ETHICS OF REPORTING AND INTERPRETATION
The major duties of a forensic scientist are to perform scientific analysis of evidence, report on the conclusions reached on the basis of that analysis, and—possibly—testify about that work and those results in court. A formal laboratory report is written for every case that is analyzed in a public forensic science laboratory in a criminal case. Formal reports may not be written for work done by independent experts in some criminal cases or by experts in civil matters. Only a small percentage of criminal or civil cases ever make it into a courtroom; nearly all are settled out of court. Most of these are the result of a plea bargain in criminal cases or an agreement between the parties in a civil case. The rules of evidence favor a court trial. Discovery is limited in criminal cases in most jurisdictions, which encourages the accused to seek information via the trial. Laboratory reports tend to be brief; in many cases they are little more than certificates of analysis (see Chapter 24). Just the opposite is true in civil cases: Since only money (and not life or liberty) is at stake in a civil case, discovery is more liberal and the parties are strongly encouraged to settle out of court. Laboratory reports tend to be comprehensive and should lay out all of the details of the analysis and present all of the data. The brevity of many laboratory reports in criminal cases raises ethical questions on the ground that important information that could be used by the defense in a case is not forthcoming by the laboratory unless discovery is exercised or there is a trial. Because very few cases get to court, the forensic science laboratory report becomes the public face of the laboratory. The report is, in many cases, the only product that the public sees from the laboratory. If it is not a com prehensive scientific report, this practice can reflect poorly on the field as not being scientific enough. Clearly, the most important component of a forensic science laboratory report consists of the conclusions reached by the examiner about each piece of evidence examined. In the course of analysis, all evidence is identified and characterized to one extent or another. In some cases, efforts are made to provide a degree of association between evidence whose source is known with evidence from the crime scene and whose source is unknown and needs to be determined. The association of crime scene evidence with a source can be critical information in the determination of guilt or innocence. For example, it may be important to determine if fingerprints on a murder weapon came from the accused, or whether a bank robber wrote a note demanding money, or if fibers found at the scene of a kidnapping came from a sweater worn by the victim. The need to explain these relationships gives rise to terms of association that express the degree of certainty that the unknown evidence came from a particular source. Only in a fraction of criminal cases it is possible to individualize evidence to a particular source and even many of these situations were called into question by the NAS Report and other sources. Only in the case of DNA typing it
is currently possible to provide reliable probabilities that evidence arose from a particular person. This means that more relative, less certain descriptors must be used in associating other types of evidence. A possible ethical problem with the use of the terms of association is that their meanings are not well understood or agreed upon even by the forensic scientific community that uses them. Some examples follow that will illustrate the problem. A prime example is the term match. This is often used to describe the association of fingerprints, bullets, handwriting, etc., with a known source. This term is often used to connote that the known and unknown have a common source (individualization), as in, “The fingerprints on the gun matched those of the defendant.” The implication is that there are no other fingerprints in the world that could have the same characteristics exhibited in the same way. In other instances, the term is used to impart a strong association but not individualization. “The fibers from the car seat matched the fibers in the victim’s sweater.” Without a standard, agreed-upon meaning for this and related terms, such as “similar to,” juries, judges, and attorneys can be confused, and rightly so. There is another ethical issue with courtroom testimony that is related to imprecise use of associative terminology. Not only it is important for the forensic scientist to use proper terminology and define it clearly for the trier of fact, but also, they must give the evidence its due and they should not overstate or understate their results or the meaning of them. For example, take the case where someone is abducted and taken away in the perpetrator’s automobile. After the victim is rescued, a search is per formed in the interior of the vehicle. Loose fibers are found. These are compared with fibers from a sweater that the victim was wearing at the time of the kidnapping. The known samples from the sweater are blue acrylic fibers with a round cross-section; the same is true for the fibers recovered from the car seat. At trial, the forensic scientist testifies that the fibers found on the car seat came from the sweater. This is a conclusion of single source—the sweater was the only possible source of the fibers! As a mass-produced garment, the sweater cannot be the only source of those fibers. On the other hand, if a scientist identifies a white powder as containing cocaine but testifies in court that the powder could be cocaine, then that is just as bad because the molecular structure of cocaine is unique to that class of material. In either case, the science is not being well used and the trier of fact is being misled.
