Like most fans of crime solving entertainment, Law was unknowingly influenced by the “CSI effect,” the public’s expectation from television shows that the path to solving crime through forensic science is clear, quick and inevitable.
Law, BS ’14, MS ’16, Forensic and Investigative Science, found out how wrong that was firsthand in his junior year.
“On TV, when you enter a fingerprint into a database, you’ll see overlays of two
fingerprints and it’s an instant match,” he said. “The face of the suspect pops
up on a computer and it has all of his information right there.
“It’s not like that at all.”
Instead, fingerprint databases generate a list of potential matches, prompting
the examiner to click on each candidate to manually compare the prints. That
process alone could easily fill up an hour of TV time.
Law is working on his third forensic science degree at West Virginia University,
the only university in the country to offer a bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral
degree in the field. And as of 2016, it’s one of two to offer a PhD program
in forensic science – the other is Sam Houston State University. Of these
two programs, only WVU is designated as a highest-research activity institution
by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
Law is a member of a growing field that is navigating a path through working as
an arm of law enforcement and evolving as a science.
Under the microscope
Earlier this year, Suzanne Bell, director of the WVU Department of Forensic and Investigative Science, and a small group of fellow scientists published a report in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences of the United States of America titled “A call for more science in forensic science.”
Bell and the scientists were on the National Commission on Forensic Science in the subcommittee on Scientific Inquiry and Research until the U.S. Department of Justice disbanded the commission in 2017.
The recent report led by Bell distilled the problem: “Forensic science is at a
crossroads. It is torn between the practices of science, which require empirical
demonstration of the validity and accuracy of methods, and the practices of law,
which accept methods based on historical precedent even if they have never been
subjected to meaningful empirical validation.”
While some aspects of the science are evolving, such as latent fingerprint analysis,
others have been discounted, such as bite-mark identification, which the report
says has been discredited by scientific studies and false convictions. Despite
this, bite-mark identification is still used in the court system because of legal
precedent.
Bell believes the government’s methods for evaluating scientific merit and expert
testimony is outdated.
Having a system that is “primarily prosecutorial in nature creates an inherent conflict
of interest that can introduce bias. The role of the prosecution and defense is
to win their case through competing arguments,” Bell said. “Scientific
evidence and testimony is often part of these cases, but neither ‘side’ can or
should be expected to evaluate underlying scientific integrity on its own merits.”
As noted in Bell’s recent report, some academic researchers have referred to forensic
science as “merely” an applied science that relies mostly on subjectivity
rather than objectivity.
For example, when a trained professional gives courtroom testimony, he or she often
compares pieces of evidence and offers an expert opinion on whether or not
they’re a perfect match. This is called pattern matching. Forensic science critics
say that’s not enough. They contend that only DNA analysis can be
statistically validated.
“This kind of ingrained attitude can be just as harmful to progress in forensic
science as the improper reliance on precedent,” Bell said. “A hallmark of WVU’s
program is integration of groundbreaking research in forensic science that clearly
counters such misconceptions. Like any diagnostic science, a solid foundation of
data and analysis is used to interrogate and integrate data and form opinions.”
Jacqueline Speir, assistant research professor, has created a one-of-its-kind database of footwear soles in the United States for forensic research.
As Jacqueline Speir, an assistant professor in the department, notes, “all sciences have subjective elements.”
“Look at the medical discipline, which employs the same pattern-analysis process
used in forensic science,” Speir said. “Physicians collect observations through
a patient’s self-report of symptoms, which leads to a hypothesis regarding an ailment,
which further necessitates laboratory tests, before the pattern of symptoms
and test results allow for a diagnosis. Medical personnel have to evaluate all
the evidence in context to formulate a diagnosis, which includes both subjective
and objective steps. This idea that science is completely objective – that doesn’t
really fit with reality.”
Speir believes that forensic science should include a blend of objectivity and
subjectivity.
“We are not at a place where computers can accurately integrate all the subtle
variations that a human-observer immediately and seamlessly uses when arriving
at a decision,” Speir said. “There will likely always be a need for both – the
subject matter expert and the objective metrics she employs.”
In 2014, Speir received nearly $400,000 in grant funding from the National Institute
of Justice to research the forensic value of shoe evidence. She used the funding
to build a database that’s the first-of-its kind in the U.S. – a database of 1,300
outsoles with 72,306 randomly acquired characteristics, which are features that develop
on footwear outsoles as a result of wear, such as scratches and tears. The
characteristics are essential for identifying particular footwear as the source
of an impression.
Speir and her students collected the shoes, a random sampling of mostly men’s athletic
footwear, scanned images of the soles and identified their traits.
“Our database can be used to understand how often, by chance alone, we would associate
a nick or tear to two unrelated outsoles,” Speir explained. “If I find a nick on
my outsole, I would want to be able to say how likely it is that another unrelated
shoe by random chance would have the same nick, with the same geometry, of the
same size and orientation and in the exact same position.”
The database is ever-growing and Speir hopes the forensic and legal communities
find value in it.
“Examiners out in the field are busy with casework and don’t have time to collect,
process and analyze this type of data, which is a luxury afforded to researchers,”
she said, “but when practitioners and academics work together to answer these questions,
the field as a whole can advance in ways not possible if we each work in isolation.”
CSI U
As Bell and other scientists advocate for a more accurate understanding of their field, they’re also tasked with training the next generation’s Temperance Brennan and Gil Grissom.
Four short years after the discovery of DNA analysis, WVU launched a forensic
science program in 1998. At the time it was a small partnership with the FBI. Adjunct instructors
from law enforcement taught fingerprint data analysis and crime scene investigation.
Chemists and biologists oversaw the program because there were very few forensic
scientists in academia.
With support from the University and the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, the
program grew both in students and faculty. It earned accreditation, established
mock crime scene houses – the largest such complex in the country – and added state-of-the-art
laboratories such as the Ballistics Research Laboratory and advanced forensic photography
lab.
Forensics students review “evidence” left behind at one of the WVU mock crime scene houses. Photo by Jennifer Shephard.
The range of research undertaken by faculty include explosives, synthetic drugs,
forensic toxicology, latent fingerprint recognition, printing ink evidence and
insect and arthropod biology.
By 2014, the program blossomed into its own full-fledged department.
“Now that we have R1 status, we’re quite aware of our leadership on the national
stage,” Bell said of the University’s standing as a highest-activity research institution
according to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. “After
several PhD programs popped up and died at other universities over the years,
people have looked at us and said, ‘Thank God WVU is in it because it will be done
right.’ That’s high praise for the department, the college and WVU.”
Collectively, the faculty has more than 150 years of forensic laboratory experience.
Bell worked for the New Mexico State Police Crime Laboratory as a forensic chemist,
drug analyst, arson analyst and crime scene investigator. She then worked at the
U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory before becoming a professor
and joining the WVU Department of Chemistry in 2003. Her role in the forensic program
grew as she taught crime scene and blood spatter courses.
“I always wanted to be a police officer or federal agent,” Bell said. “My adviser
urged me to take chem courses and I ended up a double major in chemistry and criminal
justice. I asked, ‘Now what do I do with this?’ He said to visit a lab and go to
grad school. It was a pivotal moment and decision and led me to work with
the leading forensic scientists of that time. I was very fortunate.”
WVU is working to make the path to forensic science more direct and robust. Ninety
percent of 2016 graduates have either found a job in their field or are working
toward an advanced degree. That same year, the field had 15,400 forensic
science technicians, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number
is expected to grow 17 percent to 18,000 by 2026.
That doesn’t account for the growth in research and education.
“There’s a need for our PhD program at WVU,” said Law, the PhD student. “There
are problems with the justice system, and error rates in forensic science are frequently
criticized. It’s important to have people with scientific and research backgrounds
tackle those issues.”
Law’s research takes aim at firearms investigation. He’s been test-firing, studying
and replicating cartridge cases in an attempt to make linking cartridge cases to
weapons and weapons to individuals more accurate.
“There’s lots of variability,” Law said. “If I shoot a gun 10 times, they
all won’t look identical when comparing them. My master’s thesis was more statistics-based,
looking at how many cases you need to capture variability within a firearm.”
Law’s work ties in with that of the federal Defense Forensic Science Center, which
is funding research to establish error rates for firearms tracking.
“Even with statistics, you can never say for sure it’s a 100-percent match,”
Law said. “But you can say it’s ‘likely.’ There’s always a little bit of room
for error. But the end goal of my research is to capture that variability,
to better identify which guns are used in a crime.”
Law has gone as far as to produce replicas of spent cartridge cases using rubber
and plastic resin.
“Plastic reproduction of cartridge cases actually gives you the detail you’d see
from that cartridge case perfectly,” he said.
Down the road, Law sees himself teaching forensic science at a university. But
before that, he hopes to gain practical experience in the field, whether through
an agency like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
or the Department of Defense, before re-entering academia.
“One of the things I like most about WVU is that the faculty have real-world experience,”
Law said. “That’s why WVU is in such a unique position. It’s our research faculty
and our facilities that can’t be beat.
“With four crime scene houses, a garage for vehicle processing and a ballistics
testing facility, I couldn’t get this experience anywhere else.”