NAS Recommendation 2: All Together Now…

The second recommendation in the NAS report titled “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward” should be a no brainer: standardize reporting and terminology. This sounds like it shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish, but it will be harder than it sounds. I have heard casual discussions of how to reconcile differences in reporting terminology between different jurisdictions and people become very attached to the systems that they are accustomed to and defend them fiercely. So let’s talk about what the implications of those systems are.

There are two types of standardization being recommended here: standardized reporting, meaning creating a model laboratory report to include a description of what type of analysis was done, how it was done, and what materials and methods were used, and what results were seen, and standardized terminology, meaning, basically, using the same words to describe the same outcomes that are seen in certain types of analyses.

Standardized reporting is a great and necessary idea, but it also assumes that there is a solid standard operating procedure (SOP) behind the analysis. I truly hope and expect that there is in most crime labs, but that’s something that we’ll talk about when we get to accreditation. Standardized, detailed reporting as described in the NAS report would provide transparency into how analyses are carried out, which is something that is necessary. I don’t think forensic scientists are trying to hide how they do their work. It’s just something that needs to be detailed and standardized once and for all across the board.

Don’t be ‘consistent,’ but be simply true.- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Standardized terminology is a bit of a different beast. With fields of forensic science such as narcotics or toxicology where you can run a sample through an analytical instrument and get an answer that a powder sample is cocaine or a blood sample contains metabolites of heroin, that terminology is easier to quantify and standardize. The difficulty comes in determining which terminology to use in the fields where the findings are dependent on the observations of the examiner.

Let’s take, for example, a hair found at a crime scene that is consistent with a sample taken from the suspect who is on trial. For the sake of our example here there is nothing that conclusively identifies this hair to the suspect such as a root with DNA, but nothing that would exclude the suspect either. The possible findings from any of the labs around the country could be:

• The hair could not be excluded as coming from the suspect.
• The hair is consistent with the suspect’s.
• The hair could have come from the suspect.
• The hair matches the suspect’s.
• The hair is identical to the suspect’s.

These conclusions, in the eyes of a jury, range from nothing more than a “maybe” to a damning “yes.” At this point, what other information the scientist has at the time of their examination, and what they say on the witness stand to explain their conclusion, bleeds into another recommendation by the committee: studies on human bias.

It is sometimes difficult to hear the horrific circumstances that bring evidence to us and then maintain an even keel when rendering an opinion, which is all the more reason to have standardized terminology and guidelines to fall back on. It is essential to always remember that, for the sake of all parties- the victim, the perpetrator, the criminal justice system, the public, and yourself- it is critical to make sure that the right person is convicted. It is not a forensic scientist’s job to make a prosecutor’s case or to make the evidence fit a detective’s theory. It is our job to interpret the evidence. Period.

Another important part of this recommendation is that it is supposed to be a task assigned to the National Institute of Forensic Science (NIFS). It makes much more sense for that to be carried out by an agency such as NIFS which would be set up to actually concentrate on the task at hand and produce real solutions rather than, for example, a commission of existing federal entities with their own agendas for their own agencies which was what the NAS committee was afraid of in the first place (see Recommendation 1). The NAS committee went into great detail describing why these tasks should not be left to existing federal entities. Hopefully someone out there is listening.

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