Four in the morning. I woke early. I took the dog for a walk; it’s a good time to do so before the unbearable heat we’ve been having here in the Carolina Lowcountry, land of barrier islands and alligators. The dog saw one this morning, out of the water, up on the golf course, walking about. He barked him away.

My phone beeped. Four in the morning, and my phone beeped. It was a blog comment from Gerardo Ballabio:

“Using the legal process is indeed new to Shroud research,” he wrote. “Most people who studied the Shroud come from either a scientific or theological background, so it’s understandable they aren’t familiar with it.”

Yes, we have been squabbling in that discipline a lot lately: criteria for proof of the Shroud’s authenticity and the C-14 dating. Some here on the blog know what they are talking about. Teddi and Will, in particular. Some of us pretend we do. Some of us conflate legal-like talk with what we know. I do that; I realize that.

Gerardo continues:

“One may actually wonder whether it is appropriate to apply the legal process to studying the Shroud. Naturally, scientists assume (maybe without even thinking about that) that the scientific method is the appropriate process, and they are going to be upset when lawyers want to teach them how they should do their job. But we are seeking ‘the truth’ about the Shroud, and truth is bigger than science. So we shouldn’t dismiss contributions from other fields, as long as they can add a useful perspective. And if we want to give the Shroud a ‘fair hearing’, well, isn’t that exactly what the legal process is about?”

At four in the morning, many things make sense. And Gerardo always makes sense if though I often disagree with him. But I haven’t had coffee yet. There’s a certain silliness—yes, silliness—in applying the procedural filters of a courtroom to the 1988 radiocarbon dating conversation about the Shroud of Turin. 

I mean silliness in a nice way. This is not a trial. There is no judge. There are no rules of evidence, no motions to suppress, no cross-examinations, no jury to sequester. No one is going to be fined or imprisoned depending on how the carbon dating is interpreted.

The public—reading online articles, watching YouTube videos, and maybe catching a TV special once in a while—is not a courtroom audience. They’re a curious, skeptical, sometimes indifferent crowd. They aren’t bound by “rules of admissibility.” They are bound only by common sense, curiosity, and personal plausibility.

The data is already out there. You can’t redact it. You can’t un-publish the radiocarbon test results, or the critiques by Joe Marino, or the statistical analysis by Tristan Casabianca, or the commentary of Hugh Farey. The idea that a “pre-trial judge” would or should have excluded the carbon data because of alleged protocol breaches is pure fiction. That’s not how history works. That’s not how science works. That’s certainly not how public discourse works.

We are not in a court of law—we are in a court of public opinion, where ideas compete based on reason, rhetoric, and relevance, not on procedural rules borrowed from criminal justice. The C-14 evidence is not “inadmissible.” It’s contestable. That’s a critical difference. You argue against it on the merits—by offering better evidence, better analysis, or better logic—not by saying, in effect, “Your Honor, I move to strike.”

Pretending that some hypothetical judge already ruled against the carbon date does not make it so. And frankly, trying to suppress evidence by invoking courtroom metaphors only draws attention to the weakness of the counterarguments. If the carbon dating is flawed—and perhaps it is—then demonstrate that flaw. Show us. Argue it. Don’t ask us to pretend it doesn’t exist because “the protocols were broken.”

Protocols get broken in all kinds of science. Samples get mishandled. Labs make mistakes. Peer reviewers miss things. That doesn’t make the findings null and void. It makes them questionable. And so we question them—publicly, openly, and yes, sometimes imperfectly.

That’s the reality of contested data in science and history. If you want to persuade people, argue the evidence. But please, let’s not turn this into a mock trial where judges, rules, and verdicts are imaginary, and the only real losers are truth and open inquiry.