Forcing Change In Forensic Science

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New Federal Infrastructure Attempts To Reform Forensic Science

The National Academy of Sciences’ scathing 2009 report called for massive changes to forensic science oversight and further research to shore up the discipline’s methods. But five years later “not much has happened,” says Jay A. Siegel, a forensic scientist who was on the committee that wrote the report.

Big changes may finally be in the offing for forensic science, though, as the federal government, Congress, and the larger scientific community attempt to address forensics’ fundamental flaws.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) have teamed up to create a National Commission on Forensic Science, which will attempt to take the National Academy’s broad recommendations and turn them into action. And NIST is starting a new organization to create uniform standards across forensics disciplines, including several chemistry-related fields.

Chemists are playing an important role in those changes. A half-dozen chemists are on the new national commission, and more will undoubtedly join NIST’s effort to create new standards. The American Chemical Society, which publishes C&EN, recently adopted a policy statement that calls for increased scientific rigor in forensic science (Forensic Science). In addition, ACS and other scientific organizations have supported pending legislation in Congress aimed at reforming the discipline.

“Seeing the full power of the scientific community come into this is thrilling to watch,” says Madeline deLone, executive director of the Innocence Project, which works to exonerate prisoners who have been wrongly convicted. “It is not a simple process to change the way forensic science has been done. These changes are the biggest step forward in years.”

But some observers are not so sure that the current changes will be able to restore faith in forensic evidence.

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Congress could address the money problem by appropriating funds for forensic science research. There is no indication, however, that Congress will add such funds to the relevant agencies’ budgets.

The forensic bills currently in the Senate and House of Representatives instead add to existing calls for reform. Parallel versions of a bill recently introduced in the House and Senate would create a more robust forensic science research program (H.R. 6106 and S. 2022); another bill recently introduced in the Senate would create a forensics oversight structure within DOJ (S. 2177). If passed, the legislation could work seamlessly with what NIST and DOJ are currently creating.

These bills would codify into law what the Administration has been doing, says the Innocence Project’s deLone. That’s important because a future Administration could choose to address forensics differently.

Forcing Change In Forensic Science | May 12, 2014 Issue - Vol. 92 Issue 19 | Chemical & Engineering News

This is a very interesting article of where it as now and the direction it has been taking.