COMMENTARY: "Another day, another preventable crime lab scandal," by Steven Austad, published on AL.com on July 22, 2017. ( Steven Austad is Chair of the Biology Department at UAB. Before becoming a research scientist, he had various lives as an English major, a newspaper reporter, a New York City taxi driver, and a Hollywood wild animal trainer. Living now in Birmingham with his veterinarian wife, 6 dogs, 2 parrots, and a cat, he enjoys nothing more than communicating how science works to the general public.)
GIST: "In April 2015, not long after I moved to Alabama, a man named
Anthony Hinton was freed from prison after serving 30 years for two
Birmingham murders he didn't commit. The only evidence linking him to
the 1985 crimes was a so-called "match" by a state forensic examiner of
bullets used in the murders to a pistol found in Mr. Hinton's mother's
home. Thirty years later, independent ballistics experts could neither
match that gun to those bullets nor even be sure that the bullets were
all fired from the same gun. In the same year that Anthony Hinton was freed, there were 149
exonerations in the United States, 4 in Alabama including Hinton. Three
of the Alabama exonerations were for murder convictions. What these numbers show - although you wouldn't guess it from the
popularity of science fiction television shows like the various CSI
series - is that American crime labs have been, and still are, in a
sorry state. That was the bottom line of a 328 page report done by the
National Academy of Sciences - our most prestigious scientific
organization -- in 2009. Since then, as if to emphasize this point,
scandal after scandal has erupted in crime labs across the country. For instance, earlier this year, prosecutors in Massachusetts threw
out more than 20,000 drug convictions, because a single crime lab
technician admitted that she had been fabricating drug test results for
years. A year earlier, a lab technician for the New Jersey State Police
admitted to a similar crime which could affect almost 15,000 cases. Other crime lab scandals of various sorts have cropped up in Texas,
North Carolina, California, Ohio, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana,
Michigan, Minnesota, and on and on. There are too many reasons for these scandals to cover them all here,
but several are worth noting. Sometimes the underlying science is
flawed, meaning that test results are never really conclusive, but are
open to wildly subjective interpretation. Not surprisingly, subjective
interpretation by law enforcement units typically favors the
prosecution. This was behind the recent scandal at the FBI laboratory
for misleading testimony their laboratory staff gave for years about
hair and bite mark comparisons. That scandal has led to review of more
than a thousand cases so far. Sometimes errors are the consequence of simple incompetence.
Technicians run the tests incorrectly. Incompetence is the most
charitable interpretation of the false ballistics match that sent
Anthony Hinton to prison.
Sometimes errors are the consequence of innocent mistakes. Humans make mistakes. That's what we do. One goal of science is to develop procedures that minimize human mistakes and reduce their impact when they occur. Other times like the Massachusetts and New Jersey cases above, it is purposeful technician misconduct. In a number of states, including Alabama, crime labs can receive extra money for helping get convictions. If that incentive structure does not exactly encourage laboratory misconduct, it certainly does nothing to discourage it either. If we assume that our criminal justice system values getting the right result as distinct from getting the desired result, then we should be working to make the system better because laboratory sciences will become even more important in the justice system in the future. Errors in criminal justice have many effects - all of them bad. False convictions as well as false acquittals allow criminals to walk free. For instance, whoever committed the murders that sent Anthony Hinton to prison were never brought to justice. Errors also destroy people's faith that the criminal justice system is fair. For those of us in the daily business of science research, it is quite clear that a number of the problems I mentioned could be remedied simply by taking advantage of a standard laboratory practice - one which ironically resembles an old advance in policing. In the lab, we call it using blind controls. In police work it is the difference between a line-up and a show-up. A show-up is when the police arrest a suspect, show the suspect to a witness and ask if this is the person they saw pull the trigger. Even in the 19th century, it was realized that given only one choice, witnesses often made false identifications. Out of these errors was born the police line-up, or as the British call it, an identity parade. In a line-up as everyone knows, a witness is shown 5 or 6 people among which is the suspect and asked to identify which if any is the perpetrator. Line-ups are certainly an improvement over show-ups, but they are susceptible to their own potential biases. Recently there has been a pile of research into the best way to perform them. That's a topic for another column. The procedure I'm talking about which would fix a number of the crime lab problems is another type of line-up that avoids these problems. Its use is the essence of simplicity. Instead of giving the lab technician a single sample of, say, blood, possible drugs, or bullets used in a crime, the technician is given several samples, let's say three samples, only one of which comes from the current suspect or crime scene. The others are blind controls. They technician is not told which is which and is expected to produce a report on all three. What does this simple procedural change accomplish? First, it prevents "dry-labbing," producing reports on work that was never done. If the technician does not know which is the real sample, she would not know which report to fabricate. Dry-labbing was the problem in the Massachusetts and New Jersey scandals mentioned at the beginning. Second, if the blind controls are blanks or contain a known amount of the substance of interest or are from a different crime scene, then this procedure should also catch procedural errors and innocent mistakes. So it serves as a quality control measure, allowing laboratories to determine how often such mistakes occur so they can decide if new procedures need to be developed to reduce the error rate. Certainly most of the people who work in crime labs are doing their best. They are typically overworked, overstressed, and underpaid. They want to get things right. Anything we can do to help them get things right, we should do. But we also need to weed out the few who do not care about getting things right. Application of proven procedures from other scientific fields can help with both of these things. The 2009 report on the state of forensic science by the National Academy of Sciences led to the formation of the National Commission on Forensic Science, a group of independent scientists tasked with raising the standards of rigor and accuracy in crime labs. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently announced that he will disband this Commission. Politics aside, this is a tremendous mistake. If we are to have confidence in our justice system, it needs more science, not less."
The entire commentary can be found at:
http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/07/another_day_another_preventabl.html
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
Sometimes errors are the consequence of innocent mistakes. Humans make mistakes. That's what we do. One goal of science is to develop procedures that minimize human mistakes and reduce their impact when they occur. Other times like the Massachusetts and New Jersey cases above, it is purposeful technician misconduct. In a number of states, including Alabama, crime labs can receive extra money for helping get convictions. If that incentive structure does not exactly encourage laboratory misconduct, it certainly does nothing to discourage it either. If we assume that our criminal justice system values getting the right result as distinct from getting the desired result, then we should be working to make the system better because laboratory sciences will become even more important in the justice system in the future. Errors in criminal justice have many effects - all of them bad. False convictions as well as false acquittals allow criminals to walk free. For instance, whoever committed the murders that sent Anthony Hinton to prison were never brought to justice. Errors also destroy people's faith that the criminal justice system is fair. For those of us in the daily business of science research, it is quite clear that a number of the problems I mentioned could be remedied simply by taking advantage of a standard laboratory practice - one which ironically resembles an old advance in policing. In the lab, we call it using blind controls. In police work it is the difference between a line-up and a show-up. A show-up is when the police arrest a suspect, show the suspect to a witness and ask if this is the person they saw pull the trigger. Even in the 19th century, it was realized that given only one choice, witnesses often made false identifications. Out of these errors was born the police line-up, or as the British call it, an identity parade. In a line-up as everyone knows, a witness is shown 5 or 6 people among which is the suspect and asked to identify which if any is the perpetrator. Line-ups are certainly an improvement over show-ups, but they are susceptible to their own potential biases. Recently there has been a pile of research into the best way to perform them. That's a topic for another column. The procedure I'm talking about which would fix a number of the crime lab problems is another type of line-up that avoids these problems. Its use is the essence of simplicity. Instead of giving the lab technician a single sample of, say, blood, possible drugs, or bullets used in a crime, the technician is given several samples, let's say three samples, only one of which comes from the current suspect or crime scene. The others are blind controls. They technician is not told which is which and is expected to produce a report on all three. What does this simple procedural change accomplish? First, it prevents "dry-labbing," producing reports on work that was never done. If the technician does not know which is the real sample, she would not know which report to fabricate. Dry-labbing was the problem in the Massachusetts and New Jersey scandals mentioned at the beginning. Second, if the blind controls are blanks or contain a known amount of the substance of interest or are from a different crime scene, then this procedure should also catch procedural errors and innocent mistakes. So it serves as a quality control measure, allowing laboratories to determine how often such mistakes occur so they can decide if new procedures need to be developed to reduce the error rate. Certainly most of the people who work in crime labs are doing their best. They are typically overworked, overstressed, and underpaid. They want to get things right. Anything we can do to help them get things right, we should do. But we also need to weed out the few who do not care about getting things right. Application of proven procedures from other scientific fields can help with both of these things. The 2009 report on the state of forensic science by the National Academy of Sciences led to the formation of the National Commission on Forensic Science, a group of independent scientists tasked with raising the standards of rigor and accuracy in crime labs. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently announced that he will disband this Commission. Politics aside, this is a tremendous mistake. If we are to have confidence in our justice system, it needs more science, not less."
The entire commentary can be found at:
http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/07/another_day_another_preventabl.html
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
