Chapter 1 — Further Reading

Annotated, and grouped by the book's citation-honesty tiers (see the Bibliography for the full policy). Tier 1 are sources we are confident exist and can stand behind; Tier 2 are real ideas whose exact citation you should verify before relying on it; Tier 3 are this book's own constructed teaching material.

Tier 1 — Verified canonical sources

  • National Research Council (National Academy of Sciences), Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward (2009). The foundational document for this entire book. Even reading only its summary will change how you watch a forensic drama. It is the source of the claim that, apart from nuclear DNA, no forensic method had been rigorously shown to individualize a source.
  • President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), Forensic Science in Criminal Courts: Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature-Comparison Methods (2016). The sharper, method-by- method follow-up. Introduces the standard of foundational validity that we use as a yardstick all book.
  • The Innocence Project (innocenceproject.org). The running record of post-conviction DNA exonerations and their causes — the empirical backbone of Theme 1. Browse the case profiles; note how often forensic overstatement appears.
  • U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, A Review of the FBI's Handling of the Brandon Mayfield Case (2006). The official autopsy of Case Study 1, including the role of context and the non-independence of the "verifications."

Tier 2 — Attributed; verify specifics before relying

  • General-audience books on forensic error and wrongful conviction (for example, work by Jim Fallon, M. Chris Fabricant on bite marks, and reporting on the Willingham case by David Grann) develop these themes at length. Treat specific figures in popular accounts as starting points to verify, not endpoints.
  • Academic reviews of the "CSI effect" in the criminology and law literature debate how large the effect actually is on real verdicts; the phenomenon is real but its magnitude is contested. Read more than one.

Tier 3 — This book's constructed material

  • The Cold Case File (Mill Creek / Marcus Diallo). A fictional, composite investigation built to let you practice forensic reasoning honestly across all forty chapters. Every fact in it is constructed and labeled; none refers to a real case. Appendix I is its workbook.

If you read only one thing

Read the summary and recommendations of the 2009 NAS report. Almost every argument in this book is a detailed footnote to it.