On Saturday, April 21st at 1:00 PM our Executive Director, Dr. Barry K. Logan, PhD, DABFT will give a one-hour talk on the Casey Anthony trial, entitled “Scientific Evidence in the Casey Anthony Trial: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt?”
Everybody thinks they know that the jury got it wrong in the Casey Anthony homicide trial in Orlando in 2011. The circumstantial evidence against this young mother – failure to report her child missing for 31 days, partying while her daughter was missing, lying to police, a fictitious nanny who allegedly took the child – was strong, and suggested she had a role in her daughter’s disappearance and death. But what exactly happened to Casey Anthony? Was her death an accidental drowning followed by panic and an ill-advised cover up as Casey Anthony’s lawyers claimed, or a premeditated homicide by suffocation and chloroform as the State described? The State relied heavily on scientific evidence related to decomposition of the child’s body in the trunk of her mother’s car to show that she was involved in an elaborate plot to hide and dispose of her daughter’s remains and destroy evidence of a traumatic death. Dr. Logan was retained by the defense team to review the scientific testing done by the state’s experts and uncovered some surprising limitations of the way the testing was performed, ultimately testifying that it did not meet even basic standards for forensic science. The presentation will review the scientific evidence and its many limitations that led the jury to its surprising, but justified, not guilty verdict.
Dr. Logan was retained as an expert witness in this recent and controversial trial last year, and has given this one-hour talk at the 2012 American Academy of Forensic Sciences Conference earlier this year and at NMS Labs in Willow Grove, PA. The talk is free and open to the public, and we invite all of our colleagues to attend. The talk will be held at Arcadia University’s Stiteler Auditorium located in Glenside, PA (click here for directions to Stiteler Auditorium). We invite all of our students, faculty, and colleagues to attend, as well as anyone interested in hearing a fascinating perspective on this relevant topic. We hope to see you there.