Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
https://thetriibe.com/2022/11/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-c... (disclaimer: I'm the author)
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/false-alarms/
This might have been the Tweet I reposted:
https://twitter.com/CookCoDefender/status/153970586223037644...
https://nitter.net/CookCoDefender/status/1539705862230376448
> 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.
The judge told me he would not grant my request to leave for food. "Have you heard of Amazon? Order it online." he said.
Then when I ordered it online he gave me five months in jail saying he never gave me permission to use the Internet :D
That's textbook entrapment given that collecting an Amazon order, much less the occasionally misplaced one, would require stepping outside of your apartment.
That ankle bracelet works the same way as the smartphones as far as location data. We all have ankle bracelets.
Our cities are concrete surveillance prisons...
It goes on and on and is another failure of the Justice system.
I am dealing with a corrupt Judge as well so I know frustrating it can be.
For context I got stopped in a car with a friend who had weed (unknown to me at the time), had a really old warrant for something like a missed child support payment (also didn't know), and we were both removed from the car. Mind you, I was not driving, and the car did not belong to me, I was simply a passenger. Cops claim they have cause to search the car, I can't argue otherwise, car gets searched, weed was found, we both get hit with the charge.
I was expected to pay $6000 for possession, spent a week in jail, lost my job, and had to travel 3 hours to the court house to "appear" in front of a judge with no means of getting there because every waking moment needed me to find a job and save any money I had to pay upcoming rent and needs, in addition to paying child support and not missing a payment otherwise I would end up in jail.
That's how quickly this shit escalates, had I not found a ride to get to the court house at least twice, I would've been arrested for bail jumping, and lost my new job, and my apartment.
Apologizes if I'm taking away from your experience, not my intention. I feel like that if others don't come to share similar stories, people are quick to dispel your situation as a one off, and accuse of not being responsible.
I don't say this as any sort of moral or character judgment, but simply to point out that part of the reason this thing is allowed to happen is because the people it's happening to are very rarely sympathetic individuals. They're viewed as bad people and "others" by the majority of the population.
So what's the fix for this? I wish I had an answer, but I don't. Maybe teaching empathy so that the court system starts feeling pressure from the citizens that this isn't ok. Maybe legislation against charge stacking just to elicit plea deals. There's also the very real possibility of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction where DAs don't charge petty crime and people charged with violent crimes are released on signature bonds.
An easy first step would be to increase accessibility to court documents so that journalists and researchers have better means of researching these complex problems. In Illinois for example, the judicial branch is exempt from FOIA. This effectively manifests itself as an informal allowance of judges/prosecutors to get away with a lot of systemic injustices. They get away with it because the means of identifying these systemic problems is through data and records that exist beyond a moat. One existing alternative to FOIA here is the county clerk's in-person system.. but the system times out on half of its searches, is missing tons of docs, painfully slow, etc. Another existing path is through a FOIA to the State's Attorney's office, but they're notoriously slow and I'm amongst the handful of others who are suing for non-responsiveness. A lot of this is made worse by the State's Attorney hashing person and case identifiers to make it effectively impossible to understand how someone's case progressed through the courts, starting from the arrest.
The fear was being jailed too long to respond to potential employers so that I could continue to work. Child support agencies are immediately notified if you've been let go and will hound you on a daily basis to find employment, there are no breaks.
Thankfully I'm in a much better position in life, but I know what it's like if you don't have access to capital to hire a good defense attorney who isn't behind the 8-ball like public defenders always find themselves.
I think it's important to point out that our justice system is so overburdened with cases they have to take deals, and that's just for the side of the system where folks don't have access to capital to hire good attorneys, they get stuck with the even more overburdened public defenders, who don't eve have time to review any of the details of the charge.
Then there's the other side that is well off and can fight their charge with a great attorney, or a team of lawyers, at which point the county/state decides it's not worth the hassle to tie up their DA on this particular case and they provide the defense with an agreeable plea (usually a slap on the wrist to get it wrapped up quick), then proceed with the next one.
As as most faculties in our society, the issue is and always has been an issue of resources. The problem is everything is paywalled to near obscurity, and we kick the can further down the road.
And as you say, if you start missing child support payments the judge will hit you with contempt charges and put you straight back in jail for several months to teach you a lesson.
If you had ended up in jail the case might have run on for months or years. Once you are inside a jail you lose most contact with your attorney and your support system and you have the lowest priority in the system, so your case is usually just continued each month until the end of time.
Find the wrong cops and you'll end up in jail for months for having some vitamins on you:
All of this should be illegal, debtors prisons by another name is all this is.
"That's a criminal matter - go to the police", say the courts.
"That's a civil matter - go to the courts", say the police.
Morons and Political Hacks[1], the lot of 'em.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ09bnZ747wHope you're doing well.
I'm doing good. Almost all the charges were dismissed a couple of weeks ago. Last ones on appeal now. Hope everything is good with you.
Um, what? You served 5 months in jail for a retweet? Care to elaborate?
Basically judge told me I was allowed to use the Internet while on bail and joked with me that as long as I didn't use it for anything illegal.
Then when I retweeted the article "chaps" above wrote about EM not working etc, and I also tweeted about police misconduct (I was getting arrested every single day), it angered the local Sheriff's dept and they locked me up. The judge then basically made the most strained argument in history that he never gave me permission to use the Internet and that I was a bad person for Tweeting about the police under an assumed name (my Twitter account is also my name??). "Chaps" did his level best to help my lawyer, and we were 110% in the right, but the judge was days away from retirement, so fuck me lol
Send this guy your story, he might be able to help you
An official and highly paid representative sent to testify in court couldn't just be dismissed as "well, one salesman misspoke, not our fault".
This would be the just recourse, but I'm aware that probably nobody can afford this justice.
There's also the issue of jury selection. If a potential juror seems like they might question faulty statistics, for example, and the prosecutors know they will be presenting some statistics, that juror wont be selected.
Yes, but the defense witness can make unsupported claims in the opposite direction. Neither "expert witness" is required to actually support their testimony.
> There's also the issue of jury selection.
Yes, definitely. Someone else upthread mentioned that too.
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.
but yeah your impression is not wrong, Sweden is not a nice place lol
Experts using scientifically unreliable methods to determine that asylum seekers are 18+ and can therefore be expelled from the French territory.
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.
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.
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.
Is there an article with more on this?
IMHO any upscaling in court should be strictly squaring existing pixels, along with heavy caveats on how encoding works. A 16X zoom means one black pixel becomes sixteen pixels, and jurors have to know that the individual pixel may not have ever been an accurate representation of reality. Anything else, even nearest neighbor, is adding information.
Especially with recent smart phones that are using AI to perform “super zoom” techniques you could easily magic into existence something that never existed.
The glob of pixels to the left, interpreted as Rittenhouse's support hand, was actually part of the vehicle already present in the frames before he approaches: https://i.imgur.com/4itI2r8.png
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-b...
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.
The extreme radical position is that the justice system is fundamentally and irredeemably broken, and that there is no way that a conscientious leftist could work with, let alone within, a system that exists only to oppress the people and reinforce the power of the ruling elite.
There's obviously a lot of gray between those two positions, but the punchline is that its very possible to be a liberal DA. e.g. Chesa Boudin's stated goals exemplify what that's supposed to look like, although without unified support from the police and the judiciary, Chesa Boudin also exemplifies what would actually happen.
Experiences like that drive the broader leftist calls to defund or abolish the police. If you can't get buy in from the entire judicial system to reform itself, then just getting a leftist prosecutor elected/appointed will quickly lead to that prosecutor either being ejected from the position, or co-opted by the system they were trying to fix.
#2 it is totally true that prosecutors heavily rely on the judges being ex-colleagues of theirs. I have never heard of a prosecutor only bringing charges where the defendant is clearly guilty, though. That does not follow my experience, primarily in pre-trial detention, where I got to read the discovery materials in thousands of cases. Obviously they have a bar in felony cases of having to pass a grand jury, but it was once said you could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
How does that square with overcharging? Seems like a trend is to throw a bunch of charges at person in hopes they will cop a plea deal, which is considered a win. (cheating IMO).
Heuristic: Any law that too many people are charged with should be repealed. Either too much of the population doesn't think it should be illegal even past the point of purposely not respecting it, or it's excessively broad and too many people are violating it unintentionally.
This puts pressure on you to take a deal pleading to a reduced charge and all the other charges go away.
>prosecutors tend to only bring cases where the defendant is clearly guilty.
>They like shooting fish in a barrel.
Ease of conviction is tied to many factors that aren't guilt.
This isn't quite right. Prosecutors tend to only bring cases where they judge they can win (including pleas, etc.).
There is some correlation with guilt, sure, but it's not by any stretch the only thing going on.
>Prosecutors are incentivized to get convictions,
Their entire job is to get convictions. It literally doesn't matter if the prosecutor thinks someone should be convicted or not, that's for the judge to decide. The job of a prosecutor is to make as strong a case for conviction as he possibly can.
Likewise, the job of a lawyer representing a defendant is to make as strong a case for acquittal as he possibly can. Whether the lawyer thinks someone should be acquitted or not literally doesn't matter.
The other options are: jury trial, plea deal and dismissal.
Almost every case ends in a plea deal which is really just between the prosecutor and the defendant with the judge just putting a stamp on it.
It's unfortunate that you're probably right in the de facto sense. This is how many prosecutors view their role. But it's wrong. This is not the prosecutor's objective. Their obligation is to strive toward justice, not a conviction. If a prosecutor has a reason to believe the accused is not guilty, they have an obligation to act on that. To dismiss the charges, to share their belief with the defense, etc.
Here's someone explaining it[0] better than I can:
> The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all, and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the two-fold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor—indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one
Another good quote [1]:
> For this reason, while a lawyer defending a man accused of a criminal offense should "exert all his ability, learning, and ingenuity, in such a defence, even if he should be perfectly assured in his own mind of the actual guilt of the prisoner," a lawyer should never prosecute "a man whom he knows or believes to be innocent."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor#United_States
[1] https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&h...
Ah yes, and it is politicians (you know, the people who oversee all of this) obligation to govern according to "the will of the people"...just like we see in movies, on TV, in the trustworthy and totally independent news, in various simulcast professionally written PR pieces after an incident occurs, etc. (Consensus across the board is how you know it's true. That, and: this is a democracy.)
Protect "democracy" with all you have, free and rational citizens, it is our most sacred institution.
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.
[1] https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-sha...
[2] see e.g. https://adikia.fr/2018/05/biomecanique-des-chutes/ (in French)
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.)
Is this not the exact reason for expert witnesses?
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.
In the UK, expert witnesses are "servants of the court". Sure, they're paid by one side or the other; but they're witnesses, and they're required to give true, unbiased testimony, on pain of a perjury charge. Is it not the same inthe USA?
Anyone paid by the government is always going to know which way their bread is buttered. They would always be looked on with extreme suspicion. Even public defenders have this problem defending their clients when they are paid by the same government that is prosecuting the defendant.
By ignoring math skills altogether, the legal profession necessarily ends up selecting for individuals who on average have a poorer understanding of anything quantitative or statistical, and often that also correlates with poorer understanding of all technical and scientific matters, because the same innumeracy means those individuals don’t make it far any sciences at all, even in their secondary or tertiary education. So they often don’t even have strong fundamentals on the basic concepts in those areas.
As an engineer, it was maddening to witness and absolutely pervades every aspect of the US legal system. Which both translates into reaching false factual conclusions as in OP, but also infects legal reasoning with a ridiculous lack of rigor (a point which lawyers often dispute vigorously, but they have no concept of just how much rigor they lose by eschewing mathematical and especially statistical reasoning), and it also translates into poorer operational efficiency and administrative efficiency in the legal system, and poorer outcomes from the regulatory system, which, while often informed by technical concerns, remains a primarily legal- and lawyer- driven process. That opens up regulatory bodies to subjective political concerns where there is absolutely no reasonable technical case to be made. This phenomenon is most obvious in recent history with climate change related regulations, but is pervasive throughout the US policy making establishment, and contributes substantially to our challenges with special interests and regulatory capture.
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.
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?
Claiming guilt to plea down to avoid a case is a problem, but that isn’t the case you’re making. There’s nothing magical about criminal prosecution.
Here you're saying that mass-murderers are common, but despite their extensive trails of corpses, we can't pin the actual crime on an actual criminal. No, there's nothing magical about criminal prosecution here, it's no more than bullshit as you've described it.
Back to my question, why do you think mass-murderers are so incredibly overrepresented in the American population?
If you want to act in bad faith and call it magic and bullshit feel free to grandstand.
>Here you're saying that mass-murderers are common, but despite their extensive trails of corpses, we can't pin the actual crime on an actual criminal. No, there's nothing magical about criminal prosecution here, it's no more than bullshit as you've described it.
Everyone does illegal stuff in the US. Sometimes it’s a technicality that a guilty party goes free.
These doctrines were created by judges who were sick of prosecutors and police violating the constitution and not getting punished for it.
The solution is to fix the system to stop this misconduct and then we could rid ourselves of this doctrine. It's a fucked up system.
The actual criminal in this scenario (the police officer) gets off carte blanche for breaking the law. Additionally, if they managed to find evidence then an additional criminal (the defendants) also gets carte blanche. The only people punished is the public that now have two known criminals that evaded justice!
Without the exclusionary rule the 4th amendment doesn't really exist. Cops could just violate your 4th amendment rights and then either arrest you if they find evidence of a crime or go on their merry way. Yes, some people who committed crimes go unpunished because the state fucked up and couldn't manage to protect their legal rights while investigating and arresting them. We should place a high burden on the state to dramatically disincentivize it from violating our rights, even the rights of people who commit crimes.
I mean if I trespass on your property and take a handgun and give it to police as evidence of the murder weapon they can use that to convict you. You might have trouble with a civil suit of trespassing against me but I doubt a prosector couldn't also try me for trespassing.
The exclusionary rule is not in the constitution. The 4th amendment does not describe what happens if its violated and the fruit of the poisonous tree is entirely made up by the court system in 1920 [1] over a century after the constitution was written. Prior to that point there wasn't a need of the fruit of the poisonous tree because if even if you had a warrant you couldn't use my personal possessions as evidence against me [2].
Although I don't really agree with either system. You should be able to use warrants to get personal property but taking person property without a warrant should receive the same penalty no matter who takes it. i.e. Cops should risk jail time for breaking the law like everybody else. Obviously if a cop radios their supervisor to verify they have a warrant and the supervisor lies then the supervisor is on the hook and not the cop.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverthorne_Lumber_Co._v._Uni... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_evidence_rule
A false conviction rate of a few percent does not explain an order of magnitude level differences in incarceration between countries.
I think an interesting question is what portion of the US population would be incarcerated if the totality of our laws were applied to everyone
US crime is like driving across the only road that is covered in black ice with toll trolls on the way, you have to cross it, you know it’s there, and you can do it carefully but you never know what will happen or where you’ll slip up.
Sentencing to prison is probably the key problem. Criminals need help. Outright punishment just hardens them. From my experience the bulk of crime has its origin in mental illnesses which are not being treated. The medical system in the USA almost certainly is the cause of this.
It is a valid question what fraction of dealing (as opposed to possession for personal use) is actually non-violent. But even the violence is largely a product of the war on drugs, just as the corresponding violence surrounding illegal alcohol dealing during Prohibition was a product of the war on alcohol. Take away the prohibition and the violence went away.
Is intent to distribute fentanyl a non violent possession? If so could you ever make a case it’s non violent dealing? If you don’t see it as non violent dealing, a store advertising date rape drugs should be allowed to sell all their legal products.
Whatever the current fraction is, it's in a world with a war on drugs, so it can't tell you anything useful about what a world without a war on drugs would be like.
> Is intent to distribute fentanyl a non violent possession?
As long as the distribution is done by voluntary transactions, sure.
> a store advertising date rape drugs should be allowed to sell all their legal products.
Date rape is not the only use for fentanyl. One might as well say that liquor stores should be closed down because liquor can be used for date rape.
The premise of the war on drugs is that if we make drugs illegal, people will stop using them, or at least use will be drastically curtailed. We already knew that was false because Prohibition did not stop people from using alcoholic beverages, or drastically curtail their use; it just created a lucrative black market in alcohol, plus an incentive to violence for the people who ran that market--since they were criminals already, adding violence to the mix wasn't a big step. The war on drugs has worked out the same way.
The only way to drastically reduce drug use is for people to stop wanting to use drugs. Unfortunately nobody has a really good way to do that. But we know that criminalizing their use and creating a lucrative and violent black market for them does not work.
I don’t have any philosophy towards the idea of drugs. I don’t think the world would be worst off all fentanyl sellers were all dead. I don’t see a point to say we should treat heroin like weed and cocaine like Xanax.
For a city-state with a reasonably homogeneous population, perhaps. But that's very different from a large country.
> The problem wasn’t that prohibition didn’t work, it was the lack of enforcement.
That's because the amount of enforcement it would have taken to actually prohibit all use of liquor would have been (a) way, way too costly, and (b) inconsistent with having a free country. At least our country realized that for liquor and repeated Prohibition.
> I don’t have any philosophy towards the idea of drugs.
It sure seems like you do from your statements that immediately follow this one.
I personally think the use of drugs is something better regulated by social norms then the law. However, this changes if the law socializes the cost of drug addiction. That is to say, if I'm forced to pay for food, shelter, and Healthcare for addicts, then they also lose the freedom of choice.
In many cases I think this is likely to be a post facto rationalization for the fact that the case against the suspect is weaker than initially thought but represents a great deal of manpower that feels wasted if the suspect is not convicted.
I’m not calling it right or wrong, it’s just what happens with the system in place. It’s also shown to the public to convict them. The jury has the ability to ‘throw’ the case as they did in the case of OJ.
1) People do convince themselves of falsehoods; the person may not actually have done that initial crime. 2) Being able to trump up lessor charges can be (ab)used even if the person didn't commit an initial crime but instead is just a ~journalist~ nuisance.
this seems really good until you realize its 20,000-140,000 people in prison right now. that are innocent.
and it gets REALLY bleak when you look at the 400,000 people who are locked up at any given time, pretrial, in jail. who are legally innocent. The proportion of individuals held in jail pending trial increased from 56 percent of the jail population in 2000 to 66 percent in 2018 (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-better-path-forward-for...)
so, of the roughly 2 million people behind any bars at any given time, 400,000-500,000 are innocent. 25%.
A lot of cases are won by defendants, who after spending years in pretrial, find the prosecution did not have enough evidence to convict them.
I've been witness to some far-out jury cases where the defendant was massively guilty but the jury acquitted for some reason. That's why I would often recommend a jury trial in a lot of cases simply because juries have such a high randomness attached to them.
There is a long-standing and legitimate public interest in detaining some people while they await trial. A court can find you a flight risk, or a danger to society, during arraignment before your trial without violating your due process rights.
And I'm not sure "the proportion of individuals held in jail pending trial" increasing means anything. What are the number of cases this correlates to? Have the raw or per capita numbers increased? What are the other reasons you could be held in jail other than pending trial, which apparently decreased from 44% to 34%?
And not to be too overly pedantic, but the original question was about prison specifically which is distinctly different from jail.
My main issues were that a) many people were overcharged (i.e. charged with extra crimes they were not guilty of) simply to obtain a plea deal; b) often police/prosecutor/judicial misconduct was used to get the defendant into the justice system and convict them; c) the sentences are often out-of-whack compared to the crime; d) jails and prisons generally offer very little value and rehabilitation.
And he specified “guilty of what they were charged with”.
You also need to factor in the people who are guilty of crime A (that they did commit but were not convicted of) but are convicted of crime B (that they did not commit) for whatever reason.
I’ve seen “street justice” like this. In some cases I think it a net good (right outcome for the wrong reasons, typically involving a serial criminal who manages to avoid the “smoking gun”), but sometimes it’s just an abuse of power that needs to be rectified.
The overcharging is a trick by the prosecution to secure the plea.
I see people charged with murder who plead to manslaughter when the case was manslaughter from the beginning, but who risks going to trial and being found guilty of murder? Minimum on murder is usually 20 years straight, whereas manslaughter is usually probationable.
What you wrote: And he specified “guilty of what they were charged with”.
These aren't the same. It's depressing to see someone being misquoted on literally the same page as their original statement, in a discussion about lack of accuracy in legal proceedings.
2. This is not a court of law or a legal arm of anything. Quite the contrary, it’s a social forum.
3. I don’t think any point you made materially changes the relevance of my point(s).
I appreciate being accurate and precise, but focusing on intent of communication goes a long way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
I had an expert witness testify for the prosecution against me and I thought he was fantastic, very fair and very knowledgeable.
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.
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).
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://nl... and then ignore the nearly 50% rate of decline in violent crime since 1993(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/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-...)
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-...)
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). 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.
... and the defense fails to hire their own expert witness, or use same exact method to keep people out of prison.
(Remember "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit"? Cochran did not come up with it by himself, but an expert provided it to him, the glove not fitting.)
Assuming you are talking about US, adversarial courts.
and yes they have a million other disadvantages that are SUPPOSED to be balanced by the advantage that the standard burden of proof offers. but that is clearly failing if prosecution experts are running rampant with few checks, and 95-98%(!) of criminal cases plead out before a trial even occurs. public defenders are time constrained in the extreme(https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-def...), and public defendants are financially constrained in the extreme. its a terrible mixture.
But maybe in the future some MathGPT can help....
Although she was acquited after some years, it wrecked her.
And while Googling I found another video by the same channel (Vsauce2): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OMr6zCXwuns
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/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/) 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
A few years back I was asked to informally provide a technical review the prosecution's evidence in a case involving a former colleague. The police expert's sole credentials were a 10 year old A+ certification and a few employer-sponsored day courses, but was confidently representing themselves as an expert in networking/computing/technology. Their theory of the case was brutal - filled with nonsensical jargon, fabrications and misrepresentations. Things like "a computer behind a NAT is unreachable from the Internet under any circumstances". Instances where timestamps were implied to correlate but were actually 6+ hours apart once time zones were factored in. Pages and pages of things in that vein.
None of that mattered - they were convicted anyway. It broke my faith in the justice system. The prosecution behaved in exactly the same way as today's legions of right-wing conspiracists, grifters and politicians do, because the truthfulness of their words didn't matter to them. Because the defense cared about the accuracy of what they were stating, they could be easily drowned out by confident, rapid bullshit and innuendo.
I desperately want to find a way to help make the system better, but at every avenue the response has been "it's your funeral".
Your story is sadly pretty common. networking might be the worst area for expert testimony right now because its so filled with proprietary tech and non-standardized jargon. ESPECIALLY the timezones, holy crap the amount of people who refuse to work in UTC. But that theme of 'ancient certs, terrible lazy theory' and zero pushback, is pretty much the norm outside of federal homicide cases. and even then.
Im not going to pretend that defense teams are immune to the kind of 'ends justify the means' wishful thinking, but ive never seen even 1/5th the lazy fabrications or insane ass-pulls.
My phone (Pixel 6) regularly gets my location wrong. I have lived in the same house, with the same router and same phone for years, yet every week it randomly tags incorrect coordinates on my photos, in some cases putting them a mile or more away, in a field or on the other side of town.
For me this is a minor annoyance (and one I can't correct on my phone - it won't let me edit the coordinates because they were supplied by the phone. I guess I could edit the EXIF data on a computer if I cared to), but for someone being prosecuted it could place the trustworthiness of testimony under doubt or undermine their defense etc, with "their word against hard data".
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.
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.
I'm not sure how a reasonable judge or jury would have come to any other conclusion given what little we know about this third-person retelling of a case so I don't think they "failed" him at least in the way I typically think of that word being used in these contexts.
For example, if my crazy neighbour knocked on my door, pushed their way into my home when I answered then beat me up - the only evidence of who did it would be my eyewitness testimony.
There would be incontrovertible evidence that someone had assaulted me, in the form of my bruise-covered face and body. But only eyewitness testimony as to who.
With the current justice system, that would almost certainly be enough for a jury to convict.
There are tragic miscarriages of justice from time to time, and certainly DNA evidence should be used whenever possible. But would I prefer to live in a world which rejects eyewitness testimony, where a crazy person can barge into my house and beat me up with no consequences? Or a world where I have to have CCTV in my own home? Not really to be honest.
For better or worst, we should accept that our justice system has holes and flaws, and we should do our best to avoid them. There isn’t much to help you and they might not have any suitable punishment or aid to give to the crazy person.
In cases of rape, where there's usually ample forensic evidence, there need not be a complete reliance on someone's testimony.
Are these cases a relic before dna evidence?
I'm not saying everyone is innocent, but the number of people who were wrongly convicted by a lazy system that let shoddy police work and lax standards become the norm is shocking.
There's the old thought process that even if the guy wasn't guilty of this crime he's certainly guilty of others so they would be doing the world a favor by putting him away. In the end this is just self-justified racism.
I’m sorry, where is race the factor in this? You could make a weak claim for sexism from your post but there is no racism.
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?
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.
I was talking very loosely --surely it doesn't stand up to any level of scrutiny
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.
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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.
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.