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Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

theregister.com

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Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#61

Post by londons_explore »

mschuster91 wrote: post #44
pc86 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that as if these were mistakes or unfortunate culminations of circumstance. The man committed fraud and sent innocent, grieving parents to prison by proxy. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that to be 0.00% and punish those harshly who exceed that metric.

Additionally it could be made a requirement that, like in professional sports, two or three blood drafts are taken - one sample is analyzed and one is either kept until the case is closed or analyzed at a different lab if the evidence is contested.

This method doesn't protect against evidence tampering. Someone can just take a drop of that blood and smear it on the victims clothes. Now it doesn't matter how many labs analyze it, it's always going to come back a match...

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#62

Post by Nightshaxx »

badRNG wrote: post #40
pc86 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that as if these were mistakes or unfortunate culminations of circumstance. The man committed fraud and sent innocent, grieving parents to prison by proxy. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that to be 0.00% and punish those harshly who exceed that metric.

If I'm a juror, and the evidence presented happens to have a false positive rate of 1%, that certainly meets my understanding of "a reasonable doubt."

A murderer kills less than 1% of all the people they meet. Does that mean we should just accept their behavior?

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#66

Post by watwut »

Scandiravian wrote: post #15
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and surprisingly all of the code is of equal importance so you really need to review each line sequentially! Instead of finding stuff that you think is most likely to relate to what you're trying to figure out and debug from there. Wow I would like to see this marvel of engineering myself!

Kind of makes me wonder: if the argument is that the code is too complex to review and understand, does that mean the company is not doing code reviews themselves?

You can do code review on every single commit while not being able to make overall analysis of the massive codebase.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#67

Post by MaxBarraclough »

tantalor wrote: post #29
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forensic labs and companies are expert witnesses with black box processes and the incentive to protect the authority of their profession. I imagine they're also incentivised to favour a result indicating guilt.

Why? The risk to their reputation & livelihood for a false positive should temper that.

The hands-off reputation-based approach isn't enough to regulate food and drugs, or aviation. I don't see why for-profit forensics companies should be trusted implicitly.

Also related: we know that funding bias [0] is a real problem in science, despite that scientists' reputations should (ideally) motivate them to resist such biases.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_bias

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#68

Post by watwut »

gambiting wrote: post #18
michaelmior wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the code was developed in less than 8.5 years, it seems like the answer must be yes based on their previous claims.

Well I mean if something requires 8 man years of work you can do it in a year with 8 people. Not always, but usually.

I would find it extremely unlikely to work that way.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#69

Post by londons_explore »

hirundo wrote: post #55

If an accused person has the right to see the source code that produced evidence against them, is it a violation of their rights for the source code to be obfuscated, or even just so spaghettified that not even an expert can understand it? I kinda think that should be a violation. But deciding whether a particular piece of code is so bad is so subjective that I'm not sure on how you'd make a legal standard out of it.…

You don't need a legal standard. You just need to put doubt into the minds of a jury. You can get an expert to stand up and say "I'm an expert in computers, and I couldn't understand how this DNA test works. I think it's likely there are mistakes in it that neither I nor the people that made it have discovered".

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#70

Post by MaxBarraclough »

refurb wrote: post #54
andi999 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prosecution might call in a different expert in the next trial if the current one is not 'good'.

Then they get hired by the defense.

The defence can rarely afford their services.
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