The most common offenses filling the dockets of the criminal courts involve possession or sale of illegal drugs. Individual cases rarely rate media coverage. Guilt is established by a standard form of scientific evidence: a “lab report” certifying that the substance seized was tested according to a scientific protocol and shown to be an illegal substance. Conversely, a negative finding in a laboratory analysis can exonerate an accused person.
The most significant recent “news” in drug law came in 2009 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts.1 The Massachusetts equivalent of the lab report, called the “certificate of analysis” of a substance, was held to be not enough to sustain a trial conviction of a drug offense. The Court ruled that the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment required live testimony of the drug analyst, so that the reliability of the conclusion that the substance was an illegal drug could be tested in “the crucible of cross-examination.”2 There was nothing infallible about so-called “neutral scientific testing,” Justice Antonin Scalia emphasized in the majority opinion, taking note of a study of wrongful convictions finding that “invalid forensic testimony contributed to the convictions in 60% of the cases.”3
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