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The Innocent's Project is a well known, not for profit legal organization committed to investigating and exonerating individuals who have been wrongly convicted through all sorts of different scientific approaches, often but includes other methods as well. M. Chris Fabricant joins us, the author of Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System. I feel like my introduction to you is anemic, because you've got all sorts of other rewards, and you all have done great work over the years.
What do you think of as your proudest achievement?
No, I think that probably my private achievement. There are the generations of the three people that I wrote about in Junk Science, Keith Harrow or Stephen Cheney and Ai Lee Howard. You apart from you know, raising my two.
Kids, right, I was going to put that in there too.
I agree.
But you all literally get, you know, like a mail truck full of applications or cries for help every week. How do you begin to determine who is going to get the muscle, who's going to get the eyeballs of the Innocence Project?
You know, it's really you know, when you talked about the impacts of the Innocence Project on the criminal justice system, I think it's a good way to look at our intake process is an important touchdown, and you know, relating to your question and that when Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld opened the Innocence Project doors thirty one years ago, one of the really important decisions that they made was about who was going to get the the help of
the Innocence Projects. And what they decided to do was make no subjective judgments about guilt or innocence of anybody that had written for our help. The only criteria was going to be if you could find and test DNA evidence in this case, would that prove innocence? If so, it would take the case. Didn't matter. If there is a confession, didn't matter, If there are forensic sciences pointing to guilt, didn't matter, if their eyewitnesses that were certain
that it was the defendant. That was the only criteria. And as a result of that decision, we learned that junk science plays a role in over half of a known wrongful convictions. Over half. It is astonishing because up until that point we felt that they were essentially infallible, and they're still presented that way in the media.
And we'll get back to that concept of junk science and what it means moving forward. But going backward, how long ago was it when DNA and it's use in a courtroom was considered junk science.
Well, you know, DNA is not junk science. In nineteen eighty time was the first DNA exoneration, and you know, somewhat telling ly, in that first DNA exoneration, junk science was used microscopic hair comparison of it than something that I write a fair amount about. DNA allowed, you know, scientific certainty of facts which had never been available before.
You know, up until that time, we believed that the American criminal justice system was the best in the world, that wrongful convictions were banishingly rare occurrence, and that all of our rights and privileges that it was really nearly impossible. And DNA put the lid to that.
You tell these stories really well, and you tell them using a narrative form that most people would have associate with true crime before you start to kind of unpack the very story that you just presented, and you follow the cases as you were involved in repositioning the reader's view as to what they had just thought they had understood. What's interesting about that to me? I wrote a part of my dissertation was about the narratology of true crime,
and it's called Toward a Theory of True Crime. And one of the things that we explored in that in them in my research was that frequently true crime was used as a narrative form to point out the false conclusions of police, not as often as being you know, you know, pro law enforcement, but from the very beginning it was sort of a burr under the saddle of these police departments, and they began to challenge a lot of the convictions on the basis of either they were
trying the wrong person or they had convicted the wrong person. And that kind of gave true crime and the narrative forms that you use in there this status as being sort of a de facto arm of our American judicial system that we need to hear the story, not just see the facts. And I think you did that really well in the book.
Oh thank you very much. I wanted to, you know, I wanted to write a page churner, because really what my goal was was to entertain and to educate, you know, I mean, and to dispel the myth of insoluble forensics. But nobody wants to read a textbook, you know, I mean.
And the stories of you know, the incredible crimes that my clients were wrongfully convicted of and the struggles for freedom are really some of the most compelling human interest stories that have come across and I felt very sure privileged to be you know, a close observer and a participant in them. And you know, and really it's an effort to create a new true crime genre. On true crime, that's really fundamentally what we're talking about.
But just you know, there's a strong route for that. There's a if you go back even to the true crime magazines of the nineteen thirties, all the way into when true crime became a popular book genre, it was often it was considered to be insubordinate, as it didn't it no longer. It was a interrogated the very interrogators who had gotten what many considered to be, you know, to the convictions were too easy. And then the you know,
mainstream journalism is done with this. They don't the maybe the defense attorney continues to lobby the case, but they frequently move on and so what do you have? And that's often you just have as writings like this, But there is a there's a bit of a history on that which I think you tapped into really well.
Thank you. You know, it's it's funny the way you know I mean, And we need true crime for that reason because most criminal procedurals that we see on television, in particularly you know SI, are Law and Order and frantic rials and all these other shows you know there neatly ston't happened one hour. The frantic that are always depicted as infallible, objective, conclusive, right and right, and the cops are always the good guys and the criminals get
what they're have coming. And you know, we know that true life true crime is not that way.
No.
I had there was a murder in my family and I wrote about it in a book and I covered the trial from the transcript that still exists of the trial from nineteen thirty seven. And one of the things that the defense attorneys were saying was that, oh, you can't trust this thing about ballistics.
You know, there was they.
Were challenging crime science even at what now we consider to be a very acceptable level. There wasn't anything, you know, and they called it voodoo and they made a big deal out of that, and it took a long time before that I think was seen differently by the mainstream American public. And that's why I was asking about the other thing about how long ago before you know, DNA was accepted and people were like, oh, well, it's DNA evidence, and that was all you needed to hear.
Yeah, you know, I mean there's such a fundamental difference between DNA and all the other forentic techniques because you know, almost you know, every other forentic discipline is only useful in the criminal justice system, and DNA has applications far beyond you know, criminal justice matter.
It's true, So it was.
Developed in a scientific laboratory, you know, I mean in the most forensics were developed by law enforcement for law enforcement purposes, and if they were admissible in court and they were useful for getting convictions, that was good enough for government work. And that's been true for you know, a century, you know what I mean, it's still through today, you know, I mean, it's you know, much of my job is trying to combat to continued introduction of junk science and our justice system.
Well, and I love that, And we'll get to more specifics on junk science coming up. But that reminds me of a previous guest or two that we've had on who have said all of that, what you they would say if they were here. Everything you just said is true as long as the lab itself is not corrupt, that the lab can exonerate or convict on the basis of the quality of the science being conducted in the lab.
Even if the science itself is accepted that it still has to be practiced in a way which makes it useful.
Absolutely, you know what I mean. They I mean there's always bad actors, you know what I mean that you know, can take an otherwise void technique and turn it into you know, a a tool for you know, miscarriages of justice. You know Eddie the Howard's case. You know, you talk about Michael West and doctor Michael West who's a friend of goodontologist and doctor Stephen Hayne, who's a friends of pathologist or two of the most notorious Charlatan's you know,
in the annals of junk science. You know, I mean, and you know one was working in you know, largely valid field pathology and one was working in you know, probably the junkiest field out there. But between the two of them, they're responsible for, you know, hundreds of years of wrongful incarceration and.
Into the probably into their own mind too. They thought of themselves as pioneers, and the fact that they were getting paid you know, tens of thousands of dollars every year, if not you know, considerably more to testify, to pick up to do a kind of a cursory investigation. And you talk about that in the book, where they yeah, they looked at it enough to be able to tell
a jury that they did, but they weren't. Ever, there's a lot of these professional witnesses, expert witnesses, who are less about the truth and more about how much they're going to make doing it.
Oh, one hundred percent, you know what I mean. And it's funny that you call them and they referred to them as pioneers of itself, to pioneers, you know, and they you know, like you I quoted you know a lot from the transcripts of these cases, and you know, the prosecutor and maybe the Howard's case called Michael West, you compared him to Galileo said that you were attached for his groundbreaking youth. Right, it's just the same, and it was really astonishing when I read that.
I just yeah, you couldn't believe it well, And I'm afraid if we just get started with that particular case, we'll get interrupted at the bottom of the hour break, so we'll wait till after that, and then I really want you to just tell that story.
But I had so how did you know this was a guy who had the first case we're going to talk about sort of parallels the another case that was on the on the Netflix series on the Innocence Project called the Innocence Files, and they both Some of that was focused on the uh forensic ontology, the study of of bite marks, and that was I mean, it sure
looks good. I mean look, I mean just as an outside observer, it's like, AH, got them because they you know, there are people that believe that there are no two bite marks the same. It's like fingerprinting, it's like a lot of things. And so if we got bite marks, then we're going to lead. We are going to end
up with the actual killer. And I think that was interesting that you started both the book and then The The Innocence Project Netflix series kind of started with that same premise about bite marks not a coincidence.
Well, you know it's not. It was a coincidence. You know, I'm not sure. I am the it's really it's the paradigmatic example of junk science. So it's useful in terms of telling the story. And but really some of all the problems that are associated with by mark evidence are true for so many of the techniques that are still admissible today, you know what I mean? And you touch on something important about junk science and that it has
good intuitive appeal, right, you know what I mean. It's that if you're not critically thinking about it, it makes sense. You think about blood, blood leedding you know was lasted, you know, made enough into a defense last two thousand years, you know, I mean, you know I'm sick. My blood is sick. You know, I get some new blood and
I'll feel better. Sameous to with bite marks, right, you know, say, well, you know what, we've seen this bite mark on this corpse, you know, and if we found the teeth that matched that bite mark, we would have our killer. But there was never any research, There was never any proficiency testing. There was never any ability to diagnose a particular jury as a bite mark. It was a total guest work, and it totally invented, you know, field that had no
basis in science. And one of the things that was astonishing to me is I never saw this in any cross examination of any of the cases that I took. Is that it should have blown it out of the water right from the beginning. And you say that, Okay, let's just say that you could diagnose this as a bitemark.
A forensic odentologist comes in, sometimes days, sometimes weeks after a murder, takes a photograph, many many, many, very precise photographs of what he believes or she believes is a bite and then they take the suspect and they try to match it up to this pite mark. But skin changes in a decomposing corpse hour to hour, day to day, week to week. The same is true with the healing, right, and so somebody that might match one hour might not match the next hour.
Or the next day.
And I never saw a question about that, not once. Imagine you mentioned fingerprints. Imagine if few prints matched one day and then didn't match the next.
Didn't match the next day, right, you know, so just to make the case too. There are also these really weird, rare exceptions. Strange, I would be a better use of the word, like the return of blood letting, which they're doing with leeches for people who have obese certain problems related to obesity. And it's just an experiment, but it's something that was in new scientists and they're actually looking at that. Again, it doesn't account for how it was
you before. But as you say, there are all sorts of you know, they're on an hour by hour basis, our bodies being what they are, both living and dying. We would need almost like time lapse photography that's at all time to be able to see what's working and not working.
It's true, you know what I mean. This is why we we have to, you know, go to the lab. We have to do the foundational research, you know. I mean, then we have to do the applied research. You know, otherwise we're going to end up with wrongful convictions and wrongful executions, you know. I mean, it's amazing to me that we don't have something like the FDA for forensics.
You know that there's a government agency that doesn't do validation research before it's used in criminal justice, and we have that for toothpaste or mouthwash to the paper that does that. We care more about consumer products. We care more about toilet paper, and we write about the reliability of toilet paper than we do about the reliability of science. It used to condemn people in our justice system.
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