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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

A cadaver dog could be useful for finding a carcass, human or otherwise. Once a carcass is found, can't more qualified experts testify about it? Are we talking about cases in which a carcass wasn't found, but was theorized to have been present at some point?! How do we know the carcass was human? How do we know how long ago it was present? If we could be certain of either of those things, how do we know it was the particular human whose murder is being prosecuted?

We can't blame dog enthusiasts for testifying, but it's a judge's job to keep fantasists out. Judges who allow such testimony aren't stupid; they are evil.

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When they find a body, it's easy.

It's the cases you'll read about when it says the dog "activated" or "altered" five times on the property, even though nothing was found, and that's somehow used as evidence of something.

That's hideous. Judges who allow that testimony should be impeached and disbarred, at a minimum.

I don't see why judges can't allow bunk testimony, the problem is that juries have been watching way too much CSI:Miami and don't believe any arguments brought up by the defense that forensic 'experts' are reading chicken entrails.

For the same reason that a defendant may not be presented to the jury in handcuffs or in a prison uniform. Because we humans are not able to return to a blank slate, free from biases imparted by information later learned to be false. For methods that are known to be useless, the jury shouldn't be asked to perform the impossible.

Easy to say. But to the extent that it’s easy to get rid of judges they can’t be an effective check on the other branches.

Thread hypothesis is that the judges are encouraging prosecutorial misconduct, i.e. that they are intentionally not acting as a check on the executive branch. For local and state courts, which is what we're talking about, the primary check they embody is against police and prosecutors. When they fail in this duty, absolutely they should be replaced by those who do not fail.

Then the question is, who should get to decide when to replace a judge? Obviously not the executive branch, especially in the context of this particular discussion.

For example, some judges are elected (probably varies by state, but there are some places where that's true), so in those cases a perfectly viable remedy already exists (in theory, at least). Of course, in practice there's nothing to prevent voters from being very pro-prosecutor. Usually the judicial system is the best option for a remedy to that sort of problem, but of course then we're back where we started..

Typically the legislative branch handles impeachment, although in some states the judicial branch would also play a role in the process. We have a norm that officials are not fired for doing their jobs poorly, even to the extent that they intentionally harm people, and that certainly makes various things run more smoothly. Smoothness would have been a more convincing argument back in the day when our government produced acceptable results [0], assuming that day ever occurred. Obviously one would prefer that people not be convicted of murder based on stories told by buffoons about their interactions with dogs. Probably there aren't a great many judges who would allow such a thing. When that has occurred, however, a public proceeding in a legislature would constitute a wonderful reminder for all judges to take their heads out of their asses, which would contribute to justice.

[0] In USA we spend twice as much on health care as any other nation. Our performance against covid has only been better than Peru, Brazil, and several nations in eastern Europe. Every nation in Asia and Africa had fewer deaths per capita than we did.

There's also "dog alerted, after five days of digging we found a single bone fragment 200ft away. Insufficient DNA remains for us to conclusively say it's human, but all the evidence is consistent with human"

That scares the shit out of me if I'm being honest.

years ago I read an article by bruce schneier talking about how he ran an open home network so if someone accessed illegal content he could claim it could have been anyone. His argument was that if it was secured the police would argue it had to have been him.

I got the point but disagreed.

a year or two later I was reading an article about a police officer that got convicted of accessing child pornography on the police computer systems. The chief of police was quoted as saying "we know it was him because he used his password".

My ass went home that night, opened up my home network, and I've ran it that way ever since.

of course it's not that simple, understanding why that chief of police was wrong (I'm not making any claims about whether that police officer did or didn't access that material) in his confidence is what caused me to suddenly strongly agree with Bruce Schneier.

So when I hear things like your dog story, I just know that confidence has to be misplaced, even if I don't fully understand why (although in this case I do).

Those aren't really the same thing. You can go to the next level of detail on the password question. Was the officer reliably in the area, was his password well known, is it trivial for anyone to find the password. Whereas wifi at your home, there are endless ways to get it, plus did you share it with anyone.

Good luck making those arguments to law enforcement.

Arguing with law enforcement is a losing battle. You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride, etc.

Or, when a dog's "evidence" is used to get a warrant. The argument is that the right to privacy does not exist for illegal actions, and a dog will only alert for illegal contraband. So a baseless fishing expedition without any reasonable justification is rendered legal based on pseudoscience.

This is like saying "Dont hate the player hate the game"

No I am perfectly capable of rightly placing blame on both. In this context the Cops, prosecutors and judges all have an ethical duty to the truth. All 3 seem to have forgotten that underlying obligation in the system

They want that "win", that conviction, that revenge, or what ever.

So yes I will blame the judge for letting bad "evidence" in that lacks proper foundation, but I will also blame the cop that is presenting the "evidence" and the prosecutor that presented the "evidence"

Our systems have layers for a reason, we can not and should not have to relay solely upon the Judge as the first, last and only line of defense here.

> In this context the Cops, prosecutors and judges all have an ethical duty to the truth. All 3 seem to have forgotten that underlying obligation in the system

Could you clarify: are you referring to every single member of those 3 groups, or just some?

And if it's just some, then roughly speaking, what fraction do you mean, and what evidence supports that?

Depends on which part of that quote...

I believe every single member of all 3 have an ethical duty to the truth

I think a significant number of all 3 groups have forgotten that, or believe something else take precedent further I believe every member of all 3 groups knows about a co-member of the group that has ignored or violated their ethical duty and looked the other way, or actively covered for that abuse

I think it's important to note that cops, prosecutors, judges, etc. are trained and encouraged to "listen to the science" and "don't rely on your gut." Of course, many disregard this, due to corruption or other moral failings. But many do follow this advice, and sometimes it results in presenting faulty evidence simply because they have been taught faulty science.

In addition to rooting out corruption and dismantling immoral incentives, we need to seriously re-examine the forensic science that is the backbone of many cases. People--including judges, juries, cops, and lawyers--are far too willing to blindly trust "science," and it can have extremely scary outcomes. We need more replication of studies and better science education for our criminal justice professionals.

the bigger problem is we have lost the true meaning of "science" or rather the "scientific method" as a huge part of forensic "science" has no connection with the "scientific method" upto and including the foundational "science" of fingerprints which is more of interpretive art than science

Too much of science today is Hypothesis -> Gather Data to support, reject any that does not -> Report Conclusions -> Burn Heretics

Also, in the US precedent sets if something is scientific in the eyes of the court, not science.

primarily the bad use of cadaver dogs isn’t in finding buried bodies but in allegedly being able to say that the body was somewhere else before it was moved, like the trunk of a car or a bedroom etc. cadaver dogs are basically used to frame suspects by claiming that the dog smelled the dead body somewhere where only the suspect could have been, therefore proving they killed the person. it’s complete bullshit. can dogs detect corpses? i think they can. can they detect where a corpse was, but no longer is, days or weeks or even years later? absolutely not, but cadaver dog handlers will testify under oath that they can

well, one potential nefarious use of dogs is the parallel construction of evidence that was gathered illegally in some way. That's, I assume, what psychics are for.

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