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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."
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).
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
Lie detectors can be used in investigations but not in trials. There's a real, significant difference there.
The FBI also says it will begin monitoring the testimony of all lab experts to make sure it is based on sound scientific principles. FBI Assistant Director John Miller said, "We are going to the entire distance to see that justice is now served."
Evidence Of Injustice: FBI's Bullet Lead Analysis Used Flawed Science To Convict Hundreds Of Defendants
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
A lawyer I know once described public defenders as always falling into one of two categories:
I'd like to think he's being cynical, but I haven't seen much evidence that contradicts his claim. I saw a true crime special the other day about a woman who spent four years in jail after being convicted of murder. The supposed method was LSD poisoning, even though there has never been a human fatality attributed directly to LSD. The test they used to convict her was a preliminary test that was only supposed to show if there was reason to do the more expensive test. The test was run on tissue from a exhumed cadaver, when the test was only useful applied to fresh urine from a living person. The state did perform the follow up test, but it showed up as negative, so they pretended they had not performed it. Somehow, her defendant did not question any of this evidence, at all despite it being scientifically unsound to pretty much any pathologist you could consult. That lawyer is still a practicing public defender.
The article says the National Academy of Sciences started the study in 2002, and it took 18 months, to give them the benefit of the doubt let's say that they finished the study in 2004 and found that the method was severely flawed. Then they waited an entire year to stop using the technique and the report they issued downplayed the severity of the issue saying that they still stood behind the science, even when they knew it could have been wrong. Nobody in the FBI or the Justice Department tried to identify the hundreds of cases that used their analysis, nor did they notify the defendants, prosecutors or judges involved in these cases.
What kind of twisted lies do you have to tell yourself to justify keeping possibly innocent people behind bars? They weren't just trying to ignore the science, they didn't notify defendants or their lawyers when they knew their time for appeal was almost up. Oh sorry, you appealed too late, no doubt the evidence against you is utter horseshit, but sorry, it's been a few years and everyone else has moved on, get used to jail.
It took 60 Minutes to actually get some progress on this, I hope all the people involved in keeping evidence that could exonerate someone get a fair punishment.
Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes
As a jurror, how the hell am I supposed to not have "reasonable doubt" about anything that's introduced as evidence in a trial? It's already very well-established that eye-witness identification has horrible reliability. Now apparently I shouldn't even take the reliability of forensic evidence forgranted. What's left? If the prosecution presents damning forensic evidence and the defense lawyer simply says "Yeah, but since it's been proven that even established forensic tests aren't necessarily reliable, why should anyone believe you?" how am I supposed to not have reasonable doubt about the forensic evidence now?
... 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.
On a related note, if you ever go to trial and DNA matching is used, question the methodology and get the source to the software used. A friend of mine works at a company that makes DNA comparison devices and says they make some really, really, really questionable choices in their matching algorithms. Like if the DNA strand shows a sequence that is rare in the common populace (rarer than an arbitrarily chosen value) the algorithm assumes it is an error an substitutes the most common sequence for purposes of matching. He says it sometimes keeps him up at night worrying about who is going to jail.
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.
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.