Books: Do not cross

Klatzow destroys all we hold sacred about forensic science - a field contaminated by the myths of crime TV, writes Mike Nicol
Justice Denied *****
David Klatzow (Zebra Press, R250)
David Klatzow lives in his face. It is lined, creased, baggy. It is sceptical. His gaze is baleful. All of life's disappointments seem writ large there. And I don't mean his personal disappointments; no, I mean the disappointments delivered up by the rest of us. Our human weaknesses; our "junk" science (his word) that we use to make sense of our world.
Klatzow is well known as the maverick voice of forensic science. The cops seem to have an unwritten code that goes: "Don't talk to Klatzow at a crime scene." His fellow practitioners won't willingly disclose their evidence to him.
"They loathe me," he says. "I have to fight tooth and nail to get anything. The state blocks me. I have to make an application and compel them to let me have evidence."
He broods in his study - with its microscopes and magnifying glasses and rifles and boxes of bullets and sabres and its standing skeleton, and its hand-grenade on the desk and its book-lined walls on everything from ballistics to blood splatter - about the follies we commit.
It is the sort of study where you would write a book called Justice Denied.
When you read this, Klatzow's latest, you begin to understand why the cops, the scientists, the advocates, the expert witnesses loathe David Klatzow. They loathe him precisely because he has their number. He knows that they distort their findings, that they lie and obfuscate, and will act not in the interests of justice but from ego.
This is why reading Justice Denied is a depressing experience. It collapses the world of CSI, the world we have come to believe does not lie to us about what went down at a crime scene.
The "CSI effect" it is called. The result is that the glamour of the job as seen in the TV series has enticed thousands of students to sign up for forensic science degrees. New departments to cater for the demand have become the darlings of universities across the world.
"It's a junk degree," says Klatzow. "You come out little better than a technician. You don't even have the authority to sign off a postmortem."
A junk degree for a junk science. In 250 pages, Klatzow systematically destroys all we hold sacred: police competence at a crime scene, fingerprints, blood reports, striations on bullets, the testimony of expert witnesses. All this is left in tatters.
"Pray that you are never accused of a serious crime," he says. "Unless you are rich, you will end up in jail."
Recall Fred van der Vyver, charged with the murder of his girlfriend, Inge Lotz. As Klatzow narrates the case, it was not only the police but the prosecutors who "blundered on until an acquittal was achieved by an overwhelming mass of evidence indicating fraud and dishonesty in the state case".
Now consider this from the book, on the 1987 shooting of Ashley Kriel by the police:
"It was clear to me that [Professor Deon] Knobel was trying to prove that the police version was correct" - instead of properly analysing the bullet wound.
"When I met with [Lionel Shelsey] Smith [head of forensic medicine at UCT] before the trial, he became aware of the policeman's name from the case papers. Suddenly, without any proper explanation, he did an about-turn on his report, effectively - and fatally - damaging the plaintiff's case. He said to me in chambers that he felt he could not 'drop' the policeman, as he knew him well and had socialised with him in former years."
Justice Denied not only runs rampant through South African judicial malfeasance but draws on blunders across the world, some of which put innocent people to death. It is a handbook of how forensic science has aided and abetted miscarriages of justice. It is a book we all need to read, because the notion of justice is a cornerstone of our society.
Don't take Klatzow's word for it, consider this from the US National Academy of Sciences:
"The simple reality is that the interpretation of forensic evidence is not always based on scientific studies to determine its validity. This is a serious problem. [.] The law's greatest dilemma in its heavy reliance on forensic evidence, however, concerns the question of whether - and to what extent - there is science in any given forensic science discipline."
A serious problem indeed.
@MikeNicol
