treeseeker
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Thank you for bringing forward that thesis treeseeker. I remember seeing it discussed in threads IIRC back in FEB of this year.
I was wondering if the thesis is only a thesis or if the testing of the banding and the conclusions of the results are accepted by the majority of forensic scientists? I remember a lot of discussion about whether or not that test had been presented as evidence in a trial and if so the outcome of that trial.
I'm not worried if it is ruled out. I'm just curious as to if it is still at thesis stage or if it has moved on and that it is accepted in the scientific community?
Have you seen anything? I never could find anything at the time to indicate it had been used at trial but that doesn't mean squat. It could very well be accepted in the scientific community as a standard.
Thank you in advance for any info you might have to share about that test.
As far as I can tell/remember from reading journal extracts (the full reports are kind of pricey for me), post-mortem banding isn't questioned. IIRC, the bands aren't always present, and tend to occur more often when the corpse hair has been exposed to dirt. This isn't a test, really, just an observation under a microscope. There are several, well-documented characterists of post-mortem hair.
Whether or not a post-mortem index can be determined by them is being studied, and not yet definitive (as far as I can tell). This is the subject of the thesis.
The FBI lab tech asked for more than one of Caylee's hairs with the banding before she could say definitively there was indeed a post-mortem band. Collier determined that hair decomposition is largely uniform - all the hairs of a particular corpse will have the same signs (or no signs) of decompostion. So, is the lab tech's request due to influence from the Collier thesis? Don't know.
Collier determined decompositional uniformity by using percentages. For CSI purposes, I wouldn't think this applies. See pg. 25 of the thesis - the subject's hairs aren't actually all uniform. The odds of finding one hair with banding, while the rest show no signs of decomp, are higher but not impossible, if I've interpreted this correctly.
I may not have answered your question, lol. There will be debate about what the hair means, but the fact that some post-mortem hairs have bands is pretty much a given. I don't know why it would trigger a Frye hearing, unless the prosecution intends to show PMI with it.
FWIW, IMO - not a scientist, just a geek