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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

#511

Post by owl57 »

edbob wrote: post #498
owl57 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Not sure how is it relevant. I don't expect small town judges and cops to be particularly poor, or particularly stupid for that matter. I do expect them to be uneducated and uncaring.

Is hatefulness an end in itself for you?

Maybe. Thanks, I could probably use some self-reflection.

(The anti-stress effect of covid vaccination seems to be much more immediate than I expected. This is the second time today I find myself saying things highly unusual for people on the Internet in general and my yesterday's self in particular, and the first time was literally a couple of minutes after the procedure.)

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

#512

Post by XorNot »

jfengel wrote: post #505
XorNot wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prosecutor doesn't see it that way. They see it as just "knowing" the guy is "definitely guilty". It's just like, a feeling you know? And a win will look great when they go for re-election (why is that even a thing?). Presuming rational actors in this case is missing the general problem with the system: people very easily convince themselves they know the truth despite how the validity of the evidence changes. Wh…

And a win will look great when they go for re-election (why is that even a thing?). You would prefer that they not be elected? That they would be appointed by some politician, with the public having no recourse? The fact is that the public like prosecutors who convict people. That's deeply unfair. But it's also deeply democratic.

You already elect politicians. If that system is producing people you don't trust to manage the affairs of state, why would electing prosecutors lead to different results?

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

#513

Post by jfengel »

XorNot wrote: post #512
jfengel wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a win will look great when they go for re-election (why is that even a thing?). You would prefer that they not be elected? That they would be appointed by some politician, with the public having no recourse? The fact is that the public like prosecutors who convict people. That's deeply unfair. But it's also deeply democratic.

You already elect politicians. If that system is producing people you don't trust to manage the affairs of state, why would electing prosecutors lead to different results?

Hard to say, really. It's one of those compromises, quis custodiet and all that.

I very much agree with you: a government has a monopoly on violence and ultimately we all end up trusting it. Too many checks and balances lead to gridlock. Too few lead to oppression. Much of it ends up being decided on inertia. We do it both ways in different jurisdictions, with successes and failures in both.

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

#514

Post by ashtonbaker »

ineedasername wrote: post #327
vmception wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People sometimes ask me what my “number” is, like how much net worth or “money” I want, what would I do with it I say “I want to be able to afford appeals court where my rights matter” Infinite appeals court! Most people plea out, cant make bail, dont have counsel buddy buddy with the judge enough to get you bail, and lose the ability to keep good counsel for more and more motions and appeals I want that, there is al…

Or just make the entire system based on a sort of "public defender" model. As it stands, a person accused of a crime and then found innocent has still been punished without even being found guilty due to enormous legal bills. It is a highly asymmetric power structure for anyone who isn't wealth: the prosecutors have massively more resources than the average person to call upon. Alternatively, when prosecuting the wea…

I've occasionally mused that funding for a legal case should go into a pool, which is divided equally between both sides. That way, any money thrown at a case is, at least in theory, aligned with the incentive of "getting at the truth" rather than overwhelming someone with a valid case, but lesser resources. I don't mind someone raising the profile of a case by adding funding, especially if the stakes are high for one party, but it shouldn't be at the detriment of justice.

It's kind of a half-baked idea, and I'm sure it's not totally watertight but the existing problems you've mentioned really bother me.

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

#515

Post by edbob »

owl57 wrote: post #511
edbob wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is hatefulness an end in itself for you?

Maybe. Thanks, I could probably use some self-reflection. (The anti-stress effect of covid vaccination seems to be much more immediate than I expected. This is the second time today I find myself saying things highly unusual for people on the Internet in general and my yesterday's self in particular, and the first time was literally a couple of minutes after the procedure.)

I'm glad that you're feeling better :)

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

#516

Post by ChrisLomont »

carlmr wrote: post #455
generalizations wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like mathematical clarity is what Matlab is good at, at least compared to e.g. python and C.

Most industry Matlab I've seen is similar to numpy code, heavily vectorized to make it work fast, somewhat inscrutable for everything that's not linear algebra, and a lot of assumptions about perfect floating point precision. Couple that with a unit-testing unfriendly culture and you have a code disaster. Especially on 170k lines.

Most industry C/C++/Java/Python/XXX code I have seen in production is a numerical disaster. I've been working in all these codebases for decades.

There's nothing you just wrote that is any better in any other language, except that Matlab provides a huge suite of state of the art numeric routines that almost no everyday developer could come close to making as solid.

Writing a nicely illustrated manual on brain surgery with nice fonts and proper grammar based on 11th century medicine is of little use for doing actual brain surgery.

Writing clean code based on bad numerics is also of little use for producing good results. Especially if you then have to defend that codebase in court.

Bad developers will make bad decisions in any language. At least using solid numerics underlying the code provides a huge benefit to building the entire codebase instead of on crap numerics. Every nice clean codebase I have been part of has still had crap numerics. Good numerics is nearly completely orthogonal to clean code, and it's a highly technical skill set that almost no developer has even an inkling of how to do well, no matter how pretty their formatting and documentation. I have never in 30+ years of working on highly technical teams worked with someone who really gets the nuances and details of how to do solid numerical code. I routinely get codebases and developers that do the absolute worst things numerically. I have only really good people in conferences on such topics, or online from similar filtering. These people are extremely rare in software development, to the point I don't think I've ever met on on an actual project (and the numerics when needed have always fallen to me, and I've often been selected for technical projects because such people are terribly hard to find when needed).

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

#517

Post by R0b0t1 »

AS37 wrote: post #166
R0b0t1 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an extremely flawed argument. If you can't explain it to a layman then you don't understand it. If you can't tell whether it's a gap or a fracture -- you can't get a conviction. "It just looks like it" is not a valid reason.

Interestingly there's an area of psychology called Naturalistic Decision Making which studies how experts make decisions that they can't explain. (Example: a firefighter may be able to pinpoint where a fire is before they enter a house and see it.)

I know, but that is reason for suspicion, not evidence for a conviction.

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

#518

Post by Nightshaxx »

slickQ wrote: post #129
Nightshaxx wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A murderer who kills 1% of the people he meets has certainly committed a crime. A person who has a 99% chance of being a murderer has not certainly committed a crime. That is depending on your threshold of certainty. 1% is not that high considering that, according to the OJJDP, 5 milion people were arrested for serious charges in 2019 so with a 1% false positive rate that would be 100,000 people falsely imprisoned ev…

The doctor did not have the _potential_ to fake evidence. He _did_ fake evidence.

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

#519

Post by ineedasername »

bargl wrote: post #357
meowface wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These cases also often come up with drug and alcohol detection tests, and as John Oliver points out in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f2iawp0y5Y , software used to select jurors. All of these companies claim that their source code is valuable intellectual property and that disclosing it can hurt their business. Even if this were true, when you're providing something that can be a significant factor in someone being…

Without jumping on the conspiracy bandwagon, I'd also like to see this applied to voting software. I know it's a hot topic, and I'm honestly not trying to get political. Software that is critical to our fundamental human rights, and is being used by our government should be open source, or at least audited by a group of people who sign Non-competes/NDA and can't go work for competitors, or with some other mechanism t…

I completely agree, but you can have an auditable voting record in an election without relying on software integrity. That's not really the case, from the defendant's point of view, in a trial that relies on probabilities implemented in the software. In the case of voting, it is software-assisted. In a case like this article, it is software driven.

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

#520

Post by afthonos »

nickodell wrote: post #507
afthonos wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read up on the rates of plea bargaining, as well as the methods prosecutors use to push defendants to do so, which include: - Not revealing all information they are required to. - Parallel construction (see above) - Overcharging, with the goal of making the plea more palatable than the cost/risk of defending multiple absurd charges. - Lying to you while getting to throw you in jail if you lie to them. As a…

Believe it or not, I was already aware of all of those things, having followed a number of criminal defense blogs. If you read the article and appellate decision which is linked, it says what I just said: >On Wednesday, the appellate court sided with the defense [PDF] and sent the case back to a lower court directing the judge to compel Cybergenetics to make the TrueAllele code available to the defense team.

Apologies, I thought you were stating general facts about DNA evidence in general, not about this specific case.
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