Leora Smith was a senior research fellow at ProPublica. She graduated from Harvard Law School in May 2017. Leora has worked with and provided legal support to the Bronx Defenders, the Service Employees International Union, Amnesty International Canada and other international human rights organizations. Her work can be found on the labor law blog On Labor, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s "The Fifth Estate" and in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.
Leora Smith
Former Senior Research Fellow
How a Dubious Forensic Science Spread Like a Virus
From his basement in upstate New York, Herbert MacDonell launched modern bloodstain-pattern analysis, persuading judge after judge of its reliability. Then he trained hundreds of others. But what if they’re getting it wrong?
How an Unproven Forensic Science Spread Through the Criminal Justice System
Bloodstain-pattern analysis has been accepted as reliable evidence by appellate courts in one state after another with little or no examination of its scientific accuracy.
Governors and Federal Agencies Are Blocking Nearly 1,300 Accounts on Facebook and Twitter
We filed public-records requests with all 50 governors and 22 federal agencies. Here’s what we found.
Here’s How to Find Out If Your Elected Officials Are Blocking Constituents on Facebook and Twitter
And here’s why that’s a story.
Here Are the White House Visitor Records the Trump Administration Didn’t Want You to See
The Trump White House tried to block public access to visitor logs of five federal offices working directly for the president even though they were subject to public disclosure through the Freedom of Information Act. A Washington-based transparency group successfully sued the administration to release the data and provided the documents to ProPublica.
The White House Says It Doesn’t Keep a List of Mar-a-Lago Visitors. Experts and Visitors Are Skeptical.
Seven members and guests of Mar-a-Lago say the U.S. Secret Service checks names of visitors.
