POST: "State lawmakers won’t adequately fund medical examiners’ offices. This is a huge problem," by Radley Balko, on his Blog "The Watch' published by The Washington Post on December 14, 2017. (Radley Balko blogs about criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for The Washington Post. He is the author of the book "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces.")
GIST: "Radley Balko has come up with another excellent post on the subject of death investigations that defies reduction. So the reader will have to go to the link below for the full shebang. But here's a taste: "On Tuesday, I made the case for abolishing the elected coroner system that many states still use to investigate suspicious deaths. I argued that they should opt for a medical examiner system instead. But no matter what system a state or city uses, it will fail if it isn’t properly funded, well-staffed, and structured to guard against cognitive bias and perverse incentives. New Jersey, for example, does use a medical examiner system. And it’s clearly failing. If you want convict people of murder, you need a proper death-investigation system. This is even more important if you want to convict the people who actually committed the murders. But while lawmakers are fond of boasting about the funding they’ve procured for police departments and prosecutors’ offices, they’re often reluctant to fund medical examiners’ offices. Good medical examiners then migrate to states that take the position more seriously. The field of forensic pathology is already unique within the medical profession. Most physicians practice on the living, in order to save the living. Medical examiners also work to save the living, but they do so by practicing on the dead. That takes a peculiar sort of personality. Medical examiners tend to be quirky — a bit off — and they usually possess the requisite morbid sense of humor. But the peculiarity of the field may also explain why forensic pathology seems to regularly be plagued by scandal..........The common refrain here is that lawmakers are beholden to the voters, and the dead don’t vote. It’s a classic example of the conflict between policy effects that are seen versus those that are unseen. When an office is underfunded, some autopsies still get done and some crimes still get solved. This is what is seen. Everything is fine. Unseen are all the murders that didn’t get solved; the homicides wrongly classified as accidents, suicides or natural deaths; the people wrongly convicted of, say, shaking an infant to death because an overworked or underqualified medical examiner went along with a prosecutor’s hunch; or the innocent people sent to prison who may never get out because their cases don’t involve DNA. We see the work medical examiners do with the dead. Just as critical — but harder to see — are the benefits their work, when done properly, has on the living."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/12/14/state-lawmakers-wont-adequately-fund-medical-examiners-offices-this-is-a-huge-problem/?utm_term=.e041e9eefcee
See also a related story at the link below: "Orange County's Informant Scandal Yields Evidence of Forensic Science Deception in Murder Trials," by R. Scott Moxley; (December 13, 2017); "Given the sustained popularity of fictional television shows such as CSI and heroic crime-lab characters who solve investigations in less than an hour, juries in Orange County and throughout the nation routinely give considerable weight to criminalists' testimony translating mind-numbingly complex forensic-science issues into understandable meanings. There's also an embedded assumption that forensic scientists are uniformly competent, honest and unbiased. In other words, though crime labs are often wings of law-enforcement agencies—as it is in OC—their employees aren't expected by citizens to sabotage defense attorneys or favor prosecution teams. But ever-increasing numbers of wrongful criminal convictions based largely on faulty forensic-science testimony prompted the National Research Council (NRC) to publish a 2009 report, Strengthening Forensic Science In the United States: A Path Forward, which applauded "the scores of talented and dedicated people in the forensic science community . . . who have produced valuable evidence that has led to the successful prosecution and conviction of criminals as well as to the exoneration of innocent people." Their research also left them alarmed, noting "the forensic science system, encompassing both research and practice" poses serious problems for the criminal-justice system. They observed that "faulty science analyses" has convicted innocent people even in death penalty cases. "This fact has demonstrated the potential danger of giving undue weight to evidence and testimony derived from imperfect testing and analysis," the group stated. "Moreover, imprecise or exaggerated expert testimony has sometimes contributed to the admission of erroneous or misleading evidence. . . . The simple reality is that the interpretation of forensic evidence is not always based on scientific studies to determine its validity."
In supporting their stance, the NRC cited the unwillingness of "some" in the forensic science community to acknowledge imperfections despite the chronic emergence of historical evidence: The Detroit police crime lab botched at least 10 percent of its ballistic evidence analysis; a West Virginia lab employee handling more than 100 cases falsified results that caused juries to convict defendants; a Texas Department of Public Safety audit found the Houston Police Department's crime lab "was presenting findings in a misleading manner designed to unfairly help prosecutors obtain convictions"; the Innocence Project, which has freed 351 innocent prisoners after DNA undercut criminalists' trial assertions, discovered proof some government lab workers across the country performed "drylabbing," or offering juries fake conclusions of tests that never occurred. Even the FBI, which celebrates an international reputation for crime lab proficiency, didn't escape the Council's scorn. It cited the case of Oregon's Brandon Mayfield, whom agents arrested for his alleged participation in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. It took two weeks for Mayfield to win release from custody after agency officials reluctantly conceded they had employed erroneous fingerprint analysis. According to the Council, the problem wasn't necessarily the evidence, "but rather the bias and circular reasoning of the FBI examiners.""
http://www.ocweekly.com/news/has-orange-countys-crime-lab-fabricated-scientific-analysis-to-help-prosecutors-win-murder-cases-8638149
