Okay everybody to a second also seminar for the term.
And just before I introduce to speak for today I just want to let you know that that one that
is due to happen in two weeks time has actually been cancelled because it falls in the strike.
So we've got one day and then we're not quite sure when the next one is,
because I don't know whether that one following the next one is also going to be cancelled, but I'll let you know.
But certainly the very next one has been cancelled. But today we have Professor Simon Cole who is here and who's visiting the centre.
So you've probably seen him in the centre. He's here until the end of June, so you can harass him after the talk, but also over the next few months.
And Simon is professor of Criminology,
Law and Society and Director of the NIEKERK Centre for Science and Society at the University of California, Irvine.
Simon's also the Academy to US Editor in chief of Theoretical Criminology, and he's associate editor of the National Registry of Exonerations.
Today, Simon is going to be talking to us about that registry and about the work he does with it.
So thank you. Thanks. Thank you, Mary, and thanks for such a great turnout.
I was really excited to when Mary asked me to talk about the National Registry of Exonerations,
even though she later claimed not to remember doing so because no one's really no one in academia has ever really asked me to talk about it.
And I get asked to talk about forensic science or the Castle State, but not about this, let alone in criminology.
So. So I'm kind of excited to talk about this and thanks for such great turnout.
I was just going to say a little bit about myself, since you may not know me and some of my background is sort of relevant to what I'll say later,
and then I'll talk a little bit about the context of the registry, and then I'll show you the registry.
And then at that point three, there will have been like no intellectual or research content whatsoever in the talk.
And so then in part four, I will try to introduce some intellectual and research content by talking about a project,
research project that I'm doing that I would be happy to get everyone's feedback on because it's ongoing.
So I just want to say a little bit about myself.
I work in a it's sort of interesting in the context of the Criminology Centre, I work in the Department of Criminology,
Law and Society in which either not one or only one faculty member has a degree in criminology.
So about half of us have a degree in sociology and half are other.
I'm part of the other.
I have a great degree in science and technology studies, which is sort of social social studies of the making of scientific knowledge.
Bruno Latour is the person whose name you would know in this field if you know anyone,
although that's a little sad to say in the UK because there's a lot of major figures in that field that I'm from the UK cleaning stories,
Steve Woolgar, who is still here at the business school,
and in the early days there was an Edinburgh School of Science Studies and there was a back school of lots of stuff other than Latour.
And I worked on forensic science as a project in scientific knowledge, very difficult to get jobs in science studies in the US.
So I ended up using the forensic science thing to move into the field of criminology, law,
society and my work on forensic science saying that a lot of it didn't seem to have validated itself,
got people in the innocence, research and movement interested in my work,
and I started getting invited to conferences about wrongful conviction and innocence.
And you can't really go to such things where there are exonerees in attendance who are talking about their stories
of being wrongly convicted and come away not wanting to kind of do something about the problem and get involved.
And for a while I wanted to start an Innocence Project at UC Irvine, maybe focussed on forensic science,
which I did start it very quietly, because once you start one of these things, you start getting mail from prisons.
And I didn't want to be someone who was like let down people's hopes and it didn't really work.
We didn't have we didn't have enough lawyers. I'm not a lawyer and we weren't really able to help people.
And then the opportunity came along to work on the National Registry of Exonerations.
It was looking for a new home, and that seemed a better fit, both for me and for UC Irvine.
It's a research project. We don't actually help people or work with people, so we didn't need to do that and it's very much an academic project.
So it was I was really thrilled to to be able to get involved in the Innocence Movement this, this way.
So that's kind of how how I came to it. So let me tell you a little bit about the context of the National Registry of of Exonerations.
So wrongful long, full conviction has like a long history of research and discussion in the United States as well as as well as here.
And it's nice to talk about this with Carolyn Foyle here has done a lot of research on this on this topic.
But you could go back to 1923. I don't know if if you've heard of this judge learned hand this side from having just a great name.
She is often called the greatest US judge never to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
And he has this quotation here saying, there isn't you know, we don't really need to worry about wrongful conviction.
It doesn't actually happen. It's just a myth. And starting right around that time, not.
Long afterwards, you start getting academics sort of debunking that claim.
And the first one is probably Edward Borchardt is a law professor at Yale, publishes this book in 1932.
And one of the things they do in order to debunk the claim that there are no wrongful convictions is to start compiling lists of wrongful convictions.
And that's where you get this whole idea of lists.
And you can kind of walk through all the history of books about wrongful conviction in the United States.
And they almost always have a list. There's always something, some kind of a list, maybe good, maybe bad, but some kind of a list.
So it's important to note, again, this may be obvious, but let me just note it,
that when we talk about wrongful convictions, we're trying to sort of make lists and count wrongful convictions.
We can't really count wrongful convictions because we don't know whether people are guilty or innocent.
That's the whole point. All we know is whether they've been convicted or acquitted.
So we kind of try to count wrongful convictions by counting exonerations.
So people who have somehow been released by the legal system on grounds of innocence as a proxy for wrongful convictions.
But of course, we know that it's a very imperfect proxy and that there must be lots and lots of people,
multiples of the people who are exonerated, who are wrongly convicted and just aren't able to prove it and nobody finds out about it.
So we never, never learn that. So exonerations are not the same as wrongful convictions in both directions.
Some exonerations, maybe of guilty people. I think that's probably a really small number.
But most wrongful convictions are probably not wrongful, not exonerations.
So exonerations are probably a very small drop in the bucket of actual wrongful convictions that we don't know about and we never will know about.
And how do I know this? Well, just read a few exonerations and see how lucky these people were to actually get exonerated and
look at the fortuitously involved in each of these cases that they actually got exonerated.
And then think of the people who didn't get those lucky breaks along the way.
And those are the unknown, wrongly convicted.
So this list making kind of culminates in around 1987 when Hugo Pardo and Michael
Radelet publish this list of 350 wrongful convictions in death penalty cases.
And they use this method in the middle here, cases in which we believe a majority of neutral observers,
given the evidence at our disposal, would judge the defendant in question to be innocent.
So we read the cases. We think these people are innocent and we think you, the reader, would agree.
And this is the Reagan administration. So the attorney general didn't like this, and he sent these law professors, Paul Cosell and Stephen Markman.
Paul Cosell is still around and says, you know,
take down this study and they go and read the cases and they pick the weakest, the ones with the weakest claim to innocence.
And they say, we've read this case file really carefully and we don't think this person is innocent.
They look guilty as [INAUDIBLE] to us. And so we don't think this person is innocent.
And if you don't and therefore you can't trust these researchers, they're anti-death penalty advocates.
So we don't believe any of the 350 cases.
And, you know, you can say what you want about that, but it was a somewhat effective critique.
And then DNA happens. So DNA changes the game.
DNA comes from the UK, from Al Jeffress at the University of Leicester.
And the first case it was used in, actually the first case is an immigration case,
but then it was used in a murder and it actually averted a potential wrongful
conviction because the person suspected in these murders was confessed to the crime.
And then that confession was disproved by analysis of the DNA, DNA evidence,
and it identified another person as the perpetrator of this two murders of teenage girls.
So that was the first exoneration involving DNA and also sort of begins to open up the potential for for the use of of of DNA.
Again, you may know all of this, but I'll just quickly mention.
DNA is used in exonerations when there is bodily fluid at the crime scene that probably has to come from the perpetrator.
It's not that useful if not. And so and so such cases, especially in the preceding decades when DNA evidence was not that powerful and sensitive,
the kind of cases that have this biological evidence tend to be rape murder cases,
their murder cases where there's a semen sample because of because of a rape.
So they overwhelmingly skew towards that kind of case.
And so then this spreads to the United States, and you have the first DNA exoneration in 1989 of David Vasquez.
And actually the case is remarkably similar to the Lester case.
Again, Vasquez is this mildly mentally retarded, confessed to the crime through a dream confession,
pled guilty, and then DNA eventually found the true perpetrator.
And so this inspires the famous Innocence Project in the United States, where the lawyers,
Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, say, see the potential of using DNA to to get people out of prison.
But again, in order to do that, they need a very special kind of case,
a case with biological evidence at the crime scene that's not tested at the time of the original investigation that's preserved.
And then that's that's a big one. The legal requirements to preserve that evidence are essentially nil.
So it's just luck whether the police decided to preserve that evidence and then it's able to be tested later.
So those are the only cases that are eligible to become a DNA exoneration.
But still they start litigating and they start getting people out of prison and they start getting a lot of media attention for doing so.
And in some senses, they shock the criminal justice system that they're able to keep finding these innocent people in prison.
And people keep saying they're going to it's going to taper off.
They're going to run out of cases. And that keeps not happening for 20 years.
Up to over 350 cases of DNA exonerations.
So the importance of this for the discourse over wrongful convictions is that the DNA except DNA exonerations
become a set of exonerations for which it is almost impossible to doubt factual innocence because you have DNA,
usually from a semen sample, from a rape murder that doesn't match the person who's been convicted.
It becomes kind of hard to believe that they are guilty of that crime.
In the early cases, there were attempts to sort of reconcile these things, usually by saying, well,
the person in prison didn't rape the victim, but maybe they were there and killed the victim while an accomplice rape them.
But that argument became less and less tenable as more and more cases piled up until even what I would call innocence sceptics.
The Paul Castles of the world had to admit that most of these 350 people were innocent of these crimes.
And even if you wanted to say maybe a couple of them were guilty, you would.
It's hard to really argue that most of them that that a large number were.
So for the first time and these compiling of these list, you have this kind of bullet-proof list, as they call it.
But as I mentioned already, it's a very skewed and specific set of cases.
And if we can find our discussion of wrongful conviction into these DNA exonerations,
it would be a very skewed and selective and unrepresented tiff discussion of both exonerations and of wrongful convictions.
So then you get the National Registry of Exonerations,
and this project originated from the idea of creating an encyclopaedia of wrongful convictions that Rob Horton,
who's a journalist, very active in the exoneration movement, and Michael Radelet, a sociologist, came up with.
And Sam GROSS, who became the founder of the registry, kind of made a comment on the proposal to create this encyclopaedia, which this was,
I think, the early 2000s, and said, of course, you might want to have a website associated with this, with this encyclopaedia.
And so that turned out to be that comment turned out to be sort of right.
Precisely. At the time in technological history where a year or two later it seemed obvious that this should not be a book that would remain static,
but that it should be a sort of living database that's on the web, and that it would be completely useless if it were a fixed text kind of book.
And so the encyclopaedia involved evolves into the National Registry of Exonerations,
founded by Sam GROSS at the University of Michigan and Rod Warden, who's at Northwestern.
Northwestern drops out soon thereafter, and it becomes housed at Michigan.
And then Sam hires Maurice Poe's Lee, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who used to work at the Chicago Tribune as the senior researcher.
And Maurice is kind of a game changer for the registry.
He starts turning the article right up, which I'll show you in a second,
from very kind of threadbare things written by students into professional journalist kind of stuff.
And he does it very quickly and really changes the registry.
And then Sam starts looking, thinking about retiring and about succession.
And UC Irvine, because of having several researchers interested in this topic, emerges as a possible home,
and it ends up being a joint project of UCI, Michigan State and the University of Michigan.
Okay. So we've talked about lists.
So what we have in a sense are two different approaches to how we would make a list of exonerations.
There's what you might call the social science model embodied by Vido and Radelet,
where the researchers are using their judgement to decide whether people are guilty or innocent.
But as we saw, that can be attacked by anyone who just says, I don't agree with your judgement that this person is innocent.
Sam's approach is a deference model which he wants to avoid that problem.
And the key to it is deference to the state about in a sense,
the registries definition of an innocent eration is dependent upon the state exonerating the person.
And the idea is we're not making our own judgements about any case.
These are cases where the state itself has decided to relieve this person of the consequences,
the punitive consequences of the case of the act for which they were convicted.
The problem is with that is that the state's judgement might not be the same as my judgement.
But I have to just sort of subsume that.
You could ask questions about why we would rely on the state to expose its own failures, but of course the state is exposing its own failures a lot.
And of course, someone could attack this as well if they wanted to.
So that's two ways of doing it. I read this article recently.
Maybe there's another model.
Maybe we, instead of counting, we could just do what this judge in Japan did in this comment on the Carlos Ghosn case and just say,
without counting, there are as many wrongful convictions as grains of sand on the beach.
Then you no need to count them. So here's here's our short definition of exoneration.
And here's the long definition and here's the checklist version of the long definition.
You need to be convicted of a crime. You need to be officially cleared of all related charges based at least in part
on new evidence of innocence without unexplainable physical evidence of guilt.
That's it.
And so one way I like to explain this, this is to go back to the point about the relationship between wrongful convictions and exonerations.
Let's imagine that the criminal justice system mostly gets it right,
and most convictions are right for lots more, and thus only a smaller number are wrongful.
Let's just assume that for the sake of argument, exonerations are going to capture only the tip of the iceberg of wrongful convictions.
There will be lots of wrongful convictions that we never know about that never become exonerations, huge categories of of cases,
including especially low level crimes misdemeanours where it's almost impossible to get to go through all
the legal process that you would need to to get exonerated and probably not worth it to you to to do so.
And maybe with our definition of exoneration, there's a much smaller number of actually guilty people who,
for whatever reason, meet our definition of exoneration.
And our approach is to stick to the definition and accept these two error rates despite ourselves.
And so if if we happen to run across someone who we're not really that convinced they're innocent, they meet the definition we put them in.
But again, it's much more common to run across cases where we really think the person is innocent.
And and we can't we they don't meet our definition and so we can't include them.
And those are painful experiences, especially me being new at the registry.
And yet that's that's the rules we've kind of set for ourselves.
I always I always fail to click these little. You got all that red.
Okay. So now let me try to show you a little bit of the registry itself.
And I've got this temperamental mouse here, so bear with me.
He's another one that's got the underline. Was it.
Yeah. No, I think it's it's it's okay. I think I just saw the.
Yeah, they did already. Open it. Okay. All right.
So again, bear with me a little bit as I navigate this.
So this is the registry. I was it.
This is your Internet connection. Has it clicked on it?
Yeah. Yeah, it says waiting. Yeah.
Erica. Wow.
This is so sad. So is that.
That's not normal. Yeah, that's not normal. We had that before. Right, Samuel?
We're going to put that up. But there it is. That's what I want.
Wanted. I think so.
Didn't you close it? Did you close it? What if I go forward?
Yes. Okay. All right. So this is the heart of the registry.
This is a this is a table with 2551 row.
So we have 2551 exonerees.
And so we have these basic demographic characteristics of each case.
And then you can sort and filter by all of these demographics.
So a table and a data set, that's the heart of the registry in a certain sense.
But the other part is that any one of these cases.
So I open it up. I get this professionally written by a journalist narrative summary of the case,
and as you see that they're pretty substantive and compared to other lists that had been compiled before by,
for example, the Innocence Project or the Centre on Wrongful Convictions.
These are much more thorough, and we have two former former journalists who are writing these these things, and they're journalists, right?
So they write this stuff really quickly and then they go on to the next one because that's that's what he used to do in newspapers.
And it's kind of a piece of work that I'm not used to as an academic.
And it's it's really incredible. And we're posting about 150 cases per year.
So we're posting one every two or three days.
And there. And so I've written a couple of these just to see what it was like, you know,
and it took me like three months before I felt comfortable with the facts and having checked out all the sources and so on.
And so they're checking out all the sources, all the research, and doing a much more elaborate social science coding than I showed you,
because we have all sorts of other variables we're coding that are not on the public
website doing all that and putting it up on the web once every two or three days.
A new case, which I think is impressive, both for what we're doing as the registry,
but also for the fact that someone's being exonerated in the United States once every two or three days.
Okay. What else is on my list of things I wanted to show you very quickly.
What's the sources of the people rising up?
It's it's legal. It's almost entirely legal documents.
So the legal pleadings and media sources, newspaper, newspaper articles and so on.
We talked to the lawyers. We don't talk to the exonerees.
So we usually be an interview with the lawyer and trying to get the lawyers, send us briefs and so on, court rulings, legal judgements and so on.
But behind the behind all this, there's a source document folder for every single case which varies greatly in quality and sort of thoroughness.
But that's almost entirely legal documents and newspaper articles.
So not things that many other people want.
Like I'm interested in forensic science, so I want the lab reports and the transcripts, you know, have them in almost every case.
That does bring me to something I was going to say is one thing, you know,
I sort of knew about the registry, but I didn't really know it very well until I took it over running it.
So one thing is that to 2551 cases, it's sort of like geologic strata in terms of how the data was collected.
As you go back in time and the data collection has gotten better and more rigorous and more reliable.
The closer we get to the present and we don't have the resources to go back and rework the old cases.
So you find a lot of variety in our data,
both in terms of source documents and in terms of the coding of social science variables depending on when the case was posted.
And you will see that when you look at the source documents on one document and these old cases and then ten in recent cases.
So that comes up a lot. I'm.
Let me just bring up. It's over here.
In that case, what happened to his co-defendants?
Evidence says he was sentenced to death and he was sentenced to life without parole because he was 17.
Is that right? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know.
Sorry. That should be a cop. Yeah. If he were match, then he'd be hyperlinked like this.
Co-defendant. Right. Yeah. Okay.
So maybe they're not exonerated. They might have taken a plea.
Yeah. To get out or plead to one of the charges or something like that.
So, yeah, it's not uncommon with co-defendants.
Some of them are exonerated and some are not. So.
And a plea would be a very common thing that they took some deal to go home and the other one didn't or wasn't offered it.
This is a really sad thing to look at, but we're able to compile a list of the longest incarcerations for four exonerees.
And so this just says something about sentencing practices in the state.
It states. And it wasn't just the people at the back of the room.
It nearly always says like, Oh, well, yeah, but it's how long they serve actually serves.
Yeah. So. So the record holder is 45 years in prison for a crime they didn't commit.
And the top ten are all over 35 years.
And we keep adding these new cases like high on the list and pushing people,
people with 30 more than 30 year incarcerations off the top ten of longest incarcerations, and some of them famous cases like this.
Wilbert Jones, who was in Angola, the famous case.
Okay. And then just want to show you a little bit about how the registry works.
So the advisory board isn't that important.
This is being test for how the registry works.
They're very important. So, so founded by Sam and Rob Gordon.
And then the plan, I can't really scroll very well here.
So we have three editors kind of taking over the job from Sam Barba, Brian and Catherine Grosso, who are at Michigan State and myself.
And just want to point and again, I can't scroll, but we have two professional journalists more closely and can do that.
Yeah, but I'm using that wheel so that's what's now doesn't it's all right.
So we now have not one, but two former professional journalists, Maurice Persily and Ken Waterberg, researching the cases and writing the cases.
Jessica Paradis, who's a lawyer, who's doing the first edit and checking the coding, and then it goes to the editors.
And then even the gal who's doing administration and development and communications and kind of running the whole centre.
So again, it's kind of an unusual thing for me as an academic and in some ways feels more like running a newspaper than than an academic project.
It kept going, going at a very fast pace. That tends to be driven by the journalists who are sort of used to that.
Let's not restart it. We got it.
All right. So I'm going to close this mercifully.
I think there is. What's happening, though. Okay.
Okay. All right. Now I just have to get rid of this. Rita, do we start now?
We start tonight. It always happens in windows, doesn't it?
Because no one maintains this thing because it's not there. It was announced.
First you have to use a mouse. It's working. Okay. All right.
So. So, as promised, sort of intellectual and research free so far.
Right now, I want to talk a little bit about a project on on forensic science, because that's my academic interest.
And so since I came on, they said, well, you can work on the forensic science part.
So a little bit after I started, Gerry Laporte, who is the head forensic science guy at the National Institute of Justice in the United States,
published this article on wrongful convictions and DNA exonerations.
And he's got this little thing, so you probably can't read this in the back.
He says, Well, the Innocence Project says that 157 of its 342 DNA exonerations, forensic science contributed to the wrongful conviction.
That's 46%. And so they're saying bad things about forensic science.
But I looked at the National Registry of Exonerations, and they're inconsistent.
So 24 of those, 157 cases, they say the registry says forensic science did not contribute to that.
It was like mistaken eyewitness identification or false confessions and so on.
So I talked to the Innocence Project, who we work with closely, and we said, this isn't good.
We need to kind of be consistent about this or at least figure out why we have this discrepancy and what the you know,
what the issue is that we disagree about. So we started by looking at our definitions of forensic science.
We call it false or misleading forensic science, forensic evidence.
And they call it misapplication of forensic science.
And it it certainly didn't seem like the root of the problem was the definitions.
They are different, but there's nothing fundamentally there's no sort of real fundamental disagreement there.
So the first thing to do was to come up with see if we could come up with an agreed upon definition.
And both of us were open to that. And so we did.
And so the new one we're going to call fit forensic expert evidence problem.
And here's the very simple definition of it.
So this is, I think, the first time I've really presented this definition to any audience other than within the internal work product.
So I'm interested, you know, and it's not final. It hasn't gone up on any website yet.
So I'm interested in feedback and and thoughts about it, but, but we are pretty happy with it.
So not too much feedback. But what I'm going to try to do now is sort of explain to you some of the thinking that went into this definition,
which actually for such a simple thing, there was a fair amount.
So it raised a couple of questions. So one is kind of the science question.
We did notice that we were just that some of us on both sides were not coding
cases as forensic because the forensic science seemed like not forensic science.
So and here's some examples on the left, hypnosis, slide detection, dog said.
So somebody was just saying, well, that isn't forensic science, so it doesn't count.
And the solution to this and this is why I talked about the science studies framework at the beginning,
is because here's where I think science studies came into it, is that I'm so defining science is famously difficult in philosophy of science.
So I wanted to avoid doing it. And in the end I kind of said, I don't care if if it's science or not,
if the court is admitting this person as some kind of an expert, then that's fair game.
And that's why the title of it, we have the word expert in it if you want to say it's not forensic science for whatever reason.
But to me, forensic science is anything any kind of expertise that gets admitted into court is in some sense forensic science.
So auto mechanics, psychologists, gang experts, cultural experts, hypnotists, if the courts are letting them in, I think it's forensic science.
If you don't think it's forensic science, you should maybe talk to the courts about not letting hypnosis hypnotists testify.
In court. And another way we have of saying it down here is that, you know what science is the question you're asking, not the answer you're giving.
So if you're asking, do people with tattoos, are they more often in a gang than not in a gang?
That's an empirical, scientific question.
Now, whether a cultural anthropologist has empirical scientific ways of answering that question, I don't know.
But if you want to claim to have knowledge about that question, then that's a scientific question.
So let me give two examples of this from actual cases.
So one is the Raymond Jennings case, and this case will be interesting to the criminology audience.
So this this was a murder in a parking lot.
And Jennings was the security guard on duty.
And so eventually, for lack of other suspects, they decided he was the only one there.
So it must it must have been him. And they got this expert witness, an FBI agent, who said that he was an expert in victimology.
Now, this was interesting as a criminologist, because victimology is a thing in criminology, but that's not his victimology.
His is the study of the victim to determine who might have killed her.
So the classic one, I think is if the victim is a prostitute, you might that might lead you to some theory of how they died.
So in this case, where the victim was someone who had come back from attending a rock video filming, he had a theory that,
you know, that it must have been crime of opportunity by the only male nearby, which is Raymond Jennings, the security guard.
However, later in the case, when the prosecution found evidence that she was in, you know, that she had been killed by gang members during a robbery,
he then said, well, now that I've heard that seen that evidence, I no longer think that this was a sort of sex crime of opportunity.
And so I wouldn't say that anymore. So to me, victimology, this guy was admitted as an expert witness.
It certainly contributed to the conviction. Whether victimology is science or not is there's no reason to debate it.
It's obviously a weak science if it is science, but it contributed to the conviction.
It was expert evidence. Here's another one that's useful just to just to kind of show the variety of cases that we have in the registry,
especially by not confining ourselves to DNA exonerations.
They're not all. They're not all murder cases.
Although non-high, level crimes still are very rare and under underrepresented in in the registry.
Here's one that's like insurance fraud by a farmer.
So very unusual case. And the prosecution got some expert to say, well, other the other farms were doing very well.
So this guy's crop failure, for which he filed a claim, an allegedly false claim, was just bad farming and it's his fault.
And so he's not entitled to this claim. So this is a very weird kind of expert.
We hadn't really been prepared for crop experts. But, you know, they're an expert witness.
If we found that there were a lot of crop experts, that would be interesting.
There aren't. But why?
Why rule it out? Why not collect data on it? The second difficult question was what about the of which actor do we focus on?
So where does forensic science begin? What if the bad actor is not a forensic scientist, but a police officer or a prosecutor?
But the problem involved forensic science.
And I thought that we thought it was bad to not capture that.
And so we decided what we were really trying to capture is a problem with the
delivery of forensic science that doesn't require a forensic scientist necessarily.
It doesn't really matter who is responsible if it's a problem in the delivery of forensic science.
And I'll give you a case to illustrate this, the Kenny Waters case, it's actually a pretty, pretty well known case because Kenny Waters.
Sister couldn't get a lawyer to exonerate him,
so ended up putting herself through law school in order to then litigate her brother's case and get him exonerated.
And there they are. And their son played in the movie by Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell.
So fairly well-known case because of because of the movie, which is called Conviction.
But here, the police had fingerprints that excluded Kenny Waters from the crime scene.
The police officer who had them retired, moved away,
stored the prints and the report saying Kenny Waters was not the source of those prints in this incriminating location in a storage unit.
And they were not found for years until that man went to law school and managed to obtain a court order to search this storage unit.
So the fingerprint examiners didn't do anything wrong.
They excluded him as the source and the police officer put them in a storage unit.
And so I think this is a case this is something we need to know about.
And imagine if we had 100 cases like this.
Well, this is something forensic scientists should be interested in if if if our data shows that.
You know, actually, a lot of the problems with forensic science are not with in the laboratory, with the forensic scientists themselves.
It's because the cops are taking the evidence and putting locking it in storage units.
They should know that and maybe fix that. And they didn't do anything wrong.
So so in cases like this, I'm trying to imagine we only have one case like this.
But what if we had 100 that would tell us something that might lead to sort of a policy response or an intervention.
Another problem we dealt with that was probably the the trickiest problem is consistent with evidence.
What do we do with evidence? That's literally true, but seems to be highly misleading with the juror.
And the way we got to this was hair evidence where they say it's consistent with the suspect.
It's sort of literally true. It's consistent with the suspect.
But hair evidence is extremely unreliable. And it turns out it wasn't the suspect.
It turns out we have a lot of this in in a lot of different areas, this kind of consistent.
And I'll show you an example in a minute. So our answer to this is, again, to include it that we think we want to count these cases,
but we no longer think that saying forensic science contributed to the wrongful conviction has an element of blame worthiness.
There's a sense in which the analyst was telling the truth.
They're just using a really lousy technique, which is hair evidence, microscopic hair comparison,
or presumptive field drug tests, which I'll talk about in a second.
But and so we became uncomfortable with, especially in the registry definition.
Was the words false or misleading? I didn't want to use the word false or misleading for this consistent with testimony.
I didn't think it was either false or even misleading.
So here's an example.
This another famous case maybe you know about the Steven Avery case, which got really famous because of the documentary series Making a Murderer.
But in that original conviction, there was hair evidence and the serology is Sherry Culhane,
who interestingly comes off kind of badly in the documentary as it's kind of biased.
She gave like the most conservative hair testimony that I ever saw.
She said it was similar and consistent with the victim's hair.
And then she said, the hair. Many people are consistent with each other.
She can't give a probability they're from the same source.
Finally, when pressed, she says, All I'm saying is it's not impossible that the hairs are from the victim.
Well, that's a true statement. That's a very philosophically cautious statement.
So do I really want to fault her for saying that?
Not really. But on the other hand, we know from the registry that and from the Innocence Project list,
there's tons and tons of of exoneration cases where hair evidence contributed to the wrongful conviction.
So this kind of testimony that it's consistent with, while true, leads to a lot of wrongful convictions.
Why is that? Because I think they're using a really weak undiscriminating technique.
And so by coating the hair cases, we are finding something out that this microscopic hair comparison is a really lousy forensic technique.
But I don't think we're finding that people gave false testimony.
But we we need to capture this and we need to know about it. And here's another example from the other end of the spectrum.
This case also got a lot of publicity, was written up by ProPublica, Amy Allbright.
And so she's she's from Louisiana.
She's driving into Texas. The police pull her over.
They see a white crumb on the floor mat of the car, not a baggie of white powder.
A white crumb. And they do these field tests for drugs that the police carry in the back of their police cars,
where they just do, you know, put it in a little baggie and shake it up and do a little colour test.
And and it turns a certain colour, if it might be a controlled substance and it has,
you know, an error rate of 25, 30%, something like that, very high error rate.
But that's okay because this is just for the police use out in the field.
And then that sample will go back to the laboratory and they'll do the better test with their proper chemical equipment,
except that for these drug possession cases, while they're waiting for the lab, the suspect is going to plead guilty because they want to go home.
And they're facing a very low level drug charge anyway.
And they don't they don't want to lose their job and get evicted, which is what happened to Amy Allbright.
And so, lo and behold, they test it in the laboratory and it's a cookie crumb, not a not a controlled substance.
And because Houston, the D.A. of Houston, was concerned about these cases, too,
she found out these cases were happening and decided to track all these people
down and make sure they were exonerated and their criminal records were clear.
We think this problem is happening all over the country with people pleading guilty,
except that the D.A. isn't following up and making sure to clear their records.
So they just have a misdemeanour on their on their record with all the consequences that go with that.
But in Houston, they cleared it up. So we have 150 exonerations from Houston involving this presumptive field drug test.
But again, I don't think the testimony if not that there was testimony.
Right. There's always a report of a presumptive field drug test.
I don't think it was false or misleading. It said. We did a presumptive test and it was positive.
You need to do a proper test to confirm this. It wasn't false, but it produces a lot of wrongful convictions.
So that's something we need to know about. So these consistent with statements, it's a big issue in forensic science.
They're very common. And I think if we contribute, you know, if they contribute to wrongful convictions, we need to know about them.
It's a little bit tricky for me because my in my work in forensic science,
I have said that forensic scientists need to quantify the uncertainty of their tests.
I've said if they don't, they need to tone down the certainty with which they testify.
And specifically in the context of fingerprint identification.
I've said, you know, I don't think you should say match.
I don't think you should say it's his fingerprint. I don't think you should say identification if you can't come up with any statistics.
Which would? Which is what I'd really like to see you do. Just say it's consistent with this so called fingerprint examiners.
They should use this word consistent with. But we're also coding in these cases.
And the way I look at this is if a discipline's going to can't come up with a statistical way
of quantifying their uncertainty and they're going to rely on consistent with statements,
you can do that, but you're going to have to own it. If you come up with a lot of wrongful convictions and if your technique is good,
you probably won't produce a lot of wrongful convictions like, say, fingerprint evidence.
If your technique is really weak, like microscopic hair comparison or presumptive drug test,
you're going to produce a lot of wrongful convictions by giving this testimony.
Setting aside again what what the jury might hear from somebody who says it's consistent with the defendant, you know,
they're not going to take the Deep South probative value of that to be as low as it sort of actually is, if you think about what the statement makes.
Okay.
So I'm close to fiction, so I think I've kind of talked about this, the false or so we're not requiring that the evidence be false or misleading.
So we kind of came up with this word problem. There's a problem with forensic evidence, but it doesn't mean anybody did something wrong.
It doesn't mean anybody said necessarily said something false or misleading, but something is going wrong to cause wrongful convictions.
So in some we made these choices. We broadened the definition of forensic evidence a little bit.
We included more actors, and we focus on disembodied problems rather than blame worthiness.
We're trying to avoid defining ontological concepts like science.
In some sense, I think we're trying to let the data speak to us about where the problems lie
and that they can function as an early detection system for stakeholders.
It probably will help more cases than the old definitions did,
but the balance of that is that all those cases are cases where we said a forensic scientist did something wrong.
And so you can't assume that about these cases.
So here's a summary of what we did.
We look we started with Gerry Laporte, as I said, identify 24 cases where we were discrepant and then we found a bunch more that he didn't notice.
So we ended up looking at 47 cases and this sort of shows where we said yes and they said no and they said no and we said yes.
We ended up deciding 41 of them were had a forensic expert evidence problem and six did not.
So if you look at all the DNA exonerations at that time, when we started the project two years ago,
that ends up being 174 of the cases of the 351 DNA exonerations that existed at that time,
about half of them ended up having a forensic or expert evidence problem.
So it's actually slightly higher than Laporte saw.
But again, we have this slightly expanded definition.
And to date, while I was here on the sabbatical, the number is pretty similar, but we're up to 367 DNA exonerations, so it's about 49%.
So why were there these discrepancies? Overwhelmingly, it's because somebody lacked information about a case.
And once we traded information with the Innocence Project, there was no difficulty coding it.
We just didn't know about this.
And and most of those cases were serology cases where there was an issue with the interpretation of the serology evidence.
12 cases were this consistent with issue, most of them hair, but some of them pathology.
Then these sort of odd disciplines that may or may not be forensic and then this kind of broadened definition of of problem.
So in some the portion of DNA exonerations to which forensic evidence contribute is still about half.
That's partly with this expanded definition, but that's only about five cases.
So that would only knock about 2% off.
This is was true when he wrote and it's still true the portion of all exonerations, the ones in the National Registry of Exonerations is much lower.
It's only about 24%. But we haven't applied this new definition across all these cases, so it might go up a little bit.
That's not really surprising because of the nature of the DNA exoneration cases.
These are cases where the person was exonerated through the use of forensic science.
So it's not that surprising that they were originally convicted through the use of forensic science.
And then there's a lot more to do now that we've done this project.
There's I'm working on looking at the four different forensic disciplines which discipline contributed to this, to temporal trends,
to how much this CO occurs with the other contributors like mistaken witness identification,
other patterns, and also sort of subtypes of these problems in terms of what went wrong.
So I hope your fans of the National Registry of Exonerations now follow us on social media now and we have stickers.
If you're interested. And I'm happy to take questions or discussion.