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More junk science used to convict people in the courts of America? I'm going to die now of not surprise! I guess a better way to say this is, how does the proli

More junk science used to convict people in the courts of America? I'm going to die now of not surprise! I guess a better way to say this is, how does the proliferation of shit work like this happen so fast but the refutation take so damned long?

toomuchtodo 7y ago
Incentives. If a system is designed to convict (prosecutors are measured on conviction rates, not "justice" or "the truth"), it will bias towards tools that enable meeting those metrics. You get what you measure. We need tooling to better understand when people have been wrongfully convicted using inaccurate forensics sciences so they can more quickly get their case re-evaluated (and speed exoneration if warranted). If someone from Code For America sees this, consider such a tool (similar to what has been built to rapidly expunge marijuana convictions in states that have legalized it).
- lonelappde 7y ago
  As bad as prosecutors are, judges an Congress and buried decide what's admissable. Ultimately, when no one in the process has scientific/mathematical literacy, pseudoscience proliferates.
SaberTail 7y ago
There's an asymmetry to the process of how judges allow evidence. If one judge somewhere allows a prosecutor to present junk science as evidence, that becomes precedent that other prosecutors can point to in order to convince other judges to allow it, too. Once precedent is established, it takes the decision of a higher court to stop use of that junk science. It takes time for cases to work their way up.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  At what point are judges liable here? They play a vital role in our society yet a lot of what they do seems to be based on precedent established on a whim.
  - SllX 7y ago
    Under the Appeals process. If you mean criminally liable though, we don’t hold them liable for the same reasons we don’t hold lawyers criminally liable for defending a convicted criminal. At the end of every human process, you need someone somewhere to exercise some human judgement and be able to rely on it. Humans are not infallible though, and neither is anything else we create whether it’s court systems or computer systems. This is one of the reason’s why we have trials by Jury in cases where life, limb and liberty are at stake. It is one thing to convince one person, the judge presiding over the case to pass judgement one way or another, but a whole other thing to convince several of your peers of equal social standing to pass judgement. It’s still not perfect, but nothing ever will be.
    - Mirioron 7y ago
      Do judges lose their jobs after successful appeals? I'm sure it has happened, but this seems like an incredibly rare event. Yet lawyers who do their jobs poorly (even ones defending criminals) can get fired from being a lawyer and have consequences on their ability to practice law. For most jobs, if you do it poorly enough then there can be severe consequences that follow. Yet here there are matters of life and death at play and nobody seems to have any responsibility in their screw up. Even police officers are held accountable when great harm comes to the innocent due to what they did.
      - SllX 7y ago
        Federally, Article III judges can be impeached and removed by Congress. Administrative and Military (Article II) judges can be fired outright or demoted. State-level, depends on the State, but in California we have something called retention elections, which rarely result in a change in office, but changes in office have come about after particularly unpopular rulings. An appeal doesn’t directly lead to jobs loss, but it doesn’t look good on your record when your judgements are regularly overturned, particularly if you aspire to a better position. Keeping your job isn’t always the only, or most important incentive if you have any kind of ambition or want to leave any kind of lasting legacy.
sixothree 7y ago
It is certainly a failure of the justice system and specifically the judged themselves.
mc32 7y ago
The manolo blahnik patterns were dismissed in the OJ trial, but yeah this kind of stuff was always semi-magic. Interesting and on the side of caution is that false negatives are much much higher than false positives in this Jeans pattern matching.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

toomuchtodo 7y ago

Incentives. If a system is designed to convict (prosecutors are measured on conviction rates, not "justice" or "the truth"), it will bias towards tools that enable meeting those metrics. You get what you measure. We need tooling to better understand when people have been wrongfully convicted using inaccurate forensics sciences so they can more quickly get their case re-evaluated (and speed exoneration if warranted). If someone from Code For America sees this, consider such a tool (similar to what has been built to rapidly expunge marijuana convictions in states that have legalized it).

lonelappde 7y ago
As bad as prosecutors are, judges an Congress and buried decide what's admissable. Ultimately, when no one in the process has scientific/mathematical literacy, pseudoscience proliferates.

SaberTail 7y ago

There's an asymmetry to the process of how judges allow evidence. If one judge somewhere allows a prosecutor to present junk science as evidence, that becomes precedent that other prosecutors can point to in order to convince other judges to allow it, too. Once precedent is established, it takes the decision of a higher court to stop use of that junk science. It takes time for cases to work their way up.

Mirioron 7y ago
At what point are judges liable here? They play a vital role in our society yet a lot of what they do seems to be based on precedent established on a whim.
- SllX 7y ago
  Under the Appeals process. If you mean criminally liable though, we don’t hold them liable for the same reasons we don’t hold lawyers criminally liable for defending a convicted criminal. At the end of every human process, you need someone somewhere to exercise some human judgement and be able to rely on it. Humans are not infallible though, and neither is anything else we create whether it’s court systems or computer systems. This is one of the reason’s why we have trials by Jury in cases where life, limb and liberty are at stake. It is one thing to convince one person, the judge presiding over the case to pass judgement one way or another, but a whole other thing to convince several of your peers of equal social standing to pass judgement. It’s still not perfect, but nothing ever will be.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    Do judges lose their jobs after successful appeals? I'm sure it has happened, but this seems like an incredibly rare event. Yet lawyers who do their jobs poorly (even ones defending criminals) can get fired from being a lawyer and have consequences on their ability to practice law. For most jobs, if you do it poorly enough then there can be severe consequences that follow. Yet here there are matters of life and death at play and nobody seems to have any responsibility in their screw up. Even police officers are held accountable when great harm comes to the innocent due to what they did.
    - SllX 7y ago
      Federally, Article III judges can be impeached and removed by Congress. Administrative and Military (Article II) judges can be fired outright or demoted. State-level, depends on the State, but in California we have something called retention elections, which rarely result in a change in office, but changes in office have come about after particularly unpopular rulings. An appeal doesn’t directly lead to jobs loss, but it doesn’t look good on your record when your judgements are regularly overturned, particularly if you aspire to a better position. Keeping your job isn’t always the only, or most important incentive if you have any kind of ambition or want to leave any kind of lasting legacy.

sixothree 7y ago

It is certainly a failure of the justice system and specifically the judged themselves.

mc32 7y ago

The manolo blahnik patterns were dismissed in the OJ trial, but yeah this kind of stuff was always semi-magic. Interesting and on the side of caution is that false negatives are much much higher than false positives in this Jeans pattern matching.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]