Forensics Quiz 2

What can you offer as atonement for a mistake?

• Acknowledge that nothing can make this right

• Offering counseling services is a big one

• Some kind of monetary compensation

• Take accountability

Level of courtroom testimony

The ability to communicate facts at an 8th grade level

Being able to communicate effectively shows you care, which shows that you care about finding the truth. It shows a jury you can be trusted and are relatable

What to do when you’re having a bad day in the lab

If you’re having a bad time, and you still need to go to work, tell your supervisor, and occasionally have someone go over your work- “To thine unself be true” -Shakespeare

“The Golden Hour”

• step back from something you are dreading or doing and check in with yourself to re-center yourself 

  • Block out distractions, get yourself mentally and physically prepared

  • You can’t turn it off, but you can evaluate your capabilities at that moment

Types of bias

Confirmational and contextual

Contextual bias

• Best mitigated by sequential unmasking 

  • Putting fingerprints into AFIS (now NGI), the system will spit back samples and ID numbers (NOT names) 

    • Blind identification/verification (identifying something without the context of the first identification)

• Based on context

• If an examiner receives evidence from a crime scene and then samples from a suspect, the focus is directed toward that suspect

Obligations to the professions

• Maintain professional skills and keep up to date with current information

  • Professional testing, attending conferences, reading journals, continuing education (though often come with a fee that the state can’t always pay for)

Code of ethics

• You want the same rules for all people under the umbrella of the career

  • Exist to create a baseline

  • “There are rules for a reason” -ie there is a REASON why that rule is around

Seven deadly sins

Pride, gluttony, envy, wrath, lust, sloth, greed

Cardinal virtues

Prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope, and charity

Rules for accepting a gift

• By law, anything offered to us valued over $100 has to be 

  • 1) Returned with a vigorous thank you 

  • 2) Shared with everyone in the office

  • 3) If it is accepted, you have to donate the equivalent value to a charity in that person’s (the giver) name

    • There are legal forms for this  

  • The safest bet is to decline- but if it’s food, share it if you can, that’s hard to return

How do we enforce ethical standards

• Learn from systems where things work and where things are done

• Reasonable and responsive ideals

• Principles

  • Accept ethical norms

  • Enumerated and published codes of conduct

    • Reach out to the people who know the positions and the lab in the creation of a list of ethics

    • Position of consensus among managers and people higher than them

  • Cyclical and continuing education to ensure updates are not only known but understood and cover all aspects of the code

  • Availability to all practitioners and all other interested parties

    • You have to know the rules and be able to produce them to enforce them 

  • Documented acceptance of the code and acknowledgment that it has been read and understood

    • If you join a professional organization, you have to read their code of ethics and sign to prove you understand them

How do we overcome temptation

• Self-discipline

  • Know yourself best, and first, know what you are tempted by

    • Admit to yourself what your traits are- good and bad

      • Know what things you place at a high value, as these things can be used against you to move you off your ethical square

• Accountability

DISC survey

• Dominance, influence, steadiness, and compliance test (DISC survey)

  • Identifies individual styles, strengths, and weaknesses

  • Created by the FBI

  • Used to help you grow, show areas you need to work on

    • Help you in professional and personal relations and situations

Performance =

Procedure

Character =

Action

What can emotions do?

• Emotions can control, or they can control you

  • Cravings divert ethical behavior

Impact bias

• Overwhelming, magnifies the effect of cravings, craving overvalues potential outcome, clouds judgment

  • We tend to overinflate and extend the impact of good outcomes

Focalism

• The tendency to place too much importance or emphasis on a single factor or piece of information when making judgments or decisions

  • Hyperfocusing on one piece of evidence as a lead and ignoring others 

  • Focusing on one piece of evidence might you lock in on someone and overlook something very important

  • Tunnel vision

Where do operational standards fail?

• Standards of practice cannot fit every single situation case or investigation technique

  • And yet investigators try to apply them to every situation- which might not always lead to the most ethical outcomes

Ensuring ethical standards

• Background investigations

• Ethical training- situational training

  • Mental health

  • Inebriated persons

• Ethical choices of an individual tend to echo the attitudes of an organization

Brady material

• Material information that is exculpatory or may impeach a witness and, therefore has a bearing on the guilt or innocence of a defendant

• Therefore, prior unethical conduct of an individual (expert witness or forensic practitioner) or agency by which they are employed can be considered Brady material

• It can preclude evidence associated with that behavior from being admissible

  • Goes back to maintaining your credibility

Front page/newspaper test

Whenever you’re faced with a difficult situation- think about how it would look on the front page of the newspaper

How to regain public trust

• Take accountability 

• Publicize what you are doing to fix things 

• Separate yourself from the bad act/bad actor

Demming’s 14 Points of Maximizing Enterprise

1) Create a constant purpose for improvement 

2) Adopt the new philosophy 

3) Stop depending on inspections

4) Use a single supplier for any one item

5) Improve constantly and forever

6) Use training on the job

7) Implement leadership

8) Eliminate fear

9) Break down barriers between departments

10) Get rid of unclear slogans

11) Eliminate management by objective

12) Implement education in self-improvement

13) Make transformation everybody’s job

Methods used to prevent ethical dillemmas and problems

• Revisit policies and procedures

• More training

• On the investigation side 

• Maintaining/rebuilding integrity

• People in charge of QA, but then also outside entities looking into cases in the lab (innocence project, etc)

  • Things being public record

FOIA request

Request for public record information, including case files that can be accessed by anyone with the request

Critical step in evaluating veracity of claims

Inherent bias in accepting the first impression (prima facia)- accepting the report on face value

Crime rate statistics effect

Crime rate stats should not be discussed in the lab- you’re working on cases as fast as you can and if someone shows that crime rates are going up, you will be quicker to assume that someone is guilty

• The number of open and unsolved cases

  • Pressure from the attorneys, officers, etc. to finish cases

Community involvement in forensics

• Riots happening because of misconduct 

• Public has the ability to reach out to investigators 

  • It’s the public right to have that number, but a supervisors job to shield investigators from that kind of pressure

  • Until the case is completely adjudicated, the investigator can’t legally give you any information about the case anyway- the case belongs to the attorney’s office 

    • Good relation with the attorney’s office is important for this reason

Internal investigation units

• COPA

  • Citizens office for police accountability- every time a Chicago police officer fires a gun, they have to investigate if it was necessary 

• NRE

  • National registry for exonerations- part of science departments for many university, founded in 2012 at Northwestern

  • Provides info on every exoneration since 1989- why they were exonerated, whether misconduct was present

• EJI

  • Equal justice initiative- committed to ending mass incarceration to challenge racial and economic injustice and protect equal rights for the underrepresented persons

What does presence of internal investigation units show?

Presence of these organizations show that we need some help, we have some bad actors, and the effects of poor choices are being felt widely

How do we remedy misconduct and false convictions?

• Ethics training is one thing, but it doesn’t seem to prevent bad actors 

• Vetting people and giving in depth interviews 

• Situational training

  • Including training on what to do if they do something they should not have, mistake or otherwise

• Introduce mock cases in with regular case work to test if you are doing a good job, following procedure, etc

• Everyone has to be skilled writers

  • Being able to take thorough and copious notes

MCR

Major case review

• Preform triage on evidence and weighing importance on what will be the most probative

• Forensic scientists from each discipline will meet along with the detectives and the states attorney and go through the manifest of evidence to determine what needs to be analyzed first and by who

Open phone policy

Officers can call people in the lab and ask questions about what they should bring in (like should I bring this knife in that I found in the bedroom?)

• Ask follow-up questions: Are there towels around? Is there blood in the bathroom? Can you use a UV light to look for blood around?

• It’s good to ask questions about where evidence comes from- it’s important context

Rules for keeping evidence safe

• LIMS system

  • not everyone needs access to the evidence (often given by keycard) 

• Record of who/what has happened to the evidence

  • Note that some analysis technology uses up the evidence (you may need a PTC permission to consume order) 

    • These orders are important because if the case is appealed, there’s generally secondary analysis- which cannot happen if the evidence was fully consumed 

• Record even if nothing happened with the evidence and why

  • Think about the Houston lab where the evidence was destroyed- leaks/rodents would be why nothing happened with it

• Record conversations abt the case

  • Like with the state’s attorney

• Record if evidence may need to come back to the lab

• Record what instrumentation is used on evidence

  • Also is it working properly

• Record chemicals used

  • Include expiration date

Third person personalization

A type of bias in which you believe your own lie

• such as when people lie on a resume