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Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

theguardian.com

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Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#131

Post by lisper »

beerandt wrote: post #128
lisper wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Shaken Baby Syndrome is a real thing. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/shaken-baby-s... [UPDATE] To those of you downvoting me, would you kindly explain why? It seems like a reasonable question to me.

It is, but those claiming psedoscience aren't even claiming that the set of symptoms aren't "real", just that they don't deserve their own label because of the implication. "We can't explain this trio of internal head/brain/eye trauma with lack of corresponding external trauma, but don't you dare make the reasonable claim that shaking a baby can/does nominally cause the symptoms we see when a baby is, in fact, shaken…

Sorry, I am very confused here. The comment I was responding to said:

> to make that bullshit even worse, Texas continued to use hypnosis induced testimony until 2021.

That is a sentiment with which I sympathize. But then...

> It makes me wonder when the last death penalty sentence for "shaken baby syndrome" was in Texas.

This I don't get. Shaken baby syndrome is a real thing, and it seems to me that if someone shakes a baby to death they are guilty of murder (or at least negligent homicide) and should be treated no differently than if their victim had been older. What does it have to do with hypnosis?

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#132

Post by rossant »

lisper wrote: post #108
boomboomsubban wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the other death row inmates mentioned in the article as having failed the junk science law, Kosoul Chanthakoummane, was partly convicted for hypnosis induced testimony. The appeal response on calling it junk science was, paraphrased, "hypnosis induced testimony was known to be bogus in ~2005, when your trial was. You should have argued it then." That alone is terrible. But to make that bullshit even worse, Tex…

Why? Shaken Baby Syndrome is a real thing. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/shaken-baby-s... [UPDATE] To those of you downvoting me, would you kindly explain why? It seems like a reasonable question to me.

Shaking and child abuse are obviously real things. However, the way to diagnose shaken baby syndrome has been the subject of an ongoing scientific controversy for decades. With several colleagues, we have just published a textbook about this sensitive issue [1]. I've also written about how I, as a neuroscience researcher and software engineer, came into this diagnosis [2]. Finally, an introduction to this fascinating scientific topic can be found here, with many references for those interested [3].

[1] https://shakenbaby.science

[2] https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-sha...

[3] https://cyrille.rossant.net/introduction-shaken-baby-syndrom...

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#133

Post by hexane360 »

epicureanideal wrote: post #69
qingcharles wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's often very, very, very hard to introduce new evidence of your innocence after trial. Trial is the point that you show all available evidence to the jury. In Illinois you can attempt to present your evidence only after you have exhausted all of your regular appeal routes (appellate court, state supreme court, SCOTUS, state habeas corpus, fed habeas -- there are 11 levels here first) which can take a decade.…

I'm completely shocked that the "defund the police" movement was where the progressive activists chose to dedicate their attention. Whereas issues like you mention above, and trial reform in general, and prison system reform in general, would have wide bipartisan support. It really makes me suspicious why activists and the media are not advocating for the things 90% of people would agree with. Is the other stuff just…

The problem with prison reform is politicans are incredibly afraid of being seen as "soft on crime". Paradoxically, this is especially true for democrats, because republicans are assumed to be tough on crime by default. Opposing prison reform is an easy way to seem tough on crime because convicts don't vote and most people aren't familiar with the prison system. Policing is more controversial, because a lot of people have had negative personal experiences with the police, and many are suspicious of government or authoritarianism.

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#134

Post by couchand »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #127
couchand wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain how "expert testimony has been widely discredited" doesn't count as new evidence?

It’s new evidence, but it doesn’t contradict the entire case. In particular, there are witnesses who said they saw him abuse the kid in the past, and child abuse remains a real thing regardless of medical disputes about whether there’s a distinct “shaken baby syndrome”. So the judge felt that a reasonable juror could have convicted him even in light of the new information.

I don't presume to know this case. I was replying to what seemed like a characterization of the medical testimony in this case as belonging to the latter group, when in fact it has been shown over time to be as invalid as the former.

There ceased to be a distinction between the two groups in your original comment when the weight of evidence started to clearly tip away from prosecutions like these.

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#135

Post by vorpalhex »

Arainach wrote: post #121
vorpalhex wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No he's in prison because multiple witnesses testified they saw him shake and hit and scream at his child for crying, repeatedly.

Source?

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/06/17/appeals-court-halts-...

Yes, this article is from 2016. Texas also has a strong law that allows throwing out "junk science". This case didn't make it through appeals because the forensic criteria that is suspect was such a small part of the evidence.

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#136

Post by kmeisthax »

primer42 wrote: post #8
GlumWoodpecker wrote: post #5

Powerful article. What strikes me as a layman (non-lawyer, non-law enforcement), is how prevalent these methods of forensic science have become, without any solid scientific basis backing them up - such as peer reviewed studies with quantifiable evidence. You'd think that in order for the state to take the life of a human being, you'd need to prove it using means that are more thoroughly vetted than "[one doctor] who…

IMHO our system of law cares more about precedent than almost anything else. The first case addressing a situation sets the bar, which is backwards. The most important decisions are made when we, collectively, know least about the topic at hand.

Common law is only one basis of law and it's almost exclusively an English thing. In England, alternative bases of law were associated with horrific abuses of power. In response the Anglosphere has adopted a sort of extreme legal conservatism: anything other than inviolable natural rights decided on the basis of "we've always done it this way" is not freedom, but privilege[0]. Every acquittal binds the law, ideally forever. This is the same form of law that gives us things like "human rights are what you afford your worst enemy", which is contradictory[1], but sounds like a really strong bulwark against tyranny.

Outside of the Anglosphere judges are free to ignore precedent, which they call "jurisprudence". This is a tradeoff: you get justice "in the moment" in exchange for less future surety about how the legal system will react. The legal system might just decide that you doing the exact same thing someone else did and got away with is now illegal.

My personal opinion is that any basis of law can be used for tyranny, and that common law and inviolable rights are less protective than we have been propagandized to think. Even common law legal systems occasionally overturn precedent if they feel like it - remember when anti-abortion laws were a violation of the 4th Amendment until they weren't?

[0] This even extends to the word "franchise", which means "French-ize", as in to be given freedoms by being turned into a Frenchman

[1] What if your enemy seeks to take away your rights?

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#137

Post by lotsofpulp »

guraf wrote: post #123
lotsofpulp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Science” is just the process of continuously evaluating and re-evaluating what you know using data and experiments, and changing what you “know” (or your mental model) to align with the new data. What people deify is certain conclusions, for myriad reasons.

Enough of this no true scottsmanship. "Scientific consensus" is taken as gospel by many people. Most on this very board. They don't care to learn how the consensus was reached (usually happens by just ignoring detractors). They just care to feel superior to people outside the consensus because "duh, science".

Under the assumption that no one has the capacity to perform all the science experiments and analyze all the data themselves to model the world, individuals would have to rely on a proxy such as other people telling them the results of science experiments.

Given how complicated nature or whatever around and within us is, there will be many shades of gray. What is looked down upon is (usually) conclusions reached from methods outside of the scientific method, such as predictions of one’s personal life based on a deck of cards or medical interventions with no explanation of cause of action or experimental numbers to rule out random-ness.

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#138

Post by vorpalhex »

jncfhnb wrote: post #55
vorpalhex wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize a lot of abused kids are taken to the hospital by their abuser? Kids got a broken arm or a broken nose from being slapped around, abuser can't hide it forever. Eventually kids gotta go to school or cops are going to do a welfare check. Same thing if kid disappears off the radar.

That’s a very different problem from shaken baby syndrome. See adjacent reply.

Your assertion is simply wrong.

SBS is not just a parent trying to shush a baby - it requires a very significant amount of force in a healthy infant. This is not a "oh shush let me hug you" thing, this requires repeatedly seriously jostling the baby hard enough to pinch it's airway off or bounce it's brain off the inside of it's skull. Usually repeatedly.

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#139

Post by vorpalhex »

Arainach wrote: post #120
vorpalhex wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SBS is well supported by the medical literature and extensive studies: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25616019/ (an overview) This man was not committed to death row because of one doctor. He was found guilty because multiple people in his life testified he had a history of violently shaking and screaming at a child for crying.

>He was found guilty because multiple people in his life testified Source?

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/06/17/appeals-court-halts-...

Yes, this article is from 2016 and yes it's in Texas which has a strong law which allows throwing out bad science.

The suspect forensic claim was such a small part of the evidence against the defendent that it didn't survive appeals.

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#140

Post by standardUser »

Retric wrote: post #89
dsego wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's retributive justice, it's not a deterrent. To quote a post I recently found resonating with me: "Look, we don’t necessarily hang murderers to deter other people from committing the same offence. We kill them simply because the punishment has to carry the same weight as the offence. The family of the murderer must go through the same anguish and pain that the murder victim’s family went through. The killer has to…

Retribution would require mimicry of the original crimes. That’s not what’s going on, it’s simply an attempt to reframe an old argument. Some cultures actually did do retribution based executions, they where horrific and very different from lethal injection etc.

"Retribution would require mimicry of the original crimes."

No, it would not. That's not the definition of retribution.

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