CAREER: Towards a Systems Analysis of the Utilization of Scientific Evidence in the Criminal Law

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project has three intertwined research objectives. First, investigators will engage in systemic analysis of the role of scientific evidence in the production of criminal justice errors. Second, investigators will develop a better understanding of the commonalities and differences between various types of expert knowledge deployed in criminal law and how they are understood by their practitioner, lawyers, courts, and the public. This better understanding will, in turn, inform the development of a provisional taxonomy of expert knowledge that may be useful for better assessing expert knowledge that is offered in court. An implicit storyline is already being constructed around the spate of exposed wrongful convictions in which an idealized "science" plays the white knight exposing the foibles of incompetent or corrupt humans as well as obsolete science. Such a storyline belies and obscures the point, well established in Science and Technology Studies, that fraudulent science does not look fraudulent except in retrospect. If a more nuanced portrait of the role of scientific knowledge in law is to be sustained, rigorous and persuasive research will be needed which documents the ways in which scientific knowledge, human actors, and legal rules have interacted in actual miscarriages of justice. At the same time, the debate over scientific evidence has descended into a debate between naive falsificationist and STS scholars who deny the possibility of ever saying anything meaningful about the legitimacy of claims to expert knowledge. This project will move forward the agenda of those scholars who seek to devise new ways of assessing and better understanding expert knowledge while remaining true to the insights developed by STS. DNA-generated exonerations have created a historic moment in which errors in the criminal justice system can be attested to with a cultural authority (of science) that is very difficult to resist. At the same time, legal developments have created great uncertainty about the use of scientific evidence in the law. Instead, this project seeks to use this historic moment to promote a better understanding of scientific evidence itself, rather than merely replacing one mythologized science with another. This project will enable the coalescing of a cluster of faculty around the broad area of science and law and the role of science in miscarriages of justice, attract graduate students, and facilitate doctoral research in this area. The project's research will be used to enrich undergraduate course offerings in the areas of forensic science, law and society, miscarriages of justice, and the death penalty.