16_Points wrote:Easy, because they'll fire and/or de-certify me if I don't play by "their" rules . . .
Of course that's pretty much the situation in most, if not all, official forensics. But not the case in much of the wide community of forensic expertise where a great many practice what I might call the "non-IAI" disciplines where I think it's fair to say that most have professional organizations that pretty well stay out of how they opine, other than publishing various articles commenting on methods and terminology. There are limits, of course. An expert can get so far outside the pale that they're deemed to have brought the field into disrepute and committed malpractice. Even if they aren't defrocked by their state licensing authority, being ousted from the national professional organization ends their expert witness work. A psychologist who gets the boot from the APA is not going to find many sponsors. Some of their constraints come from inside the law. For instance, the legal definition of "mental retardation" and it's morphing now into "intellectual disability." A psychologist would have to work within the definition.
My question,
"If you're such an expert, why do others decide for you how to express your findings?", was intended to prompt some thought and discussion on the limits of expert discretion, because we're talking here about something that skirts the shoals of the rejection of opinions of confidence in less than absolute Individualization by our quasi-official advisory bodies. I think there's a line that must be walked but a line that must be drawn with care in standardizing and limiting the nature of conclusions. I think there are a couple of primary goals in crafting these things.
One is uniformity and an attempt to create an conclusion space that helps define who is real. That's reasonable, given that, at least in most parts of the U.S., a latent print examiner is anyone who says they are one. (Not just latent print examiners. I encounter various forensic "experts" who put themselves forward with the flimsiest "qualifications.") Very few state laws address the issue and leave it to courts to decide who is an expert. It's rather different in some other expert fields. Rendering an opinion in testimony as a psychiatrist or any flavor of physician, for instance, generally requires a medical license in that state, because the law on medical licensing says you must have one to "diagnose." But remember that the more general perception type experts are usually excluded from testifying on fingerprint matters, not because they aren't IAI certified, but because they haven't conducted research in functional fingerprint issues.
The other reason is, I think, an attempt to limit the scope of conclusions to what can be sustained by consensus and supported by something that can be reasonably articulated. All such efforts are always ponderous. It takes a long time to get consensus. Really, in our field, most of this is articulated in very general ways. There's nothing in any SWGFAST document that speaks of just when an examiner should Individualize in any way that you could reliably use it to say with certainty if another examiner would so conclude from a given latent. In the absence of evidence of clear erroneous fact or frank sloppy examination, a body like the IAI is not going to consider action against one expert, just because of a conclusion that conflicts in a mutually exclusive way with the conclusion of another or many other examiners. The dogma is limited to broad principles. It's nothing really to do with "science." The hard sciences are arenas where competent investigators routinely not only disagree in fundamental ways but regularly engage in open intellectual warfare, as they always have.
But mostly we conform to the standards because by doing so, we're not expressing anything erroneous and because if we get outside those bounds, we risk a fight that our sponsors don't want to have to engage in. I'm not at all saying that's wrong. For every expert who goes outside the standard bounds and potentially contributing some additional legitimate value, there's someone else prepared to breech the same bounds to contribute something bogus.
Dogma has a legitimate place. We just don't want to be blindly autodogmatic. Beware of automaticdogs, too.
