The New Yorker had a really interesting article about arson forensics, a few years ago. It interleaved the case of someone being executed for arson, with a thorough debunking of the science behind his conviction.
And then fiber analysis has been debunked too.
And the list goes one: hysteria over child abuse combined with well-meaning but incompetent interviewers creating false memories in supposed victims. The problems with coerced confessions.
It's an interesting podcast, but their interviewee sucked and she didn't really cite any actual science; just hand waved away things.
I've found the studies they cite on fingerprints (your fingerprint could match up with 1 in ~300 people; they're not as unique as once though -- the study that's often cited is from the FBI) but I can't find anything on gun/bullet print identification.
Supposedly you can't match a bullet to a gun, especially with more modern firearms with precise milling. Yet all the sourced I've found should photos of bullets with distinct patterns that seem to match a particular firearm.
Then we find that all these photos are stock photos from the depths of FBI labs and none of the photographs show an actual slug collected from a crime scene.
I heard an interesting one on a Dateline. Cops had some DNA they could not match. So they did phenotyping and turned the info (hair color, eye color, etc) into a sketch. And that was enough to get court orders for people that matched the sketch to submit DNA samples.
There was a video of the police department announcing it, and even endorsing the company (Parabon) in the announcement.
Maybe not complete junk science, but sketchy legal ground to me.
It's sketchy legal ground. Basically they could say "everyone with blonde hair and brown eyes must submit", and through other extralegal means have found out the culprit had blonde hair and brown eyes. They manufactured a way to search and arrest them.
My question is was this everyone over a large area or were they going to a pool of people they already had some suspicion on. If they have a group of suspects and are using this to narrow down who to actually have submit samples it's more ok to me.
It isn't news that the courts allow whatever junk science leads to convictions.
Courts have allowed drug-sniffing dogs as evidence for ages. They're barely more accurate than a coin toss and easily persuaded to give false "testimony" by their handlers.
A coin toss with little false negatives might be a good filter for a more annoying or expensive test. I think that would be a fine use of the tool even if I agree that as primary evidence it might be lacking.
> A coin toss with little false negatives might be a good filter for a more annoying or expensive test.
Highly sensitive tests are great for this. They're usually cheap and quick. They have a low false positive rate so a negative result is likely to be correct.
Since they detect anything that even remotely looks like the targeted substance, they have a substantial false positive rate and a positive result must always be confirmed with specific tests. However, police forces seem to treat a positive result as sufficient cause for an arrest.
> police forces seem to treat a positive result as sufficient cause for an arrest
My impression from watching too much COPS and LivePD is that police don't really see arresting people as that serious, "They'll be out in few hours". For the people they arrest most often it's probably not that big a deal either. But if it's your first ever then your lifestyle is under serious and permanent threat.
EDIT: Removed "middle class". Getting arrested is terrible no matter what your economic or class status is.
What do you think happens when you're trying to get to work at a shitty retail job and you get arrested?
If anything, it's worse for the working class folks because they don't have a buffer, their friends and family likely don't have one either, and they are considered infinitely disposable by their employers.
It's not so much about class but whether or not your already a felon. Most of the arrests you see on those shows are people out on parole or with massive rap sheets.
Going from no criminal record to your first is a huge change of circumstance vs getting another incremental charge. I shouldn't have used the word middle class as it distracts from the core dynamic at play.
Once you're arrested and with a serious conviction on record it's difficult to dig out from that hole. If you end up in prison--for whatever reason--it's basically college for being a criminal because there is not even the facade of rehabilitation. When you get out all you get is the desire to not end up back in prison, but with the socialization and lack of skills that makes it easy.
Don't use those TV shows as a reflection of reality--they're as real as any other reality TV show, which is to say it's an incredibly distorted version of reality.
Isn't arrest even bigger deal to someone on parole and dependent on not being arrested to not go back to prison? I get that it is "bad guy", but there are possible very real consequences for that person.
It is big deal. ThE low level jobs will fire you when yoi don't show up. Your relationship will be affected. The familly needed you do stuff and suddenly you can't. You may have to pay money to get out even if you have done nothing wrong.
It is actually stresfull to be in jail for poor people too.
The first time I was arrested, after about 3 days, one of the inmates said to me: "You don't know how to get out of here, do you?" I did not. He told me that he would be released in a couple of hours, and if I had the money for bail, he'd come and get me out.
Bless that man!
It seemed as if he had the process down.
I made more friends in jail than I did in college. But you are right - it is no fun and it is no joke. For anyone.
A false positive rate of 2 to 4 percent could be terrible if the real positive rate is much lower than that.
Say 1 in 1000 people are actually carrying the substance you're looking for - a false positive rate of just 1% would mean that for every person you identify correctly, you'll falsely identify about 10 others.
Yes, that's just it, proportionality. Dogs might be good to sniff out contraband or whatever to flag searches, but perhaps not as incontrovertible evidence of something.
How often do cases rely on dogs as 'incontrovertible evidence of something though'. It's not like they testify!
If the dog's mentioned at all, surely normally it's background context to why the person was searched and the drug found [and if the police are lying about the finding, it's not the dog's fault!]
In some places they have "fruit of the poisoned tree" -- there are clear rules for searches, and evidence obtained without using those means is not admissible in court.
It feels weird that law enforcement get just avoid all of that by training dogs to alert at a handler's signal.
I didn't elaborate too much in the first post, but this is the gist of it.
Any search that was enabled by a dog should be considered "fruit of the poisoned tree". Between their lack of accuracy and a dog's bias towards its handler, they should not ever serve as a basis for search or arrest.
When the justification for initial stop/search comes up in court, the dog's hit is held up as incontrovertible proof that a search was justified. Courts have upheld their use many times, all the way to SCOTUS IIRC.
This approach is far to prone to misuse by law enforcement. It's bad enough they can pull you over without cause (most states have loosely defined "irregular driving" laws), they can initiate a search of your car just as baselessly.
""fruit of the poisoned tree". Between their lack of accuracy and a dog's bias towards its handler, they should not ever serve as a basis for search or arrest."
I think this is upside down ... the police are never going to have 'incontrovertible proof' of contraband before they do a full search by definition. If they did need such 'total evidence' to search, they wouldn't need to do the search at all ... they could just make the arrest.
And a dogs hint is not presented as evidence of a crime, merely reasonable suspicion for a search, which is what we want the tool for.
The point is to provide some degree of a reasonable basis for suspicion, after which more effort is used to determine the material outcome: either you have 1Kg of coke, or an illegal gun ... or you don't.
The entire point of the tools are to use something that demarcates reasonable suspicion; dogs, and other things, are viable tools.
If you attempt to enter a country, and you are asked where you are staying but can't provide an answer, or if you do not have a return flight - these are indications of 'reasonable suspicion' of further questioning.
The point is to provide some degree of a reasonable basis for suspicion
SCOTUS ruling notwithstanding, I don't consider a dog a reasonable basis for suspicion. They're easily manipulated - may as well just come right out and let the police search whoever they want, because that's what dogs allow.
The point is that if a law enforcement person lies about finding something due to their dog, the problem is juries [reasonably] trust the law enforcement personnel are telling the truth about what they find afterwards, not that they trust the dog's instincts. Indeed your average jury is almost guaranteed to have someone with enough interest in dogs to know they sometimes react to things other than suspicious substances.
If the 'dogs' can provide a scientifically credible means for 'flagging' that's significantly above random chance, but still below the threshold 'beyond a shadow of a doubt' they can absolutely be used.
If a police officer smells the odor of marijuana in the car, or alcohol on the breath, or, for example, sees a crack pipe or 'empty beer' cans - those things are all examples of reasonable suspicion and it's the whole point.
That those powers can be abused is again a secondary issue.
Finally, is the obvious issue that there's very little harm done otherwise, the 'false flags' from either dogs or 'empty beer' cans that result in searching doesn't compromise the individuals or the community at large: a 'blow test' or a 'legal search' results in more accurate presentation of justice, not less.
If the 'dogs' can provide a scientifically credible means for 'flagging' that's significantly above random chance
That's the problem. They cannot.
" narcotics-detecting dogs and their handlers aren’t very good at discerning the presence of illegal drugs. Multiple analyses of drug-dog alerts have consistently shown alarmingly high error rates — with some close to and exceeding 50 percent. In effect, some of these K-9 units are worse than a coin flip."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/05/supreme-c...
There is nothing scientific about it. They don't present the dogs when something isn't found. They don't provide a record of how frequently something was/wasn't found when a dog alerted. They just classify it differently when the dog was wrong, "trace presence of drugs was indicated by the dog". Instead of, "the dog was wrong" and is wrong x% of the time.
There does seem to be some issues with how the court system has failed to keep up with the modern day. Issues with scalability, accessibility and science literacy are leading to a general distrust of the system.
My experience with the US justice system was as a 16 year old part-time employee of a local grocery store that was robbed.
I realized that the police were not what children's shows illustrated them as when I was given a polygraph for a crime I did not commit.
And then brought in BY MYSELF with 0 indication I could have either a guardian or lawyer, and told that I failed the polygraph and that I should confess now so they would go lightly on me.
I have never been so terrified of anything in my life. Looking back, and after spending the rest of my high school career researching the "science" behind polygraph, that's exactly what the purpose of the polygraph was. Your "results" aren't important. Your answers are important. If you deviate, even when the police explicitly tell you to lie to set a baseline (as they did for me; I refused and said that I would lie about something else not related to the actual crime), they've got you for a crime you didn't commit.
Just garbage people controlling a garbage system intended to enact garbage things for garbage reasons.
“should confess now so they would go lightly on me.”
That’s how they get a lot of people to confess things they didn’t do. If you are poor and can’t afford a lawyer you will likely accept a wrong plea for a few years versus the threat of twenty years or more in prison. It’s a pretty bad system.
How come this type of thing isn't highly discouraged? As in, law enforcement or the justice system pressuring people into this should be a taboo with serious punishments. We have laws around entrapment, so how come this is okay?
Truth doesn't matter. If you "get the charges through", you're successful, with little to no penalty for failure, as a LEO or prosecutor. Innocence and guilt are irrelevant. Justice, fair punishment, and rehabilitation are also not relevant. Success is measured by man-years in prison (or arrests for law enforcement). Usually there's room to just blame someone else if you do face scrutiny. Honestly, I think this is a result of greater cultural issue in the US (maybe other countries too, I just can't speak for the culture).
They get rewarded for successful convictions. And they always have the same defense - if those people aren't guilty, why are they confessing? Which is obviously stupid, if your choice is to serve 2 years now or risk getting 20 if the jury doesn't like you, then unfortunately the smart choice is to lie and take the 2 years. Jury system is also absolute nonsense and should be abolished.
Because if everything went to trial the system would break down. I have read that 90% never go to trial instead there is some kind of plea bargain. If that practice got abolished the court system would need to grow a lot. It’s cheaper to throw innocent people into jail.
>However, the act does permit polygraph tests to be administered to certain applicants for job with security firms (such as armored car, alarm, and guard companies) and of pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors, and dispensers. The law does not cover federal, state, and local government agencies.
Since doesn't apply to any governments (local, state, federal) so so government employees are subjected to polygraphs.
Interestingly, it can be argued that polygraphs may have their place in a limited amount of employment situations as long as the lying/truthful results are thrown out as the test may work as a "placebo" for the interviewee to admit to serious skeletons in their closet.
>Polygraph results are of questionable scientific value, but the interviews have an unexpected benefit apart from their dubious powers of detection: under pressure from interviewers, applicants frequently admit to wrongdoing.
To be clear I personally lean towards not using polygraphs at all for employment situations.
"it can be argued that polygraphs may have their place in a limited amount of employment situations as long as the lying/truthful results are thrown out as the test may work as a "placebo" for the interviewee to admit to serious skeletons in their closet."
If the test cannot distinguish between true and false, then any purported "skeleton" is as likely to be false as it is to be true.
The idea isn't that the machine is actually detecting anything here, it's that the general atmosphere of the "test" and a sufficiently convincing performance of "the machine says you're not being truthful" will get people to volunteer information that they would otherwise have kept to themselves. It's a variation on an old technique where an interrogator will claim to have incriminating evidence or eyewitness testimony that they actually don't.
I wonder how the accuracy of polygraphs compares to that of psychological evaluations. Real science can still be too inaccurate to overcome reasonable doubt too.
That has probably never been the case for psychological evaluation. As the article hints at, the assessments should be under strong scrutiny. Not only in the courtroom for that matter.
While I do think it preferable to get an opinion about criminal responsibility, it should be considered as an educated guess.
Are these the same psychological evaluations that psychiatrists do to determine if somebody can be involuntarily committed? Because that sounds like an even bigger problem than this being abused in the criminal justice system. At least in the latter you tend to have rights afforded to you, whereas in the case of the former in some places they can literally even bar you from speaking to an attorney.
There are two situations in the US in which a person can be committed against their will. The first is if the person is considered a threat to themselves or others. I don't believe there's a standard evaluation for that. But the threat needs to be immediate and explicit. A homeless person wandering through a park shouting he's going to kill the president isn't going to cut it. However, that person could wind up arrested, which brings us to the second reason a person could be involuntarily committed: being mentally unfit to stand trial. And for that there are standardized evaluations. Keep in mind the bar for being mentally fit to stand trial is pretty low. It basically means you understand what a judge is, what a jury is, what the lawyers do, being able to communicate with and understand your lawyer, etc. If you are found unfit to stand trial, you will be involuntarily committed until such a time as you are considered fit to stand trial.
You can still see an attorney while committed, and you will be periodically re-evaluated and that goes before a judge. As for cracks, I'm aware of cases where a person has been put on a 72 hour hold inappropriately, but one bigger issue is declaring people mentally fit for trial who really aren't. I know institutions in Florida have been criticized for basically doing the bare minimum to make people appear to be just barely mentally fit.
You are correct that people found mentally unfit to stand trial can remain committed for years, particularly those with drug-resistant schizophrenia. Tragically, for some of the most vulnerable members of society this is the best case scenario. People with severe schizophrenia who can't function often end up on the street, suffering hardships and victimized. There are parents who's child is on the street, getting frostbite and being assaulted, who go to any psychologist they can find to try to find someone to declare their child a threat to themselves or others so they can get into treatment. But they rarely are. Often they just have to hope their child commits some minor infraction like shop lifting and wind up declared unfit to stand trial so they can get the treatment they need.
You make it sound like this is only used for good and that nothing can ever go wrong with this system. That's not true. While you do get reevaluated, you get reevaluated by colleagues of the person (or the same person) who initially committed you. Furthermore, you're forced to take mind altering substances at their say-so and are imprisoned in a place, where any sign of fear or anxiety is counted against you.
Also, in some places it's possible for the psychiatrist to determine that contact with an attorney would "exacerbate your condition" and can bar you from seeing one.
I would much rather be on the street and free than indefinitely locked up and treated as poorly as people in mental institutions are.
Like I said, I can only comment on the system in the US. I hadn't heard of the person you mentioned, but it seems this was a case in Germany where he was found not guilty of charges on the basis of insanity, and held in a psychiatric facility. I'm not entirely sure if that could happen in a US court. Getting a not guilty by insanity verdict is rare, and would have to be made by the defense with the consent of the defendant.
There is absolutely room for abuse in the system, in the US and any other country, I won't argue against that. And I'd love to here any proposed reforms or ideas you might have about improving that. Requiring the mental health evaluator and the facility treating you to be separate would reduce the issue you mentioned about being re-evaluated by "colleagues of the person (or the same person) who initially committed you" and I think that is currently the case in the US in some states, though I'm not sure. Also requiring that someone always has access to an attorney would be good (again, I'm fairly sure that's true in the US). I also think significantly more funding should be made available to mental health institutions, allowing people to voluntarily enter for free or for a small rate, expansion of halfway-house type facilities and programs, restructuring the administration of facilities (a big complaint from my father is that bureaucrats with little education often had control over facility policies rather than the PhDs who dedicated themselves to studying the best way to treat mental illness)
My parents are both clinical psychologists, and my father used to do some evaluations for the courts. If I remember correctly, he would do evaluations to see if a person is mentally fit to stand trial, and would recommend to the judge if the person would be better served with psychological help than prison time. Some context:
- Being mentally fit to stand trial is an very low bar to pass. You just need to understand what a judge is, what a jury is, etc. Generally people who don't pass either have some sort of intellectual disability or severe schizophrenia.
- The article lists a ton of different situations where psychologists are involved in the legal system, and I don't see a breakdown on what the psychologist is attempting to do. I know my Dad didn't use much more than an IQ test and some basic questions to try and diagnose a couple of clinical conditions. I'd expect some amount of pseudoscience if one side in a messy divorce hires a psychologist to try and show the other side is a bad parent, or the defense in a criminal case trying to show the defendant was in a fragile emotional state and deserves a reduced sentence.
First of all something called "Psychological Science" already raises my hackles. Science in general has become so corrupt and politically oriented it makes killing elephants to vilify your technical rival's creation look understated. We have so much useless "science" being funded and won by professional grant hounds that garbage is inevitable.
The US has a legal system not a justice system. I suspect that is true of many countries. Once you are caught up in it then you will realize it isn't personal and it has nothing to do with the truth or justice. We have incentivized "winning" of trials and have blindly gone along with the idea that having both sides behave horribly ensures fairness because well..What else can you do?
Might be time to step back and think if a bunch of premises are working out. Does giving some wannabe tyrant a lifetime job really result in good decision making because they are "free" of political influence? Is it cool to allow for things like fine print and to allow lawyers to be immunized from many bad behaviors because lawyers keep writing rules in such a way to keep lawyers employed? Is it really cool that a prosecutor can lock someone up for 20 years who was innocent but that the recourse is some lawsuit where everyone pays for the settlement and they get to basically get away with "oops"? Is it cool a defense lawyer can "win" a case where they know their client is a child molesting cannibal?
Philosophy and big questions may seem quaint and are often the target of people who claim they are some form of scientist but for some reason my non scientist self and many average people seem to be able to suspect that the legal system is a bit fucked up, paying someone to publish papers on the implications of tyrannosaurus rex having created a vegan matriarchy might also be fucked up and if you let those things near each other some really bad stuff happens unless you get serious about fixing the core of problems both of them have.
Fingerprints are actually pretty accurate, though no perfect. Polygraphs are generally not admissible it court so I don't know what you are talking about.
When last I read up on fingerprinting it was pretty dodgy - the problem being not that it's inaccurate, but that nobody really knows how accurate it is. Apparently the professional society that analysts all belong to forbids its members from participating in studies, taking the position that it's "100% accurate when done properly" (which is clearly meaningless).
It's probably 4-5 years since I read about this, it'd be nice if things have changed.
>> Apparently the professional society that analysts all belong to forbids its members from participating in studies, taking the position that it's "100% accurate when done properly"
Refusal to run a gauge R&R while insisting errors are due to the operator is a sure sign of a problem. If it hasn't been done, that's one thing but refusing to allow it is quite another.
It's the same problem as it is with most anything. They want to use huge databases, but to do that usefully you need an unrealistically low false positive rate.
Even if the rate was actually really good -- something like 99.9% accuracy -- if you apply that to a database with a ten million people in it, you get ten thousand false positives, which is crap.
If you pick one of the matches at random, they want to be able to claim that it's a 99.9% chance that it's them, but it's really a 99.99% chance that it isn't. Or worse, since it's possible the true perpetrator wasn't in the database.
Even for things like DNA that theoretically can do better than 99.9%, you can't get much better than that in practice because before you can, the error rate starts to be dominated by human error rather than coincident matches.
I work in a consulting field where the professional society forbids its members from publishing statistics on client success. There are some good reasons it's generally frowned upon but it's also the only remotely objective measure of whether anyone actually benefits from your work.
Whether a fingerprint is unique and wether a bad fingerprint is good enough to convict somebody I don't want to judge here, but there is another aspect of fingerprints:The negative check. If the fingerprints on the knife don't match the suspect's the suspect didn't use the knife (unless there's an indication of gloves) and thus creates a strong reason to show innocence. A "negative" polygraph test still leaves room for a good lier.
In a perfect world, the prosecutor would give that info to the defense with sufficient time. In the real world, the prosecutor will drop 30 pages off in front of the defense 20 minutes before the trial begins.
Can you provide evidence that this is a commonly tolerated practice in "the real world"? Are you a judge, prosecutor, or criminal defense attorney?
It's a common trope, but courts really do have discovery deadlines, continuances are common for a variety of reasons, and undisclosed evidence can be excluded from consideration.
New York state changed their laws on January 1, 2020, to alter the previous practice where the government only had to provide the evidence they had to defense lawyers on the day of the trial, and only if specifically requested by the defense.
The majority of people in jail in New York right now, today, had to accept/reject plea deals without seeing any of the governmental evidence against them.
It is to be hoped that the future of NY's justice system will be much fairer, but police unions are fighting hard against the new changes and they may well be repealed.
The "only if specifically requested" is commonplace and requesting evidence is a routine part of any case. I'm all in favor of "automatic" discovery in criminal matters—I don't believe the prosecution should have an information advantage—but the fact that it wasn't previously required by law isn't evidence that it was broadly inadequate.
Same goes for the deadlines. Sure, the law didn't set a specific timeline—but that's not evidence that prosecutors routinely "[dropped] 30 pages off in front of the defense 20 minutes before the trial [began]."
The "dropped 30 pages" is a pretty common complaint for public defenders. Now, it could be that they keep losing the cases, but it's pretty common for the state to only provide evidence on the day of a trial and often don't point to exculpatory evidence or exclude it from the documents being provided.
Your statement reminds me a lot of how a 'rapid psychological profiling' tool works in the PsychoPass anime, which you might find interesting as a good example of such a system used in a science fiction setting.
>Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no". It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009
And then fiber analysis has been debunked too.
And the list goes one: hysteria over child abuse combined with well-meaning but incompetent interviewers creating false memories in supposed victims. The problems with coerced confessions.
It's all quite terrifying.