Junk Science Puts Hundreds if Not Thousands Behind Bars

A recent Frontline PBS episode pulled back the covers on an all too common courtroom practice of using flawed forensic evidence to convict defendants. The eye-opening report highlights the disturbing fact there is often no legitimate science underlying the methodology producing the forensic findings.

The Frontline report--The Real CSI--featured a telling interview with Harry T. Edwards a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and an authority on forensic science. He was one of the authors of a landmark 2009 report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences that highlighted serious shortcomings with forensic evidence and questioned the validity and reliability of so-called "forensic science."

In a telling quote, Edwards says:

"I think I, and many of my colleagues, assumed that the forensic disciplines were based on solid scientific methodology, were valid and reliable. I don’t think that we assumed that there was anything seriously amiss.

We assumed there might be mistakes, but I don’t think that we had been forewarned in any way that there were the serious problems that the committee uncovered. …"

Despite the report done by Judge Edwards and his colleagues very little is being done to correct this glaring miscarriage of justice. People are being convicted and sent to prison (and in some cases death row) everyday based on expert forensic testimony that might as well have been made from whole cloth.

Similarly, the Washington Post headlined a story about a FBI report that also calls into questions--let's just call it what it is--the JUNK SCIENCE of forensics. An interactive in the WP story looking at the accuracy of certain forensic evidence was sobering.

What really blew my mind was the damning rebuke that "bite-mark" evidence received in the Frontline story. As a reporter I've covered a number of murder trials (the case of Doug Prade, a police captain convicted of killing his wife, is the most infamous) that turned almost exclusively on bite-mark evidence. As it turns out, more than 60 percent of the time bite-mark evidence, when used to match teeth marks left on a victim to a specific suspect, are simply wrong. Of course the prosecutors won't tell you that and more importantly, won't let that fact be known to a jury.