What Does Research Methodology Have to Do With Your Criminal Case?
The school science fair, with the hallways of your school decked with triptych poster boards explaining the process and results of experiments conducted by students outside of school, are a distant memory, and unless you later sought employment in a scientific field, neither have you. Today, every time you respond to a notification on your phone, you end up staring down a reel of brief videos where Internet personalities rant about how you shouldn’t trust science. Playing the “everything is unknowable” card can work against you in a court of law, though. If you can base your claims on studies with sound methodology, you can cast reasonable doubt on the prosecution’s evidence against you. Furthermore, by demonstrating flaws in the methodology of the scientific evidence the prosecution is using to support its allegations against you, you can establish reasonable doubt about your guilt. All of this requires the assumption that it is possible to conduct scientific research correctly, but that the results always leave at least a little bit of room for uncertainty. Here, our Miami criminal defense lawyer explains how a thorough understanding of scientific methodology can help you win your case.
Research Integrity Matters, Even If Your Charges Are Not for Research Misconduct
If you are looking for evidence that love of money is the root of all evil, look no farther than the Retraction Watch website. There, you will see new stories every day about big budget research projects plagued by poorly collected or poorly analyzed, if not outright falsified data. Unfortunately, scientific research grants go to the studies that claim to produce the splashiest results, not the ones that are the most transparent about their process of trial and error nor those whose trials are the most well designed and whose errors are the most thoroughly analyzed. There are no shortcuts in science, and scientific experimentation costs money, but the institutions that fund research tend to fund the projects that will raise the profile of these institutions.
Numerous professional researchers have worked at labs where they observed or engaged in less-than-optimal research practices, often due to constraints of time and budget. Only the most egregious cases lead to criminal charges though. It is possible to get criminal charges for fraud for falsifying information, such as the results of an experiment, on application materials for a research grant, just as you can face fraud charges if you falsify information on a loan application.
When Expert Witnesses Take the Stand, Lawyers Interrogate Their Command of the Scientific Method
Lawyers often summon expert witnesses who rely on published studies to support the lawyers’ interpretation of the matter being decided in court. Florida requires courts to follow the Daubert standard, which requires judges to review expert witness testimony on medical and scientific matters before the jury in a civil or criminal case hears the testimony. The Daubert standard also requires all published studies cited by expert witnesses to be clear about its methodology and rate of error.
That Study That Says You Are a Psychopath Probably Is Not Replicable
In theory, a well-designed scientific experiment will yield the same results every time, no matter who conducts it. That is why, when your fifth-grade science teacher mixed certain chemicals in test tubes, the mixture turned the same colors as when your parents’ science teacher mixed the same chemicals. A published study tells readers, in detail, how to perform the experiment and how to control for as many potentially confounding variables as possible. You and I cannot replicate most of the experiments that we can read about in scientific journals, but someone with a properly equipped lab can. In other words, the best studies are replicable.
Studies about the social sciences, such as psychology and sociology, are notoriously difficult to replicate, since it is so hard to reduce human behavior to mathematical formulae, and since many of these studies rely on self-reporting or observer reporting in the form of questionnaires. This means that a study that makes a good TED talk does not make for compelling evidence in a criminal case. In terms of your criminal case, this means that your responses to a personality test, even one administered by a physician or licensed psychologist, is not, by itself, evidence that you have criminal tendencies, and having criminal tendencies is not enough to prove that you are guilty of the charges against you. It takes more than that to prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Contact Our Criminal Defense Attorneys
A South Florida criminal defense lawyer can help you present a compelling defense, using published research where applicable. Contact Ratzan & Faccidomo in Miami, Florida for a confidential consultation about your case.
Source:
econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/10.1027/1015-5759/a000796#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9CDark%20Triad%E2%80%9D%20is%20an,et%20al.%2C%202017).
