Software Designer Reports Error in Anthony Trial | Hacker News Reader

Software Designer Reports Error in Anthony Trial

nytimes.com

72 pointscarterac55 comments

It's terrifying that an analysis from software like CacheBack can be used as an important piece of evidence in a murder trial. An error of this magnitude could easily contribute to somebody wrongly losing his or her life and that is not alright in any way. I would feel a lot more comfortable if a piece of FOSS, which could be independently vetted, was used instead of some half-baked proprietary garbage with a $500 price tag. I'm all for finding a niche market and exploiting it, but to me there is something deeply wrong about hiding the logic behind a piece of software producing courtroom evidence.

Or we could just get rid of the death penalty altogether, because:

a) It's cheaper to incarcerate people than it is to kill them: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29552692/ns/us_news-crime_and_co...

b) Sometimes, our judicial system gets it wrong. Wikipedia counts about 140 exonerated death row inmates over the past forty years in the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exonerated_death_row_in...

I prefer to keep the death penalty.

When we lock someone away for the rest of their life, we don't devote much effort to getting things right. When we decide to execute someone, we are very careful about making sure we got the right guy. It's likely that at least some of your 140 exonerated death row inmates would still be in jail today if they were sentenced to life in prison.

If the criminal justice system is broken, we need to fix it. Eliminating the death penalty won't fix it, it will just make the media talk about something else.

So you're saying that the death penalty is justified because it functions as an incentive for law enforcement and DAs to work a little harder? Jesus.

Let me clarify my position, since you seem to wish to misinterpret.

I think life imprisonment is a really bad thing to have happen to you, only marginally better than death. I'm honestly not sure I'd prefer life imprisonment to death at all, in fact. I also don't object to either one as punishment for the worst criminals.

That's my moral stance.

On to practicalities: lots of people hate the death penalty and will devote effort to making certain the wrong person is not executed. These people will not devote the same effort to preventing wrongful life imprisonment. Similarly, a wrongful execution is an outrage, whereas wrongful life imprisonment barely makes the news.

Thus, I see the choice as the following: some number of wrongful executions, or some larger number of wrongful life imprisonments. I prefer the smaller number of people who wrongfully lose their life.

You have a crazy idea of prosecutor priorities. They don't give a shit about the defendant.

I'm not referring to prosecutors, I'm referring to folks like Project Innocent, reporters, etc.

Canadian experience suggests you are incorrect about the energies that people will spend against injustice. Canada has had 3-4 relatively high-profile cases in the last decade where long-term prisoners have been exonerated due to the efforts of people who don't want to see injustice.

There are too many instances of prosecutorial malfeasance or justice denied to continue with the death penalty, even in cases where the guilty parties certainly deserve to die (Bernardo and probably Homolka, in Canada).

lots of people [...] and will devote effort to making certain the wrong person is not executed

That is less and less the case, given the collapse of local/regional investigative journalism, and also spectacularly unequal. The press or non-profit organizations should not be put in the position where it is responsible for providing a robust defense for people accused of capital crimes.

The fact that there is such inequity in the manner defense is provided against prosecution makes me completely against the general practice of the death penalty, given the possible injustices it may render when weighed against the possible justice it may mete out against truly heinous crimes.

The press or non-profit organizations should not be put in the position where it is responsible for providing a robust defense for people accused of capital crimes.

Agreed - the justice system should be doing this. They aren't. Until they do, I feel the sunlight that the death penalty attracts is highly valuable.

...inequity in the manner defense is provided against prosecution makes me completely against the general practice of the death penalty...

Is the inequity greater for the death penalty than for life imprisonment? If not, then do you also oppose life imprisonment?

Wow. You justify the death penalty on the basis of it providing incentive to the police and the prosecutors to do a better job.

Holding their children hostage would provide a really good incentive. Would you then recommend that as well?

I understand where you come from. But providing incentive does not justify murder. Even state-sponsored murder.

Holding their children hostage would provide a really good incentive. Would you then recommend that as well?

This makes no sense. My moral claim is that the death penalty is morally equivalent to life imprisonment. Since the issue here is differentiating between two acts I believe to be morally equivalent, I prefer the action with the lower probability of harming innocents.

When faced with a choice between harming innocent children and not harming innocent people, I obviously recommend not harming innocent children.

If, however, the choice were between holding the children hostage until they die, or merely killing them, I can't say I'd express much preference. If I were the potential victim, I'd probably prefer getting killed.

And if my odds were 80% get killed, 20% exoneration, I'd strongly prefer that to 90% stay in jail for 60 years, 10% exoneration.

Just curious - could you explain why you believe locking a person in a cell until they die is better than killing them?

"My moral claim is that the death penalty is morally equivalent to life imprisonment."

There may be some moral equivalence between a person who dies in prison and one who is executed (I would argue otherwise) but there is absolutely no moral equivalence between an innocent person executed and an innocent person who spends some time in prison and is freed.

"Just curious - could you explain why you believe locking a person in a cell until they die is better than killing them?"

Because they might be innocent? Or because killing them is used disproportionately against the disadvantaged?

...there is absolutely no moral equivalence between an innocent person executed and an innocent person who spends some time in prison and is freed.

Now you are moving from moral questions to empirical ones.

Consider two hypothetical options - one is a 10% chance of being wrongfully convicted and being executed. The other is a a 20% chance of being wrongfully convicted and locked in jail with a 25% chance of being later exonerated, resulting in a 15% chance of being wrongfully locked in jail until one dies.

I'd suggest that morally, a 10% chance of wrongful execution is better than a 15% chance of being locked in jail until death + 5% chance of being locked in jail for years until exoneration.

In any case, this probabilistic example invalidates your absolute claim that imprisonment is better because someone might later be exonerated.

Because they might be innocent?

Apriori, I'm asking you to distinguish between:

a) imprisoning until death a guilty person or executing them.

b) imprisoning until death an innocent person or executing them.

As far as putting people into the wrong categories, that's a probabilistic matter rather than a moral one.

Y'know, I'd rather spend my life in prison than die. If you're going to pick between a and b and choose the one you feel is better for you, you might as well do the same and ask death row inmates if they would prefer to be imprisoned for life instead. I won't be surprised some of them would say yes to that.

"we are very careful about making sure we got the right guy"

Sometimes notsomuch...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_...

http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Injustice_in_Texas_T...

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3472872.html

I'm not saying we should keep killing people, but the argument that the death penalty is expensive is not valid. It presupposes that the death penalty cannot be made cheaper, which is false. It is a separate issue entirely.

Not sure if you mean it the way I read it, but that's a false dichotomy. Even if the penalty in question would have only been a single day in jail, or a $50 fine, it's still terribly wrong to rely on results produced by closed-source, non-peer reviewed software when determining a person's guilt or innocence.

EDIT: that is not to say that blindly relying on open source software is any better. From my point of view the ideal would be both the use of peer-reviewed software AND requirements to manually double- and triple check the results produced by said software.

I agree with you, but I'm pretty sure the death penalty is a shining example of sort of topic to avoid on HN. (I wish there were a way of flagging entire branches of an otherwise topical discussion.)

I consider having to go to jail for long periods of time "losing your life."

Absolutely. This is not the only situation where expert testimony comes from professional witnesses who make a living supporting various hypothesis using confidently proclaimed but deeply flawed tools and analysis methods that the "expert" himself doesn't even understand. The response is that it's the job of the defense to bring up any problems with experts, but they don't always do that. It's a scam. That this is done on capital murder cases is an abomination, amoral, and should be criminal.

"He found both reports were inaccurate (although NetAnalysis came up with the correct result), in part because it appears both types of software had failed to fully decode the entire file, due to its complexity. His more thorough analysis showed that the Web site sci-spot.com was visited only once — not 84 times."

How does that work? I mean, how do you examine what must basically be a log file (though perhaps in some binary format), come up with 84 hits but then realize it was only 1 hit and blame the problem on file complexity? Seems like such an issue would only result in underreporting, not overreporting. Where did the 84 number even come from?

  $ grep 12.34.56.78 logfile | wc -l

  84

Maybe the complexity comes from there being 1 CSS file, 3 javascript includes, 58 images, and a number of AJAX calls on that HTML page?

Here is a explanation from a the maker of a competing tool[1]. It actually delves into the Mork file format with the data from the trial. There are a couple 84's in the format and in the data, but what I think what happened is because there is no "visitedcount" when you have only visited a site once, it took the data from a previous row (in this case, a myspace page) and repeated the value.

If that is truly what happened, the fix is to simply re-initialize the visitedcount to 1 between rows in case there isn't a visitedcount listed.

[1] http://wordpress.bladeforensics.com/?p=357

Mork, as in what a netscape engineer once called ""...the single most braindamaged file format that I have ever seen in my nineteen year career"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_(file_format)

Thanks for the link, the extra detail there is very helpful in understanding what the original newspaper article glossed over.

However (from your link):

"It is a plain text format which is not easily human readable and is not efficient in its storage structures. For example, a single Unicode character can take many bytes to store."

My faith in the competency of "digital detectives" is not fully restored...

Hopefully this is just another case of someone simplifying things to increase readability to a mainstream audience, but every time I read something like that related to CS/programming/IT I cringe in horror at all of the things I must have a horribly half-assed understanding of by not being an expert in that field and building what little knowledge I have on the subject from articles like these.

What is wrong with that quote? When discussing common criticisms of Mork, wikipedia states that: "The conflicting requirements gave Mork several suboptimal qualities. For example, despite the aim of efficiency, storing Unicode text takes three or six bytes per character."

This was a major mistake by the witness in this case, and everyone who has been watching the case already knew about it. Do you know why?

Because it was presented to the jury during the trial.

The jury was told that the number of visits to that site was transposed with the number of visits to myspace. A prosecution witness cleared the record in open trial.

In fact, defense attorney Jose Baez even brought up the fact during closing arguments and used it as a reason to have reasonable doubt of the entire case.

No, it's not (or shouldn't be) news to those of us who watched that part of the trial. But I bet there are a lot of people whose main information sources were cable TV talking heads who may have failed to point out this correction.

That is one terrible written article. It's almost like the writer decided to collect 20 tweetable paragraphs and tie them together into one "article"

Here is his bio:

http://www.siquest.ca/jbradley.asp

He seems heavy on law enforcement credentials, but rather light on Computer Science. Not sure that is the right combo here.

To be fair, the "heavy on the law enforcement" bit was doing exactly the kind of thing he's designing the software for. You don't need a CS degree to write a program to dig through a cache, and designing the in-house software for the RCMP is probably experience enough. We all make mistakes, but he went out of his way to make his known as soon as he learned about it. I'm happy to have people with that moral fiber heading forensics departments and designing software.

Agreed. He went out of the way to cast doubt on the reliability of his product in the name of justice.

Isn't it strange that when somebody looks for something 84 times, that a prosecutor sees that as more important as someone looking for it only once? So a stupid person who needs to read something 84 times, or whose dog eats his printed version 83 times, is more likely to 'have done it' as the person who understands it on the first try or doesn't have a dog?

Is it really that strange? I think the idea is to show a fixation or continuing interest. I've googled some terms dozens of times because I know it will return the wiki or imbd page.

It depends on the timeline I guess. But the amount of added 'suspicion' is much bigger between 0 and 1 lookups than between 1 and 84 lookups. What I mean is, when somebody looks something up only once, that says a lot about what they think about or plan to do. When somebody looks it up multiple times, well that at most shows that they have a continuing interest as you say. It's not like everybody once in a while randomly decides 'hey, I'm going to look up how to make chloroform' and that only the people who do it several times over several months actually do it.

My point was, why hammer on the '84 times'? Isn't just the one time just as much a 'smoking gun'?

I guess it depends on an individual's perception.

One time - I searched for something out of curiosity.

Eighty-four times - I searched for the term on several occasions because I was using it as part of some process or had an ongoing need for the information. Or possibly I was going to use it in some process, but decided not to, then revisited it later when I considered it again.

Inference is an important part of human cognition. We're pretty good at it. The subtle differences in the details influence the inferred outcome, and they should.

----------

Note that I am not suggesting this inference should be the basis for a conviction in trial by jury. The standard by which we judge evidence in a trial is not the same standard by which we develop opinions.

You've never googled chloroform just out of curiosity?

I just now did for the first time ;)

I'm surprised that nobody with access to the data stopped to ponder that those who know how to search would find what they need in < 84 searches, while those who don't know how to search would give up earlier. The fact everyone blindly trusted suspicious data from a 'magical' program is, to me, more disturbing than the flaw itself.

It's not just searches, but hits to a specific site with information about chloroform, which is even more crazy.

She was found not guilty wasn't she? Why does it matter now that his initial findings were faulty against her.

Surely it matters that the prosecution had a responsibility to pass on the information and chose not to?

That, and the fact that you've got to seriously worry when a report from a piece of software that can confuse the numbers 1 and 84 is being used as evidence in court.

It matters because the prosecution should have said something. The prosecutor's job is not to just put somebody in jail, but rather, to put the right somebody in jail. Unfortunately, we seem to have forgotten that in the US as part of the adversarial position between law enforcement and citizens.

Unfortunately, we seem to have forgotten that in the US as part of the adversarial position between law enforcement and citizens.

It's sad that our system has become more about winning and less about finding the truth and laying down justice. Here's a horrifying case where police and the prosecutor worked lied to convict a man who ended up in prison for 10 years before being release:

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_18385647

There was another story (not surprising in Denver again) where over 10% of the police force has been reprimanded for lying while on duty. This includes falsifying evidence, police reports and even lying on the stand. Most were still employed for some reason.

My girlfriend watched almost the entire trial. I sat in for some of it. After about 30 minutes, I literally said out loud, "Neither of these legal teams are interested in the truth; they're only interested in winning." Not only is your statement true, but it's become blatantly apparent.

The aim of an adversarial court system is to get at the truth by having the people on each side working hard to expose those bits of the truth that suit their goals. The system is supposed to get at the truth, and that doesn't necessarily require that all the people involved are primarily trying to get at the truth. It may even work best when they aren't.

Similarly: buyers and sellers in a market needn't individually be aiming to arrive at an efficient or socially beneficial outcome; voters in a democracy needn't individually be aiming to elect someone who will be best for everyone's interests; employees of a company needn't all be concerned solely with the company's success. The trick is to design the system so that even when individual people are motivated by self-interest the aggregate effect is a good one.

Of course, none of these systems works perfectly in practice, and sometimes that's because some individual's self-interest ends up having too much influence on the outcome. Some or all of the systems might want changing to encourage participants to act less self-interested somehow. But I think it's just an error to say "Ugh, those people are acting in their own interests and not pursuing the top-level goal of the system" when the system is designed to get individuals' pursuit of their own interests to work towards that top-level goal.

Your right about the system being designed a certain way and that's how it should work. The problem is that the state has so many more resources, and if you add flat out lying to the mix, the system breaks down. I'm of the opinion that since the state has the burden of proof and virtually unlimited resources that they should also be striving for the truth above all else. When it becomes more about convictions and less about justice, the system will fail to the detriment of all of society.

It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, “whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever. -John Adams

buyers and sellers in a market needn't individually be aiming to arrive at an efficient or socially beneficial outcome

Yet we have regulation because we've seen sellers destroy the environment and take advantage of buyers left and right.

voters in a democracy needn't individually be aiming to elect someone who will be best for everyone's interests

Yet Congress has shone time and again that corruption and cronyism are at it's heart, even if it sacrifices what is good for the people, the economy, or the government. (I don't think the system is even working right now, but that doesn't mean it won't in the future; the US has gone through times lime this before.)

employees of a company needn't all be concerned solely with the company's success

But what happens when employees only focus on their own reward? Companies like that become intolerable places to work at that are hugely inefficient, generally surviving only by cannibalizing itself or by simply leveraging its mass in a pseudo-illegal way). The corporate system is designed for everybody to be doing what is best for the company (which might not always be profits), but that breaks down, too, when everybody starts pursuing their own agenda to the exclusion of anything else.

Systems can take a certain amount of perturbation and survive, but, just like Stuxnet and the centrifuges, if you introduce too much disorder in a system, it will break down. In human society, it seems selfishness, that drive to take care of myself regardless of what it means to anybody else, is often the root cause of that (it certainly is in all the above cases).

It's too bad we can't be a little more communally-oriented (without needing to live in the forest in a VW and not take baths ;). Who wants to do a sun-dance with me to find some extra pollen for the hive?

Did you perhaps miss the bit where I said "Of course, none of these systems works perfectly in practice, and sometimes that's because some individual's self-interest ends up having too much influence on the outcome. Some or all of the systems might want changing to encourage participants to act less self-interested somehow." ?

I wasn't saying "there's never anything wrong with selfishness" or "systems that try to make selfishness produce results that benefit everyone never get exploited" or anything of the kind. Just pointing out that "look, people are being self-interested rather than aiming to serve the greater good" isn't on its own a good objection.

I also wasn't arguing that there should (in any of these domains) be no regulation. There should be, and as it happens there is. Perhaps there should be more. That's an entirely separate question from whether a basically-adversarial system in which all the lawyers are out to win is a good thing.

So far as I know, it's an open question whether justice is best served by a purely adversarial system in which everyone argues for a particular outcome, or a purely investigative system in which no one is supposed to be on one side rather than another, or a basically adversarial system with a bunch of rules that aim to take some of the edge off (which is what we have now), or some other intermediate thing. It's not the sort of question you can resolve by saying "You can't do that -- it means everyone just cares about winning!" or "You can't do that -- it relies on people ignoring their own interests!".

Because said findings were found faulty while the case was still proceeding. It would be irresponsible to let the prosecution get away with illegal behaviour just because the defendant won.

I took away the message that I would need to be quite careful about being called as an expert witness, viz what exactly my brief was. He thought it was about something, the prosecutor asked him about something else.

Good on him for having the moral fortitude to correct his error.

Huh? The outcome of any one trial matters very little. Accuracy and honesty in evidence collection matters in every trial.

Maybe one of the jurors found it unlikely that she visited the page about chloroform 84 times and that subtly affected his or her perception of the prosecution's case.

Many people still think she is guilty. It was a shared computer and her mother testified that she had done one search on chloroform. The prosecution countered that there were 84 searches, so the rest had to have been done by the daughter. But it turns out that they ran two different programs on the recovered cache data and one program said there was 1 hit total, the other program said there were 84 searches over several weeks. The company with the 1 hit wrote an analysis showing their competitor's results were wrong. The competitor, with the 84 hits, agreed, and contacted the prosecutors to let them know. The prosecutors decided not to mention that the testimony they were giving from expert witnesses was false, even though they were legally required to do so.

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