Legal Alchemy: The Use and Misuse of Science in the Law - Softcover

Faigman, David L.

 
9780716741695: Legal Alchemy: The Use and Misuse of Science in the Law
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0716741695 ISBN 13: 9780716741695
Verlag: W.H.Freeman & Co Ltd, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Is scientific information misused by this country’s court system and lawmakers? Today more than ever before, lawyers, politicians, and government administrators are forced to wrestle with scientific research and to employ scientific thinking. The results are often less than enlightened.

In Legal Alchemy, David Faigman explores the ways the American legal system incorporates scientific knowledge into its decision making. Praised by both legal and scientific communities when it first appeared in hardcover, Legal Alchemy shows how science has been used and misused in a variety of settings, including

• The Courtroom—from the O. J. Simpson trial to the Dow Corning silicone breast implant lawsuit to landmark cases such as Roe v. Wade.

• The Legislature—where Congress uses scientific information to help enact legislation about clean air, cloning, and government science projects like the space station and the superconducting super collider.

• Government Agencies—who use science to determine policy on a variety of topics, from regulating sport utility vehicles to reintroducing gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park.

As Faigman describes these and other important cases, he provides disturbing evidence that many judges, juries, and members of Congress simply don’t understand the science behind their decisions. Finally, he offers suggestions on how the science and legal professions can overcome their miscommunication and work together more effectively.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David L. Faigman is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. He writes extensively on topics concerning the law’s use of science and is a co-author of the leading treatise Modern Scientific Evidence: The Law and Science of Expert Testimony, which has been cited several times by the United States Supreme Court. He is regularly interviewed regarding issues of scientific evidence and constitutional law.

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Legal Alchemy
I
FROM THE DARK AGES TO THE NEW AGE
The Strange History of Science in the Law
 
 
 
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
--Genesis
 
At about one-hundredth of a second after the beginning, ... the temperature of the universe is 100,000 million degrees Kelvin (1011 K) ... . It is filled with an undifferentiated soup of matter and radiation, each particle of which collides very rapidly with the other particles. Thus despite its rapid expansion, the universe is in a state of nearly perfect thermal equilibrium. The contents of the universe are therefore dictated by the rules of statistical mechanics, and do not depend at all on what went before.
--STEVEN WEINBERG, The First Three Minutes
 
 
On February 11, 1900, a jury returned a verdict of guilty and a sentence of death in the case of the People of New York v. Roland Molineux.1 Molineux was charged with the murder of Katherine Adams, who had died as a result of ingesting cyanide, which had been added to a popular headache medication and sent to her nephew through the mails. Hernephew, Harry Cornish, worked at Molineux's athletic club and had recently had a heated dispute with him. The poison, the police surmised, was intended for Cornish. Adams's headache had made his fate hers.
According to the police, this form of mail order poison was Molineux's modus operandi; he had allegedly employed the scheme successfully six weeks before. Early in 1898, Molineux had competed with Henry C. Barnet for the affections of Blanche Cheeseborough. Later reports would indicate that the woman was partial to Barnet. In October 1898, Barnet received a package of Kutnow powders through the mail from an anonymous sender. Shortly after taking some of the powders, he fell desperately ill. Although his physician attributed the illness to diphtheria, Barnet maintained that the cause was "those damned Kutnow powders." It was later determined that the powders contained cyanide of mercury. Barnet died in November. Nineteen days later, Molineux married Blanche Cheeseborough.
Molineux was never charged with the death of Henry Barnet. Nonetheless, the details of Barnet's death and the innuendo surrounding it became a major part of the state's case against Molineux in the trial involving Katherine Adams's death. More damning, however, was the discovery of the private letter boxes rented in the names of H. Cornish and H. C. Barnet. At trial, the person who had let the Barnet box, Nicholas Heckman, would testify--fortified by a promised reward from The World (a leader in the yellow journalism of the day)--that Molineux had rented the box from him. Several newspapers soon discovered that these boxes were used to receive sundry pharmaceutical products, especially medications for sexual debility. Molineux denied any connection with these postal boxes.
The core of the state's case, however, came in the form of the "science" of forensic document examination. At trial, the state introduced eighteen witnesses who specialized in handwriting identification to testify that the Cornish and Barnet letters sent to the pharmaceutical companies were written by Molineux. These experts testified further that the writing in the anonymous note that accompanied the package that contained Katherine Adams's death warrant was also in the hand of Roland Molineux. The experts thus were able to provide the empirical link between Molineux and Adams's and Barnet's deaths.
The prosecution's handwriting experts were a motley crew. None had any formal training in handwriting identification. Apparently, American universities did not offer such programs in the late nineteenth century. Most still do not. In addition, none of the prosecution's experts had conducted any research on handwriting patterns in the population or offered data indicating their proficiency in the delegated task. Severalwere employed as bank tellers and cited their experience and responsibility for evaluating the veracity of signatures for their respective employers. Other than that, these experts had conducted no systematic and rigorous study of handwriting. Fourteen of the handwriting analysts were professional experts, however, with considerable experience testifying in court, though apparently none in checking the accuracy of the conclusions to which they testified. They researched handwriting much as someone might study Milton or Shakespeare. And, as with many "experts" on literature, such musings gave them settled opinions they sought to share with the world. All the state's experts testified confidently to the conclusion that Molineux had penned the questioned documents.
The handwriting experts employed various methodologies to establish the identity of the author of the letters. The bank tellers tended to rely on gestaltlike subjective judgments from "close study" of the questioned writings. As Gilbert B. Sayres, a bank teller for thirteen years, explained, "After I began to make it a study I studied it conscientiously and for a long time, and the more I studied it the more convinced I became of the similarity ..., the characteristics being the same in both."2
The professional experts, on the other hand, employed a more technical and seemingly more sophisticated method of comparison. Persifor Fraser, for instance, a geologist and chemist and a "student of handwriting for about twenty-one years,"3 testified in somewhat greater detail about the comparison he made between Molineux's handwriting and the note that accompanied the "poison package" received by Cornish. It is worth quoting at some length from Persifor Fraser's testimony. (The numbered exhibits he refers to were known handwriting exemplars provided by the defendant; Exhibit A was the note found with the poison package.)
Roland Molineux wrote the address on the wrapper, Exhibit A, because, firstly, there are twenty-one characteristics in the conceded writings which are visibly on Exhibit A, secondly, the patterns of a great many letters on the unnumbered [sic] exhibits accord very closely with the patterns of the letters on Exhibit A, and these differences, which exist, are those which would be naturally adapted for disguise; thirdly, the microscopic structure of the ink lines in the numbered exhibits, the conceded writings, agree with the microscopic structure in the ink lines of the Exhibit A in two respects; firstly, in the swelling and tremors, deviations through tremor of the line when highly magnified; secondly, in the characters of the margins of the lines, the edges of the ink lines ... [and] in searching for some characteristic which was not simply a question of comparison of model or a similarity, it occurred to me that these differences were more than could be accounted for by accident.4
There are a number of aspects of the nineteenth-century methods of handwriting identification that seem to be problematic. Most striking, perhaps, is how unscientific the process appears. The experts all knew what results would confirm the hypotheses they were testing. Experimenter bias, usually avoided at all costs in empirical research, was palpable here. The experts also approached the samples looking for confirming instances and were quick to discount or dismiss differences as "adapted for disguise."
The practice of searching a multitude of exemplars for...

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Verlag
W.H.Freeman & Co Ltd
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0716741695
ISBN 13 
9780716741695
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
233
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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