There aren’t many good guys in Chris Fabricant’s recent book, Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System. It’s an often-bleak story of innocent people going to prison because of bogus forensic science—bite mark evidence, flawed arson analysis, faulty hair comparisons. The book chronicles the journey of one innocent man in particular, Steve Chaney from Dallas, convicted of a 1987 murder on bite-mark evidence. Two forensic odontologists testified that a mark on the victim’s arm was made by human teeth—and one of them said the odds the bite mark belonged to someone besides Chaney were “one to a million.” Chaney spent 28 years behind bars before he was freed in 2015 after Fabricant and the Innocence Project (the New York-based nonprofit for whom he works as director of strategic…
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