STORY: "Five disturbing things you didn't know about forensic "science," by Jordan Smith, published by"the Intercept" on April 24, 2015;
GIST: "Last week The Washington Post revealed that in 268 trials dating back to 1972, 26 out of 28 examiners within the
FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit “overstated forensic
matches in a way that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent” of
the cases. These included cases where 14 people have since been either
executed or died in prison. The hair analysis review — the largest-ever post-conviction review of questionable forensic evidence by the FBI — has been ongoing since 2012.
The review is a joint effort by the FBI, Innocence Project and the
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The preliminary
results announced last week represent just a small percentage of the
nearly 3,000 criminal cases in which the FBI hair examiners may have
provided analysis. Of the 329 DNA exonerations to date, 74 involved flawed hair evidence analysis. While these revelations are certainly disturbing — and the
implications alarming — the reality is that they represent the tip of
the iceberg when it comes to flawed forensics. In a landmark 2009 report,
the National Academy of Sciences concluded that, aside from DNA, there
was little, if any, meaningful scientific underpinning to many of
the forensic disciplines. “With the exception of nuclear DNA analysis …
no forensic method has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to
consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a
connection between evidence and a specific individual or source,” reads
the report. There is one thing that all troubling forensic techniques have in
common: They’re all based on the idea that patterns, or impressions, are
unique and can be matched to the thing, or person, who made them. But
the validity of this premise has not been subjected to rigorous
scientific inquiry. “The forensic science community has had little
opportunity to pursue or become proficient in the research that is
needed to support what it does,” the NAS report said.
Nonetheless, courts routinely allow forensic practitioners to testify
in front of jurors, anointing them “experts” in these pattern-matching
fields — together dubbed forensic “sciences” despite the lack of
evidence to support that — based only on their individual, practical
experience. These witnesses, who are largely presented as learned and
unbiased arbiters of truth, can hold great sway with jurors whose
expectations are often that real life mimics the television crime lab or
police procedural. But that is not the case, as the first results from the FBI hair
evidence review clearly show. And given the conclusions of the NAS
report, future results are not likely to improve. What’s more, if other
pattern-matching disciplines were subjected to the same scrutiny as hair
analysis, there is no reason to think the results would be any better.
For some disciplines the results could even be worse. Consider the
examples below:
1. Bite-mark analysis is based on two falsehoods and has wrongfully convicted at least 24 people; (Elaboration);