[HN Gopher] Dr. Whitehurst and the FBI Lab Scandal (2017)
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Dr. Whitehurst and the FBI Lab Scandal (2017)
Author : luu
Score : 165 points
Date : 2022-03-06 06:33 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (whistleblowersblog.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (whistleblowersblog.org)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| The FBI, the guardian the we need to be guarded from.
| [deleted]
| syshum wrote:
| The main problem here is the view that the FBI is a guardian.
| What in the history of the FBI supports the position that
| agency is a guardian
| mandmandam wrote:
| If you're a wealthy white dude who makes money from the
| status quo, then, everything in their entire history.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| Can you trust a legal system which allows entrapment? I'm not
| saying any legal system is perfect, for example, can a
| defendant get a fair trial if the prison service make sure the
| prisoner is not fit to take the stand through poor diet and
| lack of sleep or simply being in a highly stressful
| environment?
|
| Likewise, when reporting stuff to the police, its advisable to
| have a lawyer with you as the Police may decide to go for the
| easy route and prosecute whoever is reporting stuff as its low
| hanging fruit.
|
| Likewise, the legal system ignores the health of the defendant
| which could explain their actions, and it often doesnt take
| into account their past. I know here in the UK, when talking to
| people, we are still seeing the knock on effects of WW2, Brexit
| is the most obvious example as there is a lot of prejudice
| towards the Germans & Austrians and a general low level
| xenophobia even towards people not from these areas, as
| highlighted by the BBC trolling the public with their comedy
| sketch show The League of Gentlemen
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p006vm6j or Little Britain
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006q2zd
|
| Is there much difference between a religious follower, like a
| muslim on jihad or a law enforcement professional? They both
| follow the written word, so then whose written is write? One
| has stood the test of time for thousands of years but ignores
| the changes in society today and the other is often changed to
| reflect changes in modern society but not stood the test of
| time as prison populations amply demonstrates.
|
| In other words who is most righteous?
| kingcharles wrote:
| It's interesting that you bring these points up. Before I
| spent time locked up I didn't realize how little sleep
| prisoners get. That definitely affects their ability to
| understand the proceedings. I did eight years with an average
| of about four hours sleep a night during that time.
|
| If you are locked in a facility awaiting trial, it is very
| unlikely you will ever see any of the evidence against. For
| instance, until very recently in Illinois it was illegal for
| your attorney to share any of the evidence with you if you
| were in jail. How can you make an informed decision about
| whether to risk trial or take a plea deal if you can't know
| what the case is? This is why so many innocent people faced
| with a death penalty following trial will accept a life
| sentence plea deal.
| jokoon wrote:
| > For some, however, it was too late. Defendants in at least 35
| of these cases received the death penalty and errors were
| identified in 33 (94 percent) of those cases. Nine of these
| defendants have already been executed and five died of other
| causes while on death row.
|
| Yay. Death penalty is a nice word for murder.
| [deleted]
| p_j_w wrote:
| I genuinely don't understand how someone can read an article
| like this one, support the death penalty, and still sleep well
| at night. We've executed so many innocent people it's
| impossible to not consider the practice monstrous.
| jokoon wrote:
| It's the whole retribution thing.
| axiolite wrote:
| > how someone can read an article like this one, support the
| death penalty
|
| I don't understand how someone can consider the death penalty
| monstrous, but forgetting someone for decades in a brutal,
| hopeless prison environment is perfectly fine.
|
| The death penalty is an interesting motivator. Death row
| inmates get much more publicity, support, and investigative
| resources than those with life sentences.
| kingcharles wrote:
| I'm totally against the death penalty, and even more so
| having spent a significant portion of my life in the criminal
| justice system. But, statistics relating to how many innocent
| people have been executed is simply not available, unless we
| extrapolate probable statistics from general exonerations.
|
| One thing that has been very helpful is the sheer amount of
| time it often takes to solidify a conviction in the justice
| system. It can take close to 20 years to finalize death
| penalty appeals, often giving enough time for science, law
| and public opinion to change sufficiently to free those who
| are innocent.
|
| (And please do not forget those who are guilty but who were
| not given their due process - they might be monsters, but if
| we allow them to be railroaded then we do a disservice to any
| of us who might find ourselves swallowed into the machine in
| the future).
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I remember the report absolutely demolishing the veracity of most
| forensic practices coming out, but has the field changed at all
| since then? Are hair samples and such still commonly used as
| evidence?
|
| My cynical side worries it's only gotten worse, as CSI made the
| job "sexy" attracting a pool of people that would not be overly
| concerned with the science part of forensics in the first place.
| axiolite wrote:
| As it happens this was the most recent topic on Skeptoid:
|
| https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4821
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Sadly it's very bad still. Judges admitting blood splatter
| "study" as hard evidence, bite marks regarded as science and
| also employing people who have zero actual expertise or
| scientific background required, as domain experts.
| tus666 wrote:
| > but has the field changed at all since then? Are hair samples
| and such still commonly used as evidence?
|
| They switched to partial-DNA "matches". Nothing has changed.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > as CSI made the job "sexy" attracting a pool
|
| Not all science is equal, and it's a doubled-edge sword. I
| think the fault is more in human nature.
|
| On one hand, we have science that lets us land probes on
| asteroids and return home with samples, or deploy a terrestrial
| vehicle on Mars capable of launching a smaller aerial probe...
| powered by radiation from a burning sphere of gas.
|
| On the other, we have forensic science. Same level of
| confidence, very different results. Who's to blame? The jurors
| ignorant of the science behind the evidence that influenced
| their decisions? The judges and lawyers equally so? The labs
| and employees perpetuating bad science, or the schools that
| taught them? The police that collect and document it?
| watwut wrote:
| > The jurors ignorant of the science behind the evidence that
| influenced their decisions?
|
| Isnt the whole point of jurors being ordinary person from the
| streets with no special knowledge making decisions purely
| going by what was said in courtroom? If you tell them "this
| guy is great expert" and then that guy dont get meaningfully
| challenged, you dont get to blame jury who went by what they
| have been said.
|
| > The judges and lawyers equally so? The labs and employees
| perpetuating bad science, or the schools that taught them?
| The police that collect and document it?
|
| Yeah, these. The judges, lawyers, prosecutors and the police
| who are the actually the ones who decide which lab is going
| to be used often and which not. Which person is going to be
| treated in courtroom as expert in front of jury, regardless
| of actual knowledge and which is not even going to be asked
| to be there.
|
| It is not that deep.
| pmichaud wrote:
| I think this is an interesting issue. We have this idea of
| "common people" being jurors, who are supposed to apply
| common sense to the facts of a case, as a sort of balance
| against corruption and weenie-headed legal technocrats, but
| the whole system is implicitly predicated on those jurors
| mostly being inside some culture window where they know
| what's happening at all.
|
| Like hypothetically if you plucked a guy from an isolated
| tribe in the amazon (who spoke perfect english), then put
| him on a jury, he would just be lost. "Well, so, we gave
| them net90 terms in the original contract, but then in the
| email dated..." -- the content is just beyond his ability
| to reason about from where he's sitting.
|
| Maybe our culture has a sufficiently large internal spread
| either between itself or between the legal system, that the
| average juror is more like the tribal guy on the jury than
| not?
|
| It's mostly not a problem because tricky contract disputes
| aren't normally jury trials, it's mostly people doing
| comprehensible things for human reasons, which is a good
| match for jurors.
|
| But then you introduce stuff like I Fucking Love Science
| propaganda plus Hair DNA Matching: SCIENCE! And how are
| people supposed to use their common sense to apply
| judgement?
|
| The original context of jurors was like "I don't know about
| no fancy laws, but wrong is wrong," like folksy, probably-
| religion-based moral intuitions that prevent legal nerds
| from running amok. But where are we now, if the nerds can
| just say the word SCIENCE and the jury has no choice but to
| sign off?
|
| I have no idea what the right answer is, but probably the
| current setup isn't it.
| bsder wrote:
| Problem 1: Jury selection in the US explicitly selects
| against jurors with enough brains to get out of it. I
| consider jury duty a civic duty, but now I will now make
| sure I properly qualify for an exception because ...
|
| Problem 2: Jury selection in the US explicitly selects
| against jurors who will exhibit independent thinking. If
| you have a job which is based on engineering, you're
| likely getting struck by the prosecution. I actually
| watched the prosecution and defense play chicken over who
| was going to strike me. I've wasted enough hours in my
| life showing up for jury duty only to get struck over and
| over and over.
|
| Problem 3: Jury selection in the US explicitly selects
| _for_ jurors who exhibit deference to authority which
| means effectively "Defendant in the seat is guilty."
| This is a problem because if the prosecution had a slam
| dunk of a case _there probably wouldn 't be a trial_. The
| correct Bayesian prior for sitting on a jury is almost
| always that the prosecution should be viewed with extreme
| skepticism.
|
| A lot of the problem in the jury system in the US could
| be solved by disallowing prosecutorial strikes. The
| prosecution has enough advantages--if you can't make the
| case with an actually random jury, tough, you didn't have
| a case and didn't do your job properly.
| tomrod wrote:
| Jury selection weeds against jury nullification,
| implicitly choosing for those who feel illegal determines
| immoral.
| alistairSH wrote:
| The judge is supposed to determine which evidence is
| allowed. The jurors only need to understand the evidence
| to the extent it proves guilt.
|
| Given new science, the prosecution and defense make their
| case and the judge allows/disallows the evidence. But,
| the judge isn't a scientist, she's a lawyer (if we're
| lucky - some parts of the US have elected judges with
| little to no professional requirements). And the
| prosecution might have more money and better experts.
| watwut wrote:
| > the whole system is implicitly predicated on those
| jurors mostly being inside some culture window where they
| know what's happening at all.
|
| I think they are explicitly assumed to be from community,
| so that they understand social aspects of issue. I
| remember layers talking about that.
|
| I am no expert on this, but jury gets very specific
| questions they are supposed to answer. There is a lot
| more to it both in theory and practical then just folksy
| wisdom against "the nerds".
|
| > But then you introduce stuff like I Fucking Love
| Science propaganda plus Hair DNA Matching: SCIENCE! And
| how are people supposed to use their common sense to
| apply judgement?
|
| They are not. This part is supposed to be on layers to
| not allow "propaganda" into the room in the first place.
| If the system regularly pushes in bad science and does
| not enable defense to conteract it, issue is not with
| jurors at all.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > The judges, lawyers, prosecutors and the police
|
| I agree wholeheartedly, but the world seems to have a
| problem holding government employees responsible for their
| actions.
|
| Ended up on Wikipedia reading about the history of jury
| trials, and found this lovely snippet: One
| issue that has been raised is the ability of a jury to
| fully understand evidence. It has been said that the
| expectation of jury members as to the explanatory power of
| scientific evidence has been raised by TV police procedural
| and legal dramas, in what is known as the 'CSI effect'.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_trial
| watwut wrote:
| Afaik, jury is answering series of specific questions in
| a process controlled by layers. So you have tidbits like
| jury not being able to take own notes, because rules says
| so. That is real world example.
|
| The quote you have there is complaint about jury
| expecting too convincing evidence. And the real world
| issue is them falling for real evidence.
|
| The issue here is with "experts" saying non scientific
| crap in courtrooms and juries being told this is science.
| Experts who have little to no scientific training, little
| to no checking done over methods they use and so on.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >Who's to blame?
|
| The FBI who falsified the accuracy of so many forensic
| sciences for a start. The prosecutorial side has a strong
| interest towards exploiting "science" for their gain, we know
| they are doing it and we need to counteract it.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > The FBI who falsified the accuracy
|
| The article didn't make it seem like there was actual
| fraud, just bad science being followed blindly. I had to
| find the original FBI announcement to understand it was
| indeed intentional fraud by individual FBI examiners
| misrepresenting bad science.
|
| https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-
| testimo...
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I think you need to check your reading comprehension or
| just re-read the article
|
| > It was "alterations of reports, alterations of evidence
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The article starts with
|
| >When Dr. Frederic Whitehurst initially blew the whistle
| on the systemic forensic fraud in the FBI crime lab...
|
| And then proceeds to discuss the fraud in no ambiguous
| terms.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think they still _can_ use hair and fiber. I think it 's less
| common due to it being less valuable to the prosecution
| (rightfully so). If I remember correctly, the big problem was
| that the experts were saying things like "This matches" or
| "It's my professional opinion that this is the defendant's
| hair", etc. Or just making blatant errors like identifying pet
| hair as human. They can really only say if the hair rules a
| person in or out of the potential suspect pool at a gross level
| (more or less on the level of hair color) - more useful for the
| defense if the comparison is inconsistent, and very little use
| to the prosecution. At least this is what I remember from the
| articles, but maybe my memory isn't accurate.
| peter_retief wrote:
| People really need the option of a second opinion. To ensure
| veracity a second sample should be sent to an independent lab and
| stored for a set period.
| zionic wrote:
| Just wait till the next shoe drops on DNA "evidence". All the
| early tests used scary-low sample counts and the odds of a false
| positive vs someone else in your geographic location were fairly
| high.
| cryptica wrote:
| Punishing whistleblowers seems to be a pattern. This might
| explains why nobody wants to speak up nowadays when they see
| people doing illegal stuff... Nobody wants to spend 20 years of
| their lives being mocked, intimidated, fired, etc... for doing
| the right thing. Now fraudsters are everywhere running the show
| and destroying society and the planet.
|
| IMO, we should introduce death penalty for people involved in
| such malicious cover ups... Especially if the evidence is strong.
| They should be hung in a public square and then all of that
| person's children and descendants should be jailed for life just
| to be on the safe side.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > They should be hung in a public square and then all of that
| person's children and descendants should be jailed for life
| just to be on the safe side.
|
| Why stop there? Jail their ascendants too! The accused bad
| education must have come from somewhere? Then just to be on the
| safe side, I'd include neighbors; the whole city block may be
| seen as too lenient so jailing the whole city would send the
| right message!
| quantified wrote:
| Thank you Dr Whitehurst. Feel like a statue should go up
| somewhere.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I think that's a great idea, actually. Somewhere in the DOJ or
| FBI?
| quantified wrote:
| Or a federal courthouse, where the right people will
| encounter it.
| motohagiography wrote:
| A similar case of a forensic lab being a perjury factory was the
| Motherisk program in Ontario, which forged drug detection in hair
| samples to remove kids from custodial care. These systems are
| rotten.
|
| In politics, you can see people who are corrupt like this getting
| rewarded with promotions for having taken one for the team. I see
| it in companies as well, where if you take on the risk from
| committing fraud, you can use it as leverage. There are numerous
| cases where I see managers telling subordinates to fudge data of
| all kinds, and the ones who don't lie get managed out, and the
| ones who do lie get promoted. The tactic is to get someone to do
| something compromising or illegal on your behalf, so you can take
| credit for the outcome, but the person bullied into lying holds
| the risk. The only people who ever get persecuted or prosecuted
| are the ones who threaten to give away the game. The dynamic is
| covered in the concept of a Moral Maze
| (https://hbr.org/1983/09/moral-mazes-bureaucracy-and-
| manageri...).
|
| You can't fix corruption and adulteration. The only way out is to
| fork a new organization and create a gate that prevents the
| corruption from taking root in the new org, and even then I've
| seen it creep back. The alternative is to make grisly examples,
| but nobody has the stomach for that.
| starwind wrote:
| I got fired from one job after my manager told me to fake
| results and I didn't. I went into a job interview a few days
| later and I summed it up as "they were asking me to do things
| with the data I wasn't comfortable with." Guy interviewing me
| was like "been there," and we moved right on from it. Got the
| job too
| throw_away wrote:
| BTW, Jackall expanded that HBR essay into an entire book.
| Highly recommended if you want to get entirely black-pilled on
| corporate work. Wikipedia says it was a favorite of Aaron
| Swartz.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > Motherisk program
|
| a quick read of four or five related Wikipedia articles shows a
| lifetime of fraud perpetrated by Motherisk founder Dr Gideon
| Koren, complete with threats of countersuit, piles of falsified
| research papers in publication, repeated denial and then being
| caught, and losing his license to practice medicine at age 70+
|
| eye-opening to see this information given the status of US AMA
| Physicians these days, in income, authority and protection from
| meaningful punishment
|
| also the psychology of using authority to remove children from
| the care of their biological mother, over and over and over..
| combined with academic hubris publishing falsified research
| over and over and over.. combined with prominent cultural
| activities.. this individual has done a lot of harm in a way
| that defeats trust and true authority
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