Maja Vestad

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

The rule of law depends in many ways on how evidence is stored after case closure. A new regime for evidence management is underway in Norway - breaking with the sense of finality that is so central to criminal justice:

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
@slsjournal.bsky.social

Thanks for this!😊

Every Object Needs a Place: Evidence Management, Access to Justice, and the Rule of law - Maja Vestad, 2025 Evidence management is integral to the rule of law, as it may enable or hinder future claims to justice. In response to public criticism over lost and degraded ...

So exciting to see another academic as interested in police storage of evidence as me and Louise Shorter! we have Norwegian counterparts! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Good morning! NJSTS recently published my article about a sock 🧦 that did not quite fit with evidence found at a crime scene. I trace “the forensic journey” of the sock from a cardboard box into digital spaces, as investigators try to make sense of it.

doi.org/10.5324/njst...

We have all seen bouncers, volunteers, and the police patrol bar areas. I’ve sometimes thought that if you need help it doesn’t matter which of them you meet because they’re all first-line personnel and similarly equipped to assist. Here’s a behind (and between) the scenes of nightlife policing:

Happy December! I’m going to count down to Christmas with a rather unusual Advent calendar! Each day I’ll be showcasing an object used in crime detection. Follow my posts to find out what detectives used to help them solve crime in the Victorian and Edwardian periods #xmascountdown #crimedetection

Hi, would you add me to this? Thanks!

I wrote an article (which later formed the basis of my book, Smoke but No Fire) about people wrongly convicted of crimes that never happened in the first place. Over one-third of all known exonerations of innocent people are in no-crime wrongful conviction cases.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Thanks for sharing both of these. The idea that “absence of proof is not proof of absence” is really central to most examples in both articles. Also shows how dependent the CJS is on transparency and quality police/forensic work. Thanks!

This was a joy to read! Non-crimes are often left out of the narrative indeed. I wonder if you’ve followed up on this more recently? Would be interesting to learn more about non-crime evidence construction.

Productive policing: Lessons from preventative police strategies in times of New Public Management Abstract. Police patrol work intersects the global trends of both crime prevention strategies and New Public Management (NPM). Based on a case study conduc

Okay, let’s give this a go.

With @foshaugen.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/policing/art...