Junk Science  in the  Courtroom

Juries usually believe expert witnesses.  Unfortunately, juries rarely understand the expert testimony they hear, and don't know what weight -- if any -- to give to terms like "consistent with" and "matching" and "virtually excluded."  The lawyers and the judge rarely understand the science that is presented by these experts, either.  Our criminal justice system is adversarial and often dog-eat-dog.  When the expert falls short of the minimum standards of the profession, or worse, is an outright fraud, it can spell disaster for the wrongly accused.

CNN Presents: Reasonable Doubt:  Can Crime Labs be Trusted? A joint investigation by CNN and the Center for Investigative Reporting examines the lack of standards, quality controls and training at many of the nation's forensic laboratories and raises serious doubts about some forensic scientists. Key Cases The Labs GSR -- or BSR? A New Scientist investigation has found that someone who has never fired a gun could be contaminated by someone who has, and that different criminal investigators use contradictory standards. What's more, particles that are supposedly unique to GSR can be produced in other ways. UPDATE GSR Lacks Scientific Credibility.  A Minnesota judge has thrown out gunshot residue evidence police say solved the pool hall murders of two people.  Judge Sharon Hall ruled that GSR has no scientific backing and does not belong in a courtroom. It's a Crime When Science Gets it Wrong .  An analysis was done of 86 criminal convictions that DNA evidence later found to be wrong.  F ully 63 percent of the cases featured errors of forensic science. What's more, in 27 percent of the cases forensic scientists gave false or misleading testimony. Army Launches Probe of DNA Tests   The Army is investigating accusations that a civilian forensic examiner at the Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory at Fort Gillem, Ga., falsified DNA test results.   The accusations, if true, would throw into doubt hundreds of criminal cases dating back at least 10 years. Justice Under the Microscope   DNA is only as reliable as the humans testing it. Virginia's once highly touted crime lab has starkly demonstrated this in an error-ridden death-row case that was propped up repeatedly by botched DNA studies from the state's supposed experts. CSI Effect?   The argument that "C.S.I." and similar shows are actually raising the number of acquittals is a staggering claim, and the remarkable thing is that, speaking forensically, there is not a shred of evidence to back it up. There is a robust field of research on jury decision-making but no study finding any "C.S.I. effect." Utterly Junk Science   Microscopic comparison of carpet fibers -- utterly junk science -- convicted Wayne Williams of two of the Atlanta child murders that terrorized the city in 1981, and police blamed Williams for 27 other uncharged killings.  The newly ensconced Dekalb County police chief who was never convinced of Wayne Williams' guilt has reopened five of the 1981 "Atlanta Child Murder" cases.  Families of many of the murdered children have been unconvinced all these years, too.  Williams says he is imprisoned with at least four relatives of his alleged victims, and that even they believe in his innocence. UPDATE:  DNA Testing Sought.  Lawyers for Wayne Williams, blamed for the murders of two dozen children and young men in the late 1970s and early '80s, have asked to perform DNA testing on dog hair, human hair and blood. Sloppy Pathology  A three-member panel from the state Board of Medical Examiners has so far substantiated 18 violations stemming from the long-running inquiry into the practice of Dr. Charles Harlan, a pathologist who spent three decades performing autopsies throughout Tennessee. BS Bullet Matching   Eighteen years ago, three Boston-area men were convicted of fatally shooting a Lynnfield couple in the basement of their Main Street home as their two young children slept upstairs, a brazen crime that sent shock waves through the quiet, prosperous suburb.  Richard Costa, Dennis Daye, and Michael DeNictolis are each serving two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole for the 1985 slaying of Robert Paglia and his wife, Patricia, in a robbery at the couple's house.  But now a retired FBI agent says in an affidavit that a former colleague gave false and misleading forensic testimony -- deemed crucial to the prosecution's case -- at the trial. More BS Bullet Matching A New Jersey appeals court overturned the 1997 murder conviction of Michael S. Behn on March 7, 2005, ruling that an FBI crime lab technique that prosecutors relied on to link the fatal bullets to the defendant was based on "erroneous scientific foundations." UPDATE:  The FBI has announced that it has discontinued the use of bullet-lead matching, a forensic technique used for at least 25 years that had been heavily criticized as inaccurate and misleading.  Nonetheless, FBI Laboratory Director Dwight E. Adams said, "we stand by the results of the reports we have already issued."  Never Admit Error UPDATE: The Kentucky Supreme Court has reversed Shane Ragland's murder conviction, which was based on comparative bullet lead analysis (CBLA).  When Ragland was tried in 2002, CBLA was all the rage at the FBI Lab.  By 2005, CBLA had been discredited as junk science.  No Choice But to Reverse Conviction UPDATE:  Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of an FBI forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago. But the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing, a joint investigation by The Washington Post and "60 Minutes" has found.  Silent Injustice. UPDATE:  Lee Wayne Hunt of Smithfield, NC vividly remembers the day 21 years ago when an FBI scientist walked into a North Carolina courthouse and told jurors that he was able to match the lead content of bullets found at the crime scene to that of bullets in a box connected to Hunt's co-defendant. The testimony provided the sole forensic evidence to corroborate the prosecution's circumstantial case.  In 2005, the bureau ended its bullet-lead-matching technique after experts concluded that the very type of testimony given in Hunt's case -- matching a crime-scene bullet to those in a suspect's box -- was scientifically invalid.  They threw out the science -- but haven't lifted a finger to help the wrongly convicted put into prison by it.  Still in Prison Officially Sanctioned Abuse   The Darke County, Ohio prosecutor has said he is closing the homicide investigation into the death of 5-year-old Daniel Crow Jr. because a rare genetic disease may be the cause of the boy's death, not abuse.  It's too late for the rest of the family.  Their other children were seized by the state and adopted by other families. Bite Mark Baloney   Cook County, Illinois prosecutors have dropped murder charges against Dan Young, Jr. and Harold Hill, who have spent more than 12 years behind bars, after DNA test results undermined their confessions and testimony from a dentist who implicated the two through a bite mark and a hickey. More Bite Mark Baloney  Jeffrey Moldowan, who spent 12 years in prison before winning a retrial and acquittal in a Warren rape case, has sued the victim, the police, a trial witness and Macomb County prosecutors.  The witness is Dr. Alan Warnick, whose bogus bite mark testimony railroaded an innocent man. Gunshot Residue   This evidence, used for years in thousands of investigations, is not as clear-cut as it has often been portrayed in court, or in the television crime dramas that have made forensics popular.  Across the country it is under increasing scrutiny as defense attorneys, prosecutors and police officials evaluate how easily suspects' hands can be contaminated by other items already covered in gunshot residue: handcuffs, car seats, even police officers themselves. Gunshot Residue Ricochet  The Baltimore state's attorney's office said that it has found about half a dozen convictions in cases that may have involved the controversial identification of gunshot residue evidence.  The preliminary review of shooting and weapons cases from the past five years came after a Circuit Court judge decided to exclude a two-element particle of gunshot residue evidence from a trial. He said a particle containing three elements -- lead, barium and antimony -- is required to meet the scientific community's threshold for establishing that a substance is gunshot residue. Digital Fingerprint Identification   The Chicago Tribune has found that the same digital technology that has allowed the FBI to speed fingerprint checks so dramatically has created a new risk -- in an already subjective and non-scientific field -- of accusing the innocent. SBS: Dubious Diagnosis   In the UK, a review of nearly 300 cases in which parents were convicted of killing their young children has identified 28 where there was "sufficient cause for concern to warrant further consideration", the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, has told Parliament.  A further 89 cases of "shaken baby syndrome" will be reconsidered in the light of a judgment from the Court of Appeal expected in 2005, Lord Goldsmith promised.  Three pending prosecutions have already been abandoned "on the grounds that it was not safe to proceed". UPDATE:  In what experts say is the first such ruling in the nation, a Greenup (Kentucky) Circuit Court judge has barred the prosecution from introducing expert testimony that a baby was injured by shaking, unless there is other evidence of abuse.  Issuing identical rulings in two cases, Judge Lewis Nichols cited biomechanical studies that have concluded it's impossible for an adult to shake an infant hard enough to cause the injuries used to diagnose the syndrome -- hemorrhaging behind both retinas and hematomas, or pools of blood, in the membranes of the brain.  Not Letting Doctors Diagnose Legal Conclusions Forensic scientist Charles Vaughan, whose testimony helped wrongfully convict two young men of murder in Oregon, has been working for the Washington State Patrol crime lab since the case unraveled nine years ago.  Landing on His Feet . Read the Seattle Post-Intelligencer series that "outed" Charles Vaughn Back in 1988, Texas Department of Public Safety serologist Glen Adams testified that Brandon Moon was among "15% of the population" who could have contributed semen in a 1987 rape.  Relying on that overstated testimony, an El Paso jury convicted Moon and he was sentenced to 75 years in prison.  It was another win for junk science.  In 2004, DNA Cleared Brandon Moon . Todd Willingham - Executed for an Accidental Fire Strapped to a gurney in Texas' death chamber in February, 2004, just moments from his execution for setting a fire that killed his three daughters, Cameron Todd Willingham declared his innocence one last time.  " I am an innocent man, convicted of a crime I did not commit," Willingham said angrily. "I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do."  Four fire cause and origin experts -- Gerald Hurst, John Lentini, John DeHaan and Kendall Ryland -- agree.  "There's nothing to suggest to any reasonable arson investigator that this was an arson fire," said Hurst, a Cambridge University-educated chemist who has investigated scores of fires in his career. "It was just a fire." UPDATE Innocence Project Asks Texas to Review Willingham and Willis Arson Convictions (In pdf format - Includes Report and Supporting Documentation) UPDATE - August 15, 2008 Texas Panel to Probe Findings That Led to Willingham's Execution Thelma Younkin used an oxygen tube to help her breathe. Her killer used it as a murder weapon.  In November 1991, the frail, 65-year-old Younkin was strangled with the tube, bitten and raped in her room at the Post Park Motel along a grim stretch of Yuma, Arizona.  A fellow resident of the low-budget motel, Bobby Lee Tankersley, was convicted and sent to Arizona's Death Row for the attack, based largely on the testimony of a forensic dentist who said he had matched Tankersley's teeth to bite marks on Younkin's body.  But on December 6, 2004, the same judge who sentenced Tankersley to death will hold a hearing that promises to showcase the problems of forensic science in America's courts, from the legacy of discredited experts to new DNA tests exposing the questionable science behind many other disciplines, including bite-mark comparison.  Bite Mark Verdict Faces New Scrutiny UPDATE:  Bobby Lee Tankersley has been granted a new sentencing hearing.  Bogus Bite Mark Evidence Cited . Should medical experts who give fraudulent testimony be subject to discipline for unprofessional conduct?  The Federation of State Medical Boards thinks so.  FSMB Guidelines Los Angeles County officials scrambled to review at least 27 -- and possibly dozens -- of pending criminal cases to determine whether critical evidence was tainted or falsified during analysis by the nation's largest private DNA lab.  Cellmark found the problems through its own audits, and said the testing protocols were not followed and that the analyst substituted results and changed computer records.  All It Takes is One Bad Apple Computer Voice Stress Analysis (CVSA) is promoted by police who use it as a reliable lie detector.  Even the manufacturer the National Institute for Truth Verification, "acknowledges that the CVSA is not capable of lie detection and specifically cautions its users regarding the proper use of the device." But it works well for getting gullible suspects to confess -- especially when they are innocent.  More Junk Saying the autopsy report was wrong, Winchester, TN District Attorney Mike Taylor dismissed a murder charge against Margaret Mignano, accused of killing her severely disabled daughter with an overdose of medication.  The murder charge was based on the autopsy report of Dr. Charles Harlan of Nashville, a forensic pathologist who is defending his medical license against state charges of misdiagnosing causes of death in other cases and destroying evidence in criminal investigations.  No Overdose Post Mortem Drug Test Errors   A technique for inferring how much of a drug a patient has taken may be putting innocent people behind bars.  The problem seems to be that doctors are incorrectly applying the method to corpses, in a bid to establish how much of a drug a deceased person took, or was given, before their death. That error can result in vastly inflated readings. Independent Crime Labs   The risk of deceptive forensic practices is heightened by the strong institutional kinship between the technicians who analyze forensic evidence and the law enforcement agencies that investigate and prosecute criminals. Virtually all crime laboratories have direct affiliations with law enforcement agencies.  Locke Bowman and Rob Warden make a strong case for independent crime labs in Illinois.  Actually, we need independent crime labs throughout the country. A Remarkable Series from the Chicago Tribune Forensic Science Under the Microscope Critics Say: Show Us the Science Arson Myths Fuel Errors Bite Marks: From the Start, a Faulty Science When Labs Falter, Defendants Pay Scandal Touches Even Elite Labs * * * Internationally known dog handler Sandra Anderson dazzled police in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Michigan and Panama with the ability of her dog, Eagle, to find evidence that eluded everyone else.  Of course Eagle could find it -- Anderson planted the evidence.  Anderson has pled guilty to federal evidence tampering charges.  How Many Cases did She Taint? Criminal Science: The Paul House Case [pdf format - use Acrobat Reader] Can we rely on forensic science as the arbiter of truth in the courtroom?  In his latest investigation for Seed Magazine , writer Simon Cooper exposes a case of corrupted science at the heart of our justice system -- and the forensic failures that put a man on Tennessee's death row.  Ken Marsh Ken Marsh spent 21 years in California prisons for a crime that never happened.  He was convicted in 1984 of murdering 2-year-old Kenneth Buell based on testimony of treating physicians -- with no independent corroboration -- who were seeking to protect themselves from malpractice claims.  His conviction was reversed without an evidentiary hearing based on insufficiency of the medical expert evidence. Ken Marsh and his attorney, Tracy Emblem, have generously made available extensive forensic resources utilized in his case for the benefit of other innocent people facing similar charges.  Visit Free Ken Marsh Dr. Patricia Moore, a former Harris County associate medical examiner accused of botching an autopsy that led to a young mother's imprisonment has come under scrutiny in several other cases in which her conclusions were later contested or revised.  Moore attributed infant deaths to shaken baby syndrome at a rate considerably higher than the rate at which it happens in the general population.  Biased Autopsies UPDATE:  Brandy Briggs, accused by Dr. Moore of shaking her baby son to death, followed her lawyer's advice in 1999 and pled guilty to injury to a child.  Subsequent review demonstrated that the child died of natural causes, and was neither abused nor neglected.  Now the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals has thrown out Briggs' conviction based on her lawyer's Deficient Performance . Convicted of rape and exonerated after 13 years in prison, Michael Green of Cleveland, Ohio sued the city for $10 million.  He settled his case for $1.6 million -- and re-opening of more than 100 cases that included testimony from Joseph Serowik, the same forensics lab worker who falsely testified in Green's trial.  Doing the Right Thing "The premise is interesting that scientific evidence is more reliable than other evidence. . . . It would be nice if it were true," said Simon A. Cole, an assistant professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine. "In the cases of wrongful conviction that we know about, scientific evidence is a very significant factor."  Massachusetts Gov. Romney believes in the myth of infallible science, and he's willing to bet other people's lives on it.  Foolproof Forensics Three separate FBI examiners — Terry Green, Michael Wieners and John T. Massey — identified a fingerprint linked to the Madrid train bombing as that of Oregon attorney Brandon Mayfield.  Even when Spanish authorities disagreed, the FBI stood by their conclusion of a "100 percent positive identification".  They gave Mayfield the "Richard Jewell/Wen Ho Lee" treatment -- smear his name, destroy his law practice, throw him in jail.  Oops.  The FBI was Wrong. Commentary:  Until now, many people in the field of fingerprinting have defensively resisted calls for additional research and investigation of fingerprinting. Because experts are permitted to testify about "100 percent positive" matches and to claim in court an error rate for the technique of zero, they have little incentive to support any research. No matter how accurate fingerprint identification turns out to be, it cannot be as perfect as they claim.  The Achilles' Heel of Fingerprints Commentary:  The pseudoscience of fingerprint identification lacks baseline standards.  It is subjective, based on "because-I-said-so" analysis.  The result is that the government can profess certainty and be Dead Wrong . UPDATE:  The fingerprint identification controversy is coming before the highest court in Massachusetts. The Supreme Judicial Court is scheduled to hear arguments on September 7, 2005 about whether to quash key fingerprint evidence in the case of Terry L. Patterson, who is being retried in the 1993 slaying of a Boston detective.  In addition, Patterson's lawyer in the case, John H. Cunha Jr., wants the SJC to do what no other state supreme court has done: bar fingerprint analysis from being presented in all criminal trials until it is subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny and proven reliable.  Unreliable Pseudoscience  UPDATE:  A single fingerprint found at the scene of a crime is such powerful evidence that it's almost an automatic conviction. Fingerprints never lie: Juries have been told that for more than a century.  But a criminologist at the University of California, Irvine, has documented 22 cases, most involving violent crimes, in which fingerprint evidence turned out to be dead wrong, usually discovered after defendants had served time for crimes they did not commit.  Faulty Analysis Difficult to Uncover

The Evidence for Shaken Baby Syndrome