In mid-July, Barket Epstein’s Head of Appellate and Post-Conviction Litigation, Donna Aldea, filed an appeal challenging the conviction of Mayer Herskovic for the highly-publicized Hasidic gang assault in Williamsburg, on the grounds that the prosecution was politically motivated, and that the People’s evidence – consisting only of DNA results obtained by Low Copy Number / High Sensitivity Testing (LCN / HST) interpreted with the OCME’s Forensic Statistical Tool (FST) – was legally insufficient and based on scientifically flawed methodology (see links to Appellate Brief and New York Times Article of July 17, 2017, below).
This week, Donna Aldea’s appeal in the Herskovic case was featured on the front page of the New York Times, as part of a comprehensive article exposing the tainted methodology of the DNA testing techniques used by the OCME. The article concludes that the tainted LCN/HST/FST methodology “rais[es] questions about thousands of cases” where these methods were used to obtain a criminal conviction, and quotes Aldea’s description of the Herskovic case as “a poster-child for how ‘DNA evidence’ can literally be fabricated out of thin air, and how statistics can be manipulated to create a false impression of ‘scientific evidence’ of guilt.” (See New York Times 9/4/2017, Page 1, “Traces of Crime: How New York’s DNA Techniques Became Tainted”).
Barket Epstein is proud to be on the cutting edge of this significant legal challenge to the scientifically flawed and tainted DNA techniques that have been used by the government to obtain convictions in thousands of cases, and that is frequently misunderstood and mischaracterized at trial to create the illusion of scientific proof where none actually exists. We will continue to fight to expose the truth, unravel the science, and exonerate those wrongly charged or convicted based on this tainted method of DNA analysis.
Click on the links below to see the full story.
