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FBI testimony on hair analysis contained errors in 90% of cases (2015)
- kwhitefoot 4y agoIt doesn't seem that they will take action to prevent failures of a similar general kind occurring again. There should be legislation regarding the quality of forensic analysis of all kinds.
- Natsu 4y ago> It doesn't seem that they will take action to prevent failures of a similar general kind occurring again. That seems to contradict this part of the article: > The Department has been working together with the Innocence Project and NACDL to address errors made in statements by FBI examiners regarding microscopic hair analysis in the context of testimony and laboratory reports. Such statements are no longer being made by the FBI, and the FBI is also now employing mitochondrial DNA hair analysis in addition to microscopic analysis They're also going to do DNA analysis now, for free in many cases, instead of just looking at hair under a microscope to compare it.
- kwhitefoot 4y agoThat's taking action to prevent errors of the same kind. My, poorly expressed, point was that all forensic analysis needs to be held to a defined and agreed quality standard. And both quality assurance and quality control should be applied to such things to ensure that the standard is met.
- arcticfox 4y agoIt feels like there need to be defamation lawsuits that ruin anyone that practice these
- themitigating 4y agoWho, the government, that's you, you and I pay for that.
- antiterra 4y agoPlease add (2015) to title?
- mantiq 4y agoI had reached maximum characters, which is also why a space is missing
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoThe real question is, did they use hair data to prosecute anyone after 2015?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mkl95 4y agoWithin two weeks I have learnt that bite mark and hair analysis are full of BS. Is there some list of all these shoddy methods?
- isthisthingon99 4y agoMostly anything with humans
- jacobolus 4y agoPolygraphs, fingerprints, DNA, face matching, forensic ballistics, forensic psychology, witness testimony (especially police testimony), ...
- boomboomsubban 4y agoDNA has a fair amount more credibility than the others. While it's not the silver bullet people think it is, and it can be used to falsely incriminate someone, there is a scientifically supported method of showing two samples of DNA belong to the same person.
- djleni 4y agoMaybe you know more about this than me, something that makes me uneasy about DNA evidence: Say you can confirm a sample is 100% a certain person. How do investigators have any idea how it got there? How do you know it’s from a criminal and not the guy that stocked the convenience store shelves? I tried to look into this and maybe I was searching the wrong thing but found nothing.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago>How do investigators have any idea how it got there? They often can't be certain, and I'm sure somebody is in prison because they're DNA was in an inconvenient place, but it's a far superior form of evidence than the other methods mentioned. Unless a crime is widely watched in person with supporting recordings and DNA evidence, it's basically impossible to be a 100% certain of what happened. That's why court only attempts to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
- woodruffw 4y agoRidiculous. So much of law enforcement and forensic "science" is just pretext or pseudoscientific supportive structure for good old gut feelings.
- smegsicle 4y agosideways application of goodhart's law- anything that can be relied upon can also be over-relied upon, which is generally going to be far easier than the subtle version or- unless there's an opposing force, bad forensic science will drive out the good
- fnordpiglet 4y agoOr prejudices.
- woodruffw 4y agoYou're absolutely right.
- beebeepka 4y agoIs there a difference? I am also guilty of this and suspect most of us are Tinfoil on: maybe that's why they were pushing this CSI bullcrap for as long as they did.
- kibwen 4y ago"Prejudice" is an apt word here, since it literally means "judgment in advance".
- thaumasiotes 4y agoYes, there's a difference. One is mostly about getting a conviction - of anyone - so that you look like you're doing a good job. This is a real and strong pressure faced by politicians and law enforcement.
- goodluckchuck 4y agoIt’s generous to assume that they believed the accused to be guilty. Many were frame jobs.
- eslaught 4y agoThis is from 2015. What happened since then?
- heavyset_go 4y agoA bunch of innocent people died behind bars.
- ROTMetro 4y agoIf you or I lie to the court, it is perjury. When it is the FBI, who are granted an additional level of professional authority and trust in their testimony 'because reasons' (even though no testimony should automatically be elevated over other) it's just harmless 'errors made in statements by FBI examiners' as phrased in this article. Having gone through the system, it's all lies. Let's start with plea agreements. You have to agree in your plea that you were not coerced or threatened into taking your plea, yet everyone know that the prosecutor threatens you with taking the plea or facing an extra 10-30 years as the 'trial tax' (google it) that get's applied if you dare exercise your constitutional right to trial. But the judge, prosecutor, everyone looks the other way and ignores that blatant threat made against you. The judge knows that the prosecutor placing that clause in the plea is being disingenuous, the prosecutor knows they are. If justice is served by a five year sentence in a plea, how is that same justice served and applied fairly when adding 15 years simply for going to trial? Either a crime warrants a 5 year sentence, or a 15 year sentence. But sentencing is based not on your crime, but on the prosecutor and judge being annoyed if you exercise your constitutional rights. There is a reason that plea agreements were considered unconstitutional up until the 60s when the police/judicial state started undermining constitutional rights. Acceptability of forensic evidence such as lie detector tests is not based on science but on precedence. If a court has accepted it as science before, then it is extremely hard for you to challenge it, even when it was complete garbage like lie detector tests. The current language is 'you can't be convicted solely based on lie detector tests' after a lot of people paid a lot of experts and took a lot of 'trial tax' to try and get lie detectors removed completely.
- ldoughty 4y agoFirstly, I'm sorry you went through the system and had to face these kinds of issues. I generally agree with you. The fact some of these citizens people were likely incorrectly executed, and others died in prison, based on bad science makes this depressing to read. However, I would factor in intent and knowledge on the part of lab workers and experts when demanding penalties for their action. If they intentionally lied to support a case, 100% they should have a sentence at least equal to and preferably greater than the person they are essentially framing. However, if they are just using equipment as trained, reading results as trained, and had no I'll intent? I don't think it makes the world better to throw them in jail.
- hedora 4y agoSo, if this is used in a trial where I am on the jury, I'll assume it implies a 90% chance the evidence says the defendant is innocent, plus a 5 to 9.9% chance of a false positive with the underlying test. Got it. Moving on. Edit: I was being snarky but, on reflection, if they are falling back on hair analysis, it implies they have a piece of the guilty party's hair and the defendant's hair, but are not willing to present the results of a $1000 genotyping test. A 99% probability of innocence is probably about right in that part of the criminal prosecution decision tree.
- akira2501 4y ago> I'll assume it implies a 90% chance the evidence says the defendant is innocent Evidence isn't there to _prove_ anything, else we wouldn't need to ask anyone to be a juror. That's why we use "preponderance of evidence" and "beyond reasonable doubt" as our metric. It also assumes that all juries, once they see bite mark analysis, presume it's magic then simply decide they're going to convict at that moment and shut off their brains for the rest of the trial. Do people really believe this is something that happens? > A 99% probability of innocence is probably about right in that part of the criminal prosecution decision tree. I find it very difficult to believe there's a single piece of evidence in a trial that could convince anyone of this. The totality of the evidence is what must be considered. A single test tells you about a single sample in isolation with respect to it's time and method of collection. It doesn't definitely prove anything about an event, and I'm astonished that you could see it that way; unless you're operating under the presumption that all District Attorneys are corrupt to the point of no longer caring about justice and truth. There are certainly examples of corruption, but to presume it's the norm to the extent that a single piece of evidence presented in a particular fashion would cause you to turn _your_ back on justice and truth as a matter of rote course. How is that an improvement?
- puffoflogic 4y ago> Do people really believe this is something that happens? What do you think the point of making all those TV procedurals was? Jurors have been explicitly trained to care about "scientific evidence" to the exclusion of all else. Look at the Chauvin trial. Dude committed murder captured by a half dozen cameras, but the trial spent about 80% of time agonizing over nigh-irrelevant scientific evidence, because that's what the jury cares about.
- kjeetgill 4y ago> The DOJ, FBI, Innocence Project, and NACDL (National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers) have been working jointly on this review and share the same goal of ensuring the integrity of the American justice system in all respects. All of the parties are committed to addressing this situation properly and will continue to work together in a collaborative and professional manner. This is the only thing keeping the cynicism at bay for me when I read stories like this. It's horrifying to think of how many people might be falsely imprisoned.
- shantaram_7 4y agoAny good books to read detailing sciences and implementation of forensics?
- steve76 4y ago
- bell-cot 4y agoOne of our clients at $Job is a testing laboratory for mold & asbestos samples - just from building inspectors & such. To maintain their modest accreditations, every single Analyst (person looking at submitted samples through a microscope) at that lab has to perform daily duplicates & replicates of their own & their coworkers' results (and achieve fairly demanding levels of consistency on those). Then they trade samples with other labs weekly or monthly, to demonstrate further consistency & accuracy of results. Then the accrediting inspectors come through to inspect regularly. Then... Where the hell were the grown-ups, let alone an inspector who actually understood laboratory QC, when the FBI was running a Keystone Cops clown lab for years?
- slavboj 4y agoSee, your job is to get accurate results because clients are paying to know if they have a problem or not. The FBI's job is to get convictions, so their lab's job is to create railroadable pseudo-evidence.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoMold lawsuits are very common; the money in mold testing is to always find mold. People who honestly want to know whether they have a problem are dwarfed in number by people who honestly want a certificate that says mold was found.
- bell-cot 4y agoMaybe as a generality. But for our laboratory client at $Job, it very definitely is not. There are plenty of people (home owners, landlords, contractors, pharmacies, etc.) who would prefer that mold not be present. And have a large financial interest in getting accurate results.
- c4ptnjack 4y agoWorking at an industrial hygiene company that works with large train companies in particular, doing studies on everything from asbestos to air particulates. The entire industry is around finding where those issues exist, using accurate data to track it, and solve whatever problems come up to avoid the large risk of getting sued by employees or communities nearby. I did QA on all the data that came in from labs and matched it all the various input samples we sent off. Incredibly thorough testing procedures, redundancy, and tracking over time was the name of the game for my companies entire business. They've been successful for 30+ years doing that too.
- miked85 4y agoDepending on the case, it is 100% accurate for the FBI however.
- egberts1 4y ago96% FALSE POSITIVE RATE (falsely accused) for a non-DNA hair analysis???!!! I want to know more about its false negative rate (how many got away with it scot-free).
- bad416f1f5a2 4y agoWould we ever know? A type II error in a criminal trial would be very hard to demonstrate, as the assumption is (should be!) that a defendant is innocent.