Double Loop Podcast

After the success and interest of Making a Murderer episodes, Glenn and Eric travel back to the 90s to discuss the physical evidence from the murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman and the trial of OJ Simpson.

Glenn Langenburg and Eric Ray discuss the most recent paper from the Noblis team (Bradford Ulery, Austin Hicklin, Maria Roberts, and JoAnn Buscaglia) from the data collected in the White Box study. Interexaminer variation of minutiae markup on latent fingerprints in Forensic Science International looks at how examiners mark points differently when looking at the same image. Clearer points tend to be marked by most examiners but unclear points or ambiguous features in clear areas can have wide variation in markup.

Glenn and Eric listened to the online recordings of the NIST Technical Colloquium Quantifying the Weight of Forensic Evidence. The presentations brought up lots of questions on how forensic scientists should be presenting evidence to juries and the court. Can juries understand complicated models or even nuanced levels of association? Is the search for a mathematical model to express the weight of evidence just a fool's errand?

Glenn and Eric take a look at the newly proposed draft documents from the Department of Justice. These documents seek to provide universal language for testimony and reports for multiple forensic disciplines. The good news is that there is nothing overly shocking or crazy in the latent print language. Examiners should provide comments to the DOJ, but the main content of the documents is in line with language from the past seven years from SWGFAST and the IAI. The link for the draft documents is https://www.justice.gov/dag/proposed-language-regarding-expert-testimony-and-lab-reports-forensic-science

Glenn and Eric received some more emails about the Avery case and fill out yet another episode with the topic. They even manage to debunk a fingerprint myth from the case.

Eric wastes almost an entire episode talking about teaching the Exclusionology class in Taipei, Taiwan and then visits Tokyo on the way back. Glenn adds in a bit about travels to Canada.

Eric (along with Penny Dechant) interviews Melissa, Nicole, and Jackie who all recently attended the Exclusionology class in Ontario, CA.

Glenn and Eric delve into a couple of recent cases involving Chicago PD where defense attorneys have filed motions challenging the admission of latent print evidence.

Glenn and Eric read a couple of emails from non-examiners that came across our Making a Murderer episodes. We ended up spending this whole episode talking about the ideas and comments from those emails. Unrelated to the episode is the image thumbnail. This is the Christmas gift to our patron in Indianapolis. Turn the image upside-down and it says 'fingerprint'.

Glenn and Eric answer some questions from an email that came in after the Making a Murderer episodes. Is all the extra time used to shield ourselves from bias worth the effort? Do the fact-finders and the general public want our conclusions expressed as associations instead of identifications? Which of our customers decides? The officers, accreditation boards, judges, attorneys, jurors, legislatures?

Eric and Glenn start with a quick review of recent topics from the 2016 OSAC meeting. They then discuss a couple of recent court cases. First, the recent DC Court of Appeals decision in the Marlon Williams case. Second, the motion to preclude latent print testimony in Chicago in the Christopher Robertson case. Both cases focus on how testimony to forensic conclusions may overstate the evidence.

Eric and Glenn continue their discussion of the popular Netflix documentary including further discussions of the physical evidence, the EDTA test, things not discussed in the documentary, and the entire concept of true crime as entertainment.

Glenn and Eric start a two-part podcast discussion on the twisty case of Stephen Avery, now an extremely popular documentary on Netflix. As they wind their way through this very interesting case, the guys try to keep the focus on the physical evidence available and how that all played in to the convictions in this case.

Glenn and Eric discuss a recent article published by Michele Triplett titled, Complexity, Level of Association, and Strength of Fingerprint Conclusions. The guys express their opinions on the strengths and shortcomings of the concepts presented in the paper, why it's a good idea to express the complexity of a comparison, and why this won't solve the problem of errors. Before that discussion Glenn clarifies a few things about ninhydrin bleeding through paper to leave reversed prints.

Glenn and Eric interview Brian Orr with Go Evidence about the vacuum metal deposition technique. Brian and Glenn each share some success stories with VMD and Brian describes how the process works and how it's not as expensive as you might think.