The Failed Evidence of Arson: Science Begins to Catch Up, and a Man is Freed After 42 Years

When I’m in Cincinnati for talks on Failed Evidence tonight, April 4, at 7:00 pm at the Clifton Cultural Arts Center and tomorrow, April 5, at noon at the University of Cincinnati School of Law, one topic sure to come up is an article from the April 3 New York Times, “Advances in Science of Fire Free a Convict After 42 Years. ”   Louis Taylor was serving 28 life sentences for the deaths caused by a fire in a Tucson, Arizona hotel in December of 1970.  Taylor, then just 16 years old, was convicted of arson based on faulty forensic science.

Mr. Taylor has been release from prison.  He is now 58 years old.

The story highlights the state of arson investigation, past and present.

A few years ago, the National Academy of Sciences turned its attention to the misuse of science in courtrooms, saying that pseudoscientific theories had been used to convict people of crimes they may not have committed. By then, a small group of fire engineers had already begun to discredit many of the assumptions employed in fire investigations, like the practice of using the amount of heat radiated by a fire to assess if an accelerant had been used.

Unlike DNA evidence, which can exonerate one person and sometimes incriminate another, the evidence collected in some arson investigations does not yield precise results. Often much of the evidence has been lost or destroyed. In the case of the hotel fire here, all that is left are photographs, reports and chemical analysis, all of them assembled to prove arson.

As a result, “we can’t definitely say what really caused the fire,” said John J. Lentini, a veteran fire investigator who wrote a report on Mr. Taylor’s case. “But what we can do is discredit the evidence” used to support the charge.

The case recalls the story of the trial and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham in Texas, executed in 2004 for the deaths of his children in a fire.  Experts call the arson in that case terribly flawed — just as in Mr. Taylor’s case.

The science surrounding investigation is light years ahead of where it used to be, even a decade ago.  It’s time that all of the old cases in which verdicts depended on outmoded and discredited methods of arson investigation be re-examined, and if necessary overturned.

U.S. Depts. of Justice, Commerce Will Create National Commission on Forensic Science

Four years after the National Academy of Science’s 2009 report Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward called for basic changes in the forensic sciences, U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology have announced they will create a national commission on forensic science.  The commission will have 30 members — forensic science practitioners, researchers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges — who will develop policy recommendations for the Attorney General.  According to the Department of Justice announcement:

The commission will have responsibility for developing guidance concerning the intersections between forensic science and the courtroom and developing policy recommendations, including uniform codes for professional responsibility and requirements for training and certification.  The new initiative provides a framework for coordination across forensic disciplines under federal leadership, with state and local participation. The Department of Justice, through its involvement in the commission, will take an active role in developing policy recommendations and coordinating implementation.

For many who looked for action in the wake of the National Academy of Science’s 2009 report and saw very little, the creation of the commission will comes as a welcome step forward.   The National District Attorneys Association (NDAA), which took a fairly negative view of the 2009 report and its recommendations, is now reacting with a wait and see attitude.  The NDAA has not yet put out a formal statement in reaction to the announcement of the commission; according to Scott Burns, the Executive Director of the NDAA, the organization will do that once it gets the details on the commission, especially its composition.  So far, Burns told me, the NDAA is  “encouraged” by the fact that prosecutors will be part of the commission, though he stresses that he hopes to see more state and local prosecutors than federal ones.  Burns said that if the commission begins with the attitude that “the system is broken” and that its basics — fingerprints, tool marks, and the like — must be fixed, the NDAA will not look on it favorably.  On the other hand, if the commission starts with the attitude that “we can improve”  the system but that it basically functions well, that would be welcome.

I will write further on this as the story develops.

 

“Failed Evidence” Selected By delanceyplace.com, the Non-fiction Book Source

Good news: Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists Science is the Feb. 4 selection by delanceyplace.com, a service that highlights and quotes new works for a large community of readers.  Delancyplace.com provides daily subscribers with “an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, primarily historical in focus, and will occasionally be controversial. Finally, we hope that the selections will resonate beyond the subject of the book from which they were excerpted.”  Other recent selections have included Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies; Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815; and Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever.

 

Another Call for Recording Interrogations: South Carolina

In another sign that resistance to better, science-based practices will eventually have to yield, a news report indicates that a member of the South Carolina has  introduced a bill that would require police to record interrogations of suspects.

The bill, proposed by Rep. Todd Rutherford of Columbia, “would require judges to instruct jurors that they could ‘draw an adverse inference’ if a law enforcement officer failed to record the questioning of a suspect unless there was an equipment failure.”  That required instruction would effectively require that the police record interrogations, because jurors would hear from the court that the interrogation might be suspicious.

Even if the bill does not pass, the significance of the proposal is hard to miss.  An increasing number of states and jurisdictions require recording of interrogations under various circumstances (see the Innocence Project’s map here), and the research shows that the recording requirement does not harm the investigation process.  In fact, recording turns out to be a great help to the police overall.  The research of Thomas Sullivan on the practical effects of recording has been particularly insightful and helpful on this issue, and academics such as Richard Leo, Saul Kassin, and Richard Ofshe have made tremendous contributions in the area of false confessions and why recording can help.

More to the point, South Carolina would not be viewed by anyone as a jurisdiction that has been particularly favorable to defendants on criminal justice issues.  The fact that the legislature in South Carolina now has a proposal to consider on recording interrogations means that, little by little, we are nearing a tipping point, which will bring us closer to what the scientific research shows us.

 

Failed Evidence: Public Talk Today at the University of Houston Law Center

Today I’ll be giving a talk on Failed Evidence at the University of Houston Law Center, 4800 Calhoun Road, Houston, 77004, at noon in room BLB 240.  The talk is free and open to the public.  I’ll be discussing the book and my thoughts about how we can move toward a future in which the existing scientific work on eyewitness identification, interrogation of suspects, and basic (i.e., non-DNA) forensics will make for better, more accurate investigation and prosecution of crime.  I’ll be speaking to law students, faculty, members of the university community, attorneys, and interested members of the public.

Details on the event are here.

Houston is a particularly interesting place to have this discussion.  Over the past ten years, the crime lab in Houston has had repeated problems.  After all of this, the authorities decided to try something they had not done before: they are removing the crime lab from the jurisdiction of law enforcement and putting it under the control of an independent body, the Houston Forensic Science Local Government Corporation.  I wrote about this in an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle on Saturday, which you can see here.  This move puts Houston’s efforts to deal with forensic reform ahead of the  curve, and implements one of the main recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences 2009 report, Strengthening Forensic Science in the U.S.: A Path Forward.

 

 

 

Forensic Reform: On the Agenda in the New Congress

I’ve written a number of times (here and here an here, for example) about the problems with forensic science laboratories in this country.  Just in the last few months, we’ve seen scandals hit labs in Massachusetts, St. Paul, Minnesota, and in Mississippi.  It seems that the parade might never end.

But today, news emerged that indicates that, just maybe, forensic reform might be on the national agenda.

The new Congress will, of course, be preoccupied with budget and fiscal matters, and also with the President’s efforts on gun control and an expected push for immigration reform.  But Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has announced that he intends to put forensic reform onto the long list of issues he will examine.  According to The BLT (the Blog of the Legal Times, which covers law and government in Washington), Leahy’s committee will be working on an ambitious agenda: immigration, national security and civil liberties issues (including the use of drones in both foreign and domestic contexts), and gun control policy, but that isn’t all.  “The committee will also focus on promoting national standards and oversight for forensic labs and practitioners,” BLT says.

This is a welcome development.  People can disagree about whether we should have national standards (I think yes) or a “national institute of forensic science,” (again, I say yes) as proposed in the National Academy of Sciences’ 2009 report Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward.  But it’s hard to argue that we should not hold the current situation up to the light for some long-overdue scrutiny and discussion of  higher standards and better oversight.  With the never-ending parade of state and local scandals in crime labs, a little federal look-see could actually help.

Stateline Article on Forensics: Yes, But CSI Isn’t the Problem

An article posted on Stateline (published by the Pew Center on the States) on November 26, “Forensic Science Falls Short of Public Image,” nails many of the problems with forensic science in the U.S.  But readers will have to go beyond the references to “the CSI effect” and how this troubles police and prosecutors.  For those who read further, the real problems surface: the inherent weaknesses in traditional (non-DNA, non-chemistry based) forensic methods, along with lack of supervision and protocols, occasional outright fraud, lack of judicial knowledge about these issues, and prosecutorial unwillingness to recognize these problems.

“In fact,” says the article “the whole field of forensic science is currently in flux, following a top-to-bottom review in 2009 by the National Academy of Sciences. The report cast major doubt on many common forensic techniques, calling them unscientific and error-prone.”  According to Judge Donald Shelton, a trial court judge in Michigan’s Washtenaw County who has written about forensic evidence, it is particularly troubling that judges don’t seem to understand just how serious the problems with forensics are, even though the National Academy of Sciences report could hardly have been clearer.  “One of my concerns, “he says, “is that these forms of evidence that we know from the National Academy of Sciences report aren’t valid, are still routinely offered and routinely admitted by judges.”

I do have to take issue with the writer’s comment that Annie Dookhan, the lab analyst who seems to be responsible for most or all of the huge numbers of fraudulent lab tests in Massachusetts was “led” to do this by overwork, underfunding, and case backlogs.   I bet that her fellow analysts who did not falsify lab results in the same lab under the same conditions would beg to differ.  But the article (part one of a two-part series) is still well worth a read.  In addition to the on-target points about the science of forensic science, it also discusses a number of the recent crime lab scandals in Massachusetts, St. Paul, Minn., Texas, and Detroit.

 

 

Failed Evidence Is Featured on Jurist

This week, Jurist, a national and international legal reporting website, is featuring my commentary on Failed Evidence.   Here’s a quick sample:

[The] image of a deep alliance between police work and modern science is misleading at best. With the exception of DNA work and certain kinds of classic chemical analysis, law enforcement generally does not embrace existing scientific work. In fact, police and prosecutors in the US resist science. The scientific work I am referring to involves the testing of the more traditional techniques of law enforcement investigation and prosecution: not the high-tech sheen of the DNA lab, but scientific testing of eyewitness identification, the interrogation of suspects and the more traditional forensic methods such as fingerprint identification. This is the daily bread and butter of law enforcement, and scientists have found it wanting. The science on these basic police investigation methods has existed for years — some of it for decades. It is rigorous, and has undergone peer review, publication and replication. It tells us what the problems with traditional police work are, and also gives us some straightforward ways of solving these problems. Yet, most — not all, to be sure, but most — of American law enforcement continues to resist this science and refuses to change its basic tactics to reflect the best of what science has to offer.

Jurist mixes straight reporting and commentary from the U.S. and around the world; it’s a great source for anyone interested in issues of justice and how it plays out in domestic and international situations around the world.  (Full disclosure: Jurist is supported by my own institution, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and has been guided and run since the beginning by my esteemed colleague, Professor Bernard Hibbitts.)  Check it out.

The Parade of Crime Lab Scandals Continues, Three Years After the NAS Report on Forensics

On the November 20 edition of NPR’s All Things Considered, “Scandals Call Into Question Crime Labs’ Oversight” pointed out that it has been more than three years since the National Academy of Sciences issued its landmark report, Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States, demanding changes in how crime labs in the U.S. were run: everything from labs’ independence from law enforcement, to the lack of proper protocols and procedures, to poor quality of the science that makes up forensic science.  Regrettably, little has changed.

Three years ago, a report from the National Academy of Sciences exposed serious problems in the nation’s forensic science community. It found not only a lack of peer-reviewed science in the field, but also insufficient oversight in crime laboratories.  Little has changed since that report came out, but concerns are growing as scandals keep surfacing at crime labs across the country.

In just the last six months, we’ve seen the still-unfolding scandal at the Jamaica Plains crime lab in Massachusetts and the crime lab problems in St. Paul, Minnesota.  I’ve blogged about both here and here.  But we never seem to stop hearing about these things.  The story mentions scandals in Nassau County, New York, and in North Carolina, but there have been many others.  Why do we keep hearing about  this happening over and over, like a forensic-focused version of the movie Ground Hog Day?

Readers, please comment — and mention other crime lab scandals of the last ten or fifteen years.  One reader mentioned the lab in San Francisco.  Let’s try to collect them, and look for the common threads.

Where Is Minnesota on Failed Evidence? Part 3 — The St. Paul Crime Lab

In my op-ed article in yesterday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune, I gave Minnesota good marks on moving toward better, science-based investigative practices, particularly recording interrogations (required by state Supreme Court decision since 1994) and the use of sequential, blind lineups (Ramsey County).  I also made a brief reference to the problems at the St. Paul crime lab that have been in the headlines in the Twin Cities for some months.  That situation is worth thinking about, especially in light of the unfolding scandal in the crime lab in Massachusetts I’ve been posting about (here and here, for example).  (This will all be discussed in today’s free public presentation on Failed Evidence at the University of Minnesota Law School in Minneapolis at 4:30 pm.)

According to some of the reporting (for example, here and here), the problems in the St. Paul crime lab include lack of proper procedures and protocol, and failure to follow the procedures that did exist.  Work was sometimes sloppy, and that has endangered some guilty verdicts.

Unlike some of the other crime lab scandals, in which fraud or errors seems to have represented an effort to help law enforcement with erroneous results that supported findings of guilt, the errors in St. Paul actually seem to have undermined the fact finding process in both directions: false positives and false negatives.  This highlights an important point: bad forensic work can mean not only that the innocent are convicted, but that the guilty may go free.

A court has heard multiple days of testimony about the faulty lab work, and a ruling is expected after the first of the year.  In the meantime, the investigation continues, with at least one case dropped and others possibly headed in that direction.

All of this cries out for change.  Crime labs should be independent of police or prosecutorial control.  (Of course, this isn’t enough by itself; the lab in trouble in Massachusetts was under the control of the state’s health department when the misdeeds occurred.)  Proper protocol and procedures are essential, along with periodic auditing and accountability to make sure this means something.  And rigorous proficiency testing and certification should be mandatory.

We would accept no less in a lab that tests over-the-counter medicines for effectiveness and safety; why would we accept less for labs that guide the criminal justice system?