The Datafication of Expertise: 3D Laser Scanners and Courtroom Narrative

• In Event: Making Objectivity in Data-Centric Knowledge Practices

Abstract

Increasingly, 3D laser scanners are deployed across the criminal legal system; they are used by law enforcement agencies to aid in crime-scene reconstruction and by prosecutors to create visually coherent narrative devices for the courtroom. Companies such as FARO and Leica manufacture these scanners and their attendant software, providing training for officers and civilian employees alike on data processing, handling and presentation. Branches of forensic science traditionally subject to the adversarial courtroom system involving expert testimony and rebuttal are now encoded into the software attendant to the 3D scanners. A reconstruction can involve shot trajectory analysis, blood spatter analysis and other forms of widely disputed areas of forensic science, making their processes invisible through a kind of datafication. The marketing and training materials for these devices claim a heretofore unachievable level of objectivity, achieved through the gathering of large quantities of data. This paper explores the ways in which truth claims, expertise and evidence are produced through and around this new technical object as well as how its relatively uncontroversial position within the criminal legal system to date exposes complex collective assumptions around the boundaries and possibilities of data, narrative and objectivity. Ultimately, the power of the 3D scanner/reconstruction is its ability to navigate the boundaries between assumptions of mechanical objectivity and the desire for a story that “makes sense” for a jury.

Author

• Stacy Wood, University of California Los Angeles