Statement

Twenty-five years is a long time to spend inside the machinery of criminal justice.

Twenty-five years is a long time to spend inside the machinery of criminal justice. Long enough to understand it from the inside in ways that courtroom observers and legal theorists never quite manage. Long enough to have formed an opinion about it that is not shaped by idealism or professional self-interest, but by accumulated direct experience of what the system actually does when no one is performing for an audience. I supported investigative authorities across four continents. I trained intelligence services and advised them on cases where the forensic dimension was either misunderstood or being deliberately misrepresented. I testified in proceedings involving child abuse, homicide, digital crime, political scandal, mass casualty events, and the full range of what human beings are capable of doing to each other and to the evidence left behind. I have seen things that a person does not forget because forgetting them is not biologically available to a functioning memory. That is the twenty-five years.

What accumulated over that time was not just testimony and case experience. It was a form of cross-disciplinary expertise that grows in a specific way, by intersection rather than by depth alone, where forensic anthropology starts informing how you read a video frame, where your understanding of network architecture starts informing how you think about a chain of custody, where the bone tells you something the instrument has not yet confirmed and you learn to trust the read because it has been confirmed enough times before to have earned that trust. I started writing code at fourteen. At sixteen I had built my own operating system on a Commodore 64. At twenty I penetrated Deutsche Telekom’s telecommunications satellite. None of that was forensic science, but all of it was the same underlying discipline: the close reading of systems, the identification of where they fail, and the extraction of meaning from what others treated as noise. Forensics was the application. The habit of mind was already there.

I will tell you plainly what I will no longer do, because clarity serves everyone better than careful language that softens the edges until no one is quite sure what was said.

I will not write another expert report destined for a German court. Not one. The decision was made in autumn 2025, it was deliberate, and it reflects twenty-five years of arriving at proceedings where the outcome had already been selected and the evidence was being organized around it rather than the other way around. I have driven to Hamburg and back. I have driven to Munich courts with my spine in the condition it is in after decades of this work, vertebral compression fractures that did not appear on their own, and I have sat in courtrooms and delivered testimony that the presiding judge had decided was inconvenient before the first sentence was complete. I have been insulted from the bench by people whose understanding of the forensic discipline they were adjudicating would not have survived thirty seconds of professional scrutiny. I have watched innocent people get convicted. I have watched the system process that outcome with the equanimity of a mechanism that does not register error as a category. And I have stood at service station forecourts on the A7, somewhere between nowhere and a courtroom I did not want to be driving toward, and understood with complete clarity that the reimbursement I would eventually receive for the travel, the accommodation, the preparation time, and the testimony itself would not cover what any reasonable accounting of the actual cost would produce.

I am finished with it. That is the whole sentence.

What I will say additionally, not out of bitterness but out of professional observation that I believe is accurate: Germany is not replacing its forensic expert witnesses. The people who have been doing this work are aging out, and the institutional conditions that caused people like me to leave are not attracting a next generation at a rate that will cover the gap. In ten years, certain German courts will look for qualified independent forensic experts in several disciplines and find the shelf considerably emptier than they expect. That is not my problem to solve. I spent a quarter century trying to give the system what it needed and was thanked for it in ways I have already described. Whatever comes next for that system will come without my involvement.

Here is what remains, and what has always been the center of the work even when the courtroom obligations were consuming most of the calendar.

I hold a skull and I know. Within seconds: the age at death, the biological sex, the ethnic origin, the approximate face that sat on those bones when the person was alive. That is not a metaphor for expertise in the general sense. It is a specific, trained, repeatedly confirmed capacity built from fifteen years of forensic facial reconstruction and the handling of thousands of actual specimens. I maintain a database built from that accumulation. The bone carries a history that is not always visible to the instrument first, and learning to read it requires the kind of repeated exposure that cannot be accelerated by motivation or intelligence alone. It requires time, and I have the time behind me.

I perform C14 radiocarbon dating and stable isotope analysis on human remains and organic materials, working through ISO 17025 accredited laboratory infrastructure using accelerator mass spectrometry. When skeletal remains are found in a field, a riverbank, a garden being excavated for a swimming pool, the first forensic question is who this person was and when they died. I answer that question. If identification requires reading the dental record, I read it. If the face needs to be reconstructed for a public search, whether through forensic photographic processing or full three-dimensional reconstruction from the skeletal structure, I do that reconstruction. I have done it in cases where no other avenue remained, and I have done it without error in the biological profile.

I give specialized training. I write forensic expert opinions for cases and institutions worldwide. I consult for attorneys and advise legal counsel who need independent forensic analysis from someone whose conclusions are not shaped by which side of the proceeding retained them. I support international law enforcement and work with investigators in jurisdictions where the evidentiary standard is taken seriously enough to make the work worthwhile. European courts outside Germany, US investigators, international agencies: these are the engagements that remain open and to which I bring the same standard I always brought, which is the only standard available to me because it is the only one I know how to operate at.

Antrometric, the precision stature estimation platform I built for forensic anthropologists and pathologists, is in active use across multiple countries. A forensic facial reconstruction system is in final testing. A biometric voice identification platform is in development. Two books are being written. The research continues on every front where something worth researching still sits unresolved.

I am a member of the British Archaeological Association, the American Anthropological Association, the International Association for Identification and its European division IAIEU, the German Society for Criminalistics, LEVA, and the Content Authenticity Initiative. I operate under ENFSI standards and certified methods. EU Expert accreditation number DE/6765. ORCiD: 0009-0008-6791-4858. The credentials are a matter of record. The work built over twenty-five years speaks at a volume that makes the list of memberships somewhat beside the point, though the memberships are accurate.

Justitia is not always just. Anyone who has spent serious time inside the actual machinery of justice, not studying it from the outside but operating within it, handling the evidence, writing the conclusions, sitting in the room and watching what those conclusions become in the hands of people who process them through institutional interest, knows this without requiring it to be argued. I know it from twenty-five years of direct exposure. It is not a cynical position. It is the position of someone who took the work and its requirements seriously enough to have noticed, over a long enough period, the gap between what the system declares itself to be and what it reliably does when the two are not the same thing.

The contact form is below. If the work is real and the standard matches what is described here, I am available.