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.
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