Junk Science and Judicial Arrogance Are Killing Us

[Passages]

Steve Kennedy

November 26, 2024

Too many jurisdictions continue to abide by wholly discredited forensic techniques and pseudoscientific nonsense, which are leaving legal mayhem in their wake.

While they remain a singularly popular pop-culture genre, the police and court procedurals that draw the eyes and attention of television viewers on a daily basis have, unfortunately, given most people an idealized view of how our legal system works. This is never more true than in how the public has come to view the role that science and forensic evidence play in criminal proceedings. Judges and juries are supposed to weigh evidence from scientific experts presenting the most current version of the scientific consensus in their areas of expertise. So how do so many people keep going to jail based on junk science?

Part of the blame lies with judicial arrogance. Contrary to our mythology around the judiciary, judges are not objective observers and often struggle to remove personal and societal biases from their analyses of the cases before them. Despite not being scientists, judges, led by the U.S. Supreme Court, have concentrated power in themselves at the expense of reliance on scientific expertise.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188437/junk-science-robert-roberson-justice?utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social

[Igel]

1. A lot of forensic techniques are called into question.

Yeah, blood spatter.

But also things like bite marks. Some have questioned whether the striations left by hammers and rifling on bullets is truly probative.

Handwriting analysis? Body language? Psych evals?

I've seen some sketchy interpretations of sound spectograms and speech analysis.

But courts have to observe precedents unless there's sufficient evidence and argumentation--not just some evidence or some argument or other--that the precedent is flawed and not to be honored, and if the science is written into the law, say at the state level, they're sort of stuck implementing the law even if they red-flag it as a problem. Until they have the balls or evidence (usually both) to declare the law simply unconstitutional, state- or federal-wise.

(I keep Loper out, because it's not ruling on the science but on whether the statutory language clearly extends to include some bit of science but not another bit--not saying which science is good or bad, gold or junk, but kicking it back to Congress for clarification, a different category of objection. Effacing the distinction is just an excuse to bash SCOTUS, and there's more than enough grounds for that without fouling the informational well.)