The DA is already covering up and defending the prosecutor's involvement, saying there is nothing wrong with prosecutors telling Dhookan what test results they needed to get their convictions, in clear violation of proper experimental procedures.
Forensic science in general is an absolute joke. It makes a mockery of the very concept of science. There are a few isolated pockets where the techniques and procedures used are sound, but for the most part the scientific method and rigor are nowhere to be seen.
Care to cite anything about this? From a Biochemist's perspective, when done properly, chemical analysis is extremely accurate and provides a great deal of information.
Forensic science encompasses a broad range of things, including bullet-lead analysis, arson investigation, handwriting analysis, fingerprinting, etc. Various techniques have bordered or even crossed into pseudoscience, others have wildly erratic error bars that are never properly considered. There are so many problems because the entire field does not treat their discipline as scientists do, they are too close to law enforcement for that. Techniques are used for decades before anybody bothers to properly figure out if the technique actually works.
There should be a chinese wall between the crime lab and the DA. All the DA should be able to do is submit evidence and any matching of that evidence to the accused should be a complete black box as far as the DA is concerned.
If you read some of the other articles in this thread, there is specific mention of a recent supreme court case ruling in 2009, "Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts", where it was found that the accused are entitled to face expert witnesses as their accusers. This means forensic analysts are forced to appear in court more often.
The forensic analysts are government employees. This means that they are almost always providing evidence that implicates the accused in the commission of a crime.
When a case goes to trial, the prosecution only includes evidence that proves guilt. At the very least, if it proves neither guilt nor innocence, they exclude it from their exhibits as irrelevant. Prosecutors don't even look for opportuinities to prove innocence. That's not their job. That's up to the defence. They deliberately engage in tunnel vision, biased only in favor of guilt. If they have evidence that exonerates the accused, they simply drop the case. They have to. But that outcome is deeply undesirable to the prosecution, because it opens the door to wrongful arrests, police harassment and other liabilities.
The disturbing part here is that she was rubber stamping evidence in favor of guilt.
What if her behavior correlates to the DEA's program of parallel construction using inadmissible evidense collected by the NSA and shared with the DEA, thus provoking a premature conclusion of guilt, where the court case was then reversed engineered to align with the illicit intelligence?
If she were playing a role in that capacity, this would represent a far more serious problem than a single "rogue" chemist... She would merely be a patsy, a useful idiot, taking the fall for a much larger institutional debacle.
>What if her behavior correlates to the DEA's program of parallel construction using inadmissible evidense collected by the NSA and shared with the DEA, thus provoking a premature conclusion of guilt, where the court case was then reversed engineered to align with the illicit intelligence?
that would explain why she went down without talking to FBI/etc and taking down all the DAs with (or even instead of :) her (as this just couldn't have happened at that scale without all the DAs involvement)
Took one for the team, and will land softly somewhere after the time on the "farm" (again with such cover it wouldn't be general prison population which she helped to populate).
I call it "going through the motions of science" in order to be able to claim scientific objectivity.
There certainly is a science of forensics, but I think that what happens in a crime lab relates to that science like plumbing relates to hydrodynamics: it's technology, not science.
Done right, this technology leads to results that are generally more reliable than eyewitnesses and other forms of circumstantial evidence. But it's a mistake to consider a technology infallible just because it's based on science. The Scientific Method cannot rule out accident, human error, and malice.
The DA is already covering up and defending the prosecutor's involvement, saying there is nothing wrong with prosecutors telling Dhookan what test results they needed to get their convictions, in clear violation of proper experimental procedures.