Round-up: A Lot of CSI-Style Forensics Have Turned Out to be Bogus
Basically a lot of it is pseudoscience that was never rigorously tested in controlled situations to see if it actually worked.
This is because it was not developed by scientists, but by police, and mainly with an interest in putting people in prison rather than uncovering the truth.
At least two dozen people have been falsely convicted due to “Bite Mark Analysis”.
“Burn pattern analysis” put an innocent man to death in Texas
“Blood Spatter analysis” such as that shown on the TV show Dexter is actually completely unreliable even according to the US Department of Justice
Forensic hair comparison is also widely believed to be junk science and the FBI is currently reviewing convictions based on hair analysis due to the unreliability of their results
Handwriting analysis has an unreasonably high error rate, by some accounts as high as 43%
Lie detector tests, or polygraphs, are notoriously unreliable and based on bad science. Even though everybody knows this, they are still constantly being used in criminal investigations among other places.
Toxicology labs can be poorly supervised and badly run, producing false and even fraudulent results
Due to sloppy procedure at many labs and lack of regulation even DNA testing is often unreliable
Even when correct results are produced, genetic profiles may be less useful than we have been lead to believe
Fingerprinting analysis is not foolproof and actually has not been thoroughly tested, as this Frontline special discusses
Here are a few more articles on how unreliable modern forensics are.
Unfortunately due to TV shows that stress forensic investigation, juries are demanding this kind of evidence at trial, and have little idea of how untested and unreliable it really is.
HEY REMEMBER WHEN I WROTE ABOUT THIS TWO YEARS AGO? SPECIFICALLY THE PART ABOUT FBI REVIEWING ITS FORENSICS HAIR ANALYSIS CASES? WELL THE RESULTS ARE IN AND WHOOPS: EVEN THE FBI ADMITS THAT IT’S BOGUS NOW
In case you are stopped by the paywall here’s a Slate article on the same thing and here’s another one.
Hair analysis alone has been used in thousands of trials. The FBI is reviewing 2500 cases out of “21000 federal and state requests to the FBI’s hair-comparison unit between 1972 and 1999″. Even if this review exonerates some of those convictions, that doesn’t even begin to cover the hundreds of state and local “experts” trained by the FBI in this bogus “hair analysis” technique to do things like this:
Santae Tribble served 28 years for a murder based on FBI testimony about a single strand of hair. He was exonerated in 2012. It was later revealed that one of the hairs presented at trial came from a dog.
So anyway remember anytime you hear about “forensic evidence” that a lot of it is bullcrap and not scientifically validated and a lot of so-called experts are just pulling conclusions out of their ass.
the forensic hair analysis thing is terrible, the FBI literally invented a branch of forensic psuedoscience with no evidence behind it in order to boost conviction rates, then taught the bogus technique to thousands of forensic investigators in the us and around the world. we have no idea how many people have been wrongfully convicted, and this is just one in a very long list of forensic techniques that lack rigorous scientific evaluation
It’s been another year or two so here’s an extremely recent article about how “Criminal Profiling” is totally bogus and TV shows like Mindhunters continue to focus on it because it looks cool and makes good stories, but it really only works in the movies.
Profiling was trendy in the 70s-90s but has been falling into disrepute ever since. This 2007 analysis showed that Criminal Profilers do not outperform regular detective work. Here’s another analysis finding Profiling unreliable in its current form and suggests ways to make it more scientifically rigorous. Here’s another.
ALL OF THIS
