Live data from Hacker News

A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

theregister.com

31–40 of 211 posts

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#31
post #9

Coming next year: "A man spent a year in jail on child pornography charge that hinged on disputed Apple CSAM evidence".

For that to happen: they'd have to be matched 30 times, the Apple employees would have to mistakenly manually confirm the match 30 times, and the defence would fail to request to see the underlying images that matched the hashes during discovery.

It seems... far fetched.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#32
post #16
post #12

“It's said that in May last year, Williams was driving through Chicago one night hoping to buy some cigarettes.” Ah yes, I remember hearing that a lot growing up. Editors, do your job!

What do you mean?

“It’s said” — by whom?

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#33
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean?

I think OP meant that "driving through Chicago" was pretty large/vague area for someone just trying to buy cigarettes. It's like saying I was driving through the United States to go to my local corner store. I wouldn't have thought about the poor writing if OP didn't mention it, but it is still a bit pedantic in my opinion.

More likely "it's said" - a claim that some unspecified people said something, expressed using a phrase people often interpret to mean "it is generally believed that..." or "there is a saying that goes...". GP sarcastically said sure "it's said" that x occurred, I heard it all the time as I was growing up.

It's not good journalism. If someone said something, say who said it. If it's an anonymous source say so. "It's said..." in an article like this means "I vaguely think this has been said somewhere but I can't be bothered to check or quote my sources".

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#34
post #10

Well that's still a failure on both the software programmed by humans causing a false positive and then doubled down by a wrong human review, based on a false alert. All involved stakeholders have failed.

How is this a failure by software? The software categorized the sound as a fire work.

Yeah, looks like it's the actual software that's undermined the case against him. A loud bang which coincides - perhaps pretty loosely - with some footage, some supposed audio expert contractor's human employee - possibly knowing other details of the case - thinks it's consistent with a gunshot but the case collapses when records reveal the AI program they ran originally classified the loud bang as a distant firework.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow i have never heard of that. Curious to see a link/article on the issue, if you can provide.

This is a decent summary of court cases related to the dogs: https://www.nlrg.com/criminal-law-legal-research/bid/84670/C... I think this part is pretty key, and has always been a big open question in my mind: "The court further recognized a potential problem in assessing reliability related to handler cuing, as even well-trained dogs could respond to subconscious cues from their handlers. For this reason, the court…

Some departments deploy dogs that alert on all vehicles when they want an excuse to search. In at least one department, this was referred to as “probable cause on four legs”.

If judges continue to allow this quality of evidence, the police will continue to abuse the legal environment that creates.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#36
post #28
post #9

Coming next year: "A man spent a year in jail on child pornography charge that hinged on disputed Apple CSAM evidence".

I know you're being coy to slam on Apple, but this already happens in the uS __without__ Apple's (imo misguided) strategy and it happens frequently. Prosecution over thumbnails, file hash matches with tenuous connections to individuals, Crime-Tech has given a new position for law enforcement to craft fanciful narratives to support prosecutions of just about anyone. I'm not specifically citing or inferring there have…

I'd be interested in reading about some of these real cases if you have any links handy.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#37

The article says that employees of the AI company (ShotSpotter) manually reviewed and classified the sounds as gunshots: > records showed that ShotSpotter actually initially picked up what sounded like a firework a mile away, and this was later reclassified by ShotSpotter staff to be a gunshot at the intersection where and when Williams was seen on camera. So the AI didn’t even make the call. The staff did, manually.…

It's scary that prosecutors thought that the ShotSpotter evidence is suitable for a court. It's amazing technology that can help police get to a crime scene quickly but is far too easy to spoof or get the wrong answer due to reflections and other sounds etc. Hopefully cases like this will eventually stop the system being used in court.

The only people saying ShotSpotter is amazing technology are ShotSpotter's PR team.

By all other accounts, it doesn't work at all and is losing contracts.

> "...a study of Chicago police data found that over a nearly 22-month period ending in mid-April, almost 90% of ShotSpotter alerts didn’t result in officers reporting evidence of shots fired or of any gun crime."[1]

> "In four years, police have made two arrests while responding to a ShotSpotter activation. Lt. Shawn Takeuchi, an SDPD spokesman, could only confirm that one of those arrests was directly related to the activation, but declined to give more information on both."[2]

1. https://apnews.com/article/chicago-police-crime-shootings-be...

2. https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/public-safety/shotspo...

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#38
This year in jail was awaiting the “speedy trial” that is supposed to be guaranteed by the US Constitution. I think that in itself is as much of an issue as the quality of the evidence. How can the government justify taking year away from the life of a man who has not been convicted of anything?

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#39

The article says that employees of the AI company (ShotSpotter) manually reviewed and classified the sounds as gunshots: > records showed that ShotSpotter actually initially picked up what sounded like a firework a mile away, and this was later reclassified by ShotSpotter staff to be a gunshot at the intersection where and when Williams was seen on camera. So the AI didn’t even make the call. The staff did, manually.…

> Crucially, Williams' lawyers – public defenders Lisa Boughton and Brendan Max – said records showed that ShotSpotter actually initially picked up what sounded like a firework a mile away, and this was later reclassified by ShotSpotter staff to be a gunshot at the intersection where and when Williams was seen on camera. ShotSpotter strongly insisted it had not improperly altered any data to favor the police's case,…

Wow, we need a civil rights lawyer to represent Williams in a wrongful imprisonment suit against the city, if not also a civil suit against ShotSpotter (or maybe even a criminal complaint for knowingly providing false testimony?). People shouldn’t be able to just dust their hands of this.

Re: A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

#40

The article says that employees of the AI company (ShotSpotter) manually reviewed and classified the sounds as gunshots: > records showed that ShotSpotter actually initially picked up what sounded like a firework a mile away, and this was later reclassified by ShotSpotter staff to be a gunshot at the intersection where and when Williams was seen on camera. So the AI didn’t even make the call. The staff did, manually.…

It's scary that prosecutors thought that the ShotSpotter evidence is suitable for a court. It's amazing technology that can help police get to a crime scene quickly but is far too easy to spoof or get the wrong answer due to reflections and other sounds etc. Hopefully cases like this will eventually stop the system being used in court.

>Hopefully cases like this will eventually stop the system being used in court.

I don't see any incentive here. The only consequence suffered by the prosecution was having to drop that evidence. That's it. Maybe there's a civil case later, but that will be separated by a large time gap, etc.

Post reply on HN