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"[Out] of 268 cases where agents used microscopic hair analysis to link a defendant to a crime, the agents’ testimony was scientifically invalid in 257 or 96% o

"[Out] of 268 cases where agents used microscopic hair analysis to link a defendant to a crime, the agents’ testimony was scientifically invalid in 257 or 96% of the cases." That seems impossibly, mind-bogglingly incompetent.

Eric_WVGG 11y ago
if you think that’s bad, don’t go reading about states and prosecutors that oppose wrongful conviction payments, you’ll be seeing red one off-the-cuff sample: http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132262 http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132262
enraged_camel 11y ago
>>impossibly, mind-bogglingly incompetent. Considering that such evidence is used to convict people and imprison them for possibly decades, shouldn't we call it "criminally incompetent"?
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  That would generally imply criminal negligence or mens rea. At the moment I have no reason to suspect either if it was de rigour of the times.
  - koenigdavidmj 11y ago
    We have prosecutors actively saying on record that we should not retry obviously innocent men because of the pain this would cause the families. There's your mens rea.
    - superuser2 11y ago
      Source? People convicted in part based on flawed science are not obviously innocent. At minimum, you'd need to assess how important that particular evidence was to determining guilt. It's possible they'd have been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt even if that evidence was never found. I assume this is the prosecutors' position, unless you have evidence otherwise.
      - finance-geek 11y ago
        >> People convicted in part based on flawed science are not obviously innocent. People convicted in part based on flawed science are also not obviously guilty. It is difficult to impossible to weigh how the jury weighed the evidence. So at the least they should be afforded another trial excluding the flawed evidence.
      - the_ancient 11y ago
        Any conviction in which microscopic hair analysis was presented to the jury should be automatically tossed and a retrial conducted... Period, end of discussion That is if you want a justice system, not a legal system I have a feeling you want a legal system and do not give a shit about justice.
        superuser2 11y ago
        > and a retrial conducted So you admit they are not "obviously innocent," but deserving of a retrial. I agree. >I have a feeling you want a legal system and do not give a shit about justice. That's a hell of a lot to infer from my comment which, as far as I can tell, doesn't even disagree with you.
        the_ancient 11y ago
        One is assumed to be innocent, thus if the trail they were convicted under it tainted, then until such time they are retried and found guilty using untainted testimony or actual science then yes these people are in fact "obviously innocent" I made the statement about you wanting a Legal System because based on the comments you seem to be more focused on the procedure and technical aspects of the law than on the miscarriage of justice that the FBI and their Fake Hair Science has caused. You want to leave it to Judges and Prosecutors to guess at the state of mind of the Jurors to figure out how much the jury may have considered the Hair Analysis, Only a person looking for a Legal system would make that comment. If you want justice you understand that there is no way to figure out how much that testimony factored into the jury, thus EVERY case it was offered in should be vacated.. TODAY. and everyone person convicted should be released. TODAY. then they can figure out who can be retried using actual evidence and attempt to get convictions with new juries Further any Plea Bargains that were reached by threatening to use FBI Hair Analysis should also be Vacated, how many people where extorted into pleading guilty by prosecutors because they threaten this "scientific evidence"?
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    There is a whole body of fraudulent pseudoscience that kept this practice looking all sciency. Once you show they knew it was bogus, that's not just being wrong, that's a criminal conspiracy. I'm surprised nobody has called out the fake science behind "polygraph," too.
    - throwaway2048 11y ago
      polygraphs are not legally admissable
      - Zigurd 11y ago
        Polygraph is, however, fraudulent pseudoscience. There are journals and conferences. The Homeland Security Administration funds universities to train people in this fraudulent practice. These people need to be called out as frauds, and it is an outrage to be openly training frauds in accredited universities.
    - mdpopescu 11y ago
      Anything called "science" is automatically granted a huge amount of respect from the masses. Science is the most successful religion we know.
  - HarryHirsch 11y ago
    There is a lot to be said against the idea of mens rea and for strict liability. It's an impossibility to accurately gauge someone's intent, on the contrary it's easy to evaluate someone's actions and see if they amount to criminal conduct. Just tick boxes in the criminal code. No thought-reading required. The conspiracy theory goes that the concept of criminal intent makes it easy for reckless prosecutors and (especially) bankers to escape justly deserved punishment. After all, who can read a prosecutor's thoughts and prove that they were not incompetent when they relied on a phrenologist to give evidence but actively malicious? Same with banksters.
    - throwaway2048 11y ago
      The problem with strict liability is the same problem with thing like mandatory minimum sentences. It ties judges hands to address the actual circumstances of an event, and without exception forces at least equal penalties on people who frankly, don't deserve it. There is no balancing point in this equation either. politicians always wanna be "tough on crime", and the latest case where some horrible monster gets a lighter penalty for nuanced reasons the public isn't interested in understanding is sure to result in a push for mandatory minimums and strict liability. Consider the case of something like a child porn thumbnail on your pc. Where did it come from? Might have come from a Google image search, and you are totally unaware of it. However because child pornography possession is a strict liability crime you could be looking at years of jail time. A law without exceptions is tyrannical no matter what its form. The answer to perceived "bad guys getting away with it" isn't always to force harsher penalties regardless of circumstance. The law is not, and never could be a fixed computer program you run that evaluates the fact, and spits out a just resolution.
    - sliverstorm 11y ago
      Strict liability has its place, but so does mens rea. I once bought a motorbike. The man sold it to me from his front porch for going market price. He gave me the keys, he signed over the authentic title. I took it to the DMV to register. The desk worker called the police and had it confiscated; it was stolen property. Under strict liability, I would be a felon. The police officer said to me, 'I have no idea how this happened, I would have been fooled too, he even had the title!?' (paraphrasing) I gather you're arguing that convicting people like me is a worthwhile price to pay for convicting truly guilty people, but I disagree.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > That would generally imply criminal negligence or mens rea. "Criminal negligence" is a kind of mens rea.
cm2187 11y ago
What I would be curious to know is how many of these 268 samples do not have a matching DNA. "Scientifically invalid" is a bit vague. Does that mean that the samples were not a match or does that mean that the method used didn't provide a sufficient degree of confidence of a match?
- walid 11y ago
  It doesn't matter if "scientifically invalid" is a vague because when the jury decides based on invalid hair sample analysis then justice is not served. Also some evidence collection might not yield DNA in the first place.
- Someone 11y ago
  This isn't about DNA analysis, it is about staring through a microscope, comparing hairs. Quote: "At trial, the prosecution relied on the testimony of the three informants as well as the testimony of Elinos Whitlock III, an employee of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department Crime Lab who had been trained by the FBI in how to conduct microscopic hair analysis. He claimed that he could make a “strong identification” that a hair recovered the crime scene was Bridges’s hair. He further stated that there was only a 1 in 1000 chance that two Caucasian people (Bridges is white) would have indistinguishable head hair."
  - cm2187 11y ago
    I know the analysis isn't about DNA, but DNA gives us a way to validate the analysis. When a defense lawyer uses words like scientifically invalid, it is designed to make it look like the analysis is just bullocks, but most likely it is something much more subtile, like a different confidence interval, or something like that.
pmarreck 11y ago
Dude that's nothing in the legal system I was on a jury and I could not argue to the rest of the jury using knowledge I was literally trained as a Psych major about... because it was not presented as evidence in the trial. It literally brought me to tears The belief that the current justice system is even close to being fair is a fallacy. Standards for evidence in law and science are almost completely different. Eyewitness testimony, for example, should basically be thrown out: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-i... Science needs to take law out back and give it a good whuppin' As my small contribution to the truth, I donate to innocenceproject.org every month.

Eric_WVGG 11y ago

if you think that’s bad, don’t go reading about states and prosecutors that oppose wrongful conviction payments, you’ll be seeing red one off-the-cuff sample: http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132262 http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132262

enraged_camel 11y ago

>>impossibly, mind-bogglingly incompetent. Considering that such evidence is used to convict people and imprison them for possibly decades, shouldn't we call it "criminally incompetent"?

sliverstorm 11y ago
That would generally imply criminal negligence or mens rea. At the moment I have no reason to suspect either if it was de rigour of the times.
- koenigdavidmj 11y ago
  We have prosecutors actively saying on record that we should not retry obviously innocent men because of the pain this would cause the families. There's your mens rea.
  - superuser2 11y ago
    Source? People convicted in part based on flawed science are not obviously innocent. At minimum, you'd need to assess how important that particular evidence was to determining guilt. It's possible they'd have been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt even if that evidence was never found. I assume this is the prosecutors' position, unless you have evidence otherwise.
    - finance-geek 11y ago
      >> People convicted in part based on flawed science are not obviously innocent. People convicted in part based on flawed science are also not obviously guilty. It is difficult to impossible to weigh how the jury weighed the evidence. So at the least they should be afforded another trial excluding the flawed evidence.
    - the_ancient 11y ago
      Any conviction in which microscopic hair analysis was presented to the jury should be automatically tossed and a retrial conducted... Period, end of discussion That is if you want a justice system, not a legal system I have a feeling you want a legal system and do not give a shit about justice.
      - superuser2 11y ago
        > and a retrial conducted So you admit they are not "obviously innocent," but deserving of a retrial. I agree. >I have a feeling you want a legal system and do not give a shit about justice. That's a hell of a lot to infer from my comment which, as far as I can tell, doesn't even disagree with you.
        the_ancient 11y ago
        One is assumed to be innocent, thus if the trail they were convicted under it tainted, then until such time they are retried and found guilty using untainted testimony or actual science then yes these people are in fact "obviously innocent" I made the statement about you wanting a Legal System because based on the comments you seem to be more focused on the procedure and technical aspects of the law than on the miscarriage of justice that the FBI and their Fake Hair Science has caused. You want to leave it to Judges and Prosecutors to guess at the state of mind of the Jurors to figure out how much the jury may have considered the Hair Analysis, Only a person looking for a Legal system would make that comment. If you want justice you understand that there is no way to figure out how much that testimony factored into the jury, thus EVERY case it was offered in should be vacated.. TODAY. and everyone person convicted should be released. TODAY. then they can figure out who can be retried using actual evidence and attempt to get convictions with new juries Further any Plea Bargains that were reached by threatening to use FBI Hair Analysis should also be Vacated, how many people where extorted into pleading guilty by prosecutors because they threaten this "scientific evidence"?
- Zigurd 11y ago
  There is a whole body of fraudulent pseudoscience that kept this practice looking all sciency. Once you show they knew it was bogus, that's not just being wrong, that's a criminal conspiracy. I'm surprised nobody has called out the fake science behind "polygraph," too.
  - throwaway2048 11y ago
    polygraphs are not legally admissable
    - Zigurd 11y ago
      Polygraph is, however, fraudulent pseudoscience. There are journals and conferences. The Homeland Security Administration funds universities to train people in this fraudulent practice. These people need to be called out as frauds, and it is an outrage to be openly training frauds in accredited universities.
  - mdpopescu 11y ago
    Anything called "science" is automatically granted a huge amount of respect from the masses. Science is the most successful religion we know.
- HarryHirsch 11y ago
  There is a lot to be said against the idea of mens rea and for strict liability. It's an impossibility to accurately gauge someone's intent, on the contrary it's easy to evaluate someone's actions and see if they amount to criminal conduct. Just tick boxes in the criminal code. No thought-reading required. The conspiracy theory goes that the concept of criminal intent makes it easy for reckless prosecutors and (especially) bankers to escape justly deserved punishment. After all, who can read a prosecutor's thoughts and prove that they were not incompetent when they relied on a phrenologist to give evidence but actively malicious? Same with banksters.
  - throwaway2048 11y ago
    The problem with strict liability is the same problem with thing like mandatory minimum sentences. It ties judges hands to address the actual circumstances of an event, and without exception forces at least equal penalties on people who frankly, don't deserve it. There is no balancing point in this equation either. politicians always wanna be "tough on crime", and the latest case where some horrible monster gets a lighter penalty for nuanced reasons the public isn't interested in understanding is sure to result in a push for mandatory minimums and strict liability. Consider the case of something like a child porn thumbnail on your pc. Where did it come from? Might have come from a Google image search, and you are totally unaware of it. However because child pornography possession is a strict liability crime you could be looking at years of jail time. A law without exceptions is tyrannical no matter what its form. The answer to perceived "bad guys getting away with it" isn't always to force harsher penalties regardless of circumstance. The law is not, and never could be a fixed computer program you run that evaluates the fact, and spits out a just resolution.
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    Strict liability has its place, but so does mens rea. I once bought a motorbike. The man sold it to me from his front porch for going market price. He gave me the keys, he signed over the authentic title. I took it to the DMV to register. The desk worker called the police and had it confiscated; it was stolen property. Under strict liability, I would be a felon. The police officer said to me, 'I have no idea how this happened, I would have been fooled too, he even had the title!?' (paraphrasing) I gather you're arguing that convicting people like me is a worthwhile price to pay for convicting truly guilty people, but I disagree.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > That would generally imply criminal negligence or mens rea. "Criminal negligence" is a kind of mens rea.

cm2187 11y ago

What I would be curious to know is how many of these 268 samples do not have a matching DNA. "Scientifically invalid" is a bit vague. Does that mean that the samples were not a match or does that mean that the method used didn't provide a sufficient degree of confidence of a match?

walid 11y ago
It doesn't matter if "scientifically invalid" is a vague because when the jury decides based on invalid hair sample analysis then justice is not served. Also some evidence collection might not yield DNA in the first place.
Someone 11y ago
This isn't about DNA analysis, it is about staring through a microscope, comparing hairs. Quote: "At trial, the prosecution relied on the testimony of the three informants as well as the testimony of Elinos Whitlock III, an employee of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department Crime Lab who had been trained by the FBI in how to conduct microscopic hair analysis. He claimed that he could make a “strong identification” that a hair recovered the crime scene was Bridges’s hair. He further stated that there was only a 1 in 1000 chance that two Caucasian people (Bridges is white) would have indistinguishable head hair."
- cm2187 11y ago
  I know the analysis isn't about DNA, but DNA gives us a way to validate the analysis. When a defense lawyer uses words like scientifically invalid, it is designed to make it look like the analysis is just bullocks, but most likely it is something much more subtile, like a different confidence interval, or something like that.

pmarreck 11y ago

Dude that's nothing in the legal system I was on a jury and I could not argue to the rest of the jury using knowledge I was literally trained as a Psych major about... because it was not presented as evidence in the trial. It literally brought me to tears The belief that the current justice system is even close to being fair is a fallacy. Standards for evidence in law and science are almost completely different. Eyewitness testimony, for example, should basically be thrown out: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-i... Science needs to take law out back and give it a good whuppin' As my small contribution to the truth, I donate to innocenceproject.org every month.