Can We Trust Crime Forensics?

by Michael Shermer

The criminal justice system has a problem, and its name is forensics.

This was the message I heard at the Forensic Science Research Evaluation Workshop held May 26–27 at the AAAS headquarters in Washington, D.C. I spoke about pseudoscience but then listened in dismay at how the many fields in the forensic sciences that I assumed were reliable (DNA, fingerprints, and so on) in fact employ unreliable or untested techniques and show inconsistencies between evaluators of evidence.

Read more: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-we-trust-crime-forensics/