Individual Scientific Method Applied to Forensic Science Paper Write a 1300 to 1700 word paper that addresses each step of the scientific method in relation to forensic science, providing examples of...

The Scientific Method As Applied to Forensic Science
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The Scientific Method As Applied to Forensic Science
The Daubert standard was established in three cases (Kumho Tire Co., 1999; Daubert,
1993; General Electric Co., 1997). The standard created minimum rules for the presentation
of scientific evidence or expert testimony. That is occurred so late in the lifetime of the legal
system is not a surprise – real scientific awareness and evidence-based practice were simply
not common enough in the world before that point, and there are significant problems with
what scientific testimony provides and what courts want (Cohen, 2011). The National
Research Council (2009) also recently published a set of guidelines for forensic science in the
US.
The application of scientific procedure to the courtroom suffers from several
significant problems, which are worth outlining before looking at the individual steps that
make up the scientific method and how they relate to forensic science. The first is that
science deals not with explanations of the past, but of explorations of probability for the sake
of future prediction. The second is that it is mechanism rather than ends directed; that is, the
purpose of scientific investigation is to find a very narrow causally valid explanation for an
event, not to show that it occurred in a particular way or that it happened for a particular
reason Law tends to be concerned with the ‘why’ and ‘certain’ of things, whereas science is
concerned with the ‘how’ and ‘scientifically plausible’. This issue is explored in detail in
Cohen (2011) and Young (2013), both of whom note that a standard understanding of the
scientific method is actually misleading in courts.
The scientific method itself is made up of four stages, each of which has implications
for forensic science. These are observation, formulation, model testing, and repeatability. In
addition, for something to be scientific it must be falsifiable (Popper, 1959). However, in
forensic science, verification is used for witness evidence, and falsification for circumstantial
evidence, which is itself a breach of proper scientific practice. There are investigation on the
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nature of whether forensics can truly adopt the scientific method, and how it can do so (Cole,
2010; Neufeld & Scheck, 2010), but for the purposes of this paper we will use the standard
stages of the scientific process for comparison.
Observation and description of a phenomenon or a group of phenomena
The first and most critical branch of science is the proper observation and recording of
an event. In the case of forensic science, this is often problematic. In general, forensic science
teams do not have access to the event that they are trying to explain, and will have little to no
controlled conditions – every evidence scene is ‘noisy’ compared to the scientific standard
for observing an event. In order to stay in keeping with the scientific method, forensic teams
will...