Académicos prominentes, incluido Thomas Albright del Salk, piden más ciencia en la ciencia forense.

Académicos prominentes, incluido Thomas Albright del Salk, piden más ciencia en la ciencia forense.

LA JOLLA—Ante el creciente escrutinio de la ciencia forense, que desempeña un papel cada vez más importante en la administración de justicia, seis científicos que recientemente formaron parte de la Comisión Nacional de Ciencia Forense hacen un llamado a la comunidad científica en general para que abogue por una mayor investigación y apoyo financiero a la ciencia forense, así como por la introducción de requisitos de pruebas empíricas para garantizar la validez de los resultados. Su llamado a la acción apareció en Actas de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias (PNAS) la semana del 9 de abril de 2018.

“Forensic reform is challenging because the field of law is based on historical precedent, whereas science builds on itself to advance continuously,” says Thomas Albright, professor and director of Salk’s Vision Center Laboratory who has studied why eyewitnesses fail. “But if the ultimate goal of a legal system is to deliver justice, then forensic evidence should be based on up-to-date methods that have been scientifically validated.”

Since the 1990s, when DNA exonerations revealed problems with some forensic disciplines, various groups have been calling for reform. This led to a landmark 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that found many forensic practices were highly subjective and paved the way for the 2013 establishment of the National Commission on Forensic Science to examine such practices. A number of independent scientists served on the commission, along with forensic scientists, attorneys, judges and law enforcement personnel, from 2013 to 2017 when the Department of Justice declined to renew its charter.

Six of the independent scientists—Albright, Suzanne Bell of the University of West Virginia; Sunita Sah of Cornell University; S. James Gates, Jr., of Brown University; M. Bonner Benton of the University of Arizona and Arturo Casadevall of Johns Hopkins University—write in the new paper that the complex methodologies of forensic science, which range from DNA analysis to pattern recognition to chemical composition, must be subjected to scientific testing rather than relying on historical precedent. They cite the example of bite-mark identification, which has been scientifically discredited and has resulted in false convictions, but continues to be accepted in U.S. courts due to precedent.

“In many forensic procedures, such as fingerprint or footprint or bullet matching, decisions about the similarity of visual patterns are made by people—and people make mistakes,” says Albright, who holds the Conrad T. Prebys Chair in Vision Science. In 2017, Albright published a paper in PNAS about an NAS study on eyewitness testimony that described why identification errors occur and how they can be prevented. “We encourage the scientific community to welcome forensic scientists into their ranks to help identify the causes of forensic failures, predict when they might occur and lend support to developing strategies to mitigate or prevent them,” says Albright.