Houston Chronicle on the Houston PD Crime Lab

The Houston Chronicle pub­lished a op-ed over the week­end, call­ing for change in their police crime lab. Even going as far as sug­gest­ing it’s time to close it down, and open up a regional crime lab that works with, but is inde­pen­dent of law enforce­ment agencies.

According to the audit, HPD work­ers often over­looked prints or

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Orange County California Looking at Independent Forensics Agency

Orange County California is pick­ing up what I’ve been putting down. They are look­ing at either cre­at­ing a new, or mov­ing the cur­rent crime lab away from the police and pros­e­cu­tor, and make them their own agency. This move would be in com­pli­ance with the NAS report’s sug­ges­tion as a way to reduce institutional

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Bitemark Experts Agree, Bitemark Evidence Isn’t Reliable

Admittedly that’s a bit over an over­state­ment for a arti­cle title, but it gets the read­ers atten­tion. A recent study at the University of Buffalo have con­cluded that bitemark evi­dence can’t be linked back to a given indi­vid­ual. Bitemark evi­dence can cer­tainly be used to exclude and include a sus­pect, but to go any

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Congress Finally Has Hearings on the NAS Report

It would seem Congress has finally taken up hear­ings on the NAS report writ­ten months ago. Congress seemed to agree to allo­cate more funds for train­ing, research in the field, and fed­eral stan­dards should be cre­ated for labs and analysts.

They didn’t agree on set­ting up a fed­eral agency.

…the fed­eral gov­ern­ment shouldn’t “try to micro­man­age every

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NPR Report on the NAS Report

NPR authored an arti­cle point­ing out that the push to form a national foren­sic over­sight com­mit­tee has stalled. Could it be that the gov­ern­ment has more impor­tant things on their hands now days than the cre­ation of a new bureau­cratic body? The end result of which would undoubt­edly the rec­om­men­da­tion for leg­is­la­tion, or creation

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