This Canadian Lab Spent 20 Years Ruining Lives by Tess Owen.
From the post:
Four years ago, Yvonne Marchand lost custody of her daughter.
Even though child services found no proof that she was a negligent parent, that didn’t count for much against the overwhelmingly positive results from a hair test. The lab results said she was abusing alcohol on a regular basis and in enormous quantities.
The test results had all the trappings of credible forensic science, and was presented by a technician from the Motherisk Drug Testing Laboratory at Toronto’s Sick Kids Hospital, Canada’s foremost children’s hospital.
“I told them they were wrong, but they didn’t believe me. Nobody would listen,” Marchand recalls.
Motherisk hair test results indicated that Marchand had been downing 48 drinks a day, for 90 days. “If you do the math, I would have died drinking that much” Marchand says. “There’s no way I could function.”
The court disagreed, and determined Marchand was unfit to have custody of her daughter.
…
Some parents, like Marchand, pursued additional hair tests from independent labs in a bid to fight their cases. Marchand’s second test showed up as negative. But, because the lab technician couldn’t testify as an expert witness, the second test was thrown out by the court.
Marchand says the entire process was very frustrating. She says someone should have noticed a pattern when parents repeatedly presented hair test results from independent labs which completely contradicted Motherisk results. Alarm bells should have gone off sooner.
…
Tess’ post and a 366-page report make it clear that Motherisk has impaired the fairness of a large number of child-protection service cases.
Child services, the courts, state representatives, the only one would would have been aware of contradictions of Motherisk results over multiple cases, had not interest in “connecting the dots.”
Each case, with each attorney, was an ad hoc data silo that could not present the pattern necessary to challenge the systematic poor science from Motherisk.
The point is that not all data silos are in big data or nation-state sized intelligence services. Data silos can and do regularly have tragic impact upon ordinary citizens.
Privacy would be an issue but mechanisms need to be developed where lawyers and other advocates can share notice of contradiction of state agencies so that patterns such as by Motherisk can be discovered, documented and hopefully ended sooner rather than later.
BTW, there is an obvious explanation for why:
“No forensic toxicology laboratory in the world uses ELISA testing the way [Motherisk] did.”
Child services did not send hair samples to Motherisk to decide whether or not to bring proceedings.
Child services had already decided to remove children and sent hair samples to Motherisk to bolster their case.
How bright did Motherisk need to be to realize that positive results were expected outcome?
Does your local defense bar collect data on police/state forensic experts and their results?
Looking for suggestions?