The most disturbing part of all this is that people were suspicious of him and he was called into question and investigated numerous times at the hospital. He killed hundreds of people who were given the wrong cause of death. The hospital was enabling this guy by prioritizing their own reputation.
A nuclear weapons lab helped crack a serial-killer case
21–26 of 26 posts
Re: A nuclear weapons lab helped crack a serial-killer case
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then why'd he accept a plea deal for life? Represented by a public defender. That doesn't seem very likely. Prosecutors were not seeking the death penalty so life would be the worst outcome he would get if he went to trial and lost. > That's a striking resource asymmetry: million-dollar national lab work for the prosecution, 30 minutes of paper-skimming for the defense. Public defenders spend considerably more time…
- "Prosecutors were not seeking the death penalty so life would be the worst outcome he would get if he went to trial and lost." Right: he accepted a plea for the same maximum penalty the prosecutors would have sought at trial. That's not strategic.
Only if you assume information symmetry. If they told him (untruthfully) that they were going to seek the death penalty, but if he pleads then they’ll take the death penalty off the table, it may seem strategic.
Re: A nuclear weapons lab helped crack a serial-killer case
#23When I saw the title, I thought of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MezNFE5eAp0 ("Why a Big Box Store Started Solving Violent Crimes") about Target's stop-loss department having so much extra capacity they will sometimes do pro-bono work for police departments, but have limited themselves to only violent crimes because the pro-bono requests got to be overwhelming to their actual day jobs
Re: A nuclear weapons lab helped crack a serial-killer case
#24This article cheerleads the policework, but I'm not convinced it's sound to introduce highly novel forensic techniques in court trials. So you validated your technique with a control sample from a pig; that's scientific rigor, that's sufficient for a scientific journal paper. I don't buy that's sufficient to put a person in prison for life. One stray cross-contamination of lab equipment would invalidate everything. R…
The twist is that all the stuff dramatized in this article is bog standard analytical chemistry process + technique, including the solid phase extraction.
All this stuff is in consumable kits and turnkey machines, which yes do require expertise and care to use properly but there's nothing weird about it. Samples are always a mixture of too much crap you don't want and which interfere with each others' detection. Etc. It's all part of the job.
Also Fourteen hours is about the length of the practical lab exam portion of my undergrad analytical chemistry course, spread over a few days of course.
Of course this was in the nineties and maybe SPE was novel - all the other chromatography and spectroscopy was more or less established though
It's basically the same as the articles you see where curl, nmap, dd are breathlessly described as novel hacking tools. Still copaganda I guess
Re: A nuclear weapons lab helped crack a serial-killer case
#25This article cheerleads the policework, but I'm not convinced it's sound to introduce highly novel forensic techniques in court trials. So you validated your technique with a control sample from a pig; that's scientific rigor, that's sufficient for a scientific journal paper. I don't buy that's sufficient to put a person in prison for life. One stray cross-contamination of lab equipment would invalidate everything. R…
It also doesn't mention recent history with the labs: they have private management & a lot of bloat these days. Livermore National Lab LLC conducts the management of the labs since ~2005 and the half-life of a physicist there is like 10years... ie 10years ago they had 2x the scientists. Now they have 10x admins. "Administrative costs at Lawrence Livermore have similarly swelled. In 2009 LLNS received $47 million and…
[dead]
Re: A nuclear weapons lab helped crack a serial-killer case
#26This article cheerleads the policework, but I'm not convinced it's sound to introduce highly novel forensic techniques in court trials. So you validated your technique with a control sample from a pig; that's scientific rigor, that's sufficient for a scientific journal paper. I don't buy that's sufficient to put a person in prison for life. One stray cross-contamination of lab equipment would invalidate everything. R…
Judges generally get statistical significance.
No judge assessed evidence in this case, as there was no trial. It was settled by a negotiated agreement between a career prosecutor and a severely mentally ill man who wanted to die, who was advised/represented by incompetent and indifferent legal counsel provided him free of charge by the state (he overpaid).