Your Public Persona and You
Navigating Social Media as a Forensic Scientist
AnnaKay Kruger, Promega
Share this article
Sometimes, social media can seem like a virtual utopia where we all have the freedom to express ourselves as we wish. At other times, social media feels like a lawless wasteland where no one is truly safe from the judgment and opinions of others. The reality probably lies somewhere in between, but the perils of using social media are numerous. Our behavior online can have implications offline in ways that we may not foresee, for both our personal and our professional lives. This is especially true when your personal life—your experiences, opinions and convictions—can be used to discredit you and call into question your ability to do your job. In this respect, there are few who stand to lose more from their use of social media than those in the criminal justice system, particularly forensic scientists.
The Duty of a Forensic Scientist
In a criminal case, forensic science stands as a bastion of objective truth between two highly motivated parties: the prosecution and the defense. A forensic scientist is called to serve the court by speaking for the evidence.
“As a forensic scientist, what you're doing is essentially you're giving a voice to items of physical evidence that can't speak for themselves,” said John Collins, founder of the leadership coaching organization Critical Victories and former forensic laboratory system director for the state of Michigan. “You can't put a bullet on the witness stand, and the bullet testifies and says I was fired. It’s the forensic scientist who has to give a voice to that evidence.”
As such, it’s critical that a forensic scientist can give voice in a way that is unbiased. Bias in a court case refers to the degree to which a person may favor one narrative or outcome over the other based solely on their personal opinions, beliefs or past experiences, and not on the evidence presented.
“We’re human beings. We all have biases and prejudices, and that never really goes away,” said Collins. “A bias is oftentimes a form of motivation. The prosecution is motivated to incriminate the defendant. The defense's motivation is to get an acquittal or a light sentence. So, then the question becomes, what's the motivation of a forensic scientist?”
Though the existence of true objectivity in science has been hotly debated for decades, an important part of becoming a forensic scientist is learning how to regulate your own biases so that they can be separated entirely from your work.
“There is a feeling, I think, that prosecutors have and that investigators have, that they're doing good work and they're getting justice for victims. And it's easy to fall into that mindset when you're working in that system so closely with those stakeholders,” said Tiffany Roy, forensic DNA expert and president of the forensic consulting agency ForensicAid. “However, a forensic scientist is an advocate for the science, and that means protecting the science. Protecting it from the prosecutor, protecting it from the defense attorney. Those people have ethical obligations that are very different from the scientist, and they might want to use your evidence or aspects of it as part of their narrative.”
Whether the evidence could be used in support of the narrative put forth by the prosecution or by the defense should be of no consideration to the forensic scientist. Everyone involved in a criminal trial—the prosecution, the defense and the court—should be able to trust in the authority, expertise and objectivity of the forensic scientist.
The Consequences of Bias in Forensic Science
If a forensic scientist were perceived by a jury to be biased, this could have consequences not only for the criminal case at hand, but for the scientist themselves and the forensic lab to which that scientist belongs.
Chair of the Department of Forensic Science at the University of New Haven and former Connecticut State Police Detective Peter Valentin said: “I think, in the worst-case scenario, the jury completely disregards what otherwise would have been a valid interpretation of what the evidence had to say. Even in the presence of extraordinarily probative evidence, if the jury for whatever reason doesn’t believe that the analyst that’s testifying is objective, they are free to disregard that testimony and, as a result, disregard what that evidence had to say.”
While casting aside key evidence obviously has dire implications in the context of a trial, attorneys can cite that situation going forward to discredit and undermine any future testimony from that scientist.
“If the forensic scientist is perceived to be biased, obviously it calls into question the accuracy of the results that are being reported. It has downstream effects too, because then it creates anxiety about the capability of that scientist to be helpful in future cases. What you get is a trust problem,” said Collins.
Further, aside from tarnishing their own reputation, a scientist accused of allowing personal biases to affect their work in turn reflects poorly on their lab, potentially impacting the testimony of all the other analysts working there.
“An issue of bias in a particular analyst can very easily be turned into a systemic issue of poor training, poor supervision, and that would certainly affect the testimony of other analysts within the same laboratory,” said Valentin.
The Hazards of Social Media
As countless people have discovered in their use of social media, anything you post publicly can be distributed and interpreted freely, sometimes exposing you to a degree of scrutiny you may not have anticipated. Even if you take something off social media after the fact, there’s no guarantee that it won’t resurface later. Someone like a forensic scientist, for whom personal biases can become a real liability, needs to think carefully about how the things that they post could be used to cast their expert testimony into doubt.
“You have to remember that whenever you’re an expert, whatever your expertise is in, you are an authority. Expertise gives you authority in a particular subject matter, and then you use that authority to exert some kind of influence,” said Collins. “The problem with social media is that if it is misused, or if you lose your sense of self-control in your engagement with social media, that can impact whether you are seen and trusted as an authority.”
Even things that seem innocuous—something as simple as a comment on someone else’s post, or a like—can be twisted to paint you in an unfavorable light.
“For those of us who are in the criminal justice realm, we have to be extraordinarily careful about not only our intentions when we post things on social media, but also about the way that somebody can twist what we've said. We need to consider how somebody could think about us or draw opinions about us based on something we posted,” said Valentin.
Though it may not always feel fair that your personal life and professional success as a forensic scientist are so intertwined, it comes with the territory.
“You're not just a scientist, but you're a scientist that provides information to do one of the most important public functions, and there's value to that,” Valentin said. “In exchange for that really important role that you have, there are some obligations, and one is not to compromise yourself.”
That said, it’s not necessary to abandon social media entirely—but if you’re going to use it, it’s a good idea to lay down some ground rules for yourself as far as protecting your public persona on the internet, whether that’s avoiding expressing personal opinions about controversial topics, carefully vetting the photos you post for sensitive content or otherwise.
“I know lawyers have this joke: ‘Dance like no one is watching and e-mail like it's going to be read aloud in a deposition,’” said Roy. “I really believe that, for forensic scientists, they need to keep in mind that we are part of the justice process and anything that they put out into the public sphere is going to reflect on them.”