When you turn on the television and settle in to watch your favorite crime drama, you

know you're going to hear about ballistics tests on bullets, fingerprints, DNA matching,

and blood spatters.

All the familiar forensic evidence techniques certainly sound science-y, and they're on television,

so they must have legitimate science foundations.

Right?

Well, we're going to find out today on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid.

I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

Forensic, pseudo-science.

Something we've pointed out on Skeptoid many times over the years is that science is

not done in the courtroom.

People are constantly mistaking legal findings for scientific findings.

They are not.

Judges and jurors can be persuaded of things by any number of methods, and solid science

is rarely one of those.

Even when good science is presented in the courtroom, lawyers are free to argue over its

validity, thus wrongly creating the impression that the science itself is shaky.

But just as harmful is the opposite process, the introduction of bad science in a courtroom

alongside a deep-rooted cultural belief that the science is a valid one.

And here we are talking about Forensic science, the bits of evidence that Linka Killer to a

crime scene, believed by many, to be irrefutable.

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