It’s not unusual these days to find articles demanding greater transparency in the criminal justice system. A recent piece in Slate, however, actually addresses the issue of transparency from an angle that doesn’t involve police beatings and body cameras. Read Rebecca Wexler’s complete blog here.
Wexler argues convincingly that it’s a terrible idea to base a criminal conviction on a “scientific” test (think DNA analysis, or even radar gun calibration) composed entirely of secret, proprietary software code. The reason? A defendant isn’t allowed access to the secret code, “leaving him free to examine the state’s expert witness but not the tool that the witness relied on.”
This approach may provide maximum intellectual property protection to the company that sells exclusively to government crime laboratories, but it also compromises a defendant’s Sixth Amendment rights under the Confrontation Clause. This is, quite frankly, an unacceptable trade-off.
Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” If you were on trial, and the state wanted to use magic against you, wouldn’t you at least want to know how the magic worked?
