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The FBI faked an entire field of forensic science (2015)

• tristanj 11y ago
  Story needs a (2015) tag, this was published April 22 2015.
  • EdHominem 11y ago
    Also ' - hair analysis' to save the click if you've already read it.
• abannin 11y ago
  Thanks for posting this. I'm shocked at the lack of response to this issue.
• fsloth 11y ago
  The imprecise nature of forensics work should be a sufficient argument for leniency in all criminal justice cases. Instead there seems to be this witch-hunting mentality where someone needs to take the fall. The fact that the justice system of the mightiest and wealthiest country in the history of the planet uses methods no better than pricking is quite disturbing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pricking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pricking).
  • snsr 11y ago
    The incentives created (enabled?) by absolute prosecutorial immunity are partially to blame for the insanely aggressive conduct of prosecutors in the US.
  • pjc50 11y ago
    The entire US approach to dealing with crime is tainted by both racism and a religious-fundamentalist approach to sin. People very much want to believe that there are good people and bad people, and that it's feasible to sort everyone into those categories and put the bad people in prison and punish them eternally for their intrinsic badness. This blinds people to misconduct by the ""good guys"".
• mabbo 11y ago
  '“the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.” Of these defendants, 14 have already been executed or died in prison.'
  • tobltobs 11y ago
    Guess what will happen with the other 18.
    • jessaustin 11y ago
      If the executive branch had any courage or decency, they'd be pardoned. Along with tens of thousands of other unjustly imprisoned citizens.
      • 794CD01 11y ago
        Bad evidence having been presented against them does not mean they are necessarily innocent. Their cases did not all hinge entirely upon this one piece of forensic evidence. Although what happened to them was wrong, pardons go too far in the opposite direction. Retrial would be far more appropriate.
        • jessaustin 11y ago
          Retrials ain't gonna happen, not least because there aren't enough courts to retry all the cases for which retrial is "appropriate", and also work through current cases. (In my county, there is a rapist of children still on pretrial bail after three fucking years because "there aren't enough judges" and the real priorities around here are traffic offences and drug possession. How eager do you think the courts are going to be to clean up ancient FBI fuckups?) Besides, which cases are you talking about? Juries will convict with no evidence. A single piece of "evidence" is enough for a judge to let the conviction stand. Most of these trials did "hinge entirely upon this one piece of forensic" bullshit. Fake forensics has allowed LEOs to pick suspects out of a hat and get convictions for decades. Do you really want to leave all those innocents in prison because you feel good about their hat-picking percentages? Far better for one innocent prisoner to be released than for hundreds of guilty people to stay in prison.
• _Codemonkeyism 11y ago
  I've read on HN several times that finger prints in principle or how they are handled are also 'fake'? Is this the case?
  • mnordhoff 11y ago
    Kind of? There was the infamous Brandon Mayfield case a decade ago, where the FBI came down on an innocent American lawyer for the 2004 Madrid train bombings, despite the skepticism of Spanish security, because he was one of twenty people with similar-ish fingerprints. He was also Muslim, worked on a terrorism case, had interest in flying, and his daughter had done a school project about a hypothetical Spanish vacation, which the FBI built into a damning case of misconstrued circumstantial evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Mayfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Mayfield http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/2/the-terrifying-surveillancecaseofbrandonmayfield.html http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/2/the-terrifying-...
    • _Codemonkeyism 11y ago
      Thanks!
  • fenomas 11y ago
    The issue with fingerprinting, when last I read about it (several years ago), was that there has been very little controlled study of just how accurate it is. Apparently the (US) professional society of fingerprint analysts forbids its members from taking part in research on accuracy, maintaining that when done correctly it's 100% accurate, full stop.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• chinathrow 11y ago
  How can these fellows sleep at night? “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.”
  • Amygaz 11y ago
    It's like fsloth said earlier in this thread: someone needs to fall. Personally, twice I had FBI field agents as my neighbor, and I while my n=2 can hardly be generalized, my first impression (and you only get one chance to make a good first impression) is that the FBI doesn't get to hire the cream-of-the-crop. Maybe it's not the staff fault: the FBI seems to be investing a lot more in their PR department than in its departments actually doing the job in the trenches.
    • dsr_ 11y ago
      The FBI cannot (or does not) pay as well for technical positions as nearly any private position. The background of agents (and, subsequently, management) is in either accounting or "criminal justice", neither one of which is a field noted for reassessment of theory or appraising scientific evidence. As a result, they tend to accept promises of accuracy that line up with their biases, and not dig too deeply into methods.
      • ams6110 11y ago
        This mindset is common in practitioners. Faith in the process, or the way it's always been done, or the way they were trained. Even in development, it's very common in corporate or government settings to find developers who know the one language and OS that they use, and the one set of patterns they use, and are not very curious about anything else. It's a job.
    • rhino369 11y ago
      FBI gets to hire the cream of the crop for special agents but all other jobs are treated like dogshit. One example is that every non-special agent takes turns emptying garbage cans.
• tyingq 11y ago
  They are apparently big fans of the polygraph as well: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/special-reports/article24749254.html http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/special-reports/article24749...
  • Overtonwindow 11y ago
    Ooohhh careful! Don't you dare tell anyone how to defeat a polygraph or they will come after you! Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/indiana-man-accused-of-teaching-people-to-beat-lie-detector-tests-faces-prison-time/2013/08/31/a7cbe74a-08ea-11e3-9941-6711ed662e71_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/indiana-man-accused-of-...
    • tyingq 11y ago
      "obstruction of an agency proceeding". Wow...didn't know that law existed. Seems easily abused and overly broad.
      • goldenkey 11y ago
        It appears that they entrapped him as an accessory to a crime. By saying things like 'I need help cheating my border patrol test. Can you help me?' Terrible..
  • jerf 11y ago
    Yes. The sad thing is I read the title discussing an entire field of forensics has been faked, and I didn't know which of the three it would be that leaped into my mind (polygraph, older less accurate DNA, drug dogs). Then it wasn't any of them. Yow.
  • peeters 11y ago
    That's an interesting read. I think the emphasis there isn't whether it's a pseudoscience or even a useful tool, but whether it should have an absolute veto w.r.t. employment. I had to take a polygraph for a job myself, and when the technician started he asked me to choose a random card. Then he started going through each card--"was it the Queen of Clubs?" and I would answer "no" to each. At the end he could tell me what card I had selected based on my responses. So it validated that polygraphs work in some sense. However, your reaction to a question like "have you ever hurt someone?", while verbally will be "yes" or "no", is a lot more loaded with emotion than lying about a card. "Have you ever lied?" "Yes." "Really?" (looks at me with contempt) "Yes, I recall that I lied to my mother about my college grades when she called me last week." "Why?" "Because I wasn't in the place or mood to have that conversation." "Ok. Other than the times you have disclosed, have you ever lied?" "No" (in truth almost certainly, but none that I can specifically recall). At the end he said the tests were "inconclusive" but I got the clearance and the job, so I guess I passed.
• maxxxxx 11y ago
  I would have expected that some higher ranking people in the justice system would be horrified by these things and do something. In fields like medicine or air travel errors happen but it's part of the system to address them and make sure they don't happen again. That doesn't seem to be the case at all in the justice system.
  • tobltobs 11y ago
    Why do you believe that higher ranking people in the justice system didn't know this before? I would guess that it is an requirement to accept this system if you want to climb higher ranks.
    • maxxxxx 11y ago
      I am pretty sure they knew. I am just surprised that they aren't horrified. If I were the head of an organization that sends innocent people to death (while the real killer is free) I would do my best to avoid this.
  • artpepper 11y ago
    Because the goal of the justice system is to convict people.
• baldfat 11y ago
  FBI and Federal Prosecutors are so aggressive. As my friend is close to being indited by the FBI and a "Star Witness" just plead guilty for bribery, tax evasion and bribery. The FBI released one recording where my friend was pissed at a company and the "Star Witness" who was wired was the one saying he would do illegal activities. Also FBI "You will find that (my friend) did not have direct contact with other people and kept himself separated from other people who did illegal activities. So far the "Star Witness" has brought down 6 people after he got caught for tax evasion.
• neilellis 11y ago
  I believe the problem here is that we (humans) are terrible at dealing with systemic failures. It would seem we find it easy to accept that a small number of cases/people/situations are flawed, and that feels like something we can fix. But usually, when faced with a problem so large it is described as systemic we choose to ignore it and move on rather than face it and fix it. I.e. the problem just seems too big. That is why I think that even when we discover such a horrific problem as listed here there is no proportional public outcry. For example if someone is imprisoned in another's basement for 10 years we accept their right to sue the person who kept them imprisoned - even many years later. But when faced with systematic slavery we classify the problem as a systemic failure and move on, the idea of reparation seems crazy. Another example would be the crash of 2009, once the flaw was discovered (high risk debt rolled up into low risk securities) very few people accepted it was a problem to fix even when shown the facts; in part because 'everybody is doing it', what can we do. I.e. the problem was systemic not localised to a small group of people. Interestingly a lot of the same bad practises appear to be continuing and are often reported - but again, what to do, it's a failure in the system! And finally it's also like the story of the discovery of Yellowstone caldera - the scientists couldn't work out where exactly the volcano was in Yellowstone initially they didn't believe/realise it was in fact all of Yellowstone.
  • Zigurd 11y ago
    This is another reason prosecutorial immunity is bad. Prosecutors and cops should be bonded so that the bad ones price themselves out of the business.
• Overtonwindow 11y ago
  IMHO this is indicative of a "win at all cost" justice system. By and large prosecutors are allowed to say just about anything they want, solicit any testimony they wish, and those in law enforcement, forensics, and the state, dutifully follow suit. The machine of the state is at fault here, and prosecutors should themselves be thrown in jail for such behavior.
  • akshatpradhan 11y ago
    Someone once told me, "Save all lives at any cost to privacy". I feel that's similar to what you mentioned, "win at all costs" justice system. Perhaps there's more of this kind of mentality when it comes to the Justice System, particularly the FBI and Prosecutors.
    • awakeasleep 11y ago
      It's true. I think we're living in an era of systemic failure of risk analysis. I see it in my company too, where the InfoSec team is basically given free reign, and they're not happy unless every machine is airgapped. At other companies, there is no concept of security at all. Where is the department that makes the cost/benefit analysis of security measures? I don't see it in government, i don't see it in the private sector.
      • oarsinsync 11y ago
        > I see it in my company too, where the InfoSec team is basically given free reign I think I'm leaving your company soon. It's definitely too much to be dealing with.
      • branchless 11y ago
        This is so true. In some places all IT sec have to say is "in theory it's possible" and people have to comply. In theory lots of things are possible. We need to balance the risk.
  • vintermann 11y ago
    Why is it like that? Is it especially bad for prosecutors' careers to not get convictions?
• arca_vorago 11y ago
  Slightly ot, but this is one of the reasons I have always felt like the law shows and csi shows had a rather obvious tinge of propaganda to them, in a way that is meant to normalize certain viewpoints. For example, how the accused in shows almost never have a lawyer present, or that the science is perfect, etc. Shades of operation mockingbird.
  • ams6110 11y ago
    Those shows are nearly compete fiction. Like how they show a DNA test coming back in 5 minutes when in reality it takes weeks.
    • askldfhjkasfhd 11y ago
      This is definitely true. But even with awareness of the inaccurate representation, I think some of the message seeps into the brain of even the most aware human. Then realize how unusual it is. Most people do not have the critical thinking skills, or industry expertise, to grok that medicine or forensics or programming is nothing like the movies.
  • Chris2048 11y ago
    Compare CSI to L&O - the criminals often confess everything when confronted (verbally) with the evidence!
• Gratsby 11y ago
  Breathalyzers aren't nearly as accurate as they are purported to be and the whole justice system just accepts it because drunk drivers are bad. The justice system isn't a science system and never has been.
  • yolesaber 11y ago
    If you bring up the fact that breathalyzers are incredibly inaccurate and calibrated to a specific type of person, you will get contempt of court. It's a miscarriage of justice and has ruined lives.
  • Spooky23 11y ago
    Never consent to a breathalyzer if you've been drinking.
    • frandroid 11y ago
      In my jurisdiction, refusing a breathalyzer test is felony, as it should.
      • llamataboot 11y ago
        Is your jurisdiction in the United States? If so, that's not true. You may automatically have your license revoked if you refuse a breathalyzer and a field sobriety test. But that's different than committing a felony. Your penalties may be harsher if you are eventually be found guilty of DUI without the breathalyzer evidence, but that is not being charged with a felony. You absolutely have the 5th Amendment right to not incriminate yourself in every jurisdiction of the US. There are automatic consequences to refusing a breathalyzer (losing ones license), but they have nothing to do with being charged with a crime, much less a felony.
  • frandroid 11y ago
    In my jurisdiction, a positive breathalyzer test is followed by a blood draw for a real analysis.
• js2 11y ago
  Arson cases too have been based on flawed forensics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Todd_Willingham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Todd_Willingham http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/trial-by-fire http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/trial-by-fire In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.” The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”
• hackuser 11y ago
  An excellent source on forensics' scientiic basis is the "Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence: Third Edition" http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13163 http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13163 It was written by the National Academies as a guide for federal judges (i.e., for non-scientists), so it's based on deep scientific expertise and yet is pretty readable. Also, the first section on how science really works in practice, relative to theories of scientific method, is unique (AFAIK) and exceptional. EDIT: If there's not a free version available at that link, I'm pretty sure you can find one from a credible source elsewhere, I think from one of the other organizations involved. However, consider paying and supporting the National Academies' work.
• hackuser 11y ago
  The systemic fix is that there needs to be accountability for these mistakes. Knowingly giving false testimony that leads to someone's conviction and incarceration should be a crime, as should knowing utilization of false testimony by a prosecutor. Just like with torture and other criminal failures of government, nobody goes to jail; there is no incentive to avoid corruption next time someone has a choice like this one.
  • elthran 11y ago
    > Knowingly giving false testimony that leads to someone's conviction and incarceration should be a crime Does the USA not have a crime of perjury?
    • djdhdhehue 11y ago
      Not for those in power.
    • hackuser 11y ago
      > Does the USA not have a crime of perjury? It does, but it is almost never prosecuted (as I've been told by attorneys and as I've coorobrated by my own anecdotal observations). The exceptions are high-profile scalps, such as Bill Clinton and Barry Bonds. The real penalty for perjury is that it discredits your testimony and damages your case.
    • misnome 11y ago
      Who is going to prosecute, when it is the person who decides who gets prosecuted, doing the perjury? And all the other prosecutors use the same methods to get forward in their jobs?
  • wfo 11y ago
    Well, sure, but in general this is never 'knowingly' -- technicians and people working in the lab are trained on methods, told the methods are sound, and then execute the methods and present them in court as trained. It is the methods people/higher ups at the crime labs who are really at fault here.
  • 11y ago
• JackFr 11y ago
  "Paradoxically, Justice Antonin Scalia has emerged as a vocal early skeptic about the risk of taint in the work of crime labs" -- there is nothing paradoxical about it all. The paradox exists only in the mind and shallow analysis of an intellectually lazy author who has been conditioned to believe that he should categorically disagree with Scalia.
  • hackuser 11y ago
    Scalia was indeed very conservative, and I'm pretty sure he would tell you that. Often was not a friend of the accused or convicted, though there were some exceptions.
    • wyldfire 11y ago
      But how should "conservatism" play into faith-in-forensic-evidence? Seems like it's mostly orthogonal. I suspect that trends of finding against the accused would track the issues well: Scalia was focused on a strict interpretation of the Constitution.
      • drzaiusapelord 11y ago
        Because death penalty supporters, like Scalia, ultimately have to accept the court's ruling as perfect or the government is just murdering random people. You can't have it both ways. You can't support the DP and also accept that our investigation tools, be them technical or social, are highly flawed and that our court is often wrong. That's the contradiction here.
        • AnimalMuppet 11y ago
          > Because death penalty supporters, like Scalia, ultimately have to accept the court's ruling as perfect or the government is just murdering random people. False dichotomy. The court's ruling can be less than perfect and still be very far from random. (Perfection is clearly something they should strive for, of course.) But in fact, we are not (and should not be) willing to accept a 100% false negative rate in order to achieve a 0% false positive rate.
• backtoyoujim 11y ago
  > Chillingly, as the Post continues, “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.” Of these defendants, 14 have already been executed or died in prison.
• jMyles 11y ago
  > jurors who, not unreasonably, believed that scientists in white coats knew what they were talking about I don't think I agree with the "not unreasonably" part. At what point do we as a society expect more from jurors? Ask yourself: If you or one of your close friends is called to be on a jury, do you think you'll just take some song-and-dance at face value without carefully weighing the ostensible expertise of each witness? Rather, it seems to me that the process of juror selection has become so obtuse - yet so routine - that critical jurors who might lead the jury away from swallowing this kind of hogwash are filtered out before the case makes it to trial. > There were no scientifically accepted standards for forensic testing, yet FBI experts routinely and almost unvaryingly testified, according to the Post, “to the near-certainty of ‘matches’ of crime-scene hairs to defendants, backing their claims by citing incomplete or misleading statistics drawn from their case work.” ...and nobody questioned this? No defense attorney or jury foreperson over the years brought any serious attention to this? That's the broken part. That the government will lie is to be expected and is part of the nature of government. That people will unflinchingly proceed as though its lies are actually veracious and sober elements of a criminal trial - this is fixable. > There is no lack of good ideas for reform. (Journalist Radley Balko and Roger Koppl, a professor of finance at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management and a fellow at Syracuse’s Forensic and National Security Sciences Institute, offered up a laundry list of fixes in Slate—almost seven years ago.)* These solutions are not all that expensive or complicated. Among them: giving defendants their own forensic experts, untethering crime labs from the prosecutors and cops to which they now answer, verification and standards. Radley has been so tireless in his reporting. Glad to see his work mentioned here. He's a true hacker and a great speaker and researcher. The recommendations mentioned here are so obvious and so easy that it's unthinkable that the failure to implement them is attributable to anything but the desire to continue to convict, truth be damned.
  • jessaustin 11y ago
    Mentioning the name "Radley Balko" during voir dire would probably be enough to get excluded from a criminal jury. If one somehow got on a jury (because the prosecutor assumed a typically ignorant pool?), one would still have to remain circumspect about one's reasons for doubting guilt. One could probably get away with "I don't believe the expert witness". More specificity, like "I've read lots of stuff that proves all of forensic 'science' to be horseshit", would probably result in dismissal along with contempt. The beast must be fed.
• yalogin 11y ago
  This is disturbing. This got me thinking, is there any institution or system that can be trusted? I mean these are organizations that enforce laws and the very foundation the rest of the society is built on. If that is flawed to the coare, what can you trust?
  • Zigurd 11y ago
    It's more that every system that asks for trust should be rigorously tested: Random double blind tests, "red team" tests, etc. Without testing, they are not even at the starting line for building trust.
• pakled_engineer 11y ago
  I was a juror in a trial 10 yrs ago where the police fielded their so-called blood splatter expert who testified he could recreate the entire crime just from casual observations about bloodstains at the scene complete with props using red dyed water to further the fraud. As soon as he was done the judge instructed us that the entire testimony be thrown out since it was blatant pseudoscience but later when I looked the police agents name up he had given the same false testimony in other trials and it was admitted as evidence without question.
  • MichaelGG 11y ago
    >instructed us that the entire testimony be thrown out This is moronic. Human minds aren't able to just discard information and biases like that. The fact that so much is allowed to be said in a courtroom, to untrained people, then simply reasoned away with "well, it's not evidence" is insane. I'm thinking of the lawyer's arguments, too. They get to present things under the guise of non-evidence.
• Zigurd 11y ago
  Forensics should be contracted from the private sector, independent of law enforcement, be equally available to defendants, and QA'ed with test data in double-blind tests.
• wrong_internet 11y ago
  How can these fellows sleep at night? You're proceeding under the popular delusion that law enforcement aren't a special kind of soulless evil. The people who choose this line of work are a self-selected minority who love ruining lives.
  • dang 11y ago
    Please keep this sort of rage rhetoric off HN. There's no signal in it, just noise. It's also a breach of HN's civility rules to attack an entire population like this, so the comment is uncivil as well as unsubstantive. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11579318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11579318 and marked it off-topic.
• wrong_internet 11y ago
  The attempt to excuse them is part and parcel of the new, hip, establishment HN. There is a very strong pro-law-enforcement mentality that has suffused HN in the last few years, primarily due to the heavy influence of popular law-enforcement apologists like rayiner and tptacek.
  • dang 11y ago
    There's no such "new" HN; that is an imaginary thing made up for rhetorical purposes. What there is is a rule against personal attacks. Please don't break it again. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11582137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11582137 and marked it off-topic.
• readams 11y ago
  We've long required the state to provide an attorney to those that cannot afford one. It may now be necessary for the state to provide scientists to those that cannot afford them as well. Sadly prosecutors too often see their job as winning cases rather than serving justice.
  • coldtea 11y ago
    >We've long required the state to provide an attorney to those that cannot afford one. It may now be necessary for the state to provide scientists to those that cannot afford them as well. Well, the state provided poor people bottom of the barrel attorneys, who didn't care much about the defendants (and had not much of a financial motive to), and urged them to plea so that they can move ahead, in a hell of a lot of cases. So, this "state scientist" process to exist, it should be really to work better than that if it's to do any good.
    • sbov 11y ago
      It's not always that they don't care, it's also that the caseload can be insane - some public defenders being assigned upwards of 1,000 felony cases per year.
      • derefr 11y ago
        You'd think that supply would rise to meet demand. Being a public defender in a free market would be an attractive career: the stability of a public servant, and the lucrative nature of a skilled job requiring high intelligence. Of course, we don't have a free market; we have a lawyer's guild with a set yearly intake of applicants.
        • sbov 11y ago
          I don't see how you can have a free market for public defenders until jurisdictions started suffering consequences due to overloading them. E.g. if convictions started being overturned because of the caseload of public defenders things would turn around really fast. From what I can tell the maximum recommended felony caseload is 150-200 per year.
• hellofunk 11y ago
  The Making a Murderer series on Netflix provides some specific case insight into possible FBI misconduct with regards to forensic tests they were asked to do when they didn't have the science to do them.
  • gypsy_boots 11y ago
    Thought of that right after I read the headline. If there was foul play here, I wonder if there was foul play in the Avery case.
• VikingCoder 11y ago
  Aren't these 26 forensic witnesses guilty of massive perjury? I have no sympathy for them AT ALL, and I think they should be personally prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
• ck2 11y ago
  We also need to revisit all shootings the FBI declared justified. Which would be all of them. No FBI agent has ever been found in the wrong for killing anyone, ever.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• Myrmornis 11y ago
  The first questions that one should ask regarding things like this are: - How does this compare to other countries? - Do other countries make use of similar lines of evidence in similar ways? - Have other countries made the same mistake of over-interpreting the evidence and subsequently overhauled it? The World contains a convenient set of correlated pseudo-replicates of western societies. Discourse in the USA often fails to make use of them.
• unabst 11y ago
  There is no good side or bad side in American justice or anywhere with similar systems. The defense is expected to lie through their teeth even if they're guilty, and the prosecution is expected to convict at all costs regardless of innocence. There are no ethical or moral grounds for either stretching their practices, especially in the big leagues where every win counts. As with sports, so often we find the winners were actually just the dopers that got away with it, until they get caught, like now. Fair and balanced? It's pretty disgusting actually, but so is the NFL depending on how offensive you feel it is to taint studies on concussions. The analogy goes further than one might expect, with the justice system struggling with their image just like any other professional sport institution. It's the Justice League. Justice is a brand. The real question is, are we really that desperate? Or rather, why wouldn't we be? When you're forced to win, you're forced to do a lot of things. Instead, we should just be forced to get it right.