news clipping on science & legal realities
Jun. 6th, 2003 01:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jenkGood article on science and law / public policy from the WSJ.
Inertia, Hope, Morality Score
TKOs in 'Solid Science' Bouts
By SHARON BEGLEY
Gary Wells is a patient soul, which is fortunate, because in 18 years he has managed to persuade approximately four of the nation's 19,000-plus legal jurisdictions to put into practice what are now incontrovertible scientific results.
Decades of research have demonstrated the fallibility of eyewitness memory of crimes. Some of the misidentifications reflect factors that resist elimination (whites tend to misidentify blacks, for instance). But Mr. Wells, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University in Ames, has found in study after study that "a lot of the errors are attributable to how the police conduct lineups." Sequential lineups, in which the eyewitness views suspect and decoys one at a time and says yes or no before going on to the next, produce a much lower rate of misidentification, especially of innocent people.
To be in favor of sound science rather than the junk variety is all the rage these days. Politicians earnestly invoke "sound science" in debates ranging from Arctic drilling to genetically modified crops. But I fear they doth protest too much. More and more, the disconnect between science and policy is nothing short of astonishing, as pols ignore science that doesn't yield the answer they want. Despite a 2003 National Academy of Sciences report calling the accuracy of polygraphs "insufficient," for instance, the U.S. Department of Energy has actually proposed using them for security screening.
In the case of police lineups, sound science says that eyewitnesses presented with half a dozen choices (live, or in a "six pack" of photos) home in on the one who looks most like their memory of the perpetrator. "That works if the real perpetrator is in the lineup," says Prof. Wells. But if the police arrested the wrong guy, closest-resemblance doesn't cut it.
Since 1985, Prof. Wells has shown time and again that sequential lineups eliminate the tendency to make these relative and sometimes erroneous judgments. Equally crucial is making the lineup "double blind": The officer doesn't know who the real suspect is, and so can't cue the witness ("Look carefully at No. 2").
Of the scores of people exonerated by DNA evidence, about three-quarters were convicted based on incorrect eyewitness IDs. Even so, authorities "have not exactly embraced sequential or double-blind line-ups, which seem radically different," says Prof. Wells. "Police and prosecutors don't like them because they're less likely to produce an identification" -- albeit a wrong one. But there may be hope yet. More jurisdictions have adopted sequential lineups in the past four years than in the previous 21, and others may come on board. In New York City, for instance, "we are reviewing" lineup procedures, says police spokesman Gerard Cole.
If the persistence of simultaneous lineups represents the triumph of inertia over sound science, fisheries policy represents the triumph of hope. Marine biologists have been warning for years about unsustainable catches -- hauling up so many fish that those left behind can't reproduce enough to replenish the population. Yet from Nova Scotia villages where men have gone down to sea for centuries to harvest cod, to California coastal towns where abalone harvests sustained generations, fisheries have collapsed. In the past 50 years, the populations of the largest and most economically important marine fish have plunged more than 90%, biologists reported last month in the journal Nature.
"The unsustainability of the catch has been clear for decades," says biologist Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, who led the study. But fishermen, and governments, haven't liked that message. So they have argued that the plunge in catches reflected one-time climate anomalies or other temporary glitches. They hoped the fish would bounce back.
"There was huge pressure on fisheries councils to remain optimistic, to believe there were more fish out there than the scientists said," notes Michael Hirshfield, chief scientist of the conservation group Oceana. Reality-defying hope and short-term economic arguments scored a TKO against sound science.
Science might as well not even step into the ring with battling views of morality. Consider, if you dare, sex education. Solid science (studies comparing hundreds of kids, published in peer-reviewed journals and with statistically significant results) shows that teaching both abstinence and contraception reduces teen pregnancy rates and sexually transmitted diseases. It also delays the start of sex among teens or decreases their number of partners. Guess whether this science will make a dent in the national policy of restricting state and federal funding (more than $500 million since 1998) to abstinence-only programs.
There is no shame in considering economic, social, political or values arguments. Science can tell you that x number of people will likely be killed by y amount of arsenic in drinking water; deciding whether to set the legal limit at 2y, y or , however, requires economic, political and value judgments. That's fine. Because truth is a moving target, science can do no more than lay out the facts, with caveats and qualifications, and describe the distribution of opinion. But once it does that, for policy makers to do the exact opposite of what the best research says makes a mockery of their pious genuflections before the altar of sound science.
Email: sciencejournal@wsj.com
Inertia, Hope, Morality Score
TKOs in 'Solid Science' Bouts
By SHARON BEGLEY
Gary Wells is a patient soul, which is fortunate, because in 18 years he has managed to persuade approximately four of the nation's 19,000-plus legal jurisdictions to put into practice what are now incontrovertible scientific results.
Decades of research have demonstrated the fallibility of eyewitness memory of crimes. Some of the misidentifications reflect factors that resist elimination (whites tend to misidentify blacks, for instance). But Mr. Wells, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University in Ames, has found in study after study that "a lot of the errors are attributable to how the police conduct lineups." Sequential lineups, in which the eyewitness views suspect and decoys one at a time and says yes or no before going on to the next, produce a much lower rate of misidentification, especially of innocent people.
To be in favor of sound science rather than the junk variety is all the rage these days. Politicians earnestly invoke "sound science" in debates ranging from Arctic drilling to genetically modified crops. But I fear they doth protest too much. More and more, the disconnect between science and policy is nothing short of astonishing, as pols ignore science that doesn't yield the answer they want. Despite a 2003 National Academy of Sciences report calling the accuracy of polygraphs "insufficient," for instance, the U.S. Department of Energy has actually proposed using them for security screening.
In the case of police lineups, sound science says that eyewitnesses presented with half a dozen choices (live, or in a "six pack" of photos) home in on the one who looks most like their memory of the perpetrator. "That works if the real perpetrator is in the lineup," says Prof. Wells. But if the police arrested the wrong guy, closest-resemblance doesn't cut it.
Since 1985, Prof. Wells has shown time and again that sequential lineups eliminate the tendency to make these relative and sometimes erroneous judgments. Equally crucial is making the lineup "double blind": The officer doesn't know who the real suspect is, and so can't cue the witness ("Look carefully at No. 2").
Of the scores of people exonerated by DNA evidence, about three-quarters were convicted based on incorrect eyewitness IDs. Even so, authorities "have not exactly embraced sequential or double-blind line-ups, which seem radically different," says Prof. Wells. "Police and prosecutors don't like them because they're less likely to produce an identification" -- albeit a wrong one. But there may be hope yet. More jurisdictions have adopted sequential lineups in the past four years than in the previous 21, and others may come on board. In New York City, for instance, "we are reviewing" lineup procedures, says police spokesman Gerard Cole.
If the persistence of simultaneous lineups represents the triumph of inertia over sound science, fisheries policy represents the triumph of hope. Marine biologists have been warning for years about unsustainable catches -- hauling up so many fish that those left behind can't reproduce enough to replenish the population. Yet from Nova Scotia villages where men have gone down to sea for centuries to harvest cod, to California coastal towns where abalone harvests sustained generations, fisheries have collapsed. In the past 50 years, the populations of the largest and most economically important marine fish have plunged more than 90%, biologists reported last month in the journal Nature.
"The unsustainability of the catch has been clear for decades," says biologist Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, who led the study. But fishermen, and governments, haven't liked that message. So they have argued that the plunge in catches reflected one-time climate anomalies or other temporary glitches. They hoped the fish would bounce back.
"There was huge pressure on fisheries councils to remain optimistic, to believe there were more fish out there than the scientists said," notes Michael Hirshfield, chief scientist of the conservation group Oceana. Reality-defying hope and short-term economic arguments scored a TKO against sound science.
Science might as well not even step into the ring with battling views of morality. Consider, if you dare, sex education. Solid science (studies comparing hundreds of kids, published in peer-reviewed journals and with statistically significant results) shows that teaching both abstinence and contraception reduces teen pregnancy rates and sexually transmitted diseases. It also delays the start of sex among teens or decreases their number of partners. Guess whether this science will make a dent in the national policy of restricting state and federal funding (more than $500 million since 1998) to abstinence-only programs.
There is no shame in considering economic, social, political or values arguments. Science can tell you that x number of people will likely be killed by y amount of arsenic in drinking water; deciding whether to set the legal limit at 2y, y or , however, requires economic, political and value judgments. That's fine. Because truth is a moving target, science can do no more than lay out the facts, with caveats and qualifications, and describe the distribution of opinion. But once it does that, for policy makers to do the exact opposite of what the best research says makes a mockery of their pious genuflections before the altar of sound science.
Email: sciencejournal@wsj.com
