FBI testimony on hair analysis contained errors in 90% of cases (2015)

If you or I lie to the court, it is perjury. When it is the FBI, who are granted an additional level of professional authority and trust in their testimony 'because reasons' (even though no testimony should automatically be elevated over other) it's just harmless 'errors made in statements by FBI examiners' as phrased in this article.

Having gone through the system, it's all lies. Let's start with plea agreements. You have to agree in your plea that you were not coerced or threatened into taking your plea, yet everyone know that the prosecutor threatens you with taking the plea or facing an extra 10-30 years as the 'trial tax' (google it) that get's applied if you dare exercise your constitutional right to trial. But the judge, prosecutor, everyone looks the other way and ignores that blatant threat made against you. The judge knows that the prosecutor placing that clause in the plea is being disingenuous, the prosecutor knows they are. If justice is served by a five year sentence in a plea, how is that same justice served and applied fairly when adding 15 years simply for going to trial? Either a crime warrants a 5 year sentence, or a 15 year sentence. But sentencing is based not on your crime, but on the prosecutor and judge being annoyed if you exercise your constitutional rights. There is a reason that plea agreements were considered unconstitutional up until the 60s when the police/judicial state started undermining constitutional rights.

Acceptability of forensic evidence such as lie detector tests is not based on science but on precedence. If a court has accepted it as science before, then it is extremely hard for you to challenge it, even when it was complete garbage like lie detector tests. The current language is 'you can't be convicted solely based on lie detector tests' after a lot of people paid a lot of experts and took a lot of 'trial tax' to try and get lie detectors removed completely.

Mostly anything with humans

Most of them are bullshit, and the ones that aren't are ripe and ready to be used to bullshit people.

Every new kind of forensics is treated like it's going to be the solution to solving crime, when what it really is, is yet another excuse not to put the time and effort into investigation, the one thing that actually solves crimes.

CCTV has the same problem, we think it will solve crimes, when it can actually do a lot, but we constantly see cases of crimes happening in public or on camera where the police haven't even taken the half hour it would take to ask local businesses for their footage. And when they even do _that_, then they don't rarely bother to follow up leads.

Policing is just an endless, endless stream of people with what are actually very important jobs who only go into it for exactly the wrong reasons.

You're absolutely right.

Fire "trace" analysis was proven shoddy too.