Culminating in the report of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, it was clear that most forensic science had little to do with science. And if this wasn’t sufficient, the results were more vigorously restated in the 2016 President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, or PCAST, report. Not that Garland’s DoJ cares much about it.
So what are the chances that law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, have learned anything about junk science, such as it not being science, not being reliable, not being admissable in court and not using it to convict people because, well, it’s crap? Not much.
Here is an actual law-enforcement officer, in the 21st century, testifying about his use of “witching rods” in a murder investigation. Just astounding.https://t.co/6eNtpNGMr4
— Lowering the Bar (@loweringthebar) March 25, 2022
And if Kevin Underhill sounds a wee bit skeptical, Tim Cushing at Techdirt sounds as if his head damn near exploded.
Arpad Vass, “forensic instructor,” is handing out divining rods to students hoping to become better crime scene investigators. I wish this were a joke. It is, very sadly, an actual thing that is happening with the blessing of the University of Tennessee and is capable of subjecting students from all over the nation to this stupidity.
Vass, a 62-year-old wearing a blue CSI-Death Valley cap, is teaching his students witching, aka divining or dowsing. It’s a centuries-old practice in which a person walks a straight line holding two bent pieces of metal, or sometimes a Y-shaped twig, until they signal the presence of whatever is being sought underground. Water witches dowse for groundwater. Others use divining rods for seeking precious gems, oil, gold. Or, as in this case, human remains.
The Marshall Project undersells the next sentence.
Dowsing for the dead is not exactly endorsed by scientists or forensic experts.
This is a new tact for the Marshall Project, the self-proclaimed crim law Messiah, which normally mindlessly regurgitates police junk science claims. But as Kevin and Tim note, it’s not merely that Vass is training police in the proper use of divining rods for the dead, but that a judge in Georgia actually admitted testimony on it conclusively demonstrating that neither the expert nor, apparently, the admitting judge passed freshman science.
If this all strikes you as too ludicrous to believe, consider that there are a great many who are similarly willing to believe anything that supports what they want to be real, ranging from magical cures for Covid to stolen elections, on the one side, to systemic racism and microaggressions that traumatize so deeply that puppy rooms are required for survival, on the other.
Having forsaken hard facts for personal truths, requiring nothing more than passionate belief and the willingness to wrap up our ideological wishlist in pseudo-scientific jargon, should we be surprised that the same thing isn’t enjoying a rebirth in law enforcement and courtrooms? After all, if it proves guilt when guilt is what we want proven, how can it be wrong?
Of course, when it comes to forensic science, most of us don’t share the desire to rationalize away reality in order to assure the guilt of a defendant based upon science-y sounding nonsense, but that’s only because we’re the defense and our work is dedicated to challenging such nonsense in order to defend that accused from conviction. In other words, our defense-oriented prior make us inclined to doubt junk science, which enables us to be science pedants when it comes to the litany of junk used in courtrooms.
There’s plenty of other stuff that’s all been considered the gold standard of evidence that has failed to add up to anything when any actual scientific scrutiny is applied to it. Bite mark analysis, blood spatter analysis, bullet matching, hair matching, DNA… all of it is suspect or, at the very least, not nearly as accurate as law enforcement forensic experts assert in court.
But at least most of that stuff has some science to it, even if it’s not nearly as capable of producing bulletproof matches as law enforcement techs believe it is. Microscopes, labs, lab coats, software, specialized hardware, chain of custody, documentation, clipboards, things utilizing radiation or ions or spectroscopes or whatever… that all goes into examining evidence and generating leads or overly confident statements in court.
Tim left out fingerprints, not to mention duct tape analysis, but to be fair, the list is really far too long to cover everything. But then, our desire to believe in whatever serves our ends at any given moment may make us skeptics when it comes to some areas of junks science, but not all. And the same nice folkx who share their outrage over the crap used in court to prove murders embrace junk when used to prove crimes they hate committed by people they hate.
One of the great curiosities is how the same folks who are outraged by junk science in the courtroom when applied to certain cases, certain crimes, “bite mark” analysis for example, or “bullet lead” analysis, aren’t perturbed at all about the testimony of someone like “forensic psychologist” Barbara Ziv.
Ziv, a professor at Temple University, may be remembered from her testimony against Bill Cosby. Her putative “expertise” is in dispelling “rape myths.” To put it differently, she’s an expert in promoting the #MeToo narrative, the litany of excuses for why anything a self-identified victim does proves their truth. Remember everything? Guilty. Remember nothing? Guilty. Remember some but not all? Guilty. Ziv gives the excuse for why, no matter what the case, it proves guilt. And she’s quite good at it.
Notably, Congress just reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, which now includes the “Abby Honold Act” to provide grants to train police to use “trauma-informed” methodology, the purpose of which is to:
(A) prevent re-traumatization of the victim;
(B) ensure that covered individuals use evidence-based practices to respond to and investigate cases of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking;
(C) improve communication between victims and law enforcement officers in an effort to increase the likelihood of the successful investigation and prosecution of the reported crime in a manner that protects the victim to the greatest extent possible;
(D) increase collaboration among stakeholders who are part of the coordinated community response to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking; and
(E) evaluate the effectiveness of the training process and content by measuring—
(i) investigative and prosecutorial practices and outcomes; and
(ii) the well-being of victims and their satisfaction with the criminal justice process.
Granted, it’s not as obvious as using divining rods to find dead bodies, but it’s no less junk science, even including the pretense of “evidence-based practices” as subterfuge for ideological lies tied up in a pretty pink bow. Not only are we no closer to eradicating junk science in the courtroom, but we’re embracing it when it serves to produce the popular ends of the moment. If we’re more than happy to ignore science when it serves pop ends, then the use witching rods should come as no surprise as voodoo makes its comeback, if it was every really gone.
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