Letter from the Editor

August tends to arrive with a kind of dual energy, one foot still in summer's casework, the other already leaning toward Providence. For those of us on the ISHI team, it also means we're just a few months out from gathering for ISHI 37, and this issue arrives right in that window: a preview of some of the stories and conversations that will carry us into October, and beyond.

That same in-between quality shows up in the science itself this month. Almost everything in this issue is about the gap between the moment evidence exists and the moment someone finally gets an answer from it, and what it actually takes to close that gap.

The longest of those gaps runs 246 years. In 2022, archaeologists set out to recover four or five sets of remains from a mass grave outside Camden, South Carolina. They found fourteen. Allison Peacock, president of FHD Forensics, walks through what it took to turn one of those graves into a name: forensic genealogists, paleogeneticists, a coroner's office anthropology team, and a network of living relatives who volunteered their own DNA, all working the same case for close to two years. Private John Pumphrey died at the Battle of Camden in 1780. Not long ago, his family got him back. "To the relatives, here is your cousin and uncle, after 246 years, home from the war," said Dr. Steven Smith of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, when the identification was ready to share.

A shorter version of the same gap runs through Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which opened 2016 with 15,370 people who should have had a DNA sample sitting in CODIS after a qualifying felony arrest or conviction, and didn't. Eight years, one prosecutor's office, and three unglamorous mechanisms, a courtroom policy, a data pipeline, and a handful of sweeps, closed most of that gap. Not new technology. Consistency, repeated quarter after quarter, until the gap finally closed.

Other pieces in this issue are about shrinking the gap rather than closing it outright. A research team found that two liters of filtered bathwater can return a complete STR profile within minutes of immersion, a new option in drowning cases where the hardest question is often whether anyone else was in the room. The same researchers are just as direct about the limit: a profile recovered from bathwater proves exposure, not presence. The gap gets smaller. It doesn't disappear, and it still takes a person to decide what's left of it.

A related gap shows up in a new study on silver chloride treated fabrics, the antimicrobial textile technology now common in athletic wear. Bloodstains on treated clothing still returned strong DNA yields and workable STR profiles overall, but consistent, locus-specific drops in peak height turned up in certain dye channels, whether or not the fabric had been treated. The more useful finding wasn't about the antimicrobial coating at all. It was that sampling method, cuttings and swabs outperforming tape, mattered more to profile quality than which extraction kit came after it. The fabric on someone's back keeps changing. The field has to keep re-testing what that means for the evidence on it.

The gap shows up differently again in this issue's piece on humanitarian principles in medico-legal work, built on interviews with twenty-six professionals who have done identification work after armed conflict, natural disaster, and enforced disappearance, and inside domestic investigations here at home. Their conclusion, drawn largely from people who have stood in both worlds: the humanitarian and criminal justice systems, which move at very different speeds and answer to very different clocks, aren't as incompatible as the field has assumed.

Providence is its own version of that same in-between. ISHI 37 gathers there this October 26 through 29, and this issue carries some of what will be waiting when we get there. Complimentary one-on-one mentor coaching returns for Forensic Leadership Alliance members. A look ahead at where the conference is headed after this year, San Diego, Nashville, Seattle, and New Orleans through 2030. And three sequencing-focused webinars from QIAGEN, covering sexual assault evidence workflows, Y-screening, and ethical Indigenous human remains identification, worth a look before you land in Rhode Island.

Two hundred and forty-six years is a long wait for a name. Eight years is a long wait for a database to catch up to what it was supposed to be doing all along. Whatever the length of the gap, closing it is still a village's work. We're looking forward to gathering ours in Providence this October.

Thank you for the work you do, every day, at the intersection of science and justice.

Warm regards,

The Editorial Board