A new study finds that U.S. courts are not properly screening out unreliable psychological and IQ tests, allowing junk science to be used as evidence.
WASHINGTON — Courts are not properly screening out unreliable psychological and IQ tests, allowing junk science to be used as evidence, researchers have concluded. Such tests can sway judges or juries and influence whether someone gets custody of a child or is eligible for bail or capital punishment.
“There’s huge variability in the psychological tools now being admitted in U.S. courts,” said Tess Neal, an Arizona State University psychology professor and co-author of the study published Saturday in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Legal challenges to the validity of psychological tests occurred in less than 3% of cases, the researchers found.
on courtroom science that found that “testimony based on faulty forensic science analyses may have contributed to wrongful convictions of innocent people.”“Courts are supposed to sift out the junk science from the good science, as laid out in the federal rules of evidence” — a set of national guidelines that require that “testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods.”The new study examined 876 court cases in the U.S.
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