[HN Gopher] The heiress at Harvard who helped revolutionize murd...
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       The heiress at Harvard who helped revolutionize murder
       investigations
        
       Author : speckx
       Score  : 50 points
       Date   : 2024-09-03 21:29 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bostonglobe.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bostonglobe.com)
        
       | boomboomsubban wrote:
       | https://archive.is/jCESq
        
         | Digit-Al wrote:
         | Just switch to reader mode the moment it loads and you can beat
         | the paywall.
        
       | sriram_malhar wrote:
       | Frances Glessner Lee. What a force of nature!
        
       | PopAlongKid wrote:
       | >Lee's goal was to eliminate human bias from death
       | investigations. "[F]ar too often the investigator 'has a hunch,'
       | and looks for and finds only the evidence to support it,
       | disregarding any other evidence that may be present," she wrote
       | in an article for a criminology journal. "This attitude would be
       | calamitous in investigating an actual case."
       | 
       | But that's how Columbo[0] solves almost every case, using the
       | perpetrator's over-reliance on "other evidence that may be
       | present" against them.
       | 
       | [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbo
        
         | tcbawo wrote:
         | Although it also helps that he was able to get a confession
         | most(?) of the time
        
         | bugglebeetle wrote:
         | As much as I love Peter Falk, we should remember that Columbo
         | was a fictional character whose presentation had little to do
         | with the actual work of solving crimes.
        
           | PopAlongKid wrote:
           | >we should remember that Columbo was a fictional character
           | 
           | Sure, which is why I included a link for those not familiar.
           | 
           | >whose presentation had little to do with the actual work of
           | solving crimes.
           | 
           | It seems very plausible to me that for a pre-meditated
           | murder, the perpetrator might very well try to create fake
           | but valid-seeming evidence pointing away from them, as much
           | as creating an alibi. So I think the need to distinguish real
           | evidence from fake (as Columbo is wont to do) is very much
           | involved in the actual work of solving crimes.
        
       | lanthade wrote:
       | I wonder how Lee would respond to the allegations that many parts
       | of forensic science are actually junk science.
       | 
       | https://www.propublica.org/article/understanding-junk-scienc...
       | 
       | The innocence project is rather pointed example of how many times
       | forensic science has been used improperly to sentence people to
       | death.
        
       | avidiax wrote:
       | I would like to try solving the nutshell studies, but they don't
       | seem to have been digitized.
       | 
       | It might make a nice temporary online community to digitize and
       | reveal one nutshell per month.
       | 
       | I suppose it might undermine their use in education to have a
       | public answer for each of them, however.
        
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       (page generated 2024-09-07 23:01 UTC)