Are courts keeping “junk science” out of the courtroom?
psychologicalscience.org
psychologicalscience.org
And then fiber analysis has been debunked too.
And the list goes one: hysteria over child abuse combined with well-meaning but incompetent interviewers creating false memories in supposed victims. The problems with coerced confessions.
It's all quite terrifying.
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-94-the-goofy-pseu...
It's an interesting podcast, but their interviewee sucked and she didn't really cite any actual science; just hand waved away things.
I've found the studies they cite on fingerprints (your fingerprint could match up with 1 in ~300 people; they're not as unique as once though -- the study that's often cited is from the FBI) but I can't find anything on gun/bullet print identification.
Supposedly you can't match a bullet to a gun, especially with more modern firearms with precise milling. Yet all the sourced I've found should photos of bullets with distinct patterns that seem to match a particular firearm.
There was a video of the police department announcing it, and even endorsing the company (Parabon) in the announcement.
Maybe not complete junk science, but sketchy legal ground to me.
Courts have allowed drug-sniffing dogs as evidence for ages. They're barely more accurate than a coin toss and easily persuaded to give false "testimony" by their handlers.
If the dog's mentioned at all, surely normally it's background context to why the person was searched and the drug found [and if the police are lying about the finding, it's not the dog's fault!]
If dogs can indeed sniff out stuff in a manner consistently beyond random, then they are a good first pass tool.
It feels weird that law enforcement get just avoid all of that by training dogs to alert at a handler's signal.
Any search that was enabled by a dog should be considered "fruit of the poisoned tree". Between their lack of accuracy and a dog's bias towards its handler, they should not ever serve as a basis for search or arrest.
When the justification for initial stop/search comes up in court, the dog's hit is held up as incontrovertible proof that a search was justified. Courts have upheld their use many times, all the way to SCOTUS IIRC.
This approach is far to prone to misuse by law enforcement. It's bad enough they can pull you over without cause (most states have loosely defined "irregular driving" laws), they can initiate a search of your car just as baselessly.
I think this is upside down ... the police are never going to have 'incontrovertible proof' of contraband before they do a full search by definition. If they did need such 'total evidence' to search, they wouldn't need to do the search at all ... they could just make the arrest.
And a dogs hint is not presented as evidence of a crime, merely reasonable suspicion for a search, which is what we want the tool for.
The point is to provide some degree of a reasonable basis for suspicion, after which more effort is used to determine the material outcome: either you have 1Kg of coke, or an illegal gun ... or you don't.
The entire point of the tools are to use something that demarcates reasonable suspicion; dogs, and other things, are viable tools.
If you attempt to enter a country, and you are asked where you are staying but can't provide an answer, or if you do not have a return flight - these are indications of 'reasonable suspicion' of further questioning.
SCOTUS ruling notwithstanding, I don't consider a dog a reasonable basis for suspicion. They're easily manipulated - may as well just come right out and let the police search whoever they want, because that's what dogs allow.
Every tool can be misapplied or misused.
If the 'dogs' can provide a scientifically credible means for 'flagging' that's significantly above random chance, but still below the threshold 'beyond a shadow of a doubt' they can absolutely be used.
If a police officer smells the odor of marijuana in the car, or alcohol on the breath, or, for example, sees a crack pipe or 'empty beer' cans - those things are all examples of reasonable suspicion and it's the whole point.
That those powers can be abused is again a secondary issue.
Finally, is the obvious issue that there's very little harm done otherwise, the 'false flags' from either dogs or 'empty beer' cans that result in searching doesn't compromise the individuals or the community at large: a 'blow test' or a 'legal search' results in more accurate presentation of justice, not less.
That's the problem. They cannot.
" narcotics-detecting dogs and their handlers aren’t very good at discerning the presence of illegal drugs. Multiple analyses of drug-dog alerts have consistently shown alarmingly high error rates — with some close to and exceeding 50 percent. In effect, some of these K-9 units are worse than a coin flip." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/05/supreme-c...
Highly sensitive tests are great for this. They're usually cheap and quick. They have a low false positive rate so a negative result is likely to be correct.
Since they detect anything that even remotely looks like the targeted substance, they have a substantial false positive rate and a positive result must always be confirmed with specific tests. However, police forces seem to treat a positive result as sufficient cause for an arrest.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/12423006/
Without confirmation, false positive rates varied from 2 to 4 percent.
My impression from watching too much COPS and LivePD is that police don't really see arresting people as that serious, "They'll be out in few hours". For the people they arrest most often it's probably not that big a deal either. But if it's your first ever then your lifestyle is under serious and permanent threat.
EDIT: Removed "middle class". Getting arrested is terrible no matter what your economic or class status is.
If anything, it's worse for the working class folks because they don't have a buffer, their friends and family likely don't have one either, and they are considered infinitely disposable by their employers.
Going from no criminal record to your first is a huge change of circumstance vs getting another incremental charge. I shouldn't have used the word middle class as it distracts from the core dynamic at play.
Don't use those TV shows as a reflection of reality--they're as real as any other reality TV show, which is to say it's an incredibly distorted version of reality.
It is actually stresfull to be in jail for poor people too.
It is not a game.
Bless that man!
It seemed as if he had the process down.
I made more friends in jail than I did in college. But you are right - it is no fun and it is no joke. For anyone.
Say 1 in 1000 people are actually carrying the substance you're looking for - a false positive rate of just 1% would mean that for every person you identify correctly, you'll falsely identify about 10 others.
There does seem to be some issues with how the court system has failed to keep up with the modern day. Issues with scalability, accessibility and science literacy are leading to a general distrust of the system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Polygraph_Protection_...
>However, the act does permit polygraph tests to be administered to certain applicants for job with security firms (such as armored car, alarm, and guard companies) and of pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors, and dispensers. The law does not cover federal, state, and local government agencies.
Since doesn't apply to any governments (local, state, federal) so so government employees are subjected to polygraphs.
Interestingly, it can be argued that polygraphs may have their place in a limited amount of employment situations as long as the lying/truthful results are thrown out as the test may work as a "placebo" for the interviewee to admit to serious skeletons in their closet.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/23/16511732/border-patrol-p...
>Polygraph results are of questionable scientific value, but the interviews have an unexpected benefit apart from their dubious powers of detection: under pressure from interviewers, applicants frequently admit to wrongdoing.
To be clear I personally lean towards not using polygraphs at all for employment situations.
If the test cannot distinguish between true and false, then any purported "skeleton" is as likely to be false as it is to be true.
I realized that the police were not what children's shows illustrated them as when I was given a polygraph for a crime I did not commit.
And then brought in BY MYSELF with 0 indication I could have either a guardian or lawyer, and told that I failed the polygraph and that I should confess now so they would go lightly on me.
I have never been so terrified of anything in my life. Looking back, and after spending the rest of my high school career researching the "science" behind polygraph, that's exactly what the purpose of the polygraph was. Your "results" aren't important. Your answers are important. If you deviate, even when the police explicitly tell you to lie to set a baseline (as they did for me; I refused and said that I would lie about something else not related to the actual crime), they've got you for a crime you didn't commit.
Just garbage people controlling a garbage system intended to enact garbage things for garbage reasons.
That’s how they get a lot of people to confess things they didn’t do. If you are poor and can’t afford a lawyer you will likely accept a wrong plea for a few years versus the threat of twenty years or more in prison. It’s a pretty bad system.
While I do think it preferable to get an opinion about criminal responsibility, it should be considered as an educated guess.
So, indefinite incarceration without being able to see an attorney or even a judge? Any system will have cracks and people do fall through those.
You are correct that people found mentally unfit to stand trial can remain committed for years, particularly those with drug-resistant schizophrenia. Tragically, for some of the most vulnerable members of society this is the best case scenario. People with severe schizophrenia who can't function often end up on the street, suffering hardships and victimized. There are parents who's child is on the street, getting frostbite and being assaulted, who go to any psychologist they can find to try to find someone to declare their child a threat to themselves or others so they can get into treatment. But they rarely are. Often they just have to hope their child commits some minor infraction like shop lifting and wind up declared unfit to stand trial so they can get the treatment they need.
You make it sound like this is only used for good and that nothing can ever go wrong with this system. That's not true. While you do get reevaluated, you get reevaluated by colleagues of the person (or the same person) who initially committed you. Furthermore, you're forced to take mind altering substances at their say-so and are imprisoned in a place, where any sign of fear or anxiety is counted against you.
Also, in some places it's possible for the psychiatrist to determine that contact with an attorney would "exacerbate your condition" and can bar you from seeing one.
I would much rather be on the street and free than indefinitely locked up and treated as poorly as people in mental institutions are.
There is absolutely room for abuse in the system, in the US and any other country, I won't argue against that. And I'd love to here any proposed reforms or ideas you might have about improving that. Requiring the mental health evaluator and the facility treating you to be separate would reduce the issue you mentioned about being re-evaluated by "colleagues of the person (or the same person) who initially committed you" and I think that is currently the case in the US in some states, though I'm not sure. Also requiring that someone always has access to an attorney would be good (again, I'm fairly sure that's true in the US). I also think significantly more funding should be made available to mental health institutions, allowing people to voluntarily enter for free or for a small rate, expansion of halfway-house type facilities and programs, restructuring the administration of facilities (a big complaint from my father is that bureaucrats with little education often had control over facility policies rather than the PhDs who dedicated themselves to studying the best way to treat mental illness)
- Being mentally fit to stand trial is an very low bar to pass. You just need to understand what a judge is, what a jury is, etc. Generally people who don't pass either have some sort of intellectual disability or severe schizophrenia.
- The article lists a ton of different situations where psychologists are involved in the legal system, and I don't see a breakdown on what the psychologist is attempting to do. I know my Dad didn't use much more than an IQ test and some basic questions to try and diagnose a couple of clinical conditions. I'd expect some amount of pseudoscience if one side in a messy divorce hires a psychologist to try and show the other side is a bad parent, or the defense in a criminal case trying to show the defendant was in a fragile emotional state and deserves a reduced sentence.
The US has a legal system not a justice system. I suspect that is true of many countries. Once you are caught up in it then you will realize it isn't personal and it has nothing to do with the truth or justice. We have incentivized "winning" of trials and have blindly gone along with the idea that having both sides behave horribly ensures fairness because well..What else can you do?
Might be time to step back and think if a bunch of premises are working out. Does giving some wannabe tyrant a lifetime job really result in good decision making because they are "free" of political influence? Is it cool to allow for things like fine print and to allow lawyers to be immunized from many bad behaviors because lawyers keep writing rules in such a way to keep lawyers employed? Is it really cool that a prosecutor can lock someone up for 20 years who was innocent but that the recourse is some lawsuit where everyone pays for the settlement and they get to basically get away with "oops"? Is it cool a defense lawyer can "win" a case where they know their client is a child molesting cannibal?
Philosophy and big questions may seem quaint and are often the target of people who claim they are some form of scientist but for some reason my non scientist self and many average people seem to be able to suspect that the legal system is a bit fucked up, paying someone to publish papers on the implications of tyrannosaurus rex having created a vegan matriarchy might also be fucked up and if you let those things near each other some really bad stuff happens unless you get serious about fixing the core of problems both of them have.
It's probably 4-5 years since I read about this, it'd be nice if things have changed.
Refusal to run a gauge R&R while insisting errors are due to the operator is a sure sign of a problem. If it hasn't been done, that's one thing but refusing to allow it is quite another.
Even if the rate was actually really good -- something like 99.9% accuracy -- if you apply that to a database with a ten million people in it, you get ten thousand false positives, which is crap.
If you pick one of the matches at random, they want to be able to claim that it's a 99.9% chance that it's them, but it's really a 99.99% chance that it isn't. Or worse, since it's possible the true perpetrator wasn't in the database.
Even for things like DNA that theoretically can do better than 99.9%, you can't get much better than that in practice because before you can, the error rate starts to be dominated by human error rather than coincident matches.
It's a common trope, but courts really do have discovery deadlines, continuances are common for a variety of reasons, and undisclosed evidence can be excluded from consideration.
The majority of people in jail in New York right now, today, had to accept/reject plea deals without seeing any of the governmental evidence against them.
It is to be hoped that the future of NY's justice system will be much fairer, but police unions are fighting hard against the new changes and they may well be repealed.
Same goes for the deadlines. Sure, the law didn't set a specific timeline—but that's not evidence that prosecutors routinely "[dropped] 30 pages off in front of the defense 20 minutes before the trial [began]."
>Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no". It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009