Mathematicians Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez have written an entire book on this very issue of bad statistics causing miscarriages of justice: https://www.amazon.com/Math-Trial-Numbers-Abused-Courtroom/d...
Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
171–180 of 205 posts
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#172Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#173Note that proportionately few of our federal judges have spent any time as public defenders, and a disproportionately high number have served as prosecutors. Jackson is the first supreme court justice to have served as a public defender, whereas 3 other justices have been prosecutors. Prosecutors are incentivized to get convictions, and that slanted thinking could easily be carried on to the bench. [1] https://www.pb…
Being primarily a civil attorney, I'm well aware of the disproportionate number of former prosecutors on the bench. A couple of points: 1. Most prosecutors are liberals. It's not like right wing law students go looking for jobs in prosecutor's offices. I can't think of any from my class way back when. 2. The problem is more that judges and prosecutors are old colleagues. The slant is that they all know the defendants…
> prosecutors tend to only bring cases where the defendant is clearly guilty.
This isn't quite right. Prosecutors tend to only bring cases where they judge they can win (including pleas, etc.).
There is some correlation with guilt, sure, but it's not by any stretch the only thing going on.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The problem is not the company per se but the fact that the government is allowed to get away with having an "expert witness" testify in court with no supporting evidence about something like this. The government should be required to produce, and keep up to date, positive evidence about the accuracy of such systems, collected independently of the manufacturer.
You'd think so, right? At least when I was researching all of this last year, absolutely no accuracy testing had been done in Chicagoland.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#175A few years back there were some stories in a Swedish newspaper about a method for medical age estimation of asylum seekers developed by a government agency. I could hardly believe my eyes when the person responsible for the accuracy of the method was quoted as saying that it was very reliable, because it used two unreliable methods to estimate if the person was above 18 years old, and then concluded that they were 1…
Pretty much the same thing happened in France: https://www.cairn.info/revue-journal-du-droit-des-jeunes-200... (in French)
Experts using scientifically unreliable methods to determine that asylum seekers are 18+ and can therefore be expelled from the French territory.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#176Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sort of thing happens all the time. The Innocence Project has a multi-year backlog. If you are a black man with a public defender the prosecution almost doesn't even have to show up to get a conviction. Death row is full of people who were railroaded by the system.
Full of is misleading. If 1%-10% are innocent, 99-90% are still guilty. 21 of the 375 men that were innocent were on death row. https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-... Are these cases a relic before dna evidence?
That's just for this one project.
I'm not saying everyone is innocent, but the number of people who were wrongly convicted by a lazy system that let shoddy police work and lax standards become the norm is shocking.
There's the old thought process that even if the guy wasn't guilty of this crime he's certainly guilty of others so they would be doing the world a favor by putting him away. In the end this is just self-justified racism.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#178My 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.
When my son was diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome [1], I investigated the science of this diagnosis and found out horrifying mistakes in French diagnosis guidelines, especially in physics-based arguments. These guidelines were written by medical doctors who did not seem to have the slightest understanding of basic physics, resulting in gross unit conversion errors, absurd comparisons, contradictory reasonings, and so on [2]. These flawed arguments led to flawed conclusions regarding differential diagnoses of pediatric head injuries, resulting in hundreds of erroneous medical diagnoses and allegations of abuse in the country.
[1] https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-sha...
[2] see e.g. https://adikia.fr/2018/05/biomecanique-des-chutes/ (in French)
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
>which ended with me serving five months in jail for retweeting the public defender's Tweet about it Um, what? You served 5 months in jail for a retweet? Care to elaborate?
Yes. Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38603663 Basically judge told me I was allowed to use the Internet while on bail and joked with me that as long as I didn't use it for anything illegal. Then when I retweeted the article "chaps" above wrote about EM not working etc, and I also tweeted about police misconduct (I was getting arrested every single day), it angered the local Sheriff's dept and they locked m…
https://thecivilrightslawyer.com/about/
Send this guy your story, he might be able to help you
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
The limitations of section 1983 to let you sue cops for violating your rights are not the fault of the exclusionary rule. Without the exclusionary rule the 4th amendment doesn't really exist. Cops could just violate your 4th amendment rights and then either arrest you if they find evidence of a crime or go on their merry way. Yes, some people who committed crimes go unpunished because the state fucked up and couldn't…
> Without the exclusionary rule the 4th amendment doesn't really exist. Cops could just violate your 4th amendment rights and then either arrest you if they find evidence of a crime or go on their merry way.
I mean if I trespass on your property and take a handgun and give it to police as evidence of the murder weapon they can use that to convict you. You might have trouble with a civil suit of trespassing against me but I doubt a prosector couldn't also try me for trespassing.
The exclusionary rule is not in the constitution. The 4th amendment does not describe what happens if its violated and the fruit of the poisonous tree is entirely made up by the court system in 1920 [1] over a century after the constitution was written. Prior to that point there wasn't a need of the fruit of the poisonous tree because if even if you had a warrant you couldn't use my personal possessions as evidence against me [2].
Although I don't really agree with either system. You should be able to use warrants to get personal property but taking person property without a warrant should receive the same penalty no matter who takes it. i.e. Cops should risk jail time for breaking the law like everybody else. Obviously if a cop radios their supervisor to verify they have a warrant and the supervisor lies then the supervisor is on the hook and not the cop.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverthorne_Lumber_Co._v._Uni... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_evidence_rule