An economic perspective on "unanalyzed evidence in law-enforcement agencies"
An economic perspective on “unanalyzed evidence in law-enforcement agencies”
Article Type: Perspectives on policing From: Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, Volume 33, Issue 4
E. James Cowan and Roger KopplCriminology & Public PolicyVol. 9 Issue 22010pp. 411-419
Forensic science has grown steadily in its influence on investigations and trials over the last decade. However, Cowan and Koppl asserts that current practices of forensic evidence processing within law-enforcement agencies are not conducive to the unbiased attainment of justice. This is due to the existence of two types of backlogs found in crime lab. First, evidence may not be processed in a timely manner, which creates the risk of justice delayed. Second, law enforcement may not submit all relevant evidence for processing,which creates the risk of justice denied. These issues mainly arise from our adversarial court system, which creates an alliance between the police and the prosecution against the defense. Prosecutors and law enforcement seek to maximize convictions and often make their decisions with this objective in mind. This may lead to the filtering of evidence and information available to the crime laboratory. Although there are several benign reasons for filtering, such as a suspect has not been identified or uncertainty about the usefulness of the evidence, the end result is that relevant and comprehensive analyses may be compromised due to insufficient information. Furthermore, strategic filtering may have a more disconcerting aspect as law enforcement and the prosecution may attempt to sway the admissible evidence in their favor. To minimize bias and lower error rates of evidence testing, the authors employ an economic viewpoint to propose major policy and structural changes.
The first policy change calls for the employment of an independent case manager to which all forensic evidence will be first submitted. The case manager will act as a liaison between the prosecution/law enforcement and the forensic examiner. Furthermore, they will responsible for the managing and routing of all evidence. This way, the relevance of the evidence will not be conveyed to the examiners, eliminating the potential for undue influence on the results by the prosecution/law enforcement.
Second, crime labs should not be under prosecutorial or law-enforcement control, but, instead, function as an independent entity. This permits both the prosecution and the defense to exert some control over the evidence being tested and the types of tests performed. Additionally, lab personnel should answer to an independent board of directors consisting of individuals from the prosecution and defense, the public defender’s office, a non-forensic scientist and a forensic scientist from another jurisdiction. This will further separate the bonds between the prosecution and law enforcement as the laboratory now answers to a broader constituency.
Third, each jurisdiction should be served by multiple crime laboratories and each crime lab should also serve multiple jurisdictions. This process, called cross-jurisdictional management, will further reduce the linkages between local prosecution and law enforcement. However, this arrangement is difficult to implement due to the present configuration of crime laboratories across the nation. Most are small laboratories, which lack the ability to conduct all the recognized forensic analyses. It is estimated that roughly half of the crime laboratories in the country have the ability to run analyses on firearms (59 percent) or DNA (53 per cent). Additionally, approximately 20 percent of all laboratories lack accreditation, with a higher percentage seen at the county and municipal level. In order to resolve these issues, the authors recommend the consolidation of smaller laboratories. Consolidation will create larger laboratories that have the resources to conduct a greater variety of forensic analyses and obtain accreditation.
In conclusion, the current association between the prosecution, law enforcement, and crime laboratories prevents impartial justice from being executed. In order to maximize convictions, prosecutors and law enforcement utilize backlogs to sway the evidence in their favor. The authors have proposed several policy changes through economic logic to remedy this situation. They believe that crime laboratories should remain impartial in their examination of evidence as “scientific truth should be the output of the forensic science process, not a conviction” (Cowan and Koppl, 2008, pp. 417). In order to achieve this objective, both the prosecution and the defense should be granted equal access to the same unbiased analyses.
Michael ChouUniversity of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA
