Feature Channels: Crime and Forensic Science

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Responding to the large number of people with serious mental illnesses in the criminal justice system will require more than mental health services, according to a new report.

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Where people look when watching video evidence varies wildly and has profound consequences for bias in legal punishment decisions, a team of researchers at NYU and Yale Law School has found. This study raises questions about why people fail to be objective when confronted with video evidence.

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Lone wolf terrorist attacks are not on the rise as popular culture might lead one to believe — but the attacks are more personal, use high-velocity firearms and targeting military and police.

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Researchers at Johns Hopkins have identified a highly sensitive means of analyzing very tiny amounts of DNA. The discovery, they say, could increase the ability of forensic scientists to match genetic material in some criminal investigations. It could also prevent the need for a painful, invasive test given to transplant patients at risk of rejecting their donor organs and replace it with a blood test that reveals traces of donor DNA.

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Web-based training targeted at college-aged men is an effective tool for reducing the number of sexual assaults on U.S. campuses, according to a researcher in the School of Public Health at Georgia State University.

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Chris Slobogin of Vanderbilt Law School backs the use of scientific risk assessment in criminal sentencing.

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The U.S. military has made progress by conducting sexual assault training, but a new University of Michigan study raises questions about the effectiveness of those efforts.

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A significant arrest of six suspected poachers took place here on Sept. 7 in a joint operation conducted by the Mecula District police, Luwire scouts and Niassa National Reserve WCS scouts.

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Disturbing news for women on college campuses: a new study from the University at Buffalo Research Institute on Addictions indicates that female college students who are victims of sexual assault are at a much higher risk of becoming victims again.

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Dr. Laura McNeal, assistant law professor at the University of Louisville and legal fellow at Charles Hamilton Houston Institute at Harvard Law School is available to offer legal insight surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.

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As the hashtag #Ferguson trends on Twitter more than a week following Michael Brown’s deadly shooting by a police officer in this suburb of St. Louis, Mo., University of Vermont professor @RashadShabazz was deeply engaged in the conversation. It’s a topic that Shabazz, UVM assistant professor of geography and protégé of renowned activist Angela Davis, understands well -- his current research looks at issues surrounding the policing of black communities, the projection of young black men as criminals and the geographies of race and racism. With persistent images suggestive of a war zone in a small American town, and a frenzy of both social and mainstream media reporting the story, Shabazz offers an academic perspective.

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Experts at Drexel University in Philadelphia are available to assist the news media with their coverage of the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, and its implications from a variety of perspectives.

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With more than 2 million people behind bars, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. This mass incarceration has serious implications for not only the inmates, but their children, finds a new University of California-Irvine study. The study found significant health problems, including behavioral issues, in children of incarcerated parents and also that, for some types of health outcomes, parental incarceration can be more detrimental to a child’s well-being than divorce or the death of a parent.

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Violent behavior and beliefs among middle school students can be reduced through the implementation of a targeted violence intervention program, according to a Vanderbilt study released in the Journal of Injury and Violence Research.

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Even when not under arrest, juvenile suspects being interrogated for a crime may be strikingly unaware of their constitutional rights and confess without legal counsel or even a parent present, according to research presented at the American Psychological Association’s 122nd Annual Convention.

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The message is simple: to save elephants, all ivory markets must close and all ivory stockpiles must be destroyed, according to a new peer-reviewed paper by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

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Email phishers have spread to social media sites where they engage in new scams researchers call 'farcing'

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A new brain imaging study has identified the mechanisms involved in balancing blameworthiness and the emotion-driven urge to punish.

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Criminals are smuggling an estimated $30 billion in U.S. currency into Mexico each year from the United States, but help could be on the way for border guards, researchers will report here today. The answer to the problem: a portable device that identifies specific vapors emitted by U.S. paper money, to be described by researchers here at 248th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.


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States that allow officers to pull over a driver for texting while driving saw fewer deaths than those that use secondary enforcement of texting bans.

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By treating incarceration as an infectious disease, researchers show that small differences in prison sentences can lead to large differences in incarceration rates. The research was published in June in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. 

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A financial literacy survey released this week by a consortium of UALR professors suggests teaching inmates how to handle money is crucial to avoiding relapse and high recidivism rates.

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Confrontational and deceptive interrogation techniques are inappropriate for the developing adolescent mind, according to Todd Warner’s psychology study at U.Va.

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A new study identifies the most corrupt and least corrupt states in the United States and calculates that government corruption costs American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars a year.

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David S. Cohen, JD, is available to comment on violence against abortion clinic workers and other issues related to reproductive rights. Cohen is a constitutional law and gender issues expert and an associate professor at the School of Law at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

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Men who have been incarcerated and released are more than twice as likely to die prematurely as those who haven't been imprisoned, according to a Georgia State University criminologist.

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The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Wildlife Crimes Unit announced today that Aceh police arrested two wildlife traders selling ivory, elephant bones, live orangutans, a live tiger cub, and other wildlife.

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Multiple studies have shown that a woman’s resistance to sexual assault reduces the likelihood of a completed assault while creating no risk of additional injury for the woman.

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Hamilton College Professor of Economics Steve Wu and 2012 grad Kendall Weir analyzed five years of NFL draft data and discovered that the performance of NFL players who had an arrest record but no charges was better than those without an arrest and those arrested and charged performed as well as those with clean records - but they cost less. The study, Criminal Records and The Labor Market for Professional Athletes: The Case of the National Football League, is forthcoming in the Journal of Sports Economics.

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The Johns Hopkins Clinic for Public Health Law and Policy at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, in a newly released paper, is calling upon states to comply with U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigational new drug regulations when administering lethal injections.

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WCS's 96 Elephants campaign released exactly 96 seconds of video footage of baby elephants to celebrate Earth Day – and to draw attention to the fact that 96 elephants are killed every day in Africa.

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In a study of crimes committed by people with serious mental disorders, only 7.5 percent were directly related to symptoms of mental illness, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.