The Trump DOJ Snuck In One Last Effort to Push Junk Science in Court
With just days left before Joe Biden’s inauguration, the DOJ abruptly responded to a milestone report on forensic science published years ago. In 2016, Barack Obama’s President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, or PCAST, composed of renowned scientists, pulled the curtain back on the misuse of forensic science in American courts. The council’s report concluded that methods frequently relied upon by prosecutors to convict people, like firearms and bitemark analysis, lack basic scientific validity.
Just days before Joe Biden took office, however, Trump’s DOJ issued an unsigned 26-page statement designed to undermine those findings. It was a smoke-and-mirrors attempt to use the credibility of the federal government to prop up the uncritical use of flawed forensic evidence that has contributed to hundreds of wrongful convictions. Like the Trump administration’s last-minute execution spree, the statement seems calculated to advance a regressive, reactionary, and cruel system of criminal prosecution.
The “science” part of forensic science is much murkier than crime shows like Law & Order or NCIS suggest. On TV, we might see a white-coated scientist gravely study a bullet mark on a computer screen as an algorithm scans a database for matches, ultimately landing on the culprit’s gun and cracking the case. But these TV depictions bear little resemblance to actual forensics. In the 2016 report, PCAST cautioned that several “pattern-matching” disciplines, like firearms, bite mark, and hair comparison, are highly subjective, involve circular reasoning, and have been insufficiently tested. They rely on subjective comparisons—essentially, eyeballing it—dressed up with the gloss of seemingly scientific language.
PCAST also offered several practical recommendations for improvement. The council called for judges to carefully assess the scientific validity of forensics methods before admitting them in court and recommended scientists conduct more research and improve the standards of each science, among other things. A core conclusion of the report is that these methods need to undergo well-designed, empirical testing that reflects real-life cases. This testing is necessary to determine which disciplines are scientifically valid and which are essentially junk science.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/trump-doj-forensic-science-pcast.amp?__twitter_impression=true
= new reply since forum marked as read
