The judge being surprised the FBI conducted studies concluding the technique lacks merit after having published an article about the initial promising result is

The judge being surprised the FBI conducted studies concluding the technique lacks merit after having published an article about the initial promising result is a problem. Preliminary results without independent verification are notoriously unreliable. Imagine an engineer designing something safety-critical based on a single scientific paper describing a result that hadn't been replicated elsewhere. Engineers usually don't do that, but if they do they face significant liability and risk losing their licenses.