S., and convictions in many of those cases were based, at least partially, on this particular type of evidence used to connect suspects to bullet fragments associated with the crimes for which they were prosecuted. In some cases, such as that of Lee Wayne Hunt, imprisoned for 21 years for murder in North Carolina, conviction was based exclusively on this type of forensic evidence (Solomon, 2007) on the basis of which prosecutors connected Hunt to ammunition in the possession of a codefendant, establishing Hunt's guilt by virtue of the felony murder rule (Kobalinsky and Liotti, et al., 2005).
Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis and Violation of the Scientific Method:
In 1998, William Tobin, a recently retired FBI metallurgical specialist who had previously been credited with identifying the cause of high profile accidents like the 1996 crash of Flight 800 initiated a series of tests in conjunction with a metallurgist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to test the validity of the underlying assumptions made by FBI chemists using the bullet lead analysis forensic technique. By 2001, that study determined that those initial assumptions were invalid. Specifically, whereas the bureau had postulated that bullet lead chemical composition varied consistently enough to positively identify bullet fragments as having come from a particular box of ammunition, the Livermore study discovered that this assumption was flawed, rendering the forensic technique invalid in many respects.
It turned out that bullets manufactured together from a single batch of lead did not necessarily always match other bullets produced from the same lead batch, by virtue of subtle changes attributable to the manufacturing process (Solomon, 2007). Even more importantly, the study revealed that bullets manufactured more than a year apart sometimes had identical chemical composition with respect to the elements tested by the comparative bullet lead analysis theory.
The researchers had purchased bullets from several different retail stores in one state and discovered that bullets bearing the same manufacturers' production dates distributed within communities as large as an entire state were capable of yielding a match via the...
Criminal Justice Drumming my hands on the desk before me, I finally spoke. "You're right, you're absolutely right." My academic advisor patiently raised a single eyebrow. "What? You thought I would steer you wrong?" I didn't believe her when she called me; I definitely thought she would be joking. Yet as I gazed at the piece of paper, reading for the third time the letter addressed to me, I had to admit,
The reduction occurs through allowing the counties to acquire other methods of jailing apart from the prisons. This includes out-of custody rehabilitative treatments, which could serve in reducing the number of the criminals taken to the prisons. However, the AB109 criminals must be individuals whose crime are not violent and not that serious as provided by the law. This means that that jailing of the A109 criminals in other
Criminal Justice: The Death Penalty Reasons for topic selection Causes of racial prejudice and discrimination Juvenile in delinquent society theory Culture and values Official and unofficial values The effectiveness of the death penalty The death penalty is irreversible The death penalty is barbaric Changes to the death sentence Implemented changes Sentencing guidelines Bifurcated trials Automatic appellate conviction review Proportionality review The importance of proposed changes Anticipated outcome Life imprisonment; alternative to death sentences The costs Decency standards Overall efficiency Policies in support of incarceration Conclusion References Background Despite the controversy over how effective it is
Other constitutional protections such as profiling are equally susceptible to manipulation and circumvention in the field by creative articulation on police reports. How common is wrongful conviction in our criminal justice system? Despite all the protections incorporated into legal standards, criminal procedure, and police administration, wrongful convictions are still a possibility. Most recently, the relatively new techniques made possible by DNA science have overturned several high-profile convictions of prisoners shown conclusively to
If human behavior can be loosely predicted, then so too can criminal behavior. 4. Criminal profiling is not one hundred percent accurate or valid. It is an inexact science. Results of profiling are close to chance, which is one reason why the process is criticized and used cautiously. Officers of the law may be misled by an inaccurate or hasty profile, and in some cases might even apprehend innocent persons
Criminal Justice -- Research Method & Theory British Crime Survey (BCS) Review The survey I reviewed is from primary research that provided a transcript for an interview, presumably to use in a face-to-face interview -- there are directions for showing cards to the respondents that give them a change to read response options and choices. Demographic data was collected at the beginning of the survey either to act as a screener or
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