Source: The Crisis of American Forensics | The Nation, by Meehan Crist and Tim Requarth
Jimmy Genrich, and thousands of others, have been imprisoned for decades because of untested “science.” … By adopting the trappings of science, the forensic disciplines co-opted science’s authority while abandoning its methods.
“The legal concept of newly discovered evidence including a change in science,” says Chris Fabricant of the Innocence Project, who is litigating Genrich’s case, “is in my view a no-brainer. It was presented to a jury as infallible, and today we know it’s not. There is an obligation—an ethical, a legal, and a moral obligation—to go back and correct the record where exaggerated claims may have led to a miscarriage of justice.”
“We were really focused on ‘this isn’t a science.’ I can tell you from doing triple-digit jury trials, the jurors really want concrete evidence. Because it’s a very hard decision to make. And that’s why scientific evidence is so dangerous when it’s not a real science, because it is persuasive.”