Bukka White Warns You...

“Junk Science and the Criminal Justice System” by M. Chris Fabricant, 2022

If your vision of scientific crime-solving is the glamorous CSI lab filled with sexy women wearing lab coats, millions in tech equipment and 'nerds' with access to thousands of databases, that's a TV fantasy. The reality is much more prosaic and flawed, especially in the retrograde death penalty states of the South and plains. Fabricant is a lawyer for the Innocence Project, which has beaten the various pseudo-scientific practices common in the courts with actual DNA science. He looks at the cases that made 'junk' science the standard in law, then how it was undermined by its numerous flaws. He also examines the methods and laws that support the imprisoning of innocents. 

If you can't read 'true crime,' this book is not for you, as it's full of the gory details of various murders. My aunt used to read true crime magazines, and after reading one of hers as a kid, I was repulsed. Now TV & streaming is flooded with this violent stuff. These cases take place in Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Virginia and Georgia, with the usual array of meat-headed prosecutors and cops. Racism and classism is a sub-text of the whole process as you might expect. He calls the flawed methods “poor people science.” In fact, the U.S. mass incarceration state inevitably increases the number of innocent people put behind bars. Overwhelming public defenders to the point where a 'defense' becomes impossible is another byproduct. Or putting in a public defender that does nothing. In fact, if you insist on your innocence, you might get a heavier sentence or preclude parole after conviction.

Several famous cases are mentioned, like Ted Bundy and the Sam Shepard murder case. The key legal decisions and doctrines that opened the door to pseudo-science in the criminal courts, all the way up to the national FBI Lab, are included. On the flip side is a 2009 study by the National Academy of Science (NAS) which undermined 13 forensic methods from the point of view of dispassionate actual scientists, not invested prosecutors and forensic associations. The arrival of sophisticated DNA evidence was also crucial and resulted in the release of 227 prisoners accused of murder over 20 years, though others had already been executed. The U.S.'s legal support of the death penalty makes errors final. Rick Perry, Texas governor, presided over 238 executions, the most of any state. 56 were later found to be erroneous according to Trafficant. It was only in 2012 that the USDOJ started restraining the FBI Lab from using junk 'expert' methods.

Fabricant goes after the dentist 'experts' who made omnipresent 'bite marks' in skin into a livelihood. Bite marks were shown to have a 63% error rate. Or the 'fire experts' who looked at fires and thought they could figure out if it was arson by looking at the scene or trusting a dog. Controlled burns in similar circumstances have shown their guesses to be wrong, as has chemical analysis. Or 'tool marks' that send people to jail for life, as if only one tool could make a certain mark. Then there are hair 'comparisons' that assume every person's hair is exclusive, without using DNA testing, many of which later proved erroneous. The FBI especially favored and testified to this cheap method until their errors were put through an audit after the NAS report. Other forensic issues – shoe prints, 'comparative lead bullet analysis,' polygraphs, tire treads, blood splatter, handwriting, fiber analysis, ballistics – are also questioned.  Even finger-prints are suspect, as no one actually knows how unique they are, especially from partial or smudged prints.

Parchman Farm, MS

One of the keys to  science is 'peer review' done by scientists who have done actual experiments. Failure rates are also key. Rigorously controlled studies have to be conducted. Most of these forensic methods met no such criteria but relied on educated guesses or pure nonsense. After all, how are dentists qualified to understand the role of skin in a bite? Skin is not their forte, nor is it stiff like molding plaster. It's fungible, soft and impermanent. And oddly, why are so many murders supposedly accompanied by bites? The battle over 'bite' marks as reliable evidence Trafficant calls “The Bite Wars” and its a strong thread through this book.

Legal ideas like 'the principle of finality' block later evidence of innocence. In 2006 the Supreme Court assumed that the 'checks' in the legal system meant that the system was working. The Supreme Court said the statistically small number of reversed felony convictions were 'the whole iceberg' and not just the tip. This though DNA evidence is only occasionally relevant in the broad range of felonies they looked at. Civil cases benefited by the Supreme Court's 1993 Daubert case, which limited the reliability of forensics in civil matters … but not criminal. Then there are the careers of elected and appointed prosecutors, judges and police, who routinely exercise 'confirmation bias' to protect their behinds. According to Fabricant, Clinton & Biden gutted death penalty appeals in 1996 in the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act , after which federal court reversals went down 40%. Mentally-deficient people are routinely executed even though the Supreme Court ruled otherwise in Atkins v Virginia.

An example is the hanging DA of Dallas, Texas Henry Wade, whose term lasted nearly 40 years from the '50s to the '90s. His police arm was Will Fritz, who had an unbelievable 98% homicide clear rate. You can imagine how that went, as Fritz was many times able to get confessions from the innocent, a leading cause of wrongful convictions. Inevitably, once out of the interrogation room they refute their confessions, but it's too late. Like other Southern cities, Wade and Fritz would round up every black man with a record in the locality where the murder was committed. Reliable and multiple alibi witnesses are ignored by the prosecutor and gullible juries alike. Wade recommended that no “Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans ...” should be put on juries.

This book is a close-in look at how the criminal courts deal with murder in the U.S., with cases and case law over a period of 50 or so years. If nothing else, it should convince you the 'death sentence' is a racist and anti-working class form of retribution, rehabilitation and deterrence. It shows the value of real science and groups like the Innocence Project, as these are virtual case studies of how they beat junk science. Though that Project has not made much of a dent in the overall incarceration state, nor can it.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Six-Pointed Star,” “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (A. Davis); “The Confession” and “A Time to Kill” (both by Grisham); “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “Prison Strike Against Modern Slavery,” “With Liberty and Justice For Some” (Greenwald); “Legal Logic Behind Raids,” “The Divide” (Taibbi).

May Day Books has volumes on prison and legal issues from a Left point of view.

And I got it at the Athens, GA library!  Red Frog / March 23, 2024