Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by qingcharles » Mon, Dec 11, 2023, 7:07 PM UTC

Lord-Jobo wrote: post #12

Wow, a hackernews topic thats actually directly related to my specialty. Anyway, this article is spot on and this is a really rampant specific issue. “expert witnesses have often overstated the probative value of their evidence, going far beyond what the relevant science can justify.” This is the absolute center of the issue. Experts are used by the prosecution AND defense, but the experts used by the prosecution are…

The prosecution brought an FBI forensic expert to testify against me and he was fantastically fair and had extremely deep knowledge. I was very impressed with him. I was expecting something totally different from all my reading of books of false convictions.

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

#102

Post by qingcharles » Mon, Dec 11, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

causal wrote: post #8

sneak wrote: post #4

The police and prosecution are the ones using these tools to attack innocent people. The article opens with a case of the corrupt prosecution intentionally and illegally withholding evidence. This isn’t about bad science, this is about bad prosecutors who are more interested in convictions than justice. Selective enforcement and opportunities to engage in misconduct like this are endemic in the US criminal justice sy…

I've always been perplexed by the incentive to get convictions. This is guaranteed to result in prosecutors preferring any method with a lot of false positives.

If you're a prosecutor you need to prosecute. If you don't win cases, you're not going to keep your employment. QED.

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

#103

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 11, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

tiahura wrote: post #21

causal wrote: post #10

Note 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…

[deleted]

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

#104

Post by qingcharles » Mon, Dec 11, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #29

I read about a case once where a man was convicted of rape. The evidence was that the rape was done face-to-face with the victim, and the victim positively ID'd him. How could she not, when she was face-to-face with him? It was a slam dunk. After some years in prison, the convicted person managed to get a DNA test, which proved he was not the rapist. How could this be? It turns out the DNA matched a convicted sex off…

False suspect identification is historically one of the largest reasons for false convictions. Courts, thankfully, are slowly catching on to this and giving it lesser weight than they used to.

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

#105

Post by cpill » Mon, Dec 11, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

bjornsing wrote: post #32

A 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…

Mimics my impression of Sweden in general. It's not a nice place of you are not Swedish.

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

#106

Post by willy_k » Mon, Dec 11, 2023, 7:11 PM UTC

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38602914

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

#107

Post by qingcharles » Mon, Dec 11, 2023, 7:12 PM UTC

oooyay wrote: post #96

qingcharles wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also wrote the previous one which ended with me serving five months in jail for retweeting the public defender's Tweet about it (not your fault): https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/false-alarms/ This might have been the Tweet I reposted: https://twitter.com/CookCoDefender/status/153970586223037644... https://nitter.net/CookCoDefender/status/1539705862230376448

Correct me if I'm off base here, but this seems to be absolute nonsense: > Like many on EM, Ross was never granted movement outside his home even once, not even to buy food. His sister, a manager at Securitas, helped when she could, but work got in the way sometimes, he said. So, they replaced the box you sit in with a box that you pay for and provide no additional services with all the same restrictions. What the fu…

I wasn't allowed to leave for food.

The judge told me he would not grant my request to leave for food. "Have you heard of Amazon? Order it online." he said.

Then when I ordered it online he gave me five months in jail saying he never gave me permission to use the Internet :D

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

#108

Post by DrunkOnPower » Mon, Dec 11, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

10000truths wrote: post #31

WalterBright wrote: post #29

I read about a case once where a man was convicted of rape. The evidence was that the rape was done face-to-face with the victim, and the victim positively ID'd him. How could she not, when she was face-to-face with him? It was a slam dunk. After some years in prison, the convicted person managed to get a DNA test, which proved he was not the rapist. How could this be? It turns out the DNA matched a convicted sex off…

Do you have a link to the case details? At the very least, there has to have been some additional evidence to convict, even if circumstantial. I find it hard to believe that someone can be ruled guilty of a crime as serious as rape based solely on the plaintiff's testimony.

Sounds like Steven Avery's rape conviction. He was convicted even though he had an alibi.

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

#109

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 11, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

stult wrote: post #88

lkbm wrote: post #18

The first time I remember running across this was /Innumeracy/ (1988) by John Allen Paulos. It's been discussed for decades, and as best I can tell hasn't really been addressed at all. I don't know the solution. Ideally, everyone would be good at math, but I don't see that happening in the near future. My best answer is for us to provide every court have an on-call statistician, reviewing every case. I would hope big…

It would help if the legal profession (at least in the US) did not actively select against numeracy. The running joke in law school is that everyone who was a decent student but bad at math goes to law school because the LSATs do not have a math component, unlike the GREs. I’m an engineer and former lawyer, and when I was in law school I actually ended up taking a really disproportionate number of tax law classes bec…

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by Lord-Jobo » Mon, Dec 11, 2023, 7:16 PM UTC

causal wrote: post #8

sneak wrote: post #4

The police and prosecution are the ones using these tools to attack innocent people. The article opens with a case of the corrupt prosecution intentionally and illegally withholding evidence. This isn’t about bad science, this is about bad prosecutors who are more interested in convictions than justice. Selective enforcement and opportunities to engage in misconduct like this are endemic in the US criminal justice sy…

I've always been perplexed by the incentive to get convictions. This is guaranteed to result in prosecutors preferring any method with a lot of false positives.

Perverse incentives are one of the worst issues in modern law enforcement. They exist at nearly every step and they are causing a rot that will take decades lot of concentrated effort to remove.

if you build a system, patchwork, entirely reactive, from the deep roots of racism and anti-labor movements (https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/)(https://nl... and then ignore the nearly 50% rate of decline in violent crime since 1993(https://www.statista.com/statistics/191129/reported-violent-...), and in fact, have a population undergo a rapid INCREASE in PERCEIVED violent crime (https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro...).... well its hard to be surprised.

If we wanted to actually evolve our system, top to bottom, to focus on reduced recidivism and a reduced prison population without increasing violent crime, one of the first steps we should take is a deep pass over every perverse incentive in the system.

Revenue sources has to be the biggest category. Ignoring salary, there are so many fines and fees that directly fund the police. (https://www.brennancenter.org/series/how-perverse-financial-...)

civil asset forfeiture is plain and open theft, and it directly incentivizes as many arrests as possible.

incarceration facilities of all kinds are funded based on bed space and occupancy for christs sake (https://www.brennancenter.org/series/how-perverse-financial-...)

Military cooperation agreements give all sorts of free military tech to police agencies and swat teams, and they constantly take christmas morning style photos with them (https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp9861590.jpg). a small town near my hometown had a population of 4500 when the 'police department' (police force was 30ish people) got a fucking APC from the military for free. This was in 2010ish so i cant find a direct source, but i did see it in person.