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Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

theregister.com

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Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#441

Post by edbob »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #424
roywiggins wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appeals? Only ~3% of people charged even go to trial, the rest plead out. Just giving everyone a substantive right to trial would amount to a revolution.

I've wondered what would happen if jail culture expected people to go to trial. So similar to how snitches are targeted, if criminals in jail start violently targeting people that didn't go to trial they might be able to tear down the system...maybe? And to be clear this is a loose idea as I don't really know the system but it seems courts would be so flooded if everyone took this route. Prosecuters would have to sto…

George Bush introduced a PREA/Safe Prisons Program that has radically changed prison culture. Prisons are far, far safer than ever before and getting even safer as time goes on. (Since I know about Texas in particular), Texas has spent millions per prison to install hundreds of HD cameras covering nearly every square inch of ground (outside of individual cells and showers). When someone commits serious violence, they are segregated for at least 5-10 years, depending on the severity.

There are still some gang-controlled areas, but they are an exception now rather than the rule. The nanny state is firmly in control of most of the prisons.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#442

Post by generalizations »

WmyEE0UsWAwC2i wrote: post #296
ChrisLomont wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numerics in Matlab are far better than pretty much any developer can produce in production. This is why Matlab is used in production - it's vastly more reliable than people rebuilding the things it is good at by hand for bespoke solutions.

True. But I believe this is a case where correctness and clarity are the paramount concerns. There should be a public reference implantation of these methods if they are going to be used in court.

Seems like mathematical clarity is what Matlab is good at, at least compared to e.g. python and C.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#443

Post by cozzyd »

willis936 wrote: post #439
cozzyd wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and depending on which MATLAB version they run it in, it might have completely different results if they haven't tested carefully...

This is not my experience. Could you share an example?

well, this script, for example, gave me all sorts of fits trying to run on the then-new version of MATLAB I tried it on: http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/summaries/AEJS_v1_0.html

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#444

Post by gamblor956 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #274
gamblor956 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just moved the goal posts from someone who can be crossed in court to someone who can't, which is worse, because then you have now way of verifying that the "independent" certifier is actually independent or that the certification was properly done. You still need to allow the "independent certification" to be examined in court to validate both the independence and the certification. The means testimony on the…

The skepticism has to end somewhere. Else ever court case becomes an infinite regressing into doubting the foundations of everything. Of course self-certification is not the best. To bring up that straw man (as most of these posts do) is not advancing the conversation.

Yes, the skepticism has to end somewhere. But when someone is facing years, or life, in prison, that skepticism absolutely should not end before it validates the primary evidence of guilt, and the tools used to purportedly analyze that evidence.

If you can't validate the equipment used to analyze the DNA, gunshot residue, or other scientific evidence, then that evidence should not be allowed in court, because that's prima facie reasonable doubt.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#445

Post by raldi »

lopatin wrote: post #426
raldi wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say more like ten lines a second, if you're skimming it to look for something. And of course, the work can be parallelized.

Is this satire?

I'm not sure what you mean. What numbers would you call realistic?

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#446

Post by mulmen »

curryst wrote: post #413
mulmen wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of this has to do with funding differences. Public defenders are famously underfunded but prosecutors have essentially unlimited resources. As a result they are on a fast-track to political fortune, especially if they "do their job well" and "win" (get a lot of convictions). How can the truth-finding benefits of the adversarial system be preserved while leveling the playing field by equalizing resou…

So there's an underlying problem here, which is that at our current rate of indictments, our court systems cannot support everyone going to trial. One of the reasons people in charge of funding want to starve the public defenders is that if they're actually good, people will be less willing to just plea out to a lower charge. So the growth will be non-linear as their success rate increases due to the funding, which t…

Huh, that’s an interesting idea but it seems to only address one form of inequality. Clearly the incentives are perverse. If there are more cases brought than the system can handle then this just sounds like a band aid at best.

The real issue is why are there so many cases?

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#447

Post by willis936 »

cozzyd wrote: post #443
willis936 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not my experience. Could you share an example?

well, this script, for example, gave me all sorts of fits trying to run on the then-new version of MATLAB I tried it on: http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/summaries/AEJS_v1_0.html

Ah okay. I thought you meant numerical changes, which would be reason to not trust a language.

Mathworks has broken some legacy support in the past, but they have slowed down on that practice. They used to threaten that dll loading would go away “in a future version of MATLAB” but have since backpedaled on that. My biggest issue is writing code that leverages cool new features (especially timetables) but some people I work with never update their IDE.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#448

Post by abandonliberty »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #418
ChrisRR wrote: post #12

This is similar to a case a few years back where someone asked to see the source code of a breathalyser that had found them guilty. AFAIR, the breathalyser was incorrectly averaging the readings, giving disproportional weight to the first reading. I don't know if it was enough to rule in their favour, but I'm sure it called the data into question Edit: Looks like it was a Draeger breathalyser https://www.schneier.com…

This is also similar to how Toyota hilled people with control software that would cause car to accelerate randomly. The software audit team concluded that they could not find the bug, but the code was totally unreadable and terrible. They settled. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/business/toyota-agrees-to... . Also let's remember that a company in UK was selling fake bomb detectors to Israeli and other militaries,…

Every attempt to replicate this has failed, and other vehicle manufacturers have just as many 'sudden acceleration events'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration

Occam's razer points to people just hitting the wrong pedal or people's floor mats getting stuck.

The reason Toyota ate it in the press for this was competitive.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#449

Post by azernik »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #418
ChrisRR wrote: post #12

This is similar to a case a few years back where someone asked to see the source code of a breathalyser that had found them guilty. AFAIR, the breathalyser was incorrectly averaging the readings, giving disproportional weight to the first reading. I don't know if it was enough to rule in their favour, but I'm sure it called the data into question Edit: Looks like it was a Draeger breathalyser https://www.schneier.com…

This is also similar to how Toyota hilled people with control software that would cause car to accelerate randomly. The software audit team concluded that they could not find the bug, but the code was totally unreadable and terrible. They settled. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/business/toyota-agrees-to... . Also let's remember that a company in UK was selling fake bomb detectors to Israeli and other militaries,…

From what I've seen of the Toyota case, the thing that Toyota actually got slammed on had nothing to do with control software, but was about the mechanical design of the pedals and the floor mats.

Re: Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

#450

Post by acct776 »

MereInterest wrote: post #425
belorn wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Sweden, there is a legal practice that you can't find someone guilty based on DNA evidence alone. Probabilistic evidence is nice to point law enforcement in a direction, but there is always a risk of false positives. In this case we are also dealing with probabilistic genotyping involving DNA Mixtures with DNA from several individual contributors, and most likely degraded DNA. It is the tool the police can us…

Interesting. What does Swedish law consider non-probabilistic evidence? Even something like eye-witness testimony I would consider to be probabilistic, given how easy it is to manipulate memories, even unintentionally.

Clear videographic, use of a PIN that only the accused had access to, etc
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