forensic science is bogus

The National Academy of Sciences is finally set to release its report on forensic science, and it says what anyone who has ever thought seriously about the subject already suspected:

Forensic evidence that has helped convict thousands of defendants for nearly a century is often the product of shoddy scientific practices that should be upgraded and standardized, according to accounts of a draft report by the nation’s pre-eminent scientific research group.

The report by the National Academy of Sciences is to be released this month. People who have seen it say it is a sweeping critique of many forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on, including fingerprinting, firearms identification and analysis of bite marks, blood spatter, hair and handwriting. The report says such analyses are often handled by poorly trained technicians who then exaggerate the accuracy of their methods in court. It concludes that Congress should create a federal agency to guarantee the independence of the field, which has been dominated by law enforcement agencies, say forensic professionals, scholars and scientists who have seen review copies of the study.

We send people to prison for life in this country using "scientific" evidence that couldn't get published in the lowest tier of scientific journals. The people who control the forensic labs, starting with the FBI, have always refused to allow outside testing of their labs, which as far as I am concerned renders all of their results useless. As things stand now we simply have no way of knowing how accurate these labs are. Academic investigators who have done small studies have found frightening error rates of greater than 20% for finger-print analysis, to take just one example. The first thing we should do is require all forensic labs to submit to annual checks of their accuracy by an outside regulatory body. The accuracy of their results-- say, that they matched 96 out of 100 DNA samples accurately-- should then be published and made available to judges and juries.

We don't test crime labs because it would be expensive and because it might make it harder to get convictions. But getting convictions isn't the point of the justice system, getting the truth is. And while getting at the truth is hard is most areas of life, it is fairly straightforward in science. It would not be hard to answer questions like "how accurate is the FBI fingerprinting lab?" if we simply did the necessary tests. That we don't is a travesty.