The Casey Anthony murder trial highlights the rampant misuse of CSI evidence in American courts. Both sides in the case have trotted big-name forensic scientists to dazzle the jury. Yet little of the forensic-science evidence presented has clarified any of the mysteries surrounding the death of little Caylee Anthony. Only the eye-witness testimony has shed any light on this case.

The problem arises from the term “forensic science.” The word “forensic” in this term means “relating to debate and argumentation.” The “science” in this term is a misnomer like most terms involving the word “science” (such as social science and political science). More apt would be the words “arts” or “craft.” For example, no one would claim to study “legal science,” because all lawyers know that practicing law is an art and craft—a skill, one that varies in quality according to the abilities of each practitioner.

Forensic science provides support for one of the sides in a legal debate or argument. It produces evidence present to bolster an argument, such as: Caylee Anthony had duct tape applied to her mouth and nose, thus suffocating her.

By definition, forensic science can also supply support for the argument that the duct tape was not applied to Caylee Anthony’s face at all but rather to something else, such as the neck of one of the bags found near her remains. Forensic science can even supply support for the argument that the duct tape became stuck to the hair at some point after the remains were dragged around by carnivores. I can think of a very long list of possibilities that forensic science could be used to support.

It isn’t science. Science is the study of nature to discover facts that lead to an understanding of the truth. Science has a specific methodology, which is vastly different from the methodology of forensic science. Science’s methodology begins with the understanding that the truth is not known; a hypothesis about the truth is proposed; and then an almost endless series of experiments is conducted to confirm or deny the hypothesis.

Forensic science begins with an assumption (not a hypothesis). The assumption in the Anthony case is that Casey Anthony murdered her daughter, carried her around in the trunk of her car for several days, concocted a kidnapping tale, then wrapped her daughter’s dead face in duct tape and stuffed her into a plastic bag (or, if that can’t be proven, that she suffocated her daughter with duct tape or maybe by putting her in the plastic bag—although you can’t have it both ways), and then discarded her like trash in a nearby wooded area. All of the FBI laboratory investigators and all of the Orange County investigators proceeded from this assumption to try to find evidence supporting their claims.

But one only bothers to go to the extraordinary effort of looking for a needle in a haystack if you know in advance that a needle is there to be found.

Science is currently looking for a needle in a haystack using the multi-billion-dollar Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a research center in Switzerland. The needle science is looking for is the Higgs Boson, an incredibly small particle that is assumed to exist and must exist if other physics concepts and equations are to be believed to be correct.

Note: I did not say that science and the governments of the world all agreed to spend billions of dollars trying to find evidence to support an assumption. The Higgs Boson is an hypothesis at this point, but it is an hypothesis derived from over a century of scientific research.

In other words, if Casey Anthony’s guilt were a scientific hypothesis instead of law-enforcement assumption, the so-called forensic scientists working on the problem would likely still be working on it until Casey Anthony dies a natural death at a ripe old age.

Unfortunately for American defendants in murder trials these days, no one in the courtroom seems to understand that forensic evidence ought not to be labeled scientific and ought to be understood by everyone—especially the judge and jury—as simply one or two people’s interpretations of a phenomenon they observed.

No amount of forensic science can tell the Anthony jury whether or not the smell and stain in the trunk of Casey’s car was from human decomposition or from pork-chop juices.