began “a slow and careful search of the Chesser Island Road Landfill in Georgia” for clues to the missing girl Somer Thompson who and gone missing on Monday.
Ross Gardner, a national forensics expert based in Oklahoma, said “it's usually easy to know where to start looking, because most landfills are strictly organized into cells by location and date.” The problem is that it is very difficult to find evidance in land fill because of all of the contamination in the landfill. As Gardner said "it's kind of poke and hope,". One of the other main problems is that by the end of the day when the trash arvived it ends up being coverd by soil and compacted to prevent odors from spreading. Paul Laska, a forensic consultant in Palm City said that unless the body is sitting on top of the garge there needs to be some excavation to dig deeper into the landfill. For them this means bringing in cadavor dogs to try and sniff around to find human remains.
Once the body was found it was difficult to differentiant between trash and evidance. Lou Eliopulos said "with a scene like this, you're basically limited to the core; you're limited to the body." The lack of DNA evidance on the outside of the boday and the bruising that is on it do to all of the trash the covered the body make it very difficult to make heads or tails of whether the body was carried or dragged to the landfill or what happened to it in genral.

Evidence From Bite Marks, It Turns Out, Is Not So Elementary

Fifteen years ago, Roy Brown, a hard-drinking man with a criminal record, was convicted of stabbing, beating, biting and strangling a social worker in upstate New York. The case rested largely on one piece of forensic evidence: bite marks on the victim’s body that the prosecution’s witness, a local dentist, said matched Mr. Brown’s teeth.

On Tuesday, Mr. Brown was released from prison, after DNA testing on the saliva left by the biter proved his innocence and implicated someone else in the crime. At the time of his conviction, Mr. Brown, 46, was missing two front teeth. The bite marks, meanwhile, had six tooth imprints.

The prosecution’s expert testified that Mr. Brown could have twisted the victim’s skin to fill the gaps his missing teeth would have left on the bite mark. Despite rebuttal from the defense, whose expert said the bite marks excluded Mr. Brown, it took jurors five hours to return a guilty verdict.

What happened to Mr. Brown is hardly an aberration. Prosecutors have invoked bite-mark matches to secure convictions in numerous cases, only to see these convictions overturned when DNA or other evidence has become available.

In spite of the evolution of other forensic sciences, bite-mark analysis remains an inexact tool. A 1999 study by a member of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, a professional trade organization, found a 63 percent rate of false identifications.

Why is it, then, that bite-mark analysis remains part of the forensic arsenal? There is, experts say, a mix of ignorance on the part of jurors and defense lawyers about the evidence’s scientific shortcomings and the overzealousness of prosecutors and their expert witnesses, who are seen as too quick to validate an unproven technique.

As the pace of overturned convictions increases, however, the courts are growing more skeptical of the absolute conclusions drawn by bite-mark experts and, in turn, are becoming more receptive when defense lawyers rebut the analysis.

Lawyers, for their part, are taking steps to counter what they call the “C.S.I. effect,” when juries become overly impressed by forensic evidence. During jury selection, it is not uncommon for them to ask potential jurors about their television-watching preferences to weed out those who seem unable to separate fact from fiction.

The key, experts say, is for lawyers to know enough about the subjective components of bite-mark analysis to refute it effectively in court.

“If you say that this bite fits this person and nobody else in the world, and if you use the bite mark as the only piece of physical evidence linking an attacker to his victim, that’s not science — that’s junk,” said Dr. Richard Souviron, chief forensic odontologist at the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office.

As people age, Dr. Souviron said, their jaws expand, changing the position of their teeth. Teeth can be chipped, broken or just pulled out; skin shifts when it is bitten. And, one must ask, was the victim moving? If the bite was on the chest, was the arm stretched above the head or resting next to the torso?

“There are just too many variables,” said Dr. C. Michael Bowers, author of “Forensics Dental Evidence: An Investigator’s Handbook,” published in 2004.

And there is also what David L. Faigman, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, calls the “context effect.” Because most forensic scientists learn a lot about the suspect before analyzing the bite mark, “it’s easy for them to see what they are expected to see,” Mr. Faigman said.

Experts, he added, “can basically be prepped to see a match.”

Bite marks, however, can be helpful in excluding someone as a suspect, or determining that the suspect could be the one who inflicted the bite, many experts and defense lawyers agree.

“If you limit bite-mark analysis to its accepted validity, it’s not inappropriate for an expert to say that a certain suspect is not the biter,” said Christopher Plourd, a lawyer in San Diego who has represented several suspects whose trials revolved around bite-mark evidence. “But that’s as far as you should go.”

In 1995, forensic odontologists moved to avoid using the term “match” in their analysis, so as to avoid giving the impression that the bite mark belongs to a specific suspect and no one else. But similar, if nuanced, phrases still find their way into court, causing confusion. The courts, however, do not have guidelines restricting the use or presentation of bite-mark analysis.

“I feel very strongly that if the courts were a little bit more vigilant or perhaps simply a little bit more informed that they would come very close to excluding a lot of this evidence,” Mr. Faigman said. “Or, at the very least, they would tell that the evidence could come in, but for very modest purposes.”

"Ritual Deaths That Were Anything but Serene"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/science/27ur.html?_r=1&ref=science

Recently, a new examination of skulls from the royal cemetery at UR discovered in Iraq almost a century ago have led archaeologists to a new and interesting discovery. Once thought to have been killed without pain by poison, CT scans of palace guards have shown otherwise.

When the bones were discovered, they were completely smashed and flattened. By using computers however, anthropologists were able to obtain three-dimensional images of each fragment and determine where the pieces fit. The researchers who were led by Janet M. Monge, a physical anthropologist, applied forensic skills to arrive at the probable cause of death in both cases. There were two round holes in the soldiers cranium and in one woman’s about one inch in diameter, giving reason to believe that the people were not killed by poison which was the common belief for many years, but by sharp pikes that were driven into their heads. The most convincing evidence was that there were cracks radiating from the holes. The holes could have only been made in a living person to have produced such a pattern of fractures along stress lines. The more brittle bones of a person long dead would have shattered.

Along with the skull punctures, something else about the Mesopotamian burial process was discovered. New research has turned up evidence that bodies of some victims had been heated or baked, and not burned and treated with a compound of mercury. This process was not as advanced a technique as mummification processes in contemporary Egypt however they managed to keep the bodies from completely decomposing during extensive funerary ceremonies. On a final note, mummification, while it helps preserve the body, I imagine would make it difficult for forensic scientists to determine time of death.

'Smell Of Death' Research Could Help Recover Bodies In Disasters And Solve Crimes

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090816211837.htm

During a speaking at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society there were early results on a new instrument used in Forensic Science. The new instrument is planned to be a portable device to help identify and pick up, a “smell of death,” or scientifically the smell released by decomposing chemicals released by the body. As of today the detection and recovery of bodies are done by Cadaver dogs, which are very expensive and time consuming to train. With a new portable device which can do the job faster and more accurately than these dogs there will be an increase in efficiency for recovering bodies in various situations. Not only would the bodies be identified easier as well as more efficiently but this new device will also give a very accurate “time of death” when it identifies and measures the various chemicals released from the body.

The portable smell of death device has been tested on pigs who are put through various environments so scientists can identify the different chemicals which are released and how much of them are released. A few of these that will significantly help scientists in finalizing this device are the gases Putrescine and Cadaverine. Using pigs scientists will tweek this device in identifying these certain compounds by placing pigs in humane conditions. After the device is complete it should be ably to identify and recover a body with the chemical odor it gives off and the time of death when the device can identify the different compounds released in different stages.

I thought this article was very interesting and well written. The fact that scientists are researching to create new and more efficient devices in the Forensic field that can help crime scene investigators more efficiently identify various parts of a crime scene shows how much technology is needed in this field.

Audio Analysis: Getting a Jump on Gun Violence

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/12file-gun.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=audio%20analysis%20of%20gun%20shots&st=cse

This article was about the new technology that law enforcement agency’s are using all across the country. The technology is called audio analysis and it can have police at the scene of a crime within minutes after it happens. It works by police setting up small listening devices in “incident prone neighborhoods” and these devices are programmed specifically so that when it hears a gun shot it contacts the closest police unit and directs them to the exact location of that gun shot. This has proven extremely useful in places like L.A. and some laces of NYC where there is heavy gang activity. This new technology is helping keep the streets safe by helping the police be every where at once and always knowing the right place to be at the right time.

New View Of The Heliosphere: Cassini Helps Redraw Shape Of Solar System

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091016101807.htm

Based on images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, the conception we have had of our heliosphere's for the past 50 years has proven to be incorrect. As the solar wind flows from the sun, it carves out a bubble in the interstellar medium. Models of the boundary region between the heliosphere and interstellar medium have been based on the assumption that the relative flow of the interstellar medium and its collision with the solar wind dominate the interaction. This would create a foreshortened “nose” in the direction of the solar system’s motion, and an elongated “tail” in the opposite direction. The INCA images suggest that the solar wind’s interaction with the interstellar medium is instead more significantly controlled by particle pressure and magnetic field energy density. It is wild to think that one image can turn our view on somthing after 50 years of a belief.

Lost for Decades, Gun Resurfaces in Shooting of New York Officer

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/nyregion/30gun.html?_r=1

This article talks about the life of a sixty year old revolver. This gun was shipped from the factory to New York City and was sold in a gun shop in Little Italy. The gun was bought by a former police officer and was reported lost in 1976. The whereabouts of the weapon were unknown until recently, when that same revolver fell from an arrested mans waistband and discharged a bullet that struck a New York police officer. The NYPD is now trying to trace the whereabouts of the gun from the time it was reported lost until the time the police officer was hit with the bullet. This process has proved to be difficult, the NYPD was able to trace the gun from its factory in Springfield, Mass through a gun shop in Little Italy, all the way to the ownership of a former police officer by examining the gun. Because the gun is so old, the John Jovino Gun Shop in Manhattan, no longer has records of guns sold in 1949. The only thing that the police do know is that it's last legal owner was in the 1970's. The criminal whose waistband the gun fell out of, Edwin Santana, said that he only had the revolver for a short period of time, and that he took it from his friend Carlos' house. Forensic scientists say that this gun was partcularly hard to track because old revolvers keep shell casings within the gun instead of spitting the out like semi-automatic pistols do. I particularly enjoyed this article because it shows how law enforcement can uncover a lot of information about the life of a weapon just from examining it. They were able to discover where and when this gun was made and also where it was sold.

DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18dna.html?_r=1
The use of DNA in criminal investigations is being questioned. Scientists are now saying that DNA is not the best proof in a criminal case. DNA is no longer the perfect; it is now possible for scientist to replicate DNA. They were able to copy blood and saliva samples from one DNA donor and replicate that same DNA. “You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin. This process is not hard either. It can be carried out by any undergraduate biology student. To fix this problem, scientists are beginning to create systems that can detect the fake DNA samples and send them out to forensic labs so that the fake DNA will not be a problem. Another finding is that a person’s DNA can be replicated by just acquiring their drinking cup or cigarette butt. Celebrities might have to fear “genetic paparazzi,” said Gail H. Javitt of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University. “DNA is a lot easier to plant at a crime scene than fingerprints,” said Javitt. “We’re creating a criminal justice system that is increasingly relying on this technology.” The one positive aspect about this is that the average criminal most likely could not perform this successfully. There are two ways to copy DNA: one is to gain a sample of a person’s DNA from piece of hair and through whole genome amplification the sample can be enlarged. The other technique has to do with DNA databases and profiles. In a lab as a series of numbers and letters corresponding to variations at 13 spots in a person’s genome tell their DNA profile.

This article is very important to society because now it is known that DNA evidence is not the best; it does have its faults. Also, people have to be more careful since their DNA can be copied just by someone acquiring a strand of their hair or their drinking cup. The best way to really be sure about anything in a crime scene investigation is to use all aspects of forensic science to solve the case. One alone cannot safely prove the case without doubt.

The article is written as if it is very easy for someone to copy DNA. But it does not go into the process very well so it is not know how simple the DNA’s replication is. It causes the reader to feel like they have to be careful about what they do with certain things that have their DNA on them. Scientists are already creating new systems that can determine what DNA samples are real and what samples are the copies. Once these are created they will be sold to forensic labs all over the country so that the process of replicating DNA will not affect a crime investigation.

Jury Deadlock Ends a Trial Over Merck’s Bone Drug

This article is about a recent court case regarding the Merck product "Fosamax", where the jury was deadlocked, forcing the judge to call a mistrial. The case came about because a 71-year-old retired sheriff claimed that taking the drug for a number of years caused the tissue of his jawbone to die. The drug was originally designed to prevent bone loss in women who are going through menopause, though in the case of the victim the opposite effect seemed to be true. In the trial the prosecutors used expert witnesses who gave their opinions on the matter, while Merck used similar tactics to try and prove that the accuser had had jaw problems before and that the drug was not, if at all, solely responsible for her osteonecrosis. This case has been closely watched by both lawyers and pharmacists as this trial is a forerunner for other potential lawsuits against Merck for other products also having adverse effects. It was claimed that in total there are 1,200 cases against Merck for Fosamax alone, but despite the compelling evidence the jury could not decide guilt or innocence, and stocks in Merck still rose by 58 cents a share.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/business/12drug.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1255047713-KLc02vBPpCE9dfLh+/ua4w

New Technology Detects Chemical Weapons In Seconds

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091005102708.htm# This article is about Scientists at Queen's University Belfast who are developing new sensors to detect chemical agents and illegal drugs which will help fight against the threat of terrorist attacks. These new sensors will use special gel pads to 'swipe' a person or crime scene to collect a sample. It is then analyzed by a scanning instrument that can tell us if there is a presence of chemicals. This works within seconds. The scanning instrument will use Raman Spectroscopy. It involves shining a laser beam onto the sample and measuring the energy of light that scatters from it to determine what chemical compound is present. this type of spectroscopy is not sensitive enough to detect low concentrations of chemicals, so to see the concentration, the sample is mixed with nanoscale silver particles making us able to see the smallest trace. Since this happens in seconds, it will help stop terrorism, because they will know if they are dangerous faster. Eventually what scientist will hope to do is use the new sensors for developing a breathalyzer for roadside drug testing.

Innocent but Dead

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/opinion/01herbert.html

This article is about a Texan named Cameron Willingham, who was executed by lethal injection in February of 2004. For the murders of his three children. The original reports said that he had set the house on fire allowing his three young children to die on December 23, 1991. When the fire was going, statements were originally taken stating the Willingham was making many attempts to get into the small house and rescue his children, eventually he was restrained and handcuffed. During trial, evidence showed that arson was most likely the cause of the fire. This is because of deep charring at the base of some of the walls and patterns of soot that made them suspicious. Forensic Scientists also noticed what they felt were ominous fracture patterns in pieces of broken window glass, leading them to believe that Willingham committed the crime, even though there had been no motive. He was put on death row and executed after 12 years despite the fact that influential scientists were making groundbreaking discoveries, all proving that the fire was not arson. Willingham was proven innocent; however, it was too late for him because he had been lethally injected.

Protection Or Peril? Gun Possession Of Questionable Value In An Assault, Study Finds

October 1, 2009

This article discusses the findings of a study done by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. The purpose of this study was to find the effectiveness of having a gun during an assault. The results of this study were shocking. It estimates that people who are trying to protect themselves with a gun are approximately 4.5 times more likely to be shot during an assault than people not carrying a gun.

This will make people think twice about carrying a gun for safety's sake. The reasons for the results of this study are unknown, but there are many potential causes. Perhaps people without guns are more likely to comply with their assaulter's demands. Or, those who have guns get shot while they are trying to extract it. Whatever the causes for these results, this study shows that having a gun does not necessarily make you safer during an assault.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090930121512