IT BECAME known as 鈥渢he CSI effect鈥�. TV shows such as NCIS, Law and Order, Silent Witness and of course CSI itself sparked a surge of popular interest in forensic science, swelling the applications for university courses.
But with this popularity came concern that idealised TV depictions of crime labs would cause the public to invest too much faith in forensics. On TV, tests are definitive, databases always find a match and scientists rarely make mistakes.
The public, however, turns out to be capable of telling fact from fiction. carried out have shown that they maintain realistic expectations of forensics.
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Sadly, we can鈥檛 always say the same for practitioners. In the US, the Department of Justice has of the FBI鈥檚 application of forensic science in the courtroom. This was prompted by a number of high-profile abuses such as the discovery that FBI agents routinely misrepresented the results of hair analysis.
The UK also has problems. In 2012, the government disbanded its Forensic Science Service and split the work among private firms, prompting fears that quality would suffer. Those fears have not been entirely dispelled. Next month, the government鈥檚 Forensic Science Regulator will publish an extensive review of the procedures it expects scientists to follow when investigating sexual assault cases, after that using a contractor鈥檚 procedures would compromise the evidence.
Now we have a new tool to worry about. Inferring that someone was at a crime scene by assessing the presence of microbes may soon have its day in court (see 鈥�Microbe CSI: How to read the air for clues at crime scenes鈥�). This technique has been hailed by one lawyer as potentially the biggest advance since DNA forensics. But it raises fresh concerns about overzealous law enforcement and naive jurors. Those may turn out to be unfounded, but that鈥檚 no reason to be complacent. A lot still hangs on our ability to tell forensic fact from fiction.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淲ill it stand up in court?鈥�
