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Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people

#141

Post by anigbrowl »

csa wrote: post #93
cool_dude85 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 out of 20 is still pretty nasty given the size of the US prison population.

He said “at least”. And he specified “guilty of what they were charged with”. You also need to factor in the people who are guilty of crime A (that they did commit but were not convicted of) but are convicted of crime B (that they did not commit) for whatever reason. I’ve seen “street justice” like this. In some cases I think it a net good (right outcome for the wrong reasons, typically involving a serial criminal wh…

What he wrote: at least 95% of the people locked up are guilty of something related to their charges

What you wrote: And he specified “guilty of what they were charged with”.

These aren't the same. It's depressing to see someone being misquoted on literally the same page as their original statement, in a discussion about lack of accuracy in legal proceedings.

Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people

#142

Post by chaps »

pc86 wrote: post #137
incahoots wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gone through the system in a similar fashion, but with no where near the same outcome as you did. If I hadn't gone through a similar situation I would almost believe that you were making it up, that's how ridiculous this is. For context I got stopped in a car with a friend who had weed (unknown to me at the time), had a really old warrant for something like a missed child support payment (also didn't know), and…

Unfortunately, the common refrain in scenarios like this is that it's your fault. Even ignoring the weed, which I think a lot of people would have sympathy for, you owed child support that wasn't paid and had a [bench, presumably] warrant out for your arrest. The simple fact of the matter is that most people don't owe court-mandated child support at any point in their lives, most people that do owe it pay it, and mos…

"Teaching empathy" won't do a thing and'll just be mocked and memed. We need to start at a lower fundamental.

An easy first step would be to increase accessibility to court documents so that journalists and researchers have better means of researching these complex problems. In Illinois for example, the judicial branch is exempt from FOIA. This effectively manifests itself as an informal allowance of judges/prosecutors to get away with a lot of systemic injustices. They get away with it because the means of identifying these systemic problems is through data and records that exist beyond a moat. One existing alternative to FOIA here is the county clerk's in-person system.. but the system times out on half of its searches, is missing tons of docs, painfully slow, etc. Another existing path is through a FOIA to the State's Attorney's office, but they're notoriously slow and I'm amongst the handful of others who are suing for non-responsiveness. A lot of this is made worse by the State's Attorney hashing person and case identifiers to make it effectively impossible to understand how someone's case progressed through the courts, starting from the arrest.

Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people

#143

Post by 2devnull »

bawolff wrote: post #72
2devnull wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I find it hard to believe I find it hard to believe you find it hard to believe. :) There’s a cliche term for such cases, “he said/she said” and they are not at all uncommon.

I dont think this term applies here - usually that term is reserved for one or both parties misrepresenting the situation. Here we have mistaken identity, which i would consider different.

My point stands. These are not uncommon cases. The justice system has obvious flaws and frequently goes awry. Mistaken identity, false testimony, wrongful convictions should be common knowledge.

Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people

#144

Post by cbsmith »

dn3500 wrote: post #116

My father was called for jury duty a few years ago. The case depended on some physics, something about the angles and momentum in a car crash. My father was disqualified, because he's a physics teacher and may have been tempted to interpret the physics expert's testimony instead of blindly accepting it.

Yup. I don't think the problem is the jury, or even the experts. There's a fundamental problem with how the courts use expert testimony to ensure fair justice. I believe the idea is that to ensure fairness, verdicts should not be determined by variances in expertise amongst the jury. I recall being specifically instructed that I was NOT to question the expert testimony based on any prior expertise I might have. It solves one problem, and creates a ton of others.

Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people

#145

Post by lesuorac »

qingcharles wrote: post #113
graphe wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame laws like fruit of the poisoned tree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree If you want to act in bad faith and call it magic and bullshit feel free to grandstand.

What is wrong with the poisonous tree doctrine in your opinion? I find it isn't used widely enough against police and prosecutor misconduct. There are too many ways out of it for them.

My main problem is that the person that suffers from the poisonous tree is the public at large.

The actual criminal in this scenario (the police officer) gets off carte blanche for breaking the law. Additionally, if they managed to find evidence then an additional criminal (the defendants) also gets carte blanche. The only people punished is the public that now have two known criminals that evaded justice!

Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people

#146

Post by eli »

dn3500 wrote: post #116

My father was called for jury duty a few years ago. The case depended on some physics, something about the angles and momentum in a car crash. My father was disqualified, because he's a physics teacher and may have been tempted to interpret the physics expert's testimony instead of blindly accepting it.

Jurors aren't expected to blindly accept expert testimony. Normal jury instructions are exactly the opposite: that jurors should treat it just like any other testimony and make their own decision on how trustworthy it is.

I think the concern is more that they don't want a self-appointed expert on the jury having too much sway over the other jurors.

Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people

#147

Post by soerxpso »

Buttons840 wrote: post #84
chaps wrote: post #53

Very, very much yes. Criminal courts really, really aren't a good place to address technical matters. For example, ankle electronic monitoring (obviously) doesn't work well in faraday-cage like apartment complexes. And yet time and time again, GPS skew is used to argue that someone left their home -- sometimes even months after the fact. I've read emails from a local sheriff's office that said that they consider a su…

Sounds like grounds for a lawsuit against the company. They are stating false things about their product and causing people harm. An official and highly paid representative sent to testify in court couldn't just be dismissed as "well, one salesman misspoke, not our fault". This would be the just recourse, but I'm aware that probably nobody can afford this justice.

Saying you're "not aware of" something that is real but that you've managed to avoid awareness of, isn't illegal. The individual representative sent to testify probably really was unaware, and the company probably does a good job of making itself as a whole mostly unaware. As long as all knowledge of something routinely goes straight to the shredder before anyone important hears about it, unawareness is achieved.

Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people

#148

Post by eli »

I was a juror on a criminal trial once and there was a ballistics expert who testified that he was "100% certain" that the markings on a shell casing came from a certain gun. This is based on a visual inspection under a microscope.

I googled it after the trial and sure enough when you put this sort of thing to the test, experts are not correct 100% of the time.

Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people

#149

Post by lesuorac »

pc86 wrote: post #68
graphe wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That definitely happens but lots of evidence is thrown out and they are looking at throwing the law at him. A famous case is Al Capone. I’m not calling it right or wrong, it’s just what happens with the system in place. It’s also shown to the public to convict them. The jury has the ability to ‘throw’ the case as they did in the case of OJ.

Except Al Capone actually did what he went to prison for. Yeah he did a lot of other stuff nobody could prove to the standard of a courtroom, but what you're talking about is someone "knows" Al Capone is bad, so they fabricate crimes and evidence and frame him for those in order to send him to prison. That would still be wrong. This is a feature, not a bug.

A feature to the prosector maybe but a bug to the public at large.

1) People do convince themselves of falsehoods; the person may not actually have done that initial crime. 2) Being able to trump up lessor charges can be (ab)used even if the person didn't commit an initial crime but instead is just a ~journalist~ nuisance.

Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people

#150

Post by qingcharles »

graphe wrote: post #140
qingcharles wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong with the poisonous tree doctrine in your opinion? I find it isn't used widely enough against police and prosecutor misconduct. There are too many ways out of it for them.

It’s in response to: >Here you're saying that mass-murderers are common, but despite their extensive trails of corpses, we can't pin the actual crime on an actual criminal. No, there's nothing magical about criminal prosecution here, it's no more than bullshit as you've described it. Everyone does illegal stuff in the US. Sometimes it’s a technicality that a guilty party goes free.

It's true that technicalities in the USA can lead to very guilty defendants walking free from very serious crimes.

These doctrines were created by judges who were sick of prosecutors and police violating the constitution and not getting punished for it.

The solution is to fix the system to stop this misconduct and then we could rid ourselves of this doctrine. It's a fucked up system.

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