More junk science used to convict people in the courts of America? I'm going to die now of not surprise! I guess a better way to say this is, how does the proliferation of shit work like this happen so fast but the refutation take so damned long?
If one judge somewhere allows a prosecutor to present junk science as evidence, that becomes precedent that other prosecutors can point to in order to convince other judges to allow it, too.
Once precedent is established, it takes the decision of a higher court to stop use of that junk science. It takes time for cases to work their way up.
If you mean criminally liable though, we don’t hold them liable for the same reasons we don’t hold lawyers criminally liable for defending a convicted criminal. At the end of every human process, you need someone somewhere to exercise some human judgement and be able to rely on it. Humans are not infallible though, and neither is anything else we create whether it’s court systems or computer systems.
This is one of the reason’s why we have trials by Jury in cases where life, limb and liberty are at stake. It is one thing to convince one person, the judge presiding over the case to pass judgement one way or another, but a whole other thing to convince several of your peers of equal social standing to pass judgement. It’s still not perfect, but nothing ever will be.
An appeal doesn’t directly lead to jobs loss, but it doesn’t look good on your record when your judgements are regularly overturned, particularly if you aspire to a better position. Keeping your job isn’t always the only, or most important incentive if you have any kind of ambition or want to leave any kind of lasting legacy.
We need tooling to better understand when people have been wrongfully convicted using inaccurate forensics sciences so they can more quickly get their case re-evaluated (and speed exoneration if warranted). If someone from Code For America sees this, consider such a tool (similar to what has been built to rapidly expunge marijuana convictions in states that have legalized it).
Ultimately, when no one in the process has scientific/mathematical literacy, pseudoscience proliferates.
Interesting and on the side of caution is that false negatives are much much higher than false positives in this Jeans pattern matching.