"The New Forensics: Criminal Justice, False Certainty, and the Second Generation of Scientific Evidence"
Erin Elizabeth Murphy · bepress Legal Repository · 2007
Accounts of powerful new forensic technologies such as DNA typing, data mining, biometric scanning, and electronic location tracking fill the daily news.Proponents praise these techniques for helping to exonerate those wrongly accused, and for exposing the failings of a criminal justice system that previously relied too readily upon faulty forensic evidence like handwriting, ballistics, and hair and fiber analysis.Advocates applaud the introduction of a "new paradigm" for forensic evidence, and proclaim that these new techniques will revolutionize how the government investigates and tries criminal cases.While the new forensic sciences undoubtedly offer an unprecedented degree of certainty and reliability, these characteristics alone do not necessarily render them less susceptible to misuse.In fact, as this Article argues, the most lauded attributes of these new forms of forensic evidence may actually exacerbate the