Kern County is a leader of California counties having inmates on death row. A man would have been executed under the new California statutes allowing “swifter justice.” Of course, the CA DA Association spent millions, along with sanctimonious “victim rights prosecutors,” saying they have “fixed” the appellate process which was “broken.” Assholes.
One of the most sanctimonious : Michael Ramos in San Bernardino.
Police obtaining your DNA without a warrant is one issue in this case. That’s allowed if you go out in public or don’t incinerate your trash. Once in the dumpster, there is no “expectation” of privacy. The other issue is law enforcement’s easy access to commercial ancestry DNA registries to round up relevant DNA profiles from either yourself or your relatives. “All OK for the Greater Good,” I suppose.
51 minute CNN video from two days ago on the case outcomes.
Start this video at 42:00. The first part is PR for the investigators in the “Justice Team” assembled to look for this guy.
Local police chief thinks using a glove box for driving with Grandpa is highly unusual.
Nothing better explains how weak this self-proclaiming Colorado Springs-based forensic org (The American Academy of Forensic Sciences) has become than this continuing look at the baseless claims of its bitemark membership. Read The Intercept interview where the authors of “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentists” tell a horrid tale of lawyers and judges ignorant of scientific training and then convicting the innocent. Its not just happening in Mississippi and Louisiana. Full story.
Background: The bitemarkers got a five year renewal of their “certification” license from the AAFS two months ago. The Bitemarkers and the AAFS.
Statistical Analysis of Forensic Odontologist Involvement In
Cases of Wrongful Bite Mark Convictions and Indictments
The misapplication of forensic sciences is a leading contributing factor to
wrongful conviction,29 and of the unvalidated techniques that have contributed to
wrongful convictions and indictments later overturned through DNA testing, bite mark
comparison poses an acute threat to the reliability and fairness of the criminal justice
system. Of the 29 known wrongful convictions and indictments secured through the use
of bite mark comparison evidence, the forensic dentists who performed the comparisons
are known in all but two cases.
Among those 27 cases with available data, a total of 21
dentists offered bite mark comparison opinions or testimony. Nearly 86%, or 18, of
those dentists were Diplomates of the American Board of Forensic Odontology at the
time of their relevant casework.
The raw data is presented below in Chart 1;
ABFO Diplomates are highlighted in yellow. A brief statistical summary is offered in Chart 2.
The scales of justice are wobbling back and forth on this one.
Copyright and Intellectual Property interests seem to be winning and allowing District Attorneys to cloak their experts’ computer programs.
One judge in San Diego, CA is running against that tide.
More on STRmix and it’s protectors invoking “special rights” in arguing against transparency of science and copyrighted material’s use in criminal courts.
Forensic experts and practitioners clearly endanger themselves when bringing to light contrarian evidence to criminal courts that reveal forensic mistakes and failures to long-court-accepted testimony.
This recent article provides a memorial and acclamation to a physician who fought to his last breath to introduce significant doubts regarding the origins and blind acceptance of Shaken Baby Syndrome diagnoses used to convict the innocent. He paid a price.
The players in these scenarios invariably involve:
Image credits: Catch more of investigations into corruption and misdeeds within the legal and forensic arenas in “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist.” The co-authors are R. Balko and T. Carringtion and John Grisham. The Economist has some said some great things about it.
A woman held at an immigration detention center in Washington state said she was raped by a medical worker and a private facility contractor as she sought help in the center’s medical unit. Another woman said officers cuffed and maced her following an argument with a fellow detainee at an immigration detention center in Florida. Then, as she lay on the ground, an officer sat on her “like a person would sit on a horse,” his “erect penis on her butt.” Officers then filmed her as she showered to wash off the mace, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
ELSEWHERE IN FLORIDA, a man said a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent threatened him with deportation after he refused to engage in oral sex — and that the officer told him he would be deported to Haiti, even though the man is from the Bahamas. In Texas, a Border Patrol agent driving detainees between detention centers pulled over and let a woman get out after she performed oral sex on him, according to another complaint.
Many other women and men held in immigration detention across the country reported routine searches that turned into groping and fondling. Many said they were propositioned, subjected to suggestive stares and sexual innuendo, and threatened with retaliation if they spoke up. Many said officers shrugged when they reported abuse by fellow detainees.
These allegations are just a sample of hundreds of complaints of sexual and physical abuse in immigration detention obtained by The Intercept in response to a public records request with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, which is tasked with independently reviewing the department’s various agencies, including ICE and Border Patrol.
The reports obtained by The Intercept include 1,224 complaints filed between 2010 and September 2017, primarily about incidents that took place in ICE custody. But in earlier responses, officials with the DHS Office of Inspector General indicated that the office received some 33,000 complaints between 2010 and 2016 alleging a wide range of abuses in immigration detention. The OIG provided records documenting investigations for just 2 percent of the complaints it shared with The Intercept.
https://theintercept.com/2018/04/11/immigration-detention-sexual-abuse-ice-dhs/
A group of scientists, including Sunita Sah, a physician and assistant professor of management and organizations, is calling for a national effort to bolster the scientific rigor in forensic science. They say many forensic science methods have never been scientifically validated, which is jeopardizing the integrity of the judicial system.
The issue is particularly important given the April 2017 decision by the Department of Justice (DOJ), under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, to shut down the National Commission on Forensic Science (NCFS). The commission advised the federal government on how to enhance the practice and improve the reliability of forensic science.
Sah and five other scientists, who served on the NFCS, wrote an editorial, “A Call for More Science in Forensic Science,” which will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The piece appeals to the broader scientific community to advocate for improvements in forensic science.
“The stakes don’t get much higher,” said Sah, who researches cognitive bias and decision-making at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management. “We are talking about decisions that affect the lives of many people, both victims and the accused. For the integrity of the criminal justice system, this is something that we need to take seriously.”
The NCFS was created on the recommendation of the National Research Council. In 2009, the council produced a report that evaluated the state of forensic science and found many techniques, including analysis of bite marks, fingerprints, tread impressions and bloodstains, lacking in scientific value.
Yet many of these methods are still accepted as evidence because courts have accepted them in the past. “Many of the studies that purportedly support forensic methods do not meet the criteria of mainstream science,” Sah said. “There have been plenty of critiques regarding bite mark analysis, it has been scientifically discredited and yet it’s still introduced in the courts because of historical precedent.”
Moreover, almost all publicly funded laboratories are associated with law enforcement – a conflict of interest that leads to concerns about objectivity and bias, Sah and her authors said.
In response to the National Research Council’s report, the DOJ created the NCFS in 2013 to address these issues, administered by the DOJ and National Institutes of Standards and Technology. During the four years the NCFS was in operation, it brought together independent academic scientists – from psychology, medicine, biology, chemistry and physics. It recommended all forensic techniques be independently validated before being used in criminal investigations. And it found the phrase “reasonable scientific certainty” (often used in court testimony) basically meaningless and recommended it be removed from the judicial process.
The DOJ has now opened its own forensic sciences office and named a prosecutor to lead it – a scenario that is exactly the opposite of what the National Research Council recommended.
Sah and her colleagues call the situation “highly problematic.” Putting a prosecutor in charge of the organization perpetuates a conflict of interest and reinforces the prosecutorial perspective, which already dominates the field, they said. And a prosecutor may not want to “embrace scientific advances that could risk undermining past convictions and current prosecutions,” the authors write.
The National Academy of Sciences, the authors say, can and must advocate for independent forensic science research and financial support, and for empirical testing in the field.
“If we don’t include independent scientists in the discussion, then it is a disservice to forensic science and to the integrity of the criminal justice system,” Sah concluded.
FORENSICS and LAW in FOCUS @ CSIDDS | News and Trends 