Menace To The Innocent: Insubstantial Expert Evidence Endangers Innocent People Accused Of A Crime

Expert evidence is a valuable prosecution technique used to link a person to a crime. However there is a dark side to this technique that can’t be ignored: The use of expert evidence as a prosecution tool to falsely implicate an innocent person in a crime. Irregularities involving prosecution expert evidence have occurred since at least 1925 in the United States. Irregularities underlying prosecution expert evidence include substandard work; reliance on unreliable or compromised test procedures; and bias by slanting evidence reports and testimony to favor the prosecution. These practices affect criminal prosecutions in a way that has been known to be prejudicial to innumerable innocent men and women. Yet they are able to occur with impunity because labeling a testing process as scientific typically assures it of a near mystical reverence by judges, jurors and defense lawyers. The same is true of people designated as scientific experts: They are given a hallowed status as interpreters of what is considered to be "the unseen, the indecipherable, or the incomprehensible" to lay persons. Menace To The Innocent exposes that this situation undermines the credibility of the legal process, and proscribes no-nonsense solutions that will dramatically improve the reliability of prosecution expert evidence.

Hans Sherrer is President of the Justice Institute, and Editor and Publisher of Justice Denied: the magazine for the wrongly convicted, which has been published since 1999. He also created and maintains the Innocents Database, which is the only database in the world that compiles all known exonerations in the United States and more than 100 other countries.