[HN Gopher] Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom conv...
___________________________________________________________________
Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent
people
Author : rossant
Score : 178 points
Date : 2023-12-11 16:26 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| thedigitalone wrote:
| https://ghostarchive.org/archive/wETB7
| albert_e wrote:
| I was thinking about this just today randomly.
|
| Every bit in computer memory or data store is just a bit flip
| away from being completely wrong.
|
| In other words all data corruption -- unintentional or
| deliberate-- can be statistically shown as a bunch of off-by-one
| errors.
|
| Of course the chance of multiple random off-by-one errors lining
| up exactly to help one party is astronomically low. But would a
| typical court of law be able to discern?
| andrewla wrote:
| I don't think this categorization is technically correct, and
| even in the places where it is partially correct I don't see
| that the "off-by-one" phrasing adds any value.
|
| Off-by-one errors are a very specific type of error in
| algorithm implementation, where a closed boundary and an open
| boundary are confused. A general bit flip is not really an
| example of this unless it is connected to this specific kind of
| mistake.
|
| And data corruption is much broader, and can involve adding or
| removing data from a stream in addition to mutating existing
| data. Saying that all data mutations are a "bunch of off-by-one
| errors" is just asserting that there exists a hamming distance
| between any two binary representations of the same length, and
| I don't think this adds a lot of insight.
|
| On the other hand, using the term "off-by-one error" carries
| with it a lot of baggage and connotations, most of which do not
| apply to scenarios you have described or general data
| corruption.
| sneak wrote:
| The police and prosecution are the ones using these tools to
| attack innocent people. The article opens with a case of the
| corrupt prosecution intentionally and illegally withholding
| evidence.
|
| This isn't about bad science, this is about bad prosecutors who
| are more interested in convictions than justice.
|
| Selective enforcement and opportunities to engage in misconduct
| like this are endemic in the US criminal justice system. Police
| and prosecutors have far too much power before and during trial,
| and far too much wiggle room to seek convictions for innocent
| people.
| causal wrote:
| I've always been perplexed by the incentive to get convictions.
| This is guaranteed to result in prosecutors preferring any
| method with a lot of false positives.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Separating evidence processing from law enforcement would be
| a good step forward.
| sneak wrote:
| I think the system of American policing was originally
| cooked up to enforce the existing social hierarchy via
| selective enforcement, and it appears to remain mostly
| unchanged because it seems to continue to serve that same
| purpose.
|
| Why would people with power to change it do so, when it is
| working as intended? Prosecutors don't bring charges
| against police and judges and senators and large
| landowners/rightsholders (or the DNI).
| qingcharles wrote:
| If you're a prosecutor you need to prosecute. If you don't
| win cases, you're not going to keep your employment. QED.
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| Perverse incentives are one of the worst issues in modern law
| enforcement. They exist at nearly every step and they are
| causing a rot that will take decades lot of concentrated
| effort to remove.
|
| if you build a system, patchwork, entirely reactive, from the
| deep roots of racism and anti-labor movements
| (https://time.com/4779112/police-history-
| origins/)(https://nl... and then ignore the nearly 50% rate
| of decline in violent crime since
| 1993(https://www.statista.com/statistics/191129/reported-
| violent-...), and in fact, have a population undergo a rapid
| INCREASE in PERCEIVED violent crime (https://content.gallup.c
| om/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro...).... well its hard to
| be surprised.
|
| If we wanted to actually evolve our system, top to bottom, to
| focus on reduced recidivism and a reduced prison population
| without increasing violent crime, one of the first steps we
| should take is a deep pass over every perverse incentive in
| the system.
|
| Revenue sources has to be the biggest category. Ignoring
| salary, there are so many fines and fees that directly fund
| the police. (https://www.brennancenter.org/series/how-
| perverse-financial-...)
|
| civil asset forfeiture is plain and open theft, and it
| directly incentivizes as many arrests as possible.
|
| incarceration facilities of all kinds are funded based on bed
| space and occupancy for christs sake
| (https://www.brennancenter.org/series/how-perverse-
| financial-...)
|
| Military cooperation agreements give all sorts of free
| military tech to police agencies and swat teams, and they
| constantly take christmas morning style photos with them
| (https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp9861590.jpg). a small town
| near my hometown had a population of 4500 when the 'police
| department' (police force was 30ish people) got a fucking APC
| from the military for free. This was in 2010ish so i cant
| find a direct source, but i did see it in person.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| > The police and prosecution are the ones using these tools to
| attack innocent people.
|
| ... and the defense fails to hire their own expert witness, or
| use same exact method to keep people out of prison.
|
| (Remember "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit"? Cochran did not
| come up with it by himself, but an expert provided it to him,
| the glove not fitting.)
|
| Assuming you are talking about US, adversarial courts.
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| the defense will always have less time and money to get their
| own expert witness, and i can tell you for absolute certainty
| that there is way more demand than supply for defense
| experts.
|
| and yes they have a million other disadvantages that are
| SUPPOSED to be balanced by the advantage that the standard
| burden of proof offers. but that is clearly failing if
| prosecution experts are running rampant with few checks, and
| 95-98%(!) of criminal cases plead out before a trial even
| occurs. public defenders are time constrained in the extreme(
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-
| def...), and public defendants are financially constrained in
| the extreme. its a terrible mixture.
| causal wrote:
| It would be hard to really know, but I'm curious what percentage
| of the total US prison population is innocent. Per capita prison
| rate is still around 5 in 1000 according to Wikipedia, which is
| very high for the developed world.
| graphe wrote:
| Innocent meaning they didn't do the specific crime, or innocent
| as in someone with a clean record that was railroaded?
|
| If you're looking for the criminal that killed a bunch of
| people but not that specific case it's not that uncommon. If
| you're looking for a squeaky clean guy that was there at the
| wrong place at the wrong time it's very rare. Most criminals
| are repeat offenders.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Most businesses create and cultivate repeat customers from
| specific target markets. The US prison industrial complex is
| adept at this.
| graphe wrote:
| What is the conclusion you're making?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| it is a revolving door in real ways
| Zigurd wrote:
| It starts with selective enforcement and repeated police
| contact with young people. That's how the business of
| imprisonment fills the funnel in the US.
| klyrs wrote:
| This is magical thinking. We know the guy was bad so we
| locked him up for a crime. We don't know if we pinned the
| right crime on him or not, but he's locked away safely now so
| he must be bad.
|
| If this is your genuine belief, it begs the question: why are
| Americans, on average, such _terrible people_ when compared
| to other first world citizens?
| graphe wrote:
| You don't just decide to lock someone up for a crime.
| Police gather evidence, give it to a prosecutor, the
| prosecutor makes a case (or not) and they will either go to
| trial or plea, then it's in the hands of a jury or judge.
|
| Claiming guilt to plea down to avoid a case is a problem,
| but that isn't the case you're making. There's nothing
| magical about criminal prosecution.
| klyrs wrote:
| > If you're looking for the criminal that killed a bunch
| of people but not that specific case it's not that
| uncommon.
|
| Here you're saying that mass-murderers are common, but
| despite their extensive trails of corpses, we can't pin
| the _actual_ crime on an _actual_ criminal. No, there 's
| nothing magical about criminal prosecution here, it's no
| more than bullshit as you've described it.
|
| Back to my question, why do you think mass-murderers are
| so incredibly overrepresented in the American population?
| graphe wrote:
| Blame laws like fruit of the poisoned tree.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
|
| If you want to act in bad faith and call it magic and
| bullshit feel free to grandstand.
| qingcharles wrote:
| What is wrong with the poisonous tree doctrine in your
| opinion? I find it isn't used widely enough against
| police and prosecutor misconduct. There are too many ways
| out of it for them.
| graphe wrote:
| It's in response to:
|
| >Here you're saying that mass-murderers are common, but
| despite their extensive trails of corpses, we can't pin
| the actual crime on an actual criminal. No, there's
| nothing magical about criminal prosecution here, it's no
| more than bullshit as you've described it.
|
| Everyone does illegal stuff in the US. Sometimes it's a
| technicality that a guilty party goes free.
| qingcharles wrote:
| It's true that technicalities in the USA can lead to very
| guilty defendants walking free from very serious crimes.
|
| These doctrines were created by judges who were sick of
| prosecutors and police violating the constitution and not
| getting punished for it.
|
| The solution is to fix the system to stop this misconduct
| and then we could rid ourselves of this doctrine. It's a
| fucked up system.
| lesuorac wrote:
| My main problem is that the person that suffers from the
| poisonous tree is the public at large.
|
| The actual criminal in this scenario (the police officer)
| gets off carte blanche for breaking the law.
| Additionally, if they managed to find evidence then an
| additional criminal (the defendants) also gets carte
| blanche. The only people punished is the public that now
| have two known criminals that evaded justice!
| qingcharles wrote:
| I absolutely agree. The problem with the doctrine is that
| it should not exist. The misconduct should be punished.
| The doctrine only exists because there is no punishment
| for the police or prosecutors.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The limitations of section 1983 to let you sue cops for
| violating your rights are not the fault of the
| exclusionary rule.
|
| Without the exclusionary rule the 4th amendment doesn't
| really exist. Cops could just violate your 4th amendment
| rights and then either arrest you if they find evidence
| of a crime or go on their merry way. Yes, some people who
| committed crimes go unpunished because the state fucked
| up and couldn't manage to protect their legal rights
| while investigating and arresting them. We _should_ place
| a high burden on the state to dramatically disincentivize
| it from violating our rights, even the rights of people
| who commit crimes.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > Without the exclusionary rule the 4th amendment doesn't
| really exist. Cops could just violate your 4th amendment
| rights and then either arrest you if they find evidence
| of a crime or go on their merry way.
|
| I mean if I trespass on your property and take a handgun
| and give it to police as evidence of the murder weapon
| they can use that to convict you. You might have trouble
| with a civil suit of trespassing against me but I doubt a
| prosector couldn't also try me for trespassing.
|
| The exclusionary rule is not in the constitution. The 4th
| amendment does not describe what happens if its violated
| and the fruit of the poisonous tree is entirely made up
| by the court system in 1920 [1] over a century after the
| constitution was written. Prior to that point there
| wasn't a need of the fruit of the poisonous tree because
| if even if you had a warrant you couldn't use my personal
| possessions as evidence against me [2].
|
| Although I don't really agree with either system. You
| should be able to use warrants to get personal property
| but taking person property without a warrant should
| receive the same penalty no matter who takes it. i.e.
| Cops should risk jail time for breaking the law like
| everybody else. Obviously if a cop radios their
| supervisor to verify they have a warrant and the
| supervisor lies then the supervisor is on the hook and
| not the cop.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverthorne_Lumber_Co
| ._v._Uni... [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_evidence_rule
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I believe, and I think the data supports, that the US prison
| population is due to the number of laws we have, and the
| harshness of our penalties.
|
| A false conviction rate of a few percent does not explain an
| order of magnitude level differences in incarceration between
| countries.
|
| I think an interesting question is what portion of the US
| population would be incarcerated if the totality of our laws
| were applied to everyone
| graphe wrote:
| US law is applied unequally. It's very harsh, sometimes
| random and I've heard all Americans break the law daily. We
| would all be in jail and sometimes prison.
|
| US crime is like driving across the only road that is
| covered in black ice with toll trolls on the way, you have
| to cross it, you know it's there, and you can do it
| carefully but you never know what will happen or where
| you'll slip up.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Opinion of a criminal: I don't think there are too many
| criminal laws at the State level. That is definitely not
| the reason for high incarceration rates. The guys who are
| in prison didn't randomly trip over a law they didn't know
| existed. 99% of the laws are the same as they've been since
| pre-history: don't hurt someone, don't steal etc.
|
| Sentencing to prison is probably the key problem. Criminals
| need help. Outright punishment just hardens them. From my
| experience the bulk of crime has its origin in mental
| illnesses which are not being treated. The medical system
| in the USA almost certainly is the cause of this.
| pdonis wrote:
| What about non-violent drug possession? AFAIK that all by
| itself accounts for a significant number of incarcerated
| people. Laws criminalizing that are a product of the war
| on drugs, not embodying something in statute that's been
| a common law crime throughout human history.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| My understanding that this is largely a thing of the
| past. Simple possession doesn't result in time, although
| dealing can
| pdonis wrote:
| Non-violent dealing (meaning possession for the purpose
| of sale instead of use) would still be non-violent
| possession.
|
| It is a valid question what fraction of dealing (as
| opposed to possession for personal use) is actually non-
| violent. But even the violence is largely a product of
| the war on drugs, just as the corresponding violence
| surrounding illegal alcohol dealing during Prohibition
| was a product of the war on alcohol. Take away the
| prohibition and the violence went away.
| graphe wrote:
| How many of those are without a weapon?
|
| Is intent to distribute fentanyl a non violent
| possession? If so could you ever make a case it's non
| violent dealing? If you don't see it as non violent
| dealing, a store advertising date rape drugs should be
| allowed to sell all their legal products.
| qingcharles wrote:
| It's often used as an aggravating factor in another
| crime. If you're caught with a gun and some drugs then it
| usually makes the gun crime radically more severe.
| moate wrote:
| Who cares? The job of the justice system is to match crime to
| perpetrator and punish as society sees fit. Anything less
| than that is a failure of the system. Also, lazy cops being
| lazy and victimizing the same people they know have proven
| themselves unable to mount a valid defense doesn't feel like
| a feature of a society I'd be proud of.
|
| This sounds dangerous close to "I know my enemies are evil
| men, so even if I can't prove it they must be punished"
| thinking, and that's how you get nazis.
| graphe wrote:
| You're writing emotionally.
|
| Other people care and you don't. It doesn't mean it's not
| something nobody should care about.
|
| Do you think 'lazy cops' work harder at persecution?
|
| Do you think cops convict and not judges and juries?
|
| What do prosecutors do?
|
| Do you think your idea of the job of the justice system is
| the only correct one?
|
| The justice system in the US isn't Judge Dreadd and I'm not
| a nazi nor do I appreciate being called one.
| moate wrote:
| Hello Again. You seem to be confused about some things
| from my last post, so I'll try to clear them up.
|
| In order: 1-OH NO, NOT EMOTIONS!?!?!?!
|
| 2- I don't care about the point you made (that, in your
| opinion, most wrongful convictions are of people who were
| guilty of other crimes) because it is a stupid thing to
| say in this discussion. What are you trying to imply
| there? Shouldn't people care about the cops doing a
| better job of getting the right guy?
|
| 3- The implication is that the type of cop who would just
| go pull the usual suspects and INSIST one of them MUST
| have done it isn't trying to solve a case, he's trying to
| close a case. This does not implicate that ALL cops must
| be lazy or attempt to victimize people. It's akin to
| saying that cops that do bad things are bad cops. This
| should not be controversial.
|
| 4- No. This has fuckall to do with what I was posting
| about.
|
| 5- A complicated job weighing a myriad of factors, some
| in the name of justice some in the name of keeping their
| job. This has fuckall to do with what I was posting
| about.
|
| 6- I believe that the only true justice system is one
| that exclusively matches a crime to the person/people who
| committed that crime. Putting people in jail because they
| were previously convicted of/plead guilty to a crime is
| an abomination of the idea.
|
| 7- I never said you were a Nazi, but if you believe that
| your enemies are evil and that even if you can't prove it
| they must be punished, then you are at minimum a fascist
| though maybe all the specific tenets of National
| Socialist German Workers' Party don't quite align with
| your worldview.
|
| My 1 question to you: Do you think that convicting people
| (which is what the article is about) for a crime they
| didn't commit is a bad thing? If so, why you fighting
| with me?
| andrewla wrote:
| This is frequently cited by law enforcement and criminal
| justice officials, but this is an impossible bar to set,
| because they have not been convicted of those other
| unspecified crimes. The excuse "he maybe didn't rob this
| store, but he did rob those other stores, so let's nudge the
| case a bit", even if done in good faith by law enforcement,
| is still fishy, because ... why not convict them instead for
| the other crimes being purported, since we're more confident
| about them?
|
| In many cases I think this is likely to be a post facto
| rationalization for the fact that the case against the
| suspect is weaker than initially thought but represents a
| great deal of manpower that feels wasted if the suspect is
| not convicted.
| graphe wrote:
| That definitely happens but lots of evidence is thrown out
| and they are looking at throwing the law at him. A famous
| case is Al Capone.
|
| I'm not calling it right or wrong, it's just what happens
| with the system in place. It's also shown to the public to
| convict them. The jury has the ability to 'throw' the case
| as they did in the case of OJ.
| pc86 wrote:
| Except Al Capone actually did what he went to prison for.
| Yeah he did a lot of other stuff nobody could prove to
| the standard of a courtroom, but what you're talking
| about is someone "knows" Al Capone is bad, so they
| fabricate crimes and evidence and frame him for those in
| order to send him to prison. That would still be wrong.
| This is a feature, not a bug.
| lesuorac wrote:
| A feature to the prosector maybe but a bug to the public
| at large.
|
| 1) People do convince themselves of falsehoods; the
| person may not actually have done that initial crime. 2)
| Being able to trump up lessor charges can be (ab)used
| even if the person didn't commit an initial crime but
| instead is just a ~journalist~ nuisance.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Capone wasn't framed; have I misunderstood you?
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| This is an obviously tough subject to get precise data on, but
| dark figure analysis and innocence project data indicates that
| the CONVICTED innocent percentage is 1-3%, i have seen
| individual studies peak at 7% but those are outliers and not
| likely to be the real number.
|
| this seems really good until you realize its 20,000-140,000
| people in prison right now. that are innocent.
|
| and it gets REALLY bleak when you look at the 400,000 people
| who are locked up at any given time, pretrial, in jail. who are
| legally innocent. The proportion of individuals held in jail
| pending trial increased from 56 percent of the jail population
| in 2000 to 66 percent in 2018
| (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-better-path-forward-
| for...)
|
| so, of the roughly 2 million people behind any bars at any
| given time, 400,000-500,000 are innocent. 25%.
| causal wrote:
| Thanks for bringing that data. And yeah, half a million is a
| staggering number if true.
| qingcharles wrote:
| And it completely depends on what you mean by innocent.
|
| A lot of cases are won by defendants, who after spending
| years in pretrial, find the prosecution did not have enough
| evidence to convict them.
|
| I've been witness to some far-out jury cases where the
| defendant was massively guilty but the jury acquitted for
| some reason. That's why I would often recommend a jury trial
| in a lot of cases simply because juries have such a high
| randomness attached to them.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| Hey hope you're doing well - have your charges have been
| fully dropped finally?
| qingcharles wrote:
| 99% of them dropped two weeks ago. Working on the last
| one now. Will post more once it is all over. Thank you!
| annexrichmond wrote:
| Love to hear it, good luck!
| pc86 wrote:
| I really don't think pretrial detention counts.
|
| There is a long-standing and legitimate public interest in
| detaining some people while they await trial. A court can
| find you a flight risk, or a danger to society, during
| arraignment before your trial without violating your due
| process rights.
|
| And I'm not sure "the proportion of individuals held in jail
| pending trial" increasing means anything. What are the number
| of cases this correlates to? Have the raw or per capita
| numbers increased? What are the other reasons you could be
| held in jail other than pending trial, which apparently
| decreased from 44% to 34%?
|
| And not to be too overly pedantic, but the original question
| was about prison specifically which is distinctly different
| from jail.
| qingcharles wrote:
| OK, having spent practically 10 years inside and having helped
| 1000s of people with their cases, here's my single-person
| perspective: at least 95% of the people locked up are guilty of
| _something_ related to their charges. The justice system isn 't
| completely off-kilter.
|
| My main issues were that a) many people were overcharged (i.e.
| charged with extra crimes they were not guilty of) simply to
| obtain a plea deal; b) often police/prosecutor/judicial
| misconduct was used to get the defendant into the justice
| system and convict them; c) the sentences are often out-of-
| whack compared to the crime; d) jails and prisons generally
| offer very little value and rehabilitation.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| 1 out of 20 is still pretty nasty given the size of the US
| prison population.
| csa wrote:
| He said "at least".
|
| And he specified "guilty of what they were charged with".
|
| You also need to factor in the people who are guilty of
| crime A (that they did commit but were not convicted of)
| but are convicted of crime B (that they did not commit) for
| whatever reason.
|
| I've seen "street justice" like this. In some cases I think
| it a net good (right outcome for the wrong reasons,
| typically involving a serial criminal who manages to avoid
| the "smoking gun"), but sometimes it's just an abuse of
| power that needs to be rectified.
| qingcharles wrote:
| A lot of people in that 5% take a plea for a crime they
| didn't commit because the plea is so sweet it saves them
| from trial on all of the charges, some of which they
| clearly did commit and might receive a higher sentence
| for than the plea deal.
|
| The overcharging is a trick by the prosecution to secure
| the plea.
|
| I see people charged with murder who plead to
| manslaughter when the case was manslaughter from the
| beginning, but who risks going to trial and being found
| guilty of murder? Minimum on murder is usually 20 years
| straight, whereas manslaughter is usually probationable.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| What he wrote: _at least 95% of the people locked up are
| guilty of something related to their charges_
|
| What you wrote: _And he specified "guilty of what they
| were charged with"._
|
| These aren't the same. It's depressing to see someone
| being misquoted on literally the same page as their
| original statement, in a discussion about lack of
| accuracy in legal proceedings.
| csa wrote:
| 1. I am not a lawyer or an LEO.
|
| 2. This is not a court of law or a legal arm of anything.
| Quite the contrary, it's a social forum.
|
| 3. I don't think any point you made materially changes
| the relevance of my point(s).
|
| I appreciate being accurate and precise, but focusing on
| intent of communication goes a long way.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I didn't see it mentioned, another case of bad math used in court
| (unsurprisingly to convict a black person):
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mTNlVAz2fdA
|
| And while Googling I found another video by the same channel
| (Vsauce2): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OMr6zCXwuns
| causal wrote:
| Note that proportionately few of our federal judges have spent
| any time as public defenders, and a disproportionately high
| number have served as prosecutors. Jackson is the first supreme
| court justice to have served as a public defender, whereas 3
| other justices have been prosecutors.
|
| Prosecutors are incentivized to get convictions, and that slanted
| thinking could easily be carried on to the bench.
|
| [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/few-public-
| defenders-b...
| tiahura wrote:
| Being primarily a civil attorney, I'm well aware of the
| disproportionate number of former prosecutors on the bench. A
| couple of points:
|
| 1. Most prosecutors are liberals. It's not like right wing law
| students go looking for jobs in prosecutor's offices. I can't
| think of any from my class way back when.
|
| 2. The problem is more that judges and prosecutors are old
| colleagues. The slant is that they all know the defendants are
| guilty. There's so much crime, and aversion to losing trials,
| that (unless politics is involved) prosecutors tend to only
| bring cases where the defendant is clearly guilty. They like
| shooting fish in a barrel. If they find that there are problems
| with a case they tend to let the defendant get continuance
| after continuance until the case just goes away on its own.
| causal wrote:
| Thanks for that insight. My discomfort is with the notion
| that they could know that the defendant is guilty- sure there
| may be some obvious cases, but I do not trust most humans to
| differentiate their intuition from hard evidence.
| swells34 wrote:
| And unfortunately, judges are the only legal entity
| empowered to use their intuition for legal decision making.
| Sentencing is a good example; judges can kinda just decide
| sentences based on feel. Just throw some number out there.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| That's not unfortunate, it's the system working as
| intended. Not being funny but that's why we call them
| _judges_. You can 't have everything decided in advance
| by an algorithm baked into the system, part of the system
| is devolved deciding, sometimes called "equity".
| eropple wrote:
| I think your point on #2 makes quite a lot of sense, but #1
| rings hollow. Plenty of erstwhile liberals hoist the black
| flag when there's inconvenience in _their own_ neighborhoods;
| no reason to think it isn 't similarly situational with
| regards to people who are incentivized towards securing
| conviction.
| petsfed wrote:
| To pile on, part of the conflict between liberals and those
| further left is that "law and order liberal" is a thing.
| That is, while liberals might concede that the justice
| system is flawed, there's still an underlying faith that
| the system will get it right the overwhelming majority of
| the time.
|
| The extreme radical position is that the justice system is
| fundamentally and irredeemably broken, and that there is no
| way that a conscientious leftist could work with, let alone
| within, a system that exists only to oppress the people and
| reinforce the power of the ruling elite.
|
| There's obviously a lot of gray between those two
| positions, but the punchline is that its very possible to
| be a liberal DA. e.g. Chesa Boudin's stated goals exemplify
| what that's supposed to look like, although without unified
| support from the police and the judiciary, Chesa Boudin
| also exemplifies what would actually happen.
|
| Experiences like that drive the broader leftist calls to
| defund or abolish the police. If you can't get buy in from
| the entire judicial system to reform itself, then _just_
| getting a leftist prosecutor elected /appointed will
| quickly lead to that prosecutor either being ejected from
| the position, or co-opted by the system they were trying to
| fix.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Being primarily a criminal, #1 doesn't follow my experiences.
| I've been very friendly with a large number of prosecutors in
| my time, and I can't imagine a single one of them being a
| liberal.
|
| #2 it is totally true that prosecutors heavily rely on the
| judges being ex-colleagues of theirs. I have never heard of a
| prosecutor only bringing charges where the defendant is
| clearly guilty, though. That does not follow my experience,
| primarily in pre-trial detention, where I got to read the
| discovery materials in thousands of cases. Obviously they
| have a bar in felony cases of having to pass a grand jury,
| but it was once said you could get a grand jury to indict a
| ham sandwich.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich#Cultural_impact
| Clubber wrote:
| >prosecutors tend to only bring cases where the defendant is
| clearly guilty.
|
| How does that square with overcharging? Seems like a trend is
| to throw a bunch of charges at person in hopes they will cop
| a plea deal, which is considered a win. (cheating IMO).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overcharging_(law)
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| That's how you know they're guilty -- by tacking on some
| charges that _everyone_ is guilty of. Of course, you don 't
| charge everyone with them, only the people who are being
| charged with something else. That way prosecutors can
| maintain a high conviction rate.
|
| Heuristic: Any law that too many people are charged with
| should be repealed. Either too much of the population
| doesn't think it should be illegal even past the point of
| purposely not respecting it, or it's excessively broad and
| too many people are violating it unintentionally.
| tiahura wrote:
| They charge you with the crime you did, and a bunch of bs
| charges as well.
|
| This puts pressure on you to take a deal pleading to a
| reduced charge and all the other charges go away.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| >prosecutors tend to only bring cases where the defendant is
| clearly guilty. >They like shooting fish in a
| barrel.
|
| Desire to Convict is tied to many factors that aren't Ease of
| Conviction.
|
| Ease of conviction is tied to many factors that aren't guilt.
| ska wrote:
| > prosecutors tend to only bring cases where the defendant is
| clearly guilty.
|
| This isn't quite right. Prosecutors tend to only bring cases
| where they judge they can win (including pleas, etc.).
|
| There is some correlation with guilt, sure, but it's not by
| any stretch the only thing going on.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Obligatory IANAL.
|
| >Prosecutors are incentivized to get convictions,
|
| Their entire job is to get convictions. It literally doesn't
| matter if the prosecutor thinks someone should be convicted or
| not, that's for the judge to decide. The job of a prosecutor is
| to make as strong a case for conviction as he possibly can.
|
| Likewise, the job of a lawyer representing a defendant is to
| make as strong a case for acquittal as he possibly can. Whether
| the lawyer thinks someone should be acquitted or not literally
| doesn't matter.
| qingcharles wrote:
| It's actually rarely for the judge to decide except in a
| bench trial.
|
| The other options are: jury trial, plea deal and dismissal.
|
| Almost every case ends in a plea deal which is really just
| between the prosecutor and the defendant with the judge just
| putting a stamp on it.
| function_seven wrote:
| > _It literally doesn 't matter if the prosecutor thinks
| someone should be convicted or not, that's for the judge to
| decide. The job of a prosecutor is to make as strong a case
| for conviction as he possibly can._
|
| It's unfortunate that you're probably right in the _de facto_
| sense. This is how many prosecutors view their role. But it
| 's wrong. This is _not_ the prosecutor 's objective. Their
| obligation is to strive toward justice, not a conviction. If
| a prosecutor has a reason to believe the accused is not
| guilty, they have an obligation to act on that. To dismiss
| the charges, to share their belief with the defense, etc.
|
| Here's someone explaining it[0] better than I can:
|
| > _The United States Attorney is the representative not of an
| ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose
| obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its
| obligation to govern at all, and whose interest, therefore,
| in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case,
| but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar
| and very definite sense the servant of the law, the two-fold
| aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence
| suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor--indeed,
| he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is
| not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to
| refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a
| wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to
| bring about a just one_
|
| Another good quote [1]:
|
| > _For this reason, while a lawyer defending a man accused of
| a criminal offense should "exert all his ability, learning,
| and ingenuity, in such a defence, even if he should be
| perfectly assured in his own mind of the actual guilt of the
| prisoner," a lawyer should never prosecute "a man whom he
| knows or believes to be innocent."_
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor#United_States
|
| [1] https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer
| =&h...
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| Wow, a hackernews topic thats actually directly related to my
| specialty.
|
| Anyway, this article is spot on and this is a really rampant
| specific issue.
|
| "expert witnesses have often overstated the probative value of
| their evidence, going far beyond what the relevant science can
| justify."
|
| This is the absolute center of the issue. Experts are used by the
| prosecution AND defense, but the experts used by the prosecution
| are often times so hilariously and openly biased that its insane
| how little pushback they get. Career cops with poor credentials
| that spend 30 years going from witness stand to witness stand
| saying literally whatever. You can definitely find biased 'pay
| for opinion' style experts for defense (its a profitable industry
| after all), and ive had the misfortune of trying to course
| correct them and their clients, but they are less frequently
| biased via a long career in law enforcement, and more
| importantly, get absolutely flambeed when they display the same
| level of bullshit as prosec witnesses. There are actual possible
| consequences for defense experts who lie, you get roasted in a
| news article that shows up on every google search and nobody with
| integrity will hire you ever again. That just doesnt happen for
| prosecution experts, ever. most media is terrified to highlight
| those bad actors because of the huge pushback they get from
| cops/cop unions/and more importantly the rabid facebook populace
| that will NOT stand for police criticism. and judges will very
| rarely hand down sanctions. after all, over a third (37 percent)
| of sitting justices (state supremes) are former prosecutors,
| while only 7 percent are former public defenders.
| (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/stat...)
|
| The article cites a few specific examples of experts creating a
| huge wake of bullshit in the legal field as they trudge around
| making stuff up, but a more convincing writeup with broader
| examples of fraud in the field was done by the intercept here
| (https://theintercept.com/2015/04/24/badforensics/) in 2015. I
| can assure you the problem is still bad.
|
| Dont think its better with digital evidence just because there
| are hash values and log files. I have seen (insert f.agency here)
| plainly and clearly fabricate evidence (and get away with it).
| Countless instances of smart people who, definitely, beyond any
| doubt, know and understand what their evidence ACTUALLY
| indicates, and instead inflate its value to a ludicrous degree.
|
| TLDR; If its physical evidence, and not exact DNA match(think
| tire marks, blood spatter, bite marks), its wouldnt remotely be
| accurate enough to be court admissible if the courts were
| functioning properly and vetting expert witnesses properly. if
| its digital evidence, and there are claims like "person was at
| location x,y,z at time a,b,c" and not in the format "the device
| was more likely than not in the general vicinity at the general
| time" then they are talking out of their ass. in absence of
| security footage or the like.
|
| my bias: if it wasnt obvious, i work with the defense the
| majority of the time, on digital evidence, and i am going to see
| and remember the transgressions of the other side more often. i
| try to account for that. not a lawyer. so much to learn in the
| field still. just an internet ignoramus
| twisteriffic wrote:
| Wondering how you got in to that field?
|
| A few years back I was asked to informally provide a technical
| review the prosecution's evidence in a case involving a former
| colleague. The police expert's sole credentials were a 10 year
| old A+ certification and a few employer-sponsored day courses,
| but was confidently representing themselves as an expert in
| networking/computing/technology. Their theory of the case was
| brutal - filled with nonsensical jargon, fabrications and
| misrepresentations. Things like "a computer behind a NAT is
| unreachable from the Internet under any circumstances".
| Instances where timestamps were implied to correlate but were
| actually 6+ hours apart once time zones were factored in. Pages
| and pages of things in that vein.
|
| None of that mattered - they were convicted anyway. It broke my
| faith in the justice system. The prosecution behaved in exactly
| the same way as today's legions of right-wing conspiracists,
| grifters and politicians do, because the truthfulness of their
| words didn't matter to them. Because the defense cared about
| the accuracy of what they were stating, they could be easily
| drowned out by confident, rapid bullshit and innuendo.
|
| I desperately want to find a way to help make the system
| better, but at every avenue the response has been "it's your
| funeral".
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| Stumbled aimlessly from biology to IT to philosophy to comp
| sci to criminology, got a lucky internship while working on
| data recovery and hardware repair. Lots of informal ways to
| break in right now because demand is very high but the
| overlap of legal/technological is still hard to find. So many
| private agencies will take anyone with decent creds right
| now. I would straight up cold call medium sized (<12
| people)private investigators and law firms if i was looking
| for work right now.
|
| Your story is sadly pretty common. networking might be the
| worst area for expert testimony right now because its so
| filled with proprietary tech and non-standardized jargon.
| ESPECIALLY the timezones, holy crap the amount of people who
| refuse to work in UTC. But that theme of 'ancient certs,
| terrible lazy theory' and zero pushback, is pretty much the
| norm outside of federal homicide cases. and even then.
|
| Im not going to pretend that defense teams are immune to the
| kind of 'ends justify the means' wishful thinking, but ive
| never seen even 1/5th the lazy fabrications or insane ass-
| pulls.
| Dyac wrote:
| I think the geolocation stuff is particularly concerning.
| Expert witnesses try to use it to prove which side of a road
| someone was on, or what route they took from point A to point B
| or something.
|
| My phone (Pixel 6) regularly gets my location wrong. I have
| lived in the same house, with the same router and same phone
| for years, yet every week it randomly tags incorrect
| coordinates on my photos, in some cases putting them a mile or
| more away, in a field or on the other side of town.
|
| For me this is a minor annoyance (and one I can't correct on my
| phone - it won't let me edit the coordinates because they were
| supplied by the phone. I guess I could edit the EXIF data on a
| computer if I cared to), but for someone being prosecuted it
| could place the trustworthiness of testimony under doubt or
| undermine their defense etc, with "their word against hard
| data".
| qingcharles wrote:
| I got arrested every day for months because GPS said I wasn't
| at home on house arrest.
|
| https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/false-alarms/
| qingcharles wrote:
| The prosecution brought an FBI forensic expert to testify
| against me and he was fantastically fair and had extremely deep
| knowledge. I was very impressed with him. I was expecting
| something totally different from all my reading of books of
| false convictions.
| tiahura wrote:
| The article doesn't prove anyone was actually innocent, only that
| dodgy science was admitted. In the highlighted case, I'm assuming
| the victim's multiple identifications of Odom as the perp was
| also fairly persuasive to the jury.
| csours wrote:
| Have we discovered how to prove a negative and I missed it? Or
| do we still have to look at the balance of evidence?
|
| In other words: in most justice systems, the prosecution must
| produce evidence of guilt, they hold the burden.
|
| It's also very important to know that (in the US justice
| system), evidence of innocence is not persuasive to appellate
| courts; they are looking for abuse of process.
|
| ---
|
| Now, cognition is a different matter altogether. When something
| terrible has happened, the human mind looks for the cause,
| specifically for the person who caused the terrible event.
|
| Sometimes, there is a person who did a crime - when someone is
| shot, that is generally treated as a crime.
|
| But sometimes sick people die. Sometimes infants fail to
| continue breathing. Sometimes wildfires burn a town and kill
| people. Sometimes viruses jump from (non human) animals to
| humans.
|
| In other words, in human cognition, satisfaction is more
| important than truth. Scientific truth is a framework whereby
| we delay our satisfaction with an answer, using specific tools
| that are socially accepted in that field of study.
| tiahura wrote:
| "Have we discovered how to prove a negative"
|
| Yes. You prove Odom was in Canada at the time, or that no
| crime actually occurred, or that someone else did it, etc.
| There are multiple ways to prove he didn't do it.
| adamsb6 wrote:
| Even photo and video evidence suffers from courtrooms that don't
| understand how nearly all cameras will record and encode images.
|
| JPEG encoding (and thus MPEG encoding) takes 8x8 blocks of pixels
| and represents them as a discrete cosine transform. In a very
| real way these pixels don't actually exist. If your video
| evidence relies on such a small portion of MPEG encoded video,
| you can easily mislead a jury to convicting an innocent person.
|
| I'm reminded of the Rittenhouse trial where the prosecutors had a
| technician massage a still from a video for hours until some very
| tiny collection of pixels, enlarged from the original by quite a
| bit, were arranged in such a way that they said demonstrated
| Rittenhouse initiated aggression against the first man he shot.
|
| The defense actually had some idea about such a small collection
| of pixels not being a reliable representation of reality, but
| couldn't sufficiently explain it and didn't have an expert who
| could, so the judge allowed it.
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| This is one of the better litmus tests to see if the expert
| witness is knowledgeable in the field, and more importantly,
| up-to-date on the tech. some really smart but definitely older
| expert witnesses will fumble this very hard.
|
| Its not like those kinds of processes, the "enhancing" filters,
| are inherently bad or inadmissible, you just have to be clear
| with the judge and jury what the hell is actually happening.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| This also came up in the Johnny Depp trial, where evidence
| was challenged and there was a long discussion about whether
| a video that had been shared over AirDrop was admissible, or
| whether that should be considered tampering, due to the
| possibility of it being re-encoded / compressed (which is a
| theoretically possible concern, as doesn't iPhone record in
| HEVC but change it to H.264 when shared with people?)
| thfuran wrote:
| >This is one of the better litmus tests to see if the expert
| witness is knowledgeable in the field, and more importantly,
| up-to-date on the tech
|
| It's an absolute travesty that it should fall to expert
| witnesses at all. Judges, police, and criminal trial lawyers
| should know how common forms of evidence work in general.
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| In my experience its just that technological ignorance
| muddies things so much that smart judges who otherwise
| understand evidence and admittance well will be silent when
| they arent sure, or worse, get actively bamboozled by
| shitters.
| brigade wrote:
| And conversely, it's a good litmus whether to listen to the
| "experts" on websites like this one. So many would discount
| literally _any_ image /video evidence just because of JBIG2's
| pattern matching or Samsung's ML model of the moon, without
| bothering to think about what's actually happening in the
| relevant pipeline.
| gruez wrote:
| >I'm reminded of the Rittenhouse trial where the prosecutors
| had a technician massage a still from a video for hours until
| some very tiny collection of pixels, enlarged from the original
| by quite a bit, were arranged in such a way that they said
| demonstrated Rittenhouse initiated aggression against the first
| man he shot.
|
| Is there an article with more on this?
| rpmisms wrote:
| Didn't find any with a cursory search, but the full trial is
| available on YouTube, and this particular argument is
| incredibly frustrating to watch. The judge should never have
| allowed it in.
| adamsb6 wrote:
| Not terribly in depth, but this is about the evidence I
| referenced: https://apnews.com/article/kyle-rittenhouse-
| technology-wisco...
|
| IMHO any upscaling in court should be strictly squaring
| existing pixels, along with heavy caveats on how encoding
| works. A 16X zoom means one black pixel becomes sixteen
| pixels, and jurors have to know that the individual pixel may
| not have ever been an accurate representation of reality.
| Anything else, even nearest neighbor, is adding information.
|
| Especially with recent smart phones that are using AI to
| perform "super zoom" techniques you could easily magic into
| existence something that never existed.
| Ukv wrote:
| This is the "clarified" video frame in question, alleged to
| show Rittenhouse aiming his rifle at protesters:
| https://i.imgur.com/7uWonoK.png (unfortunately with some
| extra degradation due it it being a screenshot from the trial
| footage)
|
| The glob of pixels to the left, interpreted as Rittenhouse's
| support hand, was actually part of the vehicle already
| present in the frames before he approaches:
| https://i.imgur.com/4itI2r8.png
| lkbm wrote:
| The first time I remember running across this was /Innumeracy/
| (1988) by John Allen Paulos. It's been discussed for decades, and
| as best I can tell hasn't really been addressed at all.
|
| I don't know the solution. Ideally, everyone would be good at
| math, but I don't see that happening in the near future. My best
| answer is for us to provide every court have an on-call
| statistician, reviewing every case. I would hope big law firms
| are already doing this, but you should get a mathematically-sound
| judgement even if you have to depend on an underfunded and
| overworked public defenders.
|
| (More recently, I've been wondering this about scientific
| publishing. Misusing statistical tests--or choosing the wrong
| once seems--like a fairly common source of error in peer-reviewed
| science. It feels like there, too, we need expert statisticians
| carefully reviewing every paper of note. Given the amounts
| charged by some journals, it feels like a reasonable service to
| demand of them.)
| pc86 wrote:
| > My best answer is for us to provide every court have an on-
| call statistician, reviewing every case.
|
| Is this not the exact reason for expert witnesses?
| twisteriffic wrote:
| Expert witnesses can be cripplingly expensive. Having a
| gratis sanity check sounds like a great idea, assuming you
| can find some way to insulate them from influence.
| claytonjy wrote:
| Can confirm. I worked at a small statistics consultancy
| where the owner did some expert testimony, and you have to
| reveal what you charge. The opposing side was often paying
| 500+/hr for shoddy work!
|
| I think we've seen stories of Ivy League professors
| charging thousands per hour, and making the bulk of their
| income this way. Not sure how high it goes in the most
| high-profile cases.
| Thrymr wrote:
| Expert witnesses are inherently adversarial, like the court
| system itself. There is no "neutral" evaluation of the
| reliability of a piece of evidence. If one side hires an
| expert to evaluate something, they are under no obligation to
| have the expert testify in court if the evaluation doesn't
| help their case.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Expert witnesses are inherently adversarial
|
| In the UK, expert witnesses are "servants of the court".
| Sure, they're paid by one side or the other; but they're
| witnesses, and they're required to give true, unbiased
| testimony, on pain of a perjury charge. Is it not the same
| inthe USA?
| qingcharles wrote:
| > My best answer is for us to provide every court have an on-
| call statistician, reviewing every case.
|
| Anyone paid by the government is always going to know which way
| their bread is buttered. They would always be looked on with
| extreme suspicion. Even public defenders have this problem
| defending their clients when they are paid by the same
| government that is prosecuting the defendant.
| stult wrote:
| It would help if the legal profession (at least in the US) did
| not actively select against numeracy. The running joke in law
| school is that everyone who was a decent student but bad at
| math goes to law school because the LSATs do not have a math
| component, unlike the GREs. I'm an engineer and former lawyer,
| and when I was in law school I actually ended up taking a
| really disproportionate number of tax law classes because I was
| so much better than my average peer at basic arithmetic that I
| could always beat the curve in classes that required basic
| calculations. And we're not talking about even intro level
| algebra, just basic arithmetic. Addition, subtraction, some
| multiplication and division.
|
| By ignoring math skills altogether, the legal profession
| necessarily ends up selecting for individuals who on average
| have a poorer understanding of anything quantitative or
| statistical, and often that also correlates with poorer
| understanding of _all_ technical and scientific matters,
| because the same innumeracy means those individuals don't make
| it far any sciences at all, even in their secondary or tertiary
| education. So they often don't even have strong fundamentals on
| the basic concepts in those areas.
|
| As an engineer, it was maddening to witness and absolutely
| pervades every aspect of the US legal system. Which both
| translates into reaching false factual conclusions as in OP,
| but also infects legal reasoning with a ridiculous lack of
| rigor (a point which lawyers often dispute vigorously, but they
| have no concept of just how much rigor they lose by eschewing
| mathematical and especially statistical reasoning), and it also
| translates into poorer operational efficiency and
| administrative efficiency in the legal system, and poorer
| outcomes from the regulatory system, which, while often
| informed by technical concerns, remains a primarily legal- and
| lawyer- driven process. That opens up regulatory bodies to
| subjective political concerns where there is absolutely no
| reasonable technical case to be made. This phenomenon is most
| obvious in recent history with climate change related
| regulations, but is pervasive throughout the US policy making
| establishment, and contributes substantially to our challenges
| with special interests and regulatory capture.
| the-dude wrote:
| Glad to see Lucia de Berk mentioned, a high profile Dutch case.
|
| Although she was acquited after some years, it wrecked her.
| graphe wrote:
| If we accept that court cases will have a non zero error rate,
| what rate are we comfortable with? Court cases are irregular,
| judges, the jury, the experts and the type of prosecution
| matters. Are we more comfortable with different crimes at
| different rates?
|
| In the US, you're presumed innocent (in the eyes of the law) and
| many in cases the law can tip the balance over a technicality,
| such as fruit of the poisoned tree and inability to admit some
| evidence that would be essential in a layman's eyes. How would a
| court be robust against problems such as biased experts, juries
| and judges? Would we be more comfortable with a lower or higher
| than average conviction rate? Is the problem the prisons?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I read about a case once where a man was convicted of rape. The
| evidence was that the rape was done face-to-face with the victim,
| and the victim positively ID'd him. How could she not, when she
| was face-to-face with him? It was a slam dunk.
|
| After some years in prison, the convicted person managed to get a
| DNA test, which proved he was not the rapist. How could this be?
|
| It turns out the DNA matched a convicted sex offender who had, in
| the meantime, died in prison. A picture of him showed that he
| looked just like the falsely convicted man.
|
| The victim, to her credit, profusely apologized for mis-
| identifying him, but she acted in good faith.
| 10000truths wrote:
| Do you have a link to the case details? At the very least,
| there has to have been some additional evidence to convict,
| even if circumstantial. I find it hard to believe that someone
| can be ruled guilty of a crime as serious as rape based solely
| on the plaintiff's testimony.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Here is an example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66513959
| 2devnull wrote:
| >I find it hard to believe
|
| I find it hard to believe you find it hard to believe. :)
| There's a cliche term for such cases, "he said/she said" and
| they are not at all uncommon.
| bawolff wrote:
| I dont think this term applies here - usually that term is
| reserved for one or both parties misrepresenting the
| situation. Here we have mistaken identity, which i would
| consider different.
| 2devnull wrote:
| My point stands. These are not uncommon cases. The
| justice system has obvious flaws and frequently goes
| awry. Mistaken identity, false testimony, wrongful
| convictions should be common knowledge.
| cafard wrote:
| Was this the case involving Alice Sebold? The man was
| cleared, but I don't remember whether DNA evidence was
| involved.
| DrunkOnPower wrote:
| Sounds like Steven Avery's rape conviction. He was convicted
| even though he had an alibi.
| WalterBright wrote:
| No. Sorry.
| graphe wrote:
| This indicates that the jury/judge also failed the innocent
| man. What would have saved him? Are these cases relics before
| dna? Would it happen again today?
| pc86 wrote:
| I think it depends on your definition of "failed." An eye
| witness said it was him. He likely didn't have an alibi that
| could have withstood an eye witness pointing at him and
| saying "he did this." Had he been at a convenience store on
| camera, or some other incontrovertible thing, it would have
| most likely turned out differently.
|
| I'm not sure how a reasonable judge or jury would have come
| to any other conclusion given what little we know about this
| third-person retelling of a case so I don't think they
| "failed" him at least in the way I typically think of that
| word being used in these contexts.
| michaelt wrote:
| For better or worse, a huge amount of our justice system
| depends on eyewitness statements.
|
| For example, if my crazy neighbour knocked on my door, pushed
| their way into my home when I answered then beat me up - the
| only evidence of who did it would be my eyewitness testimony.
|
| There would be incontrovertible evidence that _someone_ had
| assaulted me, in the form of my bruise-covered face and body.
| But only eyewitness testimony as to _who_.
|
| With the current justice system, that would almost certainly
| be enough for a jury to convict.
|
| There are tragic miscarriages of justice from time to time,
| and certainly DNA evidence should be used whenever possible.
| But would I prefer to live in a world which rejects
| eyewitness testimony, where a crazy person can barge into my
| house and beat me up with no consequences? Or a world where I
| have to have CCTV in my own home? Not really to be honest.
| graphe wrote:
| The manpower involved could also be an issue, they can
| gather dna and evidence but more likely it'll be ignored
| over other cases.
|
| For better or worst, we should accept that our justice
| system has holes and flaws, and we should do our best to
| avoid them. There isn't much to help you and they might not
| have any suitable punishment or aid to give to the crazy
| person.
| hobotime wrote:
| That wouldn't me just your verbal evidence there, as your
| other neighbors would be able to collaborate that you
| neighbor was crazy. There would be bruises on his knuckles.
| His clothing would have your blood on them.
|
| In cases of rape, where there's usually ample forensic
| evidence, there need not be a complete reliance on
| someone's testimony.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There were the semen samples taken, but this was before
| DNA matching.
| jandrese wrote:
| This sort of thing happens all the time. The Innocence
| Project has a multi-year backlog. If you are a black man with
| a public defender the prosecution almost doesn't even have to
| show up to get a conviction. Death row is full of people who
| were railroaded by the system.
| graphe wrote:
| Full of is misleading. If 1%-10% are innocent, 99-90% are
| still guilty. 21 of the 375 men that were innocent were on
| death row. https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-
| in-the-united-...
|
| Are these cases a relic before dna evidence?
| jandrese wrote:
| That's just for this one project.
|
| I'm not saying everyone is innocent, but the number of
| people who were wrongly convicted by a lazy system that
| let shoddy police work and lax standards become the norm
| is shocking.
|
| There's the old thought process that even if the guy
| wasn't guilty of this crime he's certainly guilty of
| others so they would be doing the world a favor by
| putting him away. In the end this is just self-justified
| racism.
| graphe wrote:
| >There's the old thought process that even if the guy
| wasn't guilty of this crime he's certainly guilty of
| others so they would be doing the world a favor by
| putting him away. In the end this is just self-justified
| racism.
|
| I'm sorry, where is race the factor in this? You could
| make a weak claim for sexism from your post but there is
| no racism.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Everyone acted in good faith - the lawyers, the judge, the
| jury, the victim. The problem is a system that believes
| eyewitness testimony is slam dunk evidence.
| graphe wrote:
| From your other comment it seems like this is a relic
| before dna testing. I've heard there are many samples of
| dna that have yet to be processed. Hopefully the
| circumstances don't occur again.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| Lots of times victims never will. There was a famous case of a
| guy that just admits to random crimes and the victim refused to
| believe it.
| qingcharles wrote:
| False suspect identification is historically one of the largest
| reasons for false convictions. Courts, thankfully, are slowly
| catching on to this and giving it lesser weight than they used
| to.
| bjornsing wrote:
| A few years back there were some stories in a Swedish newspaper
| about a method for medical age estimation of asylum seekers
| developed by a government agency. I could hardly believe my eyes
| when the person responsible for the accuracy of the method was
| quoted as saying that it was very reliable, because it used two
| unreliable methods to estimate if the person was above 18 years
| old, and then concluded that they were 18+ if _either_ method so
| indicated. You don't need to be a genius to realize your false
| 18+ rate will be higher when combining two methods in this way
| than it would be if you used a single method, but he argued the
| opposite.
|
| This caught my attention and I spent an inordinate amount of
| time, together with a group of other concerned people, trying to
| convince this government authority they were wrong, and later to
| expose them for it / stop them from continuing. But it sadly
| turned out to be next to impossible. They persisted with
| inaccurate/false affidavits and court testimony for years, until
| finally the minister of justice ordered a formal probe into the
| method. They then patched it up as best they could without
| exposing their previous errors, and pretended like nothing had
| happened. The formal probe issued an interim report with pretty
| harsh commentary, and was then cancelled by the minister of
| justice before it could give its final report.
|
| Forever changed my view of the Swedish justice system.
| cpill wrote:
| Mimics my impression of Sweden in general. It's not a nice
| place of you are not Swedish.
| bedobi wrote:
| in this case it's the opposite - the policy allowed asylum
| seekers to claim and benefit from being considered to be 18
| or younger when they were in fact obviously 30+
|
| but yeah your impression is not wrong, Sweden is not a nice
| place lol
| rossant wrote:
| Pretty much the same thing happened in France:
| https://www.cairn.info/revue-journal-du-droit-des-jeunes-200...
| (in French)
|
| Experts using scientifically unreliable methods to determine
| that asylum seekers are 18+ and can therefore be expelled from
| the French territory.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| This a bit misaligned, blame shifting. I will be the first to
| admit there are unscrupulous, fame seeking, and overzealous
| expert witnesses out there. But, there are mechanisms in the
| courts to filter most of them out. I just think it is not done
| for money, time, career, or political reasons.
|
| I have seen this fail both in the adversarial (e.g., US) and
| elsewhere in inquisitorial (e.g., EU) court systems.
|
| In the adversarial courts, time and time again I watch lawyers
| refuse to hire expert witnesses for their own side because
| <insert hubris here>.
|
| Overall, there is also the opportunity for a _voir dire_ of the
| expert witness. Failure to perform that is again lawyers ' fault.
|
| So, who is to blame for all the mistakes? Yes, all of them.
|
| Final note regarding experts in court, specifically around
| professional expert witnesses - there is a racket in the industry
| where new-comers are kept out. The expert witness industry does
| some gatekeeping not only for expertise, but for retiring law
| enforcement in some jurisdictions. For example, in some US states
| a digital forensics expert required to be a licensed Private
| Investigator, unless former law enforcement. The PI licensing
| requirement are completely irrelevant for the expert witness
| role.
|
| Personal anecdotal experience - Lawyer thinks he is
| technologists, refuses to hire expert witness, begs expert to
| come middle of the case. Lawyer hires cheapest expert, opposing
| expert makes haggis out of cheapest expert.
|
| Funniest one was where in a small court the State's expert start
| going off on some cockamamie ideas about transference. The
| opposing expert was an instructor and had one of her classes in
| court to learn. The class burst out laughing, and the judge had
| to gavel. When she got on the stance, it was just glorious,
| torturous evisceration.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| > time and time again I watch lawyers refuse to hire expert
| witnesses for their own side because <insert hubris here>.
|
| Because they are very expensive and most regular people don't
| have money for them? Because public defenders have a few
| minutes to look over a case and don't have time or resources to
| bother with this level of care? Which of the two are caused by
| hubris?
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| This is not a binary situation.
|
| I am writing that the choices made by lawyers are often for
| hubris, not lack of resources. This is my anecdotal
| experience, which is why I included qualifiers.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Most criminals can't afford expert witnesses. It is as simple
| as that. The court is supposed to intervene and force the State
| to pay for them, but it's such a nightmare it rarely happens.
|
| I had an expert witness testify for the prosecution against me
| and I thought he was fantastic, very fair and very
| knowledgeable.
| chaps wrote:
| Very, very much yes. Criminal courts really, really aren't a good
| place to address technical matters. For example, ankle electronic
| monitoring (obviously) doesn't work well in faraday-cage like
| apartment complexes. And yet time and time again, GPS skew is
| used to argue that someone left their home -- sometimes even
| months after the fact. I've read emails from a local sheriff's
| office that said that they consider a sufficiently weak signal to
| be a result of "foiling", period. Through FOIA though, I've been
| able to get over 100 million instances where a GPS device didn't
| have a strong enough signal. There are even criminal trials where
| an EM company will send a sales person to testify and to claim
| that they're not aware of any technical faults with the system.
|
| https://thetriibe.com/2022/11/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-c...
| (disclaimer: I'm the author)
| qingcharles wrote:
| Also wrote the previous one which ended with me serving five
| months in jail for retweeting the public defender's Tweet about
| it (not your fault):
|
| https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/false-alarms/
|
| This might have been the Tweet I reposted:
|
| https://twitter.com/CookCoDefender/status/153970586223037644...
|
| https://nitter.net/CookCoDefender/status/1539705862230376448
| oooyay wrote:
| Correct me if I'm off base here, but this seems to be
| absolute nonsense:
|
| > Like many on EM, Ross was never granted movement outside
| his home even once, not even to buy food. His sister, a
| manager at Securitas, helped when she could, but work got in
| the way sometimes, he said.
|
| So, they replaced the box you sit in with a box that you pay
| for and provide no additional services with all the same
| restrictions. What the fuck is the point of these programs? I
| can understand wanting to use EM to ensure someone shows up
| to a trial, but this geofencing stuff is absolute madness. It
| just reintroduces the problem that made prisons and jails
| problematic in the first place. If someone is a non-threat
| enough to let them live in society with a bracelet then let
| them live.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I wasn't allowed to leave for food.
|
| The judge told me he would not grant my request to leave
| for food. "Have you heard of Amazon? Order it online." he
| said.
|
| Then when I ordered it online he gave me five months in
| jail saying he never gave me permission to use the Internet
| :D
| oooyay wrote:
| > "Have you heard of Amazon? Order it online."
|
| That's textbook entrapment given that collecting an
| Amazon order, much less the occasionally misplaced one,
| would require stepping outside of your apartment.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Yes. I once stepped onto my front step to let my dog out
| and the police saw me and went bat-shit crazy about it.
| They told me I needed to hire someone to come to my house
| each day and open my front door to let my dog out.
| treebeard901 wrote:
| People in general do not seem to understand that the Govt
| more and more is not sending people to prison. They are
| bringing the prison to everyone instead.
|
| That ankle bracelet works the same way as the smartphones
| as far as location data. We all have ankle bracelets.
|
| Our cities are concrete surveillance prisons...
|
| It goes on and on and is another failure of the Justice
| system.
|
| I am dealing with a corrupt Judge as well so I know
| frustrating it can be.
| incahoots wrote:
| I've gone through the system in a similar fashion, but
| with no where near the same outcome as you did. If I
| hadn't gone through a similar situation I would almost
| believe that you were making it up, that's how ridiculous
| this is.
|
| For context I got stopped in a car with a friend who had
| weed (unknown to me at the time), had a really old
| warrant for something like a missed child support payment
| (also didn't know), and we were both removed from the
| car. Mind you, I was not driving, and the car did not
| belong to me, I was simply a passenger. Cops claim they
| have cause to search the car, I can't argue otherwise,
| car gets searched, weed was found, we both get hit with
| the charge.
|
| I was expected to pay $6000 for possession, spent a week
| in jail, lost my job, and had to travel 3 hours to the
| court house to "appear" in front of a judge with no means
| of getting there because every waking moment needed me to
| find a job and save any money I had to pay upcoming rent
| and needs, in addition to paying child support and not
| missing a payment otherwise I would end up in jail.
|
| That's how quickly this shit escalates, had I not found a
| ride to get to the court house at least twice, I would've
| been arrested for bail jumping, and lost my new job, and
| my apartment.
|
| Apologizes if I'm taking away from your experience, not
| my intention. I feel like that if others don't come to
| share similar stories, people are quick to dispel your
| situation as a one off, and accuse of not being
| responsible.
| pc86 wrote:
| Unfortunately, the common refrain in scenarios like this
| is that it's your fault. Even ignoring the weed, which I
| think a lot of people would have sympathy for, you owed
| child support that wasn't paid and had a [bench,
| presumably] warrant out for your arrest. The simple fact
| of the matter is that most people don't owe court-
| mandated child support at any point in their lives, most
| people that _do_ owe it pay it, and most people don 't
| ever have warrants out for their arrest.
|
| I don't say this as any sort of moral or character
| judgment, but simply to point out that part of the reason
| this thing is allowed to happen is because the people
| it's happening _to_ are very rarely sympathetic
| individuals. They 're viewed as bad people and "others"
| by the majority of the population.
|
| So what's the fix for this? I wish I had an answer, but I
| don't. Maybe teaching empathy so that the court system
| starts feeling pressure from the citizens that this isn't
| ok. Maybe legislation against charge stacking just to
| elicit plea deals. There's also the very real possibility
| of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction
| where DAs don't charge petty crime and people charged
| with violent crimes are released on signature bonds.
| chaps wrote:
| "Teaching empathy" won't do a thing and'll just be mocked
| and memed. We need to start at a lower fundamental.
|
| An easy first step would be to increase accessibility to
| court documents so that journalists and researchers have
| better means of researching these complex problems. In
| Illinois for example, the judicial branch is exempt from
| FOIA. This effectively manifests itself as an informal
| allowance of judges/prosecutors to get away with a lot of
| systemic injustices. They get away with it because the
| means of identifying these systemic problems is through
| data and records that exist beyond a moat. One existing
| alternative to FOIA here is the county clerk's in-person
| system.. but the system times out on half of its
| searches, is missing tons of docs, painfully slow, etc.
| Another existing path is through a FOIA to the State's
| Attorney's office, but they're notoriously slow and I'm
| amongst the handful of others who are suing for non-
| responsiveness. A lot of this is made worse by the
| State's Attorney hashing person and case identifiers to
| make it effectively impossible to understand how
| someone's case progressed through the courts, starting
| from the arrest.
| k2enemy wrote:
| I think you misread the parent. They didn't have an
| outstanding warrant, the driver did.
| pc86 wrote:
| You're right! I'm sure many would still view this as an
| "oh well, your own fault" type of thing though.
| chaps wrote:
| Do you?
| incahoots wrote:
| You're correct, the friend had the warranty out for child
| support, I was in good standing paid up.
|
| The fear was being jailed too long to respond to
| potential employers so that I could continue to work.
| Child support agencies are immediately notified if you've
| been let go and will hound you on a daily basis to find
| employment, there are no breaks.
|
| Thankfully I'm in a much better position in life, but I
| know what it's like if you don't have access to capital
| to hire a good defense attorney who isn't behind the
| 8-ball like public defenders always find themselves.
| incahoots wrote:
| Just for clarification I wasn't the one with the warrant,
| nor behind in child support. Entirely my friend's
| position, not mine.
|
| I think it's important to point out that our justice
| system is so overburdened with cases they have to take
| deals, and that's just for the side of the system where
| folks don't have access to capital to hire good
| attorneys, they get stuck with the even more overburdened
| public defenders, who don't eve have time to review any
| of the details of the charge.
|
| Then there's the other side that is well off and can
| fight their charge with a great attorney, or a team of
| lawyers, at which point the county/state decides it's not
| worth the hassle to tie up their DA on this particular
| case and they provide the defense with an agreeable plea
| (usually a slap on the wrist to get it wrapped up quick),
| then proceed with the next one.
|
| As as most faculties in our society, the issue is and
| always has been an issue of resources. The problem is
| everything is paywalled to near obscurity, and we kick
| the can further down the road.
| qingcharles wrote:
| No, you're not taking anything away. Your situation is
| (sadly) very common indeed.
|
| And as you say, if you start missing child support
| payments the judge will hit you with contempt charges and
| put you straight back in jail for several months to teach
| you a lesson.
|
| If you had ended up in jail the case might have run on
| for months or years. Once you are inside a jail you lose
| most contact with your attorney and your support system
| and you have the lowest priority in the system, so your
| case is usually just continued each month until the end
| of time.
|
| Find the wrong cops and you'll end up in jail for months
| for having some vitamins on you:
|
| https://archive.is/Blzbm
| RetpolineDrama wrote:
| >And as you say, if you start missing child support
| payments the judge will hit you with contempt charges and
| put you straight back in jail for several months to teach
| you a lesson.
|
| All of this should be illegal, debtors prisons by another
| name is all this is.
| Ekaros wrote:
| And this why there should be mechanism to throw judges
| and prosecutors for this sort of misconduct in prisons,
| for sufficiently lengthy sentences. With inmates being
| the peers they prosecuted.
| chaps wrote:
| It's very much a political issue over a practical issue.
| The EM program has been around since the 80s, but the
| pandemic caused its use to explode -- largely to reduce the
| spread of COVID in/out of jails.
| qingcharles wrote:
| This. And now with States finally trying to produce a
| fairer bond system (e.g. elimination of cash bail in
| Illinois and other jurisdictions), the system is
| expanding enormously.
| chaps wrote:
| Maybe not, but [without going into it on HN], we could have
| done much more. For the texts article, we took a _much_ more
| aggressive approach to pseudonyms to avoid something like
| that happening again.
|
| Hope you're doing well.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Yeah, lesson learned. I wasn't bitter about it. We both
| knew what could happen and I accepted the risk. You were
| doing absolutely the right thing. You did nothing wrong.
| You saw the transcripts, the judge was a piece of shit all
| the way to the end.
|
| I'm doing good. Almost all the charges were dismissed a
| couple of weeks ago. Last ones on appeal now. Hope
| everything is good with you.
| RetpolineDrama wrote:
| >which ended with me serving five months in jail for
| retweeting the public defender's Tweet about it
|
| Um, what? You served 5 months in jail for a retweet? Care to
| elaborate?
| qingcharles wrote:
| Yes. Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38603663
|
| Basically judge told me I was allowed to use the Internet
| while on bail and joked with me that as long as I didn't
| use it for anything illegal.
|
| Then when I retweeted the article "chaps" above wrote about
| EM not working etc, and I also tweeted about police
| misconduct (I was getting arrested every single day), it
| angered the local Sheriff's dept and they locked me up. The
| judge then basically made the most strained argument in
| history that he never gave me permission to use the
| Internet and that I was a bad person for Tweeting about the
| police under an assumed name (my Twitter account is also my
| name??). "Chaps" did his level best to help my lawyer, and
| we were 110% in the right, but the judge was days away from
| retirement, so fuck me lol
| RetpolineDrama wrote:
| https://thecivilrightslawyer.com/about/
|
| Send this guy your story, he might be able to help you
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Sounds like grounds for a lawsuit against the company. They are
| stating false things about their product and causing people
| harm.
|
| An official and highly paid representative sent to testify in
| court couldn't just be dismissed as "well, _one_ salesman
| misspoke, not our fault ".
|
| This would be the just recourse, but I'm aware that probably
| nobody can afford this justice.
| willy_k wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38602914
| soerxpso wrote:
| Saying you're "not aware of" something that is real but that
| you've managed to avoid awareness of, isn't illegal. The
| individual representative sent to testify probably really was
| unaware, and the company probably does a good job of making
| itself as a whole mostly unaware. As long as all knowledge of
| something routinely goes straight to the shredder before
| anyone important hears about it, unawareness is achieved.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| Yeah but those kinds of games have been standard practice
| in courts since time immemorial. Should it not be standard
| practice by now to clearly establish the QA/QC process,
| bugs opened and closed, roles and key people responsible
| for product features etc. during court proceedings?
| pdonis wrote:
| The problem is not the company per se but the fact that the
| government is allowed to get away with having an "expert
| witness" testify in court with no supporting evidence about
| something like this. The government should be required to
| produce, and keep up to date, positive evidence about the
| accuracy of such systems, collected independently of the
| manufacturer.
| chaps wrote:
| You'd think so, right? At least when I was researching all
| of this last year, absolutely no accuracy testing had been
| done in Chicagoland.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Can the defense have an "expert witness" refute the claims?
|
| There's also the issue of jury selection. If a potential
| juror seems like they might question faulty statistics, for
| example, and the prosecutors know they will be presenting
| some statistics, that juror wont be selected.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Can the defense have an "expert witness" refute the
| claims?_
|
| Yes, but the defense witness can make unsupported claims
| in the opposite direction. Neither "expert witness" is
| required to actually support their testimony.
|
| _> There 's also the issue of jury selection._
|
| Yes, definitely. Someone else upthread mentioned that
| too.
| rightbyte wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if computer forsensics is about as bad
| science as bullet forsensics.
|
| Ever since I had a porn virus hosting kinda lame porn videos over
| BitTorrent like 20 years ago, I thought about exactly how
| computer forsensics prove intent in child sexual abuse material
| cases.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I don't know. I've spoken to FBI computer forensics guys and
| their computer knowledge was up there with mine in terms of
| hardware, software, OS etc. I've been very, very impressed with
| them.
|
| The problems come when they pass their data to the prosecution
| and defense who are not computer trained and it all goes sour
| from there on.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ok nice to hear.
| conductr wrote:
| Recently a teacher at my son's school was found to be part of a
| child porn ring. His mug shot was posted alongside a couple
| dozen others and initial impression was it was organized crime
| pedaling this stuff. Perception was he's guilty; lock him up.
|
| The immediate response was he was fired, arrested, etc. There
| were no facts or investigation but the school was in
| communication with us and getting info from LEO as the
| investigation began. We pretty quickly found that no kids were
| involved (sigh of relief). Then found out it was a part of a
| FBI sting and he was actually a lone actor not involved in any
| type of organized 'ring' (wait, what?). Then about a month
| after initial arrest, we found out he watched on his computer
| (streamed or tracked from an FBI server) approximately 3
| videos. Unknown duration, unknown intent, unknown everything
| else. But, having seen the 'legit' side of the adult industry
| and how those websites work, I'm totally of the opinion he
| probably landed on a website and those videos 1) autoplayed 2)
| did not indicate or appear as containing underage people 3) or
| he clicked them and hit back once he realized the 'actors'
| appeared a little too young looking.
|
| The FBI sting also caught some terrible people and this
| teacher's mug shot in that press release basically made him
| guilty by association (that didn't exist). I don't know if this
| teacher did anything intentionally illegal, but in my opinion
| the facts that eventually came to be did not substantiate the
| initial response from law enforcement - which has ruined this
| man's career and ostracized him from our community (at
| minimum); he's still fighting to reduce charges so it's likely
| bankrupted him too. Also, If you search his name today, you'll
| see that press release and mugshot as top result.
|
| I know I've seen some adult content on 'legit' websites that I
| feel was questionable on age, no way to know for sure, but I
| didn't realize it until I viewed it and I just moved on with my
| browsing. It's scary to thing visiting any website could give
| the FBI enough data to come down this hard on someone.
| trident5000 wrote:
| Deliberately hiding evidence should should equate to hefty prison
| time for a prosecutor.
| qingcharles wrote:
| In known history, I think there has been perhaps one prosecutor
| charged with a crime over this. How about that for a statistic?
|
| From my experience it is literally impossible to report a crime
| made by a prosecutor.
|
| Hiding evidence might not even be a crime in many
| jurisdictions. In the USA it would be a constitutional
| violation, but that rarely makes it a crime because violating
| the constitution rarely becomes criminal unless violence is
| involved.
| dn3500 wrote:
| My father was called for jury duty a few years ago. The case
| depended on some physics, something about the angles and momentum
| in a car crash. My father was disqualified, because he's a
| physics teacher and may have been tempted to interpret the
| physics expert's testimony instead of blindly accepting it.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Yup. I don't think the problem is the jury, or even the
| experts. There's a fundamental problem with how the courts use
| expert testimony to ensure fair justice. I believe the idea is
| that to ensure fairness, verdicts should not be determined by
| variances in expertise amongst the jury. I recall being
| specifically instructed that I was NOT to question the expert
| testimony based on any prior expertise I might have. It solves
| one problem, and creates a ton of others.
| eli wrote:
| Jurors aren't expected to blindly accept expert testimony.
| Normal jury instructions are exactly the opposite: that jurors
| should treat it just like any other testimony and make their
| own decision on how trustworthy it is.
|
| I think the concern is more that they don't want a self-
| appointed expert on the jury having too much sway over the
| other jurors.
| rossant wrote:
| When my son was diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome [1], I
| investigated the science of this diagnosis and found out
| horrifying mistakes in French diagnosis guidelines, especially
| in physics-based arguments. These guidelines were written by
| medical doctors who did not seem to have the slightest
| understanding of basic physics, resulting in gross unit
| conversion errors, absurd comparisons, contradictory
| reasonings, and so on [2]. These flawed arguments led to flawed
| conclusions regarding differential diagnoses of pediatric head
| injuries, resulting in hundreds of erroneous medical diagnoses
| and allegations of abuse in the country.
|
| [1] https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-
| sha...
|
| [2] see e.g. https://adikia.fr/2018/05/biomecanique-des-chutes/
| (in French)
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| innocent _poor_ people.
| ubiquitysc wrote:
| Here's a worthwhile read on the subject:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33296669-the-cadaver-kin...
| eli wrote:
| I was a juror on a criminal trial once and there was a ballistics
| expert who testified that he was "100% certain" that the markings
| on a shell casing came from a certain gun. This is based on a
| visual inspection under a microscope.
|
| I googled it after the trial and sure enough when you put this
| sort of thing to the test, experts are not correct 100% of the
| time.
| load81 wrote:
| COVID enters the chat...
| rossant wrote:
| The author could have also mentioned the controversial diagnosis
| of shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma which has long relied
| on bad science, resulting in wrongful convictions:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
| rossant wrote:
| Mathematicians Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez have written an
| entire book on this very issue of bad statistics causing
| miscarriages of justice: https://www.amazon.com/Math-Trial-
| Numbers-Abused-Courtroom/d...
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