2015

Book Signing for “Bills, Quills, and Stills: An Annotated, Illustrated, and Illuminated History of the Bill of Rights” &  Presentation by Robert J. McWhirter – Just What’s So Exceptional About America?:  Rights, “the People”, and the Bill of Rights Where: Changing Hands Bookstore Phoenix, 300 W Camelback Rd, Ste 1 Phoenix, AZ 85013 (Near the intersection of […]

by Michael Shermer The criminal justice system has a problem, and its name is forensics. This was the message I heard at the Forensic Science Research Evaluation Workshop held May 26–27 at the AAAS headquarters in Washington, D.C. I spoke about pseudoscience but then listened in dismay at how the many fields in the forensic

ASU criminology and criminal justice professors Alyssa Chamberlain and Danielle Wallace wanted to find out how the release of large numbers of parolees in a concentrated area affected their chances of returning to prison. To do this, they examined data from three Ohio cities, Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland, from 2000 to 2009. They found that

An article in the The Intercept takes a detailed look at the flawed science of bite mark analysis and the case of Bill Richards, a California man who was convicted in 1997 of murdering his wife, Pamela. […] As numerous cases like Richards’ have emerged over the years, some odontologists have spoken out against the

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Picture: Susan Mellen is exonerated of murder by Superior Court Judge Mark Arnold in Torrance, Calif. At right, her attorney Deirdre O’Connor. (Brad Graverson/Associated Press) Sam Gross, the editor of the Registry, reflects on wrongful convictions in an Oped: ” We can do better, of course — for misdemeanors, for death penalty cases and for

By Lorenzo Johnson When people hear about wrongfully convicted prisoners, they often ask why these individuals end up spending so much time in prison before they are exonerated.  For the wrongfully convicted, the judicial system has failed twice – once in winning the wrongful conviction, but also in intentionally delaying exoneration for as long as

By Radley Balko This week, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is sponsoring a conference in Arlington, Va., called the “International Symposium on Forensic Science Error Management – Detection, Measurement and Mitigation.” NIST is the government agency that’s attempting to carve out some standards and best practices for the use of forensics in the