One-day workshop on establishing an International Centre for Evidence Based Criminal Law

Criminal law, as it is traditionally studied within legal science, focuses on the appropriate interpretation and application of legal rules and principles. However, this disregards that when criminal cases are investigated or decided in Courts of Law, it happens on the basis of multidisciplinary evidence that legally trained individuals like prosecutors and judges regularly lack the necessary education and/or training to understand and integrate into their decision-making. This includes, for example, DNA evidence and sources of errors in the extraction methods used in relation to DNA mixtures. Furthermore, apart from sources of errors referable to the scientific methods as such, there are also those referable to the humans (cognitive biases) who use the methods during the investigative phase or interpret the evidence during the pre-trial and trial phases. 

This constitutes a vulnerability in criminal law, opening up for wrongful suspicions, convictions, and acquittals, thereby negatively impacting its accuracy and credibility. Thus, this project focuses on organising a workshop to address these issues. The full-day workshop would be beneficial regardless of whether EB-CRIME is granted money from the Swedish Research Council or not; while the focus of the meeting may be somewhat different depending on the outcome, in the former case focusing more on conducting projects and in the latter case on how to improve the project plan. 

Area

Forensic Science

UCL leads

• Dr Sherry Nakhaeizadeh, UCL Centre for the Forensic Sciences