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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

#111

Post by rightbyte »

qingcharles wrote: post #97
rightbyte wrote: post #54

It wouldn't surprise me if computer forsensics is about as bad science as bullet forsensics. Ever since I had a porn virus hosting kinda lame porn videos over BitTorrent like 20 years ago, I thought about exactly how computer forsensics prove intent in child sexual abuse material cases.

I don't know. I've spoken to FBI computer forensics guys and their computer knowledge was up there with mine in terms of hardware, software, OS etc. I've been very, very impressed with them. The problems come when they pass their data to the prosecution and defense who are not computer trained and it all goes sour from there on.

Ok nice to hear.

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

#112

Post by qingcharles »

Dalewyn wrote: post #100
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…

Obligatory IANAL. >Prosecutors are incentivized to get convictions, Their entire job is to get convictions. It literally doesn't matter if the prosecutor thinks someone should be convicted or not, that's for the judge to decide. The job of a prosecutor is to make as strong a case for conviction as he possibly can. Likewise, the job of a lawyer representing a defendant is to make as strong a case for acquittal as he p…

It's actually rarely for the judge to decide except in a bench trial.

The other options are: jury trial, plea deal and dismissal.

Almost every case ends in a plea deal which is really just between the prosecutor and the defendant with the judge just putting a stamp on it.

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

#113

Post by qingcharles »

graphe wrote: post #60
klyrs wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you’re looking for the criminal that killed a bunch of people but not that specific case it’s not that uncommon. 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. Back to my question, why do you think m…

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.

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

#114

Post by qingcharles »

trident5000 wrote: post #80

Deliberately hiding evidence should should equate to hefty prison time for a prosecutor.

In known history, I think there has been perhaps one prosecutor charged with a crime over this. How about that for a statistic?

From my experience it is literally impossible to report a crime made by a prosecutor.

Hiding evidence might not even be a crime in many jurisdictions. In the USA it would be a constitutional violation, but that rarely makes it a crime because violating the constitution rarely becomes criminal unless violence is involved.

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

#115

Post by chaps »

qingcharles wrote: post #81
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…

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

Maybe not, but [without going into it on HN], we could have done much more. For the texts article, we took a much more aggressive approach to pseudonyms to avoid something like that happening again.

Hope you're doing well.

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

#116

Post by dn3500 »

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.

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

#117

Post by qingcharles »

chaps wrote: post #115
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

Maybe not, but [without going into it on HN], we could have done much more. For the texts article, we took a much more aggressive approach to pseudonyms to avoid something like that happening again. Hope you're doing well.

Yeah, lesson learned. I wasn't bitter about it. We both knew what could happen and I accepted the risk. You were doing absolutely the right thing. You did nothing wrong. You saw the transcripts, the judge was a piece of shit all the way to the end.

I'm doing good. Almost all the charges were dismissed a couple of weeks ago. Last ones on appeal now. Hope everything is good with you.

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

#118

Post by oooyay »

qingcharles wrote: post #107
oooyay wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> "Have you heard of Amazon? Order it online."

That's textbook entrapment given that collecting an Amazon order, much less the occasionally misplaced one, would require stepping outside of your apartment.

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

#119

Post by Ukv »

gruez wrote: post #35
adamsb6 wrote: post #17

Even photo and video evidence suffers from courtrooms that don’t understand how nearly all cameras will record and encode images. JPEG encoding (and thus MPEG encoding) takes 8x8 blocks of pixels and represents them as a discrete cosine transform. In a very real way these pixels don’t actually exist. If your video evidence relies on such a small portion of MPEG encoded video, you can easily mislead a jury to convicti…

>I’m reminded of the Rittenhouse trial where the prosecutors had a technician massage a still from a video for hours until some very tiny collection of pixels, enlarged from the original by quite a bit, were arranged in such a way that they said demonstrated Rittenhouse initiated aggression against the first man he shot. Is there an article with more on this?

This is the "clarified" video frame in question, alleged to show Rittenhouse aiming his rifle at protesters: https://i.imgur.com/7uWonoK.png (unfortunately with some extra degradation due it it being a screenshot from the trial footage)

The glob of pixels to the left, interpreted as Rittenhouse's support hand, was actually part of the vehicle already present in the frames before he approaches: https://i.imgur.com/4itI2r8.png

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

#120

Post by chaps »

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…

It's very much a political issue over a practical issue. The EM program has been around since the 80s, but the pandemic caused its use to explode -- largely to reduce the spread of COVID in/out of jails.
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