Free Republic

Enough articles have been written criticizing the result of the Casey Anthony case. I am not here to do that. While cases such as this can be polarizing, they can also be instructive. After following the case, here are some things I thought stood out as significant, but perhaps were not so obvious. CSI Effect For a long time now, we in the law enforcement professions have noted and at times feared, what has come to be known as the CSI Effect. What is this? The false expectation that, as in the television series, conclusive and irrefutable evidence will always...

Washington -- A Prince George's County, Md., jury would not convict a man accused of stabbing his girlfriend to death because a half-eaten hamburger, recovered from the crime scene and assumed to have been his, was not tested for DNA. In Washington, a jury deadlocked recently in the trial of a woman accused of stabbing another woman because fingerprints on the weapon did not belong to the suspect. An Alexandria, Va., jury acquitted a man on drug-possession charges in part because a box containing 60 rocks of crack cocaine that he was accused of tossing from his car during a...