Follow the Science?

In recent years we’ve heard cries of “follow the science” in support of all kinds of agendas and political movements.  But science is a methodology and, in many cases, has exposed those agendas as unsupported by, and sometimes even contradicted by, the science.

Claiming a word as your own and attaching that word to your agenda is a neat trick, if you can pull it off.  (Prosecutors do it all the time with the word truth.)  But despite the recent flurry of creativity surrounding the word science, this tactic is as old as the hills.  A brief look at the history of science-misuse is instructive.

In Mathew Stewart’s book The Management Myth, he explains that various groups have historically used the word science to promote their own agendas, regardless of whether there was any actual science involved:

Wordplay: How the Government Uses “Truth” and “Science” Against Us

As a criminal defense lawyer, I’ve seen government wordplay designed to violate our rights and take our freedoms.  For example, before a jury may convict a defendant of a crime, the government must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.  Yet, instead of simply instructing juries on this burden of proof, the prosecutors-turned-judges who comprise Wisconsin’s jury-instruction committee drafted a statewide instruction that concludes by telling jurors: “you are not to search for doubt. You are to search for the truth.”  Prosecutors then parrot this language during closing arguments to the jury.  

Sounds good on its surface, doesn’t it?  Who doesn’t want “the truth”?  It’s like when the government names something “the Patriot Act” or calls itself “the Department of Justice.”  The citizenry shouldn’t question what’s going on beneath the surface; the label tells us everything we’re supposed to know.

But it’s rarely that simple.  

Weird Science in Wisconsin Courts

Click here to read my latest column at the Wisconsin Law Journal, which is an excerpt from the chapter titled "Weird Science" in my forthcoming book Convicting Avery.  (The book will be published by Prometheus Books on April 4th, and is available for pre-order here.)

“Judge, have you been studying this at all?”

I’ve written numerous posts—for example, here, here, and here—about defense attorneys trying to put on evidence of innocence during a trial, only to have trial judges shut them down cold. As I explained in those posts, this happens most frequently when the prosecutor objects to a defense lawyer’s line of questioning as calling for “hearsay.” In most cases, however, the testimony isn’t hearsay at all. So the surprised defense lawyer does his best to play educator, and tries to teach the judge about the definition of hearsay. Yet, because many judges just cannot grasp this incredibly important concept, they sustain the prosecutor’s objection in knee-jerk fashion. The defense lawyer—much like a patient whose surgeon doesn’t understand basic human anatomy—is dead in the water (or on the operating table, as it were). 

Now, I don’t mean to make light of this incredibly serious and utterly unacceptable state of affairs in legal education and, consequently, in the judiciary. But when I saw the following short video clip, I couldn’t help but think of physicist Brian Greene as the frustrated defense lawyer, and the other character in the video as the completely uneducated judge, incapable of grasping the lesson. (If the embedded video does not appear below, you can find it on YouTube by clicking here.) Enjoy.

  

Time’s up, Einstein: The Legal Watchdog wrestles with dark matter and the theory of general relativity

I was supposed to be in trial all week, but the case settled last Friday.  Therefore, I decided to dedicate a few days to solving the mysteries of the universe.  True, I've only begun exploring the relevant issues, but the week is young. 

Have you ever heard of dark matter and wondered what it was?  It turns out that we can't verify its existence, and the only reason we created it—that’s right, we created it—is to allow us to cling to Einstein's theory of general relativity.  More specifically, when we use Einstein's equations (built on Newton's laws) to back into a measurement of "mass" by first looking at orbital speeds of the planets outside of our solar system, the equations produce more mass than we can actually observe.  So, observational mass and computational mass just don't match up.  Therefore, to make the two balance we created dark matter, i.e., matter that we can't see, but that must be there in order to make Einstein's equations work.  If Einstein’s theories weren’t already so well accepted in the physics community, this would be like assuming the very thing that we are trying to prove.  But because Einstein is a—or the—physics god, most physicists seem to try and substantiate, rather than question, his work.