Journalists Grieve Death Of Forensic Science Commission.

• Author: Collins, John M., Jr.

Editor's note: This article was first published in Science 2.0.com. Science 2.0 was created in 2006 by ION Publications LLC to modernize science communication, publishing, collaboration and public participation.

THE NATIONAL COMMISSION on Forensic Science was dissolved by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a decisive action that brought an end to a highly decorated body of professionals, but one that was frequently stymied by legal gamesmanship and discord. The commission, a precipitant of the Obama administration's criminal justice reform efforts, was curiously loaded with trial attorneys, law professors, and other academicians but relatively few forensic scientists.

Now that the commission has disbanded, a journalistic rebuke of AG Session's decision is underway in full force. News outlets including The New York Times have strongly criticized Sessions for his supposed dereliction of duty. Media outrage seems directed toward a ghostly assumption that the commission's demise is somehow, someway an endorsement of what the press have come to believe is an incompetent and malfeasant profession of forensic science that pervasively dooms innocent defendants to prison--or worse.

The notion that America's forensic science community is mired in malpractice and misconduct is a myth perpetuated for over 20 years by O.J. Simpson defense attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who cofounded the Manhattan-based Innocence Project in 1991. The Innocence Project is an academic legal clinic in which law students and faculty review claims of innocence submitted by convicted prisoners, then seek exonerations in those cases that warrant it.

Scheck and Neufeld gave rise to an entire industry aimed at securing exonerations for which damages can later be sought through litigation, sometimes to the tune of several millions of dollars. Each exoneration has the potential to produce a cash windfall for the attorneys on the case, just as it did in 2014 when five convicted Illinois men were awarded $40 million. And, of course, it also produces real-life drama that makes for great news--a sort of Shawshank phenomenon, if you will, that smitten American journalists have become addicted to over the last two decades. Scheck, Neufeld, and their peers have rarely disappointed, and they've used their media momentum to underwrite an aggressive public policy campaign to reform the American criminal justice system as they see fit.

Among the most formidable barriers to this...