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FBI To Review Use of Forensic Evidence In Thousands of Cases
NotSanguine writes in with a story about a review of the forensic evidence in thousands of criminal cases to see if any defendants were wrongly convicted. "The Justice Department and the FBI have launched a review of thousands of criminal cases to determine whether any defendants were wrongly convicted or deserve a new trial because of flawed forensic evidence, officials said Tuesday.
The undertaking is the largest post-conviction review ever done by the FBI. It will include cases conducted by all FBI Laboratory hair and fiber examiners since at least 1985 and may reach earlier if records are available, people familiar with the process said. Such FBI examinations have taken place in federal and local cases across the country, often in violent crimes, such as rape, murder and robbery."
The question is which.
"The Innocent Man" by John Grisham. It details a case in which a man was wrongfully sentenced to death on bad evidence.
I'm a good law-and-order conservative when it comes to things like this, but fair is fair. If someone is wrongfully convicted, it needs to be reviewed. In particular, the use of hair samples and other forensic evidence decades ago, before the advent of DNA testing, resulted in quite a few such wrongful convictions.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
Did they suddenly work out that lie detectors were a fraud?
Seriously, the FBI have been an international laughing stock for decades for that one.
This is precisely why the death penalty should be abolished: because death is permanent, and government cannot be trusted. This argument supercedes every other argument, pro or con, regarding the death penalty.
If it doesn't fit, you must acquit!
Upon review, the FBI overturned convictions in CSI Miami, series 2 and 3. Please return your DVD sets and we will replace them with edited stories free of charge.
Thank you,
CBS customer service.
its a good job the USA doesn't have the death penalty for those crimes!!!
oh... wait
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
So if i run this thru my FBI to english translator...
"Yeah we've convicted thousands of people wrongly. Sorry about that. We'll look into how that happened but we'll never do anything.
This will make us look like the good guys who care about our citizens. You know... the same ones we spy and wiretap."
Perhaps in some exceptions will this lead to a mistrial. The general idea will be that those people are locked up. because they are guilty. Stupid reasoning? Sure it is, but that is what many years of CSI and other shows and movies have learned us: There is no need for due process. The people looking for the bad people are judge, jury and executioner.
What is even more worrying is that it happened in thousands of cases and nobody picked up on it.
Not the defense. Perhaps because they were lied to.
Not the judge. Who should know that.
And how many cases were settled outside court? MAFIAA and logfiles anybody?
Where I used to work, police came regularly asking for evidence. Whenever they came without any official papers (i.e. a court order) we told them we would keep it aside till they had it. This because of two reasons.
1) We did not wanted to get sued. (Never happened with us)
2) We wanted to get the bad guys as well. Not having the proper proof could mean dropping the case. (Had that happen at least once that I know off. Somebody gave evidence and the bad guy could walk.)
3) They could not come because of personal vendetta against somebody or some protocol or organisation. (Have seen them trying that as well. And no, we did not give in. We even escorted them out of the building. Pity they were not in uniform, because that would have been hilarious.)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Hope they reexamine the Leonard Peltier conviction.
...how about they review eyewitness testimony? Eyewitness accounts are known to be highly unreliable in many situations, including stress, poor lighting, poor angle relative to event, and more. Additionally, identifying a person is difficult if the person is not already known to the witness, especially if the witness is not of the same race as the person being identified. Worse, the witness interview process by the police may result in suggestion to the witness' memory - either intentionally or unintentionally.
I would personally bet - though cannot prove - that more bad convictions are due to bad witness testimony than bad forensic evidence. By all means bad evidence should be cleaned up - a recent example is identifying bullets by trace metal composition, which was recently found to be questionable
In the end, however, it's only a start in the right direction, and somehow bad witness IDs need to be reviewed as well. It would be great if there was some sort of independent auditing agency (independent of the adversarial justice system) that reviewed questionable convictions based on changes in what we know about the validity of evidence.
Here's a good site that discusses eyewitness testimony effects. Scary, really.
Isn't this kind of fraud the realm of the SEC?
Just because someone "admitted" guilt as part of a plea bargain doesn't mean they are actually guilty. Plea bargaining itself is a form of coercion, it's like putting a gun to someone's head and telling they you'll shoot them if they don't confess and give up their conspirators. Plenty of people have gone on to recant their pleas. The Norfolk Four is an example you may be aware of. Most sensible people realize that plea-bargaining for easy convictions is a deeply flawed way of getting "justice". It puts innocent people behind bars and gives guilty people lighter sentences.
DOJ and the FBI simply winged it. Doesn't inspire great confidence in any law enforcement agency to be honest.
Great chance for the FBI to use a new budget to test equipment, and smell like roses in the public
Over the last two or three decades, we paid the penal system to house, guard, feed, and provide medical care to these inmates. But now those inmates are reaching an age where their health is deteriorating and the penal system doesn't care to pay for pacemakers, Lipitor, or chemotherapy for the aging prison population. Fantastic idea: question the pseudo science that convicted them in the first place. "Congratulations you were innocent all along. And now we are going to push you onto the street to fend for yourself. And it sure is a shame that you didn't put away any savings for retirement. Good luck out there." Problem solved.
How about: we're defining way too many goddamn crimes that should not be ? The low-hanging fruit is growing, smoking or selling a plant although I'm sure there are plenty of other examples where prison should not be the answer, but it became so because of self-righteous can-never-do-wrong types want to see somebody get fucked in the ass for doing the things they don't like.
In 2010 Justice Gertner's procedural order on trace evidence brought forensic evidence as a whole into question. The fact is that certain significant types of forensic evidence don't hold up to the Daubert criteria (peer review, publication, error rates, etc.) and have never been properly tested: http://www.swgfast.org/Resources/100310-GertnerProceduralOrder.pdf
"In the past, the admissibility of this kind of evidence was effectively presumed, largely because of its pedigree -- the fact that it had been admitted for decades."
Fingerprinting in particular is rife with problems - Simon Cole has written extensively on this. In fact it has only been in the last couple of years that serious tests have been conducted on how many points of similarity in a fingerprint can be effective in individuating. Basically we've gone on for a century using an un-tested science.
Validation testing in digital forensics is also an elephant in the room that no one wants to address (even though NIST is trying). The courts just assume that tools work as they should, and that the experts testifying understand the underlying evidence and what the tools are pulling out for them. In the area of digital forensics, tools are often proprietary and that means that the experts using them must simply trust blindly in them. Don't get me wrong, there are a great many well trained and knowledgeable experts out there that have a very good idea what their tools are probably doing (e.g. signature analysis), but testing just hasn't been comprehensively done and laid out there for peer review. And there are important reasons why it may be difficult if not impossible to even test properly. Quite often before you can test a digital forensic tool properly, several updates have come out, no one is using the older version any more, and who knows what has changed in the code. The only time I have seen validation be an issue in the courts is during the Casey Anthony trial when CacheBack gave different results with regard to web browsing than NetAnalysis did - something that got the accused acquitted.
This is what REALLY drives me crazy about political conservatives in the US.
They constantly complain about "big government" and its ability to interfere in your life. Obamacare "death panels" are a prime example. However, these same conservatives are *totally OK* with giving the government what is literally the most powerful tool possible: To legally KILL YOU!
Conservatives constantly complain that government can never do anything right, that it's full of both incompetence and corruption, yet they're more than happy to hand over the power of life-and-death over every American citizen to it. They can just not fathom that some day, maybe, it could be THEM falsely convicted to some crime and sent to the death chamber.
Don't dictate whether I can own a gun, but feel free to detain and murder me if you see fit....
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Could you please link to a PDF/PS/Whatever of the actual study then?
HAND.
Paywalled. Sigh :(.
It seems like you denying the existence of "rape culture". If so, you're quite wrong -- just look at how women are immediately threatened by rape if they speak up about discrimination(*) on the interwebs. The people who are making those threats are not necessarily rapists but they sure are implicitly "legitimizing" rape in the eyes of those who actually do rape. (I'm sure a lot of this is just general assholery, but it's still having the effect of legitimizing and/or trivializing rape.)
(*) There's also the frequent sniggering usage of the phrase "Pound-me In The Ass Prison" which has a similar effect. This is more of an equal-opportunity thing though it still does "legitimize" rape as a form of punishment and/or control.
HAND.