According to an Indianapolis news station, the FBI has developed a new scent preservation technology that can “literally bottle up a person’s distinct odor.”

The STU 100 Portable Vacuum Collection Unit absorbs the scent into a sterile pad, which makes it possible for the scent to be accessed later when needed. Ideally, the uncontaminated scent pads will be taken to K-9 units for tracking.

It seems a rather inconvenient time for the FBI to put this technology to use with all the current uproar about the unreliability of scent dogs, especially with the growing number of exonerations due to dogs’ mistakes. Since our last mention of Keith Pikett, the Texas Deputy responsible for the bloodhounds that put innocents like Calvin Lee Miller and Michael Buchanek behind bars, there has been at least one more innocent person (Curvis Bickham) released from prison who was put there partly due to Pikett’s dogs. And of course, there were many more innocent people convicted because of John Preston’s dogs. Perhaps we should come to terms with the fact that scent is another junk science and we should put it aside.

If you’d like to learn more about the unreliability of scent dogs, here is an interesting report from the Innocence Project of Texas entitled “Dog Scent Lineups: A Junk Science Injustice,” released last Monday.

Related posts:

1. More police dogs fail “scent lineup” test Two lawsuits have been filed against a police team of dogs who are accused of failing scent tests and rigging...
2. NY Times Article on Dog-scent Lineups Yesterday the New York Times ran a good article on dog-scent lineups looking particularly at cases in Texas involving that...
3. Time Magazine features article on Pikett’s dogs Not long ago we talked about another case of misleading police scent dogs in Texas (see the articles here and...
4. More on Texas police dogs A couple of weeks ago we shared the story of Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Deputy Keith Pikett and his bloodhounds...
5. Junk science is on its way out Lately we’ve been discussing a lot of junk science in our blog. Discrediting the validity of junk sciences seems to...
6. Texas bill allows defendants to challenge their convictions based on junk science Per the Innocence Project’s blog today, “A bill passed by the Texas Senate this week would provide an avenue for...