Ear Print Case Commentary Blames "Forensic Science"
An Editorial Comment
In other stories on this site, we have told our readers about the ear print evidence experience which caused David Kunze and Mark Dallagher to spend years in prison until their convictions were reversed. The forensic sciences are being blamed for these lapses, and they deserve the blame when earnest and well-meaning police experts seize upon a novelty that "sounds good" and rush in, using unproven and potentially unreliable expert conclusions to obtain convictions without having engaged in the careful scientific scrutiny that is expected of persons who profess to act as "scientists." If forensic science wants to be taken seriously, at a minimum such rush-to-judgment stampedes on novel evidence that has not been exposed to careful testing for accuracy and reliability must stop.
Mark Dallagher’s ordeal caused by ear print evidence has been criticized widely in the U.K. On February 3, 2004, the London Times (OnLine edition), ran an article by Roger Ede titled, "Wrongful convictions put forensic science in the dock." See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,200-984075,00.html Ede is, himself, a co-author of a 2003 book on forensic practice in criminal cases published in the U.K. In the story, the author comments on a number of wrongful convictions that have occurred in Great Britain. These cases dealt with different branches of the forensic sciences. About the ear print case, Ede said:
"Mark Dallagher was jailed in 1998 after a prosecution expert told his trial that an earprint on a window at the home of the victim, a 94-year-old-
woman, was certainly his. That evidence has since been discredited and new DNA evidence has implicated a different person. Mr. Dallagher was cleared last month."
"Forensic Science" is a broad label, under which many different disciplines labor. Some of these disciplines can point to many years of experience and have amassed a voluminous professional literature that sits atop of accumulated data supporting a good-faith belief in the worth of its findings. Friction ridge impression evidence is one of these. Forensic document examination is another. There are others. But research can never stop in any field. No matter how convinced in the infallibility of a profession’s tenets one may be, research challenging its conclusions is always desirable and should never be abandoned. After all, if the belief in the reliability of a science is so powerful, any additional research is simply likely to keep reinforcing the foundation for that belief. Additional research is not an enemy of established forensic sciences that are worthy of trust. But such research will ferret out instances where the trust is unwarranted.
The real danger in disciplines that have existed for a long time is not that their underlying premises will be proved wrong, but that experts in the field will go farther than research and experience of the past justify. There is a danger that methodologies that are used for some purposes will be misused, often unintentionally and in good faith, to achieve results which the methodologies cannot warrant. There is an even greater danger that well-meaning laboratory examiners will, when defending their livelihood on the witness stand, overstate the probative value of their findings and thus lull a fact finder into the false belief that the forensic evidence proves much more than it actually does. Since forensic evidence is ordinarily produced only by the prosecution, the result is, inevitably, a conviction that rests on less solid scientific grounds than the fact finder has reason to believe.
Andre A. Moenssens
