"It's a practicing laboratory with academic programs devoted to forensic science," said Robert Allen, professor of forensics science and biochemistry at the OSU medical college, which will provide $21.87 million for construction costs, mainly from bonds.

The city will provide $16.86 million from revenue generated by the 2001 and 2006 third-penny sales tax, and the 2005 general obligation bond, said Laura Christiansen, spokeswoman for the city.

It doesn’t happen often, thankfully, but it does happen. This year, three Mississippi men were freed after spending 15 years or more behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit. They’d probably still be in prison if not for the intervention of The Innocence Project, a national organization that works, largely with the assistance of DNA testing, to exonerate wrongfully convicted individuals.

When these three men -- Arthur Johnson, Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks -- were given their freedom, all they got from Mississippi was an apology. Saying “sorry” in such cases is the right thing to do, but words alone are not enough. There should be a monetary remedy as well.

The jury convicted Clarence Arthur Tremaine, 33, of possession and promotion of child pornography on Friday, recommending that he be sentenced to four years in prison for possession and seven years for promotion.

"It appears to me that the officers collected the evidence as they were supposed to," Hurtt said. "I am sure we will have discussions (about the case) and anything we need to improve."

Mayor Bill White on Thursday called on Hurtt to provide a timeline of the police investigation and plans to meet with the chief to discuss the work that led officers to Ricardo Rachell in 2002, according to White's staff. He also asked the city attorney to review Rachell's case with prosecutors.

Hurtt promised to provide White with all the information he requested, but the chief stopped short of saying HPD would open its own inquiry into the wrongful conviction.

But the sheriff stopped short of saying they were looking for a serial killer.

"The facts that we currently have do not allow me at this time to say with certainty that these cases are all linked," he said.

"It's not just sitting on the shelf," said Greg Shipley, spokesman for the Maryland State Police. "Legal is reviewing it."

The Innocence Project, a national group of lawyers who try to exonerate convicts based largely on new DNA evidence, wrote in the complaint that "serious negligence or misconduct substantially affecting the integrity of forensic results has occurred at the Baltimore Police Department Crime Laboratory... Recently, the BPD-CL revealed that a lab employee working in the DNA lab contaminated evidence in approximately 12 open cases."

On Aug. 19, Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld fired Edgar Koch -- the city's crime lab director since 1997 -- due to a "number of operational issues" including mistakenly allowing DNA evidence from lab staff to be classified as unknown crime scene evidence.

Look at his head. It was abnormally big.

Babysitter Suzanne Holdsworth - free today after a retrial - spent three years in prison after she was convicted in 2005 of murdering Kyle because of this simple logic: Kyle was essentially healthy, then he was killed.

The simple logic was wrong - Kyle's brain had five separate disorders - and that mistake led to a terrible miscarriage of justice.

RazJohn Smyer, a suspect in a string of Denver-area break-ins, often checked his victims' refrigerators and helped himself to a drink. The soda cans he left behind gave police enough DNA evidence to link him to five burglaries. He is now serving a 20-year sentence.

Smyer's conviction is just one example of how DNA evidence is increasingly being used to solve everyday property crimes across the nation. Once reserved mostly for violent cases such as rape and murder, genetic testing is now much cheaper and faster than when the technology was new.

"Regular watchers of CSI may be led to believe that this technology is already being used in this way, but it's really brand new," said John Roman of the Urban Institute, lead author of a study on the issue. "This really is the start of a revolution in policing."

The videotape will be forwarded to the FBI Crime Lab in Washington for repair and video recovery, according to a statement from Gary Nicholson, special GBI agent in charge of the regional office.

Two other video cameras also captured the incident, but authorities have refused to make their images public, although Sheriff Ronnie Strength says he has seen them and they support the action taken by his men.

Dutchess County Court Judge Gerald V. Hayes imposed the sentence on 21-year-old Cheryl Santiago as family members of both the defendant and the young victim watched in the fourth-floor courtroom of the county courthouse in downtown Poughkeepsie.

"As children growing up, we know our parents will one day pass away," Hayes told Santiago during the 20-minute proceeding. "As parents, we do not expect our child will die, especially in a manner such as this."

An emergency-room doctor and two deputy coroners found bruises, skull fractures and brain hemorrhages that pointed to child abuse.

Yesterday, Ely was convicted of murder, felonious assault and child endangering after a weeklong trial without a jury before Judge David E. Cain in Franklin County Common Pleas Court.

"The court does not know what happened," Cain said. "But the court does not have any doubt that the defendant is responsible for these injuries."

Forensic pathologist Keith Lehman testified that Ani Rose was stabbed dozens of times as she tried in vain to fight-off her attacker.

Prosecutors said the attacker was her estranged husband.

The main question in the murder trial is if Demetrio Rose was criminally insane at the time of the stabbing. The 911 tape played in court earlier Tuesday was of Demetrio Rose calling 911 moments after Ani Rose was stabbed and telling the dispatcher that he stabbed his wife.

The infant's autopsy was completed Tuesday afternoon in Terre Haute. But preliminary results, including the cause and manner of death, were inconclusive, Montgomery County Coroner Darren Forman said.

"We'll have to wait on toxicology and pathology results now," he said. "That could take four to six weeks or longer, especially with the holidays."

A 911 call was placed Monday afternoon from the infant's home in Darlington, police said. Emergency responders took the child to St. Clare Medical Center in Crawfordsville, where the child died just after 5 p.m.

That's no slam on the people working in the existing system, but it is a slam on the system. Mississippi has consistently failed to adequately fund the state's crime lab, to fund a state medical examiner or to enact modern, proper laws for the handling of DNA evidence.

The Mississippi Crime Laboratory system consists of the main laboratory in Jackson and three regional laboratories located in Batesville, on the Gulf Coast, and at Meridian. The state's crime lab provides forensic services to law enforcement agencies throughout the state.

That's good news for victims as well as suspects in ongoing criminal investigations, said Greene County Prosecutor Darrell Moore.

He and other city, county, state and federal officials attended the dedication of the new lab Monday.

The renovated, three-story building is at Jefferson Avenue and Phelps Street.

Phylecia Humphries, 26, of Brownwood, faced a maximum 20-year prison sentence after being convicted of sexual assault of a child, a second-degree felony.

Humphries must register as a sex offender for life and cannot be around children under 17 without the court's permission. She also was fined $10,000.

After deliberating about five hours Friday, jurors sentenced her to probation. State District Judge Steve Ellis assessed the 90-day jail sentence after Brown County District Attorney Michael Murray requested that Humphries spend 180 days in jail.

Watching Gil Grissom using bugs to solve murders in Las Vegas in Crime Scene Investigation, and tell-tale fibres and scientific know-how aiding his colleagues Horatio Caine in CSI: Miami and Mac Taylor in CSI: New York, has fired the imagination of some viewers who now want to follow in their footprints.

The result today is that you can find a group dressed in white coats analysing evidence collected from a crime scene just as if they are taking part in CSI: Peterborough – but, in fact, they are studying at Peterborough Regional College.

Luna County Magistrate Court Judge Ray Baese heard testimony Thursday from Elena Garcia, Luther's mother; Karl Bennett, of the Office of the Medical Investigator; and Frank Pena Jr., a Luna County Sheriff's investigator, finding probable cause to forward the case.

Tena, held in lieu of $22,500 cash bail, is charged as an accessory to murder and with two counts of tampering with evidence.

Alvar Aguirre, 16, also of Deming, has a preliminary hearing Dec. 29 in magistrate court on an amended charge of first-degree murder. Baese previously sent the case to district court on an open count of murder. Aguirre is in custody.

Phillips was recently exonerated through DNA testing and other evidence of committing a string of sex crimes over 25 years ago.
 

“When you wake up in a cell, the first thing you do is see the door and realize that the door is locked, and then you realize, ‘I’m innocent,’” he said.

A utility worker discovered a child's skull Thursday less than a half-mile from 3-year-old Caylee Anthony's home in some woods that, until recently, had been flooded. The remains could solve a six-month-old mystery of where the girl went, legal experts said.

Caylee's mother, 22-year-old Casey Anthony, was indicted in October on first-degree murder and other charges, even though the toddler's body hadn't been found. She has insisted that she left the girl with a baby sitter in June, but she didn't report Caylee missing until July.

"If the defense had been able to go to trial without a body being discovered, hopes for reasonable doubt might have been compelling. If the body proves to be Caylee, then it immediately becomes an uphill case for the defense," former U.S. Attorney Kendall Coffey said.

Robots which carry out DNA testing at three times the speed of traditional methods have begun operating in two Scottish laboratories.

The £100,000 machines will be employed at the Scottish Police Services Authority (SPSA) forensic science labs in Dundee and Glasgow.

The robots are each capable of testing up to 78 DNA samples in 24 hours.
Similar tests using the manual approach can take two people up to three days to complete.

But search orders have yet to keep pace with technological advances, which has resulted in corporate data being stored electronically, such as in hard drives and USB keys, rather than filing cabinets, according to pro.manchester.

Forensic accountants who look at personal information stored electronically could be breaking data protection rules, according to pro.manchester.

Someone had gotten his personal information and posted it on a subscriber list for companies selling things such as cell phones and satellite dishes. It was as if Welch had dropped off a loan application at 150 stores simultaneously, and they all started checking his credit history.

And with each check, his credit score dropped, tumbling from nearly 700 to the low 500s in a matter of months, he said. That raised red flags at banks where Welch had revolving credit lines and had applied for loans.

Until recently, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act -- covering a myriad of activities related to hacking and intellectual property theft -- was just one of many questionable federal laws on the books.

Then came the case of Lori Drew -- the woman found guilty of a misdemeanor under the Act: accessing protected computers without authorization. What Drew had done was invent a fake MySpace profile of a nonexistent teenage boy and develop a relationship between him and her daughter's former friend. The target of the ruse, Megan Meier, committed suicide after Drew's creation spurned her.

After Sheriff Pat Hedges asked Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, to search for grants to upgrade the local sheriff’s lab with DNA processing equipment, it was found that state’s lab was already upgraded to handle DNA but lacked equipment, sheriff’s spokesman Rob Bryn said.

Hedges then proposed forming an alliance between his department and the state: The Goleta lab would get $268,000 for scientific equipment with the proviso that the state would supply the needed manpower at no cost to either San Luis Obispo or Santa Barbara counties. The deal was sealed.

The question facing Superior Court Judge James Orlando is whether the World War II veteran is competent to stand trial in the shooting death of a caregiver at his University Place assisted-living home three months ago.

Orlando spent the better part of Tuesday and Wednesday hearing testimony on Elder’s mental health and is expected to issue a ruling as early as today.

Prosecution witness Dr. William Richie, a state psychiatrist at Western State Hospital, testified that Elder, while mentally impaired in some ways, understands enough to go to trial.

The 18-year-old Tyler woman was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder by a jury in 241st District Judge Jack Skeen Jr.'s court after approximately 15 minutes of deliberation. She was sentenced after an hour and 15 minutes of deliberation. Ms. Rhoten faced probation or two to 20 years in prison. She will be eligible for parole after serving four and one-half years.

The murder plot allegedly planned by Ms. Rhoten and her boyfriend James Neal Perkins, 19, was discovered by Ms. Rhoten's older sister Amber Rhoten, who saw text messages that had been sent between the two discussing the plan.

In 2007, 42 people were executed and 115 were sentenced to death.

The capital punishment data was compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center, a research and anti-death-penalty advocacy group.

The lull in executions defied predictions that more prisoners would be put to death after a Supreme Court ruling in April upheld lethal injection and ended an eight-month moratorium. Since that decision, Baze v. Rees, states have granted stays in 25 capital cases as courts worked through issues including the mental illness of defendants, ineffective representation and revelations of potentially exculpatory evidence.