Contention One is Inherency:

Momentum on forensic science standards stalled with end of the Commission on April 23, 2017– effectively
creating the perception that the Department of Justice has turned its back on science – this tanks scientific
credibility (:45)
Rodriguez 20 (Natalie, 4-12-20, writer for Law 360, "Why Courts Still Lag Behind On Forensic Science," https://www.law360.com/articles/1261492/why-courts-still-lag-behind-on-forensic-science ACCESSED 7-6-2020 BN)
Eddie Lee Howard is currently a death row inmate in Mississippi. He is there, in large part, because of the prosecution’s ability to match Howard’s bite marks to those on the victims he allegedly raped and murdered nearly three decades ago. Forensic odontologist Michael West, a bite marks expert, played a large role in Howard’s conviction
both in his first trial in 1994 and in a 2000 retrial, as well as subsequent post-conviction hearings. West himself has acknowledged problems with his previous testimony. In 2011, in a deposition in a separate case, West said the “science is not as exact as I had hoped” and suggested it should not be used in court cases. “The state of
Mississippi is still defending their right to put someone to death on the basis of something we know is bad science,” said Dana Delger, a staff attorney with the Innocence Project, which is representing Howard. Mississippi is not an outlier, however.

Bite mark analysis, once considered cutting-edge forensic science, reliability has fallen into disrepute. While there have been a few instances of courts
has been used in courts across the country for decades. But over the years, its

taking developments in forensic science and new testimony on the accuracy of older techniques into account on appeal, many courts have declined to reverse precedent allowing bite marks to be considered at trial

and often don’t properly caution juries about accuracy issues.

This, in a nutshell, is often the fundamental clash between ever-evolving forensic sciences and the precedent-preserving court
system. In the not so distant past, the National Commission on Forensic Science was at the center of trying to create consensus between
scientists and lawyers on issues like bite marks, fingerprint, ballistic marks and other forensic sciences that have come under scrutiny.
But since the commission’s sunset in 2017, many experts in the field contend that the U.S. Department of Justice under the Trump
administration has turned its back on trying to strengthen forensic evidence guidelines in collaboration with scientists.
Now, with the DOJ working on its own guidelines behind closed doors and the private sector trying to fill the void left by the commission, some experts fear momentum on fixing the loopholes that allow scientifically suspect evidence into the courtroom is being lost.“What
I’m afraid of is we’re going to go back to the same problems that created the need for the commission in the first place,” said Nina Ginsberg, founding partner of DiMuro Ginsberg PC and president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Unlike other sciences, forensic science grew out of law enforcement, and that has long put on it a mark of suspicion that its loyalty to prosecutorial agencies overrides the scientific rigor of other disciplines, according to experts. And over the years several forensic techniques, including bite mark, fingerprint, bloodstain and hair analysis, have faced critiques for having larger margins of error than experts once thought — and
often stated as part of testimony.For example, a police expert in a decades-old Texas murder trial acknowledged in 2018 that his testimony on the case’s bloodstain analysis would no longer hold up, according to an affidavit. That same year, the Texas Forensic Science Commission, investigating a complaint about the murder case, came to the conclusion that the testimony “was and is unreliable.” The blood spatter analysis was central to the conviction of Joe Bryan, the Texas man convicted of murdering his wife. In the beginning of the year, Texas’ high court declined to review the case. Media attention on the case, however, eventually led to Bryan being granted parole on
March 31, according to the Innocence Project of Texas, which was representing Bryan. In an effort to bridge the gap between forensic science and the law, the National Commission on Forensic Science was established in 2013 by the DOJ as a federal advisory committee, in partnership with the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The rare public-private partnership put together myriad, seemingly incongruent characters. The former chief of New York City’s detectives rubbed elbows with lab researchers and academics, judges sat down with scientists and both national associations representing prosecutors and defense attorneys had an equal seat at the table. “The
commission changed the whole orientation about how validating the reliability of science was being approached by inserting independence, transparency and a wide group of stakeholders,” Ginsberg said. They all got together on a quarterly basis for public meetings to review various standards and practices in the forensic sciences field. More than 600 documents were discussed during its four-year existence. There was exciting energy and momentum in the room, several former commission members told Law360. The meetings were like “pulling a tiger by the tail,” said John Butler, an NIST fellow who was co-vice chair of the commission. But the commission’s output didn’t
necessarily match everyone’s hopes. Over those four years, the commission had only a handful of recommendations and documents out of the 600 reviewed. There had been important consensus made on when forensics experts could use the subjective term “reasonable scientific certainty” as part of testimony, but there was still a great deal of work to be done on a number of issues ranging from setting new certification standards for medical examiners to tackling the fast-evolving world of digital forensics. The commission also hoped to create guidance for testing of cold-case evidence, particularly when advances in testing may made reevaluation worthwhile and to provide
training for lawyers and judges, according to its final report. Jules Epstein, a Temple Law professor and former commission member, acknowledged the commission’s impact was limited. “I think the commission needed to keep going because there was a lot on its agenda,” he said, adding that the commission’s sunsetting “left the job incomplete.” The National District Attorneys Association, frustrated that disagreements had reduced the commission to a “think tank” with few results, actively called for the commission to be closed and replaced with an Office of Forensic Science inside the Justice Department. Having such an office under the DOJ would have better oversight on
accreditation, certification and more, the NDAA said in a 2017 statement to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary. “There is much to work to be done. Not only will the [Office of Forensic Science] spearhead this important effort but it will also work on policy that still needs to be developed in the forensic science,” the NDAA said in the 2017 statement. A member of the NDAA could not immediately be reached for comment. But Ginsberg believes the commission was working the way it was supposed to, coming to hard-fought conclusions and compromises on key forensic science issues — such as what kind of language to use when testifying on findings
— in a transparent manner.

the loss of the commission was

“I think they accomplished a great deal. There was more that they didn’t accomplish than they did, but that’s because they were written out of existence,” Ginsberg said. In April 2017, the Trump administration allowed the commission to sunset, and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered that the DOJ suspend a multiyear, large-scale review of FBI testimony that the commission had been tackling, looking to assess the scale to which experts had provided inaccurate or flawed testimony. “To me,

part of a greater change in the Department of Justice’s approach to forensic policy ,” Epstein said. He called the sunsetting of the commission “an emblem
also

of a turning away from science.”

Since then, the forensics community has been left with a communication void. The NIST is continuing its work through the Organization of Scientific Area Committees — a body of more than 500 forensic science experts in academia, government and industry — and there’s a smattering of industry events that try to get a varied group of stakeholders to reach consensus, but nothing quite like the commission’s standing, according to experts.
“There’s not really a platform and place to come together to have those discussions,” Butler said. To get true consensus and momentum forward, the industry has to have the DOJ at the table, according to Butler. While the DOJ has a new forensic science working group established after the close of the commission, experts say the group’s scope of work is more limited and several said its unclear what exactly the working group is doing because there is less transparency. “One of the biggest problems is because it's happening all behind the door of the Department of Justice. We don’t really know what they are doing. We don’t know how they are formulating these standards. We
don’t know if or to what extent the law enforcement biases are inadvertently — or advertently — being built in to the work they are doing,” Ginsberg said.
The DOJ, however, says it has continued to work with a wide array of stakeholders, including independent scientists not affiliated with law enforcement. "The Department both created and continues to support working groups and other bodies that include forensic academics, researchers, and other experts from outside the Department of Justice," the department said in a statement emailed to Law360.
The department added, "We also partnered with NIST to establish and support the Organization of Scientific Area Committees — a body composed of over 550 scientists, academics, forensic practitioners, innocence advocates, attorneys, and judges, who collectively work to develop national standards of forensic practice in over twenty-five separate disciplines."
In the DOJ’s latest code of professional responsibility that was developed after the closure of the commission, there is a line that tells forensic scientists to “document and, if appropriate, inform management or quality assurance personnel of nonconformities and breaches of law or professional standards,” Ginsberg noted. “I can't envision any instance where it shouldn’t be mandatory if you uncover nonconformities or breaches of law and professional standards,” Ginsberg said. Only when law enforcement, scientists and lawyers get in a room together can real progress be made on creating guidelines that can be trusted by the community as a whole, according to several
experts. “Nothing is perfect, but there is at least some sense that these recommendations don’t represent just one view, but a consensus view,” Delger said of the commission’s work products.
Ginsberg pointed to a joint effort that began in 2012 by the FBI, DOJ, NACDL and Innocence Project that looked into microscopic hair comparison analysis and found that up to 90% of the testimony given about hair comparisons was overstated. That joint effort resulted in new guidelines for giving testimony on microscopic hair that has been largely accepted across the board. Currently, efforts to make similar progress on other issues — such as bite marks — face hurdles of the private sector and the government law enforcement not necessarily being on the same page and coming up with different conclusions. “Where the Justice Department may be consulting with independent
scientists, they are not standing on equal footing and their recommendations are not carrying the same kind of weight,” Ginsberg said.

And…
Termination of the Commission jeopardizes rigorous scientific examination of forensic practices – ending the
search for the truth and destroys public perception (:45)
Hsu 17 Stephen S., 4-10-17, Washington Post (reporter), “Sessions orders Justice Dept. to end forensic science commission, suspend review policy”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-
safety/sessions-orders-justice-dept-to-end-forensic-science-commission-suspend-review-policy/2017/04/10/2dada0ca-1c96-11e7-9887-1a5314b56a08_story.html, accessed 7-5-20, AFB

Even before the announcement not to renew the national commission, several commission members from
outside the Justice Department warned against ending its work, saying the Trump administration has made
several moves to reduce the role of science and independent scientists in policymaking.
[Scientists are conspicuously missing from Trump’s government] In a letter Thursday, six leading research scientists on the panel urged re-upping the commission for an additional two years, saying, “for too long, decisions regarding forensic science have been made without

“Limiting the ‘relevant scientific community’ to forensic practitioners is a disservice to that

the input of the research science community.”

field and to the criminal justice system,” they wrote, led by Thomas D. Albright, an internationally recognized neuroscientist specializing in vision and the brain at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. [Read letter from scientists here] The commission jointly led by Justice and the Commerce Department’s National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) has prompted several changes. Following one recommendation, NIST launched a $20 million research effort to solidify understanding of whether techniques used more than 100,000 times a year in U.S. crime labs work as advertised — starting with the question of how often claimed matches of pattern-based evidence such as complex DNA profile mixtures may be in error, followed by studies of firearms and bite-mark
tracing.
Sessions’s predecessor as attorney general, Loretta E. Lynch, also accepted commission recommendations to set new accrediting and ethical codes for forensic labs and practitioners . [Justice Department issues first standards for forensic expert testimony]

the department risks retreating into insularity and repeating past mistakes, saying
Several commission members who have worked in criminal courts and supported the input of independent scientists said

that no matter how well-intentioned, prosecutors lack scientists’ objectivity and training.
“It is unrealistic to expect that truly objective, scientifically sound standards for
U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff of New York, the only federal judge on the commission, said,

the use of forensic science . . . can be arrived at by entities centered solely within the Department of Justice .”
In suspending reviews of past testimony and the development of standards for future reporting, “the department has literally
decided to suspend the search for the truth,” said Peter S. Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, which has reported that nearly half of 349 DNA exonerations involved misapplications of forensic science. “As a consequence innocent people will languish in prison or, God forbid, could be executed,” he said. However, the National District Attorneys Association, which represents prosecutors, applauded the end of the commission and called for it

to be replaced by an Office of Forensic Science inside the Justice Department. Disagreements between crime lab practitioners and defense community representatives on the commission had reduced it to “a think tank,” yielding few accomplishments and wasted tax dollars, the association said. The commission was created after critical reports by the National Academy of Sciences about a dearth of standards and funding for crime labs, examiners and researchers, problems it partly traced to law enforcement control over the system. Although examiners had long claimed to be able to match pattern evidence — such as with firearms or bite marks — to a source with “absolute”
or “scientific” certainty, only DNA analysis had been validated through statistical research, scientists reported. In one case, the FBI lab in 2005 abandoned its four-decade-long practice of tracing bullets to a specific manufacturer’s batch through chemical analyses after its method were scientifically debunked. In 2015, the department and bureau reported that nearly every examiner in an elite hair-analysis unit gave scientifically flawed or overstated testimony in 90 percent of cases for two decades before 2000. The cases include 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison. Separately on Monday, the national commission heard from
Keith Harward, an ex-Navy sailor exonerated last year after serving 33 years of a life sentence for rape and murder in Newport News, Va. Harward was convicted after six experts, including a leader in the field, concurred that bite marks on a victim matched his teeth to a “medical certainty.” DNA testing identified a different sailor as the perpetrator. No court in the United States has barred bite-mark evidence, despite 21 known wrongful convictions, a proposed moratorium in Texas and research showing that experts cannot consistently agree even on whether injuries are caused by human teeth. [Va. exoneration underscores mounting challenges to bite-mark evidence The
Justice Department and commission’s moves have had impact. FBI Director James B. Comey last year asked U.S. governors to have state and local crime labs review their hair-comparison cases, and reviews of past convictions are underway in at least a dozen states, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “We want to make sure there aren’t other innocent people in jail based on our work,” Comey wrote in a June letter. “Unfortunately, in a large number of cases, our examiners made statements that went too far in explaining the significance of a hair comparison and could have misled a jury or judge.” In backing the expanded Justice Department
testimony review, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said in February 2016 that its goal was to determine whether “the same kind of ‘testimonial overstatement’ . . . could have crept into other disciplines.” “The authority afforded to scientific experts is second to none, and we must make sure that our statements are clearly supported by sound science,” Yates said.In another example, the Defense Forensic Science Center, formerly called the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory, has funded new research establishing error rates for firearms tracking and last month announced it would begin reporting fingerprint results using statistical probabilities instead of
declaring one-to-one matches to individuals, a departure from FBI practice.

Therefore, we affirm the resolution contextually within case by supporting the following
plan: The United States federal government should enact substantial criminal justice
reform in the United States in forensic science, by ensuring certification, accreditation,
and the use of reliability, validity, and transparency standards and best practices in
forensic laboratories and judicial forensic review. These standards and practices will be
established by an independent federal oversight commission comprised of scientific
leaders outside of the Department of Justice but independently contracted by the federal
government. (:30)
Advantage One: Wrongful convictions

Lack of adequate reforms in forensic evidence uniquely encourages false confessions that
disproportionately target people of color with death sentences[:30]
Vick et al 20 [Karcin, Kimberly J. Cook, and Meghan Rogers. "Lethal leverage: false confessions, false pleas, and wrongful homicide convictions in death-eligible cases." Contemporary Justice Review (2020): 1-19.]
Initially, the goal of the current research was to examine if known exonerations in death jurisdictions had an increased probability of the exoneree having falsely confessed. We hypothesized that death jurisdiction increases the likelihood of false confessions (Hypothesis 1); that death jurisdiction increased the likelihood of pleading guilty (Hypothesis 2); and false confessions decrease the likelihood of death sentences (Hypothesis 3).
We found support for the relationship between death jurisdiction and plea agreements (Hypothesis 2). However, we did not find direct support for the association between death jurisdiction and false confession (Hypothesis 1), or false confession and death sentences (Hypothesis 3). For analytical purposes, we specified gender of the homicide victims as a control variable adding three additional hypothesis. We found support for the

First, African Americans

association between gender of victim and the likelihood of a false confession (Hypothesis 4), and gender of the victim and the likelihood of receiving a death sentences (Hypothesis 6). We did not find support for the association between gender of the victim and accepting a plea agreement (Hypothesis 5).

wrongly accused of homicide in known wrongful conviction cases , where false and misleading where the homicide victims were mostly female, and

forensic evidence and official misconduct were present, are statistically most likely to have falsely confessed. Second, false
guilty pleas were mostly likely produced in death-eligible jurisdictions, net of all other control factors. And third, death
sentences were most likely to have been imposed on exonerees who were male, in homicide cases where the victims were mostly female, where official misconduct was present, and who had falsely confessed. Official misconduct
produces significantly higher odds of a false confession. Although the NRE lists official misconduct, it does not differentiate the origin of the misconduct by police, prosecutors, or other justice officials. Gilliam (2016) qualitatively examined 814 cases from the NRE and identified types of official misconduct. His categories included prosecutorial misconduct, police misconduct and other criminal justice official misconduct. Within each
category, specific tactics were listed that led to the type of misconduct. Drummond and Naito (2018) found that the majority of official misconduct cases included police and prosecutorial misconduct. Additional research identifying specific misconduct would benefit future studies in predicting specific police misconduct in regards to false confessions. Using the NRE definition, we know that misconduct can be in the form of officers

It is easier
or prosecutors concealing evidence, investigators over-pressuring the suspect into confessing, officers being overly eager creating tunnel vision or officers conducting improper photo array lineups, to name a few (Findley & Scott, 2006; Gilovich, 1991; Huff, 2003; Martin, 2002). Pressures on prosecution also intensify, and attorneys assume their client’s guilt once a confession is made.

to achieve high conviction rates for prosecutors when a confession is present so they commonly
exercise confirmation bias in ignoring potential contradictory evidence of their client or defendant
(Leo & Davis, 2010, pp. 29–33). More research is needed to examine how official misconduct in death jurisdictions impacts the likelihood of wrongful capital convictions.

And…
The impact is racialized death (:30)
Cohen and Smith 10 [G. Ben, and Robert J. Smith. "The racial geography of the federal death penalty." Wash. L. Rev. 85 (2010): 425.]
A decade ago the United States Department of Justice issued a report analyzing the government's use of the federal death penalty from Congress' enactment of the death penalty statute in 1988 until 2000.44 The study revealed at least three racial and ethnic disparities

80% of all cases in which a United States Attorney requested permission to seek
stark enough to leave now-Attorney General Eric Holder "disturbed" and "troubled." First,

the death penalty involved a minority group defendant. Second, 72% of the cases where the Attorney General authorized a
capital prosecution involved minority group defendants. Third, United States Attorneys sought death-authorization twice as
often in cases involving black defendants and non-black victims as in cases involving black defendants and black victims. 4 5 President Clinton called these disparities "astonishing." 4 6 The disparities also "sorely troubled" Attorney General Janet
Reno, who, along with then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, promised to compile data, find explanations, and root out bias.47 President Bush took office in January 2001. He appointed John Ashcroft as his Attorney General. Ashcroft's Department of Justice released a new report acknowledging that the statistics are correct; minority
group defendants are overrepresented in death penalty prosecutions. 48 But the report concluded that this disparity is not due to racial or ethnic bias, but rather the reality that minority group defendants are overrepresented in the "pool of potential federal capital cases." 4 9 In fact, according to the report, when shifting focus to the death
authorization rate among death-eligible federal minority group defendants, black and Hispanic defendants are less likely to be selected for federal capital prosecution: "[T]he Attorney General ultimately decided to seek the death penalty for 27% of the white defendants (44 out of 166), 17% of the black defendants (71 out of 408), and 9% of

looking solely at death-authorized defendants and not attempting to appreciate

the Hispanic defendants (32 out of 350).",5o Attorney General Ashcroft's reconfiguration of the statistical analysis was flawed. By

how or why black defendants were overrepresented in the pool of federal defendants was akin to , Ashcroft's approach

checking the back of the bus to see whether blacks were being discriminated against, and determining that no
discrimination existed because blacks were over-represented as bus-riders . 51 And so the Ashcroft Report met swift criticism. Professor David Baldus sent a statement to Senator Russell Feingold reporting that the Ashcroft
Report "utterly fails to convince me that there is no significant risk of racial unfairness and geographic arbitrariness in the administration of the federal death penalty."52 Baldus observed however, the relevant unanswered question: the representativeness of racial minorities in the broader pool of murder defendants, and whether bias occurs at the point where United States Attorneys decide whether and how to charge murder defendants.53 But
Professor Baldus' statement and both the Reno and Ashcroft reports failed to consider another cause of race bias in the administration of the federal death penalty: the exploitation of demographically chiaroscurist jury pools. Most federally-prosecuted capital crimes occur in minority-concentrated areas.54 Thus, expansion of the venire to the federal district level (which often includes white-flight suburbs) has a dramatic effect on the circumstance of
the prosecution.55 Moving the relevant "community" from the county to the federal district dilutes the 56 voice of the population impacted most by violent crime. Moreover, as the jury pools get whiter, the opportunity for implicit race bias increases (and minority group defendants suffer the consequences). Far from considering the influence of racialized jury pools as a potential cause of race bias in the administration of the federal death penalty,
neither the Reno nor the Ashcroft reports even mentioned the stark geography of race that results from federal death penalty prosecutions. Neither the Baldus investigation nor the DOJ reports explain why the vast majority of the federal death sentences come from a narrow band of jurisdictions. While there are ninety-four federal jurisdictions,58 fortythree (75%) death sentences have come from sixteen districts; and just nine districts have returned
nearly half (twenty-nine) of the death sentences: 59 For example, one wonders how Missouri-with eight federal death sentences between its two districts-has returned more federal death sentences than New York, California, Florida, and the thirty-seven federal districts that have never returned a federal death penalty, combined.6 1 When a disproportionately large number of federal death sentences come from a narrow band of jurisdictions-even
though there is supposed to be federal oversight from the Attorney General to avoid the arbitrary imposition of the death penalty-focused attention on the demographics of these jurisdictions is warranted. Eight jurisdictions have returned more than two death sentences, resulting in almost half of the defendants on death row.62 The eight federal districts that have returned more than two death sentences are not exclusively white jurisdictions, nor are
they jurisdictions with predominantly black or other minority group populations.63 However, what is striking about these jurisdictions is that the county of the offense generally has a high percentage of blacks, but is located within federal districts which are heavily white.

And…
The moral obligation to combat racism is an independent reason to affirm (:30)
Memmi 2K Albert Memmi 2000, Professor Emeritus, Sociology, University of Paris, RACISM, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 163-165.
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease
and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism ; one must not even let the monster in the house ,

especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the

racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible
victim (and which man is not himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge.
However, it remains true that one’s moral conduct only emerges from a choice; one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order,
on racism, because racism signifies the exclusion of the other, and his or her subjection to violence and domination . From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is “the truly capital sin.”22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity
in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death . Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains

In
within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall,” says the Bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal—indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be.

short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the theoretical and practical

political choice, a just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live
in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible .
Advantage Two: Climate Change

Lack of understanding in the public sphere creates a dichotomy between science and opinion, resulting
in lack of action due to misunderstandings (:40)
Weber and Stern 2011 [Elke U. Weber and Paul C. Stern, Colombia University and Center for Research on Environmental Decisions and Stern, National Research Council, May-June 2011, American Psychological Association, “
Public Understanding of Climate Change in the United States”, https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_4800/weber_2011.pdf, Date Accessed: 07/15/20, M.S.]
Why No Convergence in Scientists’ and Nonscientists’ Understandings?

public understanding in the United States has not tracked scientific

Physical, psychological, and social factors together help explain why

understanding. when people apply

First, climate change as a set of physical phenomena in interaction with their human causes and consequences is intrinsically challenging to understand. Second, scientists and nonscientists have different ways of understanding these phenomena, which makes divergence of beliefs possible. Moreover,

their conventional modes of understanding to climate change, they are likely to be misled.
impose conceptual frames on climate change as a policy issue, in which a well-funded and orchestrated campaign has had success in promoting frames that are at striking variance with the scientific evidence and the solidifying scientific consensus.
Third, nonscientists’ views in the United States and some other countries are being shaped by an ongoing struggle to

Physical Phenomena: Climate Change Is Intrinsically Difficult to Understand

Some fundamental attributes of climate change make it hard to understand.5 The main causes of climate change (greenhouse gases) are invisible, its impacts are geographically and temporally distant for most Americans, and, as discussed below, its signals are hard to detect (Moser, 2009; National Research Council, 2009). Unlike a heat wave or a hurricane, climate change is not a single hazard. A small number of climate “drivers”—fossil fuel consumption being by far the most important—can cause a multiplicity of causally linked hazards (National Research Council, 2010a). Thinking about climate change in terms of any one or two of these hazards leads to an underestimate of
the total threat. Another key attribute is the long-lasting environmental residence of the main greenhouse gases (Solomon, Plattner, Knutti, & Friedlingstein, 2009). These gases are unlike the air pollutants that cause smog; reducing emissions will not quickly “clear the air.” Long residence times are hard to understand; well-educated nonspecialists systematically underestimate the degree to which carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced in order to stabilize overall concentrations (Sterman & Booth Sweeney, 2007). Another climate fact of life is that climate history is a poor measurements and peer-reviewing research studies to catch errors; and (e) scientific debate and

deliberative methods are key to developing

deliberation about the meaning of the evidence, with special attention given to new evidence that calls previous ideas into question. Scientific communities sometimes organize consensus processes such as those used in the IPCC and National Research Council studies to clarify which conclusions are robust and which remain in dispute. These methods lie at the core of science, and

understanding at the frontiers of science—including climate science (Longino, 1990). Although these methods do not
prevent all error, Nonscientists’ ways of understanding
and errors in climate change research—as in other areas of scientific inquiry—have occurred and can be expected to occur in the future, the scientific methods clarify the unresolved issues and allow for continuing correction of error.

climate change leave them more vulnerable to systematic misunderstanding. Personal experience can easily
mislead (Weber, 1997); simple mental models are likely to be wrong when applied to climate change (Bostrom, Morgan, Fischhoff, & Read, 1994); and judgment can be driven more by affect,
values, and worldviews than by evidence (Slovic, 1987). For a valid understanding of climate change, most people must
rely on secondary sources. But as discussed below, these information sources are not always trustworthy.

And…
Decline in scientific literacy leads to distrust in science, accelerates climate change (:35)
Wayne Clough 10, [Gerald, 02/27/2010, Smithsonian, “INCREASING SCIENTIFIC LITERACY: A SHARED RESPONSIBILITY,”
https://www.si.edu/Content/Pdf/About/Secretary/Increasing-Scientific-Literacy-a-Shared-Responsibility.pdf, pp. 33, accessed on 07/01/2020, BS]

The decline of scientific literacy leads to a growing distrust of science and scientists, and with it a decline in public
support for scientific discovery . Exhibit A is the recent supercharged rhetoric and mixed messages about climate change. We know that climate change has been occurring for a very long time — long before Homo sapiens was on Earth. Many different mechanisms provoke climate change; some are cyclical, such as the gradual change in exposure of the Earth to the sun as a result of the tilt of its axis, while others are episodic, such as large volcanic eruptions. The geologic record documents large, prolonged changes in climate;
one such is termed the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period of significant global warming that occurred 55 million years ago . Smithsonian paleobotanist Scott Wing discovered rock exposures in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming dating back to this period, and decades of digging have uncovered fossils that demonstrate the extensive warming the planet experienced. By collaborating with colleagues from other specialties, Wing has been able to describe what it was like for the mammals, fish, and plants of the time. As temperatures rose, Wyoming’s climate became much like that of northern Mexico or parts of southern Georgia and Florida today .30
When the work of Wing and his team is combined with that of scientists who study cores drilled from the ocean floor that show sweeping patterns of climate change stretching back millions of years, the PETM emerges as a world where polar ice melted, sea levels rose by as much as 300 feet above those of today, the ocean acidified, and life often lost the struggle to adapt.
Many of the findings about the PETM are well established and make clear that largescale warming would be devastating to life as we know it. It is all the more important given that in the past 100,000 years, our species has expanded from a mere handful to seven billion today and is expected to increase to more than nine billion by 2050.31 While human beings did not exist during the PETM, we now have become a documented agent of change. We generate substantial amounts of greenhouse gases and cut down large areas of forest that would otherwise help absorb them. Scientists are nearly unanimous in their expectation that such activities will have an impact on our
future, though they do not know exactly how the different natural elements involved in climate change will interact with each other or precisely what role our own activities will play in those interaction s. Scientists have gained much knowledge and insight into climate change, but we still have much to learn. Admitting we do not know it all is hard for some to do, and there are those who would use such an admission to advocate that we should do nothing. Still, the case must be presented on its merits and the debate engaged on the appropriate terms.

Recent surveys show that while a majority of Americans believe global warming is occurring, their belief is
currently based on immediate impressions rather than a grasp of basic science.
showed a significant drop from a year earlier in the number of American adults who believed global warming was happening and who trusted scientists as a source of information about it.32 By the time of a parallel June survey, the numbers had begun to rebound — according to Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale, a reflection of the waning of “climategate” from the daily news, as well as other factors such as an improving economy and the BP oil spill in the
A January 2010 survey by Yale and George Mason Universities shortly after the release of controversial e-mails by climate scientists

to garner the consistent public support that will be needed for the long-term response
Gulf of Mexico, which called attention to the dark side of reliance on fossil fuels.33 If we are

that climate change requires, we need to find ways to clearly communicate what we know and do not know.
Ironically, even as we continue to struggle with what are often abstract debates about the causes of climate change, it is beginning to have a very real impact. I recently traveled to Alaska to open a new exhibit, “Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage: The First Peoples of Alaska,” at our National Museum of Natural History’s Arctic Studies Center at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. While in Alaska, I traveled with two Smithsonian scientists to the Yupik village of Gambell, located on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait. St. Lawrence Island is a low-lying land mass formed from volcanic rock and accumulated deposits of sand and gravel on the coasts. The day we
arrived it snowed and small icebergs floated in the sea. It seemed an odd place to talk about global warming.
The Yupik are an ancient people who have survived for thousands of years as subsistence hunters, using the land, ice, and sea to hunt whales, walrus, fish, and waterfowl. At the local high school we met with the village elders, men who for a lifetime have hunted from small open boats in the face of one of the most hostile climates in the world. Evidence of the year’s hunt was on the beach in the form of the bones of five whales killed recently. While the whale hunt had been good, it did not take long for climate change to come up, and once mentioned, each of the elders had a story to tell. The ramifications are multifold. Permafrost is melting, weakening the bottom of the
island lakes and allowing the water to drain. Ducks and geese no longer land there. The sea ice is no longer thick enough for the walrus to haul out close to the island, and the boats cannot be relied upon to reach the thicker ice far to the north. The warming seas spawn summer storms that erode the land, undermining the foundations of buildings, and prevent hunters from hunting. For the first time in anyone’s memory, subarctic sharks have been seen on the hunts. The elders are concerned for their children and grandchildren and their future. At the conclusion of the discussion, they asked us why more people are not worried about the very real changes they see day to day.
Good question.
Farther south, the citizens of New Orleans also have reasons to be concerned about climate change. With much of the city lying below sea level, the levees and flood walls surrounding it are crucial to warding off the effects of storm surges from hurricanes. Hurricane Katrina was a wake-up call in more ways than the obvious damage that citizens around the world saw during the event itself. In the aftermath of the hurricane, I was asked to chair the National Academies Committee on Hurricane Protection for New Orleans to provide oversight for the reconstruction of the hurricane protection system. Early on in our work, we came face to face with an issue related to global
warming.
One of the first actions undertaken after the disaster was to measure the height of the levees that remained. This task proved to be problematic, because the original elevations set for the levees were based on sea level. But sea level is not the constant it once was perceived to be. Because of global warming, sea level has been rising for about the last century at a rate of two to three millimeters per year. Over a century, the rise in sea level amounts to between 0.7 and 1.0 feet . Although few of the levees had been around for a century, the effective height of all the levees in terms of flood protection was less than believed because the level of the waters of the Gulf had risen over
time.
This reality was food for thought in itself, but it became a critical issue in the design of the reconstructed flood protection system. Looking ahead, the levees should ideally provide protection for a long time — one century or more — and prudent design should take into account sea-level rise over that time. How much higher should the levees be built to accommodate rising sea levels? This question is not easy to answer, because recent evidence points to an acceleration of the rate of sea-level rise. Designers could easily justify projecting two to three feet in sea-level rise, causing a significant increase in the required height and size of the levees. The choice is not an abstract one;
it is a matter of the potential for enormous property damage and loss of life. It is a matter that threatens the future of one of America’s great cities.

If we are to provide future generations with a chance to meet the

Whether you live in the far north of our nation on St. Lawrence Island or the far south in New Orleans, the impact of climate change is very real. Both of these locations are seeing harbingers of the future, a future that will require us to make critical decisions.

challenges they will face, we have to understand and appreciate the science behind climate change.
Is our situation hopeless? Those charged with helping the public understand science and technology struggle in light of an accelerating knowledge base and ever-increasing specialization. It is time to sort out the real issues from the false, to work on reducing the unneeded complexity that surrounds science, and to seek common ground, as Harvard’s E.O. Wilson makes clear in his book, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth.34 Arrogance has no place here; too much is at stake. Such attitudes are a threat to the vitality of science and technology and hence our ability to sustain our standard of living. In the next chapter, I will suggest a few ideas that I believe can help
increase scientific literacy.

And…
Climate change is an existential threat (:30)
Ahmed 19 (Nafeez, 6/3/2019, Vice investigative journalist, Vice, “New Report Suggests ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ Starting in 2050,” vice.com/en_us/article/597kpd/new-
report-suggests-high-likelihood-of-human-civilization-coming-to-an-end-in-2050, accessed 7/3/2020, MM)
A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander.
The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as “a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization” and sets out a plausible scenario of where business-as-usual could lead over the next 30 years.
The paper argues that the potentially “extremely serious outcomes” of climate-related security threats are often far more probable than conventionally assumed, but almost impossible to quantify because they “fall outside the human experience of the last thousand years.”

On our current trajectory, the report warns, “planetary and human systems [are] reaching a ‘point of no return’ by mid-
century, in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable Earth leads to the breakdown of nations and the international order.”
The only way to avoid the risks of this scenario is what the report describes as “akin in scale to the World War II emergency mobilization”—but this time focused on rapidly building out a zero-emissions industrial system to set in train the restoration of a safe climate.
The scenario warns that our current trajectory will likely lock in at least 3 degrees Celsius (C) of global heating, which in turn could trigger further amplifying feedbacks unleashing further warming. This would drive the accelerating collapse of key ecosystems “including coral reef systems, the Amazon rainforest and in the Arctic.”

The results would be devastating. Some one billion people would be forced to attempt to relocate from unlivable
conditions, and two billion would face scarcity of water supplies. Agriculture would collapse in the sub-tropics,
and food production would suffer dramatically worldwide. The internal cohesion of nation-states like the US and China would unravel . “Even for 2°C of warming, more than a billion people may need to be relocated and in

the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model with a high likelihood of human civilization
high-end scenarios,

coming to an end,” the report notes.The new policy briefing is written by David Spratt, Breakthrough’s research director and Ian Dunlop, a former senior executive of Royal Dutch Shell who previously chaired the Australian Coal Association. In the briefing’s foreword, retired Admiral Chris Barrie—Chief of the Australian Defence Force from 1998 to 2002 and former Deputy Chief of the Australian
Navy—commends the paper for laying “bare the unvarnished truth about the desperate situation humans, and our planet, are in, painting a disturbing picture of the real possibility that human life on Earth may be on the way to extinction, in the most horrible way.”Barrie now works for the Climate Change Institute at Australian National University, Canberra.Spratt told Motherboard that a key reason the risks are not understood is that “much
knowledge produced for policymakers is too conservative. Because the risks are now existential, a new approach to climate and security risk assessment is required using scenario analysis.”Last October, Motherboard reported on scientific evidence that the UN’s summary report for government policymakers on climate change—whose findings were widely recognized as “devastating”—were in fact too optimistic . While the Breakthrough scenario sets
out some of the more ‘high end’ risk possibilities, it is often not possible to meaningfully quantify their probabilities. As a result, the authors emphasize that conventional risk approaches tend to downplay worst-case scenarios despite their plausibility. Spratt and Dunlop’s 2050 scenario illustrates how easy it could be to end up in an accelerating runaway climate scenario which would lead to a largely uninhabitable planet within just a few decades. “ A
high-end 2050 scenario finds a world in social breakdown and outright chaos,” said Spratt. “But a short window of opportunity exists for an emergency, global mobilization of resources, in which the logistical and planning experiences of the national security sector could play a valuable role.” Tbe part of an overall approach that considers the practices and processes of communication more broadly. Discussion and participation models of communication
facilitate understanding through negotiation of meaning. In the criminal justice system, we acknowledged that various initiatives offering the opportunity for discussion and participation are already in place, and we have offered here a theoretical basis to explain their value. We hope that this illustration may be of interest to others who aim to communicate scientific findings from diverse scientific disciplines to nonscientists.
Contention Two is Solvency
Only substantial forensic science reform will solve – this must start from the ground up (1:00)
Hadley 19 (Megan Hadley is a senior staff writer at The Crime Report "Forensic Science Reform at ‘Crossroads’," Crime Report,
https://thecrimereport.org/2019/01/10/forensic-science-reform-at-crossroads/ Accessed 6-25-2020/WY)
Recent efforts to reform the use of forensic science in the courtroom don’t go far enough to meet widespread criticisms of its validity and reliability, according to a University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) Law School study. forensic science UCLA Law Professor Jennifer L.
Mnookin examined the state of forensic science reform. Photo courtesy UCLA In the last two decades, often-used forms of pattern evidence, such as fingerprint, tool mark, and bite mark identification, have faced significant criticism, wrote study author Jennifer L. Mnookin,

The Department of Justice’s decision in April 2017 not to

a law professor at UCLA, in a research paper posted in Daedalus, a journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

renew the charter of the National Commission on Forensic Science reduces the likelihood of real reform, which
Mnookin said puts forensic science at a “crossroads.”“Our best hope for sustained, substantial changes necessary for

improving forensic science evidence within our system of justice requires the creation of another national
commission or other institutional body, made up of both research scientists and other institutional stakeholders ,” she
wrote. Mnookin uses a mistaken bite mark identification case to further her point. Alfred Swinton, was released from prison after serving 18 years of a 60-year sentence for murder, after an expert admitted ruled the bite mark identification evidence used to convict him no longer seemed persuasive or valid. The bite mark expert “no longer believed with reasonable medical certainty–or with any degree of certainty –that the marks on [the victim] were
created by Mr. Swinton’s teeth, because of the recent developments in the scientific understanding of bite-mark analysis,” odontologist Constantine Karazulas told the Hartford Courant, as quoted by Mnookin. Is Forensic Science ‘Junk Science’? Karazulas even called his earlier testimony “junk science” and said he “no longer believes that Mr. Swinton’s detention was uniquely capable of producing the bite marks I observed.” Mnookin suggested the case
indicated a potential sea change for the use of bite mark evidence, and noted there is a growing consensus among judges that the forensic science community should scale back exaggerated and overconfident assertions of knowledge and authority by forensic scientists. Mnookin concluded that future reform required an institutional structure adversarial advocates, and practitioners themselves, staffed by accomplished research scientists to pave new
ways for credible forensic science evidence to be used in courtrooms.

“We are simply not likely to see continued forward motion unless there is some institutional body to prompt
reform, a commission or working group with both convening power and a claim to legitimacy, in which academic
researchers and forensic science stakeholders can jointly assess the state of forensic science and continue to
push for, and argue about, improvements,” she wrote. If it can happen, she said, the future of forensic science will almost certainly be far brighter, and the substance of what is
used in investigations and offered in courtrooms throughout our nation will be more reliable, more trustworthy,
and more scientifically valid.

And…
Forensic science reforms spill up into broader scientific literacy, rebuilding public trust in science and
the criminal justice system (:45)
Howes and Kemp 17 (Loene M. and Nenagh, U Tasmania Senior Criminology Lecturer, January 2017, Journal of Language and Social Psychology 36(1):96-111 , “Discord in the Communication of Forensic Science: Can the Science of
Language Help Foster Shared Understanding?”, https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X16663589, p. 12, accessed 7/1/20, zC

The issues raised above have some more general implications for the communication of science . Forensic science is science applied to law, so that nonscientist decision makers
have access to expertise to assist in their decision making. research findings from Although some unique communication challenges arise in the context of the criminal justice system, some of the

this area may transfer to other contexts, such as science communication that informs governmental policy and
organisational practice. Transferable implications include the principles used to guide written communication and the need for science communication to be explicitly taught and enacted with appropriate guidelines, so that professional integrity is not compromised.
The principles of the written guidelines that have been developed to assist forensic scientists to write readable reports were drawn from theory and research (Howes, 2015a). Such principles have been used in other fields such as medical patients’ health literacy (e.g., Clerehan, Buchbinder, & Moodie, 2005; Feufel, Schneider, & Berkel, 2010)
and may also be applied to writing for nonscientists about other fields of scientific endeavour. In written communication, to facilitate understanding by nonscientists, it is essential to sequence the text logically to walk the reader through the scientist’s reasoning process, outline key limitations and assumptions of the scientific techniques

When verbal communication is also possible, it allows a chance for mutually

used, and explain the basis for the opinion in lay terms, defining all necessary specialist terms.

beneficial exchanges, for nonscientists to deepen their understanding of science, and for both parties to
negotiate meaning of the scientific findings and expert opinion in the specific context (about which the nonscientist has valuable knowledge).It is evident that
science communication is an important aspect of many science related careers: Science communicators help foster scientific literacy in the communities with which they work. There is a need for a science communication component to be included in science degrees and professional development workshops. A number of universities offer
science communication courses as part of science or journalism degrees (Longnecker, 2009). Such courses encourage students to break away from disciplinary norms and develop flexibility in their writing (and speaking) about science. Some universities also offer cross-disciplinary courses, which foster interaction between prospective
forensic scientists and law students (Biedermann et al., 2014). Similar cross-disciplinary courses could be offered, for example, for students of climate and political sciences. In such courses, consideration should be given to how audiences can be involved in negotiating meaning for greater understanding through dialogue- and participation-

in light
based approaches to science communication. In this article, as part of the special issue on using the science of language to help translate the language of science, we have highlighted some of the contentious aspects of communicating effectively about forensic science in the criminal justice system. We have argued that

of past failings, forensic science is in an era of increased accountability and transparency. It is incumbent on
actors in the criminal justice process to communicate clearly and understand adequately the forensic scientific
evidence presented in the criminal justice process. We argued that the science of language can assist in translating the language of science in the criminal justice system. However, we contended that the attempts to improve language must