FORENSICS IV: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

by Harry A. Milman

The American criminal justice system prides itself on convicting only those who have been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but much of admissible forensic evidence on which juries base their determination of guilt or innocence has not been rigorously tested or peer reviewed. Sometimes, it is contaminated, inaccurate, or unreliable, and occasionally, forensic experts are mistaken in their analysis, exaggerate their conclusions, or provide misleading testimony.

In Forensics Guilty Until Proven Innocent, I discuss how flaws in forensic evidence, including fingerprint, firearm, DNA, hair, bite-mark, and bloodstain pattern analyses, as well as limitations in eyewitness identification, overstated conclusions by forensic experts, scientific fraud at the FBI and state forensic crime laboratories, and police and prosecutorial misconduct result in innocent people being found guilty of crimes they did not commit. Once wrongfully incarcerated, it is almost certain the process of postconviction relief toward exoneration will be long and arduous, unlike defendants who are guaranteed a speedy trial. Some of the wrongfully convicted people I reviewed include Amanda Knox, wrongfully incarcerated in Italy for murdering her housemate based on false DNA analysis; Ronald Cotton, misidentified and convicted of rape, only to be exonerated after nearly eleven years and team up with the victim to lecture about faulty eyewitness identification; Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon attorney wrongly accused of being an Islamic terrorist involved in the 2004 train bombing in Madrid, Spain, based on faulty fingerprint identification; Kirk Odom, wrongfully imprisoned for more than twenty-one years as a result of false microscopic hair analysis; Keith Harward, wrongfully convicted of rape and murder based on overstated bite-mark comparison analysis; Julie Rea and David Camm, found guilty of killing her son and his wife and two children, respectively, based on inaccurate bloodstain pattern analysis; Patrick Pursley, wrongfully convicted of murder due to firearm misidentification; Kirk Bloodsworth, the first death row inmate to be exonerated with DNA evidence; and five men wrongfully incarcerated because of false microscopic hair analysis; among others.

468 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 12, 2025

About the author

Harry A. Milman, PhD is the author of three bestselling forensics books -- (1) "FORENSICS: The Science Behind the Deaths of Famous People," a 2021 Readers' Favorite Finalist in the Non-Fiction, Health - Medical genre; (2) "FORENSICS II: The Science Behind the Deaths of Famous and Infamous People;" and (3) "FORENSICS III: They Got Fifteen Minutes of Fame from the Way They Died," as well as two award-winning mystery novels—"A Death at Camp David," winner of the Best Mystery Novel in the 2018 Book Talk Radio Club Awards, and the space exploration thriller "SOYUZ: The Final Flight," a finalist for Best Second Novel in the 2018 Next Generation Indie Book Awards and a finalist for Best Science Fiction Novel in the 2018 Book Talk Radio Club Awards. As a pharmacologist, toxicologist, and cancer expert with over fifty years of experience at ToxNetwork.com, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the US National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, and the US Public Health Service. Dr. Milman has testified at trials and depositions and has assisted law firms for nearly twenty-five years as an Expert Witness in over three hundred and fifty civil, criminal, and high-profile legal cases. In addition, Dr. Milman has authored over seventy scientific articles and has edited five science books. Often quoted in newspapers and magazines, Dr. Milman appeared as a toxicology expert on the History Channel, the Oxygen Channel, TV and radio news programs, true-crime television shows, and in numerous podcasts.