"[Out] of 268 cases where agents used microscopic hair analysis to link a defendant to a crime, the agents’ testimony was scientifically invalid in 257 or 96% of the cases."
That seems impossibly, mind-bogglingly incompetent.
That seems impossibly, mind-bogglingly incompetent.
one off-the-cuff sample: http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132262
Considering that such evidence is used to convict people and imprison them for possibly decades, shouldn't we call it "criminally incompetent"?
People convicted in part based on flawed science are not obviously innocent. At minimum, you'd need to assess how important that particular evidence was to determining guilt. It's possible they'd have been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt even if that evidence was never found. I assume this is the prosecutors' position, unless you have evidence otherwise.
People convicted in part based on flawed science are also not obviously guilty. It is difficult to impossible to weigh how the jury weighed the evidence. So at the least they should be afforded another trial excluding the flawed evidence.
Period, end of discussion
That is if you want a justice system, not a legal system
I have a feeling you want a legal system and do not give a shit about justice.
So you admit they are not "obviously innocent," but deserving of a retrial. I agree.
>I have a feeling you want a legal system and do not give a shit about justice.
That's a hell of a lot to infer from my comment which, as far as I can tell, doesn't even disagree with you.
I made the statement about you wanting a Legal System because based on the comments you seem to be more focused on the procedure and technical aspects of the law than on the miscarriage of justice that the FBI and their Fake Hair Science has caused. You want to leave it to Judges and Prosecutors to guess at the state of mind of the Jurors to figure out how much the jury may have considered the Hair Analysis, Only a person looking for a Legal system would make that comment.
If you want justice you understand that there is no way to figure out how much that testimony factored into the jury, thus EVERY case it was offered in should be vacated.. TODAY. and everyone person convicted should be released. TODAY. then they can figure out who can be retried using actual evidence and attempt to get convictions with new juries
Further any Plea Bargains that were reached by threatening to use FBI Hair Analysis should also be Vacated, how many people where extorted into pleading guilty by prosecutors because they threaten this "scientific evidence"?
The conspiracy theory goes that the concept of criminal intent makes it easy for reckless prosecutors and (especially) bankers to escape justly deserved punishment. After all, who can read a prosecutor's thoughts and prove that they were not incompetent when they relied on a phrenologist to give evidence but actively malicious?
Same with banksters.
Consider the case of something like a child porn thumbnail on your pc. Where did it come from? Might have come from a Google image search, and you are totally unaware of it. However because child pornography possession is a strict liability crime you could be looking at years of jail time.
A law without exceptions is tyrannical no matter what its form.
The answer to perceived "bad guys getting away with it" isn't always to force harsher penalties regardless of circumstance.
The law is not, and never could be a fixed computer program you run that evaluates the fact, and spits out a just resolution.
The police officer said to me, 'I have no idea how this happened, I would have been fooled too, he even had the title!?' (paraphrasing)
I gather you're arguing that convicting people like me is a worthwhile price to pay for convicting truly guilty people, but I disagree.
Your proposal is a pragmatic way of making it easier to convict people you're unwilling to presume innocent - which is why you identify "banksters" as your preferred bad guys, where you can presume guilt.
"Criminal negligence" is a kind of mens rea.
I was on a jury and I could not argue to the rest of the jury using knowledge I was literally trained as a Psych major about... because it was not presented as evidence in the trial. It literally brought me to tears
The belief that the current justice system is even close to being fair is a fallacy. Standards for evidence in law and science are almost completely different. Eyewitness testimony, for example, should basically be thrown out: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-i...
Science needs to take law out back and give it a good whuppin'
As my small contribution to the truth, I donate to innocenceproject.org every month.
"At trial, the prosecution relied on the testimony of the three informants as well as the testimony of Elinos Whitlock III, an employee of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department Crime Lab who had been trained by the FBI in how to conduct microscopic hair analysis. He claimed that he could make a “strong identification” that a hair recovered the crime scene was Bridges’s hair. He further stated that there was only a 1 in 1000 chance that two Caucasian people (Bridges is white) would have indistinguishable head hair."