Scott McGrath

3/26/18

Current Event 20

https://www.forensicmag.com/news/2018/03/17-years-later-toddlers-death-ruled-homicide

This article is titled “17 Years Later, Toddler’s Death Ruled a Homicide” and is written by Phil Williams. The article is very interesting and discusses a toddlers death 17 years ago that is only now being ruled a homicide due to a second autopsy. In 2001 Jeffry Skaggs died at the young age of 15 months. At the time, it was believed that the child fell off a bookcase and hit his head and died. Back in December, Investigators reviewed his body for another autopsy.  They found fractures on the baby’s skull that would have only been possible from an extreme amount of force. Investigators concluded that it was murder. The killer is unknown but the family has agreed to cooperate fully.

This article is very significant to the field of modern forensics. It shows that investigators have the ability to pick up a seemingly “dead case” and shed new light upon it. Seventeen years passed since this child's death, and they finally discovered the real cause of death. This is huge because it makes this case a murder, and with every murder, there is a murderer. This is a very important case in the forensics field.

I think the author did a very good job explaining this case. I really liked how she utilized a lot of quotes from high ranking officials to get a better idea of what was going on. Also, the author incorporated videos from a  documentary on the case. This made it easier to visualize what is going on. Overall, this was a very interesting article and very well written.

Sleep may help eyewitnesses from choosing innocent suspects

Michigan State University. "Sleep may help eyewitnesses from choosing innocent suspects."

ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 8 February 2018. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170906144924.htm>.

I read a Michigan State University study on the benefits of sleep. But, this article took a very interesting point of view. They investigated how sleep can help eyewitnesses choose the perpetrator in a police lineup and not an innocent person. The article began by showing that choosing the wrong perp is a very big problem in the US. Nearly 70% of all wrongful imprisonments are due to someone picking the wrong person in a police lineup. The study was done by having 200 people watch a video of the crime and then identifying the suspect in a police lineup. One group was allowed to sleep before they did the identifying where the other group did not. The group that did not sleep identified the right person 42% of the time while the group that slept was able to do so 66% of the time, a major difference. The researchers believe participants who slept were more likely to use an "absolute strategy," in which they compare each person in the lineup to their memory of the suspect, while participants who didn't sleep were more likely to use a "relative strategy," in which they compare the people in the lineup to each other to determine who most resembles the perpetrator relative to the others.

This is a major finding that would help the rest of the field of forensic science. It brings the bigger idea up of should trials be rushed to appease the public or should they be time consuming in order to cut down on the wrongful imprisonment numbers. All in all will hopefully bring chance to the way police lineups are done.

This article was very well written as the authors used very concise vocabulary so the piece was easily understandable. In addition, the piece had lots of direct quotations from the actual article that brought lots of credibility to it.