Roger Koppl discusses the inherent problem of the government’s monopoly on crime labs, pointing to institutional incentives for experts in a variety of fields. From fingerprint analysis to DNA matching, Roger estimates that 20,000 individuals are wrongly convicted each year in the United States because of faulty forensic evidence.

Koppl has consulted with the Innocence Project, an organization that challenges wrongful convictions, on this issue. Koppl says that competition among experts is the fairest way to judge differing opinions, and suggests that standards for evidence testing be established, such as randomly having evidence tested by a second lab and “sequentially unmasking” identification of case information to testers in order to prevent bias.

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