Although the furor about the Casey Anthony trial has generally died down, I am going back to the well one more time, because of this New York Times story. Briefly, the prosecution presented evidence at trial from the designer of computer forensic software called CacheBack, which the police had used to examine Anthony's computer. He testified that his software found that Anthony had searched the word "chloroform" 84 times. His own concerns about the accuracy of that result led him to redesign the software after he testified, and the redesigned version indicated that Anthony had searched the term just once, and accessed just one website as a result -- a page that contained information about chloroform use in the 1800s. The software designer says that he immediately reported this to the prosecutor and an officer -- while the trial was still ongoing -- but that they sat on the information. Serious stuff, if true. In other news: 1. Sentencing Law and Policy reports here on a new empirical study about the effectiveness of different types of defense attorneys. The study, by an analyst with the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, finds that "private attorneys and public defenders secure similar adjudication and sentencing outcomes for their clients. Defendants with assigned counsel, however, receive less favorable outcomes compared to their counterparts with public defenders." 2. Sentencing Law and policy also reported recently on another interesting study. The short, and depressing, summary is this: "Black men are half as likely to die at any [...]
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