I'm Begging the Courts to Stop Citing My Work on Bite Mark Identification | Hacker News Reader

I'm Begging the Courts to Stop Citing My Work on Bite Mark Identification

theatlantic.com

73 pointsfortran7711 comments

The way that society is so quick to accept evidence positioned as "scientific" as unequivocally true boggles my mind. Bite mark identification, arson investigation, just how far out on a limb many medical examiners are willing to go in deeming something a homicide when they have so little context... people really must think that wrongful accusations either don't happen, or are never going to happen to them. It seems like the vast majority of people crave a sense of order and justice to a point of willful ignorance about reality.

I listened to the details of a case where a woman was indicted for perjury under the logic that she didn't confess to a crime.

WTF. In what legal systems does that work?

I can imagine plenty of cases where this would be reasonable. We would need more details to say if this is a bad outcome.

For example, if this was in the US, did the woman plead the fifth, or did she assert to something she knew to be false? Was she convicted of a crime and found to have knowingly concealed having committed the crime? Did this conviction come before or after her lying on the stand?

How can asserting your innocense in caught be reasonably taken as perjury? That seems like a statement that you need to expand on more than you have, what kind of hypothetical do you have in mind? Surely you don't believe that merely asserting your innoncense and later being found guilty should be treated as perjury per se?

Because they could have pled the fifth instead of providing the court with a known lie.

You assert your innocence by pleading innocent before a trial takes off. Not by obfuscating on the stand. If an option is to not comment on your innocence under oath, or you'd be lying if you did that, then don't take the stand or remember you don't have to admit to a crime. But unless there are provisions against what lies are applicable to perjury I don't understand how it wouldn't be perjury

Verdicts of the court are not findings of fact for a start.

Difference between pleading the fifth and lying. If she for example lied in another case for serious crime to cover up her own crime that is reasonable (she could just have plead the fifth instead)

Add shaken baby syndrome to that list. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402

>The Nevada Supreme Court rejected all of those arguments, reasoning that Collman would likely have been convicted on other evidence. And they also again refused to specifically rule on the challenges to bite-mark identification, and to Rawson.

This, to me, seems to be the hurdle to clear. These cases are complex and have lots of evidence. The Nevada Supreme Court essentially said that the bite mark evidence in his case is not needed to convict him. The author of the article is seemingly only knowledgeable of the use of teeth "evidence".

I don't even know where to go from here. I'm from Arizona, not Nevada so I don't know their laws. I assume that the effort needed will involve going over this individual's court case, arguing the details in front of a court, traveling to the court, filing and responding to court documents... The whole 9 yards. The biggest hurdle is that freeing this man requires a lot of effort from another man. Who's going to go to bat for this man when maybe there's an easier way to free someone else?

The alternative solution is to campaign for Nevada to change their laws. Or perhaps shame/punish the court for this hypocrisy. The judges are surely accountable to someone else.

> This, to me, seems to be the hurdle to clear. These cases are complex and have lots of evidence. The Nevada Supreme Court essentially said that the bite mark evidence in his case is not needed to convict him.

I'm concerned that a supreme court of all courts justify a ruling with “would likely have been” reasoning. Like, really? How about we throw that out of the window, and let a court decide whether it's enough evidence instead of guessing what a court would've done in that situation??

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