With this beta site of The Forensic Echo, we open a new door to an unparalleled world of scientific and legal information. In these pages, scores of the world's leading experts—doctors, lawyers, judges, scientists, scholars, researchers, teachers, practitioners—share their unique insights about uses and abuses of science in the most interesting, difficult, and precedent-setting legal cases of our times.
From late 1996 through 1999, the The Forensic Echo (The Forensic Psychiatry Echo and The Forensic Panel Letter in prior and subsequent incarnations) was accessible only to owners of the monthly paper edition and to patrons of subscribing libraries. In early 2000, concluding that promulgation of knowledge and insight is more important than the tangibility of paper, we discontinued the print version, and published the Letter online as an e-zine. The Letter found a vast new audience.
The overwhelming success of The Forensic Panel Letter online, combined with paper-format readers' persistent loyalty toward and longing for "the old Echo," inspired us to bring that paper archive to life in the electronic world. We are also thrilled to continue to publish this wonderful journal, under its old—and new—name: we proudly introduce the online home of The Forensic Echo, past, present, and future editions.
This remarkable collection, comprised of almost 1,100 articles (and growing) from our paper and digital archives, covers the gamut of forensic sciences in the courtroom. For the first time, the entire corpus is collected in one place for you to read, browse, search, research, and disseminate.
To bring the paper archive to life was no small feat. At The Forensic Panel, publishers of the Echo, we have been scanning, proofreading, computer-coding, designing, sorting, searching, organizing, and testing this site and its many megabytes of content for nearly a year. But we can't be satisfied that this project is ready until you are. So we invite and welcome you here as a beta-tester. We ask only that you give us your informed, candid, and unflinching opinion—the very thing we ask of all who contribute to these pages.
