Scientific Forensicists

(3 votes, aver­age: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading …

I have a hard time believ­ing what some attor­neys tes­tify to dur­ing tri­als. Well, I guess they aren’t offi­cially tes­ti­fy­ing, but they are stat­ing their opin­ion on the mat­ter, and end their pon­tif­i­ca­tion with a sel­domly agreed to, “Do you agree?”

Recently I was tes­ti­fy­ing in court, and I was asked by the pros­e­cut­ing attor­ney if I agreed with the fol­low­ing statement:

Since all the qual­ity assur­ance require­ments were met, the results must be valid.

I replied with a state­ment to the neg­a­tive. The attor­ney then asked if I was aware that another foren­sic sci­en­tist employed by the police rou­tinely tes­ti­fies that the reg­u­la­tions relat­ing to this type of test­ing require the fol­low­ing things. The the attor­ney listed a series of reg­u­la­tory require­ments. I replied I was aware of those requirements.

I was finally asked if all those require­ments were in place. I stated there was noth­ing to indi­cate they were not.

The unasked ques­tion of course was that if all the require­ments are in place, does that guar­an­tee accu­rate and reli­able results. My answer being “no”, the infer­ence being that the un-named police sci­en­tist rou­tinely answers “yes”.

I really don’t know if there is a police sci­en­tist who tes­ti­fies that way. If there is, I won­der if they truly believe it. If there is, I won­der about their train­ing and under­stand­ing of their role in the crim­i­nal jus­tice system.

A foren­sic sci­en­tist per­forms sci­en­tific test­ing to inves­ti­gate legal ques­tions. First and fore­most that sci­en­tist should be con­cerned with the sci­en­tific aspects of their job. Any sci­en­tist who believes that reli­able results can be obtained by merely meet­ing the legal require­ments of a test­ing pro­ce­dure is either grossly under-educated, or a biased witness.

Regulatory require­ments are put in place by politi­cians (some­times with input from sci­en­tists, some­times with­out). Science is the pur­suit of the truth. I find it hard to believe that any sci­en­tist would agree that politi­cians can leg­is­late and reg­u­late truth. Unfortunately for some, real­ity is not deter­mined by the demo­c­ra­tic process.

State imposed reg­u­la­tions related to sci­en­tific test­ing are only min­i­mum require­ments, there help ensure the reli­a­bil­ity of the results. If results are going to be valid, they must meet the state min­i­mum reg­u­la­tory require­ments — true. But just because test­ing meets the reg­u­la­tory require­ments doesn’t mean the results are sci­en­tif­i­cally reli­able — they must also meet the accept­able prac­tices of the rel­e­vant sci­en­tific community.

That doesn’t even take into account errors that can occur that would never be detectable even with the best QA system.

A sci­en­tist should never let a politi­cian tell them what makes for valid or reli­able test results. Scientists should be con­cerned about the sci­en­tific valid­ity and reli­a­bil­ity of their opin­ion first, and then make sure legal require­ments are met. Politicians can make rules about what are legal requirements.

As a foren­sic sci­en­tist, my job is to explain the sci­ence related to my opin­ion. I let the lawyers and the judge worry about the legality.

A valid foren­sic sci­en­tific con­clu­sion also meets legal require­ments. A con­clu­sion that meets legal require­ments is not nec­cis­ar­ily sci­en­tif­i­cally valid.

As soon as a foren­sic sci­en­tist accepts the legal require­ments as the min­i­mum require­ments for sci­en­tif­i­cally valid test­ing, they stop being foren­sic sci­en­tists, and become Scientific Forensicists.