Police forensics

Deeply disturbing report in Reason about an investigation of North Carolina's State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) crime lab that found evidence of systematic perversion of justice, including in death penalty cases.

The report found that SBI agents withheld exculpatory evidence or distorted evidence in more than 230 cases over a 16-year period. Three of those cases resulted in execution. There was widespread lying, corruption, and pressure from prosecutors and other law enforcement officials on crime lab analysts to produce results that would help secure convictions. And the pressure worked.

The SBI crime lab scandal is only the most recent story of forensics malfeasance. In recent years there have been forensics scandals in Virginia, Maryland, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Nebraska, California, Michigan, Texas, and at the FBI. And this is only a partial list. At some point, it becomes sensible to conclude that these scandals aren't the result of isolated bad actors, but of a system that produces them.

Given that I have very low expectations of any state agency, why do I find it disturbing? Because the British police depend more on forensics than any of the US police forces or even the FBI. It was what the British police turned to after judges stopped tolerating their "fitting up" of suspects in the late 1970s. Science, not undependable detectives and their sleazy informers, would ensure safe convictions.

The emphasis on DNA in crime solution, in which Britain was a world pioneer, led to the police recovering some of the prestige - although considerably less of the public trust - lost to the overturned convictions and revelations about senior police officers living cheek-by-jowl with notorious gangsters on the Costa del Dosh.

So the question that now forms in my mind is: did the leopard change its spots? Did forensics drive out the culture of corruption in the police forces of Britain, or did that culture find a way to corrupt forensics?

The problem is that there is no form of independent oversight in this country, and not the smallest chance in hell that any Minister of Justice would order the sort of investigation by qualified outsiders that Attorney General Roy Cooper ordered in North Carolina.

In the absence of such oversight, it is a racing certainty that the crime labs of our police forces and the Met are every bit as corrupted by pressure to produce convictions as their peers across the pond.