Inauguration of Truth Labs at Chennai by Dr APJ Abdul Kalam
Keynote Address by Padma Bhushan Prof Dr P Chandra Sekharan, President, Forensic Science Society of India
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." This is so in the poetry from John Keats." I would prefer to say “Science is truth, truth science” in the context of Truth Labs Chennai being inaugurated by one of India’s celebrated and most popular scientist, the former First Citizen a secular individual.
Forensic Science, as the police interpret, is the science used in crime investigation. When law looks at it, it is the science used in courts of law.
But according to the noted author, F.E.Camps, Forensic Science is the application of Laws of Nature to Laws of Man”. I have redefined ‘Forensic Science as the conglomeration of all bits of human knowledge, experience and endeavour which are used as fact finding tools for all legal requirements.
Evidence in wider sense includes everything that is made use of in determining or demonstrating the truth of an assertion. Collecting evidence is the process of using those things that are either (a) presumed to be true, or (b) were themselves proven via evidence, to demonstrate an assertion's truth. Evidence is the asset with which one can fulfil the burden of proof.
Evidence while playing its major role in law, is an important partner in many academic disciplines, including science adding to the discourse surrounding it. In scientific research evidence is accumulated through observations of phenomena that occur in the natural world or which are created as experiments in a laboratory or in fields under controlled conditions. Scientific evidence usually goes towards supporting or rejecting a hypothesis.
An important distinction in the field of evidence is that between circumstantial evidence and direct evidence, or evidence that suggests truth as opposed to evidence that directly proves truth. One must always remember that the burden of proof is on the person making the positive claim. The evidence is classified into five types, namely, Intuition, Personal experience, Testimonial, Anecdotal evidence and Scientific evidence.
Among the five, scientific evidence is supreme because science can never tell a lie or alter the truth. Nor science can become corrupt and biased. But scientists can. They are also from our society- the same corrupt society. Corruption has crept into the three pillars of democracy-the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary-shaking the very foundation of the democratic set-up. How can Forensic science be an exception?
Scientific data are fudged and expert opinions are changed for consideration. Not just changed. Totally opposite opinions are offered from the same State lab in a case of Narabali [Human Sacrifice] due to political intervention and as a result the real culprits were let off and the innocents who were coerced to volunteer were jailed. I am not quoting the anecdote from cinema but from a real reported case in criminal law review.
During the recent past the society had witnessed with distress how forensic science was corrupted with pseudo-scientific intrusions and how the investigating skill of the Indian police was mortgaged to those intrusions [narcoanalysis, brain fingerprinting and polygraph tests]. The last one decade or so and to be precise from 2001 onwards was indeed a black period for crime investigation and criminal justice administration in this country until the Supreme Court ruling on May 5th 2010 in Criminal Appeal No. 1267 of 2004 came to the rescue and put an end to the slothful ease that had engulfed the crime investigators.
While a vast majority of the people including senior police officers welcome the verdict, quite a few like Ashwani Kumar and Kiran Bedi play a discarding note.. Justice AR Lakshmanan’s critical analysis on the subject are more relevant and reflect the mood of the majority
It can be argued that if for running a butcher’s outlet or grocer’s shop or even a beauty salon, the licensing codes stipulate that certain level of competence and integrity be proved, why not for forensics where the stringency, integrity and expectation are and should be more. I confess that the relevance of such judgements of competence and integrity were neglected elements for long, of course for a variety of reasons. Some of them are: 1) forensic personnel work for the State and therefore for prosecution especially in adversarial system of law like ours and as a result, the credibility is taken for granted. 2) Private experts deposing for defence are rare or obnoxiously less competent and 3) the lack of desirability and practicability of having autonomous professional checks and balances. The situation is changing now as people are becoming more and more knowledgeable.
The State’s forensic experts cannot continue to expect the judges, lawyers or the accused remain unarmed.. Defence counsel now knows of the existence of private experts some of them highly knowledgeable being retired from government after decades of experience with abundance of expertise. But their number is very few. I have heard from Dr Gandhi that our colleagues in government labs who are yet to retire from service accuse us saying ‘Why not these old guys settle themselves with bhajans rather than poking their nose in forensic problems?’ Gandhi and I are indeed retired from government service but we are not retired from forensic science service. What else Gandhi and I can do? Can we sell cakes? Once one becomes a forensic scientist will always be a forensic scientist. A true forensic scientist is a watch dog of the society. The society is watching him with great expectation, because they need his service-service selfless, moderate, comprehensive and even handed in all what he says.
Expert consultancy in our country has thus far been the monopoly of the experts from the State funded institutions and thus Court has no opportunity to choose any other expert knowledgeable, if I may say so, to expose the mountebanks and charlatans who were grown among these monopolists or perhaps to incidentally eliminate self-styled quacks among private experts.
It may also be noted that in a state monopolised forensic science service system, there is little sign of independence or broader concern, however good they may be technically, serving only a limited sector of the justice system. Forensic science no more confines its application to criminal investigation, but has become a relatively new and renewed method in its application in fact finding in almost every walk of life of mankind-including his engulfed life in cyber space.
Well, Truth Labs can serve better in all these thrust areas in addition to criminal investigation.
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