Faulty forensic science under fire

Abstract

For 19 years, Gerard Richardson sat in prison in New Jersey wondering how forensics experts had got his case so wrong. His conviction for a 1994 murder was based on a bite mark on the victim’s body that seemed to match his own teeth; it was the main physical evidence linking him to the crime. Last year, he was exonerated when DNA taken from the same bite mark turned out not to be his. According to the Innocence Project in New York, which tracks wrongful convictions, more than half of DNA exonerations involve faulty forensic evidence from crime labs and unreliable methods such as bite-mark analysis. Cases such as Richardson’s are one reason why the U.S. Department of Justice and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have now created the first US national commission on forensic science. The panel of 37 scientists, lawyers, forensics practitioners and law-enforcement officials met for the first time this week in Washington D.C., and aims to advise on government policies such as training and certification standards. In March, NIST will begin to set up a parallel panel, a forensic-science standards board that will set specific standards for the methods used in crime labs.