For just $495 dollars you can become a certified “Forensic Consultant.”
By Leah Bartos
This is how a journalism graduate student with no background in forensics — became certified as a “Forensic Consultant” by one of the field’s largest professional groups.
One afternoon early last year, she punched in her credit card information, paid $495 to the American College of Forensic Examiners International Inc. and registered for an online course.
After about 90 minutes of video instruction, she took an exam on the institute’s web site, answering 100 multiple-choice questions, aided by several ACFEI study packets.
As soon as she finished the test, a screen popped up saying that she had passed, earning an impressive-sounding credential that could help establish her qualifications to be an expert witness in criminal and civil trials.
For another $50, ACFEI mailed her a white lab coat after sending the certificate.
For the last two years, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, in concert with other news organizations, have looked in-depth at death investigation in America, finding a pervasive lack of national standards that begins in the autopsy room and ends in court.
Expert witnesses routinely sway trial verdicts with testimony about fingerprints, ballistics, hair and fiber analysis and more, but there are no national standards to measure their competency or ensure that what they say is valid. A landmark 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences called this lack of standards one of the most pressing problems facing the criminal justice system.
Over the last two decades, ACFEI has emerged as one of the largest forensic credentialing organizations in the country.
But ACFEI also has given its stamp of approval to far less celebrated characters. It welcomed Seymour Schlager, whose credentials were mailed to the prison where he was incarcerated for attempted murder. Zoe D. Katz — the name of a house cat enrolled by her owner in 2002 to show how easy it was to become certified by ACFEI — was issued credentials, too. More recently, Dr. Steven Hayne, a Mississippi pathologist whose testimony helped to convict two innocent men of murder, has used his ACFEI credential to bolster his status as an expert witness.
Several former ACFEI employees call the group a mill designed to churn out and sell as many certificates as possible. They say applicants receive cursory, if any, background checks and that virtually everyone passes the group’s certification exams as long as their payments clear.Some forensic professionals say the organization’s willingness to hand out credentials diminishes the integrity of the field.
“I am insulted by it,” said Dr. Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist for Maryland’s chief medical examiner office and the vice president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. “They seem like an organization that’s all about the money.”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/criminal-justice/real-csi/no-forensic-background-no-problem/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/real-csi/