Forensic Science

The Supreme Court announced Thursday a potentially significant change in how crime lab reports are used in trials, ruling that a defendant has the right to cross-examine in front of the jury the experts who prepared these reports. Crime labs have been subjected to criticism in the last decade, much of it because of DNA evidence that has shown at least 240 prisoners were in fact not guilty.

Vidal Herrera has heard every joke about death. But death has been a godsend to Herrera, who runs three growing businesses out of a gray, two-story building along a dreary El Sereno strip of auto body shops and small warehouses. After a back injury ended his career as a deputy field investigator for the Los Angeles County coroner's office, Herrera started 1800Autopsy.com, performing private autopsies, DNA tests and other forensic services. So successful, he turns away business at times.

When Kimberlee Heale was a little girl growing up in Covina and San Diego, she used to ask her father, a firefighter, to describe traffic accidents. By the time she took a tour of the FBI Crime Lab as an eighth-grader, she knew that a career in forensics was for her. "It was just the whole idea behind being able to put pieces of a puzzle together to figure out what somebody did," she says. "It was pretty interesting to me."

Last summer, the Los Angeles Police Department was dealt a rude shock. Expecting nearly $1 million in federal grant money to help cover the cost of analyzing DNA evidence in rape cases and other violent crimes, the department was awarded only half that much. U.S. Department of Justice officials, who distribute the money to police agencies nationwide, told LAPD staff that the fault was their own.

Late on the morning of April 14, 2006, a troubling letter rolled off the fax machine in the harried, disordered fingerprint unit of the Los Angeles Police Department. Months before, one of the unit's print specialists had determined that several prints lifted from a cellphone store where a burglary had occurred belonged to Maria Maldonado, a 25-year-old hospital technician. Two others in the unit had signed off on the work.

In their cocoons of leather upholstery, soothing high-tech sound systems and automatically activated personal seat settings, drivers have come to regard their car interiors as mobile extensions of the homes that are their private refuges. The courts have tended to disagree.

Patricia Cornwell's name comes with more than a whiff of myth and expectation. Almost every woman writing thrillers with extreme violence gets compared to Cornwell's bestselling work featuring forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta. Interviews focus less on the books and more on Cornwell's Armani suits, personal security concerns or her obsession with solving the Jack the Ripper murders.

Francesco de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his wife, Bianca Cappello, died in 1587 of arsenic poisoning and not malaria, as was claimed at the time, according to a new study by Italian researchers. Known as Francesco I, he ruled for 13 years before he died at age 46 at his villa at Poggio a Caiano, 11 days after falling ill. His second wife, Bianca, died the next day.

The Los Angeles Police Department has a logjam of more than 5,000 rape kits that have not undergone forensic analysis because of a lack of DNA-testing resources, a leading advocate for rape victims told a state commission Wednesday. "Every day, there are citizens in our state ... who are being sexually assaulted and otherwise victimized when they don't have to be.

"NCIS," Tuesday, Feb. 13; 8 p.m.; "Friends and Lovers." The premise: In an abandoned warehouse in Georgetown, a man is proposing to his bride-to-be when he discovers the dead body of a sailor covered with maggots. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service is called and uses the maggots to determine that he has been dead for almost five days. NCIS medical examiner Dr.