Shreya Rastogi (Director-Forensics At Project 39A) Wins Prestigious Award By The New York Legal Aid Society For Contributions To Forensics

Director of Litigation and Forensics at Project 39A, Shreya Rastogi has been awarded the New York Legal Aid Society's 2024 Magnus Mukoro Award for Integrity in Forensic Science for extraordinary accomplishments in the field of forensics.

Shreya Rastogi is a founding member of Project 39A, a criminal justice initiative at National Law University, Delhi. She is at the forefront of research and litigation efforts to ensure that scientific and reliable forensic disciplines are used in India's criminal justice system. She is the first non-American and the first Indian to receive this prestigious award that was instituted in 2015 by the New York Legal Aid Society (LAS)

Founded in 1876, the New York LAS was the United States' first legal aid organisation geared towards low-income individuals. It was built on the belief that every person should have the right to equal justice. Today, it is the largest social justice law firm in New York. Established in 2015 in honour of Magnus Mukoro, a Legal Aid Society paralegal, previous recipients of the Award include some of the biggest names in the field of forensics - Erin Murphy (Professor of Law, New York University and author of Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Forensic DNA) to Dr. John Butler (NIST Fellow, renowned scientist and leading author on Forensic DNA Profiling) and Sarah Chu (currently Director of Policy and Reform at Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice at Cardozo School of Law).

India currently has no framework or guidelines for the operation of forensic labs and to enforce quality standards of criminal investigations relying on flawed understandings of forensics. Courts often accept forensic reports without sufficient scrutiny of their scientific validity, a problem worsened by a legal exemption for government forensic examiners from testifying and allowing their reports into evidence without any cross-examination. These significant structural issues were brought out under Shreya's leadership through the Forensic Science in India Report: A Study of Forensic Science Laboratories (2013-2017). The findings and recommendations therein have been integral to Shreya's policy advocacy efforts. It is against this backdrop that Shreya Rastogi has developed and led Project 39A's forensics work both inside and beyond the courtroom.

At Project 39A, Shreya also leads the team on Death Penalty Litigation, which provides pro bono legal representation to capital defendants across India. The multi-pronged strategy of Project 39A's forensics work involves pro bono criminal defence which has proven to be in dire need of reliable forensics from litigators like Shreya well-versed in the field, empirical and doctrinal research, policy advocacy, and stakeholder training. These efforts have led to notable shifts in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and various High Courts on the importance of testing the reliability of forensic evidence and the cross-examination of forensic experts as part of the right to fair trial.

She was the Deputy Director and Assistant Author of the Death Penalty India Report, the first pan-India empirical study that documents the socio-economic background of prisoners sentenced to death and their experience through the criminal justice system. In 2015, Shreya was featured in the Forbes India 30 under 30 list for her death penalty litigation and research efforts. She also regularly conducts training programs for different stakeholders including lawyers, judges, prosecutors, police officials and forensic scientists. Shreya has also advised government ministries, lawmakers and public institutions on policy matters concerning forensic science. In recognition of her expertise, she was invited to depose before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on The DNA Technology (Use and Application) Regulation Bill, 2019.

The Magnus Mukoro Award for Integrity in Forensic Science is awarded as part of the New York Legal Aid Society's annual 'Questioning Forensics' conference organised by its DNA Unit. Inspired this year by the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) groundbreaking recent study of human factors in forensic science and how that informs our understanding of DNA interpretation, the conference took place in New York between December 5th and 6th. You can know more about it here.