FBI testimony on hair analysis contained errors in 90% of cases (2015)
fbi.gov
fbi.gov
Where the hell were the grown-ups, let alone an inspector who actually understood laboratory QC, when the FBI was running a Keystone Cops clown lab for years?
The entire industry is around finding where those issues exist, using accurate data to track it, and solve whatever problems come up to avoid the large risk of getting sued by employees or communities nearby.
I did QA on all the data that came in from labs and matched it all the various input samples we sent off. Incredibly thorough testing procedures, redundancy, and tracking over time was the name of the game for my companies entire business. They've been successful for 30+ years doing that too.
Tinfoil on: maybe that's why they were pushing this CSI bullcrap for as long as they did.
One is mostly about getting a conviction - of anyone - so that you look like you're doing a good job. This is a real and strong pressure faced by politicians and law enforcement.
or- unless there's an opposing force, bad forensic science will drive out the good
This is the only thing keeping the cynicism at bay for me when I read stories like this. It's horrifying to think of how many people might be falsely imprisoned.
Having gone through the system, it's all lies. Let's start with plea agreements. You have to agree in your plea that you were not coerced or threatened into taking your plea, yet everyone know that the prosecutor threatens you with taking the plea or facing an extra 10-30 years as the 'trial tax' (google it) that get's applied if you dare exercise your constitutional right to trial. But the judge, prosecutor, everyone looks the other way and ignores that blatant threat made against you. The judge knows that the prosecutor placing that clause in the plea is being disingenuous, the prosecutor knows they are. If justice is served by a five year sentence in a plea, how is that same justice served and applied fairly when adding 15 years simply for going to trial? Either a crime warrants a 5 year sentence, or a 15 year sentence. But sentencing is based not on your crime, but on the prosecutor and judge being annoyed if you exercise your constitutional rights. There is a reason that plea agreements were considered unconstitutional up until the 60s when the police/judicial state started undermining constitutional rights.
Acceptability of forensic evidence such as lie detector tests is not based on science but on precedence. If a court has accepted it as science before, then it is extremely hard for you to challenge it, even when it was complete garbage like lie detector tests. The current language is 'you can't be convicted solely based on lie detector tests' after a lot of people paid a lot of experts and took a lot of 'trial tax' to try and get lie detectors removed completely.
I generally agree with you. The fact some of these citizens people were likely incorrectly executed, and others died in prison, based on bad science makes this depressing to read.
However, I would factor in intent and knowledge on the part of lab workers and experts when demanding penalties for their action.
If they intentionally lied to support a case, 100% they should have a sentence at least equal to and preferably greater than the person they are essentially framing. However, if they are just using equipment as trained, reading results as trained, and had no I'll intent? I don't think it makes the world better to throw them in jail.
I think this should be changed, so that false convictions are treated with the same level of seriousness as police officers shooting unarmed civilians on camera.
Patterns of prosecutorial misconduct should lead to prison time that is the sum of the false convictions, in the worst environment the falsely convicted parties ended up in. (So, probably not the country club minimal security white collar prison.)
Also, the people in charge of this should be untouchable by the currently elected politicians they would likely be investigating. Fixed-term appointments with mandatory recusal rules probably make sense.
This is not correct; they're supposed to e.g. dismiss charges if they learn they've charged the wrong guy.
The problem isn't that the system calls for them to convict innocent people. The problem is that they're evaluated by their conviction rate.
Police officers in USA are almost never convicted of murder in these or any other circumstances.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/20/us/police-convicted-murder-ra...
Would you be OK with a hospital having this level 'innocent mistake' rate? How about if 90% of a medicines studies had erroneous statements made by the same group of professionals?
Would you be OK with an amusement park having a 90% failure rate when they attest to the safety of their equipment?
Should not repeated failures that have a severe impact on people's lives be held to a higher standard than 'oops, my bad bro'? A doctor wouldn't get away with 90% erroneous statements, why do these professionals?
Start reading cases and judgements. I think you will find discomfort in how things really work.
Then why is there a difference between first degree murder and second degree murder? Murder warrants a particular sentence, and circumstances should not matter?
> But sentencing is based not on your crime
The court is taking into consideration your behavior and your reticence over your own actions. Taking the plea deal shows reticence as it immediately requires an admission of guilt.
Demanding a trial, particularly when you actually have committed the offense, in an effort to "get out" of the time you must serve or to merely publish your side of the story is not viewed favorably by the court. Why should it be?
You're tying up immense resources simply to parse the details of your crime in an effort to convince a judge that maybe you're actually not that bad of a guy. The court knows it is not a perfect arbiter of the truth, and that it's application of process inherently deprives, in some way, the rights of everyone involved. Every witness you call is subpoenaed to court under penalty if they don't comply. Victims are never actually made whole by the trial, and offenders run the risk of incriminating themselves further.
They're there because they're necessary, not because they are an ideal or preferred solution. Courts aim for settlements in civil trials, and they aim for pleas in criminal trials.
> were considered unconstitutional up until the 60s when the police/judicial state started undermining constitutional rights.
The means under which they were offered was unconstitutional, why should it be against the constitution for you to negotiate your own settlement in a criminal matter with the state? Is it really a better outcome that you must go to trial without any option?
> even when it was complete garbage like lie detector tests.
Lie detector tests actually _do_ measure physiological responses, though. The problem is that's not all they measure, and the results are too polluted by the reviewer to be useful. That a human beings heart rate increases when they intentionally try to deceive another is an actual fact.
So are they really "complete garbage?" Or are they just not as pure of a datapoint as we thought they were? Perhaps this is why some courts still allow them to be admitted when all parties agree to it's use.
Or it shows a preference for 5 years over the risk of 15 years out of pure fear or knowledge that the jury will be manipulated with pseudo-scientific "evidence".
Taking a plea deal can be totally separate from guilt or innocence.
> You're tying up immense resources simply to parse the details of your crime in an effort to convince a judge that maybe you're actually not that bad of a guy.
You seem to be ignoring that someone may actually be innocent in some cases. You're sounding like an ambitious prosecutor yourself, or you just have too much faith that the system would never bring the wrong person to court.
> Courts aim for settlements in civil trials, and they aim for pleas in criminal trials.
Which, over time, turn into a perverse incentive structure because court time gets increasingly valued over justice and so plea deals become threats rather than offers.
Fundamentally, when presenting prosecutorial evidence that's not what it appears, my reaction, if I ever need to defend myself against such things, world be to further tie up the courts time by presenting evidence against the evidence and / or demanding a thorough explanation of the implications of what is being described as evidence. This could add literal weeks to every single case that goes to trial. The method of evidence collection would be on trial because there's so much trust lost due to, basically, lies on the part of law enforcement and prosecution in their pursuit of conviction as metric for success and promotion.
first degree and second degree are two different charges, which obviously should have two different sentences. What I am talking about is that the sentence for the same crime goes from 20 years to 5 if you waive your rights. How can the punishment for the same crime vary by that much? Why is there so much written about the trial tax?
How is it voluntary and not coerced to threat someone with 15 more years if they don't sign a plea? If I threaten to lock you in my basement for 15 years if you don't sign over your car's pink slip, is that coercion? But when it's the FULL WEIGHT OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT threatening me while I am 100% under their control and authority, somehow that is NOT coercion?
Say you can confirm a sample is 100% a certain person. How do investigators have any idea how it got there? How do you know it’s from a criminal and not the guy that stocked the convenience store shelves?
I tried to look into this and maybe I was searching the wrong thing but found nothing.
They often can't be certain, and I'm sure somebody is in prison because they're DNA was in an inconvenient place, but it's a far superior form of evidence than the other methods mentioned.
Unless a crime is widely watched in person with supporting recordings and DNA evidence, it's basically impossible to be a 100% certain of what happened. That's why court only attempts to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
This is the same way we guarantee the integrity of elections.
Keeping a massive DNA database and using it to convict someone, anyone because a crime occurred near something they touched before would be fallacious and unjust. However, if we already had other reasons to suspect someone, and DNA gives us another, that's much more powerful.
The problem is that there are some attempts to make weaker test and try to confuse people so they think it's the real test. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_profiling#Partial_matches
Quoting the Wikipedia article:
> We can see no reason why partial profile DNA evidence should not be admissible provided that the jury are made aware of its inherent limitations and are given a sufficient explanation to enable them to evaluate it.
That sound good, but every time I read it again it looks more and more fishy.
I don't know how far forensic science has come since a decade ago when I learned some of it, but at that point they were running "feature matching" instead of full-fingerprint matching. In other words, they looked for aberrancies (e.g. "islands," "deltas," "bifurcations" etc. at specific spots), and then checked those against a finger-to-person database. Then a list of possible matches would be found, if they also contained some set amount of same features in the same places.
There are two main issues here.
First, while taking an optical scan can provide very high-resolution images of a fingerprint -- field data is never like that. Fingerprints that are collected usually are not uniform, and dependent on pressure applied by the finger(s) in question and the amount of oil left behind (which powder sticks to "reveal"). Because of this, you're never going to get a perfect fingerprint in the field. Some areas will be faint, misleadingly separated (and even have false artificial aberrancies not present on the original finger), or outright missing -- leading to less "features" to check against. Others will be completely "blotched" out by a high amount of oil, removing vital information.
Second, you will almost never get an exact match because of this -- you will be getting a list of possible matches. I can remember one notable case of a terrorist's prints being wrongly attributed to someone who could never have been at the scene, much less anywhere near the country -- but was still whisked away by (I believe?) Interpol. Forensic evidence is just a piece of numerous possible stories that can be spun up any which way. There's something to be said here about human biases, incentives, and so on -- but I think it's intuitive enough (and frankly, I don't want to write more).
There are two kinds of witness testimony - the most common is where a witness sees a stranger and testifies about it. Those have little credibility.
But there's another kind, where the witness actually knows the person, those are far more credible. Historically only this type was permitted, but over time things seem to have shifted to the first type.
Every new kind of forensics is treated like it's going to be the solution to solving crime, when what it really is, is yet another excuse not to put the time and effort into investigation, the one thing that actually solves crimes.
CCTV has the same problem, we think it will solve crimes, when it can actually do a lot, but we constantly see cases of crimes happening in public or on camera where the police haven't even taken the half hour it would take to ask local businesses for their footage. And when they even do _that_, then they don't rarely bother to follow up leads.
Policing is just an endless, endless stream of people with what are actually very important jobs who only go into it for exactly the wrong reasons.
There's a graphic about halfway down that shows supposed "evidence" of accelerants being used when in fact they're either common to all fires, caused by the rapid cooling from water used to extinguish the fire, or are simply random occurrences completely unrelated to the fire. Yet to this day they are taught to investigators as rock solid evidence of arson.
To be fair, any experiment investigating this could only show that they are evidence of arson. ;D
https://www.loevy.com/blog/the-fallout-continues-from-massac...
"Last month, the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General began notifying approximately 7,500 people that their drug convictions have been overturned."
That seems to contradict this part of the article:
> The Department has been working together with the Innocence Project and NACDL to address errors made in statements by FBI examiners regarding microscopic hair analysis in the context of testimony and laboratory reports. Such statements are no longer being made by the FBI, and the FBI is also now employing mitochondrial DNA hair analysis in addition to microscopic analysis
They're also going to do DNA analysis now, for free in many cases, instead of just looking at hair under a microscope to compare it.
Got it. Moving on.
Edit: I was being snarky but, on reflection, if they are falling back on hair analysis, it implies they have a piece of the guilty party's hair and the defendant's hair, but are not willing to present the results of a $1000 genotyping test.
A 99% probability of innocence is probably about right in that part of the criminal prosecution decision tree.
Evidence isn't there to _prove_ anything, else we wouldn't need to ask anyone to be a juror. That's why we use "preponderance of evidence" and "beyond reasonable doubt" as our metric.
It also assumes that all juries, once they see bite mark analysis, presume it's magic then simply decide they're going to convict at that moment and shut off their brains for the rest of the trial. Do people really believe this is something that happens?
> A 99% probability of innocence is probably about right in that part of the criminal prosecution decision tree.
I find it very difficult to believe there's a single piece of evidence in a trial that could convince anyone of this. The totality of the evidence is what must be considered.
A single test tells you about a single sample in isolation with respect to it's time and method of collection. It doesn't definitely prove anything about an event, and I'm astonished that you could see it that way; unless you're operating under the presumption that all District Attorneys are corrupt to the point of no longer caring about justice and truth.
There are certainly examples of corruption, but to presume it's the norm to the extent that a single piece of evidence presented in a particular fashion would cause you to turn _your_ back on justice and truth as a matter of rote course.
How is that an improvement?
What do you think the point of making all those TV procedurals was? Jurors have been explicitly trained to care about "scientific evidence" to the exclusion of all else. Look at the Chauvin trial. Dude committed murder captured by a half dozen cameras, but the trial spent about 80% of time agonizing over nigh-irrelevant scientific evidence, because that's what the jury cares about.
That sounds like a crazy conspiracy, but, from the headline 90% of the time, the test is misadministered. That suggests that, indeed, all DA's that use this tactic are "corrupt to the point of no longer caring about justice and truth".
Do you have an alternate explanation for a 90% error rate?
I want to know more about its false negative rate (how many got away with it scot-free).