Wait - blood spatter must follow the rules of physics, so there is some kind of analysis that would be valid, surely?
Reading online I see its still respected lots of places and still taught in forensics. Don't know where that came from.
Reading online I see its still respected lots of places and still taught in forensics. Don't know where that came from.
With bite marks, the skin has to hold the bite mark (which it doesn't) and experts have to be able to map it back to real human teeth (which they can't). With blood spatter, there are analogous problems.
Not playing devil's advocate; just doing some simple searches and calling out hyperbole.
These days folks have replaced science with advocacy. You know, that thing lawyers do to convince a jury. To the point folks think that you can arrive at a conclusion with advocacy. Instead of looking at the data.
I'd ramble on about how the world is going to pot, because folks thing a sarcastic remark or clever-sounding turn of phrase is 'just as good' as facts. But oh well.
If someone critiques astrology you don’t reply that “planets follow physics”.
Could there be an astronomy equivalent for blood spatter analysis? In principle yes, but it doesn't exist yet.
Could the current astrology sometimes shed real light? In some cases yes, just like even an astrologer can tell you something true about where Mercury is likely to be on the sky tomorrow. But the vast majority of the claims of current experts are going to make claims a lot stronger than that.
And just like most astrologers, they will make those claims based on what they want to be true, or what they think you want to be true, not on what the evidence tells them.
> The validity of bloodstain pattern analysis has been questioned since the 1990s, and more recent studies cast significant doubt on its accuracy. A comprehensive 2009 National Academy of Sciences report concluded that "the uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous" and that purported bloodstain pattern experts' opinions are "more subjective than scientific." The report highlighted several incidents of blood spatter analysts overstating their qualifications and questioned the reliability of their methods. In 2021, the largest-to-date study on the accuracy of BPA was published, with results "show[ing] that [BPA conclusions] were often erroneous and often contradicted other analysts."
That's not the same as saying it could _never_ be done properly, but the analysis being done right now is not that, even though it's presented in courts as expert opinion with high certainty.
IE: from a specific (discrete) distribution of temperatures in, say a length of wire, you cannot infer the distribution some time before.