“Is there a constitutional right not to be convicted based on junk science?” The Intercept asks, in a piece about an Alabama case based almost exclusively on a “bogus bite-mark testimony.” Recently, Justice Sonia Sotomayor advised that, instead of waiting on the courts, Congress and state legislatures should tackle the problem. “Hundreds if not thousands of innocent people may currently be incarcerated despite a modern consensus that the central piece of evidence at their trials lacked any scientific basis,” Sotomayor wrote, in a statement issued as the Supreme Court unanimously declined to review the Alabama case, that of Charles McCrory, who was convicted in 1985 for the murder of his wife.
Sotomayor described McCrory’s case as a symptom of a broader problem. “This petition raises difficult questions about the adequacy of current postconviction remedies to correct a conviction secured by what we now know was faulty science,” she wrote. Bite-mark analysis has been roundly discredited by scientists and, to date, is behind at least 39 wrongful convictions or indictments and is only one of “a host of scientifically questionable forensic practices” that are widely used in the criminal legal system, The Intercept notes. To date, a handful of states – including Texas and California -- have created a direct avenue of appeal for defendants convicted based on junk or debunked science. “These statutes,” Sotomayor wrote, “create an efficient avenue for innocent people convicted based on forensic science that the scientific community has now largely repudiated.”