Opposing Digits

Few law enforcement institutions have been so thoroughly discredited in recent years as the FBI's forensic lab. In 1997 the Bureau's inspector general of the time issued a devastating report, stigmatizing one instance after another of mishandled and contaminated evidence, inept technicians, and outright fabrication. The IG concluded that there were "serious and credible allegations of incompetence" and perjured courtroom testimony.

CounterPunch's view is that taken as a whole, forensic evidence as used by prosecutors is inherently untrustworthy. For example, for years many people went to prison on the basis of the claims of a North Carolina anthropologist, Louise Robbins. She helped send people to prison or to Death Row with her self-proclaimed power to identify criminals through shoe prints. As an excellent recent Chicago Tribune series on forensic humbug recalled, on occasion she even said she could use the method to determine a person's height, sex and race. Robbins died in 1987, her memory compromised by the conclusion of many Appeals Courts that her methodology was bosh. There have been similarly hollow claims for lip prints and ear prints, all of (added "of") them invoked by their supporters as "100 per cent reliable" and believed by juries too easily impressed by passionate invocations to 100 per cent reliable scientific data.

# posted by madthumbs @ 8:28 PM