The “CSI Effect”: NAS Says U.S. Needs a Forensic Science Overhaul
Watching another episode of CBS’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation might not be as harmless an activity as you think. According to a report released this week by the National Academy of Sciences, the millions of people who watch CSI every week are often led to believe that forensic science is infallible, and this view has dangerous consequences when those people are the adjudicating judges and jurors in our courts. Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, which has worked to overturn convictions based on unreliable forensic evidence, spoke to NPR about the report: “Whether it is hair analysis, fiber comparison, bite marks, even fingerprints … judges and juries hear this evidence and rely on it to come up with convictions that later have proven to be wrong.”
This overconfidence of judges and jurors in the reliability of forensic science, the “CSI Effect” as the NAS study calls it, is only one of several much more serious problems in the field. Some of the key findings of the report:
- There is no nation-wide regulation of forensic science, leading to large disparities between local, state and federal forensic methodologies and inter-reliability.
- Forensic science facilities are often woefully lacking in quality equipment, skilled labor, and funding.
- With the exception of nuclear DNA analysis, little evidence has been published that indicates the rigorous reliability of forensic techniques used in the courtroom.
- Judges do not often enough insist on a clear presentation of forensic information from experts, leading jurors to overlook elements of human interpretation involved in the science.
The study calls for the creation of a new agency, the National Institute of Forensic Science, which would be responsible for the overhaul of the national forensic science community, working to solve the problems highlighted by the NAS.
An op-ed by UCLA law professor Jennifer L. Mnookin in the Los Angeles Times concurs that the creation of a forensics agency is a good idea, but indicates that in the meantime judges should do more to ensure that individuals aren’t incarcerated on the basis of unreliable evidence passed off as irrefutable. If the United States is going to ensure “equal justice under law” for all of its citizens, then the first step must be to make certain that the forensic evidence in our courtrooms is presented responsibly and is held up to the highest standards of peer-review and scientific rigor.
One potential component of such an effort will require effective communication between the science and law enforcement communities. For more on that relationship, see the analysis researchers from the Federation of American Scientists, the FBI, and AAAS published here in Science Progress: “How Scientists View Law Enforcement.”
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