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FBI Overstated Forensic Hair Matches In Nearly All Trials Before 2000
schwit1 writes The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000. Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory's microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country's largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence. The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.
Fixing this is simple. Just make misprosecution punishable on parity with the charges being prosecuted.
Willfully hide exculpatory evidence in a capital murder trial? Death penalty.
Lie about evidence in a life imprisonment case? Life in prison.
Etc.
For that matter, this works on false rape charges too, but there you need more filtering. Honest false charges (disagreements, mistakes, etc) should be safe, so much so that no victim should even remotely fear coming forward. And amusingly, the prosecutor thing would guard against abuse of that too...
See that "Preview" button?
simple solution. you mix in a control group, and you don't tell the people who determine the match which one is the 'real one'. That way, they can't have a bias, unless the people preparing the material secretly mark it or something, but nothing's perfect.
It's not just the police and courts, it's the jury too. I was a juror a few years ago on a case based entirely on circumstantial evidence. Most of the jurors simply couldn't accept that a real world case doesn't always rely on 3D slow motion video of bullets piercing internal organs and perfect DNA matches. They didn't want to think about the balance of probabilities of all the pieces of circumstantial evidence and decide if someone was guilty or not. They wanted cold hard forensic evidence to do that for them. If someone presented DNA evidence then the jury would have decided guilt without deliberation.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
I'm in favor of the death penalty in principle, but I really can't trust the government to only kill people who have it coming. That being the case, I would reserve it for politicians only.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I think that that's actually how it works here in Sweden.
I seem to remember that it's also not always good. Since they only answer questions, more open ended searches are seldom performed.
In one case where an elk killed a woman (unique case, apparently) the police got hung up on her husbands lawn mower (!) which happened to have traces
of blood on the blades (which in fact could have been rust combined with other biological material ) and spent a year or so trying to convict him for murder,
until someone actually saw a YouTube clip of an elk-attack and asked the lab if it could have in fact been an elk. Answer: Yes. Most likely.
Lord Acton hit the nail on the head. 128 years ago he wrote that, ""Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Unfortunately, no one has ever devised a way of running societies without giving power to certain individuals. With a very small number of honourable exceptions (which prove the rule), that power has corrupted them. We see it around us almost every day, and the people who rise to control entire nation states display the corruption due to power in singularly pure and concentrated form.
The technicians working in the FBI labs had a very limited form of power, but within that particular domain their sway was almost unchallenged. What expert would dispute the word of the mighty FBI, what lawyer would challenge it, what judge or jury would not be impressed by it? And the technicians' bosses had more power, which was assuredly focused on the important task of getting convictions. I rather doubt that any lab technician at the FBI ever got much career advancement out of frequently discrediting prosecution evidence. Every bureaucratic organization measures itself according to a limited set of drastically oversimplified metrics, and conviction rate is an important metric for any law-enforcement organization. The higher up the tree you go, the greater the desire for more convictions, and the less the concern for whether they are justified or not.
"One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters".
- Aldous Huxley
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
It's happened with arson experts too. I remember reading a horrible story of a guy convicted of burning his family to death because all the experts described these "pour patterns" in the burnt floor, signifying liquid accelerant. After he was put to death, they figured out it was just carpet glue patterns.
Between the way police feel free to shoot fleeing non-dangerous subjects these days, planting evidence in full view of other officers, lying on the stand to get convictions, and the labs and experts from every field falsifying results, I'd say our legal system is a disaster.