You may already know that if the police want to track your comings and goings, your cell phone has become the digital equivalent to a bloodhound. Because it communicates in the background with nearby cell phone towers, and your phone provider records and saves these “pings” in a way that police can search through, they…
Let’s say (hypothetically, of course) that you have fallen in with the wrong crowd, and they persuade you to drive them to a place where they plan to commit a robbery. While they are committing the crime, something goes wrong and one of them gets fatally shot by the intended victim. The police catch up…
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 law acts as a two-sided coin: on one side, you are expected to not only be aware of laws that govern your behavior, such as speed limits and what constitutes an unacceptably high blood alcohol content level (ignorance is not a defense), but also to obey those laws. The consequences for your failure to…
