Malaysian Crime Accreditation Failure on Trial

While accred­i­ta­tion may be vol­un­tary, if a lab attempts to be accred­ited and fails after hav­ing two exten­sions, that infor­ma­tion should be made avail­able to juries.

It let’s the juries know that the lab in ques­tion is not up to the stan­dards of the accred­i­ta­tion body. It doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean the results are wrong, but the jury

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Policing Crime Labs

An inter­est­ing arti­cle from the North County Times in San Diego. It hits on a lot of what has already been said about crime labs on this blog, but ties var­i­ous top­ics all together well.

Forensics, the use of sci­ence to answer ques­tions of law, play a vital role in the court­room. Using tools such as

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More Problems for Houston PD Crime Lab

During a re-accreditation attempt by the Houston PD crime lab with ASCLD-LAB (Association of Crime Laboratory Directors — Laboratory Accreditation Board), the exter­nal audi­tors found problems:

The depart­ment said it iden­ti­fied sev­eral prob­lems includ­ing insuf­fi­cient staffing, lack of proper super­vi­sory review, inad­e­quate qual­ity control/quality assur­ance pro­to­cols, tech­ni­cal com­pe­tence incon­sis­tent with indus­try stan­dards, insuf­fi­cient train­ing and inad­e­quate standard

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ASCLD 2009 Seminar

I recently had the oppor­tu­nity to attend the Association of Crime Laboratory Directors 2009 Symposium in Garden Grove California (across the street from Disneyland!).

While there I was able to net­work with other inde­pen­dent foren­sic prac­ti­tion­ers including:

Susan Narveson of Strand Analytical Laboratories

Jim Lee of Summit Forensic Document Laboratory

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