Forensic experts and practitioners clearly endanger themselves when bringing to light contrarian evidence to criminal courts that reveal forensic mistakes and failures to long-court-accepted testimony.

This recent article provides a memorial and acclamation to a physician who fought to his last breath to introduce significant doubts regarding the origins and blind acceptance of Shaken Baby Syndrome diagnoses used to convict the innocent. He paid a price.

The players in these scenarios invariably involve:

• Prosecutors invested in obtaining convictions.
• Judges pretending to understand the Rules of Evidence yet allow these rules to circumvent advances in scientific understanding because of cultural resistance to change legal mistakes.
• Adversarial groups of self-promoting professional colleagues protecting their status and bankrolls.
•  Weak scientific oversight regarding experts proclaiming their “science” using the legal cloak of “reasonable medical certainty.”
• A few journalists who use the media to dig into these well orchestrated road-blocks to addressing the relationships of bad “science” and erroneous convictions. Here is one of them.

Radley Balko at The Watch 

Image credits: Catch more of investigations into corruption and misdeeds within the legal and forensic arenas in “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist.” The co-authors are R. Balko and T. Carringtion and John Grisham. The Economist has some said some great things about it.