8 ms·
Dr. Whitehurst and the FBI Lab Scandal (2017)
- quantified 5y agoThank you Dr Whitehurst. Feel like a statue should go up somewhere.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoI think that’s a great idea, actually. Somewhere in the DOJ or FBI?
- quantified 5y agoOr a federal courthouse, where the right people will encounter it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- readthenotes1 5y agoThe FBI, the guardian the we need to be guarded from.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- syshum 5y agoThe main problem here is the view that the FBI is a guardian. What in the history of the FBI supports the position that agency is a guardian
- mandmandam 5y agoIf you're a wealthy white dude who makes money from the status quo, then, everything in their entire history.
- Terry_Roll 5y agoCan you trust a legal system which allows entrapment? I'm not saying any legal system is perfect, for example, can a defendant get a fair trial if the prison service make sure the prisoner is not fit to take the stand through poor diet and lack of sleep or simply being in a highly stressful environment? Likewise, when reporting stuff to the police, its advisable to have a lawyer with you as the Police may decide to go for the easy route and prosecute whoever is reporting stuff as its low hanging fruit. Likewise, the legal system ignores the health of the defendant which could explain their actions, and it often doesnt take into account their past. I know here in the UK, when talking to people, we are still seeing the knock on effects of WW2, Brexit is the most obvious example as there is a lot of prejudice towards the Germans & Austrians and a general low level xenophobia even towards people not from these areas, as highlighted by the BBC trolling the public with their comedy sketch show The League of Gentlemen https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p006vm6j https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p006vm6j or Little Britain https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006q2zd https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006q2zd Is there much difference between a religious follower, like a muslim on jihad or a law enforcement professional? They both follow the written word, so then whose written is write? One has stood the test of time for thousands of years but ignores the changes in society today and the other is often changed to reflect changes in modern society but not stood the test of time as prison populations amply demonstrates. In other words who is most righteous?
- kingcharles 5y agoIt's interesting that you bring these points up. Before I spent time locked up I didn't realize how little sleep prisoners get. That definitely affects their ability to understand the proceedings. I did eight years with an average of about four hours sleep a night during that time. If you are locked in a facility awaiting trial, it is very unlikely you will ever see any of the evidence against. For instance, until very recently in Illinois it was illegal for your attorney to share any of the evidence with you if you were in jail. How can you make an informed decision about whether to risk trial or take a plea deal if you can't know what the case is? This is why so many innocent people faced with a death penalty following trial will accept a life sentence plea deal.
- 5y ago
- boomboomsubban 5y agoI remember the report absolutely demolishing the veracity of most forensic practices coming out, but has the field changed at all since then? Are hair samples and such still commonly used as evidence? My cynical side worries it's only gotten worse, as CSI made the job "sexy" attracting a pool of people that would not be overly concerned with the science part of forensics in the first place.
- tus666 5y ago> but has the field changed at all since then? Are hair samples and such still commonly used as evidence? They switched to partial-DNA "matches". Nothing has changed.
- tomnipotent 5y ago> as CSI made the job "sexy" attracting a pool Not all science is equal, and it's a doubled-edge sword. I think the fault is more in human nature. On one hand, we have science that lets us land probes on asteroids and return home with samples, or deploy a terrestrial vehicle on Mars capable of launching a smaller aerial probe... powered by radiation from a burning sphere of gas. On the other, we have forensic science. Same level of confidence, very different results. Who's to blame? The jurors ignorant of the science behind the evidence that influenced their decisions? The judges and lawyers equally so? The labs and employees perpetuating bad science, or the schools that taught them? The police that collect and document it?
- boomboomsubban 5y ago>Who's to blame? The FBI who falsified the accuracy of so many forensic sciences for a start. The prosecutorial side has a strong interest towards exploiting "science" for their gain, we know they are doing it and we need to counteract it.
- tomnipotent 5y ago> The FBI who falsified the accuracy The article didn't make it seem like there was actual fraud, just bad science being followed blindly. I had to find the original FBI announcement to understand it was indeed intentional fraud by individual FBI examiners misrepresenting bad science. https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-testimony-on-microscopic-hair-analysis-contained-errors-in-at-least-90-percent-of-cases-in-ongoing-review https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-testimo...
- zionic 5y agoJust wait till the next shoe drops on DNA “evidence”. All the early tests used scary-low sample counts and the odds of a false positive vs someone else in your geographic location were fairly high.
- jokoon 5y ago> For some, however, it was too late. Defendants in at least 35 of these cases received the death penalty and errors were identified in 33 (94 percent) of those cases. Nine of these defendants have already been executed and five died of other causes while on death row. Yay. Death penalty is a nice word for murder.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- p_j_w 5y agoI genuinely don't understand how someone can read an article like this one, support the death penalty, and still sleep well at night. We've executed so many innocent people it's impossible to not consider the practice monstrous.
- jokoon 5y agoIt's the whole retribution thing.
- axiolite 5y ago> how someone can read an article like this one, support the death penalty I don't understand how someone can consider the death penalty monstrous, but forgetting someone for decades in a brutal, hopeless prison environment is perfectly fine. The death penalty is an interesting motivator. Death row inmates get much more publicity, support, and investigative resources than those with life sentences.
- p_j_w 5y ago>I don't understand how someone can consider the death penalty monstrous, but forgetting someone for decades in a brutal, hopeless prison environment is perfectly fine Neither do I.
- kingcharles 5y agoI'm totally against the death penalty, and even more so having spent a significant portion of my life in the criminal justice system. But, statistics relating to how many innocent people have been executed is simply not available, unless we extrapolate probable statistics from general exonerations. One thing that has been very helpful is the sheer amount of time it often takes to solidify a conviction in the justice system. It can take close to 20 years to finalize death penalty appeals, often giving enough time for science, law and public opinion to change sufficiently to free those who are innocent. (And please do not forget those who are guilty but who were not given their due process - they might be monsters, but if we allow them to be railroaded then we do a disservice to any of us who might find ourselves swallowed into the machine in the future).
- peter_retief 5y agoPeople really need the option of a second opinion. To ensure veracity a second sample should be sent to an independent lab and stored for a set period.
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
- cryptica 5y agoPunishing whistleblowers seems to be a pattern. This might explains why nobody wants to speak up nowadays when they see people doing illegal stuff... Nobody wants to spend 20 years of their lives being mocked, intimidated, fired, etc... for doing the right thing. Now fraudsters are everywhere running the show and destroying society and the planet. IMO, we should introduce death penalty for people involved in such malicious cover ups... Especially if the evidence is strong. They should be hung in a public square and then all of that person's children and descendants should be jailed for life just to be on the safe side.
- csdvrx 5y ago> They should be hung in a public square and then all of that person's children and descendants should be jailed for life just to be on the safe side. Why stop there? Jail their ascendants too! The accused bad education must have come from somewhere? Then just to be on the safe side, I'd include neighbors; the whole city block may be seen as too lenient so jailing the whole city would send the right message!
- cryptica 5y agoThe line has to be drawn somewhere. My main point is that it should be much further than where it is now.
- motohagiography 5y agoA similar case of a forensic lab being a perjury factory was the Motherisk program in Ontario, which forged drug detection in hair samples to remove kids from custodial care. These systems are rotten. In politics, you can see people who are corrupt like this getting rewarded with promotions for having taken one for the team. I see it in companies as well, where if you take on the risk from committing fraud, you can use it as leverage. There are numerous cases where I see managers telling subordinates to fudge data of all kinds, and the ones who don't lie get managed out, and the ones who do lie get promoted. The tactic is to get someone to do something compromising or illegal on your behalf, so you can take credit for the outcome, but the person bullied into lying holds the risk. The only people who ever get persecuted or prosecuted are the ones who threaten to give away the game. The dynamic is covered in the concept of a Moral Maze (https://hbr.org/1983/09/moral-mazes-bureaucracy-and-managerial-work https://hbr.org/1983/09/moral-mazes-bureaucracy-and-manageri...). You can't fix corruption and adulteration. The only way out is to fork a new organization and create a gate that prevents the corruption from taking root in the new org, and even then I've seen it creep back. The alternative is to make grisly examples, but nobody has the stomach for that.
- starwind 5y agoI got fired from one job after my manager told me to fake results and I didn't. I went into a job interview a few days later and I summed it up as "they were asking me to do things with the data I wasn't comfortable with." Guy interviewing me was like "been there," and we moved right on from it. Got the job too
- throw_away 5y agoBTW, Jackall expanded that HBR essay into an entire book. Highly recommended if you want to get entirely black-pilled on corporate work. Wikipedia says it was a favorite of Aaron Swartz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes
- mistrial9 5y ago> Motherisk program a quick read of four or five related Wikipedia articles shows a lifetime of fraud perpetrated by Motherisk founder Dr Gideon Koren, complete with threats of countersuit, piles of falsified research papers in publication, repeated denial and then being caught, and losing his license to practice medicine at age 70+ eye-opening to see this information given the status of US AMA Physicians these days, in income, authority and protection from meaningful punishment also the psychology of using authority to remove children from the care of their biological mother, over and over and over.. combined with academic hubris publishing falsified research over and over and over.. combined with prominent cultural activities.. this individual has done a lot of harm in a way that defeats trust and true authority
- Jenda_ 5y agoAnother story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Dookhan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Dookhan I don't get why they don't continuously send 10-20% of "control samples" (either with known result, or randomly sampled from e.g. the last 3 months → to check that the results are still the same) through the labs, thus having a continuous estimate of data quality - and they can also score "accuracy vs. technician" etc., to spot these problems. (of course this won't work when the entire system is corrupt -- but often it's just a malice/incompetence of a few persons in the lab)
- TruePath 5y agoI'd like to see a charity that retrospectively sends people like this cash. Creating both the sense that you'll be financially and socially rewarded for this kind of brave action would do a lot to make the world better.