大量的伪科学在法庭上被当作证据

大量的伪科学在法庭上被当作证据

The scientific evidence used to sway the opinions of jury members and judges in US courtrooms may not be all that reliable, according to the findings of a new study in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

发表在《公共利益心理学》期刊上的一项新研究发现，用来影响美国法庭陪审团成员和法官意见的科学证据可能并不那么可靠。

Analysis found that some 60 percent of all psychological assessments that are admitted as evidence appear to be based on junk science, although only about 5 percent of these dodgy testimonies are ever challenged by lawyers.

分析发现，在所有被承认为证据的心理评估中，约有60%似乎是基于垃圾科学，尽管这些可疑的证词中只有约5%曾受到律师的质疑。

The study authors began by pooling data from 22 separate surveys of forensic mental health practitioners, who were found to use a total of 364 different psychological assessment tools when acting as experts in legal cases. These tools serve a variety of purposes, such as determining a defendant’s competence to stand trial or indicating whether or not a parent is deserving of child custody.

这项研究的作者们首先汇集了22个独立调查的法医学心理健康从业者的数据，这些人在担任法律案件的专家时，总共使用了364种不同的心理评估工具。这些工具有各种各样的用途，例如确定被告受审的能力，或表明父母是否应享有儿童监护权。

Ben Taub

A team of coders were then employed to scan the scientific literature for references to each of these 364 assessment tools, and to determine whether they were generally accepted as reliable by the scientific community.

然后，一组编码人员被雇佣来扫描这364种评估工具的科学文献，以确定它们是否被科学界普遍认为是可靠的。

Results indicated that only 67 percent of the psychological tests used by forensic experts in court cases are generally accepted by scientists as valid. However, only 40 percent of these assessment tools were given favorable reviews in the Mental Measurements Yearbook, which is seen as an authority on the effectiveness of psychological testing.

结果表明，只有67%的法医学专家在法庭上使用的心理测试被科学家普遍接受为有效的。然而，只有40%的评估工具在《心理测量年鉴》中得到好评，该年鉴被视为心理测试有效性方面的权威。

The researchers then narrowed their focus onto 30 of these 364 assessment tools, which were used in a total of 372 court cases in the US between 2016 and 2018. Despite only 40 percent of these tests being seen as solid by the scientific community, their admissibility was challenged by lawyers just 19 times.

然后，研究人员将他们的研究范围缩小到这364种评估工具中的30种，这些工具在2016年至2018年期间被用于美国总共372起法庭案件。尽管科学界认为这些测试中只有40%是可靠的，但它们的可采性仅受到律师19次质疑。

This means that suspect scientific evidence went unchallenged in 94.9 percent of cases. What’s more, only 6 of these 19 challenges were successful.

这意味着，在94.9%的案例中，可疑的科学证据没有受到质疑。更重要的是，这19个挑战中只有6个成功了。

The team notes limitations with the study, primarily in regards to scope. "We did not conduct a comprehensive survey of the case law regarding the admissibility of psychological tools; rather, we conducted a limited but organized investigation into a sample of legal cases citing a sample of psychological tools. Our methods provide us a rough nonparametric sense of the population of cases."

研究小组注意到这项研究的局限性，主要是在范围上。“我们没有对心理工具可接受性的判例法进行全面调查;相反，我们对一些法律案例进行了有限但有组织的调查，并引用了一些心理学工具的样本。我们的方法为我们提供了一个粗略的非参数总体情况。”

In their write-up, the study authors explain that lawyers can’t be blamed for letting so much junk science enter their testimonies, since they are not trained psychologists and are therefore unable to identify the weakness of an assessment tool unless they happen to be alerted to it by an expert.

在他们的文章中，该研究的作者解释说，不能因为让这么多垃圾科学进入他们的证词而责怪律师，因为他们不是训练有素的心理学家，因此无法识别评估工具的弱点，除非他们碰巧被专家提醒。

Furthermore, since precedent holds so much sway in legal proceedings, and so many of these questionable tools have been seen as admissible for so long, there is now a precedent for allowing bad science to stand as evidence in US courtrooms.

此外，由于先例在法律程序中具有如此大的影响力，而且这么多有问题的工具长期以来一直被认为是可以接受的，现在又有了一个允许糟糕的科学作为证据出现在美国法庭的先例。