Further Reading: Field Autopsy — Criminal Justice

Tier 1: Verified Sources

National Research Council. Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward. National Academies Press, 2009. The landmark report that documented the lack of scientific basis for multiple forensic techniques. The report's recommendations — including creating an independent National Institute of Forensic Science — have been only partially implemented. Essential reading.

Garrett, Brandon L. Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong. Harvard University Press, 2011. The most comprehensive analysis of wrongful conviction cases. Garrett examined the trial transcripts of the first 250 DNA exonerees, documenting the specific failures in each case: flawed eyewitness procedures, overstated forensic testimony, false confessions, and inadequate defense.

President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Forensic Science in Criminal Courts: Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature-Comparison Methods. 2016. The follow-up to the NAS report, providing specific recommendations for validating forensic techniques. The report's standards for scientific validity have been resisted by the forensic science establishment.

Scheck, Barry, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer. Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How to Make It Right. New American Library, 2001. By the co-founders of the Innocence Project, documenting early DNA exoneration cases. Accessible and compelling; demonstrates the systemic nature of wrongful convictions through individual stories.

National Academy of Sciences. Identifying the Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification. National Academies Press, 2014. The definitive report on eyewitness identification reliability, summarizing decades of research and recommending evidence-based reforms to identification procedures.

Tier 2: Attributed Claims

Research by Samuel Gross and colleagues on the prevalence of false convictions, including the widely cited estimate that approximately 4.1% of death row inmates are factually innocent, has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2014).

The FBI's acknowledgment of flawed hair microscopy testimony was documented in a joint FBI-DOJ review initiated in 2012 and reported in 2015. The review's findings were covered extensively by the Washington Post and other media.

Research on the other-race effect in eyewitness identification — the finding that people are less accurate at identifying members of other races — is among the most replicated findings in cognitive psychology, documented in meta-analyses by Meissner and Brigham (2001) and others.

  1. Start with Garrett (Convicting the Innocent) — for the case-level analysis
  2. Then the NAS Report (2009) — for the forensic science assessment
  3. Then the NAS Report (2014) — for the eyewitness identification analysis
  4. Then PCAST (2016) — for the reform recommendations
  5. Then Scheck et al. (Actual Innocence) — for the Innocence Project's founding story