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Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

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Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#51

Post by FireBeyond »

hiatus wrote: post #16
Lord-Jobo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main concern here is that the system is being nearly entirely bypassed. Literally 98% of cases plea out^1, bypassing the entire system of court procedure that is supposed to resolve these issues. 1: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...

Submitting a plea is part of court procedure, and I'd also point out that the data you shared is for US federal cases, which have a notoriously high rate of conviction which could explain why people are quick to plea out. > In fiscal year 2022, only 290 of 71,954 defendants in federal criminal cases – about 0.4% – went to trial and were acquitted, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest available st…

The US is one of the only jurisdictions in the world to use the plea bargain, and it uses it so much more than even the others that do that it’s absurd.

And in most other places where it’s even an option it’s subject to much more rigorous scrutiny and pushback than here.

It will never go away here without a lot of effort, because prosecutors love it because they get to hype their “conviction rates” for re election. There are huge swathes of evidence of people pleading out while factually innocent because they can’t afford the cost (public defenders aren’t incentivized here - you need your own counsel), stress, inconvenience, and beyond.

Plea bargains, as implemented in the US, are a huge system drive by perverse incentives.

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#52

Post by [deleted] »

throw0101d wrote: post #13

See also: > The Phantom of Heilbronn, often alternatively referred to as the "Woman Without a Face", was a hypothesized unknown female serial killer whose existence was inferred from DNA evidence found at numerous crime scenes in Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009. The six murders among these included that of police officer Michèle Kiesewetter, in Heilbronn, Germany on 25 April 2007. > The only connection…

[deleted]

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#53

Post by bnralt »

linuxftw wrote: post #25
bnralt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve had numerous cases here where prosecutors declined to press charges or gave a small amount of time as part of a sweetheart plea deal, and the criminal went on and killed someone. We’ve also had cases where the judge let a violent criminal out before trial and they killed someone. Should we make the judges and prosecutors culpable in those situations as well? If you have strong penalties for the criminal justice…

That's not how the justice system is supposed to work. Better to let 10 guilty go free than convict 1 innocent.

Do you really think there should be no limit to the state refusing to protect citizens from violent criminals?

Here are a few recent examples from my city:

Woman’s violent stalked is let out of prison early. Goes and threatens woman, who calls police. Prosecutors decline the case. Goes back and beats up woman. Prosecutors decline the case. Goes back and murders the woman[1].

Woman is caught on video trying to murder someone with a gun. Plea bargain is given where she serves no time. Soon afterwards she’s charged with murdering someone else[2]. Little to no time for trying to murder someone with a gun is surprisingly common here.

A guy is found with an illegal gun, but judges toss the case because they said the police officers weren’t allowed to ask if the man had a gun before approaching him. Days later, he’s charged with murder[3].

Man shoots several people and murders one in a mass shooting. Is arrested, but judge let’s him out before trial. Over the course of the next two years, he’s arrested several times for other crimes, but is still allowed to walk around free awaiting trial (this is a mass shooter!). Finally is arrested again after two separate shooting incidents, including shooting a gun into a house with a baby inside[4].

Violent criminal with a long history commits an armed robbery with a gun, but it allowed to walk free awating sentencing even after another judge said he was too violent to be released. Skips out of sentencing for weeks, then stabs a woman to death.[5]

It actually took me a while to dig these up, because I just had to go from memory about local cases I came across the past couple of years, and these things aren’t well documented or reported on (I had to go to Bing to find an local article about the mass shooter who’s been allowed to walk around committing crimes for years, because Googling his name didn’t bring up articles). It’s fine to say we should err on the side of innocence, but at some point you’re erring on letting violent criminals murder people.

[1] https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/stalking-murder-... [2] https://dccrimefacts.substack.com/p/call-them-they-wont-do-a... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/25/dc-murder... [4] https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/maryland/gerald-tho... [5] https://www.fox5dc.com/news/woman-stabbed-to-death-inside-iv...

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#54

Post by flir »

toast0 wrote: post #41
Lord-Jobo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main concern here is that the system is being nearly entirely bypassed. Literally 98% of cases plea out^1, bypassing the entire system of court procedure that is supposed to resolve these issues. 1: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...

You're already quite a bit down the funnel if you're talking about % of cases. If the feds have a high bar before opening a case, it's not immediately unreasonable that most of the cases are managed with plea bargains. It might be better to look at the process beginning with arrests or beginning with investigations.

In the Horizon Post Office case in the UK[1], over 700 individuals were convicted based on false accounting data.

I can't find what percentage of that total pleaded guilty, but I did find[2]: "Of the 39 successful appellants in the Post Office Scandal, 35 had pleaded guilty to at least one charge against them."

Personally, I'm not feeling 100% confident in the adversarial system right now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal [2] https://evidencebasedjustice.exeter.ac.uk/false-guilty-pleas...

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#55

Post by dekhn »

jansan wrote: post #15

Do people know about the Phantom of Heilbronn? For 15 years, police in Germany found DNA of one and the same person on about 40 different crime scenes. The crimes seemed to be completely unrelated, including murder, burglary, theft and even disputes between neighbors. This person was labeled "The Phantom" and all that was known aws that she was a female (XX chromosme type female). Everyone agreed that she must have b…

Much of science involves the eliminate of false positives (this is a great example).

Throughout my career as scientist (I'm an ex-scientist now) and machine learning, I came to the conclusion that false positive rates must be kept extremely low for people to trust the system, because of the consequence of false positives.

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#56

Post by bborud »

DNA evidence is scary because we have decades of experiences and milestones saying that it isn't as simple and clear cut as we think it is, and still we treat it is hard, inarguable truth. Even though history teaches us we should know better.

It is one of those things that reminds me that most people with a science degree do not actually practice science.

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#57

Post by BobaFloutist »

jerf wrote: post #44
jansan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Trust the science" always must be taken with a grain of salt.

This is another example of the "probability noise floor" I mentioned yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39112610 You can't be one-in-a-trillion confident about any particular DNA result, even if that's what the nominal probability from the DNA analysis itself seems to say, because it is objectively observable that there are plenty of other sources of errors of all sorts. You can only get down to that "no…

It's almost a corollary to how a lot of magic tricks work. Sure, you probably could sneak a card from one place to another, but why not just have a second card?

You could predict someone's behavior, but why not simply hedge against every possibility?

Magic does involve a good amount of sleight of hand, but it mostly relies on getting people to accept flawed premises. The most essential part of any given trick is the bit where you tell them what's going to happen: even as they reject it and try to bring skepticism to bear, they're often working off of (carefully placed) incorrect assumptions.

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#58

Post by psunavy03 »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #45
karmakaze wrote: post #21

> [...] he confessed after a series of lengthy interrogations that several experts have described as coercive. Police found plenty of male DNA at the scene, and it did not match Tapp's. But the prosecutor and jury believed his confession. This story isn't even about DNA evidence.

Confessions need to be made inadmissible in court as evidence. All state legislatures have the power to make that so, as does Congress at the federal level. The judicial system could do it too, in theory, but never will. Confessions could still be used by police as leads. While all "eyewitness testimony" is defective evidence, confessions are the most defective of all. Humans have weird psychology, but the psychology…

> Humans have weird psychology, but the psychology around confessions is the weirdest of all. It's why it's been exploited by the Catholic religion (and others). It causes strange (and not always unpleasant) emotions in those confessing, those hearing the confession, and even those confessing falsely.

The purpose of confession in the religious sense has nothing to do with the purpose of confession in the judicial sense. The judicial purpose is to convict you of a crime. The religious purpose is to examine your flaws with a trusted counselor (in this case a member of the clergy), and try to become a better person. I hope it's obvious why these are not the same.

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#59

Post by huytersd »

jansan wrote: post #31
bradyd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was also the case where a DNA test of a woman's children showed that they did not share any of her DNA. Social Services was threatening to take them away from her. When she had another child, the court ordered an officer to be present during the birth and collect DNA from both of them at that time. Even still the DNA "proved" she was not the mother. It was only after another similar case was discovered that the…

"Trust the science" always must be taken with a grain of salt.

The tiniest of grains because chimeras are effectively non existent in the society. This literally works for 99.999999% of people.

Re: Forensics Gone Wrong: When DNA Snares the Innocent (2016)

#60

Post by cmiller1 »

jMyles wrote: post #38
jansan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Trust the science" always must be taken with a grain of salt.

"Trust the science", a refrain we of course heard over and over again used to justify questionable (and often coincidentally highly profitable) interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic, is already a contradiction in terms. The entire basis for being so enamored with science, as so many of us are, is that it provides a method for establishing facts without needing trust. Despite the noise to the contrary, we live in…

> justify questionable (and often coincidentally highly profitable) interventions

What interventions might those be? I'm only aware of the interventions that time and time again have been proven to be highly effective that were implemented here, masking, improved guidelines for hygiene, distancing, and vaccination.

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