CSI Is Lying to You: Junk Science in Criminal Convictions

Socialism 2018

July 05, 2018

Even for those of us who are cynical about the criminal justice system, the scale at which evidence has been manufactured in criminal prosecutions is shocking. Exposés have revealed tremendous flaws in each successive wave of biological evidence used in criminal convictions -- fingerprinting; bite analysis; hair analysis; and even DNA -- at exactly the same time that TV procedurals have given vast credibility to forensics, and with it, to policing and prosecution as a whole. This talk will explain how forensic science is manipulated in criminal prosecutions. It will also argue that this science opens concrete questions about how the movement for justice for sexual assault survivors can ally itself with the movement for black lives and against the criminal justice system, rather than with police practices that have led to far too many false convictions, which victimize railroaded black men and survivors of sexual assault alike.

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