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their innocence. Many DNA-relat- ed exonerees were convicted upon forensic evidence such as hair com- parisons, blood splatter patterns or ballistics testing, to name just a few. Clearly, later DNA evidence in these cases demonstrated that much of this forensic evidence was faulty or at least overstated.
It is undeniable that when an expert witness tells of holding an M.D. or Ph.D. from a prestigious institution along with an impressive list of publications and honors, any juror is likely to place a great deal of weight on the testimony of that wit- ness. Even attorneys and judges are at a disadvantage to challenge the work, as they too lack backgrounds in the field. Thus, when that testimony
incorrectly links a defendant to a crime with an unjustifiable degree of certainty, it is a recipe for convicting the innocent.
“They really wanted me to know, and you the lawyers to know, that they took their job ver y seriously. They reiterated that they looked at every piece of evidence twice before rendering their verdict.” So the judge told Megan, one of the authors of this article, after a recent jury trial, after she met with members of the jury to thank them for their service. We be- lieve we have seen a change in jurors over the years. With the rise of docu- mentaries about false convictions, jurors seem less prone to blindly accept the word of law enforce- ment. They seem to take longer to
reach verdicts, to struggle with the seriousness of the duty they have un- dertaken. Most jurors want to reach the “right” verdict. When they hear from an “expert,” it offers them a sense of relief; a feeling that someone with authority has provided informa- tion that is irrefutable — information they can depend on — information that absolves them of any concern they may wrongfully convict an inno- cent person. However, the misappli- cation of forensic science contributed to 52% of wrongful convictions in In- nocence Project cases.2 False or mis- leading forensic evidence was a con- tributing factor in 24% of all wrongful convictions nationally, according to the National Registr y of Exonera- tions, which tracks both DNA and non-DNA based exonerations.3
Surely, one would think that advances in science were only helping to ensure the accuracy of convictions. For years, even defense attorneys thought so. “They found your finger- prints at the scene, the case is unwin- nable,” is what defense attorneys told clients for decades in the belief that fingerprint analysis was infallible. For years, the fields of forensic expertise used to convict expanded — micro- scopic hair comparison, bite mark matching and touch DNA amplifica- tion, to name a few. With the growing number of expert disciplines and resulting convictions, there ultimate- ly came challenges to the accuracy of the science. Then came hundreds of exonerations as we learned that the “science” was often unreliable and the testimony exceeded the reality of what the science could show.
A 2009 report issued by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concluded that, “with the excep- tion of nuclear DNA analysis . . . no forensic method has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to con- sistently, and with a high degree of
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