March 21-25: Things Are Changing Again

Hello Readers,

As you may have noticed, once again the title of my blog has changed to more accurately reflect my project. But it feels like things are actually coming together. The work I’m doing is fascinating, but after a month at AIP, it felt like my project needed more focus. Colleen made a suggestion that really pulled everything together and pinpointed the true similarity in the cases I’ve been working: faulty forensic evidence in innocence cases.

Forensic science is science as it applies to law. In criminal cases this can include ballistics, DNA, toxicology, fingerprinting, and much more. These can all testified to by experts in criminal trials. But not all forensic sciences are created equal, and often these methods have no grounding in science at all, and are thus now becoming more accurately referred to as forensic practices. Misuse of forensic practices can often lead to false conviction. Even more sophisticated forensics, such as DNA, which is very well grounded in science, are subject to human error at the cost of innocent people. This is what I’d like to explore more with my project.

So, what happens from here? Well, my project doesn’t actually change all that much. I’ll be doing what I’ve been doing, but I’ll be honing in more specifically on the evidence used to convict, which in many cases is misused or faulty forensic science. This week I’ll be reading some chapters from Convicting the Innocent by Brandon L. Garrett, which generally explains forensics and I’ll update on how that goes next week.