Science Found Wanting in Nation’s Crime Labs

The report says such analyses are often handled by poorly trained technicians who then exaggerate the accuracy of their methods in court. It concludes that Congress should create a federal agency to guarantee the independence of the field, which has been dominated by law enforcement agencies, say forensic professionals, scholars and scientists who have seen review copies of the study. Early reviewers said the report was still subject to change.

The result of a two-year review, the report follows a series of widely publicized crime laboratory failures, including the case of Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer from Portland, Ore., and Muslim convert who was wrongly arrested in the 2004 terrorist train bombing in Madrid that killed 191 people and wounded 2,000.

And there’s some commentary, How to Bring Real Science Into the Courtroom

Law enforcement organizations have tried to derail the report nearly every step of the way, and with good reason. Police and prosecutors have been relying on bad science to get convictions for decades. It’s only recently, as the onset of DNA testing has begun uncovering a disturbing spate of wrongful convictions, that some of the criminal justice system’s cottage industry pseudo-sciences like “bite mark analysis” have been exposed for the quackery they are.

I agree with the skepticism that more government bureaucracy will fix the problem. I think it’s more that the standard of legal evidence is not the same as the standard of scientific evidence. In science, you need to take steps to rule out alternate explanations of a phenomenon, which we sometimes explain as “correlation does not prove causality.” If you watched the videos of why you should never talk to the police, you’d see that the legal system is not interested in ruling out alternate explanations — they leave that to the defense. But the prosecution and the science labs are part same system, so it’s a matter of whether they are asking all the questions, or if they stop when they get an answer they want.