A nuclear weapons lab helped crack a serial-killer case | Hacker News Reader

A nuclear weapons lab helped crack a serial-killer case

undark.org

74 pointsignored23 comments

This article cheerleads the policework, but I'm not convinced it's sound to introduce highly novel forensic techniques in court trials. So you validated your technique with a control sample from a pig; that's scientific rigor, that's sufficient for a scientific journal paper. I don't buy that's sufficient to put a person in prison for life.

One stray cross-contamination of lab equipment would invalidate everything. Repeat the work multiple times; but it's a systemic issue, and you repeat the same error.

- "The prosecution did not seek the death penalty in part because of the uncertainties of using a new scientific protocol, and the possibility of a long and expensive case as a result."

edit / tangent: (Then why'd he accept a plea deal for life? Represented by a public defender [0]. That's a striking resource asymmetry: million-dollar national lab work for the prosecution, 30 minutes of paper-skimming for the defense).

[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-mar-13-mn-32560...

When also has someone retracted a real confession? It seems more likely that the police beat it out of him, then they leaned on this obscure lab to get the results they wanted. Or he’s just guilty and somehow thought confessing to multiple murders wasn’t going to effect his life that much.

if the Replication Crisis ever comes for criminal forensics there will be hell to pay.

Oh, it’s here. https://www.propublica.org/article/understanding-junk-scienc...

"It's here" being an article published fourteen years after a watershed debunking of many forensics staples.

Fun fact, if anybody was convicted after 2009 using some of the junk science in that report, and they later try to appeal based on the junk science, the appeal judge can say "that science was already known to be flawed during your original trial. You should have challenged it then."

> hat's scientific rigor, that's sufficient for a scientific journal paper. I don't buy that's sufficient to put a person in prison for life.

It may be sufficient for a scientific journal paper, but if it is not sufficient to put a person in prison for life, then it's not scientific rigor!

The bar for scientific paper should be far lower than the bar for imprisoning someone for life.

Scientific rigor is built up over time by different scientists replicating and re-proving and building on the work of others. It's never a single paper. So the OC is right. Before this should be used to decide someone's life, there should be a larger foundation of evidence.

Judges generally get statistical significance.

No judge assessed evidence in this case, as there was no trial. It was settled by a negotiated agreement between a career prosecutor and a severely mentally ill man who wanted to die, who was advised/represented by incompetent and indifferent legal counsel provided him free of charge by the state (he overpaid).

> Then why'd he accept a plea deal for life? Represented by a public defender.

That doesn't seem very likely. Prosecutors were not seeking the death penalty so life would be the worst outcome he would get if he went to trial and lost.

> That's a striking resource asymmetry: million-dollar national lab work for the prosecution, 30 minutes of paper-skimming for the defense.

Public defenders spend considerably more time and effort than 30 minutes of paper-skimming when the charge is multiple murders.

- "Prosecutors were not seeking the death penalty so life would be the worst outcome he would get if he went to trial and lost."

Right: he accepted a plea for the same maximum penalty the prosecutors would have sought at trial. That's not strategic.

Only if you assume information symmetry. If they told him (untruthfully) that they were going to seek the death penalty, but if he pleads then they’ll take the death penalty off the table, it may seem strategic.

It also doesn't mention recent history with the labs: they have private management & a lot of bloat these days.

Livermore National Lab LLC conducts the management of the labs since ~2005 and the half-life of a physicist there is like 10years... ie 10years ago they had 2x the scientists. Now they have 10x admins.

"Administrative costs at Lawrence Livermore have similarly swelled. In 2009 LLNS received $47 million and $30.9 million in 2008. The most the University of California received for running Lawrence Livermore was $6.75 million in 2005."[1]

[1] https://aps.org/publications/apsnews/201006/losalamos.cfm [2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/privatization-dogma-confr_b_7... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/us/11bclivermore.html?_r=...

The twist is that all the stuff dramatized in this article is bog standard analytical chemistry process + technique, including the solid phase extraction.

All this stuff is in consumable kits and turnkey machines, which yes do require expertise and care to use properly but there's nothing weird about it. Samples are always a mixture of too much crap you don't want and which interfere with each others' detection. Etc. It's all part of the job.

Also Fourteen hours is about the length of the practical lab exam portion of my undergrad analytical chemistry course, spread over a few days of course.

Of course this was in the nineties and maybe SPE was novel - all the other chromatography and spectroscopy was more or less established though

It's basically the same as the articles you see where curl, nmap, dd are breathlessly described as novel hacking tools. Still copaganda I guess

> A team of around 22 scientists meets twice a day for such a test, said Williams, and works 10 to 14 hours a day.

They're saying it like they should be proud of that...

The link in this article to an analysis from the lab of highly enriched uranium from 1999 is a good read: https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:33057956

Fascinating read! Although calling a forensics lab within a nuclear weapons organization a "nuclear weapons lab" feels a bit cheeky.

When I saw the title, I thought of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MezNFE5eAp0 ("Why a Big Box Store Started Solving Violent Crimes") about Target's stop-loss department having so much extra capacity they will sometimes do pro-bono work for police departments, but have limited themselves to only violent crimes because the pro-bono requests got to be overwhelming to their actual day jobs

The most disturbing part of all this is that people were suspicious of him and he was called into question and investigated numerous times at the hospital. He killed hundreds of people who were given the wrong cause of death. The hospital was enabling this guy by prioritizing their own reputation.

> NUCLEAR WEAPONS laboratories don’t often help solve serial-killer cases.

Because mass murder is their specialty...

Serial killer < Parallel killer

Series-parallel is more their speed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman

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