I'm Roberta Glass and you're listening to my true crime report. My guest, John Collins, is a forensic

science and criminal justice expert who has served as a practicing scientist or administrator

in federal, state, and local forensic science laboratories. He has also written extensively about

what he calls the wrongful conviction of forensic science

and how the innocence movement denigrates science to further its cause.

Welcome, John Collins.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background?

Sure. I, back in 1992, I graduated from Michigan State University with a forensic science degree.

And back then, Michigan State had really the premier collegiate forensic program.

This was before CSI, so we didn't have all of the college programs that we have today.

It seems like almost every college now has a forensic science program.

But back then, Michigan State really had the only major forensic program.

And my first job was with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

I trained as what's called a firearm and toolmark examiner.

And what a firearm and toolmark examiner does is really look at marks, scratch

marks, cut marks, marks on the surface of a bullet from the barrel of the gun that fired it,

those types of things.

So what I spent most of my time doing down in Atlanta was determining if specific guns fired

a specific bullet that may have been recovered from a body at autopsy

or from a shooting victim in surgery.

And I was recruited by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Laboratory, which was also

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