Brian Rushton Identity crisis

Brian Rushton,

Another forensic mess you’ve gotten me into

THE more that is known about a science, the more uses tend to be found for it. But in the case of forensics—the discipline through which villains are identified by stray fingerprints, stands of hair or other giveaways—it seems that the more is discovered about the field, the more courts are losing faith in it.

Advances in forensic science have led to spectacular breakthroughs in justice. In 2009 Sean Hodgson, who had spent 27 years in jail for the 1979 murder of a Southampton barmaid, had his conviction quashed after DNA tests proved that blood found at the crime scene could not have been his. But in other cases faulty forensic evidence has led police and prosecutors astray. In 2012 a man spent five months in jail awaiting trial for a rape committed in a city he had never visited, after a police lab confused his DNA with samples taken from the victim. In 2014, after spending 12 years in jail, Dwaine George had his murder conviction overturned after a retrial established that the tiny quantity of gunshot residue found on a coat in his house could have been picked up...Continue reading

via Brian Rushton, Identity crisis