It began in 1993. A series of crimes occurred in Germany, several of them violent, including six murders. Police were at a loss to identify a suspect, but thanks to DNA evidence collected in connection with the crime scenes they were certain about a few things: – the primary suspect was a woman; – she…
The use of DNA evidence as a tool to implicate people accused of crimes must rank as one of the most momentous advances in criminal justice technology since the development of fingerprint evidence in the early 20th century. The ability of a prosecuting attorney to tell a jury that, based on a tiny sample of…
The point of using a hand sanitizer is not just to wash your hands, but to kill germs on your skin. To accomplish this purpose, many hand sanitizers use ethanol as their active ingredient. As you may already know, ethanol is also the active ingredient in alcoholic beverages. But if a police officer pulls you…
One of the hallmarks of the criminal justice system, not only in Oklahoma but throughout the United States, is the “repeat offender / revolving door” phenomenon: a disproportionate number of criminal convictions come from a comparative handful of offenders who keep committing offenses, sometimes engaging in the same infractions over and over. The classic example…
The overcrowding of Oklahoma’s state prisons has for many years negatively affected not only those serving time but also society as a whole. This overcrowding was a main driver behind recent voter-approved reforms intended to address the problem by reducing some drug possession and property-related crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. Easing prison overcrowding by reducing…
