By Laura Spinney, scientific journalist and writer based in Paris. His book “Proto: How One Ancient Language Goss Global” will be published on May 13. Originally published in Undark.
When does it become the context?
It is a question that the anxiety of the engendra in many scientific disciplines and with good reasons. Information about a patient’s family history can push a doctor towards the right diagnosis or incline them towards a wrong one. The awareness of the criminal adjustments of a suspect can help an investigator read a crime scene correctly, or involuntarily instill an innocent person. When the truth of the ground is inaccessible, it is difficult to know where the line is. The ancient dilemma has exploded again, in forensic science, and is dividing the field.
The catalyst was the publication, in 2022, or a document that went unnoticed beyond the field. Sixteen forensic scientists from six countries, in what they called Sydney’s statement, affirmed that their discipline was in a “pretacable state of crisis.” The central purpose of the forensic scientist, as defined in the birth of the field at the beginning of the 20th century, was the study of the trace, any established or human activity, in the context of a crime scene. His work was to examine the scene, formulate hypothesis of what had happened there and direct the evidence compilation that would allow these hypotheses to be proven. Instead, the authors said, the scientist had become a technician, performing specialized analysis in a laboratory, in divorced evidence of every context. Forensic science had lost sight of its reason for being.
The document fell into what was already a moment of intense search for the soul for forensic science. In 2009, the National Research Council, or NRC, published an excessive report on field practices. He thought that the report highlighted a series of problems, which obtained more time air was that many routinely used forensic techniques, including digital fingerprint exams and firearms, were necessary or reliable.
His infallibility aura broke, the field was bitten in action. For 2019, Peter Neufeld, co -founder of the non -profit innocence project based in the United States, praised his efforts to reinforce the scientific basis of the techniques that criticized Bone. Neufeld said in a press release that the progress of forensic science had tasks to become a “neutral truth cashier” could not be underestimated; Innocent people had been released and saved lives. Legal academics and scientists also expressed approval.
But other problems highlighted by the NRC had not addressed the bone. There was still no central agency that would provide supervision, and forensic services were still mainly under the control of the agencies of application of the law or the prosecutors. This meant that the crime scenes were usularly examined by police officers or technicians with experience in specific types of trace evidence, many of which had not trained to evaluate the scene in an integral way. The Dalt report with the United States, but the theses were also true elsewhere. Simon Cole, A Professor of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine, Told Me That, By The Latest Being of Being of Being of Being It of Being of Being of Being of Being of Being “
It was this state of things to which Sydney’s statement reacted, and its moment was not coincidence. Several of their authors told me that the technical improvements, although welcome, have created a strange disjunction in which they are the extremely precise responses to poorly defined projects. The evidence that is collected tends to be that it is visible or is probable that it leads to the identification of a suspect – DNA, digital footprints, Images of CCTV, instead of what will admit a hypothesis on another and will facilitate the correct reconstruction of the events.
In 2023, three of the co -authors of the statement illustrated their arguments with a case of real life. While trying to escape, a hospitalized prisoner had shot and killed the police officer who watched him. Please, he is not guilty of a homicide charge, the prisoner said he had acted in self -defense. The initial examination of the scene by the Police did not produce evidence to challenge that plea, but a second investigation carried out by a forensic scientist showed that the prisoner’s actions had been premeditated.
Many in the field agree with the diagnosis of the declaration, but not necessarily with their solution, namely, return to an older world in which the coroner supervises the processing of the scene. The problem, the skeptics say, is that the crime scenes are no longer what they were. Many crimes now have a digital dimension, even if only because many people have an online existence. This fact, combined with the increasing sensitivity of forensic tools, means that a scene generates a large volume of information that a single person can evaluate in an integral way. Then there is the risk of bias, on which we know much more than 20 years ago.
Irrelevant contextual information can biased the decisions of the most competent and conscious scientist of himself. This happened in the case of Brandon Mayfield, Oregon’s lawyer who was erroneously arrested for the 2004 Madrid bombing based on a false identification of digital footprints. The understanding of bias has fed the movements to separate police scientists from the police and with each other, so that subdisciplins work more and more in the Siloes of the information, Sydney’s trend decreases.
But Itiel Dor, a London -based neuroscientist who studies bias, believes that the statement establishes a false dichotomy. Between the two bad options to make the police do the scientific work or expose scientists to prejudice, Dror says there is a good third option: scientists examine the scene and different scientists perform laboratory analysis. Those in the laboratory only receive relevant information for the task that are presented sequentially, so that the bias potential is minimized at each stage of their decision making.
But then, who decides what information is relevant? How much do each technician need to know about the case to perform the correct tests and make the evidence “speak” the most accurate and similar to the computer as possible? Isn’t the bias in the eye of the Beolder, made up of his experience lived? Or to reiterate the initial question, where does the context and bias end? For the authors of Sydney’s statement, bias is ubiquitous and changes form, and the scientific method is the best shield against it. And they have at least one ally in the director of the Forensic Service of Scotland, Fiona Douglas.
Scotland is unusual, since both its police force and its forensic service respond to the Police Authority of Scotland, but operate independently. In an interview, Douglas cited a 2017 case that, previously resolved, only the surface of the weapons had routinely joined, but working with DNA experts and fingerprints, a ballistic specialist took a gun separately and found traces of blood inside. This led to the identification of a man connected with an illegal network of firearms and, ultimately, to the dismantling of the network.
Three years after Sydney’s statement, the field still lacks a unified vision. Lacking that vision, the authors write, Forensic Science is resulting in recruits that do not know what they do not know, technicians who never learned to examine a scene. If a discipline of just a century that moves to avoid the victim of the fingers to their own success, he warns, it must reinvent itself. Otherwise, he will lose the award against the neutral truth, justice will suffer and we will all suffer with him.
