The doctor handled thousands of cases in his career, and a well-funded inquiry found issues with less than 1% of them.
Sure we'd like that to be 0%, and society should spend time thinking of how much they rely on complicated processes of reasoning, but that's a really good accuracy.
It's all tradeoffs, but "his blood was found on the murder weapon" wouldn't be sufficient for me - some childhood enemy could easily have planted a bunch of forensic evidence next to a crime scene.
After all, if my next door neighbour barged into my house and beat me up, the only evidence would be my visible injuries and my statement that it was my neighbour.
I'm not sure if I'd prefer a society where he would be convicted, or where he wouldn't.
Considering that possibility, I don't want to put your neighbour in prison.
While I admire your devotion to Blackstone's Ratio, this doesn't seem like a recipe for stability and rule of law to me.
That is depending on your threshold of certainty. 1% is not that high considering that, according to the OJJDP, 5 milion people were arrested for serious charges in 2019 so with a 1% false positive rate that would be 100,000 people falsely imprisoned every year.
It does not have to be and really can't be 0% but 1% is unreasonably high in my opinion. If it can't be helped then it can't be helped but that isn't necessarily the case with these devices.
> In June 2005, the Chief Coroner of Ontario ordered a review of 44 autopsies carried out by Smith. Thirteen of these cases had resulted in criminal charges and convictions. The report was released in April 2007, indicating that there were substantial problems with 20 of the autopsies.
That sounds more like 45% to me.
Also this bit from the article about a baby that allegedly had a skull fracture:
> Later exhumation of the child and examination of the skull have shown that there was no skull fracture. It is thought Dr. Smith confused the normal gap between the baby's skull plates for an injury.
Holy shit that is bad. Even as a lay person I know about these gaps.
Between Baby skull plates, not adult ones ;-)
They grow together at some point.
Sure, but can you tell them apart from a fracture caused by injury? Presumably someone knowledgeable in medicine should be able to, but maybe it is one of those things that isn't as obvious as we, the uneducated outsider, might think.
"It just looks like it" is not a valid reason.
We, as a society, like to say this because it makes us feel good.
But a critical analysis of our actions reveals that we don't believe it for a second. We are happy to write overbroad laws that allow most behaviors to be criminalized, over police marginalized communities, and place those who have been convicted by this flawed system in deeply dysfunctional prisons that may well violate their human rights.