Youtor
The Interactions Between Science and the Law
>> YOUR LINK HERE: ___ http://youtube.com/watch?v=3pdsy_0VBAc
http://www.DocuThesis.com • My name is Simon Cole; I'm an associate professor and the chair of the department of criminology, law and society, in the school of social ecology. • I do research on the interaction between science and the law, my primary interest is fingerprints identification and the use of finger prints identification in the criminal justice system. • Fingerprints evidence is one of the most widely trusted forms of forensic evidence in a court of law. It's based on trying to create a link between a fingerprint found at the crime scene and a fingerprint taken from a person you have in custody. • They do that by seeing similarities between the print of the crime scene and the print taken from the person in custody. But the question is how much similarities are necessary to reach that conclusion when they come from the same source. • Lots of prints in the world have to one another, how many similarities do you need to decide that these two prints came from the same finger... • Everybody assumes that the important question about fingerprints is are they unique? it turns out the a hundred years later that's really not the key question. There's not much despaired whether or not our fingerprints are unique but the key question is how accurate fingerprints examiners are when they match fingerprints. • Around the turn of the 20th Century, 1910's, 1920's, what happened in courtrooms... • Why did the courts allow fingerprints evidence into the courts in the first place? So I went back and looked at the early court cases, the appellant records, the trial transcripts, the scientific literature that existed at that time and to my astonishment I found out that it was led into court without any scientific study showing how good or bad it actually was or whether it actually worked. • We've assumed that it always gives the correct answer. We treated it as a hundred per cent accurate, as something that is never wrong and that's just not true. Errors do occur. The question is how often they occur... • So we're now a hundred years later and the studies to validate fingerprint evidence are beginning to be done. • The Dalbort decision is probably the most important scientific evidence case ever decided in the United States. It's a Supreme Court case from 1993 that says that for a scientific evidence to be used in court, it has to be both relevant and reliable, because my research shows that there are no reliability studies for fingerprints evidence according to the Dalbort Case that means that fingerprints evidence shouldn't be allowed in court. • One of the consequences of juries not having the good information as to the accuracy of the fingerprint identification that gave, assigned higher value to it that it actually has. They've been told that it's a hundred per cent accurate. We know that isn't true so they have to be told how accurate it is. • One of the things that this research can do it actually reform forensic science. We want the justice system to do better at finding the right person and not identifying the wrong person. • If scientific evidence is misused it can lead to a person being convicted of a crime they didn't commit. There are errors in fingerprint identification.
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