FBI Overstated Forensic Hair Matches In Nearly All Trials Before 2000 173
schwit1 writes The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000. Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory's microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country's largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence. The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.
I'm shocked, I tell you! (Score:3, Insightful)
Anybody else surprised by this?
Truth, justice... is simply not the American way.
Re:I'm shocked, I tell you! (Score:4, Funny)
Truth & justice & the American Way = 0.
As a limey, I always thought they were a list of options. After all, if "the American way" incorporated truth and justice, you would be able to say merely "the American way".
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it is a list of options.
Truth, --obvious
Justice -- also obvious
The american Way --Not obvious this is where money talks louder than truth or justice.
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Including the almost complete lack of minorities. And by the odds at least two of the characters were gays in the closet. Probably church goers too. Many of the men-- WW2 vets with PTSD were beating their wives and everyone was driving drunk. Any of the teens who were gay left for New York- and if their parents found out they were cutoff and tossed out. Some of the men-- probably Andy-- were getting some on the side since you couldn't divorce and when the wife stopped putting out (because the men knew
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"Truth, Justice, and the American Way" made me think of Superman's decades long heroic ideal of justice, and overwhelming power deployed in the most postive and helpful ways possible. Interestingly, Superman renounced his US citizenship because it "wasn't enough anymore".
http://www.washingtontimes.com... [washingtontimes.com]
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Re:I'm shocked, I tell you! (Score:5, Interesting)
Lord Acton hit the nail on the head. 128 years ago he wrote that, ""Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Unfortunately, no one has ever devised a way of running societies without giving power to certain individuals. With a very small number of honourable exceptions (which prove the rule), that power has corrupted them. We see it around us almost every day, and the people who rise to control entire nation states display the corruption due to power in singularly pure and concentrated form.
The technicians working in the FBI labs had a very limited form of power, but within that particular domain their sway was almost unchallenged. What expert would dispute the word of the mighty FBI, what lawyer would challenge it, what judge or jury would not be impressed by it? And the technicians' bosses had more power, which was assuredly focused on the important task of getting convictions. I rather doubt that any lab technician at the FBI ever got much career advancement out of frequently discrediting prosecution evidence. Every bureaucratic organization measures itself according to a limited set of drastically oversimplified metrics, and conviction rate is an important metric for any law-enforcement organization. The higher up the tree you go, the greater the desire for more convictions, and the less the concern for whether they are justified or not.
"One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters".
- Aldous Huxley
Forensic evidence should not be subjective (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't solve the problem. The FBI can simply fire or transfer elsewhere anyone who doesn't lean towards positive matches. It wouldn't take long for the experts to realise that saying yes a lot is good for their careers, but expressing doubt in court is going to lead to no more court appearances and a demotion to lab tech.
Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective (Score:5, Interesting)
simple solution. you mix in a control group, and you don't tell the people who determine the match which one is the 'real one'. That way, they can't have a bias, unless the people preparing the material secretly mark it or something, but nothing's perfect.
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this assumes the FBI and/or Prosecutors actually want accurate results.
they don't anymore, if they ever did.
time spent on fingerprint analysis, dna testing, whatever with the result of "this is not the person you want" = 100% waste of time for everyone involved.
If the result is "this is the person you want" = 100% useful time for everyone involved.
And if an investigation into a crime takes an extended amount of time, but it is focused on a specific individual, the pressure to ONLY find that the evidence mak
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A hair versus a fingerprint. On average a person has 100,000 hairs on the head and they loose on average 100 every single day, that is 36,500 hairs over a year (have you any idea how long those hairs can lost and how far they could travel, attached to another persons clothing), for which the US legal system in all of it's rampant stupidity now holds you legally liable. Now add to this shitty testing, so basically a scam to enable easy prosecution and early promotions.
Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective (Score:5, Insightful)
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The only acceptable solution (if you care about justice) is to stop putting so much weight on fingerprint evidence. It's basically worthless. The weight applied to DNA evidence needs to be scaled right back too.
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The only acceptable solution (if you care about justice) is to stop putting so much weight on fingerprint evidence. It's basically worthless. The weight applied to DNA evidence needs to be scaled right back too.
I'm not questioning that you're correct, but since eye witness testimony is even worse evidence than either fingerprint or DNA, what sort of evidence do you think should be accepted?
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It's not a binary accept/reject, it's the amount of weight given to evidence.
Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective (Score:5, Insightful)
Last few decades???
IN case you were unaware, the FBI handles kidnapping. Why? Because 80-odd years ago, Herbert Hoover decided the FBI needed some good publicity, and could get it with the Lindbergh kidnapping.
IOW, fiefdom building has been going on forever - all it takes is a chance to get a bigger budget if you do something special....
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Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective (Score:5, Insightful)
You might be able to solve the problem(at the expense of a great deal of additional workload) by larding the caseload with samples specifically constructed to be non-matches; but then blinded and packaged the same as any other sample, to identify people who just lean positive; but that would probably require a lot of additional work to do in enough quantity to counteract the obvious pressure.
Add in that on a random basis you don't have any legitimate suspects in the collection being analyzed. The goal isn't to find best match. The correct answer has to be none of the above on a regular basis as well.
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This is where cross examination can be your best friend.
Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective (Score:5, Insightful)
Even before that, though, we need high-quality, doubly blinded trials to establish how well any of these comparison-based forensic methods actually work. Evidently, a key problem with hair comparison was that no one actually had any idea how reliable it was for "matching" a sample to a suspect. It is now obvious that the false positive rate is completely unacceptable.
We should have known this long before anyone even thought about using hair comparison evidence at trial, and the sad thing is that the experiments needed to rigorously evaluate this technique aren't even very complicated. For prosecutors, though, it is undoubtedly a lot more fun to impress juries with your scientific-sounding evidence and experts than it is to ask whether the evidence is actually reliable, and you can bet that the hair comparison "experts" were not in any hurry to show that their work was a sham.
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Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that that's actually how it works here in Sweden.
I seem to remember that it's also not always good. Since they only answer questions, more open ended searches are seldom performed.
In one case where an elk killed a woman (unique case, apparently) the police got hung up on her husbands lawn mower (!) which happened to have traces
of blood on the blades (which in fact could have been rust combined with other biological material ) and spent a year or so trying to convict him for murder,
until someone actually saw a YouTube clip of an elk-attack and asked the lab if it could have in fact been an elk. Answer: Yes. Most likely.
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I don't know the case -- was it an American elk or a moose? Cuz both are dangerous under the wrong circumstances, but moose far more so.
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I'm assuming European elk (American moose) - OP called it an elk, and referred to "here in Sweden"...
And yes, a moose (European elk) is much more dangerous than a wapiti (American elk)
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Ah, I missed the Sweden reference, thanks. Too much stuff to read this morning and I'm skimming at best.
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Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective (Score:5, Interesting)
It's happened with arson experts too. I remember reading a horrible story of a guy convicted of burning his family to death because all the experts described these "pour patterns" in the burnt floor, signifying liquid accelerant. After he was put to death, they figured out it was just carpet glue patterns.
Between the way police feel free to shoot fleeing non-dangerous subjects these days, planting evidence in full view of other officers, lying on the stand to get convictions, and the labs and experts from every field falsifying results, I'd say our legal system is a disaster.
How many other flaws (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm becoming more convinced that Police are often too lazy to do police work and now reviews of the cases shows evidence procedures stacked in favour of the prosecution. If the Court systems do not have mechanisms to self correct evidence procedures how can there be any trust that policing will lead to outcomes that protect society.
Justice is impossible if the system is not Just.
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Re:How many other flaws (Score:4, Insightful)
They didn't want to think about the balance of probabilities of all the pieces of circumstantial evidence and decide if someone was guilty or not. They wanted cold hard forensic evidence to do that for them.
Isn't that how it's supposed to work? The defendant is supposed to be given the benefit of every doubt. That's part of being presumed innocent until proven guilty. If you've ever been accused of doing something you didn't do, you'll likely appreciate the value of this system.
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Isn't that how it's supposed to work? The defendant is supposed to be given the benefit of every doubt.
No. The standard is reasonable doubt, not every doubt.
--
JimFive
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Re:How many other flaws (Score:5, Informative)
Some facts about the U.S. justice system:
* The Reid technique [wikipedia.org] is widely used for interrogations, a technique notorious for its effectiveness in enticing false confessions.
* Only 5 % of convicted felons had their case tried in court; the rest make a plea bargain [pbs.org] (typically under threats of excessively long prison sentences and/or the death penalty).
* Judges are elected [vox.com], subjecting them to the whims of public opinion and making them more politicians than impartial legal officials.
* At least 4 % of people sentenced to death in the U.S. are innocent [forbes.com].
* The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, [wikipedia.org] not just relative to the population size, but in absolute numbers.
* U.S. private prisons sees $3+ billion in annual revenue [online-par...degree.org]... Not that that has anything to do with the above issues, I'm sure [wikipedia.org].
The U.S. justice system is broken in so many ways, I'm certainly forgetting some things.
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-Convince my future children to study abroad in Scandinavia (or some other legitimately 1st world country) and ultimately move there
-When they do, I'll follow
-Give up on the United States as it's a poor excuse for a 1st world country (especially when we trail in virtually every measure)
Consider watching the first 10 minutes of Newsroom [youtube.com] except that the anchor there has higher hopes and expectations than I do (i.e., much easier to go somewhere already fixed than liv
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Some facts about the U.S. justice system:
* Judges are elected [vox.com], subjecting them to the whims of public opinion and making them more politicians than impartial legal officials.
Actually, judges in the U.S. justice system are appointed for life. State and municipal systems differ (some are elected, some are hired under civil service rules), but judges in the federal government are, in fact, appointed.
Mind you, that doesn't make any of the rest of your points invalid, I just wanted to correct the record.
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Not all federal judges are appointed for life. Some are, most aren't.
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Article III, Section I of the US Constitution:
"During good Behavior" basically means until impeached. Which judges are not appointed for life, and how does that get by the Supreme Court?
Re: How many other flaws (Score:2)
All Supreme Court judges fall under article iii, as do some district court judges, and I believe court of appeals judges. Lesser district court judges(magistrate judges), U.S. Tax court judges, and a few others are not.
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What if justice and truth don't actually benefit society?
What if there were no hypothetical questions?
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What if justice and truth don't actually benefit society?
That's an interesting question. I think that depends of if you believe it's is supposed to. Law replaced belief systems as ways to maintain reasonable behaviour to build society, like 'I won't kill and eat my neighbour if I am starving' all the way through to 'if you make a contract with someone, it's binding'.
Personally I think it does when it is given the resources to function properly which means it should be malleable enough to adapt and improve to the needs of changing human civilization. I think that
Minimum retrial (Score:2, Insightful)
And in addition a prosecution for false witness should be started against lab people, and prosecutor penalized heavily for having used flawed evidence. otherwise there is no way prosecution and involved people will learn. In fact that would tea
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So wheres that stand relative to plea bargaining?
If only 5% of felons have even been convicted in court. Then the majority have no case to retry after all they pleaded guilty.
Re:Minimum retrial (Score:5, Informative)
The article is very misleading on several points. It gives the impression that there was a problem "in almost all trials"; that's not what happened.
Of the ~21000 requests for an analysis, the lab reported a match about ~2500 times. Of those, the evidence was used in something like 268 trials, and a retrospective analysis of the DNA revealed that the hair did indeed match almost 90% of the time.
The bigger problem (which is where the "almost all") part came from is that when the evidence was actually presented at a trial, the expert witness overstated the reliability of the hair match; if they had stated that the analysis was only 90% accurate there wouldn't have been a problem.
A retrial in the 27 or 28 cases in which DNA revealed a mismatch is certainly in order. Otherwise there is no problem with the conviction; a retrial would simply replace the hair match with a DNA match anyway.
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I don't see the 90% match through DNA testing in the article. Case to explain where it came from?
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Re-reading the article, I think that I know where you got the 90% number from, but I think that you are wrong.
Firstly, as you note in another post, it's 89%, not 90% (bias showing here?)
However, more importantly, it's 89% of all the "positive" results, not 89% of those used at trial. In the 11% where there was a false match, the likelyhood of actual guilt is lower, so the amount of other evidence would be much lower, thus it is very reasonable to assume that the 11% of false matches are over-represented in
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t's 89%, not 90% (bias showing here?
I said "almost 90%", I believe 89% fits that description. But if you prefer yes - 89% of the time the hair match was supported by a DNA match.
it is very reasonable to assume that the 11% of false matches are over-represented in the 268 cases
Pure speculation on your part, there's nothing to support that assumption.
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And your claim that the 11% false positives (of all analysis) applies to the subset cases where hair analysis evidence was used at trial? Where's your evidence to support that claim? It's no more than speculation.
You have no more evidence than I do, but at least I have a rational explanation why it's likely to be greater than 11%.
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When hair "evidence" was used in a little over 10% of the times that it was available, it's reasonable to think that a lot of selection is going on.. It's reasonable to assume that those cases where the hair evidence was used were not typical. It's very reasonable to assume that the reason the hair evidence was used was lack of alternative evidence. It's not reasonable to make the assumption that the perce
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It's not reasonable to make the assumption that the percentages would be similar when the number of cases when hair evidence was used in court is such a small proportion of the overall percentage.
You are mixing two unrelated things:
1) A lack of other compelling evidence might increase the likelihood of using hair evidence. Yes, that's reasonable. There is nothing to support the assumption, but it's reasonable.
2) An assumption that the false positive rate on those cases is different than the false positive rate overall. No, there is no reason to assume the false positive rate is different in those cases.
I understand what you are trying to connect - a hair match might be used when other evidence is we
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Exactly. We don't know the false positive rate in the cases where the evidence was used. You can't claim that my speculation is not valid, yet yours is valid.
This isn't a case of a random subset of a larger population. In every case, there was a decision made whether or not to use the hair evidence. That decision was based on the evidence available. Thus, you can't assume that you have a random subset of the larger population. Th
Easy to fix (Score:4, Interesting)
Fixing this is simple. Just make misprosecution punishable on parity with the charges being prosecuted.
Willfully hide exculpatory evidence in a capital murder trial? Death penalty.
Lie about evidence in a life imprisonment case? Life in prison.
Etc.
For that matter, this works on false rape charges too, but there you need more filtering. Honest false charges (disagreements, mistakes, etc) should be safe, so much so that no victim should even remotely fear coming forward. And amusingly, the prosecutor thing would guard against abuse of that too...
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In their capacity as (ostensibly) trustworthy, neutral, expert testimony, they both victimize the defendant and betray the public's trust in the criminal justice system and the duties of their office.
Punishment-on-parity seems like the absolute bare minimum, with no acknowledgement of the aggravating circumstances of abuse of authority, the corrosive effects on rule of law and public trust in the existence of rule of law, and so on. I am sympathetic to arguments that mounting their heads
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"Why on parity?"
Yeah, I'd say execute him twice. :-)
Not easy to fix and we need fewer killings (Score:2)
I disagree; knowing that bad evidence was presented (particularly in life imprisonment and death penalty cases where there is no chance to make amends with those falsely convicted) shows more evidence of why the death penalty was never a good idea. Therefore we don't need more death penalty conclusions such as "Willfully hide exculpatory evidence in a capital murder trial? Death penalty.".
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First, this doesn't appear to be perjury (which is a felony).
Second, some penal codes (e.g. California) do consider perjury at a capital trial to be a capital offense.
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If what you say were remotely possible, many of these problems would not exist.
'Fixing this is simple" almost always translates to "Here's my oversimplified misunderstanding"
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That's a...polite...way to put it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perjury is more deliberate (Score:3)
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It's not perjury if you really believe it to be true. Merely being wrong is not enough. Being shown to be wrong may discredit a witness, but it does not in and of itself demonstrate perjury. Perjury requires intent.
If you were told that a match to a certain level of confidence is sufficient to make a case, and you testify that your samples matched to that level (because it turns out that's a very low bar), how is that perjury? Even if your initial assumption is wrong, you are reporting what you believe to b
Re:That's a...polite...way to put it. (Score:4, Insightful)
The perjury, if there is any, is in the expert witnesses claims about the strength of the evidence.
From TFA:
"misleading" == perjury.
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Again, misleading does not necessarily mean they knew it to be untrue. They could have bought into the propaganda themselves.
Agent Smith sets up misleading guidelines setting a particularly low bar for matches on fingerprints, knowing what he's doing could net the wrong people. Agent Jones follows those guidelines and testifies on the assumption that they are sound. Both the court and Agent Jones have been misled, and Jones is not guilty of perjury. Smith did not testify, thus is not guilty of perjury eithe
The wider social context - people distrust science (Score:2)
Re:The wider social context - people distrust scie (Score:4, Informative)
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Forensic analysis methods are not scientifically validated in general. AFAIK any forensic evidence is admissible if the the judge decides so. The general standard is that is sounds plausible.
No. The general standard is the Daubert standard (so named because it arose in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 509 U.S. 579 (1993). The standard is:
Judge is gatekeeper: Under Rule 702, the task of "gatekeeping", or assuring that scientific expert testimony truly proceeds from "scientific knowledge", rests on the trial judge.
Relevance and reliability: This requires the trial judge to ensure that the expert's testimony is "relevant to the tas
Re: Distrust of scientists and not science... (Score:2)
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But when does it become 'accepted science'? (Score:3)
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... climate change denialists are hugely overrepresented on Slashdot.
Apparently we've reached a consensus among this scientifically literate community that AGW isn't proven, then? ;)
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My theory is that climate scientists are generally honest and scientific, to the extent that people who deny global warming is occurring have to slander scientists in order to provide any credibility. Then, having accused honest men and women of being liars and cheats, and paid other people to say the same thing, they announce that many people say that the scientists are corrup
Naturally (Score:2)
Since "scientific evidence" is very persuasive to jurors, they'll be granting new trials to the ones they haven't killed yet.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAI crack me up!
14 already executed.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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In a way, yes. The practical argument against capital punishment (as opposed to the ethical argument) is that the standard of evidence suitable for such a severe punishment results in capital punishment being more expensive than life imprisonment.
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You are assuming that they care. But what they're probably regretting is that they haven't killed all to ones convicted on fraudulent evidence.
O, wait, you said "people". You didn't mean officials.
N.B.: The laws are made and enforced by organizations composed of people who hold power. They *like* holding power. And they are quite willing to kill innocent people to keep it. Some of them would cavail at mass murder.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm not against the death penalty; I'm against making irreparable mistakes.
There's a way to prevent gung-ho justice: if judgment is later found to be in error, visit the same penalty on those who condemned. Tho I vaguely recall this principle comes from Sharia law, and if so it doesn't seem to limit behavior much in Real Life.
American "Justice" (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is not a mistake.
This is presuming that the arresting officers or investigators must have done their job right, so we should support their side of the story.
The same, effectively, as telling a jury that the defendant must be guilty because why would an innocent man be arrested and in court?
It's not justice, but so far beyond just covering up mistakes.
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Breath Easy! (Score:2)
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"Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime."
- Lavrentiy Beria, head of Joseph Stalin's secret police
Less accurate than other evidence? (Score:2)
In 2002, the FBI reported that its own DNA testing found that examiners reported false hair matches more than 11 percent of the time.
As I read the article, the examiners were right 89% of the time and reported a match when there wasn't one 11% of the time. While that is certainly a problem, it's probably at least as accurate as all the other evidence presented at a trial. The best evidence is usually DNA, but people often don't even believe that (e.g. O.J.)
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That was a supplemental fact from 2002 in a story about stuff encompassing decades. You are missing a lot of information. Did you stop reading at that point?
Nothing surprising here... (Score:2)
Experts inherently favor the interests of those who pay them. The FBI doesn't get paid to find people innocent. In a world where the FBI can choose to hire this expert or that expert, it will rehire the ones most likely to make a finding helpful to a finding of guilty.
Courts are masters of deciding truth between opposing parties. Where one side possesses more resources than the other (the U.S. Attorney General's Office vs. the local public defender) the criminal court is crippled to find the truth of guilt
One in two-billion chance of a false positive (Score:2)
Means that there are two people in the world who match the DNA evidence. If the DNA evidence is the only evidence, then the chances that you've got the right person is 50/50.
DNA evidence alone should never convict, only exonerate.
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Oh, if you are a criminal defense lawyer, this is a gift from Heaven. I see a flood of requests for appeals and retrials on the horizon.
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Well, in a just world, the people who falsified their testimonies which led to a potentially innocent person to be executed would be put on trial for murder 1. I bet that doesn't happen.
Re:shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Get compensation for their family for wrongful execution.
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This does not prevent/deter the problem. The "government" pays the penalties - read tax payers, not the people who committed the perjury (police, prosecutors, judges, expert witnesses, etc.).
Unless there is a real and expected negative consequence to the direct actors, there is no incentive to stop.
(But if I were one of the victims' families, I'd sure want a few million dollars for the government's screw up.)
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If the client is dead, and you're only appealing the criminal portion, exactly what do you intend to do?
Doesn't it usually happen that after an innocent person is released from custody the state gives them a big fat check and a "We're sorry. Don't sue us." agreement? The person's heirs could still get the check if its proved that good old Dad really didn't commit that crime.
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Corporations are no different from governments,except they are not even remotely tied to the wishes of the country as a whole.
Sure, the US government is indistinguishable from any other corporation with a monopoly of force over 350 million people. But let's consider your statement in detail.
First, the usual use of the term, corporation is with respect to a legal creation of a limited liability organization. The vast majority of those have no relevance. They were created as a legal means for a single person to organize their business efforts or a shell company that enables some business or tax avoidance task. Another significant
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Of all the governments in the world, the US government is the one that is farthest away and least capable of having a monopoly on force.
I don't consider the Second Amendment to be even remotely as powerful in this regard. Where's the US citizen's right to own and operate a nuclear weapon, for example? That's a important example of the monopoly right there. And it is illegal for a US citizen to wage war on another country without express legislative approval from US Congress.
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The original statement was monopoly on "force", not monopoly on a specific type of weapon.
You are wasting my time.
The history of asymmetric warfare has shown us that one does not need the biggest and fanciest weapons to contest the government's ability to establish a monopoly on force.
And the history of asymmetric warfare shows that the weaker side usually loses.