The Innocence Project—aimed at vindicating the wrongfully convicted—asked researchers at the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this week to help improve forensic science techniques.
“It’s still a Wild Wild West out there in forensic science,” attorney Justin McShane, who works with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project and serves as co-chair of the ACS Division of Chemistry and the Law, told Nature. Despite efforts to improve the practice and application of forensic methods, including a 2009 report by the US National Research Council and a bill currently in the US Congress, major concerns remain about the field’s reliability and accuracy.
According to Innocence Project co-founder Peter Neufeld, forensic science is a major part of many of the cases the project investigates, having used DNA evidence to free close to 300 imprisoned people. In addition to supporting the bill in Congress, he called on the chemists at the meeting to ...
