In a short New York Post piece Roger Koppl draws the right lessons from the Duke case:

The life-altering injustices suffered by the affluent white defendants in this case are precisely the sort of injustices suffered regularly by many of America’s less privileged citizens.

DNA is no magic bullet of truth when the testers are aligned unambiguously with the prosecution. During the testimony in which it was revealed that Nifong and Meehan had agreed to hide the DNA evidence, Meehan referred to Nifong as “my client.” Instead of serving the truth, Meehan’s forensics lab was helping its “client,” the prosecutor.

When forensic scientists work exclusively for the prosecution, we should expect errors and abuse. Using post-conviction DNA evidence, the Innocence Project has helped exonerate nearly 200 people wrongly convicted of crimes. A study of the first 86 such cases, published in the journal Science, found faulty forensics played a role in almost two-thirds of those convictions.

The time has come to free forensic science from the pressures of prosecutorial bias. To that end, crime labs should become independent of police and prosecutors, and public defenders should be given greater access to forensic advice and testing.

Koppl’s the author of a forthcoming study for the Reason Foundation on forensics. I’m anxious to read it.

This all ties directly to fa eature piece I’m working on right now for reason. Some of the stuff I found in the article absolutely blew my mind.

The one-sidedness of forensic evidence is an ongoing problem, from the Ralph Erdman and Fred Zain cases of the early 1990s to just last month, when a self-styled ballistics expert in Maryland committed suicide after being exposed as a fraud. And the list goes on. The Maryland man had testified in hundreds of cases in state and federal court, all of which will now need to be revisited.

Indigent defendants often can’t afford to hire their own experts, and judges and juries can’t easily tell the frauds from the actually qualified. There are also lots of fly-by-night “certification mills” out there to further muddy up the picture. So when the only expert witness is an official-sounding fraud for the prosecution, you can see how bad convictions might result.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 9:52 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Forensics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.