In a case arising in Texas in 2006, police, largely on the basis of evidence provided by a dog handler named Keith Pikett, concluded that Michael Buchanek had murdered Sally Blackwell. Several months after the investigation began another individual, Jeffrey Grimsinger, confessed to having killed Blackwell. Had it not been for this confession, the canine evidence provided by Pikett might have put Buchanek, who did a tour training Iraqi police, in prison. Grimsinger was suggested as a suspect early in the investigation but this seems to have been...
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Scent Lineup Admitted into Evidence by California Court Despite Numerous Deficiencies
A recent California case demonstrates why scent lineups continue to be attacked as “junk science” by the defense bar, and why better procedures must be imposed by courts and law enforcement agencies to overcome such criticisms. People v. White, 2009 WL 3111677 (Cal.App. 2Dist. 2009)The crime occurred on June 7, 2006, in the early evening in Compton, California. Five teenagers were skateboarding when two of them were shot by an assailant. One died. Shell casings were recovered from the crime scene and placed in manila envelopes. Problem one:...
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Dogs Distinguish Types of Warning Growls
Animals have been shown to make sounds that are context specific, such as alerting other members of the group to a predator, even a specific type of predator. Dogs, like wolves, bark, but dogs bark more frequently and in more variable contexts than is the case with wolves. Both dogs and wolves growl in three situations that were studied in a recent paper: (1) offensive threatening in social conflict, (2) guarding food, and (3) during social play....
Aerodynamics of the Wake of Walking Person
Trailing dogs are generally thought to follow a path based on their smell of proteins and/or bacteria in desiccated epithelial cells that flow off us at the rate of thousands per minute. This raises the question of how the air flow around a person affects the pattern by which these cells swirl and fall in our wake. Three engineering professors at Pennsylvania State University studied the aerodynamics of the human wake in an article published in...
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Middle Eastern Origin of Dogs Argued in New Genome Study
A study of the dog genome published in Nature, the pre-eminent publication in biology, reached some surprising and immediately controversial results. For one, disagreeing with prior studies, the new research concludes that “dog breeds share a higher proportion of multi-locus haplotypes unique to grey wolves from the Middle East….” (vonHoldt et al., Genome-wide SNP and Haplotype Analyses Reveal a Rich History Underying Dog Domestication, Nature, vol. 464(8), April 2010). This takes issue with mitochondrial DNA studies that suggested that canine...
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