The problem with science in the justice system is that we aren’t generally dealing with scientists but with people who are selling something. Maybe they’re selling a BAC machine, maybe they’re selling their analysis of bite marks, but at the end of the day they aren’t going into a courtroom to add to the body of human knowledge but to get a paycheck. As a result they have an incentive to fudge the data, to push theories that aren’t really robust enough to be turned into technology or technique, and to avoid actually updating and improving theory because invalidating a theory would mean invalidating their past work. They are able to get away with it because, as a society, our eyes tend to glaze over when people start talking about science. We treat science with the same reverence and awe that our ancestors gave to faith and superstition. We let people like Dr. Hayne get away with incredible lies because they dress them up with a couple of poorly designed experiments performed while wearing a white coat in something they labeled a lab. As a result we let phlogiston and phrenology into our courtrooms.

If you are a “certified” lab, part of your membership dues go to an independent office–the only job of the independent office is to send known samples to certified labs for blind testing. Does hair A match hair B? Did fiber A come from shirt B?

A wily prosecutor only has to blow sufficient smoke up a jury’s ass. Let’s hope that this study has some sort of affect on judges and gives them reason to apply much higher standards to evidence admitted at trial.

The free market could allow the government to “shop” for evidence. Who wouldn’t want the government as a client?

Accountability: preach it from on high

When the government will only pay a single person to do something, it doesn’t matter if they’re technically a government employee or not, they’ve got a government monopoly.

Does Dr. Steven Hayne not ring a bell for some reason? Everything he did to screw up Mississippi was as a private “lab”, not as the state’s law-designated destination for all forensics. Prosecutors were free to use other (better) people, defendants could contract their own (or him, if they beat prosecutors to the punch), and other expert witnesses could be used to challenge him. It didn’t seem to help much, did it?

Unless you know something else, it also seems your complaints about the pseudo-science of certain evidence is based off the ridiculous lengths people like Hayne took it to, instead of just being the weak circumstantial evidence it is. That would once again be an issue with private forensics, not government forensics.

I certainly think there are things that need to be changed. The government certainly can’t do it alone, but it also seems quite clear to me the free-market has failed to solve the problem on its own either in spite of having so many years to try.

Agreed. If there is no accountability at the top, accountability down the chain is arbitrary and meaningless.

I think a federal agency may indeed be necessary to ensure compliance. And, as Mike T (#7) suggested, we may need a federal entity (whether it’s civil rights or a separate agency) to act as an IG for law enforcement in general. Radley’s example of the State of Mississippi’s failures is a textbook example of a state violating it’s 14th Amendment obligations. While I am much less likely to call for federal intervention than I used to be, I think such cases scream out for federal action.

On the state level, I believe that governments should consider removing forensic labs from police agencies and setting up separate forensic services agencies. These agencies could offer lab and field investigative services to state and local police, fire departments, etc.. Everyone from forensic biologists, to CSI’s to the Medical Examiner could work out of these agencies. Large local governments might be able to do the same thing (ie. Indianapolis/Marion County has a separate forensic science agency, last I checked). Forensic scientists and investigators need access to crime scenes and police records, and must work well with the police, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that everyone has to work for the same agency. Police departments have clearly become to prosectution-oriented, so the time for independence is now.

Also, creating an über-Inspector General office has its own problems. The IGs have a dual role, both investigating the quality of their own agencies’ work, and supporting prosecutions and civil cases against people who have ripped it off or otherwise impeded its function. Setting up an outside IG agency would tend to frustrate the latter role. Bush has also proved that there’s no agency that a corrupt president cannot bend to his political purposes, even an IG.

Your coverage of the whole Hayes debacle is evidence of that. How many people were put away based on his testimony are still rotting in jail, even though he was discredited?

You fail to address my questions.

1) Who would be better able to afford such a service? Government, of course.

2) How would pricing be implemented? As much as the market could bare.

3) See 1. Rinse and repeat.

(of course private companies waste money and resources, but lets stick to this issue)

I haven’t taken an Evidence class yet, but I believe both sides are entitled to evidence through discovery. How this actually works in practice, I’m not sure.

A small problem I see with the free market argument is how it wants to fix everything as if it is capable of fixing everything. It is not. My initial point was that when something is broken, the best answer isn’t always to take it apart and allow the free market to fix it. Instead, why not just hold the institutions accountable (I can feel the free market come back as I write this). If accountability is off the table, neither government institutions or private companies work effectively.

So just fix the root problem: Accountability

The report says such analyses are often handled by poorly trained technicians who then exaggerate the accuracy of their methods in court…

I didn’t realize that this was seriously in question. When DNA techs say that the probability that a person other than the defendant left a certain DNA sample is greater than 1 in some number of trillion, based on abstract math that does not ACTUALLY calculate the probability (because some number of combinations simply don’t exist), you know they’re full of shit.

Someone already mentioned BAC, which is also a joke, and anyone who doesn’t think that forensic experts will outright lie to placate the police is not thinking straight.

@ #13 | Ben (the other one): I think that placing any agency like that in the Administrative Office of the Courts would present non-delegation problems. I think a cabinet level Office of the Inspector General would be the best way to handle this, at least at the federal level.

They could consolidate the IG assets from the various departments, and have one outside watchdog that handles IG duties for the federal executive. One division, headed by a Deputy IG, would be solely responsible for USA/AUSA misconduct and trial audits, with investigative powers, administrative adjudicative authority (if the infraction merits only dismissal), and the authority to seek indictments and try cases (if an infraction merits prosecution). A USA would have to be referred for impeachment, I believe, but the AUSA’s could be removed administratively.

Now, in theory, this is Congress’s oversight role, but given that Congress uses its investigative and oversight roles for grandstanding and making speeches, rather than actually looking for wrongdoing, it seems unlikely that Congress can be trusted to handle the heavy lifting.

On the policy side, if Congress or the Courts were to extend the rule in Gideon to providing indigent defendants with a positive right to their own forensic experts, that would go a long way to correcting abuses.

“My only concern would be the cost involved in privatization. If both sides HAD to use private companies, who would be better able to afford this service? And how would pricing be implemented?

Therein lies the problem.”

I can see how this may look like a problem, but you may need to look into what it is presently costing first.

I do not know any actual $$ amounts, but you can bet that a government ran agency is probably wasting bucket loads of money.

Private organizations on the other hand can’t waste money, because that removes profits, and results have to be accurate, or another company will jump in to replace incompetence.

As it stands right now only one side uses this service, and that is the government, defendants are barely able to afford an attorney, let alone specialized labs for rebuttals against the prosecution witnesses.

NOTHING WILL CHANGE.

On the off-chance I am wrong:

IT WILL GET WORSE.

Of course, they step in and puff their chests out about any measure that might help people prove their innocence as “anti-cop”.

Criminal justice is too important to entrust to superstition and pseudo-science.

The issue is a lack of accountability. You can shuffle the deck an infinite amount of times, but if the dealer is coming off the bottom of the deck, what is the point of shuffling?