Category Archives: Forensic Industry News

AUSTIN, TX (STL.News) – Texas Governor Greg Abbott has appointed Patrick Buzzini, Ph.D. and reappointed Bruce Budowle, Ph.D., Nancy Downing, Ph.D., and Jasmine Drake, Ph.D. to the Texas Forensic Science Commission for terms set to expire on September 1, 2020. The commission provides oversight over Texas crime laboratories and other entities conducting forensic analyses for use in criminal proceedings and provides an accreditation mandate responsible for establishing procedures, policies, and practices to improve the quality of forensic analyses conducted in Texas.

BALTIMORE — A 10-second handshake could transfer a person’s DNA to an object that the person never touched.
In handshaking experiments, people who never picked up a knife became the major source of DNA on the handle about 7 percent of the time, forensic scientist Cynthia Cale reported February 21 at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. That DNA was transferred to the knife when the person’s handshaking partner grasped the handle.

They are haunting drawings: black, white and Latina women, most of them youthful, with bright lips and lined eyes, staring plaintively at the viewer.
The women were etched in chalk pastel by the man who says he killed them, in a spree he says began in 1970 and continued for decades. If verified, that would make him among the most prolific serial killers in American history.

ST. GEORGE — A St. George Police officer is among several city employees to have received recognition for going above and beyond the call of duty.
During a public meeting at City Hall Thursday evening, St. George Police Detective Josh Wilson was honored with the city’s “Brighter Side” award for his work solving a case of brutal sexual assault perpetrated against a woman last spring.

“It is estimated that 50% of the samples entered into the national database do not result in matches, nor support investigations,” said Mike Cariola, President and CEO of Bode Technology. “Over the past three years alone, Bode has processed nearly 50,000 sexual assault kits. Every one of these cases that goes unmatched, thus unsolved in CODIS, is a candidate for forensic genealogy. Victims deserve justice and perpetrators need to be caught before they commit more crimes.”

Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit Superior Court Judge John Allen ruled last week that Gates is entitled to a new trial, citing new testing that showed his DNA was not on the fabric used to bind Wright. The judge also found that prosecutors at Gates’ trial purposely excluded black jurors, but he wrote that evidence of that behavior was presented too late to declare a new trial on those grounds.

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — New Hampshire will implement a new system to keep track of evidence in sexual assault cases after finding that nearly 600 rape kits had not been submitted to the state crime lab.

In science, it was the best of times, and the worst of times.
2018 was a year when researchers focused in on ways to head off disease by reprogramming a patient’s own cells, but also crossed what many thought were ethical red lines in genetic experimentation. It was the first year in which women won a share of the Nobel Prize for physics as well as for chemistry, but also a year when the #MeToo issue came to the fore in the science community.
And it was the year that marked the passing of British physicist Stephen Hawking, who was arguably the world’s best-known living scientist.

It’s long been thought that people inherit mitochondrial DNA — genetic material found inside cells’ mitochondria — exclusively from their mothers. But now, a provocative new study finds that, in rare cases, dads can pass on mitochondrial DNA, too.