The Maryland Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that firearms experts will no longer be able to testify that a bullet was fired from a particular gun. Many forensic methods that rely on pattern-matching, like bite mark and tool mark analysis, rely on subjective interpretations that are presented as scientific conclusions with definitive solutions.
In the case of bite mark evidence, government watchdogs report that examiners not only cannot identify the source of bitemark with reasonable accuracy, they cannot even consistently agree on whether an injury is a human bitemark. It turns out that using rifling groove patterns to match an unknown bullet to a known firearm is not repeatable, reproducible, or accurate to any statistically valid level of certainty. I have previously reported similar reports suggesting that drug dogs are even more inaccurate. Cops know they are inaccurate, but refer to drug K9s as “4 legged money generators.”
Dogs are very good at reading people. They know that if they give their handler what he wants, they get a reward. If the cop wants the dog to alert on a car, the dog will alert on a car. There was one study that actually supported that, but once the study was published, cops have refused to participate in any more studies unless those studies are being performed by pro-policing organizations.
Cops don’t even keep records of how often dogs alert to drugs and then no drugs are found. The police say:
“There’s been cars that my dog’s hit on… and just because there wasn’t a product in it, doesn’t mean the dog can’t smell it,” says Gunnar Fulmer, a K9 officer with the Walla Walla Police Department. “[The drug odor] gets permeated in clothing, it gets permeated in the headliners in cars.”
The problem here is obvious- even giving the dog the benefit of the doubt, probable cause means that the search is being done because drugs are probably there. What the cop in the above quote is saying is that by alerting, the dog is indicating that drugs may have been there at some time in the past. The dog indicates the odor of drugs, but not the presence of drugs. That isn’t the same thing and shouldn’t be enough to trigger a warrantless search of someone’s property.
It isn’t just police dogs, or bite marks, or even bullet matching. Falsifying evidence to get higher conviction rates is widespread among police, and the FBI lab itself has been caught falsifying lab tests. Much of what is called “forensics” is little more than pseudoscientific nonsense that hides behind the public’s virtual ignorance of what science really is, but it sounds good and is nothing more than snake oil designed to fool a jury into convicting the defendant.
When I worked for the fire department, we participated in the United Way. One of the things I used to donate money to was the Innocence Project. They use scientific results to prove that people were wrongly convicted- things like DNA evidence to prove that a man on death row was actually innocent. It’s a worthy cause.
