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The Courts Science

'The Law Must Respond When Science Changes' (scientificamerican.com) 168

The clash between law's need for finality and science's evolving nature is creating serious justice problems, an opinion piece on Scientific American argued on Monday. Two recent cases highlight this: Robert Roberson faces execution based on now-discredited shaken baby syndrome science, while the Menendez brothers' life sentences are being questioned due to improved understanding of childhood trauma's effects on violence.

Scientific understanding in criminal justice has repeatedly proven wrong. Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004 based on invalidated arson science. The FBI found errors in 90% of their reviewed hair analysis cases. Courts still accept bite mark evidence despite experts failing to distinguish human from animal bites. The legal system fails in two critical ways, the story argues: Judges don't properly screen out bad science despite their "gatekeeper" role established in Daubert v. Merrell Dow, and courts resist reopening cases when scientific understanding changes.

While some states like Texas and California have laws allowing appeals based on updated science, implementation remains weak. Roberson has spent 20 years on death row and the Menendez brothers 28 years in prison while courts drag their feet on reviewing their cases with current scientific knowledge. The piece argues that constitutional due process requires allowing convicts to challenge their cases when the science underlying their convictions proves faulty. The system can reform by enforcing stricter scientific evidence standards and creating clear paths to challenge convictions based on outdated science.

'The Law Must Respond When Science Changes'

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  • by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @11:17AM (#64918521) Journal

    Judges and courts are only interested in finality, not justice or facts.

    Meanwhile, too many prosecutors are only interested in "winning", despite the facts.

    The police are not on your side: they are only on their own side -- this may result in the police helping you, but that only happens when they think it will ultimately benefit them.

    Listen to a few episodes of the "Wrongful Conviction" podcast and you will develop a deep cynicism about justice in the USA.
    https://lavaforgood.com/with-j... [lavaforgood.com]

    There are many cases where prosecutors framed innocent people, yet suffered no consequences for this.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @11:23AM (#64918543) Homepage Journal

      The judiciary in most countries is reluctant to accept that mistakes have been made, even when they are fairly clear. It can help if someone else is on the hook for it, like cops lying or coercing a confession, but often it's just some witness who can reasonably claim to have given his expert opinion based on the known science of the day. Some of it is even subjective, like fingerprint matches often are.

      Another issue is the assumption that juries don't make mistakes, when they very clearly do. Absent some procedural or legal flaw in the trial, the jury being bamboozled or mislead is un-appealable. Someone I know was on a jury where they decided the guy was guilty pretty much so they could go home, not because the case against him was compelling. There are systems that can help avoid that kind of thing, while still preserving the right to be judged by your peers.

      • by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @11:26AM (#64918553) Journal

        In civilized countries, unlike the USA, the police are not allowed to lie to people under interrogation. These lies lead to false confessions.

        • But you never have to submit to any police interrogations, ever, unlike certain other "civilized" countries.
          • ever

            You actually do. For the extent of time they are allowed to detain you prior to filing charges or releasing you. But all you have to respond with is "Attorney, please."

        • Those people are fucking dumb. The -only- thing you say to cops, especially if you're not guilty of anything, is "I will only talk to my attorney ".

          • Those people are fucking dumb. The -only- thing you say to cops, especially if you're not guilty of anything, is "I will only talk to my attorney ".

            So what you are saying is that the law should only protect smart, well-educated people?

            These lies are often used against naive teenagers. Do they not deserve protection? Do they not deserve fair treatment in the "justice" system? Did you see the interrogation of Brendan Dassey? He had a lawyer, who was useless.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          It's the same in the UK, the police can lie in interviews, or apply unreasonable pressure to confess. For the most part they can lie in court as well, and it rarely becomes an issue for them.

        • by JBMcB ( 73720 )

          And in the US you don't have to say a thing to the police beyond you are staying silent.

          The problem in the US isn't that police can lie to you, it's that people sleep through their civics classes and don't understand how rights work.

          Go watch some court cams or police bodycam videos on Youtube. I'd estimate 60% of them feature dialog approximating:

          "I don't have to talk to you! I don't have to talk to the police! I wasn't doing anything! I was just driving my friend..."

          And then goes on to incriminate themselv

          • Re:5th (Score:4, Insightful)

            by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @12:40PM (#64918869) Journal

            The problem in the US isn't that police can lie to you, it's that people sleep through their civics classes and don't understand how rights work.

            Civics classes don't teach you how to deal with the psychological torture techniques that the police use.

            I have not done any of those classes, but I doubt that they teach you that you should assume the police want to frame you.

            Your post is classic victim blaming.

            • You say "I'm remaining silent" and you stay silent and they stop questioning you, because anything after that gets thrown out of court per multiple supreme court and circuit court decisions.

              As I've said, 60% of the time the suspect confesses on the spot. Maybe 1-2% of the time they say they are staying silent, and the cops stop talking to them, more or less, immediately.

              They covered this stuff in my civics class 30 years ago. Not the newer nuances, but that, in general, you don't have to talk to the police.

              • You say "I'm remaining silent" and you stay silent and they stop questioning you,

                Not sufficient. Firstly, you have to explicitly invoke your 5th amendment right. Merely saying that you are going to be silent won't cut it.

                Secondly, just because you invoke your constitutional right to be silent doesn't mean they have to stop questioning you. You have to explicitly invoke your right and actually shut up.

                I hope you are never hauled in for questioning by police, because it's not going to go well for you.

                Finally, most important: you demand a lawyer.

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            Civics class doesn't include teaching resistance to interrogation using techniques that would be called a war crime if done by enemy soldiers.

        • In civilized countries, unlike the USA, the police are not allowed to lie to people under interrogation. These lies lead to false confessions.

          Yeah - civilized, amirite? We so soon forget that in Europe they didn't deal often with interrogation. Pop e'm in one of those special camps, and if they aren't fit to perform slave labor, gas 'em, and toast 'em, government approved.

          Europe's most recent genocide was in the mid 90's.

          Does Europe suppress their history? I mean they clam we are neanderthals while trying to kill everyone they didn't like like joos, slavics, people of African origin, gays. And the people behind the fun and games could not

    • by bsolar ( 1176767 )

      Judges and courts are only interested in finality, not justice or facts.

      They are interested in following procedure. By following procedure the assumption is that it leads to establishing the "truth". The system assumes that said "truth" is correct and unquestionable as long as procedure has been followed and has very few avenues to challenge an outcome after it has been established.

      The assumption that following the procedure leads to the correct outcome is crucial in the legal system since without that assumption it would not be justifiable for the legal system to deprive a per

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        They should be forced to debug a computer program that "worked in the simulations" when it meets the real world or even just a real user.

    • The solution is simple and easy. Severely punish any and all of the rooked judges, DAs, and police who conspire or act to sentence, prosecute, arrest, detain or otherwise harass and railroad anyone through the justice system who is not, in fact, guilty. Remove the judge and demote him to regular lawyer for dereliction of duty. Prosecute and imprison the DA, cops, and witnesses for perjury. Include assault and kidnapping sentences for the police. Break qualified immunity, seize the assets, and garnish a

    • Wins and losses is right. Most prosecutors, even after retirement, will argue loudly if any of their old cases are overturned based on science, technicalities, or even deliberate prosecutorial misconduct. They want the WIN, because that gets them the votes, and sadly these prosecutors very often are elected or have elected bosses. Justice takes a back seat to the appearance of swift and effective justice.

      I soured on all this way back when there were several high profile douche bags of the highest order go

    • Humans don't deal well with ambiguity. We can't remove ambiguity systematically, and I think it's broken to expect people to. Best I've got is to recognize when motivations will cause problems, and to block or identify them.

      If judges 'productivity' is estimated by 'cases closed'... is it any surprise they'd care most about decisions on cases? What you measure you tend to optimize.

      How well do we measure social bonds, happiness, or contentment?

      What about prosecutor cases won/lost? Should there be any mot

  • by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @11:17AM (#64918523)
    The problem is that much of this never was science -- no blind studies, no repeatable research. A high school graduate that spends a decade as a fireman and then attends a one-week course can still become an arson investigator and be allowed to testify at a trial as an expert. This "expert testimony" can result in a person being convicted of murder. We should not consider this person to suddenly be a "scientist" and they should never have been allowed to express their opinions as expert testimony.
  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @11:28AM (#64918561)
    How there are All these men in positions of power that really really just want to kill people and don't care how they do it and we are all just kind of okay with that.

    The problem here isn't changing law with changing science The problem here is these prosecutors and the governor just really want to murder this guy for the sake of murdering him. I don't know if it's because it plays well with the tough on crime crowd or if they just have some kind of sick kink but the evidence in this guy's case is so overwhelming.

    It's probably also that they're afraid of lawsuits. If you really get going on exonerating innocent people you're probably going to find thousands or even tens of thousands of them. And in addition to that not being a good look it would cost tens of millions of dollars in lawsuits. If I remember correctly Arizona had a county that famously paid out over $100 million dollars because of some dumb sheriff who insisted on ignoring the civil rights act. I think the voters got tired of him when they finally noticed how big the bill had gotten for his bullshit.

    A lot of Voters don't seem to particularly care about justice but when you drop 100 million dollar bill in their laps they sit up and take notice

    It's one of those things I wonder if you actually quantified the cost of over policing and of maintaining our militarized police what that would do. If you look at the actual budgets of police departments in general they're about half the budget of the entire city they're in. Not how much the city spends mind you because so much of the money for cops comes from state and federal grants but the raw dollars spent on cops. You'd have a hell of a lot less crime if you took that money and spent it on parks and affordable housing but that doesn't play as well in campaign ads. Kind of like how glossy computer monitors sell better but a matt finish on a display is infinitely more usable
    • This is an idea that is widely asserted by many, but the evidence just isn't there. Crime levels 100 years ago in settled communities were far lower, and poverty was far worse, than it is today. Crime rates, on the whole, have been rising consistently since then, with unexplained drops in recent years. Despite this the idea of better material provision for the poor as THE SOLUTION persists, as you demonstrate.

      What we need is stable families and communities where people have hope for the future as well as st

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        The issue is relative poverty. If nobody has a lot of money, prices stay low. If some have plenty, prices go higher and societal expectations go up as well, leaving those without in the dust. If 90% of the population has no car, there is little call to "just get a car". Nobody expects anyone to commute 10 miles to work. If 90% have a car, the few left find that a 10 mile commute to work is "the norm" and are told to "just get a car" if they can't find employment a mile or 2 away.

        That's not to say there is n

  • From what I remember in the Cameron Todd Willingham case, experts testified that the arson science used to convict him was outdated even at the time of his conviction and not decades later when arson science had evolved. The case is a better example of political meddling. Governor Rick Perry used his power to ensure the conviction stood by replacing members of Texas Forensic Science Commission days before it was scheduled to meet about the Willingham case. The commission subsequently cancelled all meetings
    • From what I remember in the Cameron Todd Willingham case, experts testified that the arson science used to convict him was outdated even at the time of his conviction

      I think it wasn't so much that the "science" was outdated, but that there was no science in arson investigation. The old wives tales about fires and their origins that arson investigators passed down to new trainees had never been tested. Also, some of these old wives tails included concepts about fires that were known at the time to be false.

  • by 2TecTom ( 311314 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @11:32AM (#64918581) Homepage Journal

    and it is classist and corrupt to boot, indeed, justice for sale is no justice at all. When our jails are full of poor people and rich people are above our laws, there is no hope for any justice at all. This is a pay to play economy, where the rich rule the roost, welcome to our plutocracy.

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      our jails are full of poor people and rich people are above our laws,

      When you're a rich star, you can grab the justice system by the

      What really chaps my hide is that the rich get golden parachutes for fucking up. Defenders of plutocracy like to talk about the motivational power of money to produce efficiency & invention, but if you get a golden gift basket when you cheat, the "motivation" is clearly F'd up.

      • by 2TecTom ( 311314 )

        I 100% agree. The problem is the very mechanisms we depend upon for social justice and societal equilibrium have been corrupted and perverted.

        I see this as a sign that our society is in decline.

  • Lawyers argue that a product is either safe or unsafe, an absolute binary choice
    Reality is never simple and binary

  • The duality here isn't a duality, it is a misnomer of purpose.

    There ought to be NO law that depends on science. For a law that is based on science is destined to be changed when science ("settled science") changes.

    Laws ought to be written for purpose, and when those purposes fail, or the law itself fails, the laws are automatically nullified. How many stupid laws are still on the books, because they were short sighted and limited?

    I cringe every time someone says "There ought to be a law", because someone do

    • by Sique ( 173459 )

      There ought to be NO law that depends on science. For a law that is based on science is destined to be changed when science ("settled science") changes.

      But that's always the case. Any law against spells wishing for a lightning to strike a building are baseless the moment you know that lightning can not be forced by spells, and that a lightning rod will divert any lightning strikes to the ground without causing harm.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by davidwr ( 791652 )

      There ought to be NO law that depends on science.

      Please finesse this statement. As written, it's way too easy to find examples where the law's dependence on science is the obvious correct thing to do:

      If the law couldn't rely on science, you couldn't have laws that regulate speeding cars (radar guns and calibrated-speedometers in police vehicles are only as good as our understanding of the laws of physics), murder (even when "obvious," the official cause of death is declared by a coroner, using science), and much more.

      • We can and do have laws on murder that do NOT depend on science, but we use Science to convict or acquit, but that isn't encoded into the law itself.

        The law, not the courts, ought to be science agnostic. The courts ought to use rules of evidence, which is a foundation of science itself

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      That still leaves mis-application of science in the courts. X is illegal for good and proper ethical (not scientific) reasons. But we convict someone of X because "scientific evidence" shows that he did X. 5 years later, we realise the science behind that conclusion is dead wrong and so we no longer have any reason to believe the (now convicted) defendant did X at all. But there he sits in prison. And prosecutors will fight tooth and nail to keep him there. Even if the new science actually insists that he d

  • I will also point out that Trauma is subjective and so must be separated from law. Just because you had trauma in your life is no excuse for your own actions in any definitive way. Some trauma is very real and deep, like obtained by many of our Veterans in War. Some trauma is deserved: such as getting arrested for your own selfish actions. Some amount of trauma is normal growing up from accidents and poor choices. But a great amount of trauma is completely bogus self created snowflake mental stuff. Case
  • Expert shopping is where one side or the other cherry-picks experts to fit their target result. The other side may not have the money or time to find a counter expert.

    I'm not entirely sure how to prevent it, though. Perhaps require a review by at least 3 random experts rather than a hand-selected expert. Let the court manage the selection via a group independent of the judge on the case.

  • Literally millions of people have faced terrible childhoods, war, watching their families murdered, raped, had it happen to them etc. and they don't turn out to be piece of shit murdering criminals. Using the childhood trauma excuse is bullshit.
  • by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @12:20PM (#64918799) Homepage

    According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], his conviction was based on blunt force trauma -- and in large part on multiple skull fractures. He was also accused of abusing his wife and two older daughters. That's not a "shaken baby" conviction.

    His is a terrible case to cite in support of the proposition that the law needs to change. I don't get why people keep pointing to him.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Firethorn ( 177587 )

      Other than it not being a US case, the one where a woman was convicted for murdering her babies when 3 died from SIDS, on the basis of a "researcher" who plotted the odds of 3 babies dying of it was millions to one, would be much better. The problem was that he disregarded that heredity might be a factor. They eventually figured out that a genetic combination between her and the father, a gene interaction, drastically raised the odds of SIDS.

      • Other than it not being a US case, the one where a woman was convicted for murdering her babies when 3 died from SIDS, on the basis of a "researcher" who plotted the odds of 3 babies dying of it was millions to one, would be much better. The problem was that he disregarded that heredity might be a factor. They eventually figured out that a genetic combination between her and the father, a gene interaction, drastically raised the odds of SIDS.

        As well as ignoring the possibility that there was some genetic connection between the deaths, the "expert" made another crucial mistake:

        Millions to one is not so small odds that it would never randomly happen. If you then search out those cases where it may have happened randomly, then the statistics provide no evidence that it wasn't a purely random event.

        • A good point. There's like 3.8 million births a year in the USA. If you figure that around 0.5M of them are giving birth to their 3rd child, that means you'd expect a 1 in a million even that affects mothers of 3 children to happen about every other year.
          Looking up the rates for the USA, it varies massively by state - 45 per 100k in Massachusetts, and 222 in Mississippi. It's much higher for blacks and natives.

          But let's figure on 80 per 100k. That's a 0.08% chance. The researcher just did 0.08% * 0.08%

  • by strike6 ( 823490 ) on Monday November 04, 2024 @12:30PM (#64918825)
    Magazine years ago. Now it's just a propaganda machine.
    • An illustration of the REAL problems today: big money corrupting everything and how easy it is to break democracies from functioning.

      Far easier to break things than fix them... and democracy has the most attack vectors; it's main defense is the wisdom of the crowd... which does actually exist but also studies show it falls apart quickly with a little competent propaganda.

      If real science was completely immune (and it's probably the best thing we've got) that does not matter since science alone doesn't DO an

    • Can't wait for the explanation on this one...

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Mspangler ( 770054 )

        One example was an article they ran that the James Webb telescope should be renamed because James Webb was a bad man by current Woke standards.

        I let my subscription run out right after that.

        Before that they had the great reversal. After literal decades of insisting there was no such thing as Race they did a complete flip-flop and decided race was not only real, but the most important thing of all. The races were Black, Asian, Indigenous, Latinx, and white. Notice which race does not deserve a capital letter

  • 1) Statement from American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS): [aans.org] "Shaken Baby Syndrome (also known as Shaken Impact Syndrome) is a serious form of abuse inflicted upon a child. It usually occurs when a parent or other caregiver shakes a baby out of anger or frustration, often because the baby will not stop crying."

    The AANS appears to be a legitimate association for neurological surgeons. Google this phrase to see how it is referenced by colleges and universities: american association of neurologica

  • 911 call analysis is another psudoscience that is being used to fuck over innocent citizens.
    https://www.propublica.org/art... [propublica.org]

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