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CSI Effect questions forensic evidence

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Broadcast: 03/05/2012
Reporter: Deborah Cornwall
High profile appeals highlight alarming questions around the standing of some forensic evidence and whether it may contaminate juries or convict innocent people.

Transcript

CHRIS UHLMANN, PRESENTER: Expert evidence or junk science? That's the question being asked after a series of high profile appeals in recent months. They've raised alarming doubts about the use of untested evidence that can put innocent people behind bars.

Hollywood crime shows have made forensic evidence all the rage, but in truth it can be dangerously unreliable, as Deborah Cornwall reports.

DEBORAH CORNWALL, REPORTER: It's called the CSI effect: the highly seductive notion that forensic science, at least on television, never fails. But in the real world, say the experts, forensic evidence is complex and maddeningly inconclusive, and when used in court, can be dangerously misleading for juries.

SAUL HOLT, VICTORIA LEGAL AID: When you're talking about stab wound comparisons or shoe marks or photographic comparisons, those sorts of things, it's very sexy evidence. It's the CSI material that people see on their TV screens all the time. The reality is, though, the scientific reality is that much of that evidence is built on foundations of sand.

DEBORAH CORNWALL: A recent string of high profile appeals have exposed a worrying lack of rigour behind much of the forensic evidence heard in our courts.

These Mythbusters-style experiments were crucial to the 2008 murder conviction of Sydney man Gordon Wood, convincing the jury Wood must have thrown his girlfriend Caroline Byrne over The Gap, Sydney most notorious suicide spot.

But in February this year, the prosecution case collapsed spectacularly when the NSW Court of Appeal threw out the expert evidence as critically flawed.

PETER MCCLELLAN, NSW COURT OF APPEAL (February): I am not persuaded that Associate Professor Cross' evidence or the experiments which he devised allow a conclusion that Ms Byrne could not have jumped.

DEBORAH CORNWALL: In another extraordinary case last November, Victoria Legal Aid successfully challenged the standard X-ray tests that had been used to detain 24 Indonesian boys in adult prisons on people smuggling charges. The wrist X-rays which have been used for the past 80 years to identify chronological age were completely discredited in a test case in which a 14 and 17-year-old were found to have been wrongly identified as adults.

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