The Failings of Forensic Science, Part II

Published Jul 21, 2016, 5:08 PM

What if bad science put you in prison for a crime you didn't commit? How many guilty offenders are still out there because of pseudoscience, fraud or disorganized laboratories? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, join Joe and Christian for part two of our review of forensic science in the courtroom. How accurate is the analysis of fingerprints, ballistics, hair, bite marks, fire and DNA?

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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuffwork dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Joe McCormick, and I'm Christian Sager, and our regular host Robert Lamb is out on vacation. So Christian and I are returning to finish our discussion about science and pseudoscience and criminal investigation and the justice system. So if you haven't heard part one yet, you should go back and listen to that first so you can understand what we're going to be talking about in this episode. So, without further ado, here is the second half of our conversation. So Christian, yeah, tell me about fingerprint analysis and ballistics matching. Okay, So fingerprint analysis is one of those ones that, like, you know, especially based on the C S I effect, like a lot of us just assume, like, yeah, well that's that's accurate, right, Like your your fingerprint is your fingerprint. Everybody's got a unique snowflake, and uh like how hard that's got to be bulletproof? Right, No pun intended. There's a little bit of wiggle room there, right, So legal experts are concerned. Actually there's inaccuracies in something that's called the friction ridge analysis that's used in fingerprint identification. So fingerprints are believed to be unique. The process of matching them, however, isn't statistically valid, mainly because prints on an ink pad are compared to smudged or partials, which you always hear that on shows right, we only got a partial, right that that's the stuff that's often found at crime scenes. Fingerprint examiners often testify, however, with absolute certainty. This isn't like like when you watch I don't know, like a like a Batman movie or something like that, and he finds a fingerprint and he runs it through the bat computer and it's like finds all those points of agreement and it's a perfect match. But in those examples, it's usually like a very clear fingerprint matched against a very clear fingerprint. What if it's a kind of smudge fingerprint match against a partial, kind of smudged fingerpot exactly, it's it's much harder to tell, and it's not with absolute certainty. A two thousand six study by the University of Southampton in England asked six veteran fingerprint examiners to study prints taken from their own cases without even telling them where these came from their results were totally inconsistent. Only two of the six reached the same conclusion that they had come to on the second examination. On the first a pattern recognition expert at Sunny Buffalo is actually developing software to quantify the certain the certainty of fingerprint matches. So it's kind of the back computer metaphor that we were just using. Right, So if you had an automated method, uh, and it was scientifically valid at the beginning, that would take sort of the subjectiveness out of it. Well, and that but also I mean think about it, like it could also easily tell you how what thecentage of accuracy was versus rather than like, I don't know, it was sort of the same, you know, like the well, that's what I talked about earlier, how it's important to have numerical quantities to deal with rather than just letting people go with their gut feeling. Right. So if this program works the way it's supposed to work, right, it could say, well, it's got twenty six percent match or it's got a nine percent match. You know, you just you can't do that as a human being with your eyes. And that's essentially what we've been relying on. Right, is like, well I looked at that one. That I looked at that one, and I've been doing this for twenty years. They looked the same to me. So boom, absolute certainty, you know. And that's a little bit like more complicated than it's portrayed to be. Ye, same thing happens with ballistics matching again. Another Yeah, Batman's coming up all over the place in this one, right, Like was it the Dark Knight where they were like doing the ballistic right, get that brick and he finds the bullet and then he matches it to It's ridiculous. Um. Ballistics matching is often done the same way, based on the theory that when a bullet is fired from a gun, it leaves unique marks on the slug by the guns barrel, but there's no standards to constitute what operates as a match between bullets. The National Research Council has actually called ballistics testing into question and that they say, look, it's neither unique nor is it reproducible, so why should we be using this in the court. A lab in Saint Paul, Minnesota, this is one of the ones I mentioned earlier was found with major errors that impacted their fingerprint and other evidence processing. This included sloppy documentation, dirty equipment, as well as a lack of basic scientific procedure. They actually used Wikipedia as technical reference. In one case, there was no clean area designated for Roobe for review even for their DNA evidence. So, for instance, like we've been saying, you know, we'll talk about it later at the end of the episode, but we've been saying DNA evidence is is pretty good, right, But when you've got like a pig style of a work environment and there's no clean area to review the d N a, yeah, it could be tainted. Yeah, And so these are basic problems with the just like the environment and procedure of analysis. They might not even be problems necessarily with the underlying theory that they're using to uh to determine the outcomes, though there might be problems there to be, yeah, exactly, So when you combine the two it gets even worse. Right, So, like ballistics matching or fingerprint matching, it's not always a d percent certain there's it's not absolute. And then you throw in the idea that well, like maybe this fingerprint technician is also like spilling. I don't know, like a HOGI on his fingerprint. Uh slides you know everything goes out the window. Yeah, let us committed this crime, right. Uh So I want to talk about fire analysis. Yeah, I don't know. It doesn't want to look at fire. It's it's a glowing god that draws all of us to it. But so, getting a joking aside for a minute, this is pretty serious. Actually. In February two four, a man named you may have heard about this, A man named Cameron Todd Willingham was put to death in Texas after being convicted of murdering his three children by arson. I have not heard of this, Okay. According to the charges, Williams set fire to his own house with his children trapped inside in order to kill them. And Uh, if you've heard about this case before, it was probably likely from one of the many articles and reports, maybe the most famous among them being this two thousand nine article in The New Yorker called Trial by Fire by David Grant. Uh. And they're all making the case that the state of Texas had very likely in this case, executed an innocent man. So why were people saying this? Well, the main thrust of the cases against the case against william were the only solid pieces of evidence against him were Number one, the testimony of a jail house informant of the criminal informants are sort of notoriously those are the cis that we were really talking about yeah, unreliable, yeah uh, and that that's that testimony itself has been subsequently called into question in this case, and a fire investigation concluding that the fire showed signs of deliberate arson pointing to the defendant, how do you come up with that? Well, I'm gonna get into it. So this fire analysis has been roundly criticized by experts as being pretty much without any scientific marriage. So I'm about to quote from David Grand's New Yorker article in a section where he describes this scientist and fire investigator named Dr. Gerald Hurst's reaction to what was happening in the field during fire investigations. Okay, quote. By the nineties, Hurst had begun devoting significant time to criminal arson cases, and as he was exposed to the methods of local and state fire investigators, he was shocked by what he saw. Many arson investigators, it turned out, had only a high school education. In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a four our course on fire investigation, and pass a written exam. Often the bulk of an investigator's training came on the job, learning from Quote old timers in the field who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of arson, even though a study in nineteen seventy seven warned that there was nothing in the scientific literature to substantiate their validity, and then later in the piece Grand Rights quote in nineteen seven, the International Association of Arson Investigators filed a legal brief arguing that arson sleuths should not be bound by a nineteen nine Supreme Court decision that's probably referring to Daubert there Um, requiring experts who testified at trials to adhere to the scientific method. What arson sleuths did, the brief claimed, was quote less scientific. By two thousand, after the courts had rejected such claims, arson investigators increasingly recognized the scientific method, but there remained a great verys in the field, with many practitioners still relying on the unverified techniques that have been used for generations. Quote. People investigated fire largely with a flat earth approach. Hurst told me that this means the common sense thing that we were talking about earlier. Yes, exactly, the quote continues, it looks like arson, therefore it's arson, he went on. My view is you have to have a scientific basis otherwise it's no different than witch hunting. I know arson when I see it right now. I don't claim to know one way or another about willing him personally, whether he was guilty or innocent. But this does make a close look at the field of fire analysis very worthwhile. Uh And, and I want to point out that, like pretty much all of these others in theory, fire analysis is a perfectly legitimate field of study. It's not for anology. It's not just wrong from the ground up. So what might a fire investigation look like? Often it involves searching through the remains of a burned building for indications of how a fire was started, what course it took once it was ignited. Um And in forensic investigation, for fairly obvious reasons, this often involves looking for indications of arson. You're trying to figure out, did somebody set this fire or did it happen accidentally? Uh And if you can find evidence that accelerants such as gasoline or lighter fluid, where used to start the fire. That's one of the most common indications of varson, of deliberate intention in the fire. But unfortunately, in practice, some fire investigators have been known to use these highly faulty techniques that are not established to have any scientific validity. It's just like we're saying earlier, kind of like folk knowledge. The investigators pass it down, but there's never been a study dedicated to figuring out whether these rules of analysis are true or not. So in a short article in September, the skeptic writer Michael Schermer reported a conversation he had with a guy named John Jay Lntini, who is a fire analysis expert and the author of this this criminal this forensics textbook called Scientific Protocols for Fire Investigation. So this is a guy who's taking the scientific approach, and Lean Teeny tells him that lots of fire investigators follow scientifically baseless folk wisdom, such as that so called alligator ing can indicate whether a fire burned fast or slow. And this alligator ing, this this idea is that it's it's like looking at an alligator's hide. So you look at wood that burned during a fire, and if you look at it and you see small flat blisters, that means that the fire burned quote slow. And if you see large shiny blisters, that means that it burned quote fast. Lntini his analysis of this rule is quote nonsense. Yeah. Ok, that nobody's actually measured that essentially, and then we quantified it and published papers that we can refer back to. Right. Also, according to len Tina, it used to be fire investing gator wisdom that when you see crazing and window glass, you know what crazing is. It's like when you see these, uh, these sort of crazy spiderweb patterns virgin not exactly, not like the circular spiderwebs, but just cracks all through the glass, crazy all over the place. Right, This glass is now legally insane. Yeah, So they uh, they used to say that this was an indicator that the glass had been heated very rapidly, which would indicate the use of an accelerant. It heated rapidly because somebody squirted gasoline or lighter fluid all over the place. In fact, that's not true, and it turns out after scientific investigation that window crazing is caused by the opposite. It's caused by rapid cooling, like what would happen when firefighters douse the area with water. Okay, I can picture this, yeah yeah. Um. Also another thing that's common puddle shaped burns on the floor that can make it look certainly like there was an ignited pool of liquid on the floor, like somebody emptied a gas can all over the place set it on fire. According to Lenten E wrong again, even though fire and heat do tend rise when an entire room burns, the floor burns along with it, and these marks can appear without the presence of an accelerant. Um. So, fire analysis is one of the forensic fields addressed in this two thousand nine in our C report, and they conclude that while there is a fairly solid basis for explosion analysis like when a bomb goes off, fire analysis is much shakier than explosion analysis is as practice today. Um. They say, quote many of the rules of thumb that are typically assumed to indicate that an accelerant was used e g. Alligatoring of wood specific char patterns have been shown not to be true. Experiments should be designed to put arson investigations on a more solid scientific footing. Uh. And again this is just crazy. I mean, this is yet another one of these that has been used to convict people, like in the case of William So we don't know, I guess whether he was guilty or innocent, But if this was the main evidence to show he was guilty, that's that makes it look pretty bad. Yeah, that's kind of stuff is depressing, especially like when you I don't know if you watched Making a Murderer, right, when you watch these like long form documentaries about the justice system and just how flawed it is. Not saying that in that particular case, I know whether anybody is guilty or innocent or anything, but it's you think about how often this stuff goes on and then you've got examples like this. It's heartbreaking. Uh. This section though, highlights one thing I do want to emphasize again where we don't want to paint all forensic science professionals and experts in these fields with a with a you know, tainted brush, I mean, and also saying here like most of them are doing the best they can with what they have available to him exactly, and in this case, the bad forensic science and fire investigation is being exposed by good scientists and fire investigation so it's not like everyone in this field is doing a bad job of it, but many people who are practicing it are. Yeah, this is truly a wicked problem. I wish we had more money to divide to divert into research and resources for stuff like this. Yeah. Well, hair analysis is one of the ones we brought up at the top because that was actually one of the hair and fiber was one of the things we're talking about, Josh about. Yeah, we're and we were also like, maybe we'll do something like that in our little like video series, and then the more we start to look into it, we're like, I don't know about this, this is a little hokey. Well okay, so one thing I can say is, if you find a perpetrator's hair at the crime, couldn't you use that to do some DNA analysis? That would be pretty conclusive. I don't know, I would think so. But again, remember the statistics on how often they use DNA and say versus something like this, probably because of the timing and the money involved. Yeah, um, whereas like to just look at two fibers and have somebody come in as an expert and say, yep, it's a match. Seems easier to a lot of people, I would guess are cheaper. Okay, what happens when there is hair matching or hair fiber analysis. Well, I want to back up, because there was just last year the Justice Department and the FBI formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in the FBI's laboratory on microscopic hair comparison gave flawed testimony in the trials that they offered evidence. And this is over the course of two decades. This is huge. It's like the biggest UH scandal in forensic science to date as far as I can tell. Um. They were giving statements that were quote, beyond the bounds of proper science. What they were basically doing was saying there's a hundred percent match between two hair fibers or a hair fiber found on the scene the hair from you know, a defendant, uh, when there's just a similarity. So they're totally misleading. The jury's twenty six out of the twenty eight overstated forensic mass matches favor the prosecutors, of course, because they're working together. This equated to nine of the two hundred sixty trials. According to the National Association of Criminal Defense lawyers and the Innocence Project. This is the nation's largest post conviction review of question forensic evidence. It's crazy. Of these cases, thirty two defendants were sentenced to death. Fourteen have already been executed or died in prison. So that's I mean, whether they were innocent or guilty, we don't know, but they don't yeah, and we'll never have a chance. Now the cases against them have been undermined. And keep in mind that just because the FBI made these errors, there was other evidence used to convict these defendants of guilt. Okay, so it wasn't the only thing. But still each case has to be reviewed to see if there are grounds for an appeal. Four were previously exonerated, So this is a landmark revelation that pattern based forensic techniques, things like hair bite mark analysis, ballistics largely subjective, and these contributed to more than twenty five of the three hundred and twenty nine cases where a defendant has been exonerated with DNA analysis post conviction. So that's how DNA analysis has been used very much in the last like ten to twenty years. Well, we talked about the exclusionary principle earlier, you know, a lot of what DNA evidence is actually brought to the field is uh, not just matching and saying here, you know this criminal, definitely, that's that's his or her blood there, but excluding people saying, look, this is not their day genetic material. Yeah, this is not a match. So a lot of politicians weighed in on this. Of course, they asked the FBI to do a systematic analysis to breakdown their system, and the FBI says that their hair examiners lacked written standards that defined what were the appropriate ways to explain their results in court. That was until two thousand and twelve. This all came to light after the Washington Post reported on flawed forensic hair match is. Federal authorities investigated this and they found it to be true. They found that the experts quote unquote that we're testifying to near certainty of matches in a crime scene, they were citing incomplete and misleading statistics drawn from their own work. So I want to make this clear, there is no accepted research on how hair from different people can appear the same. So, I mean, like you asked at the topic, well, how does that work? I mean I think it's literally like you look under a microscope at the two pieces of hair, and that looks similar to me. Yeah, And I mean I'm sure that there's some more to it than that, right, in the same way as like there's some old timey wisdom passed down about how fires look the same, right, but there's no accepted research that one one thing leads to another. Even before this, the FBI reported it's examiners were reporting false hair matches more than eleven percent of the time, and at the time of this report, five defendants were exonerated through d in a testing, all of whom had served between twenty and thirty years in prison for either rape or murder. Jeez, I mean, this is just, again, like I said, heartbreaking. Of twenty one thousand federal or state requests for hair comparison evidence from nineteen seventy two to nineteen ninety nine, the FBI found that two thousand, five hundred of those cases had examiners declare hair matches. They're reviewing every single one of those cases now, like they have to go back and just review everything. The same examiners who are now under review also taught five hundred to a thousand state and local crime analysis labs how to testify in the same way. So this is like the old timers passing down the wisdom, and so it's an endemic problem. It's not just the FBI, it's everywhere now. So these same testimonies were likely flawed at the same level. It's just it's it's insane. In one shocking example, this is just one example of how it affected a person, a lot person's life. Sante Tribble served twenty eight years for murder based on FBI hair testimony. It later turned out that one of the hairs that was used to prosecute him came from a dog. Oh my god, he was exonerated in Wow, So hair analysis not so much bite mark analysis. Okay, here's another example. Expert in forensic odeontology, we mentioned that earlier testified that multiple bite marks found on a murder victim were entirely consistent with the dental impressions taken from a guy named Roy Brown. This was the only physical evidence in this case. Brown was sentenced to twenty five years to life in prison. DNA tests later confirmed that a second suspect was actually guilty, but Brown. He spent fifteen years in prison. So bite mark analysis is now also widely considered unreliable. Yeah, it was explored in the two is a nine in RC document and that they outlined several problems with current use of bite mark evidence. Uh, they say, quote, uniqueness of human dentition has not been scientifically established. I mean you'd think that that's pretty basic. You'd have to start with the study making it statistically clear that humans have unique bite marks. But I mean, what if they don't usually have unique bite marks. I mean, I don't know what you would expect bite marks to look like. Maybe lots of people have very similar looking bite marks. And I would also think that again, like this is I haven't done research on this, but I would imagine that the force of the bite would contribute to what the bite marks look like. Well, that's another thing. So they say, even if dentition is unique, even if everybody has a unique bite mark in the same way that it's commonly assumed people have unique fingerprints. Uh, the ability of the person to transfer a unique pattern to human skin, and then the ability of the skin to maintain the uniqueness of that pattern has not been scientifically established. So, so imagine just what happens when people are trying to analyze a bite mark on skin that maybe sagging or distorting the bites. The marks might not leave a clear impression that's still there when the forensic scientist gets a picture of it or gets to examine it. I don't even know how you test this, like, well, I meanlock style, Like you get like some molds of teeth and then you take like a corpse and and have the molds bite the corpse several times and see how they line up. Yeah, I think you'd have to. You'd have to examine it statistically with a large sample size, just testing different Yeah, different molds of teeth or something like that. I don't know, if you test on dead people's bodies or something like that. Well, I don't know. I mean, it's the thing. I admit this is difficult to test, but this is this is ground level research that should be done if you're going to be using this to convict people. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah absolutely, or to defend people either way. All right, so you're ready for the big one. Yeah, So DNA analysis we established at the beginning, and I think this is true, is widely considered, and I think with good reason, the most reliable forensic science field. When you when you're matching DNA evidence, you can know if the if the procedures have been carried out carefully and and all of the protocols have been followed, that if you have a DNA sample of the crime scene, and you have a DNA sample from the defendant, you can know, you know, beyond a one in billions chance of error, that this is the same person or it's not the same person. Yeah. Except The Atlantic published an article this year called a reasonable doubt. Uh, and it said exactly that it starts off and saying yes. D NA analysis has long been held as the exception to the rule about forensics. Arose from academics. It's been studied and validated by researchers all around the world. Uh, just a little history here. It was pioneered by British geneticist named Alec Jeffreys. He was looking into genetic sequencing and he applied it in the field with police to help solve a pair of murders in the British Midlands. Following that, several private companies in the US and the UK opened their own forensic DNA labs. But defense teams have argued against it for years. Well why, Well, the first thing they said was, at first DNA analysis actually didn't pass the fry test. I can understand when it's new, it's not generally accepted yet. Yeah, they set a legal standard requiring scientific evidence to have widespread acceptance in his field was needed. Okay, well we have that now. Academics complained that these firms weren't actually being transparent about their testing technique. Well, our methodology wasn't. Well, that's a perfectly acceptable concern. I think anybody doing this kind of analysis should be making public exactly what their methodologies are. And then, as we've well, I maybe not all of us. I I was paying attention to the news at the time, but as popularized by the O. J. Simpson trial, the argument that DNA samples can in fact be contaminated during both collection or in the crime lab. But throughout the years, the thoroughness of labs and analysis list they all got better, right, so so much so that the Innocence Project, which we've been mentioning over and over again this episode, was founded in because they were absolutely convinced that DNA evidence could exonerate questionable convictions. They have since won one hundred and seventy eight exonerations due to DNA testing. In a book by the founders of the Innocence Project, they said, quote, DNA testing is to justice what the telescope is for the stars. But yeah, I think in many ways that's true. And now we're gonna say what the flaws are. But overall, DNA testing, I will agree, is super solid. Yeah, yeah, no, I think you're right too. But it's important to sort of lay this out to know that there are problems with it. Uh So this has been amplified, of course by the c s I effect that we've also been talking about, right the expectation of jurors to see DNA evidence in corn cases. In fact, in two thousand and eight, there was a study done by a felony judge in Michigan where he randomly pulled a thousand, twenty seven summon jurors, and seventy five percent of them expected that they would see DNA in a rape case. Fifty of them expected that in a murder or an attempted murder case. They would see DNA in expected they would see it in any criminal case that they were a part of. The DNA was just so widely available to research and use as evidence that of course it would pop up. Yeah, and this has got to be frustrating to I mean, well meaning prosecutors. Who are you know, they're they're not trying to cut corners or something, But in many cases DNA evidence just might not be available. Well, and the other side of it, too, is that DNA has become such a powerful tool in the courtroom that it almost automatically secures convictions, right because people hear those words d N A and they're just like, well, that's irrefutable. Well, I mean, I can say if if there's a murder case and uh, and there are blood stains found on a victim, and you can take those blood stains and and several different DNA analysis labs, I'll say that it's a perfect match for the defendant. I think it's pretty likely that looks like guilt to me. You should watch Making a Murderer Man, because there's a whole thing in that about how like they found this guy's blood at a at a crime scene in a car. And then the argument is made, well, the police actually had access to his blood from previous case. They may have planted the blood there. Well, in that case, that's I would say that's again not a problem with the scientific methodology, but a problem with the with the investigation and the procedures. Yeah, like you're right, so okay. Research from Australia found that sexual assault cases involving DNA evidence were twice as likely to reach trial and thirty three times is likely to result in a guilty verdict. There's DNA right. Homicide cases fourteen times is likely to reach trial, twenty three times is likely to end in a guilty verdict. Another major study in the UK found that just the knowledge that prosecution intended to introduce DNA evidence before it was even actually like introduced in a case was enough to get a defendant to capitulate because they're just like, okay, so there's questions about collection and storage, but they just they just stopped because what do you mean stopped? Well, because people were starting to think, like, well, this is just irrefutable evidence. Why should we bother looking at the collection and storage of it. DNA is just winning so many cases, let's not bother with it. So as the cases we use DNA evidence and become more complicated, it actually becomes less of an objective science. And I'll give you an example here so just real quick primer on this, nine percent of our genes are the same as every other human on the planet. My genes are the same as Joe's jeans. But the DNA analysts know this, of course, So we need to look for things that are called alleles. They're very specific locations on each DNA strand that vary from individual to individual, the different versions of a gene in the different places on your chromosomes. The standard is to compare alleles at thirteen locations. Now, if you do it that way, the odds of two unrelated people matching are less than one in a billion, So that's pretty good, right, But what happens if you're looking at a case and it involves a third person, So you're not just comparing two DNA, you're comparing three, or what if you're comparing four? What if there are four people at the scene. Figuring out which alleles belong to whom becomes more complicated the more people that are involved, And if a sample is small or degraded, which they often are from crime scenes, the alleles might drop out in some locations as well. So there's a study done by a guy's name a teal drawer and Greg hamp A key in they took DNA paperwork from a two thousand to Georgia rape trial here in the state that we're recording this in. They gave the evidence to seventeen technicians without context. All of these people were experienced DNA technicians with an average of nine years in the field. They were asked to determine if the DNA was from the defendant in the case. Only one of the seventeen people concurred that it was the defendant, twelve said it was exclusionary, for said it was totally inconclusive. Since this example, there have been accounts of dozens of DNA typing cases that have gone wrong, especially because it's so easily contaminated depending on who comes in contact with it. Right. So there's something that's called d N A transfer which contributes to this the most. It's when cells migrate from people to people or from people to objects, inevitably when we just touched things. Right. Another study asked participants to shake hands for two minutes and hold a knife when the DNA on the knife was analyzed. Well, to be a participant there just sitting there holding the knife, and now you hold the knife. What do I do with it? Just hold it? Just hold it. Man. When the DNA on the knife was analyzed, the partner was identified as a contributor in the cases found them to be the sole contributor. They didn't even find the DNA from the second person. So going forward, more context needs to be around for this DNA analysis. Right. The science is is there, but it it's complicated and there needs to be like, I guess again, procedures put in place for like, well, how how do you what? What's the percentage of accuracy? I think is what we need to come down on. Uh. Houston, Oh boy, Houston. Houston had a real bad incident of this. Their crime lab handled DNA evidence from five cases a year. A local television station obtained dozens of the DNA profiles that were processed by this lab and they sent them to independent experts for analysis. It turned out that the technicians were routinely misinterpreting even the most basic of DNA samples. So this was just like a technician error, and the Innocence Project themselves said, well, we don't take cases where there are positive DNA matches. And one example, a tech created a profile for a victim from three different sets of DNA, the result profiles all totally varied. Then she mismatched the DNA from the crime scene and the accused defendants. This led to a retrial where the defendant was released. So this tech was fired. This is the same Houston lab she was fired. Then she was reinstated because her lawyer said, well, the problem was systemic. It was the whole lab in Houston that was the problem here. They had inadequate supervision. Well that may have been the case, it could have been. Yeah, but think about all five of those cases. I mean, we think that this DNA analysis is rock solid, and then you hear this and it's like, well, there's five cases we have to go back and review again. You know. So, oh man, this is so crazy because it's you think of scientific evidence as being the most reliable kind of evidence that you can have in a courtroom, at least I would, I think. But and and that's so scary that you often will have this problem of not knowing whether you can trust the expert witness telling you something because you don't know if there if there was something wrong with the data collection and contamination. You don't know if their methodologies are actually sound to begin with, whether they've been based on well tested scientific principles, do they have a clean lab. Is their supervisor pushing them to do more work than they're capable of doing exactly? Or is there is there prosecutorial bias or something. Is there pressure from the dep artment for them to uh basically convict more cases? Yeah? And man, that's so tough because we've already seen evidence in courtrooms undermined by lots of other kinds of studies. I mean, the more we learn about the reliability of eyewitness testimony, nothing ever makes it look more reliable. Uh. People, it just turns out, man, people's memories are not very good. And in many cases, people have they profess confidence in identifying a you know, a perpetrator or something in a courtroom, but then it turns out there wrong. And uh so, so eyewitness testimony. What I'm not saying it's always wrong, but it's just you can't be very confident in trusting it. Um. We we've seen all these problems with forensic science and so man, it is just it's just tough out there to know that you're getting the right answer in a courtroom. I would hate to be I would hate to be the defendant in any case, especially a case in which I was innocent. Right now, that's yecially if you're innocent, Yeah, I think, yeah, it's guilty. I'd still hate it, but I'd be like, but I did beat Joe down with the folding chair, Yeah exactly, But how are they going to tell bruise marks? There's no science that unless you're Sherlock and you're beating corpses with a horse whip, like I said, Uh, okay, jokes aside, Seriously, this is a big problem. What do we do, like, what's the future of this look like? How do we reform it? Well? One of the problems is that forensic science encompasses many different fields, right, so that lots all these fields have different standards, and some have different problems. Some are more solid than others, Some have more regulations in place to keep all of the practitioners in line than others do. So, so it's a it's a big, hairy, complicated problem, and there's not one simple prescription that will fix it all. Yeah, but there are some sort of general rules that some fields may already be following pretty well, and others could do a much better job of Yeah, some possibilities that people are throwing out as they're saying, defendants should have their own forensics experts that are paid for. Uh. There should be separate crime labs from the prosecutors and the police that they're answering to. And there should be, of course, as we've been alluding to all episode, an established system of verification and standards. Yeah. I mean one one hypothetical you could imagine would be something like that. There is. It would be sort of like the uh, forensic science version of public financing of elections, where you say, you know, like if you have mismatched resources going in, you can make this fairer if you just give both sides equal money from the government and that's what they have to spend on elections. Uh. In in this case, you could say, well, what if we just have a a crime lab that is, you know, big national crime lab that works for neither the defense nor the prosecution, and that in order to get forensic science that's admissible in court, you have to go through this this big uh, this big well regulated system, and that that they don't work for either side. Yeah. In fact, an independent entity that would be called the National Institute of forensic science has been recommended for something like this, and they would be responsible for both establishing the standards that we're talking about and for certifying people as experts. Another another way of helping the problem is just from the ground up in each field itself. Like we were talking about earlier in in fire analysis, they're very legitimate scientists working in this field who are just trying to improve the field by doing scientific research and holding others in their field accountable to pay attention to it. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Uh. There's also this one like case that came up about DNA, which is interesting. There's a company that's using software and automation to take the human element out of it completely, and I've alluded to that as well with like finger analysis things like that. Um, they're saying, well, we take the subjective decisions out of it, and the analyst is the one who's making the flawed conclusions. The company calls itself true Allele uh. And the software, however, has been criticized for whether it actually met the FRIES standard, even though we're no longer using the price standard is being criticized because it hasn't been accepted by the larger science community. But one thing I would say about that is I think if you have a computer program that's that's doing analysis on forensic science, I think that would need to be open source. And company who develops that probably isn't gonna want that because they're gonna want it to be proprietary own it. But that should be something that anybody can go look at the source code and make sure that it's working accurately and not biasing towards a certain conclusion. Okay, so that was a lot about forensic science, and unfortunately we don't this is already a long episode. We don't have time to two more here, and there were a bunch of other topics we wanted to get into and just didn't even have space for, like handwriting analysis, lie detection, the polygraph recovered memories. So maybe we can address those. If you're interested, you can write us and let us know you want to learn about them, and we'll talk about them in a future episode. Yeah, we can sit down record a future episode, maybe bring in old Robert Lamb and uh we could uh um. Also, like I would love to hear in the meantime from some of you who perhaps work in this field, you know, we have something to add to the discussion. Yes, is there anything we missed out on or that's a really interesting case of of of how these standards are enforced in the field that you're familiar with. So if you want to write into us about forensic science, you want to talk to us about maybe your experiences, maybe you've been on a jury like I have, or you work in forensic science lab and you have some argument perhaps with how we've portrayed the science here. Please let us know. We'd love to hear from you. We are all over the internet. You can find us on social media on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram now right. You can also visit us at our home base, stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you can find all of the podcasts we've done. We also right there and all of our videos are there as well. And of course, if you want to email us and let us know your feedback on this episode or any other, or just let us know a topic you might like us to do in the future, you can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com

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