When a crime scene involves blood, the outcome of the situation was probably a sever injury, or worse yet, death. When that happens, law enforcement officials call upon experts in the field of bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA), to figure out what happened. Blood can tell a lot about what happened to a person with a great amount of detail.

This infographic from forensic nursing tells us how blood pattern analysis is used in crime scenes, and what story can be told in blood.

Created by: ForensicNursing.org

As we’ve covered before on Donklephant, while the US justice system is one of the best in the world, it is not without flaws. Every once in a while someone gets wrongfully convicted. As John Adams famously said, “It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished”. But what of those who are convicted, and rightfully so, what fate awaits them?

Thanks to the folks at the Criminal Justice Degrees Guide, today we take a look at a day in the life of a typical prisoner along with some other interesting facts, such as:

• What is the ratio of male to female prisoners?
• What is the difference between private and public (government) correctional facilities?
• What are the different types of inmates and how are they treated differently?

Click the image for full-sized version

The US legal system is one of the best in the world, but it isn’t without its flaws. The exact number of wrongful convictions will never actually be known, which is why it’s considered one of the most detrimental flaws of the US legal system as a whole.

This infographic from Forensic Science details a few major key points of wrongful convictions in the US.

Let’s break it down in point form to highlight some of the points the graphic shows:

• 271 convicts have been exonerated by DNA evidence in US history.
• 13 years is the average sentence served by DNA exonerates.
• In nearly 40% of DNA exoneration cases, the real culprit was later identified by DNA.

Feel free to discuss in the comments!

Click the graphic to enlarge

Created by: forensicscience.org

The following video is heartbreaking, especially since it happened in my state. Still, this is happening every day in every other state over completely victimless crimes.

Here’s a quick explanation if you can’t watch the video (via Radley Balko)…

SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on. They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment. So smoking pot = “child endangerment.” Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone’s safety.

Just so we’re clear.

And now…yeah, wow…

And yet people can smoke and drink to their hearts content around their kids and nobody bats an eye.

Here’s E.D. Kain’s take on it…

How can we give our government the authority to trample on its own citizens like this over what is by every sane and rational argument – not to mention every piece of scientific data – an incredibly harmless substance used consensually without any real side-effects? It boggles the mind.

Here’s the original story, which happened back in February…

Whitworth was arrested, and his wife and 7-year-old son were present during the SWAT raid, Haden said. A second dog, which Whitworth’s attorney Jeff Hilbrenner described as a corgi, also was shot but was not killed.

“The family is concerned with what happened,” Hilbrenner said. “We don’t feel like what happened in the home was appropriate. The priority right now for us is the misdemeanor charges.”

Police discovered a grinder, a pipe and a small amount of marijuana, Haden said. Because the SWAT team acts on the most updated information available, the team wanted to enter the house before marijuana believed to be at the location could be distributed, she said.

Long story short…if the right wing, Constitution-loving crowd really wanted to fight tyranny…well…here ya go. This is it. Shock and awe in the face of some pot and some pets.

The FBI has foiled another terrorist plot, this one in New York and involving the planned bombing of synagogues and the shooting down of a military plane.

The FBI was apparently all over this, following the would-be attackers for quite awhile and even supplying them with fake C-4 through an informant. In fact, while the men under arrest professed their desire to wage jihad, they seem more like deranged criminals than anything like the al Qaeda style terrorists we’ve seen in the past. Of course, thwarting mass murder is always a good thing, no matter the criminals involved.

Good for the FBI.