When researchers examined arrest data from 1997 to 2008, a third of all young adults and almost half of all African-American men had arrest records by age 23. Yet most arrests are for low-level crimes like disorderly conduct, public drunkenness and drug possession....
Month: August 2019
What can we gain from pretrial risk assessments?
One of the great injustices in today's justice system is that so many people are punished long before they have been found guilty.They are punished by being kept in pretrial detention for months or even years, either because they were denied bail or because they could...
Lie-detector tests are unscientific, produce faulty evidence
Polygraph tests, often called "lie-detector tests," are not admissible as evidence in the courts. This is because they have never been shown to produce reliable proof of whether the subject is lying.Nevertheless, they continue to be popular as an employment screening...
Genetic genealogy database leads to exoneration of Idaho man
We've discussed on this blog how genealogy databases like GEDmatch warehouse the DNA results of huge numbers of people who have taken part in genetic testing for genealogy purposes.GEDmatch and similar databases collect DNA profiles from 23andMe, Ancestry.com and...