STORY: "Bite Marks and Bullet Holes The Attorney General ended the National Commission on Forensic Science, suppressing an opportunity for reducing convictions based on faulty evidence," by Ramin Skibba, published by Undark on June 2, 2017. (Ramin Skibba is an astrophysicist turned science writer and freelance journalist who is based in San Diego. He has written for Newsweek, Slate, Scientific American, Nature, Science, among other publications.)
GIST: "Keith Harward spent more
than three decades in prison on the presumed strength of forensic
dentistry. No fewer than six forensic dentists testified that his teeth
matched a bite mark on a 1982 victim of rape and murder. But in April of
last year, after serving
more than 33 years in a Virginia penitentiary, new DNA evidence
prompted the state Supreme Court to make official what Harward knew all
along: He was innocent, and the teeth mark analysis was unequivocally,
tragically wrong. Keith Harward was released from prison at age 60, after spending more than half of his life behind bars. “Bite mark evidence is what the whole case hinged on and ultimately had me convicted,” Harward said. “But,” he added, “this stuff is just guesswork.” Today, many forensic scientists would agree — and they’d say the
same, or nearly so, about a menagerie of other techniques that are used
to convict people of crimes, from handwriting analysis to tire track
comparisons. And while some techniques fare better than others,
everything short of DNA analysis has been shown to be widely variable in
reliability, with much hinging on forensic practitioners with widely
varying approaches and expertise. It was with this in mind that many forensic scientists expressed
dismay that the administration of Donald J. Trump had decided — nearly
one year to the day after Harward’s bittersweet exoneration in Virginia —
to disband the National Commission on Forensic Science.
Established just four years ago by the Department of Justice, in
partnership with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the
commission’s goal was “to enhance the practice and improve the
reliability of forensic science.” “We want forensic science to actually be scientific,” said Sunita
Sah, a Cornell University behavioral scientist who served on the
commission. “It’s got to be valid science, which means it’s got to be
reliable, it’s got to be robust. The stakes are very high when you’re
using forensic science in court to convict people.” With the removal of this new and essential channel for forensic
science reform, experts now fear that the imperfect — and by that count,
potentially unjust — status quo will prevail. That status quo, they
say, has for too long placed a burden on untrained judges and juries to
figure out what to make of forensic science presented in the courtroom,
with the very real risk that they will be swayed by misleading evidence,
and with the lives of thousands of defendants like Harward hanging in
the balance. Efforts to improve the situation have a long history. In the landmark 1993 case of Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc.,
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that judges have a responsibility as the
gatekeepers of evidence to ensure that “all scientific testimony or
evidence admitted is not only relevant, but reliable.” It also described
factors involved in assessing the admissibility of evidence, including
whether a forensic technique successfully withstands testing and peer
review, whether it has a known error rate, whether standards and
protocols have been developed, and whether it is generally accepted in
the scientific community. Those were lofty goals, but since then, the Innocence Project, a
non-profit legal organization based in New York that helps wrongfully
convicted people, has used DNA evidence to secure 350 exonerations of
people convicted of crimes they did not commit. In the majority of these
cases, the conviction turned on faulty eyewitness testimony, which
itself has been shown to be routinely unreliable. But nearly half of the
cases at least partly hinged on some presentation of forensic science —
much of which, some scientists suggest, has little research behind it. “Bite marks is the obvious example,” said Suzanne Bell, a forensic
chemist at West Virginia University in Morgantown and another former
commissioner. “It’s inconceivable to most of us as to how this stuff
even continues to be admitted. It has no scientific basis.” Other kinds of forensics, like hair and fiber analysis, tool marks,
firearms and ballistics, and voice comparisons, are considered more
reliable, but these need to be thoroughly assessed to develop validated
standards, Bell and others argue. Fingerprint comparisons, a traditional
forensic tool, are moving forward, but a 2011 study highlighted the need for more standardization and training. And even DNA analysis doesn’t have an error rate of zero. In response to growing questions about the reliability of the various
forensic techniques being used to convict Americans of crimes, Congress
ordered the National Academy of Sciences to study the problem, leading
to a major report in 2009.
That report came to the damning conclusion that, aside from DNA, “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.” It also pointed
out that judges and lawyers have insufficient training in scientific
methodology, and it argued that police and prosecutors have too much
control over crime labs, creating conflicts of interest. This report eventually gave rise to the Department of Justice’s
forensic science commission four years later. The advisory panel
produced 20 documents containing recommendations made to the Attorney
General during its short tenure — not just about forensic science
methods but also how attorneys present evidence. The panel managed to
eventually make an impact, as its recommendations trickled down to
prosecutors.......... But their work had really just begun when Attorney General Jeff
Sessions, a former prosecutor, terminated its charter, and its members
are now lamenting its loss. “Without the commission, I don’t see how
we’ll solve these problems,” Bell said. “Science needs to be independent
of the prosecutorial side, as well as defense.” Even more worrying, scientists suggest: Sessions has announced plans for an internal, DOJ task force whose job it will be to make recommendations to advance forensic science. This is just “the fox guarding the henhouse,” said Thomas Albright, a
neuroscientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, who also
served on the commission. He and others suggest that in practice, little
will change with respect to forensic science in the courtroom in the
foreseeable future. That’s because while both prosecutors and defense attorneys want to
win their cases, prosecutors have often been far more willing to have
their experts play fast and loose with scientific evidence, said David
Faigman, law professor at University of California, Hastings. That’s a
fundamental injustice, Faigman suggested, when the lives of the accused
hang in the balance, and it’s also unfair to the judges and juries
weighing their fates. “They fall for Sherlock Holmes syndrome,” Faigman
said. “They don’t need to provide a wall of proof, just bricks in a
reliable fashion.” Harward echoed those concerns. “The juries have to believe them
because the court approved them as experts and allowed them to testify,”
he said. “But,” he added, “there’s nothing to object to because you’ve got only one side.”
The entire story can be found at:
https://undark.org/article/bite-marks-bullet-holes-forensic-science-courtroom/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/c
The entire story can be found at:
https://undark.org/article/bite-marks-bullet-holes-forensic-science-courtroom/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/c
