How Bureaucracy Tarnishes Forensic Science

TV series like the CSI romanticizes the effectiveness of forensic science in solving criminal cases.

In reality, as the following Washington Post article reports, this has not been the case (bold emphasis mine)

Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.

Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.

In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.

As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects….

A review of the task force documents, as well as Post interviews, found that the Justice Department struggled to balance its roles as a law enforcer defending convictions, a minister of justice protecting the innocent, and a patron and practitioner of forensic science.

By excluding defense lawyers from the process and leaving it to prosecutors to decide case by case what to disclose, authorities waded into a legal and ethical morass that left some prisoners locked away for years longer than necessary. By adopting a secret process that limited accountability, documents show, the task force left the scope and nature of scientific problems unreported, obscuring issues from further study and permitting similar breakdowns.

That’s because the incentives guiding the actions of bureaucrats have innately been centered on politically based parameters (such as rules, regulations, codes and degrees) than from the discipline of profit and losses.

The above case fits exactly the predicaments of bureaucratic management as described by the great Ludwig von Mises in Bureaucracy p.49 (bold emphasis added)

There are, of course, in every country's public administration manifest shortcomings which strike the eye of every observer. People are sometimes shocked by the degree of maladministration. But if one tries to go to their roots, one often learns that they are not simply the result of culpable negligence or lack of competence. They sometimes turn out to be the result of special political and institutional conditions or of an attempt to come to an arrangement with a problem for which a more satisfactory solution could not be found.

Where there has been less incentive to become solutions to the problem (think “limited accountability”), bureaucratic shortcomings, operating mostly on legal technicalities (note “struggling to balance…”), are magnified.

The unfortunate realization from the above report is that two wrongs don't solve the problem of criminal justice, where criminals run scot free while the accused innocent remain incarcerated. Or differently put, injustice has been amplified by the bureaucratic or government failure.