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Full-Text Articles in Law
How Daubert And Its Progeny Have Failed Criminalistics Evidence And A Few Things The Judiciary Could Do About It, David H. Kaye
How Daubert And Its Progeny Have Failed Criminalistics Evidence And A Few Things The Judiciary Could Do About It, David H. Kaye
Journal Articles
A recent report of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology questioned the validity of several types of criminalistics identification evidence and recommended “a best practices manual and an Advisory Committee note, providing guidance to Federal judges concerning the admissibility under Rule 702 of expert testimony based on forensic feature-comparison methods.” This article supplies information on why and how judicial bodies concerned with possible rules changes—and courts applying the current rules—can improve their regulation of criminalistics identification evidence. First, it describes how courts have failed to faithfully apply Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceutical’s criteria for scientific validity to …
Firearm-Mark Evidence: Looking Back And Looking Ahead, David H. Kaye
Firearm-Mark Evidence: Looking Back And Looking Ahead, David H. Kaye
Journal Articles
This article, written as a contribution to a festschrift for Paul Giannelli, surveys the development of the law on one type of feature-matching evidence that repeatedly attracted Professor Giannelli’s attention — “firearm-mark evidence.” By inspecting toolmarks on bullets or spent cartridge cases, firearms examiners can supply valuable information on whether a particular gun fired the ammunition in question. But the limits on this information have not always been respected in court, and a growing number of opinions have tried to address this fact.
The article explains how the courts have moved from a position of skepticism of the ability of …
User-Generated Evidence, Rebecca Hamilton
User-Generated Evidence, Rebecca Hamilton
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
Around the world, people are using their smartphones to document atrocities. This Article is the first to address the implications of this important development for international criminal law. While acknowledging the potential benefits such user-generated evidence could have for international criminal investigations, the Article identifies three categories of concern related to its use: (i) user security; (ii) evidentiary bias; and (iii) fair trial rights. In the absence of safeguards, user-generated evidence may address current problems in international criminal justice at the cost of creating new ones and shifting existing problems from traditional actors, who have institutional backing, to individual users …
The Technologies Of Race: Big Data, Privacy And The New Racial Bioethics, Christian Sundquist
The Technologies Of Race: Big Data, Privacy And The New Racial Bioethics, Christian Sundquist
Articles
Advancements in genetic technology have resurrected long discarded conceptualizations of “race” as a biological reality. The rise of modern biological race thinking – as evidenced in health disparity research, personal genomics, DNA criminal forensics, and bio-databanking - not only is scientifically unsound but portends the future normalization of racial inequality. This Article articulates a constitutional theory of shared humanity, rooted in the substantive due process doctrine and Ninth Amendment, to counter the socio-legal acceptance of modern genetic racial differentiation. It argues that state actions that rely on biological racial distinctions undermine the essential personhood of individuals subjected to such taxonomies, …