by Jo Ellen Nott

Cellebrite—the Israeli digital intelligence company that provides data extraction tools for law enforcement to collect, analyze, and manage digital data—is asking its customers to keep the technology a secret.

For years, Cellebrite has tried to keep the technology of its products secret and has urged law enforcement agencies purchasing its best-selling product, the UFED (Universal Forensics Extraction Device) to be hush-hush about using the device. A training video for Cellebrite takes it even one step further by advising the user of the hardware to stay quiet as well.

In a transcript that TechCrunch published of the training video used to teach companies about the UFED, a senior company employee emphasizes the need to keep the capabilities of the UFED secret for several reasons. The employee/instructor cautions that “it’s super important to keep all these capabilities as protected as possible” to enable Cellebrite to continue investing in research and development, to keep ahead of bad actors who try to steal the technology, to combat advances made by cellphone manufacturers to keep their product secure, and to limit unavoidable courtroom disclosures that could comprise the effectiveness of its flagship product, Cellebrite Premium.

The instructor also talks about the ...

by Jo Ellen Knott

Rand, a nonprofit research organization, published a research brief on January 9, 2024, that proves hiring individuals with criminal records is not risky and has benefits for the employer, the individual seeking employment post-incarceration, and society.

The brief titled “Resetting the Record: The Facts on Hiring People with Criminal Histories” provides established facts on the realities of hiring people with criminal histories and offers valuable insights to hiring managers, policymakers, and the world at large. Drawing from at least eight sources of published research, the brief addresses concerns about hiring formerly justice-involved persons and suggests that not hiring them leads to missed opportunities on both sides.

The brief busts the myth that there are not many people with criminal records looking for work. The fact is nearly half the men aged 35 in the labor pool do have a criminal record (46 percent). That percentage varies only slightly by race and ethnicity. “Among 33-year-old women, the percentage of those looking for work in 2018 who had a conviction for a nontraffic offense was between 22 percent and 52 percent for White women,” according to the brief’s author. With a tight labor market, disqualifying half of the ...

by Jo Ellen Knott

On January 10, 2024, Forensic Mag delivered astonishing news: Research out of Columbia University and the University at Buffalo radically challenged the long-held belief that fingerprints from different fingers of the same person are always unique and unmatchable.

The research team, led by Columbia Engineering undergraduate senior Gabe Guo, developed an AI-based system that has shown a remarkable ability to correlate fingerprints from different fingers to the same individual with high accuracy. The team used a public U.S. government database of approximately 60,000 fingerprints to train their artificial intelligence system.

Guo and his colleagues, with no background in forensic analysis, fed the fingerprint data into a neural network. At times, they fed pairs from the same person, other times prints from two different people. They trained “twin deep neural networks to predict whether two fingerprint samples (not necessarily from the same finger) were from the same person.” The neural network learned to correlate a person’s unique fingerprints with a high degree of accuracy. According to the researchers, it does this by analyzing the curvature of the swirls at the center of the fingerprint rather than the minutiae, or endpoints in fingerprint ridges.

From the paper published ...

by Jo Ellen Knott

The First Step Act (“FSA”), a 2018 law designed to curb recidivism among formerly incarcerated individuals on the federal level, is showing modest but positive results in reducing the amount of time people serve in the federal Bureau of Prisons (“BOP”) system.

An analysis performed by Avinash Bhati, expert in Mathematical and Empirical Modeling Statistical Analysis, finds that people released under the FSA in 2022 served an average of 7.3% less of their imposed sentence compared to those released beforehand. This translates to an average reduction of five months in prison time.

Bhati wrote a three-part series of his FSA analysis for the Council on Criminal Justice starting in August of 2023. This part of the series is called “Time Sentenced and Time Served” and was published in December 2023.

An important finding from this analysis is that individuals released under the FSA in 2022 served about 82 percent of their sentence on average while individuals released pre-FSA served almost 90 percent of their time.

Although these sentence reductions are encouraging and moving the needle in the right direction, they are modest. Most sentence reductions were less than a year. For 92 percent of those released ...

by Jo Ellen Nott

Vince Schiraldi talks private probation and parole in his new book Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom. When Schiraldi was selected to run the troubled New York Department of Corrections (“DOC”) during the COVID pandemic crisis, the New York Times called him “a cerebral reformer who has spent an illustrious career in public life trying to end mass incarceration.”

Schiraldi’s tenure as commissioner of the New York DOC was short-lived at six months. He arrived late in the game, in June 2021, to fix a jail that had been getting worse for years and then exploded into waves of violence and death because of the pandemic. Schiraldi initiated programs and reforms to help guards whom the New York Times described as “exhausted, scared and quick to go on the offensive” and to help detainees who are often “ignored, debased, violated and easily triggered.”

Newly elected Democratic mayor Eric Adams did not support Schiraldi’s efforts to help the situation of both guards and detainees at Rikers Island and replaced him with the more hardline ex-cop Louis Molina. Schiraldi went on to become the Secretary of the Maryland Division of Youth Services and ...

by Jo Ellen Nott

F.D. Zigan, a veteran crime scene investigator who specializes in fingerprint analysis for the Roswell Police Department in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, writes about the disconnect between evidence collection and scene reconstruction in Forensic Magazine, November 2023.

Zigan points out that in a world of specialization, a crucial element of crime scene investigation is being overlooked—the context in which impression evidence is found. The separation between evidence collection and scene reconstruction limits the possibilities of forensic analysis, affecting everything from witness statements to suspect interviews.

The disconnect is based on three problem areas, according to Zigan. The first is the separation of disciplines within crime scene investigations. Crime scene technicians collect evidence, latent fingerprint examiners analyze prints, and reconstructionists solve the puzzle by arranging the pieces into an understandable narrative. Often, crucial context is lost in this handover.

The forensic consulting and education group Bevel, Gardner and Associates advises, “Finding a fingerprint at the scene may be important, but of greater importance is the context in which we find the fingerprint.”

Zigan explains the separation of the disciplines by saying there are crime scene investigators who are trained to document and collect evidence only. Then, there are ...

by Jo Ellen Nott

Imagine a courtroom where a defendant’s fate is being decided. But instead of evidence, jurors rely on an unconscious judgment based on downturned lips or a heavy brow. Scientists at Columbia University have proven that people unfairly believe that those specific facial features mark a person ...

by Jo Ellen Nott

The First Step Act (“FSA”) is a bipartisan criminal justice bill passed in 2018 to reform federal prisons and sentencing laws to reduce reoffending, decrease the federal prisoner population, and maintain public safety.

The Council on Criminal Justice published the results of an early analysis of ...

by Jo Ellen Nott

Wrongful convictions are a troubling aspect of the criminal justice system in the United States. Most experts estimate the rate of falsely convicted prisoners to be between four and six percent.

Studies report that eyewitness misidentification of strangers is the leading cause of wrongful convictions, contributing ...

by Jo Ellen Nott

Dr. Robert Maher, electric and computer engineer who has researched and studied gunshot acoustics at the University of Montana, published the results of a two-year study on synchronizing and processing audio recordings of gunshots in 2018. His research was sponsored by a National Institute of Justice ...