How is spectroscopy presented in a court and are there any arguments against the use of this evidence?

Question

How is spectroscopy presented in a court and are there any arguments against the use of this evidence?

Answer 1

More specifics on spectroscopy?

But in general.

Issues that work for, or against any laboratory tests are:

Calibration

Standards

Quality control

Personnel qualifications

Answer 2

Well, it depends on what type of spectroscopy, and what they say they're looking at.

For example, if it's something like x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, then you have a curve, and you're sometimes just estimating which combination of chemical signature peaks are summing up to make that curve, so I could see maybe another chemist or physicist making a counter-interpretation of the data.  XPS usually needs another type of spectroscopy to support its claims.

On the other hand, if it's something more established, such as FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy), then you might have a harder time coming up with an argument against it.  You should really ask a local professor to look at the data and see what he/she thinks, as sometimes even if the data is done with a reliable device, the data can be displayed misleadingly (things like this get published too often).

Just find out what kind of spectroscopy, get the data (the raw data, as well as whatever diagrams or graphs they might have made from it), and go ask your local university's physics or chemistry department (preferably the larger the university the better, but for larger ones, they'll be more busy, so you'll have to persuade more) for a professor familiar with that type of spectroscopy, and who's good at telling bullcrap from good data.