- Dairy Queen manager charged with involuntary manslaughter following suicide of teen employee reportedly bullied on the job [AP, Missouri]
- Court orders new trial: carpenter, in school to argue against son’s school suspension over knife, had displayed knife he carries as part of work [Lancaster Online, Commonwealth v. Goslin]
- Desires for retribution aside, hanging homicide rap on dealers after overdoses unlikely to solve opiate problem [Mark Sine and Kaitlyn Boecker, Baltimore Sun]
- “Man wrongly convicted with bite mark evidence confronts bite mark analysts” [Radley Balko]
- Judge Neil Gorsuch and over-criminalization [C. Jarrett Dieterle, National Review]
- Debate over DoJ oversight of city police forces continues [David Meyer Lindenberg, Fault Lines (report on Chicago) and more]
2 Comments
Radley Balko’s article on “bite mark evidence” points out that no proponent of “bite mark analysis” has ever established, or even described, a scientific and replicable basis for the practice.
This raises a major question: why are such “expert witnesses” about unproven “science” even allowed to testify in court?
Should courts allow witch doctors to give expert testimony about the cause of death?
Should numerologists give expert testimony about generally accepted accounting practices?
In point of fact the only forensic discipline that has a replicable scientific basis is DNA analysis.
Even the oldest forensic discipline, fingerprinting, rests on dozens of assumptions that have never been scientifically tested.