Yesterday (January 7, 2012) our office filed a motion that seeks to suppress all BrAC tests in pending cases in the state of Pennsylvania. This would cause all per se DUI cases to be dismissed in Pennsylvania regardless of the BrAC reported results. Here has been the press coverage on the successful Linear Dynamic Range […]
The Demonstrated Linear Dynamic Range Challenge in PA DUI Breath Tests
“You gotta prove it before you can use it, and then prove it again.” Would you use a pacemaker in a loved one if it wasn’t proven to work correctly before you used it? Would you use a baby car seat with your child if it wasn’t proven to work correctly before you used it? […]
Thank you for being a reader
I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for being a reader of this blog. It is a real passion of mine. I cannot express how wonderful it makes me feel to help promote legitimate science in the courtroom. As I do every year, here is my tally for travel: In 2012, I […]
A New Year’s Resolution for us all: Better forensic science
I would love it if our collective societal New Year’s Resolution would be for us to demand more science in forensic science. What a wonderful world it would be. I have reprinted in its entirety a wonderful article about the state of forensic science today (Hat tip to Michael Romano for noticing the article and […]
Just because you could doesn’t mean you should: lawyer Ethics in the Forensic Science case
Quite honestly, I think that most criminal defense attorneys who handle cases are not substantively and truly competent to handle the case that they accept. That’s right over 50%. At first blush, I am sure that this assertion makes me seem like a pompous know-it-all and perhaps even a jerk, but that is not my […]
Loophole for Justice: Does a Combination of Prosecutorial Ignorance and Outsourcing of Forensic Services Matter?
One of the alarming trends I am seeing locally and even nationally is the employing of third party vendor laboratories to do forensic analysis. While I think it is a good idea to remove the forensic analysis from law enforcement per the NAS report recommendations, I fear that it is also done, in part, for […]
The Shame that is Dallas County Crime Lab-the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences, or SWIFS
It is great to live in a time of great awakening. It is marvelous to watch even the mainstream media do what it should have done decades ago: question. We must continue to question the sacred cow of forensic science. In doing so, it will only promote justice. Here is a great article on the […]
How maintaining scientific justice is like establishing and maintaining a path in the darkest jungle
One of my all time favorite books is Heart of Darkness written by Joseph Conrad. It is a short read but the combination of the first person narrative and the vivid imagery makes it unforgettable. The book is set in colonial times in Africa. The main character is a sailor by the name of Marlow. Marlow […]
Integration and the need for electronic data files
Boss Tweed (pictured below) was a notorious political crime boss in New York. He had a quote that was attributed to him: “Remember the first rule of politics. The ballots don’t make the results, the counters make the results. The counters – keep counting.” This is also true in chromatography. We have written in this […]
Only in the bizarro “science” world of forensic science: I only consider the data the DA tells me to
Remember this scene from Seinfeld? I had a brush of this of similar type today. Science versus science fiction… The Bizarro World (also known as Htrae) is a fictional planet in the DC comics universe. Introduced in the early 1960s, Htrae is a cube-shaped planet, home to Bizarro and his companions, all of whom were […]
A “drug detection dog” is certainly not specific
Who doesn’t love dogs? They are man’s best friend after all. But can we really trust “drug detection” dogs and their handlers? We have blogged about these dogs here before: What can David Letterman’s Stupid Animal Tricks Teach us About Forensic Science? Doggie sniffs are a poor substitute for meaningful analytical chemistry Here is a […]
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