单选题
VIII. (Forensic Appraisal)
Forensic evidence has played a role in many Canadian wrongful convictions. In 2007, the Supreme Court held in a 4:3 decision that post-hypnosis(催眠后) identifications should not be admitted because of their unknown reliability and the risk of wrongful convictions. This decision presents a potential for Canadian courts to place stricter reliability-based restrictions on the admissibility of expert evidence including unreliable forensic evidence offered by the state. At the same time, various inquiries have made many important recommendations about reforming the practice of the forensic sciences. Many of these recommendations have been implemented, though the tendency has been to do so on a discipline-by-discipline and jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis.
A number of wrongful convictions in Canada have been caused by faulty forensic evidence. There are two main ways to respond to such dangers. One is by reforming the production of the state’s forensic evidence. The other is for the courts to place reliability based restrictions on the admissibility or content of forensic evidence offered by the state. The Commission of Inquiry into Proceedings Against Guy Paul Morin in its 1998 report found that Ontario’s Forensic Centre for Forensic Science had made numerous mistakes in the production of hair and fibre evidence that purported to link Mr. Morin to the murder before his DNA exoneration. This inquiry heard testimony that Crown prosecutors had assumed that the Centre was infallible despite finding problems in contamination of evidence and the misuse of published research. Many reforms were introduced at that central crime laboratory in Ontario in the wake of the highly publicized inquiry. A decade later, a similar inquiry was held in the neighbouring province of Manitoba when hair comparison evidence was again refuted by DNA testing. The Manitoba inquiry heard that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police labs had stopped conducting hair comparison evidence in light of more advanced DNA testing, but stopped short of recommending that such hair comparison evidence be inadmissible. It also did not recommend that the crime laboratories be separated from the police. Finally, it suggested that it did not have jurisdiction to order a national audit of cases that relied on hair comparison evidence, even though the province of Manitoba had conducted such an inquiry.
Many of the same themes found in the Morin inquiry which focused on hair and fibre comparison evidence re-emerged a decade later when the Ontario Commission of Inquiry into Forensic Pediatric Pathology (the Goudge Inquiry) recommended similar reforms to the practice of forensic pathology.
单选题
After the Supreme Court decision in 2007, the admissibility of forensic evidence became ( )
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Which of the following is NOT the way to respond to the dangers of wrongful conviction? ( )
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One finding in common in the inquiry of the provinces of Ontario and Manitoba is that ( )
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单选题
The underlined word “theme” can be replaced by the following word in the context ( )