Should convicts have the right to the evidence that could exonerate them?
Over the past decade, DNA has been used to help exonerate and convict thousands of defendants. But on June 18, 2009, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision (District Attorneys Office v. Osborne) that convicted defendants have no constitutional right to post-conviction access to a states DNA evidence, even if it could help exonerate them. Dissenters said that this goes against the Courts prior decisions recognizing substantive constitutional protections to state prisoners under the Due Process Clause.
Our distinguished panel will discuss the implications of this latest Supreme Court decision, the future post-conviction DNA testing, and when and if convicted felons should have access to DNA evidence.
Ed Imwinkelried is the Edward L. Barrett, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Carlson and Imwinkelried's Dynamics of Trial Practice: Problems and Materials, 3d (American Casebook Series®). He has served as a member of the Legal Issues Working Group of the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence, the legal consultant to the Surgeon General's Commission on Urinalysis Testing in the Armed Forces, and a member of the Expert Group on Human Factors in Latent Print Analysis of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
David H. Kaye is Distinguished Professor and Weiss Family Scholar at Penn State's Dickinson School of Law. Formerly a Regents' Professor of Law and Professor of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, he is a preeminent legal scholar of DNA evidence and an expert on scientific and statistical evidence.
Dr. Lawrence Kobilinsky is the Chairman of the Department of Sciences and has published extensively on the subject of forensic DNA analysis and has made many presentations at regional, national and international meetings. As an internationally renowned forensic scientist he has served as advisor to criminalistics laboratories in several countries including Mexico, China, Brazil, Dominican Republic, and others. He is a Diplomate of the American College of Forensic Examiners and is a Board Certified Forensic Examiner.
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