Chapter 38 — Self-Check Quiz

26 questions: multiple choice and short answer. Try them closed-book. The answer key is in the collapsed block at the bottom.

Multiple choice

1. Forensic ethics is best described as: - A. A vague aspiration to be a good person - B. The set of moral obligations — objectivity, competence, honest representation, disclosure, service to the court — that constrain what an analyst may do, claim, and testify to - C. The same thing as the criminal law - D. A purely optional set of professional courtesies

2. The chapter's central argument about the state of forensic science is that: - A. The science is hopelessly broken and cannot be trusted at all - B. All the problems have already been fixed by the NAS and PCAST reports - C. The crisis is no longer primarily a scientific problem but an ethical and structural one — the fixes are largely known but unimplemented - D. Television has solved the field's credibility problem

3. A code of ethics is "necessary but not sufficient" mainly because: - A. Codes are too long to read - B. It relies on individual will to resist pressures built into the structure of the work, and assumes good faith - C. No forensic organization has ever adopted one - D. Codes are illegal in most states

4. The lab independence problem refers to the fact that most American crime labs: - A. Are located too far from courthouses - B. Are administratively part of, and funded by, the law-enforcement/prosecution agencies with a stake in their results - C. Refuse to become accredited - D. Are run by defense attorneys

5. The independence problem is best characterized as: - A. Routine, deliberate falsification of results - B. Structural bias — a systematic tilt toward one outcome built into the arrangement of the work, operating through good people below the level of conscious choice - C. A problem that exists only in fiction - D. A purely financial fraud

6. In Figure 38.1, the single most important difference between the dependent (A) and independent (B) models is: - A. The color of the letterhead - B. That in (B) the analyst receives only the question, not the answer anyone wants, and the lab serves both sides - C. That (B) labs never make mistakes - D. That (A) labs are unaccredited

7. The NAS report's single most important structural recommendation was: - A. Buy faster instruments - B. Make crime laboratories independent of law enforcement and prosecutors - C. Abolish DNA testing - D. Eliminate cross-examination

8. Among the reforms the NAS and PCAST demanded, the chapter finds that the ones adopted least: - A. Were the ones asking the field to measure and report itself - B. Were the ones asking the field to restructure power (independence, a strong national authority, active judicial exclusion) - C. Have all been fully implemented - D. Were never actually recommended

9. PCAST said an examiner from a foundationally valid discipline may testify to a match only by: - A. Claiming individualization "to the exclusion of all others" - B. Stating it is held "to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty" - C. Reporting the relevant error rate from the validation studies - D. Saying the error rate is zero

10. OSAC is: - A. A federal court that decides admissibility - B. The NIST-administered body that develops and registers consensus-based forensic standards — but cannot compel labs to adopt them - C. A private company that sells DNA kits - D. The police union for crime-lab analysts

11. The chapter warns that the existence of detailed standards for a method: - A. Proves the method's central claim is valid - B. Is the same thing as foundational validity - C. Does not establish that the method's central claim is valid — a standardized process for an unvalidated method still produces unsupported results - D. Makes accreditation unnecessary

12. The Department of Justice's formal disagreement with PCAST is presented as: - A. Proof that PCAST was wrong - B. An example of institutional conflict of interest — the chief user of forensic evidence resisting the science's verdict on that evidence - C. A minor clerical matter - D. The reason DNA was invented

13. A conflict of interest in forensic science is a situation that creates: - A. Certain proof that the analyst cheated - B. A risk that professional judgment will be improperly influenced — realized most often through unconscious bias, not deliberate fraud - C. An automatic mistrial - D. A guarantee of an accurate result

14. The three characteristic forms of conflict of interest named in the chapter are: - A. The judge, the jury, and the witness - B. The embedded analyst, the hired expert ("hired gun"), and the institution - C. The chemist, the biologist, and the toxicologist - D. The prosecutor, the defendant, and the victim

15. Conflicts of interest are especially dangerous in forensic work because forensic interpretation involves: - A. Purely mechanical, unambiguous measurements - B. Interpretive judgment under ambiguity, where an interest can quietly tip a genuinely close call - C. No human judgment at all - D. Only reading a number off a machine

16. The chapter describes the adversarial system as "double-edged" because it: - A. Is purely beneficial - B. Both creates conflicts (the hired-gun marketplace, pressure on embedded labs) and provides some of the only working remedies (cross-examination, confrontation, Daubert challenges) - C. Has nothing to do with forensic science - D. Should be abolished entirely

17. "An honest forensic future," in Figure 38.2, is a world where every result must survive five questions. The first and most fatal is: - A. Is the analyst well-paid? - B. Is the method foundationally valid? (a "no" cannot be rescued by careful application) - C. Is the report typed neatly? - D. Did the prosecution win?

18. Which reform can an individual analyst enact personally, today, regardless of institutional structure? - A. Making the entire lab independent - B. Refusing to read the case narrative before analysis; reporting "consistent with" when that is what the evidence supports; stating the error rate unasked - C. Passing a national independence law - D. Creating a federal forensic agency

19. In the cold case, the honest status after this chapter is: - A. "Keller is guilty beyond doubt" - B. "Process critique completed" — a critique of the machinery, not a change to the conclusion about who is responsible - C. "The case is unsolvable" - D. "Renner is guilty after all"

20. The cold case is said to have reached a sound result: - A. Because of its excellent, independent process - B. Despite its process (a non-independent lab, a contaminating early narrative, no blind verification) — which is exactly what reform exists to eliminate - C. By pure luck with no evidence at all - D. Only after the lab was made independent

Short answer

21. State, in one sentence each, the difference between structural bias and individual corruption, and explain why the chapter says structural bias is harder to fix.

22. Give three of the five core principles common to forensic codes of ethics, and for each, name the earlier-chapter technical theme it restates.

23. PCAST recommended that judges take an "active gatekeeping role." Connect this to the Daubert standard (Chapter 5) and explain why the chapter rates this reform as "largely not done."

24. Explain why OSAC is "both genuine progress and a perfect emblem of the chapter's thesis" in two sentences.

25. Name the two safeguards against cognitive bias at the individual level (Chapter 31), and explain how lab independence (§38.2) is the institutional version of the same fix.

26. Write one sentence about the Mill Creek process that an honest analyst could defend, and one sentence that would overstate what this chapter establishes about the case.

Answer key (click to expand) **Multiple choice:** 1-B · 2-C · 3-B · 4-B · 5-B · 6-B · 7-B · 8-B · 9-C · 10-B · 11-C · 12-B · 13-B · 14-B · 15-B · 16-B · 17-B · 18-B · 19-B · 20-B **Short answer (model points):** **21.** **Structural bias** is a systematic tilt toward one outcome built into the *arrangement* of the work, operating through honest people unconsciously; **individual corruption** is a person *deliberately* falsifying results. Structural bias is harder to fix because you cannot solve it by removing "bad apples" or asking people to try harder — it persists through good-faith actors as long as the structure stands, so the only real fix is to *change the structure* (independence) and the *information flow* (context management). **22.** Any three, e.g.: **Be objective** = context management against cognitive bias (Ch. 31); **stay within your competence** = the validity spectrum / foundational validity, don't testify to individualization a method can't support (Ch. 6); **represent the evidence honestly** = the honest-verb discipline, *excludes / consistent with / strongly supports*, never *proves* (Ch. 1); **disclose** = the openness/confrontation principle (Ch. 30, *Melendez-Diaz*); **serve the court, not a side** = the answer to the hired-gun problem (Ch. 30) and the independence problem (§38.2). **23.** *Daubert* makes the judge the gatekeeper of scientific evidence, with "known or potential error rate" and testability among the factors; PCAST argued judges should actually *demand* evidence of foundational validity rather than admitting methods on their longevity or practitioners' confidence. It is "largely not done" because many courts declined to exclude long-accepted methods even after PCAST, and the Department of Justice's formal disagreement reduced the report's legal force — so the gatekeeping role exists in law but is exercised weakly in practice. **24.** OSAC is **genuine progress** because it created, for the first time, a coordinated, scientifically vetted, cross-disciplinary process for writing down evidence-based standards for how forensic work should be done. It is a **perfect emblem of the thesis** because it can only *recommend*, not *mandate* — it is exactly the weaker, voluntary structure that replaced the NAS report's call for a strong national authority with teeth, showing the field will improve technique through consensus but not create an authority that can compel change. **25.** The two individual-level safeguards are **context management** (withholding domain-irrelevant information — the suspect's name, the wanted answer — from the analyst) and **sequential unmasking** (revealing case information only in a controlled order, after the analyst's independent judgment is fixed). **Lab independence** is the same fix at the institutional scale: instead of (only) hiding the wanted answer from an analyst who works for the prosecuting agency, you remove the lab from that agency entirely, so the structural pull toward the wanted answer is gone. Neither fully works alone — context management is undermined by an institution whose whole culture pushes one way, and independence still leaves room for individual bias on ambiguous calls — so both are needed. **26.** **Defensible:** "The Mill Creek case was worked by a small, non-independent county laboratory under an early accidental-fire narrative and a confession already obtained, so the conditions for structural and contextual bias were present, and blind verification and context management would have produced a more defensible result." **Overstated:** "Because the lab was not independent, the conclusions in the Mill Creek case are wrong and the evidence should be thrown out." (The chapter establishes a *process critique* — risk, not proof of harm — and explicitly does *not* change the conclusion about who is responsible; that is the capstone's work in Chapter 39.)