Crime Labs across the country in crisis: Are shoddy forensics being used to secure convictions?
By Matt Clarke:
Crime lab workers are not necessarily scientists. In fact, sometimes only a high school diploma is required for employment as a forensic technician or arson investigator. Nor are lab examiners and their supervisors always the unbiased investigators portrayed on TV; in fact, many crime labs are run by or affiliated with police departments, which have a vested interest in clearing unsolved crimes and securing convictions.
Police often share their suspicions regarding suspects with lab workers before forensic examinations are performed. This has been shown to prejudice lab personnel in areas as diverse as fingerprint examination and chemical testing for accelerants in arson investigations. Further, some lab examiners feel they are part of the prosecution team, helping the police and prosecutors convict suspects regardless of the results of forensic testing. In such cases, forensic experts and other lab personnel may lie about test results, be misleading about the reliability of their methods, and/or cover up test outcomes when they are beneficial to the defendant.
Some forensic examiners “dry-lab” their tests, writing down results for tests they never performed. They may be motivated by understaffing and excessive workloads, a belief that tests required by lab protocols are unnecessary, an inability to perform the tests due to a lack of training, education and experience, or even the belief that the police have already arrested the right person, so evidence testing would be superfluous.
Then there are the forensic “experts” who lie about their academic credentials or accreditation, either on their résumés or in perjurious testimony. They initially may have been motivated to pad their résumé to secure employment, but might also seek to discourage defense attorneys from questioning their test results and conclusions by presenting overwhelming evidence of expertise they do not actually possess. This often works. Giving a bite of truth to the old adage that lawyers went to law school because they couldn’t do math, few judges, prosecutors or defense attorneys can keep up with complicated developments in the field of forensic science.
These types of problems have led to scandals at dozens of crime labs across the nation, resulting in full or partial closures, reorganizations, investigations or firings at city or county labs in Baltimore; Boston; Chicago; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Dallas; Detroit; Erie County, New York and more...
The 2009 National Academy of Sciences report noted that the techniques used to connect a person with a crime scene often lack any type of scientific validation. This includes frequently-used forensic methods such as handwriting analysis and comparison of hairs, fibers, tool marks, tire treads, shoe prints and even fingerprints.
To validate these techniques, controlled studies would have to be performed such as blind testing (where the answer is known to the evaluators but not to the persons performing the forensic analysis) and statistical testing (in which a large number of samples are compared to see how often a random “match” occurs). Further, issues of investigator bias, unknown error rates, lack of crime lab independence, underfunding, poor training, lack of lab personnel qualifications, low academic requirements, and lab personnel making exaggerated claims about the accuracy of forensic techniques were noted in the NAS report.
Crime lab officials reacted with predictable outrage, claiming that the report says fingerprint and other identification techniques should be discarded, and blaming the slew of crime lab scandals on a few bad employees.
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