Another Call to Make Crime Labs Independent

Excellent arti­cle echo­ing a com­mon theme here on Forensic Science News. Take the labs out of the police/prosecutors’ offices. Make them inde­pen­dent. Just like what the NAS report said.

Problems with crime labs fol­low a depress­ing pat­tern: a tech­ni­cian makes mis­takes or delib­er­ately fudges data. When the errors are even­tu­ally dis­cov­ered, the police and pros­e­cu­tor scram­ble to min­i­mize or cover up the prob­lem, out of con­cern for the via­bil­ity of both pre­vi­ously adju­di­cated and pend­ing cases. Eventually heads roll, the lab is reor­ga­nized, some inno­cent indi­vid­u­als go free (or not), and it’s back to busi­ness as usual. We’ve seen this in Texas, Washington, New York, cur­rently in San Francisco and even at the FBI and now, here.

Why does it hap­pen, time and again? Part of the prob­lem is the per­sonal integrity of indi­vid­ual lab tech­ni­cians. While the vast major­ity of techs are ded­i­cated pro­fes­sion­als, the bad apple prob­lem per­sists. Little can be done to pro­tect against the bad apples, other than very care­ful screen­ing and hir­ing prac­tices and ongo­ing scrutiny.

But there is another, broader, more sys­temic prob­lem with crime labs that rarely gets dis­cussed, out­side of the rar­i­fied air of pro­fes­sional meet­ings and crim­i­nal jus­tice class­rooms. Your front-page story gave (per­haps inad­ver­tent) atten­tion to the issue in this sen­tence, dis­cussing the role of cer­tain lab tech­ni­cians: They exam­ine the pat­terns left by a victim’s or suspect’s blood … and they tes­tify on behalf of the state.

To have the inher­ent bias of being paid, essen­tially, to sup­port some investigator’s the­ory of the crime is con­trary to both good sci­en­tific prac­tice and any ratio­nal view of objec­tiv­ity. After all, that is what crime lab tech­ni­cians are — they are sci­en­tists, con­duct­ing sci­en­tific exper­i­ments. They are trained pri­mar­ily in biol­ogy and chem­istry. They shouldn’t be hired guns for the pros­e­cu­tion, but that’s often how they come to view them­selves. The tele­vi­sion show “CSI” in its var­i­ous iter­a­tions sup­ports this wrong­headed notion.

The solu­tion? Take taxpayer-funded crime labs out from under the con­trol of the police and pros­e­cu­tor, and set them up as inde­pen­dent enti­ties avail­able to both the pros­e­cu­tion and defense and beholden to nei­ther. This may not be the com­plete solu­tion, but it would go far to rein­state the kind of sci­en­tific pro­fes­sion­al­ism and objec­tiv­ity these labs need to be able to provide.

Tom Cadwallader, Ph.D.

Assistant pro­fes­sor, Department of Criminal Justice

N.C. Central University

Durham

Originally posted on NewsObserver.com.