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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Crime Lab In The Age Of The Genetic Panopticon, Brandon L. Garrett Jan 2017

The Crime Lab In The Age Of The Genetic Panopticon, Brandon L. Garrett

Michigan Law Review

Review of Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice by Adam Benforado, Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Forensic DNA by Erin E. Murphy, and Cops in Lab Coats: Curbing Wrongful Convictions Through Independent Forensic Laboratories by Sandra Guerra Thompson.


The Banality Of Wrongful Executions, Brandon L. Garrett Apr 2014

The Banality Of Wrongful Executions, Brandon L. Garrett

Michigan Law Review

What is so haunting about the known wrongful convictions is that those cases are the tip of the iceberg. Untold numbers of unnoticed errors may send the innocent to prison — and to the death chamber. That is why I recommend to readers a trilogy of fascinating new books that peer deeper into this larger but murkier problem. Outside the rarified group of highly publicized exonerations, which have themselves done much to attract attention to the causes of wrongful convictions, errors may be so mundane that no one notices them unless an outsider plucks a case from darkness and holds …


A Tale Of Two Sciences, Erin Murphy Apr 2012

A Tale Of Two Sciences, Erin Murphy

Michigan Law Review

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . .. . So might one describe the contrasting portraits of DNA's ascension in the criminal justice system that are drawn in David Kaye's The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence and Sheldon Krimsky and Tania Simoncelli's Genetic Justice: DNA Data Banks, Criminal Investigations, and Civil Liberties. For Kaye, the double helix stands as the icon of twenty-first-century achievement, a science menaced primarily by the dolts (lawyers, judges, and the occasional analyst) who misuse it. For Krimsky and Simoncelli, DNA is a seductive forensic tool that is …


Relative Doubt: Familial Searches Of Dna Databases, Erin Murphy Jan 2010

Relative Doubt: Familial Searches Of Dna Databases, Erin Murphy

Michigan Law Review

The continued growth of forensic DNA databases has brought about greater interest in a search method known as "familial" or "kinship" matching. Whereas a typical database search seeks the source of a crime-scene stain by making an exact match between a known person and the DNA sample, familial searching instead looks for partial matches in order to find potential relatives of the source. The use of a familial DNA search to identify the alleged "Grim Sleeper" killer in California brought national attention to the method, which has many proponents. In contrast, this Article argues against the practice of familial searching …


Toward A More Communitarian Future? Fukuyama As The Fundamentalist Secular Humanist, June Carbone May 2003

Toward A More Communitarian Future? Fukuyama As The Fundamentalist Secular Humanist, June Carbone

Michigan Law Review

With The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama established himself as the prophet of liberal democracy and free markets, heralding their triumph as the only form of governance capable of commanding legitimacy. Asked to reflect on his predictions a decade later, Fukuyama concluded that the greatest threat to liberalism comes from biotechnology because it alone has the potential to remake the human nature that liberal democracy was designed to serve. Fukuyama makes a compelling case that biotechnology may produce developments that should concern us; he is ironically less persuasive in articulating a liberal-democratic framework for governing the …