title: Dismantling the Justice Silos: avoiding the pitfalls and reaping the benefits of information-sharing between forensic science, medicine and law.
abstract: Forensic science is increasingly relied on by police and the courts to exonerate the innocent and to establish links to crime. With this increased reliance the potential for unjust outcomes increases, especially in serious matters for two reasons. The more serious the matter, the more likely that evidence mishandling can lead to wrongful imprisonment, and the more likely the personnel involved will be multi-disciplinary (police, medicine, law, forensic science), and multi-organisational (Health, Justice, private legal/medical, police). The importance of identifying effective multi-organisational interactions was highlighted in the recent wrongful imprisonment of an Australian male for a sexual assault he did not commit. One factor that led to this unjust outcome was the justice silo effect: where forensic practitioners from different agencies operate in isolation (rarely communicating or sharing information/knowledge). In this paper we discuss findings from the Interfaces Project designed to assess the extent of the justice silos within Australia. We interviewed 103 police, forensic scientists, lawyers, judges, coroners, pathologists and forensic physicians Australian-wide. Five main themes were identified in the data: the silo effect was only partial and in each jurisdiction some form of inter-agency communication was actively occurring; inter-agency meetings were more common in homicide than sexual assault cases; forensic physicians were semi-invisible; there had been considerable momentum over the past ten years for practice improvement groups, and; practitioners gain more benefits than pitfalls from inter-agency information-sharing. Based on these findings, five recommendations are made for improving practice.
authors.affiliation: Tasmanian Institute of Law Enforcement Studies, University of Tasmania, Private Bag 22, Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia. Sally.Kelty@utas.edu.au
authors.forename: Sally F
authors.initials: SF
authors.lastname: Kelty
authors.forename: Roberta
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Julian
authors.forename: Alastair
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ross
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001315:Australia; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D003334:Coroners and Medical Examiners; D017144:Focus Groups; D044707:Forensic Sciences; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D007400:Interprofessional Relations; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D033241:Lawyers; D008875:Middle Aged; D010820:Physicians; D016495:Police; D055815:Young Adult