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Crime Lab Scandals Just Keep Getting Worse (slate.com)
Many people are convicted in American courts on the basis of drug lab analysis. Just how accurate or accountable are the people and labs? schwit1 writes with an excerpt that gives a good reminder of how people can land in jail based on fake data, with the example (an outlier, surely) of Annie Dookhan, a chemist who worked at a Massachusetts state lab drug.
Dookhan was sentenced in 2013 to at least three years in prison, after pleading guilty in 2012 to having falsified thousands of drug tests. Among her extracurricular crime lab activities, Dookhan failed to properly test drug samples before declaring them positive, mixed up samples to create positive tests, forged signatures, and lied about her own credentials. Over her nine-year career, Dookhan tested about 60,000 samples involved in roughly 34,000 criminal cases. Three years later, the state of Massachusetts still can't figure out how to repair the damage she wrought almost single-handedly.
To be fair, witnesses should have zero credibility.
Start here: Intro to Eyewitness Identification, still ongoing. Then go back to the beginning, it's a good read.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
"Do you have any bias against testimony by police officers?" was one of the explicit questions asked when I last served.
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The trouble with juries is they are inherently conservative and right wing because only successful people who've never experienced any hardship can really afford to be on them.
I'm not sure where you came up with this line of reasoning. Many (most?) people who have lots of jury time available are government employees. Teachers and the like are not generally known as "inherently conservative and right wing". Certainly as a group less so than the private sector people around them.