On the contrary, that's what the American justice system is entirely based upon. Fair judges, juries of peers and so on. Its the bedrock of justice.

Engineers have some notion that it can all be replaced with science. In so far as science can certify the reliability of tests, that is good. But in the end one has to trust the humans between those tests and the courtroom.

The whole point of this discussion is that this trust is being largely misplaced.

A lot of forensic science in itself is essentially phrenology (tooth prints, hair analysis - the non DNA kind, even fingerprinting is of exaggerated value). A lot of labs systematically turn out biased results with generally no expectation of risk, either personally to researchers and definitely not to higher ups.

Ultimately, forensic evidence should be seen as a signal, but not nearly as trustworthy as witness testimony (which in itself is not very trustworthy), despite what many believe.

And this is important for the general public to understand, the people who will participate in juries. The mystique that forensic experts have can make juries give extremely wrong decisions (even bad aquitalls on lack of forensic evidence).

Yes there is a need for controls and independent certification.

There is also a need to recognize that a lot of this science just doesn't work (to the extent that it is often presented). The right way to phrase a lot of the conclusions of these experts, at the state of the art, would be 'in my expert opinion, it looks like it might be their DNA/fingerprint/hair/teeth', not 'in my expert opinion it is [...]'. Because even the state of the art is often about at that level - probably closer to 75% accuracy than 99.99% like it's often treated. Especially on real world, partial, corrupted samples.

And to emphasize again, I'm talking about the state of the art without the biases being discussed. The biases only compound this problem significantly.