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FBI Doesn't Tell Courts About Bogus Evidence
dprovine writes "According to a joint investigation by The Washington Post and 60 Minutes, a forensic test used by the FBI for decades is known to be invalid. The National Academy of Science issued a report in 2004 that FBI investigators had given "problematic" testimony to juries. The FBI later stopped using "bullet lead analysis", but sent a letter to law enforcement officials saying that they still fully supported the science behind it. Hundreds of criminal
defendants — some already convicted in part on the testimony of FBI experts — were not informed about the problems with the evidence used against them in court."
Lie Detectors are still occasionally used and can be presented in the US. The basic premise behind them is very tenuous but they continued to be used. What they tell you is several physical indicators of stress which may or may not correlate to telling a lie. Nobody has proved a strong correlation but they continues to be used in the US.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
That's what happens when the judicial system is an adversarial system - the prosecutor feels that the defendant is his enemy, because his record is dependent on the percent of cases he closes with a conviction. At the same time there is little to no penalty for convictions that are later overturned, unless they happen to be VERY high profile cases. I am not saying that another system is better, but this problem is certainly inherent in the system.
Other than dramatically increasing the responsibility for false convictions and penalties for malicious persecution, I am not sure that I can come up with any changes that would remedy the problem. People are intrinsically prone to corruption when they are going to benefit from it... and the "blue wall of silence" is just one example of what happens in fraternal orders endowed with power over people's lives.
If this turns out to be true, which it seems to be, then William Tobin is a hero for revealing all of this. If I were in his position, working for so many years under the assumption that the FBI had actually done some tests to back up their original theory, I too would be pissed off that my spurious work had put so many people behind bars for decades (the article mentions someone behind bars for 22 years based solely on this evidence, who has maintained absolute innocence from day one).
We know they were guilty because a jury said they were. These are very complex scientific arguments being presented. If you can't trust 12 people who were not smart enough to get out of jury duty to evaluate that evidence, then who can you trust?
One big problem with our justice system is that it's modeled on science, with evidence, hypothesis (of guilt), theory(of how the law was broken), and logical analysis of physical tests (and the weaker, but still analytical, cross examination of witnesses), all relying on the principle of falsifiability (if the hypothesis can be disproven, or alternatives can't be disproven, the hypothesis is rejected). But science really relies on reproducibility. Experiments are repeated several times and competitively criticized by others with experience repeating and reading the results. While criminal justice does a single "experiment", the alleged criminal act, and then analyzes it once. And then sometimes executes people.
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make install -not war
I seem to recall reading that there is no scientific study validating the uniqueness of fingerprints. The primary defence for the use of fngerprints on Wikipedia appears to be that "they have been used for a long time", repeated in several forms.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Simple - follow the money. There are two things that corrupt - power and money. You do bogus "bullet lead analysis", and you get more funding, a bigger staff, more power ... rinse, lather, and repeat.
Welcome to faith-based criminology - where nobody bothers to test basic assumptions because in Soviet Amerika, the FBI trolls YOU! And no, its not just a problem for the US.
What's particularly galling is that nobody in government feels a need to review all the cases where the FBI basically LIED. Again, power and money. Is it a coincidence that the first case this was used on was the Kennedy Assassination, and that it supposedly tied the "magic bullet" to a box of bullets Oswald had? Or was this the FBI "inventing junk science" for a political agenda, and then it got out of hand?
Kevin Smith on Prince
Older guys, there for a paycheck, who do as little as possible, even choosing unnecessary plea bargains just so they have less paperwork to do.
The thing is, around here if a public defender just wants a paycheck they're a lot better off going into private practice, and a few years in the PD's office looks good on your resume.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
... a troll will tie this issue to the "Bush administration", or even to "BushCo".If you RTFA you'd know the problem is not that the test is wrong, it is that current FBI and DoJ officials who are the only people in a position to provide a list of all the cases where this evidence may have sent innocent people to jail, have not bothered to do so. They did stop performing the test, but in the letter informing police agencies of this, downplayed the issue and stated that they think the scientific basis is still valid. As a result, there are almost certainly innocent people who will not get an appeal despite all it would take is the FBI admitting the problem and handing over the list. Note the FBI director was one of the first people Bush appointed to office and he also appointed the head of the DoJ, so I think some blame rightly belongs with the Bush administration and their habit of politically expedient coverups, instead of justice.
If you can't trust 12 people who were not smart enough to get out of jury duty to evaluate that evidence
Such a finely developed sense of civic duty you have there. Jury duty may well be a pain in the arse but it's a hard won right for accused that people in trouble with the law in most other parts of the world would find an amazing gift.
You have nothing to worry about. That type of thinking (logicical) will exclude you from ever being selected as a juror. Unless you fiegn complete ignorance in the selection process, that is.
That is what I see as the single biggest flaw with the American legal system. We are supposed to be judged by our peers, but I wouldn't consider any modern jury to be made up of my peers. They are selected based on their ignorance of the topic involved. Prosecutors want blank slates to trick with fancy sounding testimony. Defenders want considerate and empathetic people. In any case involving race, both sides will seek to fill a quota of a certain demographic.
Judged by your peers? Not very likely.
Sounds like he never took an ETHICS class. That should have whistle blowing all over it.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
Yeah, they'd be better off. But that would take ambition and competence. There are a LOT of people who are perfectly comfortable (if not happy) to just work only within what they know, and keep things from changing as much as possible. Change is bad. The old guys would stay there as long as they knew they'd get their regular pay increases, and know exactly what's expected of them, and don't have to do much work.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
It's obvious you've never been on a jury. You're too smart.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
As with all science, forensics also move on with time and methods used a few years back can be shown to be invalid a short while later.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Dammit - and here I have mod points, but already replied to something else.
This is exactly the purpose of the ACLU. While it doesn't deal with expert testimony, it does represent the union of all people who are accused (note that accused != guilty) and are being railroaded by the system. I never understand why people rail against the ACLU when the ACLU defends people like the KKK and child molesters because of a lack of due process in the trial. The only thing that stands between an honest man/woman and a wrongful conviction is the process itself. We'll disregard lying witnesses, missing evidence and other things that are just human failure. But if process isn't followed, the system itself is failing. And we can't have that.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
He must be guilty or he wouldn't be here.
Actually, if I recall correctly, Richard Jewel only had problems because the news media figured out that he was being investigated by the FBI. The news media assumed that since he was a suspect he must be guilty. The FBI was doing its job, the media made his life hell. The FBI did overstep itself after the media jumped all over the case because they were afraid of evidence being destroyed. However, what went wrong in the Richard Jewel case was the media.
And if you think the FBI is the equivalent of the Gestapo, you live an insanely sheltered life.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison