"In the
December episode of the Reasonably Suspicious podcast,
we published an excerpt from an interview Grits conducted with national
Innocence Project co-founder Peter Neufeld. We mainly discussed
forensic-science topics including the abolition of the national forensic
science commission, of which he was a member, and DNA mixture
controversies. You can listen to the full interview here. "Scott Henson: I wanted to start ... in your speech to the Texas Defender
Service luncheon, you had talked about Texas having, really, I guess
for the nation, sort of a surprising role in some of these innocence and
forensics issues, and in particular about our Forensic Science
Commission and our junk-science writ. I feel like Texans almost take
these things for granted now. Can you give us, from your perspective,
what that looks like from New York and from the national view?
Peter Neufeld: Sure. So, nationally, during the Obama administration,
there was a major effort to look at particularly the forensic issues and
think that we needed a national federal solution because, quite
honestly, if you have some piece of evidence tested in the laboratory in
Houston, or you have it in Buffalo, New York, that you get the same
results just as they would in a clinical test. If you're sending in a
sample of your kid's saliva to see whether or not she has some kind of
disease, you'll get the same results from both labs, well the same thing
should apply in crime laboratories.
And we got a lot of good things passed and introduced, a national
forensic science commission that I was appointed to by the President, a
standard setting body, efforts to review the way the FBI agents and
other federal agents testify about forensic disciplines. It's got to be
consistent with scientific principles, which became particularly
relevant after they found that in 96% of the hair cases, FBI agents gave
erroneous testimony, which exceeded the limits of science. All of this
was moving along. On four different fronts.
Then of course, we had the last election. And Jeff Sessions became the
Attorney General. Last April, he abolished the commission, he abolished
the effort to standardize a language with outside input from
statisticians and scientists. He ended and suspended the review of the
way agents testify in all other forensic disciplines, and basically he
brought to a screeching halt any effort by the federal government to
enhance the quality of forensic science in the criminal justice system.
The responsibility fell much more to the states, and in that regard,
Texas is leading the country in two ways. Texas has a Forensic Science
Commission, which is outstanding, which has lots of stakeholders
involved. They've sort of put petty differences aside and they all have
one thing in common, they want to see only the best forensic disciplines
used in cases where life and liberty are at stake. And it's remarkable.
New York had a commission before Texas and it's an awful commission.
It's a commission completely dominated by law enforcement and
prosecutorial interest, and the truth ... and principles play a back
seat. So Texas should be applauded for that.
Number two, Texas got the so called junk science statute passed, which
allows people to bring a writ to throw out an old conviction, which was
based on what we now know as discredited forensic science. It's very
important because science moves much more rapidly than law. And so many
of these disciplines are disreputable. So many of these disciplines have
never been validated, have never been determined empirically reliable,
but nevertheless, if a judge lets it in, that's the end of the review.
Scott Henson: And just real quick, to expand on that, some of these
disciplines are some of the most common ones used in law enforcement,
from matching ballistics to fingerprinting, all these things that are
basically pattern recognition. Someone looking at it closely. Now that
we don't have the National Forensic Commission, where do we go from
here? Because we basically had ... after the 2009 National Academy of
the Sciences report, really the flaws in forensics had sort of been
exposed and the commission that you were a part of was created to say,
"Okay, what do we do now that we know that all these things aren't
really that scientific?" It seems like we've left it up in the air, but
the path to figure out what needs to happen next has vanished, at least
at the national level.
Peter Neufeld: Oh it's certainly vanished at the national level. You had
a commission, which for the very first time, had, in addition to
stakeholders, half a dozen world class scientists, who were not involved
in forensics, but are leading Physicists, Chemists, Biologists,
Neuroscientists, all playing an active role. And of course with the end
of the commission, the Justice Department is determined that we no
longer want independent scientists to give us any input.
So you've replaced a body of 35 people, including a half a dozen
independent scientists, with a forensic tsar who was a Deputy District
Attorney from the mid west, who's not a scientist, and he and other
people inside justice will unilaterally make all the decisions about
forensics for the future.
Scott Henson: Wow. Well, one guy huh? Who is this? What's his name? Yeah, it's okay if you don't know.
Peter Neufeld: Alright. I can't remember at the moment.
Scott Henson: That's fine. If it's going to be one guy, I thought we should know."
The entire transcript - moving on to the controversy surrounding mixed DNA - can be found at:
