GIST: "In 1992, Eddie Lee Howard, a poor black man, was accused of murdering an 84-year-old woman in Lowndes County, Mississippi. Howard had a solid alibi, and the state had no concrete evidence against him.
In the original autopsy, the assigned pathologist had found knife wounds, but his report included nothing that would tie the victim specifically to Howard. Investigators needed more. So they brought in “forensic odontologist” Michael West, a Mississippi dentist famous for his ability to use tinted goggles, ultraviolet light, and other gadgets to discover previously unnoticed human bite marks on the bodies of victims. He’d dubbed his self-invented technique the “West Phenomenon.”
The victim’s body was disinterred and returned to the morgue. Then, West “got his camera, lenses, UV lights, and yellow goggles out of the trunk of his car and went to work,” writes M. Chris Fabricant in his spellbinding Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System.
West worked alone and never shared the photographs he claimed he took that night.
But when he emerged, he announced he’d found three bite marks on the woman’s body. And, after matching those previously unseen marks with a mold of Howard’s teeth, he had determined the bites had been “indeed and without doubt, inflicted by one Eddie Lee Howard.”
Forensic odontology was just one discipline in the burgeoning field of crime forensics, the family of supposedly scientific techniques that could identify suspects through tiny fiber or hair samples, patterns of splattered blood, unique marks made by blades or tools, and similar bits of arcane evidence.
When the case finally came to trial more than two years later, the judge manipulated Howard into the hopeless position of defending himself without an attorney.
In the courtroom, Howard, an ex-con, faced West, a full-time expert witness who was much in demand by prosecutors around the country. Howard tried to pin the dentist down on just what concrete evidence he had. “I’m not talking about some hocus-pocus stuff,” Howard said. “I’m talking about facts.”
Despite being “the least educated person in the courtroom,” as Fabricant writes, Howard was correct: The West Phenomenon was hocus-pocus at best, deliberate (and lucrative) malfeasance at worst. But, as is typically the case, the judge and jury were awed by the dentist’s credentials. Howard was dispatched to the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary, where he would spend more than two decades on death row.
As director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to exonerating the falsely convicted, Fabricant helped represent Howard through years of tortorous legal battles. Fabricant tells Howard’s story, and those of several other unjustly convicted men, with legal and scientific precision — and a disciplined, focused fury.
Readers of true-crime nonfiction will feel at home with Fabricant’s vivid descriptions of crime scene investigations, grisly autopsies, and courtroom confrontations. But the author’s narratives subvert the cliches of the field. Fabricant recently told an interviewer , “I hope to create a new genre of narrative nonfiction: untrue crime.”
He is off to a good start. Decades of fawning media coverage and TV shows like CSI have burnished the image of infallible forensic investigators using science to bring evildoers to justice.
Fabricant’s examples reveal a very different process: In case after case, he shows, police prematurely zeroed in on a suspect, ignored other leads, and then relied on all-too-willing forensic “experts” to add pseudoscientific heft to their hunches.
While the disciplines of analyzing fibers or fingerprints or bite marks might employ scientific equipment and techniques, they lack the self-correcting rigor of actual science. Much of the forensic expertise on display in courtrooms, Fabricant writes, is actually “speculation masquerading as science.”
Science is more than microscopes and spotless laboratories. At bottom, true science requires skepticism: the willingness to challenge received wisdom and combat individual biases. Humans are all too prone to “see what we expect to see,” as Fabricant puts it.
So, over centuries, scientists have developed ways to sidestep those biases: They insist that hypotheses be testable and that experiments include control groups, as well as employ other safeguards.
But forensic science never developed these habits. Its leading practitioners invented techniques to serve the needs of prosecutors; they rarely tried to confirm whether their methods actually worked. If a technique succeeded in the courtroom, that’s all that mattered.
Junk Science describes the first major bite mark case in the 1970s. The dentist who testified claimed he could scientifically tie a wound in the victim’s skin to an individual suspect.
However, the “technique had not been subjected to even the most rudimentary tenets of the scientific method,” Fabricant writes. “No hypotheses were tested. No laboratory experiments were conducted. … It was just an opinion.”
According to the Supreme Court’s “Frye test,” courts are only supposed to allow scientific evidence if it is generally accepted in the “relevant scientific community.”
There was no relevant scientific community overseeing the study of bite marks. Nonetheless, the judge allowed the evidence. And that made all the difference.
Now, the use of bite marks was a legal precedent, one other prosecutors could cite when they called their own forensic experts. Judges were soon allowing all kinds of forensic hocus-pocus, Fabricant writes, all “without requiring empirical evidence of reliability.”
Dentists and other aspiring crime fighters wasted no time creating their own relevant scientific communities. They formed associations, started journals, and lobbied for membership in the booming American Academy of Forensic Sciences. No doubt, most practitioners believed they were doing honest work on behalf of justice.
But the field lacked both the willingness and the tools to test whether its methods were valid. Moreover, juries responded to expert certainty, not scientific nuance or doubt. Once asked about his rate of errors, West responded, “Something less than my savior, Jesus Christ.”
By the 1990s, the number of forensic expert witnesses testifying in criminal trials had exploded. And each year, thousands of suspects were being sent to prison on the flimsiest grounds imaginable.
But then a new forensic science emerged: the use of DNA evidence — and this one could stand up to scientific scrutiny. As early as 1989, prisoners began to challenge their convictions based on the ability to go back and test crime scene DNA.
According to the Innocence Project, 375 prisoners have been exonerated based on DNA evidence to date. Some 43% of those cases involved the “misapplication of forensic science,” the group says.
Suddenly, the shaky courtroom claims made by forensic superstars were facing a kind of retroactive scientific control: the hard facts of DNA. Some of the biggest names in the field were seeing their cases — cases that had built their reputations — overturned.
It would be nice to say that Junk Science ends here, with a good faith reform of the whole forensic field based on the DNA exonerations. Sadly, that didn’t happen. Judges continued to admit flimsy forensic evidence, West and other dubious experts continued to appear in court, and suspects continued to go to jail based on their testimony. But skepticism was growing. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences published an in-depth report on 13 forensic specialties.
It found that of all those, only DNA could consistently “demonstrate a connection between an evidentiary sample and a specific individual.” That bombshell did spur some reforms. But many judges, prosecutors, and even the FBI remain maddeningly reluctant to reexamine convictions that were marred by junk science. Even today, Fabricant notes, bite mark evidence is admissible in all 50 states.
In 2020, Howard finally walked free after 26 years on death row. Other Innocence Project clients spent as much as 33 years imprisoned on false forensic evidence. Fabricant writes movingly about what it’s like seeing a man reenter society after spending most of his adult life unjustly locked away.
The power of the state to prosecute and imprison criminals is vital to a healthy society. But that power becomes dangerous when it is bolstered by false claims of all-knowing authority. Junk Science is a sobering testament to the need for humility — for admitting that our knowledge is limited and fallible — both in science and in the law. Questions of justice are too important to be left to hocus-pocus."
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/how-fake-science-corrupts-criminal-justice
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resurce. 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/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
