Forensic Science is NOT “Junk Science”. However…

In February 2009 the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a report titled “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward”.  The congressional mandate for this report was built in to the 2006 federal budget.  The purpose of the report was to determine what exactly was going on the wide, wide world of forensic science.  The report is intended to be a road map of what to do with and about the field in the future.

The report makes some very sweeping, bare-knuckles recommendations like mandating federal oversight of crime labs, determining who is allowed work in the field and disengaging management of forensic science from law enforcement.  Basically the report says that the way forensic science is currently practiced in the US- everything from crime labs to accreditation agencies to medical examiners- needs to be torn down and rebuilt.  That’s exaggerating it a little bit, but not by much.  That’s why everybody is freaking out right now.

Right now anyone and everyone who has a stake or even a passing interest in forensic science is becoming mildly unhinged in their effort to raise their argument for or against whatever part of the report affects them above the din of all others.  And I do mean everyone… attorneys, forensic scientists and their professional societies (full disclosure: I am, at least until they read this post, a dues-paying member of one), research scientists, various advocacy groups, criminal justice agencies… the list goes on.

I have read the position statements and official responses from various professional groups within the forensic science community and they ALL (with the notable exception of the IAI, the International Association for Identification) say the same thing: You’re wrong, we know what we’re doing, we’ve been doing this a long time, and we’ve already proven that this is science, leave us alone, go away.

To these groups, I say- and I say this as a friend and a colleague: You are going to be completely shut out of this discussion and you are proving their point for them.  Your current response could not be worse for you or for your field.  This is not going away.  There is a better way to deal with this and you can do it but you have to start thinking about this in a different way than you have been doing so in the past.

Attorneys, of course, are thrilled with the perceived denunciation in the NAS report of many of the fields of forensic science based on the lack of any traditional scientific research to validate the fields.  Ironically, one reason for the current lack of research in many fields of forensic science is that driving force to provide scientific “validation” for various fields has not been to really validate them at all.  It has been to explain the field adequately in court for defense attorneys.

As defense attorneys come up with increasingly convoluted challenges, forensic scientists come up with increasingly dumbed-down answers with scientific-ish sounding reasoning to explain what they do and how they do it to attorneys who don’t understand (and often don’t even try to understand) the science or the evidence itself.

Forensic science is real science and it is solid.  However, it has been and still is the wild, wild west of the world of science.  Practitioners of forensic science set their own rules and methodologies about what is and is not “science” and some of those rules and methodologies are more solid than others.  In areas such as DNA, narcotics, and toxicology there is instrumentation to provide what would seem to be solid backing for an analyst’s findings.  In areas such as firearms analysis or fingerprint examination the analysis seems to be more subjective and is open to more attack from attorneys and others who see it as scientifically unsupported.

The reason that forensic science has been called “junk science” in so many quarters by those who do not understand it is two-fold, whether those who are labeling it as such realize it or not.  First, the simple fact of examining evidence means that each sample is likely to be radically different from the next so it is difficult to obtain a true population norm in the traditional scientific sense, so carrying out traditional scientific research is much more difficult in forensic science.  Not to mention the lack of time and funding (and established standards) to carry out research, which is also mentioned in the NAS report.

Second, the problems really do not lie with the science.  The problems lie with the fact that the field of forensic science has more than its fair share of inadequately trained and sometimes questionably motivated “scientists”.  Every forensic scientist knows of at least one other forensic scientist who should not be working in the field.  Maybe not in their own lab, but we each know of at least one other who should not be in the field.  But that’s what happens when you staff the field using the same requirements and mechanisms that you would use to staff the DMV.

The reputation of forensic science has been the victim of the best and worst intentions of those who labor under its patronage.  The well-intentioned want to shoo away outsiders, insisting that we’ll get it all figured out on our own, which only serves to create the same image as the Blue Wall of Silence does for corrupt police departments.  It also helps to hide those with the worst of intentions that no one wants to admit are there.

I’ll be going through each of the NAS report’s recommendations and talking about what they mean and how they can be constructively addressed.  I’ll also be setting up a new page for the NAS report to keep track of all of this.  The findings of the NAS committee are likely to be included in the National Criminal Justice Commission’s recommendations for the overhaul of the criminal justice system, so you and your group need to pay attention now.

See all NAS posts.