Forensic Science

The first ruling of its kind in the country could give people convicted based on SBS testimony a new shot at freedom.

Spurred by an Appeal investigation into Michelle Heale’s controversial 2015 case, a law professor is asking New Jersey’s Conviction Review Unit to “correct an injustice” and set Heale free.

The Travis County District Attorney’s office had joined the release request and, despite Jimenez being taken into custody by ICE, she is expected to be released today.

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.

Advocates say junk science was used to convict Jimenez. DA Margaret Moore has not yet decided whether she will drop charges or retry her.

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 […]

An autopsy blamed the sleeping situation, but forensic experts aren’t so sure. And the same Ohio county just charged another mom in a similar case.

With Jessica Brand, Legal Director at The Justice Collaborative and Appeal contributor.

It has been over a week since California law enforcement announced what many have waited to hear for more than 40 years — that they identified and captured the man they believe to be the Golden State Killer, thought to be responsible for at least 12 murders and nearly 50 rapes between northern and southern California from […]

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 […]

This story was written by Vince Beiser for The Chronicle of Social Change, a nonprofit news publication that covers issues affecting vulnerable children, youth and their families, and was co-run with Slate Magazine. There was no doubt about the horror of the situation: a four-month-old baby girl was dead. The question facing the jurors was less clear-cut: […]

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 […]

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 […]

Ledura Watkins spent 41 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. And the only evidence prosecutors had against Watkins in the early 1970’s was a single hair.