ABSTRACT
James E. Starrs (Foreword) is a Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C. He also holds a joint appointment as a Professor in the Department of Forensic Sciences of the Columbian School of Arts and Sciences at the same university. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and is a past Chairman of the Jurisprudence Section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and served two 3-year terms on the Academy's Board of Directors. In February 1996, he received the Distinguished Fellow medallion from the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. He served as a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Forensic Sciences for 15 years and is presently the co-author of Scientific Evidence in Civil and Criminal Cases, 4th ed., Foundation Press, 1995, and the author of some 100 articles in law and science. Professor Starrs has been a senior co-editor of Scientific Sleuthing Review for the past 25 years and was on the advisory board for the three-volume Encyclopedia of Forensic Sciences. He has lectured widely, both nationally and internationally, to legal and scientific audiences on various subjects in the forensic sciences. He is probably most well known for having directed a number of exhumations of historical figures in controversial historical matters, such as the assassination of Senator Huey P. Long, the death and cannibalism of the five victims of Alfred Packer, the CIA LSD-related death of Frank R. Olson, and the identification of the remains of Jesse W. James. He has investigated the death of famed American explorer, Meriwether Lewis and the mysteries underlying the death of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He was, in 1999, the director of excavations in Charles Town,West Virginia, which sought to locate and identify the remains of Samuel Washington, George Washington's brother. In 2000, he organized a reinvestigation into the Boston Strangler killings. Among his other accomplishments, Professor Starrs crafted a computerized simulation of the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, as well as the killings of the Menendez parents in Southern California, both of which were nationally televised.
