This one was done during a festival in the UK. “It was only a test, which was successful” seems a bit over the top. I can’t wait to see how the Rapid-DNA coming to your local cop shop does in this police culture of denying false positives.
http://news.sky.com/story/police-facial-recognition-trial-led-to-erroneous-arrest-11013418
This is rather cringe-worthy for a number of reasons. Foremost is the continued bs that polys are reliable.
“[Now] we have a commitment from CBP brass that adjudicators will immediately remove “unsuitable” job applicants from the hiring process when the candidate admits wrongdoing rather than continue spending money and resources on keeping them in the pool.”
A time line on the growing trends for future increase of innocents being convicted. Police forensics clearly has a hand in this. Racial targeting is another.
Although Gross says there’s no way to know an exact number, “at least tens of thousands of people who are in prison are likely to be innocent,” he said. If just 1 percent of the prison population were exonerated that would be upward of 20,000 people. For context, a study published in 2014 made “a conservative estimate” that 4.1 percent of those sentenced to death are innocent.
The New York Times and ProPublica presents:
Once again we look at the tenuous reliability of forensic expertise in US criminal courts. This time it is New York’s famous crime lab.
“The day of reckoning is going to come,” Scheck told his fellow commissioners, some of whom rolled their eyes, a video of the meeting showed. “Someday people are going to review this,” he continued. “It’s an Ebola. It is a cancer here that could be spreading. We are all on notice.”
Backstory
“As its reputation spread, the lab processed DNA evidence supplied not only by the New York police, but also by about 50 jurisdictions as far away as Bozeman, Montana, and Floresville, Texas, which paid the lab $1,100 per sample.”
“A coalition of defense lawyers is asking the New York State inspector general’s office — the designated watchdog for the state’s crime labs — to launch an inquiry into the use of the disputed analysis methods in thousands of criminal cases.”
Here is the kicker.
“The medical examiner’s office “has engaged in negligent conduct that undermines the integrity of its forensic DNA testing and analysis,” the Legal Aid Society and the Federal Defenders of New York wrote the inspector general on Friday.”
Sounds to me as similar to rumblings seen with the FBI lab’s scorched history of using unwarranted forensic methods and prosecutors in all 50 state’s still using biased and incompetently trained bitemark “scientists.”
The veracity of police doing their own forensic testing takes another hit. We should note the current overwhelmingly optimistic popularity of cops using “magic boxes” to do their own DNA testing. Sounds like more of these dangers will continue into the future of “tough on crime” advocates.
Back in the 90’s I got into it with the American College of Forensic Examiners Inc regarding its ‘diplomate mill’ of certifying dentists as being forensics qualified. Past AAFS President Mary Fran Ernst led the battle to track and counter-act the meandering path of this group’s attempt to self-certify itself as acceptable expertise in US courts.
From THE WATCH
“Finding the Way Forward for Forensic Science in the US” from Forensic Science International.
For some this article may seem esoteric, but its worth a try, especially if you are a non-science trained forensic tech, prosecutor or judge.
“This paper is written in response to a recent report on forensic science of the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) [1]. There have already been several responses to the report from the forensic community [2–7] which have resulted in an addendum to the report [8]. Our main concern is that the report (and its addendum) fails to recognise the advances in the logic of forensic inference that have taken place over the last 50 years or so. This is a serious omission which has led PCAST to a narrowly-focussed and unhelpful view of the future of forensic science.” (abstract available for free).
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379073817302256?sf110048770=1
Lets see what the District Attorney’s Association (@NDAAJustice) lobby in Michigan does to obstruct this process. It’s leadership is patently deaf to wrongful convictions by touting their accuracy rate primarily based on pleas deal before trial. Read about some of these prosecutors here. In California, the process of compensation is illogically under control of these same prosecutors.
This all happens after the inmate goes through years of incarceration. Read about Clarence Harrison.
The above chart shows, but leaves out the criminal litigation that produces the exoneration, the process in California which could ultimately “award” $100 per day. That’s certainly nothing more than chump minimum wage. Hence, civil litigation is largely fought in federal courts under various 1983 civil rights theories. This process creates it’s own burdens for the exonerated.
From Michigan.
“When the wrongfully convicted, those convicted but later found innocent of a crime, appeared before the Michigan Court of Claims in downtown Detroit on August 16th, it was a historic day for our state. They were the first of Michigan’s eligible exonerees to appeal for financial assistance under a new state law. Senate Bill 291, creating the Wrongful Imprisonment Compensation Fund, passed the State House and Senate just before last Christmas. It was signed into law on December 21, 2016. It took more than a dozen years, and plenty of hard work and perseverance, to transform this goal into a reality.”
Another ho-hum look at media shows using forensic science as characters using their mythology of “how it’s done.” I’ve never seen an equal amount of attention paid to what it takes to exonerate people from flawed convictions by prosecutors, exaggerated forensics, and erroneous or incentivised witnesses. Considering it usually takes a decade or more after a conviction, the exoneration time-line certainly doesn’t “fit” into a 38 minute per week TV show.
The horrific career of the notorious ex Mississippi prosecutors’ go-to non forensic pathologist will never end. This hearing recently occurred in MS and has death row inmate Jeff Havard (pictured above) hearing of numerous examples of prosecutorial misconduct, lazy justice, and junk science presented by the State during his original trial. This is no different than Hayne and bitemarker Michael West being protecte by Mississippi prosecutors in Eddie Lee Howards’ fight for freedom.
“After Judge Johnson finished addressing the court, the defense called Dr. Steven Hayne to the stand. Hayne poses many problems for the state of Mississippi. Hayne has a shady past that involves thousands of autopsies, and countless legal cases. Hayne was presented by prosecutors as a primary expert in criminal trials for a period of decades in Mississippi. Investigative journalist Radley Balko has been reporting on Hayne’s questionable conduct for years.”
“Hayne attempted to save face by saying that he still believes the death was the result of a homicide, but he offered not valid theory to support that belief. Hayne’s demeanor in court was a bit questionable. During breaks, he appeared to wander about, willing to chat with anyone who would provide an ear. At one point, he sat down next to Havard’s stepfather, engaging him with stick figure drawings he had sketched on a pad in an apparent attempt to form new theories.”
FORENSICS and LAW in FOCUS @ CSIDDS | News and Trends 