This post is juuust a little bit late. The website in question is still up, but has been involved in “website maintenance” for years, though promising to be back in “a few days.” It won’t be: GOOD. However, it is instructive to consider the saga of this epically unethical website in light of the recent revelation that the most famous forensic expert of them all, Dr. Henry Lee, used fake forensic evidence to help send two teenagers to prison for 30 years for a crime they didn’t commit. It is also useful perspective for the current fealty the political Left and the mainstream media wants Americans to pledge to “experts” who will explain why progressive policy cant just “follows the science.”
When it isn’t performing its tax-payer funded role as a progressive propaganda mouthpiece, PBS is still capable of doing valuable investigative journalism. In 2012, a notable example was the Frontline series called “The Real C.S.I.,” blowing the whistle on the forensic science racket then being extolled weekly on network TV as all-but-infallible. There were a lot of head-exploders in the series, among them that fingerprints might not be as unique as we have assumed, but one of the main discoveries in the series was that criminal trials all over the country were being influenced by “graduates” of the American College of Forensic Examiners Institute (ACFEI), an on-line diploma mill founded and operated by a shady entrepreneur named Robert O’Block. ACFEI would certify someone as a forensics expert essentially for cash, though there was an “exam” that had a more than 99% pass rate. PBS interviewed a reporter who took the exam and got her certification despite knowing little more about forensic science than the average “C.S.I Miami” fan. O’Block, meanwhile, had turned fake credentialing into an empire, with 14 separate certification scams. These in turn churned out an estimated 70,000 fake forensic experts who were routinely admitted as legitimate testifying expert witnesses by judges who accepted O’Block’s meaningless certificates as sufficient proof of expertise.
O’Block also sent one certification to a prison inmate and bestowed another on his cat. ACFEI was never recognized by the US Department of Education’s Distance Education/learning Department, or the Federal Trade Commission/FTC, but most of the time neither judges nor defense attorneys took the time to check.
In 2017, O’Block, then 66, fatally shot himself after killing his 27-year-old girlfriend. On the disciples of this pillar of rectitude and ethics did a substantial segment of the American criminal justice system and its juries place their trust as they sent accused American to prison.
Investigative reporter Radley Balko wrote in part upon the occasion of O’Block’s demise,
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Ethics Alarms 