DNA evidence collected from death scenes is an essential tool for law enforcement, death investigators, and forensic pathologists-providing insights into cause and manner of death as well as the identification of the responsible person or persons. Ineffective collection procedures raise the risk of evidence being altered or lost during transportation of the body. Using real death scene photos and actual cases as examples, Forensic DNA Collection at Death Scenes: A Pictorial Guide provides a practical approach to evidence collection with emphasis on proper identification, collection, documentation, and preservation. The first atlas of its kind, it demonstrates best practices for collecting DNA from decedents depending on the circumstances of the death scene and other materials present on the decedent such as clothing, bindings, and other objects. The authors discuss the success of the techniques employed in each scenario and analyze the DNA results obtained. The techniques employed at death scenes can also be applied to sexual assault cases, where DNA is collected from the body after an assault takes place. The increasing applications of evidence-based medicine and forensic science to criminal justice and civil litigation demand that crime scene investigations be more scientific, better organized, and multidisciplinary. This atlas provides a step-by-step guide to effective, uncompromising evidence collection.

Black women have traditionally represented the canvas on which many debates about poverty and welfare have been drawn. For a quarter century after the publication of the notorious Moynihan report, poor black women were tarred with the same brush: "ghetto moms" or "welfare queens" living off the state, with little ambition or hope of an independent future. At the same time, the history of the civil rights movement has all too often succumbed to an idolatry that stresses the centrality of prominent leaders while overlooking those who fought daily for their survival in an often hostile urban landscape.
In this collective biography, Rhonda Y. Williams takes us behind, and beyond, politically expedient labels to provide an incisive and intimate portrait of poor black women in urban America. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Williams challenges the notion that low-income housing was a resounding failure that doomed three consecutive generations of post-war Americans to entrenched poverty. Instead, she recovers a history of grass-roots activism, of political awakening, and of class mobility, all facilitated by the creation of affordable public housing. The stereotyping of black women, especially mothers, has obscured a complicated and nuanced reality too often warped by the political agendas of both the left and the right, and has prevented an accurate understanding of the successes and failures of government anti-poverty policy.
At long last giving human form to a community of women who have too often been treated as faceless pawns in policy debates, Rhonda Y. Williams offers an unusually balanced and personal account of the urban war on poverty from the perspective of those who fought, and lived, it daily.

In this collective biography, Rhonda Y. Williams takes us behind, and beyond, politically expedient labels to provide an incisive and intimate portrait of poor black women in urban America. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Williams challenges the notion that low-income housing was a resounding failure that doomed three consecutive generations of post-war Americans to entrenched poverty. Instead, she recovers a history of grass-roots activism, of political awakening, and of class mobility, all facilitated by the creation of affordable public housing. The stereotyping of black women, especially mothers, has obscured a complicated and nuanced reality too often warped by the political agendas of both the left and the right, and has prevented an accurate understanding of the successes and failures of government anti-poverty policy.