Stossel: Junk Science Locks Up Innocent People

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Do you watch CSI?
Law and Order?
NCIS?
I like how those crime shows use
modern science to get the bad guy.
Rob's prints
are all over Singer's convertible.
The pollen that was in Petty Officer Bick's lungs
is found only one place on earth.
People who watch these shows
believe that this is how it's really done.
It's not?
It's not.
Former detective Harry Houck's annoyed
that the TV shows make
forensic science look infallible.
And you watch a detective get down and look at a body
and touch it
"he's been dead for three hours now,
he ate dinner four hours ago."
I can't do that.
On TV, experts identify the killer
by his bite mark.
A little 3D magic for clarity
and I give you the
killer's incisors.
In real life, experts
claim they can identify criminals that way.
Swinton was convicted and sentenced
to 60 years in prison based on testimony
that bite marks found on the victim
were his.
The TV show Cold Case Files covered the trial,
in which Alfred Swinton was convicted
because this so-called bite mark expert said
Swinton's teeth matched a bite on the victim.
When the models of the teeth
were laid onto the bite mark,
it was a perfect match.
The expert explained he's a neutral scientist.
A forensic scientist is not on the side
of the prosecution or the defense.
We look at the evidence
and we make sure
that if we're going to make a decision,
it's going to
be a truthful decision.
The doctor was just wrong.
He was just wrong because
it's an unreliable technique.
It looks like science.
It does.
They're in white lab coats,
they sound very authoritative,
but they're full of it.
Lawyer Chris Fabricant
helped get Swinton freed from jail
by doing a DNA test.
New DNA evidence shows
he had nothing to do
with the 1991 murder of Carla Terry.
Tonight Alfred Swinton's conviction was vacated
and he's a free man.
That's Chris Fabricant
celebrating with Swinton
the day he was released.
Bite marks is similar to you and I maybe
looking at a cloud and then I say to you,
John doesn't that cloud
look like a rabbit to you?
And you look at it and say, yeah Chris
I think that does look like a rabbit.
But that kind of junk science
puts innocent people in jail.
That's one or two people.
Many more people are in jail
and we're supposedly safer
because of that.
If you think that maybe even 1%
of convicted defendants may have been
innocent, we have 2.6 million people in prison today
so we're not talking about a couple of people,
we're talking about
tens of thousands of people.
But the people who use these techniques
they believe in it,
they're confident.
Sure, they're confident.
It's faith based science.
The expert who got Swinton convicted
now admits he was wrong
but police still trust bite marks.
Let's say one tooth is missing in the front so
you got to look at that and you go,
your suspect's got one tooth missing in the front
that's pretty good.
But then again, that's not enough.
Houck says he'd demand other evidence,
but not all cops do.
Especially if experts say
they're sure someone's guilty.
When they say so, you trust that.
Yes.
But even fingerprint evidence isn't foolproof.
The deadliest terror attack on Europe
since World War II.
When terrorists in Madrid killed 193 people,
the FBI found this
fingerprint on one of the terrorist's bags
and matched it to this fingerprint of a
man in Oregon.
An international investigation led to Brandon Mayfield.
However,
two weeks after Mayfield's arrest,
Spanish investigators found the
man to whom the fingerprint really belonged.
FBI researchers claimed
fingerprints are right more than 99% of the time,
but that still leaves plenty of
wrongful convictions.
Other technique are even less accurate.
Carpet fiber evidence,
gun tracing,
hair matching.
Microscopic hair comparison evidence
has been admitted by courts for a century.
In one case, it was a dog's hair.
A dog hair was associated wrongfully
with a human hair.
Since the turn of this century,
there have been 75 wrongful convictions.
Fabricant works for the Innocence Project.
By using more modern DNA evidence,
the project's lawyers have
helped free 191 innocent people.
All these people
were wrongly jailed
based on so-called scientific evidence.
Why do judges admit this stuff?
Why don't defense attorneys
get it thrown out?
We all went to law school because
we don't know science,
we don't know math,
and if somebody comes in with a white
lab coat and says,
I've been accredited by the American Board of Forensic
Odontology and I've been practicing for 20 years
that's good enough for
government work.
That shouldn't be the standard.
Too much is at stake.
Jurors tend to believe people who
courts call experts.
But the experts often rely on
junk science.
Juries and judges should be much
more skeptical.

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Stossel: Junk Science Locks Up Innocent People

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