Supreme CourtVerdict is not Setback to Forensic Science

Verdict is not Setback to Forensic Science
P. Chandra Sekharan Guest faculty, National Law School of India University, Bangalore
Mr. Ashwani Kumar, Director CBI said in an interview to the national newspaper ‘The Hindu’ dated 31.05.2010
“The (Supreme Court) Verdict is a setback to Forensic Science”
Nay Mr. Ashwani Kumar! It is not a setback to Forensic Science. But indeed it is a setback to CBI. The agency, a few months ago, with the help of a combination of narcoanalysis, polygraph and brain electrical activation profile (?fingerprinting) tests, established before the Supreme Court Bench [comprising Justices M.K. Sharma and H.L. Dutta] the guilt of a domestic servant Ajay Kumar Pal to the accuracy of 99.9 percent.
The Bench believed the deduction from the above tests as projected by CBI and termed the case ‘rarest of the rare’ and upheld the death sentences awarded by the lower courts. Of course it will be a setback for the courts to believe such deductions henceforth; but the phrase ‘rarest of the rare’ will always be handy. Forensic Science never owned the polygraph or the recent science-fictional brain fingerprinting as scientific tests belonging to their armour. Polygraph has always been the tool of the criminal investigator rather than the forensic scientist even before it came to disrepute. Its functions have been handled world over by people trained in the techniques of criminal investigation and interrogation and not by forensic scientist.
Unlike other expert witnesses who testify about factual matters outside the court’s knowledge, such as the analysis of fingerprints, ballistics, or DNA found at a crime scene, a polygraph expert can supply the court only with another opinion.
Mr. Ashwani Kumar wants our Parliament to take up the issue and also desires our CBI has to be better than FBI. But I want to bring to his notice the ‘Opening Statement’ of Dr. Drew C. Richardson, FBI Laboratory, before the United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C. 20510 on the 29th day of September 1997. “
“It is completely without any theoretical foundation and has absolutely no validity. Although there is disagreement amongst scientists about the use of polygraph testing in criminal matters, there is almost universal agreement that polygraph screening is completely invalid and should be stopped”. . I am yet to come across any peer reviewed published research paper by our Indian group against this view.
Brain Fingerprinting
America, where brain fingerprinting was first proposed by Lawrence Farwell a psychologist during 1995, dumped it as Potemkin Science. There are no takers for this test anywhere in the world. Farwell came to Hyderabad, India in March 2004 to sell his machines to Indian Police. After he introduced his machine I confronted him with the comment that his technique would not differentiate the brain wave response of a perpetrator of a crime from that of the others who have knowledge about the crime, Farwell had to agree with me.
The then Director General of Police, Andhra Pradesh, Mr. Sukumaran, had on the spot cancelled the order he had placed with Farwell who had to go back to America without selling a single unit in India.
In India, the Brain Fingerprinting research, to put it mildly, is a hoax. Its two main psychologist defenders are from Bangalore and Ahmadabad whose careers bloomed under Dr C.R. Mukundan whose attempts at brain fingerprinting research began in 2001 at the controversial Bangalore FSL using those accused of criminal acts shepherded by the police for ‘voluntary research’ as guinea pigs with or without the consent of the persons concerned. Dr Mukundan who had however left Bangalore unceremoniously and settled in Ahmadabad attended the Hyderabad meeting along with his two disciple groups.
Both the groups currently credited with national fame or infamy as one’s intellect pronounces – merely copied Farwell’s technique but gave their ‘findings’ different names to circumvent patent rights. As expected, each group debunked the other’s ‘technique’ as fake. The Bangalore FSL group termed its technique as ‘brain-mapping’ claiming its details were perfected in 1992 itself when its psychologist underwent training in a Canadian University – i.e. a full three years before Farwell! The false certificate produced to this effect resulted in the psychologist being dismissed from service and winding up brain fingerprinting test at Bangalore.

The Ahmadabad group credited its technique’s invention/ development to Dr Mukundan and called it ‘brain electrical oscillation signature profiling’ (BEOS). Dr. Mukundan managed to fabricate BEOS machines and marketed them to a few unsuspecting buyers – a track record that earned him the post of Advisor, Directorate of Forensic Science, Ministry of Home Affairs [DFSMHA]. Before long the questionable details began stinking to high heaven.

As a result, DFSMHA appointed a committee chaired by the Vice Chancellor Director, NIMHANS to examine the scientific validity of the brain fingerprinting technique practiced by these two groups.

In spite of the fact that NIMHANS was the training ground of the aforesaid questionable groups from Bangalore and Ahmadabad including Mukundan, the NIMHANS Committee declared both the techniques as “unscientific” and recommended their “immediate discontinuance”.

In addition to the above facts, Mr. Ashwani Kumar may please realise that both the groups make use of the EEG unit in their fabricated machine to detect the scalp electrical signal outputs.

In the common man’s language, an EEG test is comparable to the knowledge gleaned by a soccer fan sitting outside a football stadium without seeing any of the activity inside but making reasonable guesses about the course of the game based on hearing the fluctuating roars of the crowd. The ‘vantage point’ does not allow the fan to discern or deduce even a minor fraction of the game’s finer details or the paths of its progress.

How can our non-medical psychologists claim to read reactions of the brain with the help of an EEG to pinpoint the guilty and pronounce their findings as 100 percent correct, after such a ‘scientific test’ evidently comparable to the football fan above, legally acceptable?

Brain Fingerprinting should meet the Daubert Standard for establishing the scientific validity and subsequent admissibility of evidence into court. To meet the criteria of the Daubert Standard, the method must be testable, have a known potential rate of error, be subject to peer review, and be accepted in the relevant scientific community. But it is still in its science-fictional stage.

Dear Mr. Ashwani Kumar! Would you still insist that CBI should depend on these pseudo scientific techniques and become a laughing stock before the other world investigating agencies? Any way, thank you, Mr. Kumar for agreeing the verdict on Narcoanalysis and saving the CBI from disgrace.