#Aeon timeline free trial trial#
Science has been intertwined with the law for almost as long as the jury trial has been in existence. But with the growing importance of forensics in the courtroom and scientific methods in prosecuting crime, it’s become critical to marry the two disciplines. Science and the law have always had an uneasy relationship. The gap between the two methodologies – enquiry versus argument, testing versus precedent – is where innocent people sometimes can fall. In this way, legal practice tends to move forward more slowly than science. For guidance, they look to precedent: you can trust your legal theory if previous courts have approved it. Tasked with the job of arriving at a verdict, legal professionals gather information under strict rules of evidence and subject it to rigorous cross-examination. The legal approach involves making an argument. You can trust your results if others can reproduce them. The scientific method involves making observations, constructing a hypothesis, and testing that hypothesis with an experiment that others can repeat. There’s a ‘two cultures’ problem in our legal systems too, in the contrasting methodologies of science and the law. More than 50 years ago, C P Snow, the British scientist and novelist, warned that the division between ‘two cultures’ – science and the humanities – makes it harder to solve the world’s problems. But it’s not just forensics: bad science is marbled throughout our legal system, from the way police interrogate suspects to the decisions judges make on whether to admit certain evidence in court. According to the US National Academy of Sciences, none of the traditional forensic techniques, such as hair comparison, bite-mark analysis or ballistics analysis, qualifies as rigorous, reproducible science. Part of the problem involves faulty forensics: contrary to what we might see in the CSI drama shows on TV, few forensic labs are state-of-the-art, and they don’t always use scientific techniques. It’s impossible to know how often this happens, but the growing number of DNA-related exonerations points to false convictions as the collateral damage of our legal system. Hundreds of innocent people have been convicted by bad science, permitting an equal number of perpetrators to go free. Unfortunately, Rivera’s case is not unique. Seen another way, it’s also the result of bad science and anti-scientific thinking – from the police’s coercive interview of a vulnerable person, to the jury’s acceptance of a false confession over physical evidence, including DNA. Rivera’s case represents a tragic miscarriage of justice. He had been wrongfully imprisoned for nearly 20 years. Finally, after another appeal in 2011, Rivera’s lawyers were able to set him free. A jury found Rivera guilty a second time. But the prosecutor devised a theory that the 11-year-old victim had had sex with another man previously, and that Rivera did not ejaculate when he raped her after that. In 2005, DNA tests excluded Rivera as the source of the semen recovered from the body. So did a jury, which found Rivera guilty and a judge, who sentenced him to life without parole.
His first confession was inaccurate, however, so police kept questioning him until he got it right.Ĭonfessions have extraordinary power, so police believed it despite a lack of physical evidence. By the end of the fourth day, having endured more than 24 hours of round-robin questioning by at least nine different officers, Rivera signed a confession. The police chose to ignore that when they grilled him for several days and lied to him about the results of his polygraph test. Rivera had a low IQ and a history of emotional problems, which psychologists knew would make him highly suggestible. Yet, based on a tip, police decided to arrest him. On the night of the murder, Rivera was wearing an electronic ankle bracelet in connection with unrelated burglary charges, and this bracelet showed he’d been at home. In 1992, Juan Rivera was arrested for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in Waukegan, Illinois.
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