Federal district judge for the Southern District of New York Jed S. Rakoff delivered the keynote address, “Judging Forensics” during the Forensics, Statistics and Law conference at the University of Virginia School of Law on March 26, 2018. The address can be viewed online here.
Judge Rakoff’s presentation commemorated the 25th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc. which reshaped how judges evaluate scientific and expert evidence. The presentation looked at how courts have considered the admissibility of testimony about scientific evidence and specifically forensic evidence. Judge Rakoff cited a study which found that in Daubert challenges between 1993 and 2001, defense proffers of expert testimony were rejected 92 percent of the time, whereas where the prosecution was the proponent of the evidence, expert testimony was admitted 95 percent of the time. Judge Rakoff examined some reasons for that disparity.
He addressed the NAS Report and PCAST Report and several examples of unreliable forensic science and statistical evidence, including a hair comparison case and a case where a mathematics professor improperly calculated the likelihood of a two suspects driving a specific car and was allowed to testify to that evidence. The question and answer session offered important insights into how these issues can be addressed.
Recordings of additional presentations and panels are available on the UVA Law YouTube channel (scroll down to “uploads”) or here. Attorneys may be interested in viewing Dr. Peter Stout’s presentation on the use of blinds at the Houston Forensic Science Center (at 27:50), Henry Swofford’s presentation on the use of statistical software in fingerprint comparisons at the Defense Forensic Science Center (at 1:12), and Dr. Alicia Carriquiry’s presentation on statistics and the evaluation of forensic evidence.
Everything has changed and yet… nothing has changed. A pattern written in stone. We know however that “No stone so hard but that a little wave might beat admission in a thousand years.” Fred Whitehurst