Innocence Project in the St. Pete Times: A lifeline for imprisoned innocent

[Mark Wallheiser, Special to the St. Petersburg Times] Innocence Project of Florida executive director Seth Miller and lawyer Bobbi Madonna meet with associates on potential cases. In the background is the whiteboard used in weekly lectures given to law school interns.

The Innocence Project of Florida received some press today in the St. Petersburg Times, Florida's largest newspaper, that explores the arduous process we go through to select our cases.

The process is a lot like sifting for gold. Of the 3,000 inmates who have asked for help since the office opened six years ago, 90 percent have received rejection letters. Rarely do the lawyers find someone like Wilton Dedge or Alan Crotzer, both wrongly convicted of rape.

Ironic turn of phrase – since we certainly don't want to compare innocent people in prison to gold, being a good thing in any way, but sifting and deciphering and contemplating are all appropriate ways of imagining the process.

The entire article is worth a read, and it is somewhat brief.

Update: Our story is on A1 in the St. Pete Times today! Here is a PDF of the front page.

The Coverdell Grant Program for forensic science

The Innocence Project in New York recently released a report titled, "Investigating Forensic Problems in the United States: How the Government Can Strengthen Oversight through the Coverdell Grant Program." From the executive summary:

In 2004, Congress established an oversight mechanism within the Paul Coverdell Forensic Science Improvement Grant Program, which provides federal funds to help improve the quality and efficiency of state and local crime labs and other forensic facilities.

[...] Nearly five years after Congress passed legislation to help ensure that forensic negligence or misconduct is properly investigated, extensive independent reviews show that the law is largely being ignored and, as a result, serious problems in crime labs and other forensic facilities have not been remedied. In short, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP), which is responsible for the program, has failed to make sure that even the law’s most basic requirements are followed.

Yesterday, the blog for TheHill.com paraphrased some of the results of this study, and reiterated the Innocence Project's call for increased oversight or, rather, they called for the Obama administration to increasingly take advantage of the grant program that Congress created five years ago. One particularly egregious fact they quote is this: only 13% of designated oversight entities meet the federal law’s forensic oversight requirements. If you were a defendant, would you want to take a 1-in-8 chance that the forensic lab that processed the evidence in your trial was subject to proper oversight?

Finally, "Under new leadership, the Department of Justice can – and should – make sure crime lab problems are properly addressed, which will enhance the public safety and help prevent wrongful convictions." Remember, working to correct problems in order to preclude wrongful convictions is cheaper than housing wrongfully incarcerated individuals.


No sooner had The Hill run this post than Grits for Breakfast published some presentations from the public meetings held by the National Academy of Sciences, meetings held to address the problems plaguing forensic science labs around the country. They link to this presentation in particular that calls for forensic tests "to be as blind as possible, for as long as possible," and which contains the shocking graphic on common error rates linked above.

You'll notice that firearms and fingerprints, while among the most reliable forensic testing methods, still yield erroneous conclusions around 1-5% of the time. Some toolmark and bitemark tests, meanwhile, are reliable less than half of the time. That report also refers to several studies that found that, for example, when a scientist was provided with "context" for certain samples – context such as, "The suspect has already confessed, here's his hair and a hair from the crime scene" – that error rates were much higher. Those who conducted the psychological studies could induce false positives by giving false context, leading the forensic scientist to believe certain conclusions before they came to them independently.

All of these scientific studies point to the sad state of the crime labs in this country. Scientists might think so, but they are not immune to psychological tendencies – such as suggestibility – that afflict every human being. Independent oversight and common-sense reforms are the necessary solution to the problem.

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Reactions to the NAS Report: Roundup

We blogged earlier about the National Academy of Sciences report eviscerating the nation's forensic laboratories and the way scientific testimony is used and abused at trial. The report has received a good deal of attention in the papers, even Scientific American chimes in. This is a good sign; the national press is giving the report the attention it deserves.

The Innocence Project in New York has been doing a good job of cataloguing all of the press. Here are some of the best snippets.

Grits for Breakfast excerpts this, which is a good summary of the conclusions and highlights:

Rigorous and mandatory certification programs for forensic scientists are currently lacking, the report says, as are strong standards and protocols for analyzing and reporting on evidence. And there is a dearth of peer-reviewed, published studies establishing the scientific bases and reliability of many forensic methods. Moreover, many forensic science labs are underfunded, understaffed, and have no effective oversight.

Forensic evidence is often offered in criminal prosecutions and civil litigation to support conclusions about individualization -- in other words, to "match" a piece of evidence to a particular person, weapon, or other source. But with the exception of nuclear DNA analysis, the report says, no forensic method has been rigorously shown able to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source.

...there has been little rigorous research to investigate how accurately and reliably many forensic science disciplines can do what they purport to be able to do. In terms of a scientific basis, the disciplines based on biological or chemical analysis, such as toxicology and fiber analysis, generally hold an edge over fields based on subjective interpretation by experts, such as fingerprint and toolmark analysis. And there are variations within the latter group; for example, there is more available research and protocols for fingerprint analysis than for bitemarks.

Nuclear DNA analysis enjoys a pre-eminent position not only because the chances of a false positive are minuscule, but also because the likelihood of such errors is quantifiable, the report notes. Studies have been conducted on the amount of genetic variation among individuals, so an examiner can state in numerical terms the chances that a declared match is wrong. In contrast, for many other forensic disciplines -- such as fingerprint and toolmark analysis -- no studies have been conducted of large populations to determine how many sources might share the same or similar features. For every forensic science method, results should indicate the level of uncertainty in the measurements made, and studies should be conducted that enable these values to be estimated, the report says. [emphasis mine]

And here's Simple Justice, with a good – although cynical – take on the report and its possible impact on society.

So the cat is out of the bag. Decades of reliance on forensics are now in doubt. But this isn't the first time, and won't be the last. As scientific knowledge and tools developed, we kept getting the "new improved" version of whatever tools existed to prove facts. Of course, if a scientific tool was so reliable that it could put a man in prison for life, what did it say when a new tool came along that was that much more reliable? Courts embraced the new tool, confident that it was the latest and greatest in scientific proof, and lost no sleep over the demise of yesterday's absolutely certain scientific method. No one got hot and bothered by the conundrum.

So the NAS rips existing forensic practice to shreds and offers a roadmap to correcting junk science going forward. In a rational world, somebody would ask, "What do we do with all those people who have been convicted on science that we now know to be so flawed as to be unreliable, or at best cannot be sufficiently certain is reliable to admit as evidence in court?" By somebody, I mean a judge.

The answer is that the prison doors will not be thrown open, with tens of thousand, hundreds of thousand, told that they are free to leave.

I think GenPop also has a good "So what?" that fits well with my general belief about the holism of common prosecutorial tactics. Courtney says that the report's conclusions,

combined with the fact that eyewitness statements are often faulty, and jailhouse snitches are just doing it for the sentencing break, pretty much leaves us with DNA testing. And yet, people are continually convicted based on these types of fallible evidence. We are going to be setting free innocent people until the end of time, it seems.

We can hope President Obama takes the report's recommendations to hear, including creating a National Institute for Forensic Science.