[HN Gopher] FBI testimony on hair analysis contained errors in 9...
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FBI testimony on hair analysis contained errors in 90% of cases
(2015)
Author : mantiq
Score : 211 points
Date : 2022-10-29 17:25 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fbi.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fbi.gov)
| shantaram_7 wrote:
| Any good books to read detailing sciences and implementation of
| forensics?
| miked85 wrote:
| Depending on the case, it is 100% accurate for the FBI however.
| antiterra wrote:
| Please add (2015) to title?
| mantiq wrote:
| I had reached maximum characters, which is also why a space is
| missing
| myroon5 wrote:
| s/FBI testimony on hair analysis/FBI hair analysis testimony
| IncRnd wrote:
| Testimony on Hair Analysis is not the same as Hair
| Analysis.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The real question is, did they use hair data to prosecute
| anyone after 2015?
| [deleted]
| woodruffw wrote:
| Ridiculous. So much of law enforcement and forensic "science" is
| just pretext or pseudoscientific supportive structure for good
| old gut feelings.
| smegsicle wrote:
| sideways application of goodhart's law- anything that can be
| relied upon can also be over-relied upon, which is generally
| going to be far easier than the subtle version
|
| or- unless there's an opposing force, bad forensic science will
| drive out the good
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Or prejudices.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Is there a difference? I am also guilty of this and suspect
| most of us are
|
| Tinfoil on: maybe that's why they were pushing this CSI
| bullcrap for as long as they did.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Yes, there's a difference.
|
| One is mostly about getting a conviction - of anyone - so
| that you look like you're doing a good job. This is a real
| and strong pressure faced by politicians and law
| enforcement.
| kibwen wrote:
| "Prejudice" is an apt word here, since it literally means
| "judgment in advance".
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| It's generous to assume that they believed the accused to be
| guilty. Many were frame jobs.
| themitigating wrote:
| What percentage?
| woodruffw wrote:
| You're absolutely right.
| hedora wrote:
| So, if this is used in a trial where I am on the jury, I'll
| assume it implies a 90% chance the evidence says the defendant is
| innocent, plus a 5 to 9.9% chance of a false positive with the
| underlying test.
|
| Got it. Moving on.
|
| Edit: I was being snarky but, on reflection, if they are falling
| back on hair analysis, it implies they have a piece of the guilty
| party's hair and the defendant's hair, but are not willing to
| present the results of a $1000 genotyping test.
|
| A 99% probability of innocence is probably about right in that
| part of the criminal prosecution decision tree.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > I'll assume it implies a 90% chance the evidence says the
| defendant is innocent
|
| Evidence isn't there to _prove_ anything, else we wouldn't need
| to ask anyone to be a juror. That's why we use "preponderance
| of evidence" and "beyond reasonable doubt" as our metric.
|
| It also assumes that all juries, once they see bite mark
| analysis, presume it's magic then simply decide they're going
| to convict at that moment and shut off their brains for the
| rest of the trial. Do people really believe this is something
| that happens?
|
| > A 99% probability of innocence is probably about right in
| that part of the criminal prosecution decision tree.
|
| I find it very difficult to believe there's a single piece of
| evidence in a trial that could convince anyone of this. The
| totality of the evidence is what must be considered.
|
| A single test tells you about a single sample in isolation with
| respect to it's time and method of collection. It doesn't
| definitely prove anything about an event, and I'm astonished
| that you could see it that way; unless you're operating under
| the presumption that all District Attorneys are corrupt to the
| point of no longer caring about justice and truth.
|
| There are certainly examples of corruption, but to presume it's
| the norm to the extent that a single piece of evidence
| presented in a particular fashion would cause you to turn
| _your_ back on justice and truth as a matter of rote course.
|
| How is that an improvement?
| puffoflogic wrote:
| > Do people really believe this is something that happens?
|
| What do you think the point of making all those TV
| procedurals was? Jurors have been explicitly trained to care
| about "scientific evidence" to the exclusion of all else.
| Look at the Chauvin trial. Dude committed murder captured by
| a half dozen cameras, but the trial spent about 80% of time
| agonizing over nigh-irrelevant scientific evidence, because
| that's what the jury cares about.
| bell-cot wrote:
| One of our clients at $Job is a testing laboratory for mold &
| asbestos samples - just from building inspectors & such. To
| maintain their modest accreditations, every single Analyst
| (person looking at submitted samples through a microscope) at
| that lab has to perform daily duplicates & replicates of their
| own & their coworkers' results (and achieve fairly demanding
| levels of consistency on those). Then they trade samples with
| other labs weekly or monthly, to demonstrate further consistency
| & accuracy of results. Then the accrediting inspectors come
| through to inspect regularly. Then...
|
| Where the hell were the grown-ups, let alone an inspector who
| actually understood laboratory QC, when the FBI was running a
| Keystone Cops clown lab for years?
| slavboj wrote:
| See, your job is to get accurate results because clients are
| paying to know if they have a problem or not. The FBI's job is
| to get convictions, so their lab's job is to create
| railroadable pseudo-evidence.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Mold lawsuits are very common; the money in mold testing is
| to always find mold. People who honestly want to know whether
| they have a problem are dwarfed in number by people who
| honestly want a certificate that says mold was found.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Maybe as a _generality_. But for our laboratory client at
| $Job, it very definitely is not. There are plenty of people
| (home owners, landlords, contractors, pharmacies, etc.) who
| would prefer that mold _not_ be present. And have a large
| financial interest in getting accurate results.
| eslaught wrote:
| This is from 2015. What happened since then?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| A bunch of innocent people died behind bars.
| egberts1 wrote:
| 96% FALSE POSITIVE RATE (falsely accused) for a non-DNA hair
| analysis???!!!
|
| I want to know more about its false negative rate (how many got
| away with it scot-free).
| bad416f1f5a2 wrote:
| Would we ever know? A type II error in a criminal trial would
| be very hard to demonstrate, as the assumption is (should be!)
| that a defendant is innocent.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Within two weeks I have learnt that bite mark and hair analysis
| are full of BS. Is there some list of all these shoddy methods?
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| Mostly anything with humans
| chillingeffect wrote:
| in addition to methods, whole entire labs have been found to be
| faking everything!
|
| https://www.loevy.com/blog/the-fallout-continues-from-massac...
|
| "Last month, the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General
| began notifying approximately 7,500 people that their drug
| convictions have been overturned."
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Drug sniffing dogs that alert to please their handler when he
| gives them a cue that he wants them to alert.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Polygraphs, fingerprints, DNA, face matching, forensic
| ballistics, forensic psychology, witness testimony (especially
| police testimony), ...
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| DNA has a fair amount more credibility than the others. While
| it's not the silver bullet people think it is, and it can be
| used to falsely incriminate someone, there is a
| scientifically supported method of showing two samples of DNA
| belong to the same person.
| gus_massa wrote:
| IMHO, the real DNA analysis is credible.
|
| The problem is that there are some attempts to make weaker
| test and try to confuse people so they think it's the real
| test. For example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_profiling#Partial_matches
|
| Quoting the Wikipedia article:
|
| > _We can see no reason why partial profile DNA evidence
| should not be admissible provided that the jury are made
| aware of its inherent limitations and are given a
| sufficient explanation to enable them to evaluate it._
|
| That sound good, but every time I read it again it looks
| more and more fishy.
| djleni wrote:
| Maybe you know more about this than me, something that
| makes me uneasy about DNA evidence:
|
| Say you can confirm a sample is 100% a certain person. How
| do investigators have any idea how it got there? How do you
| know it's from a criminal and not the guy that stocked the
| convenience store shelves?
|
| I tried to look into this and maybe I was searching the
| wrong thing but found nothing.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The relevant concept is called "chain of custody";
| essentially you're trusting every person who ever handled
| the sample to have correctly documented where they got it
| and what they did with it.
|
| This is the same way we guarantee the integrity of
| elections.
| jessaustin wrote:
| One catchphrase is "means, motive, opportunity". DNA can
| indicate a _possible_ opportunity, in that a suspect 's
| DNA can be shown to have appeared in the same place a
| crime occurred. That doesn't address means or motive,
| i.e. whether the suspect had the ability or inclination
| to commit the crime. If I were on a jury and a DNA sample
| was all the prosecution had, my verdict would be not
| guilty.
|
| Keeping a massive DNA database and using it to convict
| someone, anyone because a crime occurred near something
| they touched before would be fallacious and unjust.
| However, if we already had other reasons to suspect
| someone, and DNA gives us another, that's much more
| powerful.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >How do investigators have any idea how it got there?
|
| They often can't be certain, and I'm sure somebody is in
| prison because they're DNA was in an inconvenient place,
| but it's a far superior form of evidence than the other
| methods mentioned.
|
| Unless a crime is widely watched in person with
| supporting recordings and DNA evidence, it's basically
| impossible to be a 100% certain of what happened. That's
| why court only attempts to prove guilt beyond reasonable
| doubt.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| I'm willing to believe that fingerprints are unique until
| proven otherwise, though I would need to see the actual
| finger prints and not some computer report claiming they
| "match". I also know that fingerprints can be faked.
| throwaway74829 wrote:
| Fingerprints are unique in the technical sense (i.e. no one
| has the _exact_ same set of fingerprints) -- but matching
| is a completely different issue.
|
| I don't know how far forensic science has come since a
| decade ago when I learned some of it, but at that point
| they were running "feature matching" instead of full-
| fingerprint matching. In other words, they looked for
| aberrancies (e.g. "islands," "deltas," "bifurcations" etc.
| at specific spots), and then checked those against a
| finger-to-person database. Then a list of possible matches
| would be found, if they also contained some set amount of
| same features in the same places.
|
| There are two main issues here.
|
| First, while taking an optical scan can provide very high-
| resolution images of a fingerprint -- field data is never
| like that. Fingerprints that are collected usually are not
| uniform, and dependent on pressure applied by the finger(s)
| in question and the amount of oil left behind (which powder
| sticks to "reveal"). Because of this, you're never going to
| get a perfect fingerprint in the field. Some areas will be
| faint, misleadingly separated (and even have false
| artificial aberrancies not present on the original finger),
| or outright missing -- leading to less "features" to check
| against. Others will be completely "blotched" out by a high
| amount of oil, removing vital information.
|
| Second, you will almost never get an _exact_ match because
| of this -- you will be getting a list of possible matches.
| I can remember one notable case of a terrorist 's prints
| being wrongly attributed to someone who could never have
| been at the scene, much less anywhere near the country --
| but was still whisked away by (I believe?) Interpol.
| Forensic evidence is just a piece of numerous possible
| stories that can be spun up any which way. There's
| something to be said here about human biases, incentives,
| and so on -- but I think it's intuitive enough (and
| frankly, I don't want to write more).
| faceplanted wrote:
| Most of them are bullshit, and the ones that aren't are ripe
| and ready to be used to bullshit people.
|
| Every new kind of forensics is treated like it's going to be
| the solution to solving crime, when what it really is, is yet
| another excuse not to put the time and effort into
| investigation, the one thing that actually solves crimes.
|
| CCTV has the same problem, we think it will solve crimes, when
| it can actually do a lot, but we constantly see cases of crimes
| happening in public or on camera where the police haven't even
| taken the half hour it would take to ask local businesses for
| their footage. And when they even do _that_, then they don't
| rarely bother to follow up leads.
|
| Policing is just an endless, endless stream of people with what
| are actually very important jobs who only go into it for
| exactly the wrong reasons.
| aasasd wrote:
| The post on bite marks had plenty of comments ripping apart
| various other methods.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Fire "trace" analysis was proven shoddy too.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| interesting - links?
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| https://archive.ph/DJGW7
|
| There's a graphic about halfway down that shows supposed
| "evidence" of accelerants being used when in fact they're
| either common to all fires, caused by the rapid cooling
| from water used to extinguish the fire, or are simply
| random occurrences completely unrelated to the fire. Yet to
| this day they are taught to investigators as rock solid
| evidence of arson.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Yet to this day they are taught to investigators as
| rock solid evidence of arson.
|
| To be fair, any experiment investigating this could only
| show that they are evidence of arson. ;D
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| It doesn't seem that they will take action to prevent failures of
| a similar general kind occurring again. There should be
| legislation regarding the quality of forensic analysis of all
| kinds.
| Natsu wrote:
| > It doesn't seem that they will take action to prevent
| failures of a similar general kind occurring again.
|
| That seems to contradict this part of the article:
|
| > The Department has been working together with the Innocence
| Project and NACDL to address errors made in statements by FBI
| examiners regarding microscopic hair analysis in the context of
| testimony and laboratory reports. Such statements are no longer
| being made by the FBI, and the FBI is also now employing
| mitochondrial DNA hair analysis in addition to microscopic
| analysis
|
| They're also going to do DNA analysis now, for free in many
| cases, instead of just looking at hair under a microscope to
| compare it.
| arcticfox wrote:
| It feels like there need to be defamation lawsuits that ruin
| anyone that practice these
| themitigating wrote:
| Who, the government, that's you, you and I pay for that.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| If you or I lie to the court, it is perjury. When it is the FBI,
| who are granted an additional level of professional authority and
| trust in their testimony 'because reasons' (even though no
| testimony should automatically be elevated over other) it's just
| harmless 'errors made in statements by FBI examiners' as phrased
| in this article.
|
| Having gone through the system, it's all lies. Let's start with
| plea agreements. You have to agree in your plea that you were not
| coerced or threatened into taking your plea, yet everyone know
| that the prosecutor threatens you with taking the plea or facing
| an extra 10-30 years as the 'trial tax' (google it) that get's
| applied if you dare exercise your constitutional right to trial.
| But the judge, prosecutor, everyone looks the other way and
| ignores that blatant threat made against you. The judge knows
| that the prosecutor placing that clause in the plea is being
| disingenuous, the prosecutor knows they are. If justice is served
| by a five year sentence in a plea, how is that same justice
| served and applied fairly when adding 15 years simply for going
| to trial? Either a crime warrants a 5 year sentence, or a 15 year
| sentence. But sentencing is based not on your crime, but on the
| prosecutor and judge being annoyed if you exercise your
| constitutional rights. There is a reason that plea agreements
| were considered unconstitutional up until the 60s when the
| police/judicial state started undermining constitutional rights.
|
| Acceptability of forensic evidence such as lie detector tests is
| not based on science but on precedence. If a court has accepted
| it as science before, then it is extremely hard for you to
| challenge it, even when it was complete garbage like lie detector
| tests. The current language is 'you can't be convicted solely
| based on lie detector tests' after a lot of people paid a lot of
| experts and took a lot of 'trial tax' to try and get lie
| detectors removed completely.
| ldoughty wrote:
| Firstly, I'm sorry you went through the system and had to face
| these kinds of issues.
|
| I generally agree with you. The fact some of these citizens
| people were likely incorrectly executed, and others died in
| prison, based on bad science makes this depressing to read.
|
| However, I would factor in intent and knowledge on the part of
| lab workers and experts when demanding penalties for their
| action.
|
| If they intentionally lied to support a case, 100% they should
| have a sentence at least equal to and preferably greater than
| the person they are essentially framing. However, if they are
| just using equipment as trained, reading results as trained,
| and had no I'll intent? I don't think it makes the world better
| to throw them in jail.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| '90 percent of trial transcripts the Bureau analyzed as part
| of its Microscopic Hair Comparison Analysis Review contained
| erroneous statements'.
|
| Would you be OK with a hospital having this level 'innocent
| mistake' rate? How about if 90% of a medicines studies had
| erroneous statements made by the same group of professionals?
|
| Would you be OK with an amusement park having a 90% failure
| rate when they attest to the safety of their equipment?
|
| Should not repeated failures that have a severe impact on
| people's lives be held to a higher standard than 'oops, my
| bad bro'? A doctor wouldn't get away with 90% erroneous
| statements, why do these professionals?
| hedora wrote:
| It's the explicit job of prosecutors to get guilty verdicts
| regardless of the defendant's guilt. This is the core of the
| US's adversarial justice system. (In the same way it is the
| defense attorney's job to get a not guilty ruling.)
|
| I think this should be changed, so that false convictions are
| treated with the same level of seriousness as police officers
| shooting unarmed civilians on camera.
|
| Patterns of prosecutorial misconduct should lead to prison
| time that is the sum of the false convictions, in the worst
| environment the falsely convicted parties ended up in. (So,
| probably not the country club minimal security white collar
| prison.)
|
| Also, the people in charge of this should be untouchable by
| the currently elected politicians they would likely be
| investigating. Fixed-term appointments with mandatory recusal
| rules probably make sense.
| [deleted]
| jessaustin wrote:
| _...the same level of seriousness as police officers
| shooting unarmed civilians on camera._
|
| Police officers in USA are almost never convicted of murder
| in these or any other circumstances.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/20/us/police-convicted-murder-
| ra...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It's the explicit job of prosecutors to get guilty
| verdicts regardless of the defendant's guilt.
|
| This is not correct; they're supposed to e.g. dismiss
| charges if they learn they've charged the wrong guy.
|
| The problem isn't that the system calls for them to convict
| innocent people. The problem is that they're evaluated by
| their conviction rate.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| Any recommended reading?
| ROTMetro wrote:
| https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lexis.page
|
| Start reading cases and judgements. I think you will find
| discomfort in how things really work.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Haha. Just kidding. Of course that sort of insight into the
| courts is paywalled. Why should people have free access to
| what is going on in the courts?
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Black Box Thinking has a few examples of law enforcement
| doubling down on obviously wrong conclusions when presented
| with new exculpatory evidence.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Man, that's fucking shitty. I hate how CSI and Law and Order
| have trained the general population to trust this stuff so
| much. The culture around criminal justice in America needs to
| be reset completely. It's clearly still poisoned by the
| prejudices and power structures from a few hundred years ago.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Either a crime warrants a 5 year sentence, or a 15 year
| sentence
|
| Then why is there a difference between first degree murder and
| second degree murder? Murder warrants a particular sentence,
| and circumstances should not matter?
|
| > But sentencing is based not on your crime
|
| The court is taking into consideration your behavior and your
| reticence over your own actions. Taking the plea deal shows
| reticence as it immediately requires an admission of guilt.
|
| Demanding a trial, particularly when you actually have
| committed the offense, in an effort to "get out" of the time
| you must serve or to merely publish your side of the story is
| not viewed favorably by the court. Why should it be?
|
| You're tying up immense resources simply to parse the details
| of your crime in an effort to convince a judge that maybe
| you're actually not that bad of a guy. The court knows it is
| not a perfect arbiter of the truth, and that it's application
| of process inherently deprives, in some way, the rights of
| everyone involved. Every witness you call is subpoenaed to
| court under penalty if they don't comply. Victims are never
| actually made whole by the trial, and offenders run the risk of
| incriminating themselves further.
|
| They're there because they're necessary, not because they are
| an ideal or preferred solution. Courts aim for settlements in
| civil trials, and they aim for pleas in criminal trials.
|
| > were considered unconstitutional up until the 60s when the
| police/judicial state started undermining constitutional
| rights.
|
| The means under which they were offered was unconstitutional,
| why should it be against the constitution for you to negotiate
| your own settlement in a criminal matter with the state? Is it
| really a better outcome that you must go to trial without any
| option?
|
| > even when it was complete garbage like lie detector tests.
|
| Lie detector tests actually _do_ measure physiological
| responses, though. The problem is that's not all they measure,
| and the results are too polluted by the reviewer to be useful.
| That a human beings heart rate increases when they
| intentionally try to deceive another is an actual fact.
|
| So are they really "complete garbage?" Or are they just not as
| pure of a datapoint as we thought they were? Perhaps this is
| why some courts still allow them to be admitted when all
| parties agree to it's use.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| > Taking the plea deal shows reticence as it immediately
| requires an admission of guilt.
|
| Or it shows a preference for 5 years over the risk of 15
| years out of pure fear or knowledge that the jury will be
| manipulated with pseudo-scientific "evidence".
|
| Taking a plea deal can be totally separate from guilt or
| innocence.
|
| > You're tying up immense resources simply to parse the
| details of your crime in an effort to convince a judge that
| maybe you're actually not that bad of a guy.
|
| You seem to be ignoring that someone may actually be innocent
| in some cases. You're sounding like an ambitious prosecutor
| yourself, or you just have too much faith that the system
| would never bring the wrong person to court.
|
| > Courts aim for settlements in civil trials, and they aim
| for pleas in criminal trials.
|
| Which, over time, turn into a perverse incentive structure
| because court time gets increasingly valued over justice and
| so plea deals become threats rather than offers.
|
| Fundamentally, when presenting prosecutorial evidence that's
| not what it appears, my reaction, if I ever need to defend
| myself against such things, world be to further tie up the
| courts time by presenting evidence against the evidence and /
| or demanding a thorough explanation of the implications of
| what is being described as evidence. This could add literal
| weeks to every single case that goes to trial. The method of
| evidence collection would be on trial because there's so much
| trust lost due to, basically, lies on the part of law
| enforcement and prosecution in their pursuit of conviction as
| metric for success and promotion.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| So reticence deserves a 20 year sentence taken down to 5? Are
| you sure it wasn't just inflated to 20 years to push people
| into taking the 5 year sentence?
|
| first degree and second degree are two different charges,
| which obviously should have two different sentences. What I
| am talking about is that the sentence for the same crime goes
| from 20 years to 5 if you waive your rights. How can the
| punishment for the same crime vary by that much? Why is there
| so much written about the trial tax?
|
| How is it voluntary and not coerced to threat someone with 15
| more years if they don't sign a plea? If I threaten to lock
| you in my basement for 15 years if you don't sign over your
| car's pink slip, is that coercion? But when it's the FULL
| WEIGHT OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT threatening me while I
| am 100% under their control and authority, somehow that is
| NOT coercion?
| steve76 wrote:
| kjeetgill wrote:
| > The DOJ, FBI, Innocence Project, and NACDL (National
| Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers) have been working
| jointly on this review and share the same goal of ensuring the
| integrity of the American justice system in all respects. All of
| the parties are committed to addressing this situation properly
| and will continue to work together in a collaborative and
| professional manner.
|
| This is the only thing keeping the cynicism at bay for me when I
| read stories like this. It's horrifying to think of how many
| people might be falsely imprisoned.
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