Morning News: Getting Real About Forensics
Last May, The New Yorker published an article, “The CSI Effect,” by Jeffrey Toobin, about the really rather shaky foundations on modern forensic science. It turns out that hair, for example, is usually pretty uninformative as evidence. Fibers shed by clothes and upholstery aren’t much better. Aggressive prosecutors (pardon the tautology) are past-masters at finessing the doubts that crime lab technicians might have about their own findings. It turns out that the triumphs of dispositive clues on TV crime shows are about as realistic as your basic Seventies sitcom.
I was heartened, therefore, to read this morning that states are buckling down, not only on crime labs, but on lineup procedures and the use of DNA evidence. According to Solomon Moore’s sotry, “DNA Exoneration Leads to Change in Legal System,”
Nationwide, misidentification by witnesses led to wrongful convictions in 75 percent of the 207 instances in which prisoners have been exonerated over the last decade, according to the Innocence Project, a group in New York that investigates wrongful convictions.
The great thing about all of this is changes are being mandated by state legislatures, not by courts. I’m second to none in believing that judicial activism is our ultimate bulwark against profound social injustice, but in a well-run democracy that fallback is rarely if ever necessary, because legislatures do what they’re supposed to do: pass intelligent laws.
Cheering as this news is, it oughtn’t to deflect our attention from the fact that the far dirtier blot on American justice is the shameless exploitation of unconscionably broad drug laws to incarcerate African Americans.