Bad forensics: Reporter Rachel Mendleson explores why it's so hard to keep bad forensics out of the courtroom - and how, when bad science (or a bad scientist) infects the judicial process, things can go very wrong, very quickly; Toronto Star.

GIST: "As post-conviction DNA testing has exonerated hundreds of wrongly convicted, it has revealed the inherent danger of what one New York Times op-ed column recently dubbed “the collision between the law and science.” A big problem, says Toronto defence lawyer Alan Gold, who wrote the book on expert evidence in criminal law in Canada, is that most lawyers — along with police officers, judges and jurors — simply don’t know enough to effectively challenge scientific evidence. “We all went to law school to avoid the math and science stuff,” Gold said. “The math and science stuff has pursued us into the courtroom, and we are not very well-equipped to deal with it.” Although there are standards for admissibility of evidence in both Canada and the U.S., critics say the bar is not high enough. A watershed report by the National Research Council in the U.S. in 2009 found that with the exception of DNA analysis, “no forensic method has been rigorously shown able to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source.” Commonly used methods like shoe print analysis and fingerprinting are important tools, the report concluded, “but many need substantial research to validate basic premises and techniques.” In cases where there are competing scientific experts, the arbiters are often jurors without scientific training, which is less than ideal, said Hageman. “Why should it be up to a jury to listen to two testimonies and figure out which is right and which is wrong?” she said. “That’s the thing: the adversarial system doesn’t work that great when it comes to trying to get the truth out of the science.”

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