There's an interesting court case wrapping up recently in the US, and catching a bit of attention as well. I think this is actually a brilliant example of how the legal system loses any semblance of common sense in pursuit of complying with the letter of the law. And yes, I know I'm writing about this as an outsider (or "alien", as the US immigration department likes to term me), but it relates to science and laboratory analysis, which is where I do make my living, so I think I'm able and entitled to comment at least a little bit on that side of things. And hey, what would a blog be without an occasional slightly-irrelevant opinion..?
So, the argument, as best as I understand it (and do please correct me if I'm wrong) basically is this: the Sixth Amendment (which is part of the constitution, and therefore akin to holy scripture) says that a defendant has the right to confront any witness testifying against them. The defendant in this case, Mr Melendez-Diaz, was caught with a bunch of little bags of white powder that it was alleged were cocaine. The laboratory tests that were run said that it was cocaine. He was convicted of offenses related to possession and trafficking of cocaine. All of this is reasonably standard so far. Where it starts to go wrong is where Melendez-Diaz (or, more likely, his overly-creative lawyer) decided to challenge the admissability of the lab analysis on the basis that he didn't have the chance to 'confront' (6th amendment terminology) the lab technician who had done the analysis to determine that the white powder was in fact cocaine. He took this all the way to the Supreme Court, and ended up winning, which now means that defendants have the right to demand the presence of the specific lab technician, analyst, autopsy-conducting-person (don't know what they're called), etc., who ran the tests which led to the identification of any substance by chemical means. (I presume this would extend to DNA also).
Now, the key thing here is that sometimes this type of analysis will only take a few minutes or an hour to run, but being personally present in court to testify that you've done your (highly procedure-based and often partially automated) job correctly takes much much longer than that. So, if a technician runs, say, 9 analyses in an 8-hour workday, and then spends a day in court for each of them, that means they get to do their actual job one day in every two weeks. This is flagrantly inane - although may actually lead to a boom in the job market for laboratory-trained people, which might be a positive side-effect...
The other question is: if I ran an analysis on an instrument (say a gas chromatograph or mass spectrometer), and the instrument detected a particular signal which takes very little creativity to identify as being, for example, cocaine - is it me that did the analysis, or the instrument? In that case, is it the technician who needs to turn up in court, or is it the manufacturer of the instrument? Or maybe the guy (or team of 20 guys) who wrote the software that controls the instrument? These people almost certainly had more input into the instrument giving the results it did than did the technician operating it; where does the chain stop?
I think it also needs to be recognised that a document written about 220 years ago (like the Bill of Rights, which contains the 6th Amendment) must be placed in the context of the time in which it was written, rather than being read word-for-word and interpreted as such in a modern legal system. The people who wrote the 'rules' had no idea that it would ever be possible for a machine to create evidence for a technician to analyse - so does it make sense to be bound by that in deciding whether the evidence is 'testimony' or simply a statement of fact and therefore not subject to the confrontation rule? I don't think this is the sort of thing that leads to 'justice' coming from the legal system - it's basically just going to mean that technicians can't do their jobs, creative lawyers will continue to be able to find loopholes and create extra billing hours for themselves, and the 'bad guys' will get away with things because of it.
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I agree with you and I also don't. The sixth amendment's confrontation clause was violated because the state was putting forth witness testimony (in the form of the technician's report). The petitioner didn't have the opportunity to cross examine the witness and perhaps poke holes in the testimony. It's like having to accept an argument without having the opportunity to rebut. But I do see your point. I do think though, that a defendant in such a case does have the right to challenge test results by questioning how those results came to pass and that happens in the court room. Isn't that the bigger issue? Why should anyone accept without question 1.) what the state says is true and 2.) how they got to that "truth" is valid?
ReplyDeletePersonally, I find that the various state statues that allow for these certificates to be used but only after the defendant being notified of the intent, is well within the constitution. To me it's like the defendant waiving the right to cross-examine if s/he doesn't care to challenge the results.
It was interesting though to see how the court was divided. It was a mix of conservative and liberal justices on both sides.