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ABSTRACT: The NAS/NRC committee report, Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward, issued in February 2009, was a milestone in the decades-long struggle to get those who control the production and utilization of forensic science expertise to admit the various weaknesses of some of the techniques involved, and to take steps to strengthen the reliability of those techniques and their products. The NAS/NRC committee report is in some ways the culmination of those efforts and has made it now untenable to dismiss criticisms as simply the cavils of uninformed academics with nothing better to do.
In this sense, the report is a glass nine-tenths full and is to be celebrated as such. But then there is the other tenth, the tenth that may, as an unintended consequence, delay needed reform significantly and unnecessarily. The most significant part of this unwise tenth is the decision not to push strongly for the immediate adoption of masking and sequential unmasking protocols in forensic science practice, but instead to call for "more research" on the issue in advance of moving forward.
This paper explains in detail why the "await more research" approach is misguided.
CITATION: D. Michael Risinger, The NAS/NRC Report on Forensic Science: A Glass Nine-Tenths Full (This Is About the Other Tenth), 50 Jurimetrics J. 21-34 (2009).
Some of the participants in this symposium have been involved in a decades-long struggle to get those who control the production and utilization of forensic science expertise to admit the various weaknesses of some of the techniques involved, both in theory and in practice, and to take steps to strengthen the reliability of those techniques and their products.1 The National Research Council's report2 is in some ways the culmination of those efforts and has made it now untenable to dismiss criticisms as simply the cavils of uninformed academics with nothing better to do.
A couple of years ago when the NAS/NRC committee process began,3 if you had offered me this report and told me that I could take it as it is, or await the results of the committee process with its hopes for better but risks for worse, I would have grabbed this report in a heartbeat. In this sense, the report is a...