Houston: They all have a problem

Another edi­to­r­ial push­ing for the inde­pen­dence of crime labs.

The whole nation is about to learn what Houston already knows through painful experience.

Crime labs far too often pro­duce not sci­ence but sci­ence fiction.

A story in Thursday’s New York Times pre­viewed a report expected later this month from the National Academy of Sciences.

In a bipar­ti­san vote, Congress in 2005 com­mis­sioned the acad­emy to study the nation’s foren­sic prac­tices in the wake of a series of embarrassments.

The final straw involved the case of a Portland, Ore., attor­ney who was arrested by the FBI for involve­ment in a 2004 Madrid train bomb­ing that killed 191 peo­ple. Spanish author­i­ties had to work hard to get the FBI to admit that their fin­ger­print method­ol­ogy was wrong.

The gov­ern­ment paid the lawyer $2 mil­lion in com­pen­sa­tion, prov­ing empir­i­cally that bad sci­ence can be as expen­sive as good science.

According to the Times, peo­ple who have reviewed a draft of the academy’s report say it is “a sweep­ing cri­tique of many foren­sic meth­ods that the police and pros­e­cu­tors rely on, includ­ing fin­ger­print­ing, firearms iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and analy­sis of bite marks, blood spat­ter, hair and handwriting.

The report says such analy­ses are often han­dled by poorly trained tech­ni­cians who then exag­ger­ate the accu­racy of their meth­ods in court.”
Budgetary stepchildren

The report, says the Times, “con­cludes that Congress should cre­ate a fed­eral agency to guar­an­tee the inde­pen­dence of the field, which has been dom­i­nated by law enforce­ment agencies.”

Law enforce­ment agen­cies, both police and pros­e­cu­tors, nec­es­sar­ily develop very pow­er­ful cul­tures. Like any cul­tures, they have their strengths and weak­nesses. But they most def­i­nitely are not sci­en­tific cultures.

Crime labs often are the bud­getary stepchil­dren of a law enforce­ment agency — Exhibit A hav­ing been the Houston Police Lab — and they too often see police and pros­e­cu­tors as their clients. True sci­ence has no clients.

Ironically, our aware­ness of the inep­ti­tude of tra­di­tional police “sci­ence” is largely the result of the great­est advance in foren­sic sci­ence, DNA matching.

One of the stud­ies con­sid­ered by the acad­emy panel exam­ined the trial tran­scripts of 137 cases in which DNA showed that a sus­pect had been wrongly convicted.

According to Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project, and University of Virginia Law pro­fes­sor Brandon Garrett, who con­ducted the study, in 60 per­cent of the cases false or mis­lead­ing analy­sis was pre­sented regard­ing such things as hair, blood, fin­ger­prints, fiber or soil.

The study is sched­uled to be pub­lished next month in the Virginia Law Review, but its find­ings in an ami­cus brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court were described by Justice Stephen Breyer as being “filled with hor­ror sto­ries” of erro­neous con­clu­sions by police labs.

The academy’s report is expected to cause quite a splash nation­ally, but will it pro­vide an impe­tus for Texas to build a strong net­work of inde­pen­dent crime labs? A good sign is the emer­gence of three women in key posi­tions who can push for reform:

• • Barbara Hervey, a judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s high­est court for crim­i­nal mat­ters, has spear­headed cre­ation of a Texas Criminal Justice Integrity Unit to inves­ti­gate a range of causes of wrong­ful con­vic­tions, includ­ing crime labs.

• • Dr. Sarah Kerrigan, who heads the foren­sic sci­ence pro­gram at Sam Houston State University’s College of Criminal Justice, is a strong pro­po­nent of inde­pen­dent crime labs. Trained at Scotland Yard’s lab, her most recent post was direc­tor of the State Laboratory in New Mexico, which was in the state’s health department.

• • Pat Lykos, the new Harris County dis­trict attor­ney, wants to replace the Houston Police Lab with a regional inde­pen­dent lab. She said she has talked with some county com­mis­sion­ers and the med­ical exam­iner and has received a favor­able response. Speaking of the upcom­ing acad­emy report, she said, “This is very excit­ing. It’s like all the stars are align­ing to do some­thing right.”