Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 211 posts

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

#131

Post by leephillips »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #128
leephillips wrote: post #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?

It's typical for a defendant to waive their right to a speedy trial. If you don't waive it typically you get the book thrown at you and in the little time you have to prepare, something sticks. I agree this should be changed but there is not much political will behind it, as prosecutors view it as a necessity to try everyone fairly. The real solution is to not bring so many pointless cases to trial. Knowing that, I t…

Huh, thanks for pointing that out. I had no idea that waiving the right to a speedy trial was even a thing. If you do not so waive, what is the standard for a trial date that is considered constitutionally speedy at the moment?

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

#132

Post by ClumsyPilot »

nend wrote: post #10
yawaworht1978 wrote: post #5

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.

'The system' is software + people who run it. Their failures are combined. As an external person i dont care which part of the company fucked up, they shoupd carry responsibility

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

#133

Post by jdjd6 »

d4mi3n wrote: post #109
jdjd6 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really boggles my mind how desperate people are to try and include and blame the police for everything. >sales people ready to make a call any way their customer (police) wants it made. You really believe people signed up for a dangerous amd thankless job with high liability and low pay so they can feverishly conspire to have this guy arrested? Edit: This place is becoming reddit. Someone posting links which dont…

I think you're conflating issues with the institution of policing within the United States with the behavior of individual police officers. Without getting into the politics or philosophy of the comportment or purpose of a police force, there are some things in situations like this that are fact: 1. Police officers (and more importantly, prosecutors) are incentivized to make arrests and have those arrests stick. 2. I…

1. What are those incentives you mention?

2. That applies to everyone, not just police.

3. This is a fallacy due to media portrayal. If you are late to your job what happens? Probably nothing or you get asked not to do it again. The same mistakes you make, police officer will get investigated by internal affairs and punished over.

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

#134

Post by phsau »

aeturnum wrote: post #101
jdjd6 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really boggles my mind how desperate people are to try and include and blame the police for everything. >sales people ready to make a call any way their customer (police) wants it made. You really believe people signed up for a dangerous amd thankless job with high liability and low pay so they can feverishly conspire to have this guy arrested? Edit: This place is becoming reddit. Someone posting links which dont…

Just fyi - Police are generally quite well paid for the area they live in. For example, in Alameda (the county I live in) it's common for police to make over $450,000 a year[1]. Also, while police to have a more-dangerous-than-average job[2] (and face unique risks - they are probably the most likely profession to die of a gunshot on the job), there are much more dangerous jobs[3]. So if you have been excusing police…

Where in source [1] does it show that it's common for police to make over $450k a year?

The 'Avg Total pay & benefits' sorted by title has Chief Information Officer/Registrar of Voters as the entry into that level of remuneration. Police specific above that you only have the Sherrif, which is an elected official.

Police pay for the vast majority of roles is significantly below $450k.

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

#135

Post by jdjd6 »

aeturnum wrote: post #101
jdjd6 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really boggles my mind how desperate people are to try and include and blame the police for everything. >sales people ready to make a call any way their customer (police) wants it made. You really believe people signed up for a dangerous amd thankless job with high liability and low pay so they can feverishly conspire to have this guy arrested? Edit: This place is becoming reddit. Someone posting links which dont…

Just fyi - Police are generally quite well paid for the area they live in. For example, in Alameda (the county I live in) it's common for police to make over $450,000 a year[1]. Also, while police to have a more-dangerous-than-average job[2] (and face unique risks - they are probably the most likely profession to die of a gunshot on the job), there are much more dangerous jobs[3]. So if you have been excusing police…

I looked at your link and I dont see any police making over 450K a year. In fact, I dont see any making over 100k a year except supervisors and elected officials.

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

#136

Post by giantg2 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #106
giantg2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's face it - most judges are, at least subconsciously, on the same side as the police and prosecutors even though that's not how the system should work.

I don’t know about that. Judges have front row seats to the 10,000 ways that cops, prosecutors and defense attorneys screw up every day. If anything, I think the expense of defense and the poor quality of public defenders probably accounts for bias.

Magistrates aren't even required to pass the bar. I had one think that I was calling him prejudiced when asking to dismiss with prejudice (and many other examples with other magistrates, but this one is somewhat funny). I had a judge say that you can't use statements made at a prior trial to discredit the same witness at the current trial if their testimony conflicts. He also denied said that a trial de novo is a "complete do-over" yet denied a petition to dismiss because there's no record of the issues being raised before the end of the trial. So is it a complete do-over? The whole reason they do de novo trials for appeals from the magistrate is because the magistrate doesn't have a court reporter. Not to mention one of the complaints was that the magistrate wouldn't even hear the petition, responding with "That's not gonna happen". Makes sense since he was a retired police cheif. The judge also called me a sovereign citizen when I asked to speak, even though I met the definition of a litigant under the state constitution. There were some minor things too. The main point is, he knew rights had been violated in an irrevocable way as part of that case but decided that it didn't matter.

My impression is that if they do recognize it, they don't care. I also think many dont recognize it. After all, are they going to side with a layman citizen or the police and prosecutor? Even with a defense attorney, it often comes down to the police officer's word vs the accused. Who are they going to believe?

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

#137

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

leephillips wrote: post #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?

A lot of times, people have to waive their right to a speedy trial. Apparently, in some districts they don't like it when the accused doesn't waive their right, so much that the defense attorney will get assaulted by the judge.

https://youtu.be/jAv1QUkHFSY?t=397

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

#138

Post by giantg2 »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #104
giantg2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hopefully cases like this will eventually stop the system being used in court." Maybe it will stop this system from being used in court, but new ones will take its place. It would be great if we could change the structure of the justice system to prevent these types of issues from popping up again. I have no idea what a solution would look like.

If you did that then everyone on here would be ranting about old judges and a luddite system instead

Those same complaints are still applicable today.

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

#139

Post by jtbayly »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #7
jtbayly wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not be right to blame AI, but it's certainly the case that they were presenting it as "the system says there was a shot fired here." The bigger point is that the "system" can't be trusted. And the fact that they need to manually classify things is proof of that fact. (It's way more complicated than just an audio recording. It's recordings from numerous locations, attempting to triangulate the original location…

> It may not be right to blame AI, but it's certainly the case that they were presenting it as "the system says there was a shot fired here." I think a crucial distinction is to clarify who “they” is: Who was making the claim? From the article, it seems that the prosecutors may have been the ones exaggerating the evidence: > Prosecutors said ShotSpotter picked up a gunshot sound where Williams was seen on surveillanc…

Sure. But the point is that they misrepresent the evidence by pointing to the system as trustworthy. Even without tampering with the evidence the system isn’t trustworthy beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt.

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

#140

Post by hervature »

tooltower wrote: post #114
giantg2 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't exactly support your claims for most of forensics. If you read/skim the NAS report these articles are based on, you will see that much of the issue is not with the underlying science, but rather in the "interpretation" part. Yes, the odontology seems to be unsupported. But even the fire analysis that you list as an example is said to have a scientific basis like chemistry, but that the interpretation par…

While my stance on forensics is not as negative as the parent comment, I don't see how you are drawing such a sharp distinction between the "science" and the "interpretation". They are not separate things. When a scientist proposes a new test, they include measurement techniques as well as a method of interpretation. If a medical test is used in a way that is frequently prone to misinterpretation, it would be fair to…

I disagree. The canonical example here are p-values. Completely valid and accepted interpretation which will forever be abused. In the medical realm, we see the same things with false-positive and false-negative rates causing massive confusion. An even more recent example is COVID vaccine efficacy. I would take the bet that 90% of the general population could not give the accurate definition of what the definition of efficacy is.
Post reply on HN