Voodoo Science in the Courtroom;
Problems with forensic evidence have plagued the criminal-justice system for years. Faith in the granddaddy of all forensic-science methods–latent fingerprint comparison–was shaken in 2004 when the FBI announced that a print recovered from the Madrid train bombing was a perfect match with American lawyer Brandon Mayfield. Spanish authorities promptly discovered that the print belonged to someone else.
Doubt turned to horror when studies revealed that certain types of forensic science had absolutely no scientific basis. Longstanding ideas about “char patterns” that prove a fire was caused by arson have been discredited. Yet at least one man, Cameron Todd Willingham of Texas, was executed based on such mumbo jumbo.
This cannot be Factual Kate. After-all Global Warming/Climate Change SLYENCE Charts & Models are ACCurate for at least a Hunnnerd Years Or a Huunnerd Decades at this time.
Sadly forensic science is solid compared to public health science.
I’m astonished that lie detectors are still in use.
This article makes a lot of generalizations, and has its own issues with credibility.
In reading it, I would come away with the idea that “char patterns” are of no value whatsoever in determining whether or not a fire was arson.
Having been the victim of an arson, I’ve seen the evidence first hand – burn marks on the floor from where an accelerant was used; unusual charring and stippling of wood in areas subjected to heat far in excess of the “normal” temperature for the fire.
Yes, there is “junk science” out there – especially “hair matching”. And there have been instances of overly cooperative forensic experts forming opinions based on being told that the “perp” is guilty, rather than the evidence at hand.
Each case needs to be evaluated on its own merits. The Madrid bombing case makes it sound like fingerprints are unreliable. Not true – but that’s because the actual process of “matching” prints is done by computer nowadays. The computer looks for points of similarity; it does not perform an actual match of patterns. Statistically, it’s bound to occur that some prints are declared a “match”, when in reality they may be nowhere near identical, but simply share a large number of features.
Defense attorneys would like nothing better than for all forensic evidence to be ruled unreliable. Don’t hand them that gift on a silver platter; allow competent experts to review and explain the evidence, allowing for ample cross-examination and criticism. If something is a fact, it will stand up to scrutiny.
…new study from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology…
Well that certainly gives me confidence in the article.
Lest anyone suspect that Willingham was innocent, he was convicted on other evidence as well.
“According to their sworn statements, both Brandice Barbee and Diane Barbee urged Willingham to return into the house to rescue his children, as according to Brandice Barbee, “All I could see was smoke”.[10] According to Brandice, he refused, and went to move his car away from the fire before returning to sit on a nearby lawn, “not once attempting to go inside to rescue his children”. Once the fire had reached flashover and the fire department arrived, Willingham became far more agitated, to the point of being restrained by emergency services.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Todd_Willingham#Witnesses_to_the_event_and_days_after
I would have convicted on that testimony alone.
If only the WSJ would apply that headline to climate change. How they don’t understand they just shot themselves in both feet regarding AGW is beyond me.
Can anyone read this with the confidence that the author is doing his best to present an honest picture?
All “interpretive” evidence is questionable.
Fingerprints, handwriting, polygraphs, etc. are interpretive and subject to the bias of the “expert interpreter”.
As such, the jury or judge should be informed of the possibility that bias may be part of the interpretation and that interpretation itself is an appeal to raw authority(a logical fallacy) rather than clearly measurable scientific surety.
David Milgaard was purposely framed, as have been others, and Milgaard spent 22 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Additionally, Larry Fischer, a serial rapist and likely a serial killer, went merrily on his way and committed many more heinous crimes after raping and murdering Gail Miller.
Mitigating exculpatory divergences from the expert interpretation should be specifically given amplification within our systems where innocence is the assumed position of the defendant and reasonable doubt should prevail over expert interpretation.
A relative of mine is a consulting forensic civil engineer (Remember the famous lawyer smashing through the high-rise window urban legend? That was one of his). The problem is that juries like clear yes or no answers, and you can’t get that with most forensic testimony. You get probabilities and estimates. “Preponderance of evidence” isn’t enough in a criminal trial, so there’s pressure to say that a piece of evidence is unambiguously inculpatory when in fact it’s part of a larger chain of reinforcing evidence that has to be considered in toto.
My relative’s partner was a forensic chemical engineer specializing in fire, and I’ve been on a few of their investigation sites when they needed an extra hand to hold gear. Paredoilia is a very real danger when talking about fire damage. When there’s a clear scorch line leading from the heat-warped gas can to the corner of the house, you don’t need science or even an expert to interpret that. It’s when it;s not so clear that you have to be very careful.
I’ve been involved in the occasional computer forensic case myself, and the difficulty of accurately determining origin and cause, much less proving it, is staggering.
One commenter at the linked article, Alan kelman, writes:
“Alcohol levels in re blood tests have been shown to be scientifically accurate. If a law is written that a level in excess of a particular blood alcohol reading is sufficient evidence of driving while drunk, that seems reasonable.”
Yes, they may be able to accurately measure blood alcohol content. And it seems reasonable to Alan kelman. What Alan kelman does not know is that the law was based on a single study with a sample of 163 people!!!
Since then jurisdictions all over the western world have adopted that law, with varying degrees of penalty attached, based on finding a blood alcohol content exceeding .08 and yet the study, if it were only a single study based on a ridiculously small sample of 163 people, would be laughed at today by reasonable people.
Those people weren’t proven to be drunk or impaired or to have even hurt anyone, they were simply convicted on having a blood alcohol content exceeding that allowed by the law.
Very sensible, Joey.
They don’t call it the Criminal Code because it is common law :).
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/window.asp
I remember that episode,it was widely reported in Newspapers such as the Vancouver Province, and on TV News reports. Snopes says it is true,and no,I don’t trust Snopes on anything political.
“[Prior to 2007], the biggest law firm to shut down was Toronto-based Holden Day Wilson LLP in 1996. Holden Day at its peak had 90 lawyers after a merger in 1990, but the firm was devastated in 1993 by a fatal accident involving popular partner, Garry Hoy, who playfully took a run at a window during a reception at the Toronto-Dominion Centre.”
You are claiming this is an urban legend? Show us your evidence,please.
Agreed. Further to that some juristictions (Alberta being one) convict you for a BAC of .05 – suspension and licence seizure. A BAC that IS NOT impaired.
It’s like fining people for driving 50km/h in a 50 km/h zone.
I got phoned in the middle of yesterday afternoon by a representative of MADD’s Red Ribbon Campaign saying they had been cut out of government support(?) and they needed people to make up the difference to improve the safety of Alberta roads.
I said, “Hell no, prohibitionists get no money from me.”
Long story short he had no idea what I was talking about. Here he is working for people who want to altogether bring back alcohol prohibition and I told him that if MADD had stated their true goal in the first place that they would have gotten nowhere.
So … OJ really IS innocent ?
No. I’d have voted guilty just for the gloves.
Obama and his racist cabinet are convinced every single black man in prison has been unjustly incarcerated. Be it for murder, rape, drug offenses, you name it. So he is bent on undermining the entire foundation of our criminal justice system – evidence. No admissible evidence … no charges, no trial, no incarceration. Perps will be running free. I’ve got news for you all … it is soon going to be a Wild West free for all … Totally lawless. This is entirely consistent with Obama’s disdain for the law in the way he has ignored our Immigration Laws, Constitution, and Congress. If you cannot live by the white man’s laws … then you just ignore them and crash the whole system. Obama’s legacy has been a sh*t show …
They’ve lowered the BAC limits from .10 to .08, in some places to .05, and they’re now talking about .04. None of this has been done with any studies that actually show these lower alcohol levels to result in significant impairment. OTC cold medicines, even the ones without alcohol, cause impairment far worse than these low levels of alcohol. For that matter, I’d argue that a soccer-mom, distracted by 5 unruly kids in the back of her van is probably as impaired, or perhaps even more so than another driver at .10 BAC.
The nannies justify their overreach with the false argument that “It’s worth the cost, even if it only saves a single life.” They never, never, never consider the possible costs (of all sorts, possibly including people’s lives) in weighing the value of their proposals.
This certainly happened, but it’s also an urban legend. By which I mean, some 15 years before this guy made his move, I was hearing stories that insisted that they hired off-duty Argonauts to fling themselves against the windows of the T-D Centre to assure the occupants that the windows were solid and safe. It’s a story that started going the rounds not long after the building went up; it may have origins in some testing or demonstration process on completion of the then unprecedentedly tall construction, or it may have been pure fantasy. But it was going around presented as fact for 20 years before this guy decided to act on it.
This phenomenon, of a folk tale taken for true and acted on and thus becoming true, is known to folklorists as “ostension”. Toronto has a claim to be the fatal ostension capital of the world. Another urban legend, that of the “Snuff film” in which a victim is actually murdered, was believed in by Karla Homolka and her boyfriend, who wound up making the first ever actual snuff film because they thought all kinds of other people had done it first.
For some reason, nobody seems to pick harmless stories when they decide to make them real.
As a child in the early 60s I enjoyed reading the stack of Reader’s Digest magazines kept in the outhouse. I remember well one of the amusing short anecdotes they published, it seems when they opened the high-rise Place Ville Marie in Montreal some of the secretaries on the higher floors were afraid of the floor-to-ceiling windows, that they might trip and fall through the glass. A burly construction worker gave them a demonstration, removing his hard hat, he ran across the floor and flung himself into the air to bounce off the window. When I heard the lawyer story I wondered if maybe he had read the same issue.
Another problem is that prosecutors are lazy with forensic evidence. I saw this personally in a rape trial, where the perp’s fingerprint was placed into evidence during trial, but once back in the jury room, a couple of jurors actually compared the recovered latent print to the perp’s own fingerprint… they didn’t match!!! It turned out that the prosecution had submitted a mirror-image of the recovered print, but the difference was enough to convince a couple of jurors who already wanted to acquit.
As it turned out, it was a mistrial, but the guy was later convicted in different cases as a serial rapist. If the prosecution had done their job right, the validity of the fingerprint would never have been in question.
one of the greatest problems with “forensics” is human error coupled with their EGOs. As a service tech I was often sent out when the technical/mechanical problems as stated by the customer didn’t make sense. I found that about 75% of all technical problems were either completely or mostly human error (stupidity and ego)which was then covered up so as to not void warrantee. With cops and their EGOs, crowns and their need to convict for their “record”, and “scientists” need to be “experts”, and juror’s general ignorance, you have quit a combination that tends to lend it’s self to error
OZ
Re ‘blood alcohol levels around driving”
I remember John Brignell
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/number%20watch.htm
on how these got
“The March of the Zealots”
but can’t find a link just now
Thanks for your comments/explanations Joey. Like you, I focused in on the Madrid bombing fingerprint statement. And yes, according to the article, “The Madrid bombing case makes it sound like fingerprints are unreliable.”
Clearly, if finger prints are suddenly unreliable then many essential identification systems based on finger prints (law enforcement, criminal investigation, military and civilian deaths, immigration, computer log in, security/background checks, etc) are useless. It would be a major shift in identification science.
So why did the author include this example in his article without explanation of it’s exceptionalism …. why even mention it if not to imply that fingerprinting is undependable. I think it was done intentionally. That makes me wonder about the entire article. What’s the agenda?
Fingerprints didn’t “suddenly” become unreliable. They never were. We aren’t under the spell of the “experts” any more.
From Fall 2003(over a Decade ago):
http://issues.org/20-1/mnookin/
a taste>
“Although some present-day defendants do retain a fingerprint expert of their own, what is striking, even astonishing, is that no serious effort to challenge either the weight or admissibility of fingerprint evidence ever did emerge until just a couple of years ago. One of the many consequences of DNA profiling and its admissibility into court is that it has opened the door to challenges to fingerprinting. Ironically, DNA profiling—initially called “DNA fingerprinting” by its supporters to enhance its appeal—could turn out to have planted the seeds for fingerprinting’s downfall as legal evidence.”
You see, David in Michigan, you have just become aware of what many people already knew, that few people challenged the experts and their claims before, about the actual efficacy of fingerpints.
But it turns out that fingerprints and the experts that make false claims about their value were just accepted without examining whether or not the claims about their value being true or false from the very start as they should have been.
Here’s the deal Oz. I could say a lot about that article but I’ll keep it short.
A law professor claims that finger print identification is not meeting some kind of standard …. but offers no examples where it actually was shown to be incorrect. Then she shifts to attacking the qualifications of the examiners….. she argues that there is no specific criteria for identifying fingerprints. But in this she later acknowledges that there are in fact certain standards, just varying in details. And finally, she is forced to admit that, in the very worst case scenario, fingerprint identification is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that can be presented (right up there with DNA which she also (initially) tries to undermine).
All in all, I think the entire lengthy argument in an exercise in lawyereze and essentially without much merit. Defense lawyers make their living trying to introduce doubt in jurors…….
Oz: I wrote a good response but somehow it was lost. I’m not going to recreate it. Let me leave it at two sentences:
Defense lawyers (author) try to introduce doubt in the minds of jurors …..
The article was self contradictory and I give it little merit.