ShareThisWhile the techniques seldom seem to fail on television, a new report to Congress says the nation's crime lab system is badly fragmented and needs to be overhauled to ensure consistent, accurate results to investigators and courts.
The "shortcomings pose a serious and continuing threat to the quality and credibility of forensic science in this country,'' said Judge Harry Edwards, a senior federal appellate judge who co-chaired the National Academy of Sciences committee that wrote the 255-page report.
About 400 forensic crime labs, most run by state or local governments, operate across the nation, along with more than 2,300 medical examiners or coroners. Analysis of some evidence from crime scenes may be done by private labs, universities and police agencies.
Yet, except for DNA analysis, the committee said no other forensic discipline has been thoroughly and independently researched scientifically to ensure connections between evidence and a specific individual or source.
For instance, at least one criminal court judge has recently ruled out fingerprint evidence in a case because the traditional analysis technique was subjective and untested. Similar challenges have been mounted against bitemarks, tools, tire and footprint analysis, and ballistic testing of firearms -- all long-time crime-solving staples.
"Studies of these fields that depend on observation and judgment to determine how accurate they are in the field have simply not been done, or openly published to any great extent if they have been done,'' said panel co-chair Constantine Gatsonis, a biostatistics expert at Brown University.
Improperly trained specialists, along with some who have admitted to sloppy, even fraudulent, studies in recent years, contribute to inconsistency and the possibility of questionable evidence being used in court, the committee said.
Although professional organizations of crime investigators, lab technicians and medical examiners have attempted to set standards and produce research to back their findings, only a few states have required accreditation of labs, and many are underfunded, understaffed and face large backlogs of evidence to be tested.
"Much research is needed not only to evaluate the reliability and accuracy of current forensic methods, but also to innovate and develop them further," Gatsonis said.
To make that happen, the panel urges Congress to set up a National Institute of Forensic Science to promote and enforce standards, fund research and assess and introduce new technologies that become available.
The institute would also work on incentives and other programs to establish medical examiner systems in all jurisdictions and eliminate elected coroners and similar positions from death investigations.
On the Net: http://www.nas.edu
E-mail Lee Bowman at bowmanl(at)shns.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
