When I was a kid, Popular Mechanics was a really cool magazine.  It had cars that could be driven into the water like a boat, and wild one-person helicopters and jetpacks that we would all be using one day to get around.  It was the stuff that dreams were made of, at least for 12 year olds.  I haven’t read it in a long, long time.  In fact, I haven’t even seen one around.  My metrosexual dentist prefers Architectural Digest.

But after reading Radley Balko’s post about Popular Mechanics and its story on the flaws of forensic science, I’m think that it might be time for the state to buy a bunch of copies and leave them lying around the judges’ lounge.

The article includes a skeptical look at four common forensic specialties, including fingerprint analysis, ballistic evidence, trace evidence, and biological evidence, and explains how none are as certain as they’re often portrayed in the courtroom.

Lawyers are not required to know squat about science to pass the bar.  For some bizarre reason, judges, upon their elevation to the bench and donning of the robe, are of the belief that they’ve suddenly become scientific savants (as well as funny, which is another issue).  As the gatekeepers of evidence, they ought to be.  But, of course, they’re not.

A while back, I wrote a piece for the now defunct Judicial Reports about how the thousands of videos of police doing the dirty makes it impossible for judges to honestly default to the assumption of police credibility and integrity.  My position was that it was no longer possible to close one’s eyes to the fact that some cops lie and harm people, and do so without what others might see as a comprehensible reason.  It just happens.

Nothing changed.  Judges are either too busy or too disinterested to spend their time watching Youtube to learn what the rest of us have come to realize by being bombarded day to day with the proof that our fears of the past are indeed valid.  We may be firmly convinced, but we’re not the decisionmakers.  The decisionmakers haven’t budged.  A few, perhaps, but not enough to make a dent.

The same is true with advances in science, They are still in love with science, viewed as perfect evidence in contrast with the garbage of testimony that we’re all forced to endure.  Their job is so much easier when scientific proof, something upon which they can rely without any nagging doubt in their back of their mind, is presented.  They lose no sleep when some tech takes the stand and speaks the results of their test.

Of course, judges are the last people one would want to decide the validity of scientific testing.  They know zip about it to begin with, and haven’t kept pace with new data and faults that appear in the literature.  Of course, one might remind them that at one point in time, bleeding with leeches was considered the height of medical knowledge.  Things change.  Except in the courtroom.  Debunked science will continue to be embraced with love and appreciation long after researchers have determined that it’s just another round of leeches.

Judges are the human version of lemmings, following each other blindly under the guise of precedent.  Not until some rebel judge challenges the orthodoxy will another even consider the question of whether a test, once deemed reliable, might be full of crap.  It’s not that each judge doesn’t have the capacity to be the rebel, though most lack the desire.  It’s that they can never go wrong (legally) by falling back on that which has already been decided.  What was once good science remains good science, so long as no judge has broken ranks.

Publishing this article in Popular Mechanics seems like an important step in breaking away from the mindset that if some scientist once said that this is good evidence, it’s now irrefutable in perpetuity.  You can bet money they won’t be reading the scholarly journals to find out that fingerprinting isn’t perfect, but it’s just possible that they will read Popular Mechanics.  After, it’s got pictures.

Now if we could just get Playboy to cover the subject.  They only read it for the article, you know.