I loved Quincy. I still do - one advantage of working from home has been the chance to watch it over lunch. 70s fashion, Quincy jumping up on his soapbox - and scientific crime investigation. It turns out that most techniques (even fingerprints) range from "more art than science" to "totally false." Entertaining, but ineffective at best, and putting the wrong people behind bars (or into the execution chamber) all too often.
M. Chris Fabricant, an attorney with the Innocence Project, details the convictions and exonerations of three men in Junk Science. All three were convicted on the basis of bite marks. They're inherently unreliable evidence (as any older sibling of a biter can tell you, two bites from the same person are not identical, let alone distinctive), and one particular "expert" invented a method of "finding" bite marks to match to previously identified suspects. Beyond the injustice done to these three men, there's the fact that in at least one case, the actual criminal committed additional serious crimes while the scapegoat was in prison.
While his stories were interesting, Fabricant could have used a better editor. He jumps between cases, adding in personal information about his case preparations, without much warning and without an index that would let the reader refresh their memory about the details of each case. Junk Science is worth reading if you're interested in the subject, but likely too frustrating to get through if you're not.
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