Word: labs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Gelbart says that recent cases of academic dishonesty in the biology department have involved various kinds of take-home assignments--collaboration on lab reports, or take-home writing assignments...
...McVeigh is guilty, so if the jury acquits him, the prosecutors, led by Joseph Hartzler, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney from Illinois, will face a tumult of outrage. Last week their burden appeared to become even heavier when the Justice Department released a damning report on the FBI forensics lab. The report specifically criticized work done in the Oklahoma bombing case, saying that investigators had drawn unjustifiable conclusions and failed to follow proper procedures. Potential jurors may have heard about the report, although they are supposed to avoid any news about the trial, and that may offset the damage done...
Prosecutors have anticipated the report, and have long planned to avoid calling anyone tainted by it. Late last year they hired a British expert, Linda Jones, to confirm the lab's findings. The only witness the government would call from the lab itself is Steven Burmeister. He is treated neutrally in the part of the report that deals with the Oklahoma City bomb and is praised in other sections. He found the nitroglycerin and petn on McVeigh's clothes, and he can testify that they were never in the two sections of the lab where contamination was found. Whitehurst, meanwhile...
...defense has a better hope of creating reasonable doubt by addressing specific aspects of the prosecution's case. Most important, Jones will be able to excoriate the FBI's forensics lab. The critical Justice Department report concludes, for example, that an investigator in the Oklahoma City case lacked an adequate scientific basis for stating that the bomb was made out of ammonium nitrate mixed with fuel oil. Ammonium nitrate was found at the scene, but the bomb could have been made out of another explosive that contains it, such as dynamite. The report says the investigator reached his conclusion...
This Whitehurst guy is Frederic Whitehurst, the FBI chemist who originally blew the whistle on the FBI lab in 1989 and helped launch an inquiry that finally resulted last week in a blistering report from the Justice Department's inspector general. Michael Bromwich released a 600-page doorstop charging that some FBI forensic operations had been sloppy and biased. But even before the verdict was reached, Whitehurst's treatment as a whistle-blower raised questions about the FBI's ability to manage dissent. At first, lab managers dismissed his complaints about colleagues' work as prickly perfectionism. They suspended...