Oné of the major prob­lems in the way that foren­sic sci­ence is pre­sented in Court­room today is the use of the word “expert” and the very low thresh­old of what passes for one in court.

You have cancer

But first I ask you to imag­ine.  Imag­ine that you go to a doctor’s office hav­ing pre­vi­ously given them a sam­ple of your blood for rou­tine analy­sis.  You feel fine.  The nurse comes into the room and gives you the worst news you can imag­ine, you have can­cer.  Wow!  Then you ask ques­tions such as:  “What type of can­cer?”, “What process was used for you to come up with this bad news?”, “What are my can­cer cell mark­ers?”, “Has it spread?” and “Is there hope and treat­ment?” but after each ques­tion, the well-intentioned nurse says “I don’t know, but you have can­cer”.  You grow frus­trated, you want to see the doc­tor.  You want answers.  The nurse tells you no, that you can­not.  How­ever, the nurse says that you have to make an irrev­o­ca­ble deci­sion right now based only upon that lim­ited amount of infor­ma­tion as to whether or not you want to undergo risky surgery imme­di­ately.  Wow!  On the one hand you think to your­self, bet­ter safe than sorry and you had bet­ter go through with the surgery.  On the other hand, you think to your­self, there is nowhere near enough infor­ma­tion to make this type of impor­tant deci­sion.  You think to your­self how unac­cept­able this sit­u­a­tion is.  It is not fair.  It is not right.

This is pre­cisely what hap­pens in Court every day in Amer­ica and the type of sit­u­a­tion that we put jurors in every day.  It is not fair.  It is not right.  But why does it happen?

There is a large demon­stra­ble dif­fer­ence between a true cre­den­tialed sci­en­tist who has attained a PhD or in the case of a Med­ical Exam­iner a MD or in the case of an engi­neer a PE through a brick and mor­tar insti­tu­tion ver­sus a machine oper­a­tor.  A machine oper­a­tor is sim­ply a per­son who is an expert in employ­ing a check­list:  an expert in push­ing a but­ton on a machine.  This type of per­son is not an expert in any­thing beyond that check­list or that but­ton.  Whereas, a true cre­den­tialed sci­en­tist is some­one who can explain the why.  The why is the key.  Exam­in­ing and under­stand­ing in detail as well as view­ing any sit­u­a­tion with an ounce of  skep­ti­cism leads to appro­pri­ate deci­sions.  Lim­ited or wrong data can often lead to mis­takes in decisions.

A machine oper­a­tor is not a sci­en­tific expert

The machine oper­a­tor should not be allowed to present and cer­tainly not inter­pret results in Court.  The cre­den­tialed sci­en­tist should be the only one per­mit­ted to do so.  Doing this will min­i­mize the poten­tial prob­lem illus­trated with the nurse with no answers anal­ogy that I used above.

A machine oper­a­tor does not nec­es­sar­ily under­stand the why.  The ideas and the proofs of the under­ly­ing val­i­da­tion of the under­ly­ing method to achieve a result is not within their typ­i­cal scope of knowl­edge.  Why the steps exist at all, why the cer­tain steps are included and why cer­tain steps are in a par­tic­u­lar order is of vital importance.

This dis­tinc­tion between machine oper­a­tor and a cre­den­tialed sci­en­tist must be devel­oped and exposed in every court case.  No one should be allowed to tes­tify beyond the scope of their pro­fes­sional knowl­edge and opine con­clu­sions that are not prop­erly founded in their artic­u­la­tion of the science.

The worst exam­ple is per­haps the most fre­quent form of this abuse on sci­en­tific truth.  The most prob­lem­atic pre­sen­ta­tion in the real world of this divide occurs in the exam­ple of the glo­ri­fied traf­fic cop with a High School degree or per­haps only has a com­mu­nity col­lege Asso­ciates’ Degree in Crim­i­nal Jus­tice [cer­tainly not in a hard sci­ence (i.e., biol­ogy, chem­istry, or physics)] who one day lit­er­ally wrote traf­fic tick­ets and either declared a desire or was iden­ti­fied to move into foren­sic work who was trained by other non-credentialed lay tech­ni­cians mis­la­beled as “sci­en­tists” who they them­selves were for­mer traf­fic cops.  It is inces­tu­ous non-credentialed and indeed gen­er­a­tional spawn­ing of under-trained tech­ni­cians and machine oper­a­tors that has lit­er­ally nearly crip­pled the truth in Amer­i­can Courts.  They are “worker bees” and non-technical lay peo­ple who have no sci­en­tific under­pin­ning to be able to answer the why.  The old adage is true.  The worst type of dan­ger comes from a man/woman who has a lit­tle bit of knowl­edge.  It breads false courage.