CAREER: Towards a Systems Analysis of the Utilization of Scientific Evidence in the Criminal Law

这个项目有三个相互交织的研究目标。首先，调查人员将对科学证据在刑事司法错误产生中的作用进行系统分析。其次，调查人员将更好地了解刑法中运用的各种专家知识之间的共性和差异，以及他们的从业人员、律师、法院和公众如何理解这些知识。这种更好的理解反过来将有助于制定专家知识的临时分类，这可能有助于更好地评估在法庭上提供的专家知识。一个隐含的故事情节已经围绕着一连串被曝光的错误定罪而构建，在这些错误定罪中，理想化的“科学”扮演白衣骑士，揭露了无能或腐败的人类的弱点，以及过时的科学。这样的故事情节掩盖和模糊了这一点，这一点在《科学与技术研究》中得到了很好的证实，即除非回顾起来，否则欺诈性的科学看起来并不欺骗性。如果要维持对科学知识在法律中的作用的更微妙的描述，就需要进行严谨和有说服力的研究，以记录科学知识、人类行为者和法律规则在实际司法不公中相互作用的方式。与此同时，关于科学证据的辩论已经沦为天真的证伪主义者和STS学者之间的辩论，他们否认有可能就专家知识主张的合法性发表任何有意义的言论。这一项目将推动那些寻求设计新的方法来评估和更好地理解专家知识的学者的议程，同时保持对STS发展的见解的真实性。DNA产生的无罪释放创造了一个历史性的时刻，在这个时刻，刑事司法系统中的错误可以通过一个非常难以抵抗的(科学的)文化权威来证明。与此同时，法律的发展给在法律中使用科学证据带来了极大的不确定性。相反，这个项目寻求利用这一历史性时刻来促进对科学证据本身的更好理解，而不仅仅是用另一种神话科学取代一种神话科学。该项目将使一群教师围绕科学和法律的广泛领域以及科学在司法不公中的作用联合起来，吸引研究生，并促进这一领域的博士研究。该项目的研究将用于丰富法医学、法律和社会、司法不公和死刑等领域的本科课程。

This project has three intertwined research objectives. First, investigators will engage in systemic analysis of the role of scientific evidence in the production of criminal justice errors. Second, investigators will develop a better understanding of the commonalities and differences between various types of expert knowledge deployed in criminal law and how they are understood by their practitioner, lawyers, courts, and the public. This better understanding will, in turn, inform the development of a provisional taxonomy of expert knowledge that may be useful for better assessing expert knowledge that is offered in court. An implicit storyline is already being constructed around the spate of exposed wrongful convictions in which an idealized "science" plays the white knight exposing the foibles of incompetent or corrupt humans as well as obsolete science. Such a storyline belies and obscures the point, well established in Science and Technology Studies, that fraudulent science does not look fraudulent except in retrospect. If a more nuanced portrait of the role of scientific knowledge in law is to be sustained, rigorous and persuasive research will be needed which documents the ways in which scientific knowledge, human actors, and legal rules have interacted in actual miscarriages of justice. At the same time, the debate over scientific evidence has descended into a debate between naive falsificationist and STS scholars who deny the possibility of ever saying anything meaningful about the legitimacy of claims to expert knowledge. This project will move forward the agenda of those scholars who seek to devise new ways of assessing and better understanding expert knowledge while remaining true to the insights developed by STS. DNA-generated exonerations have created a historic moment in which errors in the criminal justice system can be attested to with a cultural authority (of science) that is very difficult to resist. At the same time, legal developments have created great uncertainty about the use of scientific evidence in the law. Instead, this project seeks to use this historic moment to promote a better understanding of scientific evidence itself, rather than merely replacing one mythologized science with another. This project will enable the coalescing of a cluster of faculty around the broad area of science and law and the role of science in miscarriages of justice, attract graduate students, and facilitate doctoral research in this area. The project's research will be used to enrich undergraduate course offerings in the areas of forensic science, law and society, miscarriages of justice, and the death penalty.