The great Bard once penned:

All: God save your majesty!

Cade: I thank you, good people—there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one liv­ery, that they may agree like broth­ers, and wor­ship me their lord.

Dick: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

Cade: Nay, that I mean to do.

Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2, 71–78

Shakespeare’s char­ac­ter Dick the Butcher’s idea of a per­fect soci­ety was one where jus­tice pre­vailed because there were no lawyers. The trai­tor­ous Jack Cade had not so noble a rea­son for want­ing to get rid of all of the lawyers. He wanted to become the auto­crat in a quasi-communistic social rev­o­lu­tion. Cade alleges that all lawyers do is use laws and lan­guage set up by fel­low lawyers to oppress and ruin the life of every day man. There­fore, in his esti­ma­tion, no jus­tice results.

That is an extreme view.

I sug­gest that per­haps jus­tice best results when we have an edu­cated and orga­nized defense bar who is sci­en­tif­i­cally edu­cated in foren­sic sci­ence. As I have blogged before, the foren­sic sci­ence com­mu­nity as cur­rently prac­ticed in the United States today is very flawed. Extremely flawed. Fun­da­men­tally flawed. In some cases, if not the major­ity of cases, it is utterly unsci­en­tific. I agree with the sen­ti­ments that the crim­i­nal defense com­mu­nity shares a large por­tion of the blame. Many lawyers well before our times, let come into evi­dence prac­tices, tech­niques, and “the­o­ries” that had just but the very veneer of sci­ence and were, how­ever, any­thing but sci­en­tific and far from valid. This insti­tu­tional prop­a­ga­tion of error is a large hur­dle for many of us to over­come now where busi­ness as usual or sim­ple rep­e­ti­tion is some­how equated with validity.

So what are we to do?

Set up pro­grams where we edu­cate the defense bar.

I would like to high­light one of these: The Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety Hands-on Foren­sic Chro­matog­ra­phy course.

It is a five-days hands-on class con­ducted at Axion Ana­lyt­i­cal Lab­o­ra­to­ries, Inc. in Chicago, Illi­nois. This hands-on course is taught by three icons of chro­matog­ra­phy (Dr. Harold McNair, PhD, Dr. Lee Polite, PhD and Mr. Lew Fox) and two attor­neys who spe­cial­ize in eval­u­at­ing chro­matog­ra­phy and foren­sic sci­ence related cases (Justin J. McShane and Josh D. Lee).

The agenda includes:

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

This class attracts full of attor­neys from all across the United States. In this class atten­dees not only are instructed in the class­room the­ory that under­lies chro­matog­ra­phy (both liq­uid and gas chro­matog­ra­phy) in gen­eral and the spe­cific the­o­ries that allow for head­space analy­sis and how Flame Ion­iza­tion Detec­tor, UV-DAD and Mass Spec­trom­e­try (EI and EC based) works, and get to see the instru­ments, but they also get to do the fol­low­ing with their own two hands and more:

Hands-on Lab 1

Instru­ment Famil­iar­iza­tion where the atten­dees pre­form direct injec­tions into a Gas Chromatograph-Flame Ion­iza­tion Detec­tor (GC-FID) using EtOH sam­ples, and learn to inter­pret GC-FID chro­matograms, import and manip­u­late a method, change the dif­fer­ent vari­ables on the GC-FID and elu­ci­date the results.

Hands-on Lab 2

The atten­dees on their own GC machine remove and install cap­il­lary columns and all of the com­po­nents of the injec­tor (septa, liner, gold seal, etc.), check for effi­cien­cies, res­o­lu­tion, the­o­ret­i­cal plates, and learn about split ver­sus split­less injec­tor settings.

Hands-on Lab 3

The atten­dees on their own GC machine estab­lish a cal­i­bra­tion curve from CRMs for EtOH. The atten­dees on their own GC machine ana­lyze the response and pro­gram a cal­i­bra­tion curve (exter­nal stan­dard) and also use the Inter­nal Stan­dard method to assure qual­ity. The atten­dees on their own GC machine estab­lish meth­ods and report­ing of this cru­cial part of testing.

Hands-on Lab 4

The atten­dees con­tinue to use Head­space Gas Chromatograph-Flame Ion­iza­tion Detec­tor and also use Gas Chro­matog­ra­phy Mass Spec­trom­e­try (GC-MS) sys­tem, and use an High Per­for­mance Liq­uid Chro­matog­ra­phy (HPLC) system.

Hands-on Lab 5

Sam­ple Preparation-sampling ver­sus sam­ple selec­tion is demon­strated. The atten­dees do their own Pipet­ting. The atten­dees do their own con­trol chart­ing. The atten­dees use vol­u­met­ric flasks. The atten­dees learn about pre-analysis error hands-on and how it affects quan­tifi­ca­tion. The atten­dees are intro­duced to issues of metrol­ogy and Uncer­tainty Measurement.

Hands-on Lab 6

Inte­gra­tion. The atten­dees on their own Chem­Sta­tion work­sta­tion learn about inte­gra­tion and how easy it is to manip­u­late the data. The atten­dees manip­u­late their own data. The atten­dees learn what to look for that shows that the data was manip­u­lated, and the atten­dees learn how to manip­u­late data so that it is not dis­cov­er­able with­out the raw com­puter data in the soft­ware files.

Hands-on Lab 7

GC-MS Instru­men­ta­tion. The atten­dees see how easy life is for an ana­lyst. The atten­dees get to see the analy­sis of the raw data on a GC-MS and dis­cover how a true novice can turn into an “expert” with a sim­ple push of a but­ton. The atten­dees see with their own two eyes the “hid­den” data that the Gov­ern­ment and its lab­o­ra­tory doesn’t want any­one to see that will reveal the truth that the sup­posed “gold stan­dard” that pro­vides for the alleged “unequiv­o­cal iden­ti­fi­ca­tion” of test­ing of unknowns that is GC-MS is not perfect.

Hands-on Lab 8

How to Obtain Discovery/Walking Down a Case/Defenses that Win-Advanced Issue Spot­ting: In this lab, the best prac­tices in how to obtain dis­cov­ery with a spe­cial empha­sis on how to strate­gi­cally and prac­ti­cally build a record so that the atten­dees can get the raw data in its un-manipulated raw com­puter form and also in its print form. The atten­dees go through an actual case that was lit­i­gated that fea­tured experts on both sides, and issue spot all of the prob­lems with the dis­cov­ery and the data as it was presented.

Hands-on Lab 9

Trou­bleshoot­ing. The atten­dees on their own GC machine run an unknown sam­ple which may result in some sort of “prob­lem” in the chro­matogram. The atten­dees issue spot the prob­lem and ratio­nal­ize what is wrong, and fix it.

Hands-on Lab 10

The atten­dees with their lab part­ners go over their own data set from real cases to fig­ure out what is wrong with the atten­dees’ local laboratory.

Grad­u­ates of the group include:

There have been 89 grad­u­ates to date.

The next class (which is full) will be in April is sched­uled to have the fol­low­ing folks:

To insure jus­tice, we need to have an edu­cated defense bar. We need more sci­en­tific pro­grams like this one.