12 ms·

Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people

202 points by rossant 3y ago

thedigitalone 3y ago
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/wETB7 https://ghostarchive.org/archive/wETB7
albert_e 3y ago
I was thinking about this just today randomly. Every bit in computer memory or data store is just a bit flip away from being completely wrong. In other words all data corruption -- unintentional or deliberate-- can be statistically shown as a bunch of off-by-one errors. Of course the chance of multiple random off-by-one errors lining up exactly to help one party is astronomically low. But would a typical court of law be able to discern?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- andrewla 3y ago
  I don't think this categorization is technically correct, and even in the places where it is partially correct I don't see that the "off-by-one" phrasing adds any value. Off-by-one errors are a very specific type of error in algorithm implementation, where a closed boundary and an open boundary are confused. A general bit flip is not really an example of this unless it is connected to this specific kind of mistake. And data corruption is much broader, and can involve adding or removing data from a stream in addition to mutating existing data. Saying that all data mutations are a "bunch of off-by-one errors" is just asserting that there exists a hamming distance between any two binary representations of the same length, and I don't think this adds a lot of insight. On the other hand, using the term "off-by-one error" carries with it a lot of baggage and connotations, most of which do not apply to scenarios you have described or general data corruption.
  - albert_e 3y ago
    thank you I was talking very loosely --surely it doesn't stand up to any level of scrutiny
sneak 3y ago
The police and prosecution are the ones using these tools to attack innocent people. The article opens with a case of the corrupt prosecution intentionally and illegally withholding evidence. This isn’t about bad science, this is about bad prosecutors who are more interested in convictions than justice. Selective enforcement and opportunities to engage in misconduct like this are endemic in the US criminal justice system. Police and prosecutors have far too much power before and during trial, and far too much wiggle room to seek convictions for innocent people.
- causal 3y ago
  I've always been perplexed by the incentive to get convictions. This is guaranteed to result in prosecutors preferring any method with a lot of false positives.
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    Separating evidence processing from law enforcement would be a good step forward.
    - sneak 3y ago
      I think the system of American policing was originally cooked up to enforce the existing social hierarchy via selective enforcement, and it appears to remain mostly unchanged because it seems to continue to serve that same purpose. Why would people with power to change it do so, when it is working as intended? Prosecutors don’t bring charges against police and judges and senators and large landowners/rightsholders (or the DNI).
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    If you're a prosecutor you need to prosecute. If you don't win cases, you're not going to keep your employment. QED.
  - Lord-Jobo 3y ago
    Perverse incentives are one of the worst issues in modern law enforcement. They exist at nearly every step and they are causing a rot that will take decades lot of concentrated effort to remove. if you build a system, patchwork, entirely reactive, from the deep roots of racism and anti-labor movements (https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/)(https://nleomf.org/slave-patrols-an-early-form-of-american-policing) https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/)(https://nl... and then ignore the nearly 50% rate of decline in violent crime since 1993(https://www.statista.com/statistics/191129/reported-violent-crime-in-the-us-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191129/reported-violent-...), and in fact, have a population undergo a rapid INCREASE in PERCEIVED violent crime (https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/ozgaysrcqku8igcmvkhtba.png https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro...).... well its hard to be surprised. If we wanted to actually evolve our system, top to bottom, to focus on reduced recidivism and a reduced prison population without increasing violent crime, one of the first steps we should take is a deep pass over every perverse incentive in the system. Revenue sources has to be the biggest category. Ignoring salary, there are so many fines and fees that directly fund the police. (https://www.brennancenter.org/series/how-perverse-financial-incentives-warp-criminal-justice-system https://www.brennancenter.org/series/how-perverse-financial-...) civil asset forfeiture is plain and open theft, and it directly incentivizes as many arrests as possible. incarceration facilities of all kinds are funded based on bed space and occupancy for christs sake (https://www.brennancenter.org/series/how-perverse-financial-incentives-warp-criminal-justice-system https://www.brennancenter.org/series/how-perverse-financial-...) Military cooperation agreements give all sorts of free military tech to police agencies and swat teams, and they constantly take christmas morning style photos with them (https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp9861590.jpg https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp9861590.jpg). a small town near my hometown had a population of 4500 when the 'police department' (police force was 30ish people) got a fucking APC from the military for free. This was in 2010ish so i cant find a direct source, but i did see it in person.
causal 3y ago
It would be hard to really know, but I'm curious what percentage of the total US prison population is innocent. Per capita prison rate is still around 5 in 1000 according to Wikipedia, which is very high for the developed world.
- graphe 3y ago
  Innocent meaning they didn’t do the specific crime, or innocent as in someone with a clean record that was railroaded? If you’re looking for the criminal that killed a bunch of people but not that specific case it’s not that uncommon. If you’re looking for a squeaky clean guy that was there at the wrong place at the wrong time it’s very rare. Most criminals are repeat offenders.
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    Most businesses create and cultivate repeat customers from specific target markets. The US prison industrial complex is adept at this.
    - graphe 3y ago
      What is the conclusion you’re making?
      - mistrial9 3y ago
        it is a revolving door in real ways
        Zigurd 3y ago
        It starts with selective enforcement and repeated police contact with young people. That's how the business of imprisonment fills the funnel in the US.
  - klyrs 3y ago
    This is magical thinking. We know the guy was bad so we locked him up for a crime. We don't know if we pinned the right crime on him or not, but he's locked away safely now so he must be bad. If this is your genuine belief, it begs the question: why are Americans, on average, such terrible people when compared to other first world citizens?
armchairhacker 3y ago
I didn’t see it mentioned, another case of bad math used in court (unsurprisingly to convict a black person): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mTNlVAz2fdA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mTNlVAz2fdA And while Googling I found another video by the same channel (Vsauce2): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OMr6zCXwuns https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OMr6zCXwuns
causal 3y ago
Note that proportionately few of our federal judges have spent any time as public defenders, and a disproportionately high number have served as prosecutors. Jackson is the first supreme court justice to have served as a public defender, whereas 3 other justices have been prosecutors. Prosecutors are incentivized to get convictions, and that slanted thinking could easily be carried on to the bench. [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/few-public-defenders-become-federal-judges-ketanji-brown-jackson-would-be-the-supreme-courts-first https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/few-public-defenders-b...
- tiahura 3y ago
  Being primarily a civil attorney, I'm well aware of the disproportionate number of former prosecutors on the bench. A couple of points: 1. Most prosecutors are liberals. It's not like right wing law students go looking for jobs in prosecutor's offices. I can't think of any from my class way back when. 2. The problem is more that judges and prosecutors are old colleagues. The slant is that they all know the defendants are guilty. There's so much crime, and aversion to losing trials, that (unless politics is involved) prosecutors tend to only bring cases where the defendant is clearly guilty. They like shooting fish in a barrel. If they find that there are problems with a case they tend to let the defendant get continuance after continuance until the case just goes away on its own.
  - causal 3y ago
    Thanks for that insight. My discomfort is with the notion that they could know that the defendant is guilty- sure there may be some obvious cases, but I do not trust most humans to differentiate their intuition from hard evidence.
    - swells34 3y ago
      And unfortunately, judges are the only legal entity empowered to use their intuition for legal decision making. Sentencing is a good example; judges can kinda just decide sentences based on feel. Just throw some number out there.
Lord-Jobo 3y ago
Wow, a hackernews topic thats actually directly related to my specialty. Anyway, this article is spot on and this is a really rampant specific issue. “expert witnesses have often overstated the probative value of their evidence, going far beyond what the relevant science can justify.” This is the absolute center of the issue. Experts are used by the prosecution AND defense, but the experts used by the prosecution are often times so hilariously and openly biased that its insane how little pushback they get. Career cops with poor credentials that spend 30 years going from witness stand to witness stand saying literally whatever. You can definitely find biased 'pay for opinion' style experts for defense (its a profitable industry after all), and ive had the misfortune of trying to course correct them and their clients, but they are less frequently biased via a long career in law enforcement, and more importantly, get absolutely flambéed when they display the same level of bullshit as prosec witnesses. There are actual possible consequences for defense experts who lie, you get roasted in a news article that shows up on every google search and nobody with integrity will hire you ever again. That just doesnt happen for prosecution experts, ever. most media is terrified to highlight those bad actors because of the huge pushback they get from cops/cop unions/and more importantly the rabid facebook populace that will NOT stand for police criticism. and judges will very rarely hand down sanctions. after all, over a third (37 percent) of sitting justices (state supremes) are former prosecutors, while only 7 percent are former public defenders. (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/state-supreme-court-diversity-april-2021-update https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/stat...) The article cites a few specific examples of experts creating a huge wake of bullshit in the legal field as they trudge around making stuff up, but a more convincing writeup with broader examples of fraud in the field was done by the intercept here (https://theintercept.com/2015/04/24/badforensics/ https://theintercept.com/2015/04/24/badforensics/) in 2015. I can assure you the problem is still bad. Dont think its better with digital evidence just because there are hash values and log files. I have seen (insert f.agency here) plainly and clearly fabricate evidence (and get away with it). Countless instances of smart people who, definitely, beyond any doubt, know and understand what their evidence ACTUALLY indicates, and instead inflate its value to a ludicrous degree. TLDR; If its physical evidence, and not exact DNA match(think tire marks, blood spatter, bite marks), its wouldnt remotely be accurate enough to be court admissible if the courts were functioning properly and vetting expert witnesses properly. if its digital evidence, and there are claims like "person was at location x,y,z at time a,b,c" and not in the format "the device was more likely than not in the general vicinity at the general time" then they are talking out of their ass. in absence of security footage or the like. my bias: if it wasnt obvious, i work with the defense the majority of the time, on digital evidence, and i am going to see and remember the transgressions of the other side more often. i try to account for that. not a lawyer. so much to learn in the field still. just an internet ignoramus
tiahura 3y ago
The article doesn't prove anyone was actually innocent, only that dodgy science was admitted. In the highlighted case, I'm assuming the victim's multiple identifications of Odom as the perp was also fairly persuasive to the jury.
- csours 3y ago
  Have we discovered how to prove a negative and I missed it? Or do we still have to look at the balance of evidence? In other words: in most justice systems, the prosecution must produce evidence of guilt, they hold the burden. It's also very important to know that (in the US justice system), evidence of innocence is not persuasive to appellate courts; they are looking for abuse of process. --- Now, cognition is a different matter altogether. When something terrible has happened, the human mind looks for the cause, specifically for the person who caused the terrible event. Sometimes, there is a person who did a crime - when someone is shot, that is generally treated as a crime. But sometimes sick people die. Sometimes infants fail to continue breathing. Sometimes wildfires burn a town and kill people. Sometimes viruses jump from (non human) animals to humans. In other words, in human cognition, satisfaction is more important than truth. Scientific truth is a framework whereby we delay our satisfaction with an answer, using specific tools that are socially accepted in that field of study.
  - tiahura 3y ago
    "Have we discovered how to prove a negative" Yes. You prove Odom was in Canada at the time, or that no crime actually occurred, or that someone else did it, etc. There are multiple ways to prove he didn't do it.
adamsb6 3y ago
Even photo and video evidence suffers from courtrooms that don’t understand how nearly all cameras will record and encode images. JPEG encoding (and thus MPEG encoding) takes 8x8 blocks of pixels and represents them as a discrete cosine transform. In a very real way these pixels don’t actually exist. If your video evidence relies on such a small portion of MPEG encoded video, you can easily mislead a jury to convicting an innocent person. I’m reminded of the Rittenhouse trial where the prosecutors had a technician massage a still from a video for hours until some very tiny collection of pixels, enlarged from the original by quite a bit, were arranged in such a way that they said demonstrated Rittenhouse initiated aggression against the first man he shot. The defense actually had some idea about such a small collection of pixels not being a reliable representation of reality, but couldn’t sufficiently explain it and didn’t have an expert who could, so the judge allowed it.
- Lord-Jobo 3y ago
  This is one of the better litmus tests to see if the expert witness is knowledgeable in the field, and more importantly, up-to-date on the tech. some really smart but definitely older expert witnesses will fumble this very hard. Its not like those kinds of processes, the "enhancing" filters, are inherently bad or inadmissible, you just have to be clear with the judge and jury what the hell is actually happening.
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    This also came up in the Johnny Depp trial, where evidence was challenged and there was a long discussion about whether a video that had been shared over AirDrop was admissible, or whether that should be considered tampering, due to the possibility of it being re-encoded / compressed (which is a theoretically possible concern, as doesn't iPhone record in HEVC but change it to H.264 when shared with people?)
  - thfuran 3y ago
    >This is one of the better litmus tests to see if the expert witness is knowledgeable in the field, and more importantly, up-to-date on the tech It's an absolute travesty that it should fall to expert witnesses at all. Judges, police, and criminal trial lawyers should know how common forms of evidence work in general.
lkbm 3y ago
The first time I remember running across this was /Innumeracy/ (1988) by John Allen Paulos. It's been discussed for decades, and as best I can tell hasn't really been addressed at all. I don't know the solution. Ideally, everyone would be good at math, but I don't see that happening in the near future. My best answer is for us to provide every court have an on-call statistician, reviewing every case. I would hope big law firms are already doing this, but you should get a mathematically-sound judgement even if you have to depend on an underfunded and overworked public defenders. (More recently, I've been wondering this about scientific publishing. Misusing statistical tests--or choosing the wrong once seems--like a fairly common source of error in peer-reviewed science. It feels like there, too, we need expert statisticians carefully reviewing every paper of note. Given the amounts charged by some journals, it feels like a reasonable service to demand of them.)
- pc86 3y ago
  > My best answer is for us to provide every court have an on-call statistician, reviewing every case. Is this not the exact reason for expert witnesses?
  - twisteriffic 3y ago
    Expert witnesses can be cripplingly expensive. Having a gratis sanity check sounds like a great idea, assuming you can find some way to insulate them from influence.
    - claytonjy 3y ago
      Can confirm. I worked at a small statistics consultancy where the owner did some expert testimony, and you have to reveal what you charge. The opposing side was often paying 500+/hr for shoddy work! I think we've seen stories of Ivy League professors charging thousands per hour, and making the bulk of their income this way. Not sure how high it goes in the most high-profile cases.
  - Thrymr 3y ago
    Expert witnesses are inherently adversarial, like the court system itself. There is no "neutral" evaluation of the reliability of a piece of evidence. If one side hires an expert to evaluate something, they are under no obligation to have the expert testify in court if the evaluation doesn't help their case.
the-dude 3y ago
Glad to see Lucia de Berk mentioned, a high profile Dutch case. Although she was acquited after some years, it wrecked her.
graphe 3y ago
If we accept that court cases will have a non zero error rate, what rate are we comfortable with? Court cases are irregular, judges, the jury, the experts and the type of prosecution matters. Are we more comfortable with different crimes at different rates? In the US, you’re presumed innocent (in the eyes of the law) and many in cases the law can tip the balance over a technicality, such as fruit of the poisoned tree and inability to admit some evidence that would be essential in a layman’s eyes. How would a court be robust against problems such as biased experts, juries and judges? Would we be more comfortable with a lower or higher than average conviction rate? Is the problem the prisons?
WalterBright 3y ago
I read about a case once where a man was convicted of rape. The evidence was that the rape was done face-to-face with the victim, and the victim positively ID'd him. How could she not, when she was face-to-face with him? It was a slam dunk. After some years in prison, the convicted person managed to get a DNA test, which proved he was not the rapist. How could this be? It turns out the DNA matched a convicted sex offender who had, in the meantime, died in prison. A picture of him showed that he looked just like the falsely convicted man. The victim, to her credit, profusely apologized for mis-identifying him, but she acted in good faith.
- 10000truths 3y ago
  Do you have a link to the case details? At the very least, there has to have been some additional evidence to convict, even if circumstantial. I find it hard to believe that someone can be ruled guilty of a crime as serious as rape based solely on the plaintiff's testimony.
  - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
    Here is an example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66513959 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66513959
  - 2devnull 3y ago
    >I find it hard to believe I find it hard to believe you find it hard to believe. :) There’s a cliche term for such cases, “he said/she said” and they are not at all uncommon.
    - bawolff 3y ago
      I dont think this term applies here - usually that term is reserved for one or both parties misrepresenting the situation. Here we have mistaken identity, which i would consider different.
      - 2devnull 3y ago
bjornsing 3y ago
A few years back there were some stories in a Swedish newspaper about a method for medical age estimation of asylum seekers developed by a government agency. I could hardly believe my eyes when the person responsible for the accuracy of the method was quoted as saying that it was very reliable, because it used two unreliable methods to estimate if the person was above 18 years old, and then concluded that they were 18+ if either method so indicated. You don’t need to be a genius to realize your false 18+ rate will be higher when combining two methods in this way than it would be if you used a single method, but he argued the opposite. This caught my attention and I spent an inordinate amount of time, together with a group of other concerned people, trying to convince this government authority they were wrong, and later to expose them for it / stop them from continuing. But it sadly turned out to be next to impossible. They persisted with inaccurate/false affidavits and court testimony for years, until finally the minister of justice ordered a formal probe into the method. They then patched it up as best they could without exposing their previous errors, and pretended like nothing had happened. The formal probe issued an interim report with pretty harsh commentary, and was then cancelled by the minister of justice before it could give its final report. Forever changed my view of the Swedish justice system.
- cpill 3y ago
  Mimics my impression of Sweden in general. It's not a nice place of you are not Swedish.
  - bedobi 3y ago
    in this case it's the opposite - the policy allowed asylum seekers to claim and benefit from being considered to be 18 or younger when they were in fact obviously 30+ but yeah your impression is not wrong, Sweden is not a nice place lol
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- rossant 3y ago
  Pretty much the same thing happened in France: https://www.cairn.info/revue-journal-du-droit-des-jeunes-2009-5-page-33.htm https://www.cairn.info/revue-journal-du-droit-des-jeunes-200... (in French) Experts using scientifically unreliable methods to determine that asylum seekers are 18+ and can therefore be expelled from the French territory.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
WaitWaitWha 3y ago
This a bit misaligned, blame shifting. I will be the first to admit there are unscrupulous, fame seeking, and overzealous expert witnesses out there. But, there are mechanisms in the courts to filter most of them out. I just think it is not done for money, time, career, or political reasons. I have seen this fail both in the adversarial (e.g., US) and elsewhere in inquisitorial (e.g., EU) court systems. In the adversarial courts, time and time again I watch lawyers refuse to hire expert witnesses for their own side because <insert hubris here>. Overall, there is also the opportunity for a voir dire of the expert witness. Failure to perform that is again lawyers' fault. So, who is to blame for all the mistakes? Yes, all of them. Final note regarding experts in court, specifically around professional expert witnesses - there is a racket in the industry where new-comers are kept out. The expert witness industry does some gatekeeping not only for expertise, but for retiring law enforcement in some jurisdictions. For example, in some US states a digital forensics expert required to be a licensed Private Investigator, unless former law enforcement. The PI licensing requirement are completely irrelevant for the expert witness role. Personal anecdotal experience - Lawyer thinks he is technologists, refuses to hire expert witness, begs expert to come middle of the case. Lawyer hires cheapest expert, opposing expert makes haggis out of cheapest expert. Funniest one was where in a small court the State's expert start going off on some cockamamie ideas about transference. The opposing expert was an instructor and had one of her classes in court to learn. The class burst out laughing, and the judge had to gavel. When she got on the stance, it was just glorious, torturous evisceration.
- cool_dude85 3y ago
  > time and time again I watch lawyers refuse to hire expert witnesses for their own side because <insert hubris here>. Because they are very expensive and most regular people don't have money for them? Because public defenders have a few minutes to look over a case and don't have time or resources to bother with this level of care? Which of the two are caused by hubris?
  - WaitWaitWha 3y ago
    This is not a binary situation. I am writing that the choices made by lawyers are often for hubris, not lack of resources. This is my anecdotal experience, which is why I included qualifiers.
rightbyte 3y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if computer forsensics is about as bad science as bullet forsensics. Ever since I had a porn virus hosting kinda lame porn videos over BitTorrent like 20 years ago, I thought about exactly how computer forsensics prove intent in child sexual abuse material cases.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  I don't know. I've spoken to FBI computer forensics guys and their computer knowledge was up there with mine in terms of hardware, software, OS etc. I've been very, very impressed with them. The problems come when they pass their data to the prosecution and defense who are not computer trained and it all goes sour from there on.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Ok nice to hear.
- conductr 3y ago
  Recently a teacher at my son's school was found to be part of a child porn ring. His mug shot was posted alongside a couple dozen others and initial impression was it was organized crime pedaling this stuff. Perception was he's guilty; lock him up. The immediate response was he was fired, arrested, etc. There were no facts or investigation but the school was in communication with us and getting info from LEO as the investigation began. We pretty quickly found that no kids were involved (sigh of relief). Then found out it was a part of a FBI sting and he was actually a lone actor not involved in any type of organized 'ring' (wait, what?). Then about a month after initial arrest, we found out he watched on his computer (streamed or tracked from an FBI server) approximately 3 videos. Unknown duration, unknown intent, unknown everything else. But, having seen the 'legit' side of the adult industry and how those websites work, I'm totally of the opinion he probably landed on a website and those videos 1) autoplayed 2) did not indicate or appear as containing underage people 3) or he clicked them and hit back once he realized the 'actors' appeared a little too young looking. The FBI sting also caught some terrible people and this teacher's mug shot in that press release basically made him guilty by association (that didn't exist). I don't know if this teacher did anything intentionally illegal, but in my opinion the facts that eventually came to be did not substantiate the initial response from law enforcement - which has ruined this man's career and ostracized him from our community (at minimum); he's still fighting to reduce charges so it's likely bankrupted him too. Also, If you search his name today, you'll see that press release and mugshot as top result. I know I've seen some adult content on 'legit' websites that I feel was questionable on age, no way to know for sure, but I didn't realize it until I viewed it and I just moved on with my browsing. It's scary to thing visiting any website could give the FBI enough data to come down this hard on someone.
chaps 3y ago
Very, very much yes. Criminal courts really, really aren't a good place to address technical matters. For example, ankle electronic monitoring (obviously) doesn't work well in faraday-cage like apartment complexes. And yet time and time again, GPS skew is used to argue that someone left their home -- sometimes even months after the fact. I've read emails from a local sheriff's office that said that they consider a sufficiently weak signal to be a result of "foiling", period. Through FOIA though, I've been able to get over 100 million instances where a GPS device didn't have a strong enough signal. There are even criminal trials where an EM company will send a sales person to testify and to claim that they're not aware of any technical faults with the system. https://thetriibe.com/2022/11/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-county-bombarded-with-texts-from-sheriffs-contractor/ https://thetriibe.com/2022/11/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-c... (disclaimer: I'm the author)
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Also wrote the previous one which ended with me serving five months in jail for retweeting the public defender's Tweet about it (not your fault): https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/false-alarms/ https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/false-alarms/ This might have been the Tweet I reposted: https://twitter.com/CookCoDefender/status/1539705862230376448 https://twitter.com/CookCoDefender/status/153970586223037644... https://nitter.net/CookCoDefender/status/1539705862230376448 https://nitter.net/CookCoDefender/status/1539705862230376448
  - oooyay 3y ago
    Correct me if I'm off base here, but this seems to be absolute nonsense: > Like many on EM, Ross was never granted movement outside his home even once, not even to buy food. His sister, a manager at Securitas, helped when she could, but work got in the way sometimes, he said. So, they replaced the box you sit in with a box that you pay for and provide no additional services with all the same restrictions. What the fuck is the point of these programs? I can understand wanting to use EM to ensure someone shows up to a trial, but this geofencing stuff is absolute madness. It just reintroduces the problem that made prisons and jails problematic in the first place. If someone is a non-threat enough to let them live in society with a bracelet then let them live.
trident5000 3y ago
Deliberately hiding evidence should should equate to hefty prison time for a prosecutor.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  In known history, I think there has been perhaps one prosecutor charged with a crime over this. How about that for a statistic? From my experience it is literally impossible to report a crime made by a prosecutor. Hiding evidence might not even be a crime in many jurisdictions. In the USA it would be a constitutional violation, but that rarely makes it a crime because violating the constitution rarely becomes criminal unless violence is involved.
dn3500 3y ago
My father was called for jury duty a few years ago. The case depended on some physics, something about the angles and momentum in a car crash. My father was disqualified, because he's a physics teacher and may have been tempted to interpret the physics expert's testimony instead of blindly accepting it.
- cbsmith 3y ago
  Yup. I don't think the problem is the jury, or even the experts. There's a fundamental problem with how the courts use expert testimony to ensure fair justice. I believe the idea is that to ensure fairness, verdicts should not be determined by variances in expertise amongst the jury. I recall being specifically instructed that I was NOT to question the expert testimony based on any prior expertise I might have. It solves one problem, and creates a ton of others.
  - lopis 3y ago
    I can imagine that this is required because the vast majority of people have "opinions" on the experts' field. So many people operate on gut feelings and reject science and fact. So they prefer to blanket ban arguing about the experts statement.
    - cbsmith 3y ago
      The motive is clear, but consequence is that we deliberately choose juries that are fully Dunning-Kreugered. They have to rely on social cues as such to reason about which expert witness is credible... which pretty much undermines the justification for bringing the expertise to court. If you brought in a magician instead, the jury would find them equally credible.
- eli 3y ago
  Jurors aren't expected to blindly accept expert testimony. Normal jury instructions are exactly the opposite: that jurors should treat it just like any other testimony and make their own decision on how trustworthy it is. I think the concern is more that they don't want a self-appointed expert on the jury having too much sway over the other jurors.
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
innocent poor people.
ubiquitysc 3y ago
Here's a worthwhile read on the subject: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33296669-the-cadaver-king-and-the-country-dentist https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33296669-the-cadaver-kin...
eli 3y ago
I was a juror on a criminal trial once and there was a ballistics expert who testified that he was "100% certain" that the markings on a shell casing came from a certain gun. This is based on a visual inspection under a microscope. I googled it after the trial and sure enough when you put this sort of thing to the test, experts are not correct 100% of the time.
load81 3y ago
COVID enters the chat…
rossant 3y ago
The author could have also mentioned the controversial diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma which has long relied on bad science, resulting in wrongful convictions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
rossant 3y ago
Mathematicians Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez have written an entire book on this very issue of bad statistics causing miscarriages of justice: https://www.amazon.com/Math-Trial-Numbers-Abused-Courtroom/dp/0465032923 https://www.amazon.com/Math-Trial-Numbers-Abused-Courtroom/d...
amai 3y ago
What do you expect? Just a few days ago we saw this article: "High school math doesn't prepare most students for their college majors", where professors complain that high school math doesn't include enough statistics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38596191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38596191 But maybe in the future some MathGPT can help....

202 points by rossant 3y ago

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/wETB7 https://ghostarchive.org/archive/wETB7

I was thinking about this just today randomly. Every bit in computer memory or data store is just a bit flip away from being completely wrong. In other words all data corruption -- unintentional or deliberate-- can be statistically shown as a bunch of off-by-one errors. Of course the chance of multiple random off-by-one errors lining up exactly to help one party is astronomically low. But would a typical court of law be able to discern?

deleted 3y ago
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andrewla 3y ago
I don't think this categorization is technically correct, and even in the places where it is partially correct I don't see that the "off-by-one" phrasing adds any value. Off-by-one errors are a very specific type of error in algorithm implementation, where a closed boundary and an open boundary are confused. A general bit flip is not really an example of this unless it is connected to this specific kind of mistake. And data corruption is much broader, and can involve adding or removing data from a stream in addition to mutating existing data. Saying that all data mutations are a "bunch of off-by-one errors" is just asserting that there exists a hamming distance between any two binary representations of the same length, and I don't think this adds a lot of insight. On the other hand, using the term "off-by-one error" carries with it a lot of baggage and connotations, most of which do not apply to scenarios you have described or general data corruption.
- albert_e 3y ago
  thank you I was talking very loosely --surely it doesn't stand up to any level of scrutiny

sneak 3y ago

The police and prosecution are the ones using these tools to attack innocent people. The article opens with a case of the corrupt prosecution intentionally and illegally withholding evidence. This isn’t about bad science, this is about bad prosecutors who are more interested in convictions than justice. Selective enforcement and opportunities to engage in misconduct like this are endemic in the US criminal justice system. Police and prosecutors have far too much power before and during trial, and far too much wiggle room to seek convictions for innocent people.

causal 3y ago
I've always been perplexed by the incentive to get convictions. This is guaranteed to result in prosecutors preferring any method with a lot of false positives.
- Zigurd 3y ago
  Separating evidence processing from law enforcement would be a good step forward.
  - sneak 3y ago
    I think the system of American policing was originally cooked up to enforce the existing social hierarchy via selective enforcement, and it appears to remain mostly unchanged because it seems to continue to serve that same purpose. Why would people with power to change it do so, when it is working as intended? Prosecutors don’t bring charges against police and judges and senators and large landowners/rightsholders (or the DNI).
- qingcharles 3y ago
  If you're a prosecutor you need to prosecute. If you don't win cases, you're not going to keep your employment. QED.
- Lord-Jobo 3y ago
  Perverse incentives are one of the worst issues in modern law enforcement. They exist at nearly every step and they are causing a rot that will take decades lot of concentrated effort to remove. if you build a system, patchwork, entirely reactive, from the deep roots of racism and anti-labor movements (https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/)(https://nleomf.org/slave-patrols-an-early-form-of-american-policing) https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/)(https://nl... and then ignore the nearly 50% rate of decline in violent crime since 1993(https://www.statista.com/statistics/191129/reported-violent-crime-in-the-us-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191129/reported-violent-...), and in fact, have a population undergo a rapid INCREASE in PERCEIVED violent crime (https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/ozgaysrcqku8igcmvkhtba.png https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro...).... well its hard to be surprised. If we wanted to actually evolve our system, top to bottom, to focus on reduced recidivism and a reduced prison population without increasing violent crime, one of the first steps we should take is a deep pass over every perverse incentive in the system. Revenue sources has to be the biggest category. Ignoring salary, there are so many fines and fees that directly fund the police. (https://www.brennancenter.org/series/how-perverse-financial-incentives-warp-criminal-justice-system https://www.brennancenter.org/series/how-perverse-financial-...) civil asset forfeiture is plain and open theft, and it directly incentivizes as many arrests as possible. incarceration facilities of all kinds are funded based on bed space and occupancy for christs sake (https://www.brennancenter.org/series/how-perverse-financial-incentives-warp-criminal-justice-system https://www.brennancenter.org/series/how-perverse-financial-...) Military cooperation agreements give all sorts of free military tech to police agencies and swat teams, and they constantly take christmas morning style photos with them (https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp9861590.jpg https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp9861590.jpg). a small town near my hometown had a population of 4500 when the 'police department' (police force was 30ish people) got a fucking APC from the military for free. This was in 2010ish so i cant find a direct source, but i did see it in person.

causal 3y ago

It would be hard to really know, but I'm curious what percentage of the total US prison population is innocent. Per capita prison rate is still around 5 in 1000 according to Wikipedia, which is very high for the developed world.

graphe 3y ago
Innocent meaning they didn’t do the specific crime, or innocent as in someone with a clean record that was railroaded? If you’re looking for the criminal that killed a bunch of people but not that specific case it’s not that uncommon. If you’re looking for a squeaky clean guy that was there at the wrong place at the wrong time it’s very rare. Most criminals are repeat offenders.
- Zigurd 3y ago
  Most businesses create and cultivate repeat customers from specific target markets. The US prison industrial complex is adept at this.
  - graphe 3y ago
    What is the conclusion you’re making?
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      it is a revolving door in real ways
      - Zigurd 3y ago
        It starts with selective enforcement and repeated police contact with young people. That's how the business of imprisonment fills the funnel in the US.
- klyrs 3y ago
  This is magical thinking. We know the guy was bad so we locked him up for a crime. We don't know if we pinned the right crime on him or not, but he's locked away safely now so he must be bad. If this is your genuine belief, it begs the question: why are Americans, on average, such terrible people when compared to other first world citizens?

armchairhacker 3y ago

I didn’t see it mentioned, another case of bad math used in court (unsurprisingly to convict a black person): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mTNlVAz2fdA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mTNlVAz2fdA And while Googling I found another video by the same channel (Vsauce2): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OMr6zCXwuns https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OMr6zCXwuns

causal 3y ago

Note that proportionately few of our federal judges have spent any time as public defenders, and a disproportionately high number have served as prosecutors. Jackson is the first supreme court justice to have served as a public defender, whereas 3 other justices have been prosecutors. Prosecutors are incentivized to get convictions, and that slanted thinking could easily be carried on to the bench. [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/few-public-defenders-become-federal-judges-ketanji-brown-jackson-would-be-the-supreme-courts-first https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/few-public-defenders-b...

tiahura 3y ago
Being primarily a civil attorney, I'm well aware of the disproportionate number of former prosecutors on the bench. A couple of points: 1. Most prosecutors are liberals. It's not like right wing law students go looking for jobs in prosecutor's offices. I can't think of any from my class way back when. 2. The problem is more that judges and prosecutors are old colleagues. The slant is that they all know the defendants are guilty. There's so much crime, and aversion to losing trials, that (unless politics is involved) prosecutors tend to only bring cases where the defendant is clearly guilty. They like shooting fish in a barrel. If they find that there are problems with a case they tend to let the defendant get continuance after continuance until the case just goes away on its own.
- causal 3y ago
  Thanks for that insight. My discomfort is with the notion that they could know that the defendant is guilty- sure there may be some obvious cases, but I do not trust most humans to differentiate their intuition from hard evidence.
  - swells34 3y ago
    And unfortunately, judges are the only legal entity empowered to use their intuition for legal decision making. Sentencing is a good example; judges can kinda just decide sentences based on feel. Just throw some number out there.

Lord-Jobo 3y ago

Wow, a hackernews topic thats actually directly related to my specialty. Anyway, this article is spot on and this is a really rampant specific issue. “expert witnesses have often overstated the probative value of their evidence, going far beyond what the relevant science can justify.” This is the absolute center of the issue. Experts are used by the prosecution AND defense, but the experts used by the prosecution are often times so hilariously and openly biased that its insane how little pushback they get. Career cops with poor credentials that spend 30 years going from witness stand to witness stand saying literally whatever. You can definitely find biased 'pay for opinion' style experts for defense (its a profitable industry after all), and ive had the misfortune of trying to course correct them and their clients, but they are less frequently biased via a long career in law enforcement, and more importantly, get absolutely flambéed when they display the same level of bullshit as prosec witnesses. There are actual possible consequences for defense experts who lie, you get roasted in a news article that shows up on every google search and nobody with integrity will hire you ever again. That just doesnt happen for prosecution experts, ever. most media is terrified to highlight those bad actors because of the huge pushback they get from cops/cop unions/and more importantly the rabid facebook populace that will NOT stand for police criticism. and judges will very rarely hand down sanctions. after all, over a third (37 percent) of sitting justices (state supremes) are former prosecutors, while only 7 percent are former public defenders. (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/state-supreme-court-diversity-april-2021-update https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/stat...) The article cites a few specific examples of experts creating a huge wake of bullshit in the legal field as they trudge around making stuff up, but a more convincing writeup with broader examples of fraud in the field was done by the intercept here (https://theintercept.com/2015/04/24/badforensics/ https://theintercept.com/2015/04/24/badforensics/) in 2015. I can assure you the problem is still bad. Dont think its better with digital evidence just because there are hash values and log files. I have seen (insert f.agency here) plainly and clearly fabricate evidence (and get away with it). Countless instances of smart people who, definitely, beyond any doubt, know and understand what their evidence ACTUALLY indicates, and instead inflate its value to a ludicrous degree. TLDR; If its physical evidence, and not exact DNA match(think tire marks, blood spatter, bite marks), its wouldnt remotely be accurate enough to be court admissible if the courts were functioning properly and vetting expert witnesses properly. if its digital evidence, and there are claims like "person was at location x,y,z at time a,b,c" and not in the format "the device was more likely than not in the general vicinity at the general time" then they are talking out of their ass. in absence of security footage or the like. my bias: if it wasnt obvious, i work with the defense the majority of the time, on digital evidence, and i am going to see and remember the transgressions of the other side more often. i try to account for that. not a lawyer. so much to learn in the field still. just an internet ignoramus

tiahura 3y ago

The article doesn't prove anyone was actually innocent, only that dodgy science was admitted. In the highlighted case, I'm assuming the victim's multiple identifications of Odom as the perp was also fairly persuasive to the jury.

csours 3y ago
Have we discovered how to prove a negative and I missed it? Or do we still have to look at the balance of evidence? In other words: in most justice systems, the prosecution must produce evidence of guilt, they hold the burden. It's also very important to know that (in the US justice system), evidence of innocence is not persuasive to appellate courts; they are looking for abuse of process. --- Now, cognition is a different matter altogether. When something terrible has happened, the human mind looks for the cause, specifically for the person who caused the terrible event. Sometimes, there is a person who did a crime - when someone is shot, that is generally treated as a crime. But sometimes sick people die. Sometimes infants fail to continue breathing. Sometimes wildfires burn a town and kill people. Sometimes viruses jump from (non human) animals to humans. In other words, in human cognition, satisfaction is more important than truth. Scientific truth is a framework whereby we delay our satisfaction with an answer, using specific tools that are socially accepted in that field of study.
- tiahura 3y ago
  "Have we discovered how to prove a negative" Yes. You prove Odom was in Canada at the time, or that no crime actually occurred, or that someone else did it, etc. There are multiple ways to prove he didn't do it.

adamsb6 3y ago

Even photo and video evidence suffers from courtrooms that don’t understand how nearly all cameras will record and encode images. JPEG encoding (and thus MPEG encoding) takes 8x8 blocks of pixels and represents them as a discrete cosine transform. In a very real way these pixels don’t actually exist. If your video evidence relies on such a small portion of MPEG encoded video, you can easily mislead a jury to convicting an innocent person. I’m reminded of the Rittenhouse trial where the prosecutors had a technician massage a still from a video for hours until some very tiny collection of pixels, enlarged from the original by quite a bit, were arranged in such a way that they said demonstrated Rittenhouse initiated aggression against the first man he shot. The defense actually had some idea about such a small collection of pixels not being a reliable representation of reality, but couldn’t sufficiently explain it and didn’t have an expert who could, so the judge allowed it.

Lord-Jobo 3y ago
This is one of the better litmus tests to see if the expert witness is knowledgeable in the field, and more importantly, up-to-date on the tech. some really smart but definitely older expert witnesses will fumble this very hard. Its not like those kinds of processes, the "enhancing" filters, are inherently bad or inadmissible, you just have to be clear with the judge and jury what the hell is actually happening.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  This also came up in the Johnny Depp trial, where evidence was challenged and there was a long discussion about whether a video that had been shared over AirDrop was admissible, or whether that should be considered tampering, due to the possibility of it being re-encoded / compressed (which is a theoretically possible concern, as doesn't iPhone record in HEVC but change it to H.264 when shared with people?)
- thfuran 3y ago
  >This is one of the better litmus tests to see if the expert witness is knowledgeable in the field, and more importantly, up-to-date on the tech It's an absolute travesty that it should fall to expert witnesses at all. Judges, police, and criminal trial lawyers should know how common forms of evidence work in general.

lkbm 3y ago

The first time I remember running across this was /Innumeracy/ (1988) by John Allen Paulos. It's been discussed for decades, and as best I can tell hasn't really been addressed at all. I don't know the solution. Ideally, everyone would be good at math, but I don't see that happening in the near future. My best answer is for us to provide every court have an on-call statistician, reviewing every case. I would hope big law firms are already doing this, but you should get a mathematically-sound judgement even if you have to depend on an underfunded and overworked public defenders. (More recently, I've been wondering this about scientific publishing. Misusing statistical tests--or choosing the wrong once seems--like a fairly common source of error in peer-reviewed science. It feels like there, too, we need expert statisticians carefully reviewing every paper of note. Given the amounts charged by some journals, it feels like a reasonable service to demand of them.)

pc86 3y ago
> My best answer is for us to provide every court have an on-call statistician, reviewing every case. Is this not the exact reason for expert witnesses?
- twisteriffic 3y ago
  Expert witnesses can be cripplingly expensive. Having a gratis sanity check sounds like a great idea, assuming you can find some way to insulate them from influence.
  - claytonjy 3y ago
    Can confirm. I worked at a small statistics consultancy where the owner did some expert testimony, and you have to reveal what you charge. The opposing side was often paying 500+/hr for shoddy work! I think we've seen stories of Ivy League professors charging thousands per hour, and making the bulk of their income this way. Not sure how high it goes in the most high-profile cases.
- Thrymr 3y ago
  Expert witnesses are inherently adversarial, like the court system itself. There is no "neutral" evaluation of the reliability of a piece of evidence. If one side hires an expert to evaluate something, they are under no obligation to have the expert testify in court if the evaluation doesn't help their case.

the-dude 3y ago

Glad to see Lucia de Berk mentioned, a high profile Dutch case. Although she was acquited after some years, it wrecked her.

graphe 3y ago

If we accept that court cases will have a non zero error rate, what rate are we comfortable with? Court cases are irregular, judges, the jury, the experts and the type of prosecution matters. Are we more comfortable with different crimes at different rates? In the US, you’re presumed innocent (in the eyes of the law) and many in cases the law can tip the balance over a technicality, such as fruit of the poisoned tree and inability to admit some evidence that would be essential in a layman’s eyes. How would a court be robust against problems such as biased experts, juries and judges? Would we be more comfortable with a lower or higher than average conviction rate? Is the problem the prisons?

WalterBright 3y ago

I read about a case once where a man was convicted of rape. The evidence was that the rape was done face-to-face with the victim, and the victim positively ID'd him. How could she not, when she was face-to-face with him? It was a slam dunk. After some years in prison, the convicted person managed to get a DNA test, which proved he was not the rapist. How could this be? It turns out the DNA matched a convicted sex offender who had, in the meantime, died in prison. A picture of him showed that he looked just like the falsely convicted man. The victim, to her credit, profusely apologized for mis-identifying him, but she acted in good faith.

10000truths 3y ago
Do you have a link to the case details? At the very least, there has to have been some additional evidence to convict, even if circumstantial. I find it hard to believe that someone can be ruled guilty of a crime as serious as rape based solely on the plaintiff's testimony.
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  Here is an example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66513959 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66513959
- 2devnull 3y ago
  >I find it hard to believe I find it hard to believe you find it hard to believe. :) There’s a cliche term for such cases, “he said/she said” and they are not at all uncommon.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    I dont think this term applies here - usually that term is reserved for one or both parties misrepresenting the situation. Here we have mistaken identity, which i would consider different.
    - 2devnull 3y ago

bjornsing 3y ago

A few years back there were some stories in a Swedish newspaper about a method for medical age estimation of asylum seekers developed by a government agency. I could hardly believe my eyes when the person responsible for the accuracy of the method was quoted as saying that it was very reliable, because it used two unreliable methods to estimate if the person was above 18 years old, and then concluded that they were 18+ if either method so indicated. You don’t need to be a genius to realize your false 18+ rate will be higher when combining two methods in this way than it would be if you used a single method, but he argued the opposite. This caught my attention and I spent an inordinate amount of time, together with a group of other concerned people, trying to convince this government authority they were wrong, and later to expose them for it / stop them from continuing. But it sadly turned out to be next to impossible. They persisted with inaccurate/false affidavits and court testimony for years, until finally the minister of justice ordered a formal probe into the method. They then patched it up as best they could without exposing their previous errors, and pretended like nothing had happened. The formal probe issued an interim report with pretty harsh commentary, and was then cancelled by the minister of justice before it could give its final report. Forever changed my view of the Swedish justice system.

cpill 3y ago
Mimics my impression of Sweden in general. It's not a nice place of you are not Swedish.
- bedobi 3y ago
  in this case it's the opposite - the policy allowed asylum seekers to claim and benefit from being considered to be 18 or younger when they were in fact obviously 30+ but yeah your impression is not wrong, Sweden is not a nice place lol
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
rossant 3y ago
Pretty much the same thing happened in France: https://www.cairn.info/revue-journal-du-droit-des-jeunes-2009-5-page-33.htm https://www.cairn.info/revue-journal-du-droit-des-jeunes-200... (in French) Experts using scientifically unreliable methods to determine that asylum seekers are 18+ and can therefore be expelled from the French territory.

deleted 3y ago

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WaitWaitWha 3y ago

This a bit misaligned, blame shifting. I will be the first to admit there are unscrupulous, fame seeking, and overzealous expert witnesses out there. But, there are mechanisms in the courts to filter most of them out. I just think it is not done for money, time, career, or political reasons. I have seen this fail both in the adversarial (e.g., US) and elsewhere in inquisitorial (e.g., EU) court systems. In the adversarial courts, time and time again I watch lawyers refuse to hire expert witnesses for their own side because <insert hubris here>. Overall, there is also the opportunity for a voir dire of the expert witness. Failure to perform that is again lawyers' fault. So, who is to blame for all the mistakes? Yes, all of them. Final note regarding experts in court, specifically around professional expert witnesses - there is a racket in the industry where new-comers are kept out. The expert witness industry does some gatekeeping not only for expertise, but for retiring law enforcement in some jurisdictions. For example, in some US states a digital forensics expert required to be a licensed Private Investigator, unless former law enforcement. The PI licensing requirement are completely irrelevant for the expert witness role. Personal anecdotal experience - Lawyer thinks he is technologists, refuses to hire expert witness, begs expert to come middle of the case. Lawyer hires cheapest expert, opposing expert makes haggis out of cheapest expert. Funniest one was where in a small court the State's expert start going off on some cockamamie ideas about transference. The opposing expert was an instructor and had one of her classes in court to learn. The class burst out laughing, and the judge had to gavel. When she got on the stance, it was just glorious, torturous evisceration.

cool_dude85 3y ago
> time and time again I watch lawyers refuse to hire expert witnesses for their own side because <insert hubris here>. Because they are very expensive and most regular people don't have money for them? Because public defenders have a few minutes to look over a case and don't have time or resources to bother with this level of care? Which of the two are caused by hubris?
- WaitWaitWha 3y ago
  This is not a binary situation. I am writing that the choices made by lawyers are often for hubris, not lack of resources. This is my anecdotal experience, which is why I included qualifiers.

rightbyte 3y ago

It wouldn't surprise me if computer forsensics is about as bad science as bullet forsensics. Ever since I had a porn virus hosting kinda lame porn videos over BitTorrent like 20 years ago, I thought about exactly how computer forsensics prove intent in child sexual abuse material cases.

qingcharles 3y ago
I don't know. I've spoken to FBI computer forensics guys and their computer knowledge was up there with mine in terms of hardware, software, OS etc. I've been very, very impressed with them. The problems come when they pass their data to the prosecution and defense who are not computer trained and it all goes sour from there on.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Ok nice to hear.
conductr 3y ago
Recently a teacher at my son's school was found to be part of a child porn ring. His mug shot was posted alongside a couple dozen others and initial impression was it was organized crime pedaling this stuff. Perception was he's guilty; lock him up. The immediate response was he was fired, arrested, etc. There were no facts or investigation but the school was in communication with us and getting info from LEO as the investigation began. We pretty quickly found that no kids were involved (sigh of relief). Then found out it was a part of a FBI sting and he was actually a lone actor not involved in any type of organized 'ring' (wait, what?). Then about a month after initial arrest, we found out he watched on his computer (streamed or tracked from an FBI server) approximately 3 videos. Unknown duration, unknown intent, unknown everything else. But, having seen the 'legit' side of the adult industry and how those websites work, I'm totally of the opinion he probably landed on a website and those videos 1) autoplayed 2) did not indicate or appear as containing underage people 3) or he clicked them and hit back once he realized the 'actors' appeared a little too young looking. The FBI sting also caught some terrible people and this teacher's mug shot in that press release basically made him guilty by association (that didn't exist). I don't know if this teacher did anything intentionally illegal, but in my opinion the facts that eventually came to be did not substantiate the initial response from law enforcement - which has ruined this man's career and ostracized him from our community (at minimum); he's still fighting to reduce charges so it's likely bankrupted him too. Also, If you search his name today, you'll see that press release and mugshot as top result. I know I've seen some adult content on 'legit' websites that I feel was questionable on age, no way to know for sure, but I didn't realize it until I viewed it and I just moved on with my browsing. It's scary to thing visiting any website could give the FBI enough data to come down this hard on someone.

chaps 3y ago

Very, very much yes. Criminal courts really, really aren't a good place to address technical matters. For example, ankle electronic monitoring (obviously) doesn't work well in faraday-cage like apartment complexes. And yet time and time again, GPS skew is used to argue that someone left their home -- sometimes even months after the fact. I've read emails from a local sheriff's office that said that they consider a sufficiently weak signal to be a result of "foiling", period. Through FOIA though, I've been able to get over 100 million instances where a GPS device didn't have a strong enough signal. There are even criminal trials where an EM company will send a sales person to testify and to claim that they're not aware of any technical faults with the system. https://thetriibe.com/2022/11/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-county-bombarded-with-texts-from-sheriffs-contractor/ https://thetriibe.com/2022/11/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-c... (disclaimer: I'm the author)

qingcharles 3y ago
Also wrote the previous one which ended with me serving five months in jail for retweeting the public defender's Tweet about it (not your fault): https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/false-alarms/ https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/false-alarms/ This might have been the Tweet I reposted: https://twitter.com/CookCoDefender/status/1539705862230376448 https://twitter.com/CookCoDefender/status/153970586223037644... https://nitter.net/CookCoDefender/status/1539705862230376448 https://nitter.net/CookCoDefender/status/1539705862230376448
- oooyay 3y ago
  Correct me if I'm off base here, but this seems to be absolute nonsense: > Like many on EM, Ross was never granted movement outside his home even once, not even to buy food. His sister, a manager at Securitas, helped when she could, but work got in the way sometimes, he said. So, they replaced the box you sit in with a box that you pay for and provide no additional services with all the same restrictions. What the fuck is the point of these programs? I can understand wanting to use EM to ensure someone shows up to a trial, but this geofencing stuff is absolute madness. It just reintroduces the problem that made prisons and jails problematic in the first place. If someone is a non-threat enough to let them live in society with a bracelet then let them live.

trident5000 3y ago

Deliberately hiding evidence should should equate to hefty prison time for a prosecutor.

qingcharles 3y ago
In known history, I think there has been perhaps one prosecutor charged with a crime over this. How about that for a statistic? From my experience it is literally impossible to report a crime made by a prosecutor. Hiding evidence might not even be a crime in many jurisdictions. In the USA it would be a constitutional violation, but that rarely makes it a crime because violating the constitution rarely becomes criminal unless violence is involved.

dn3500 3y ago

My father was called for jury duty a few years ago. The case depended on some physics, something about the angles and momentum in a car crash. My father was disqualified, because he's a physics teacher and may have been tempted to interpret the physics expert's testimony instead of blindly accepting it.

cbsmith 3y ago
Yup. I don't think the problem is the jury, or even the experts. There's a fundamental problem with how the courts use expert testimony to ensure fair justice. I believe the idea is that to ensure fairness, verdicts should not be determined by variances in expertise amongst the jury. I recall being specifically instructed that I was NOT to question the expert testimony based on any prior expertise I might have. It solves one problem, and creates a ton of others.
- lopis 3y ago
  I can imagine that this is required because the vast majority of people have "opinions" on the experts' field. So many people operate on gut feelings and reject science and fact. So they prefer to blanket ban arguing about the experts statement.
  - cbsmith 3y ago
    The motive is clear, but consequence is that we deliberately choose juries that are fully Dunning-Kreugered. They have to rely on social cues as such to reason about which expert witness is credible... which pretty much undermines the justification for bringing the expertise to court. If you brought in a magician instead, the jury would find them equally credible.
eli 3y ago
Jurors aren't expected to blindly accept expert testimony. Normal jury instructions are exactly the opposite: that jurors should treat it just like any other testimony and make their own decision on how trustworthy it is. I think the concern is more that they don't want a self-appointed expert on the jury having too much sway over the other jurors.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

innocent poor people.

ubiquitysc 3y ago

Here's a worthwhile read on the subject: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33296669-the-cadaver-king-and-the-country-dentist https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33296669-the-cadaver-kin...

eli 3y ago

I was a juror on a criminal trial once and there was a ballistics expert who testified that he was "100% certain" that the markings on a shell casing came from a certain gun. This is based on a visual inspection under a microscope. I googled it after the trial and sure enough when you put this sort of thing to the test, experts are not correct 100% of the time.

load81 3y ago

COVID enters the chat…

rossant 3y ago

The author could have also mentioned the controversial diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma which has long relied on bad science, resulting in wrongful convictions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402

rossant 3y ago

Mathematicians Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez have written an entire book on this very issue of bad statistics causing miscarriages of justice: https://www.amazon.com/Math-Trial-Numbers-Abused-Courtroom/dp/0465032923 https://www.amazon.com/Math-Trial-Numbers-Abused-Courtroom/d...

amai 3y ago

What do you expect? Just a few days ago we saw this article: "High school math doesn't prepare most students for their college majors", where professors complain that high school math doesn't include enough statistics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38596191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38596191 But maybe in the future some MathGPT can help....