CLPEX Chat Board

I would expect that when an identification fails for lack of verification, the notes of the original examiner would reflect that he/she called the identification, but that it failed for lack of verification, and that the second examiner would also initial the notes, or that there would be some such documentation to provide transparency. How much of the justification and discussion appears in the notes?

Pat A. Wertheim wrote: But I question whether a team of LPE's, even removed from the pressure to perform to the satisfaction of the officers, can seriously question each other to justify and prove their conclusions year after year. Over time, I wonder about the same climate developing that allowed the Mayfield error.

I have a related concern that totally isolated independent latent units might also tend to be very conservative, limiting definitive conclusion only to cases where they believe the conclusion couldn't be subject to rational challenge. If you're trying to represent both "sides," don't you have to play the sophist and argue both sides? How do you reconcile that with a conclusion of firm belief? Examinations would still be challenged when they could be challenged to the benefit of one side or the other. I think there's considerable intellectual failure in imagining greater separation accomplishes much. It amounts to a determination that there can be a clear distinction made between opinion conclusions that are palatable and those that aren't. That's the same kind of vague threshold that's criticized now. The solution to the dilemma in law is exactly what's in place now, experts argue their opinions to the fact finders. Both views get heard. Even the advantages are balanced. The defense expert can argue with absolute freedom, including argument from the fringes and beyond. The official expert argues under far more constraints, but those constraints themselves lend a certain credibility.

One defense case I am currently working pro bono is a death penalty case going up for appeal. The appellate attorney asked the court to fund a defense expert to help her review the case. The court refused. And this is not a case with a broad variety of other evidence -- only the fingerprints and nothing else, but there are serious questions in my mind already.

It's real hard to pursue that kind of appeal. The petitioner has to pretty much show what the outcome of the analysis would be and that it would change the verdict, in order to get an attorney and the money for the analysis and permission to reanalyze, and even having an attorney doesn't get you over that hurdle. So you naturally see more of that sort of effort in death cases where it's a lot easier to get pro bono work done.

So again I ask, wouldn't a competent, ethical defense expert who caused the original law enforcement examiner to have to justify his conclusion introduce better science into the situation?

That goes back to what's "science." But, if we take it strictly considering an opposition expert reinterpreting the evidence (as opposed to expounding on the discipline as a whole), and if we mean that an examination becomes more "scientific" when the examiner does all that is technically possible in the way of refined observation and reports the data and interpretations that went into the conclusion, as well as the differentials - if that would be the response to a hypothetical situation in which any examination more than "easy" got an adversarial expert - I suppose it would be more scientific, more rigorous. It would certainly be closer to the way in which science demands research be reported. (Always remembering that an examination is not "research" or "an experiment.") In other words, you would be better able to review the examination, and I think that makes it "more scientific."

And why did you say "ethical" expert? "Ethical" is as hard to pin down as "scientific." For instance, is an expert (fully qualified) who is privately and publicly an unequivocal opponent of the death penalty and whose expert conclusions always favor the petitioner under death sentence ethical or not? Is he strictly neutral in his science and just not being sponsored when his conclusions won't help the petitioner? Is he intentionally biased and will find any interpretation of evidence that might keep the petitioner alive? Is he unwittingly biased? The point is that you can't say "ethical" and filter the field of experts in any meaningful way. As you know, you may have to answer what to you is the most absurd conclusion or criticism. Ethical or not, the effect on the original examiner's work is the same.

Gerald Clough wrote:. . . if we take it strictly considering an opposition expert reinterpreting the evidence (as opposed to expounding on the discipline as a whole), and if we mean that an examination becomes more "scientific" when the examiner does all that is technically possible in the way of refined observation and reports the data and interpretations that went into the conclusion, as well as the differentials - if that would be the response to a hypothetical situation in which any examination more than "easy" got an adversarial expert - I suppose it would be more scientific, more rigorous. It would certainly be closer to the way in which science demands research be reported. (Always remembering that an examination is not "research" or "an experiment.") In other words, you would be better able to review the examination, and I think that makes it "more scientific."

I was thinking of the adversarial situation that occasionally occurs when researchers from different laboratories reach conflicting conclusions in a scientific experiment (the infamous cold fusion experiment, for example), and I was trying to apply that adversarial environment to the latent print world. As you correctly point out, the two are different and should not be confused.

Gerald Clough wrote:And why did you say "ethical" expert? "Ethical" is as hard to pin down as "scientific." For instance, is an expert (fully qualified) who is privately and publicly an unequivocal opponent of the death penalty and whose expert conclusions always favor the petitioner under death sentence ethical or not? Is he strictly neutral in his science and just not being sponsored when his conclusions won't help the petitioner? Is he intentionally biased and will find any interpretation of evidence that might keep the petitioner alive? Is he unwittingly biased? The point is that you can't say "ethical" and filter the field of experts in any meaningful way. As you know, you may have to answer what to you is the most absurd conclusion or criticism. Ethical or not, the effect on the original examiner's work is the same.

Point taken. Word “ethical” withdrawn.

Thanks, Gerald. I really do appreciate your comments. This whole discussion exercise is about having to think out a situation, examine beliefs, and understand better what we do.

Pat A. Wertheim wrote:I would expect that when an identification fails for lack of verification, the notes of the original examiner would reflect that he/she called the identification, but that it failed for lack of verification, and that the second examiner would also initial the notes, or that there would be some such documentation to provide transparency. How much of the justification and discussion appears in the notes?

We write reports with conclusions on them. The verifier will annotate the report with their own notes and give the case back to the original examiner if any update is needed. If a subsequent report is generated, the original report is kept in the case jacket so that any changes can be seen. All items are dated too, so if documentation is created after the original report is generated, you can see when. Justifications usually exist in the form of a side by side chart, I've never received a narrative justification.

Pat A. Wertheim wrote:I was thinking of the adversarial situation that occasionally occurs when researchers from different laboratories reach conflicting conclusions in a scientific experiment (the infamous cold fusion experiment, for example), and I was trying to apply that adversarial environment to the latent print world. As you correctly point out, the two are different and should not be confused.

Well, now what if we keep it in the proper realm, which could properly be described as "clinical practice," forming critical opinion that is required to answer some vital need and forming that opinion from a combination of considerable expert experience and scientific knowledge that is not sufficient to opine with absolute certainty but provides useful information and doesn't conflict with the opinion. Does critical review make that opinion more "scientific"? No. The science contribution is unchanged. Does the entity that will use the opinion have a better ground for judging its merit? I have to say yes.

The real question is if it causes the crafter of the opinion to be more rigorous. If it didn't, that kind of review wouldn't be a part of so many endeavors. Is it more likely to make one or the other more accurate? If it induces greater rigor, it may, although the opinion gained with less rigor might also be accurate, or both the original opinion and the offered alternative may be wrong. But the critical review may argue one or another aspect of the process that perhaps the affected entity should consider. Not science. Just plain old good decision making. And in clinical practice, in the case of differing opinions, no matter how firmly the opinion is held, if pressed, each has to acknowledge that it's possible the other might be right. Even if they don't acknowledge that it's possible, the entity that uses the opinions certainly will (or should), but will depend on the one they eventually choose to depend on or will reject them both and decide their question on some other basis.

Gerald said:

I think there's considerable intellectual failure in imagining greater separation accomplishes much.

Gerald,

Playing the devil's advocate, are you saying that the NAS got it wrong?

Michele wrote:Gerald said:

I think there's considerable intellectual failure in imagining greater separation accomplishes much.

Gerald,

Playing the devil's advocate, are you saying that the NAS got it wrong?

I don't take much issue with anything in the Report, because it was intended to be a call for examination of every aspect of forensics, and that's not a bad thing at all, and because I understand the nature of committees and their products and the perspectives they're trying to balance, which can never be done wholly satisfactorily to anyone. They can't get it wrong by suggesting anything that might have potential. But I think the impulse to think about addressing some obvious concerns about law enforcement based forensics by suggesting separation reflects a failure to consider that such a thing both creates its own potential for problems and isn't based on the kind of evidence that ought to be demanded before making such a substantial change. It's also not something that can be controlled at the federal level and therefore isn't a very practical suggestion. I also think it doesn't address the real functional issues that can only be addressed in law and aren't really part of any argument about science or reliability. Of course, there are degrees of separation that can be considered, and some of them may be worth pursuing. But all that can really come out of it is study and recommendations that can't be forced, since the states individually determine issues of evidence.

It's not such a failure to think about it, but any leaping to embrace the idea isn't well thought out with regard to it being a substantial improvement, compared to a lot of other possible improvements, which I happen to think are in the area of training. But again, mostly all that can be done at the national level is to sponsor study and make recommendations to the states and agencies.

The separation would indeed be a worthwhile thing, if there was a standard of practice that produced scientific factual certainty that could not be contested. But that's not the case in these disciplines, and nothing is going to substitute for adversarial expertise. I haven't talked with anyone involved about precisely this proposal. Maybe they do recognize that the legal environment is very hard and slow to change, and they just figure this accomplishes at least something. But I still don't think it turns out to do much when it's thought all the way through. My thinking and my opinion, subject, of course, to being argued.

Edit

Sorry to join in so late. It's been great seeing a good discussion erupt from clpex.

I think that it's clear that 'Are we scientists?' is a difficult question to answer and impossible to get a consensus on.

The general public thinks we're scientists for no other reason than the TV said so. Grissom says, "Dammit, I'm a SCIENTIST." And that's what everyone now believes. But no one can nail down what it means to be a 'scientist'.

What if you posed those original questions to scientists? Would theoretical scientists be able to answer all of those questions? Would research scientists? Would you only qualify if you worked at a university, or would private biotech firms have scientists, too? Many, many scientists are not impartial or objective. The scientific method is a nice theory, but isn't practiced on a day-to-day level. Peer review has become a joke. The journals read the article, but there is no verification or repeatability studies going on. The big journals publish articles that are flashy and sell copy. So what are we even comparing ourselves to.

I've worked in a research lab, a testing lab, and now a forensics lab. Our BS isn't so that much different from their BS. I know that I follow the scientific method in a much more structured way here than when I was doing cancer research. But does that mean anything? Everyone seems to have this ideal view of a scientist that just doesn't exist. THEY think we're scientists (whoever THEY is) so we should act like scientists and work scientifically. And if we act like scientists and work scientifically, then we're scientists.

In my lab I have flasks and beakers of colored liquids, and I wear a white lab coat. So according to every movie I've ever seen, I guess that makes me a scientist.

or should the question really be do you want to be considered a scientist?

See the link: http://www.amazon.com/Better-Science-Go ... 513&sr=1-1 for the following book:

For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage (Hardcover)
~ Tara Parker-Pope

"This is science writing at its best. . . . "
-Christopher McDougall, author of The New York Times bestseller

I guess if you're married, you are a scientist. If you are divorced or single, you don't know jack-spit about science.