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Forensic Science

Justice in America Episode 27: Junk Forensic Science

Josie Duffy Rice and guest co-host Zak Cheney Rice talk with Radley Balko, opinion journalist at the Washington Post and author of The Cadaver and the Country Dentist, about faulty forensic science.

The Myth Of Technology As Equalizer

Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. The criminal legal system is unequal. Technology was supposed to help. But most of the time, technological advances end up magnifying inequality instead. Consider an example as […]

Faulty Forensics: Explained

In 1992, three homemade bombs exploded in seemingly random locations around Colorado. When police later learned that sometime after the bombs went off, Jimmy Genrich had requested a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook from a bookstore, he became their top suspect. In a search of his house, they found no gunpowder or bomb-making materials, just some common household […]

No Backlog: Why the Epidemic of Untested Rape Kits Is Not a Symbol of Insufficient Police Budgets But Instead a Failure to Investigate Rape

A sex crimes detective with the Memphis Police Department will keep her job despite leaking confidential investigative files to the family of a rape suspect, the Commercial Appeal reported last week. Before Detective Ouita Knowlton became the subject of a criminal investigation, she was the supervisor of the DNA Unit, which was formed in 2014 to investigate long-neglected […]

The Massachusetts Lab Scandals: Confronting the New Normal of Mass Error in Criminal Justice

Last month, Massachusetts criminal defense lawyers filed suit seeking an extraordinary measure of relief: dismissal en masse of thousands of drug convictions, with prejudice — meaning that prosecutors would forever be barred from retrying the defendants. The circumstances giving rise to the request were, at first glance, equally extraordinary. First, there was the revelation in 2013 that Massachusetts state […]