Originally published 24 November 1997
“It’s the science, stupid,” said defense lawyer Barry Scheck at the Louise Woodward trial.
Well, maybe not in those exact words, but that was the gist of his argument.
And, indeed, Louise Woodward’s fate did seem to turn on technical testimony of medical authorities for both defense and prosecution. Now, weeks after the trial’s conclusion, the “science” of Matthew Eappen’s injuries continues to be debated by physicians and pathologists in the pages of newspapers and on TV talk shows.
One doctor is quoted in the press as saying that the chances that Matthew’s injuries occurred weeks before his death, without anyone noticing — as claimed by the defense — are “something like 100 to 1” against. Asked whether Matthew could have died from weeks-old injuries, another doctor said: “Absolutely, positively, no question about it.”
These vigorous disagreements among “authorities” do not increase the public’s confidence in the reliability of “science.”
When it came right down to it, most people probably made up their minds about Woodward’s guilt or innocence on the basis of intuition, not science. They looked at the girl sitting in the courtroom chair and asked themselves, “Is this a murderer?” Or they were swayed in their opinion by the media, or by class prejudice.
For all of Barry Scheck’s table-thumping about “science,” it is hard to believe that science had much to do with the outcome of this much ballyhooed trial.
Scheck has made a name for himself as a guru of forensic science. DNA testing, in particular, has become, for Scheck, a “magical black box that suddenly produces the truth.” Used carefully, DNA evidence can “clarify what was previously ambiguous or frankly misleading to juries,” he claims.
And he may be right. But the public can be forgiven if they harbor doubts about the reliability of science as an arbiter of judicial truth. After all, they watched this same Barry Scheck successfully discredit a powerful DNA case against O. J. Simpson, with a mind-boggling story of police misfeasance and planted blood.
If there is any place one is unlikely to find good science, it is in a courtroom with television cameras, “dream-team” lawyers and an audience of millions. The whole point of science, after all, is to avoid commotion, cash, politics, and class — and to foster dispassionate rhetoric.
Good science and courtroom grandstanding are antithetical.
If the public is justifiably skeptical of courtroom science, it is because they are offered a mistaken impression of what science is. Science is not “truth.” Science is not “expert testimony.” Science is not a “magical black box” that one can simply open and find the facts.
Science is the very opposite of these things.
Science is not truth. Rather it is a social means of achieving a broad consensus about what constitutes reliable knowledge.
Science is not the opinions of experts. No one person’s opinion, or research, defines science. Science is a community enterprise. The larger and more diverse the scientific community, the more reliable the consensus.
Scientific method does not yield facts at the turn of a crank. In fact, there is no such thing as a single, unique “scientific method.”
What scientists practice is ordinary skepticism, logic, and common sense. Individual scientists are subject to the same foibles, deceits, and prejudices that afflict us all. What makes scientific knowledge reliable is the elaborate consensus-building apparatus that has been painstakingly evolved over centuries.
Quantitative data-taking, reproducible experiments, numerical graphs and charts, specialized languages, scrupulous citation of all relevant previous work, and peer review: These are all designed to focus attention on the natural phenomenon under study, and away from individual scientists. Universities, scientific societies, journals, and conferences also act to nurture consensus.
The motto of the first scientific institution, the Royal Society founded in England in 1660, was “Take no one’s word for it.” What they meant was “Take no one’s word but ours.” On the face of it, this suggests replacing one “expert authority” by another. But in practice, it means placing one’s faith in the elaborate system of checks and balances which is the international scientific community.
What we see in the courtroom is not science, which is by definition a collective enterprise, but individual opinion on a short leash. When Barry Scheck evokes science as an absolute authority — in the testimony of an “expert” witness — he conjures an illusion.
Science works more or less like the court system itself. What it seeks is not certainty, which is always elusive, but consensus knowledge that is reliable beyond reasonable doubt.
