The veteran law enforcement, law and science blogger at Grits for Breakfast’ in TX has some sharp points to make about his picks for the worst in forensic methods. There are more than just bitemark “interpreters” which he includes in this list.
He does touch about the ‘War on DNA mixtures” examiners who overstated their confidence levels by a power of about 10 to the seventh power.
2d state labsite has police looking into a coverup involving an examiner’s exaggerating results.
In Australia, the road for compensation of being wrongfully convicted is just like the US regarding a judiciary who lacks the tools to counteract bad actors in its own system.
Roseanne Beckett, wrongly convicted for conspiracy to kill her husband in 1991, served 10 years of her 12 year sentence. She finally overturned her conviction in 2005. This month, 26 years later, she successfully sued the New South Wales (Australia) government for AU$2.3m for malicious prosecution after proving that it was the corrupt detective, Peter Thomas and his obsession with Beckett, that led to her wrongful conviction. In a lengthy ruling, the judge stated;
“Ms Beckett says that if she had not been prosecuted by Detective Thomas, tried and imprisoned for over ten years, her future might have been “like any other normal woman, mother, or member of a community,..The fact that the State has managed successfully to defend a substantial proportion of Ms Beckett’s claims in these proceedings ought not be permitted to disguise the fact that Detective Thomas’ determination to get square sullied his objectivity. In the…
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“In numerous instances, experts diverge widely in their evaluations of the same bite mark evidence, which has led to questioning of the value and scientific objectivity of such evidence.”
The case of Andrew Mallard (pictured here) will be well known to those in Australia – he was wrongly convicted in 1995 of the murder of two women in Western Australia, spending 12 years in prison before his conviction was overturned. Mallard was eventually awarded AU$3.25 for his 12 years wrongly imprisoned, but the litany of ‘errors’ during the police investigation continue to come to light.
The real perpetrator was never convicted of the murders, he committed suicide in 2006 after being named as prime suspect by the police subsequent to a cold case review. However, during this review, and other subsequent inquiries into the policing handling of the murders, many questions have been raised about the police handling of evidence and exhibits – with many being claimed to be “lost”, now appearing on exhibit lists during a police audit – at the same time the police claimed to have…
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The phrase “don’t mess with Texas” surely is true. The state’s Department of Public Safety Forensic Science Commission’s new stance on crime lab DNA mixture outcomes surely is going to bounce around the county like a flash bang grenade.
More comments from Dallas of opinions that the DNA game may be turning towards a much less robust outcome leaving prosecutors relying more on circumstantial evidence to bolster much weaker assurances that DNA is the “smoking gun” for conviction.
This sea change within the forensic community parallels what happened in Washington DC crime lab where prosecutors and politicians slammed its now ex-crime lab director Max Houck for promoting a similar conservative approach due to subjective and sometimes conflicting DNA examiner’s opinions when mixed blood samples are recovered from a crime scene.
From the WFAA (with video)
Past WaPo news reports about the DC crime lab DNA mixture dust-up.
A crime lab accreditor suspends all DNA testing
DC mayor orders audit of DC crime lab
DC Prosecutors go after crime lab director
Even when exoneration cases have proven forensic experts wrong (the first 200 exons had a 57% error rate of the participating forensic types :Brandon Garrett, Judging Innocence, 108 COLUMBIA L. REV. 55, 107 (2007)), the US courts’ reliance on precedent cases versus upated data-driven scientific proofs continue to lay waste (actually they avoid to recognize) Due Process clause protections of the US Constitution. As in any disease or harmful process, the cure is often tougher than a few ounces of prevention. Worse stages of disease require much more. To continue this allegory to its legal source, the US courts are practicing an antiquated version of British Common Law that isn’t keeping up. The scientific evidence Frye Rule is from 1923 and is a core component in current similar iterations.
Science is banging up against legal inertia (i.e. the tendency for objects to resist outside force and keep on what they are doing, either to stay at rest or keep moving).
In addition, the cobweb of multi state cases accepting faulty science are so intertwined as to be…. for lack of a better word, endemic.
One example: With respect to death penalty cases alone, at least fifteen convictions where bitemark evidence not only played a key role in the prosecution, but also, as in Stinson (WI) and Brooks (MS) (2 bitemark exonerations) , the cases rely mutually on each others’ flawed acceptance of the pseudo-science to justify the convictions.
Here’s are quotes from “shifted paradign in forensic science” that uses a different context.
“This kind of self-serving, court-facilitated pseudo-jurisprudence not only facilitates trial courts’ wholesale admission of flawed evidence; it also insulates such decisions from appellate review, no matter how legally indefensible and intellectually dishonest. Post-conviction courts, moreover, typically avoid any rigorous analysis of a discipline’s validity or of the propriety of a trial court’s admissibility decision by invoking procedural bars.”
The focus become sharper when the current appellate review of junk-science caused convictions is laid out for all to see.
“……for example, post-conviction courts’ review was primarily focused not on substantive analysis – even cursory – of fire science, but, instead, but on procedural hurdles that Lee’s [ convicted of arson and murder by junk fire “science” ] request for post conviction relief were required to overcome in state and federal habeas corpus litigation. After a lower court declined to address the scientific legitimacy of the fire science, Lee was denied review because his “claim of newly discovered evidence [that the fire evidence was not based on sound science] is not cognizable under § 2254 [state remedies in federal court] because claims of actual innocence based on newly discovered evidence are never grounds for federal habeas relief absent an independent constitutional violation.”
[Lee v. Tennis, No. 4:08-CV-1972, slip op. at 1 (M.D. Pa. June 13, 2014).. The court cited Herrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 390 (1993) for the proposition that “[c]laims of actual innocence based on newly discovered evidence have never been held to state a ground for federal habeas relief absent an independent constitutional violation occurring in the underlying state criminal proceeding . . . . This rule is grounded in the principle that federal habeas courts sit to ensure that individuals are not imprisoned in violation of the Constitution-not to correct errors of fact.” ]
This story is decades long and runs from Dallas, the Texas Monthly, Smith County Texas to New York and back. Now its all about motions for a new trial in the same county (Smith) where the misconduct accused ex DA now judge presides.
The [legal] papers also point to powerful new evidence that officials in Smith County, Texas, withheld favorable evidence to secure Mr. Cook’s 1999 “no contest” plea to murder (a highly unusual plea that required no admission of guilt and permitted Mr. Cook to maintain his factual innocence), and ordered a piece of highly probative evidence destroyed shortly after the state adopted a DNA testing law giving Mr. Cook the ability to request testing of the item for the purpose of securing his full legal exoneration.
Here’s more:
In light of this evidence, the Innocence Project has filed a motion before Smith County District Judge Christi Kennedy asking that she recuse herself from the case because of her close relationships with several of the prosecutors and judges who are alleged to have committed misconduct against Mr. Cook over the course of 38 years, three capital murder trials, and in the legal proceedings surrounding Mr. Cook’s no contest plea. One of those officials, former elected Smith County District Attorney Jack Skeen, led the prosecution team seeking Mr. Cook’s execution for more than 15 years; Skeen is now a judge on the same Smith County District Court as Judge Kennedy, which consists of only four judges. The motion notes that judges in Texas and nationally regularly recuse themselves or are ordered to be recused from such cases, given the inherent difficulty in fairly resolving allegations of a fellow judicial colleague’s misconduct.
Another news article going further in the Innocence Projects filing in this case.
“Four Decades, Three Trials, Two Death Sentences, One Exoneree. Almost.”
Thanks to the Innocence Project of Texas and NY.
One Response to
John Lentini says:
September 15, 2015 at 8:49 am
Dr. Shermer attended a meeting that was intended to focus on problem areas in forensic science. So it is no surprise that he can tell us about the flaws that we discussed at the meeting. I think, however, that he over-generalizes the problem in this SA article. Not all of forensic science exhibits the same problems as bite marks and fire investigation, and that point was made clear at the meeting. Perhaps he was out of the room at that point. Dr. Victor Weedn, President of the AAFS, has sent a reply to SA. It remains to be seen if SA will publish it.
A FLAMIMG MAGICIAN DETECTING THE REAL CRIMINAL (NOTE THE DISPARATE PARTICIPANTS OF THE LINEUP). From the Scientific American Aug 18 2015
The bloom is certainly off the flower, when the SA starts publicizing the mythologies contained in the corners of forensic expertise.
How trustworthy are DNA and other crime scene tests?
The criminal justice system has a problem, and its name is forensics. This was the message I heard at the Forensic Science Research Evaluation Workshop held May 26–27 at the AAAS headquarters in Washington, D.C. I spoke about pseudoscience but then listened in dismay at how the many fields in the forensic sciences that I assumed were reliable (DNA, fingerprints, and so on) in fact employ unreliable or untested techniques and show inconsistencies between evaluators of evidence.
The conference was organized in response to a 2009 publication by the National Research Council entitled Strengthening…
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