First, please don't mix in lie detectors here. They are plain quack science, and an "interrogation technique" (read: intimidation method) at best. Second, we h

First, please don't mix in lie detectors here. They are plain quack science, and an "interrogation technique" (read: intimidation method) at best. Second, we have always known witness testimonies to be unreliable. That's why perjury is a crime! We wouldn't need it to be a crime if nobody was giving false testimonies. And that's assuming people don't make mistakes, which they do. We still use testimonies. A court case, after all, is all about probabilities. Very often we just don't know the truth 100%. It's just that compounding evidence, ideally, would convince that it is very unlikely that a particular scenario didn't happen. E.g.: someone could have mistaken another person for you when they said they saw you hitting the old pawnbroker lady with an axe, BUT given that you were caught with an axe AND blood was dripping from it AND that blood matched the old lady's AND you wrote an article about the merits of butchering old ladies in the local newspaper - ALL those things could have been mere coincidences and mistakes, HOWEVER they establish that it's highly unlikely that you didn't commit the crime. Same with DNA evidence. We just need to re-adjust our expectations of how foolproof it is for it to work effectively in a court system. As long as we know that the labs are not 100% reliable, we'll be fine. And that's what the authors are trying to do here. The next step would be punishments for quack/pseudo science being used as "expert" testimony, as well as actual experts being reckless in their work (as is the case with the DNA labs in the article) when that work is used to accuse someone of a crime. The punishment doesn't need to be jail-time; even banning the person/lab from providing evidence again would be a good first step. But that's my view on how to solve this problem, and a subject of another discussion.