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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Forensic labs and companies are expert witnesses with black box processes and the incentive to protect the authority of their profession. I imagine they're also incentivised to favour a result indicating guilt.
Why? The risk to their reputation & livelihood for a false positive should temper that.
It's an important development. Forensic labs and companies are expert witnesses with black box processes and the incentive to protect the authority of their profession. They are as likely to lie as any other witness. Perhaps even moreso. "Those arguing on behalf of the defense cited past problems with other genetic testing software such as STRmix and FST (Forensic Statistical Tool). Defense expert witnesses Mats Heim…
It's important for experts to use validated, tested equipment. That's clear. And by the sound of it that is happening (stories of how code was tested and found wanting confirm that; stories of double-blind testing).
Maybe what is needed is, an 'underwriters lab' certification for such devices. To forstal the inevitable gaming of the 'right to challenge'.
Are forensic labs often get blind tested? If there is a bias for guilty cases then it should turn out in those blind tests. Source code is a red herring here, there should be independent evaluations of forensic laboratories/methodologies/etc... regardless of software source code availability. Maybe these checks are already in place, I genuinely don't know.
If there were a way to ensure that the test suite applied to these forensic labs was all-encompassing w.r.t. the genetic variables at play, then maybe. But that sounds impossible. What if there's a coding error that causes the software to operate differently/incorrectly only for people with a certain (rare) genetic abnormality?
For what it's worth, I'm totally unversed in genetics, though I have a great deal of experience writing software tests (and seeing them come up short in adequately modelling real-world data).
I kinda think that should be a violation. But deciding whether a particular piece of code is so bad is so subjective that I'm not sure on how you'd make a legal standard out of it. Maybe start with "the linter found a ratio of warnings to lines > X%" or some such.
Having a legal standard of code coherence/incoherence might help filter pull requests. "This PR cannot be merged to this project because it is configured to reject legally incoherent code."
As code becomes more complex it may become more meaningful to have access to the test suite, and to challenge the evidence if the tests are inadequate to demonstrate the correct code behavior.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say that as if these were mistakes or unfortunate culminations of circumstance. The man committed fraud and sent innocent, grieving parents to prison by proxy. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that to be 0.00% and punish those harshly who exceed that metric.
If I'm a juror, and the evidence presented happens to have a false positive rate of 1%, that certainly meets my understanding of "a reasonable doubt."
It's all tradeoffs, but "his blood was found on the murder weapon" wouldn't be sufficient for me - some childhood enemy could easily have planted a bunch of forensic evidence next to a crime scene.
It's an important development. Forensic labs and companies are expert witnesses with black box processes and the incentive to protect the authority of their profession. They are as likely to lie as any other witness. Perhaps even moreso. "Those arguing on behalf of the defense cited past problems with other genetic testing software such as STRmix and FST (Forensic Statistical Tool). Defense expert witnesses Mats Heim…
I'm not so sure we should be allowing challenges to expert witness, with no evidence. That sounds like a rich source of abuse of the system, like a big company filing thousands of briefs to delay a case. It's important for experts to use validated, tested equipment. That's clear. And by the sound of it that is happening (stories of how code was tested and found wanting confirm that; stories of double-blind testing).…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Forensic labs and companies are expert witnesses with black box processes and the incentive to protect the authority of their profession. I imagine they're also incentivised to favour a result indicating guilt.
Why? The risk to their reputation & livelihood for a false positive should temper that.
On the other side a metric which says how many times no conclusive evidence was found with DNA testing sounds more like a metric of failure (but is not, if you don't have qualitative good enough evidence including "complete enough" DNA you should not make up results which simply don't exists, but then courts ruling without conclusive evidence isn't that rare and some would say even necessary to some degree. It's just that many believe DNA tests are somehow unfailable perfects ways to prove the presence of an specific person at a specific place, but they are often not).
Without, at minimum, an independent review (and preferably open source code) the software and lab processes being used constitute an inscrutable "black box" process within which any judgment can be made, for any conceivable reason, with life-changing effects for the defendant (and for the victims of a crime if, for example, a rapist or murderer is set free by a non-match decision).
One could even say that unreviewable code here falls under the umbrella of "secret evidence", which much of the world already knows can be easily misused and/or misapplied at the whim of the court.