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  1. #51
    Veteran Wild Cobra's Avatar
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    Mouse and Cosmored would be great at it. They have a real good imagination to make up how something went down, and if you look for supporting evidence, it can almost always be found for most hypothesis.

  2. #52
    Moss is Da Sauce! mouse's Avatar
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    But after my findings will the text books in schools be updated?

  3. #53
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    fake/shoddy forensics have a human cost:

    The Timothy Cole Exoneration Review Commission continues to trundle along months after your correspondent left its ranks and is scheduled to meet Thursday, September 15th at 1:00 p.m. in the House Appropriations Committee Room, Texas Capitol Extension Room #E1.030. The Office of Court Administration posted links to the Agenda, Meeting Book, Appendix, and Media clips for this and prior meetings. The meeting will be broadcast live on the House of Representatives website here.


    Among other do ents, the "meeting book" this time contains a joint power-point presentation from the Harris County DA and Public Defender on the rash of drug exonerations in that county stemming from a combination of over-aggressive drug enforcement and faulty field tests. Their update included a reminder that quite a few falsely convicted people in this episode served out their full sentences without ever being notified they were en led to relief. Just to try out something new, here are a few screenshot-highlights from that presentation collected into a brief slideshow:



    The difficulties faced in notifying defendants eligible for relief, much less equipping them with counsel if they have a viable claim, are neither new nor unique to this episode. Rather, it's a problem the state confronts in multiple situations where large-scale forensic and/or other errors potentially taint large classes of cases instead of one or two convictions. These are not problems with obviously great solutions, but identifying them and talking about ways to improve on past failings is a good place to start.
    http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.co...cted-drug.html

  4. #54
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    There is a case where the BLACK guy, of course, was exonerated, and he knew it, but the PIC wouldn't let him go.

  5. #55
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    DOJ Tells Forensic Experts To Stop Overstating The 'Scientific Certainty' Of Presented Evidence

    The DOJ is finally addressing some long-ignored problems with the forensic evidence its prosecutors rely on. For two decades, FBI forensics experts handed out flawed testimony in hundreds of criminal cases, routinely overstating the certainty of conclusions reached by forensic examination. Of those cases, 28 ended in death penalty verdicts.

    An earlier attempt to address issues with flawed science and flawed testimony swiftly ran aground. Federal judge Jed S. Rakoff very publicly resigned from a committee formed to examine these issues after he was informed by the attorney general's office that he wasn't actually supposed to be examining these issues.

    Caleb Mason of Brown, White & Osborn (the "White" is Popehat's Ken White) reports that the DOJ appears to be taking these problems more seriously. It has issued a directive [PDF] forbidding forensic experts from making claims about "scientific certainty" when presenting evidence.

    Directive Number 1 provides that agencies must now “ensure that forensic examiners are not using the expressions ‘reasonable scientific certainty’ in their reports or testimony.” Yes, you read that right. The Department of Justice is telling its forensic expert witnesses to stop claiming “scientific certainty.” Why? Because for most forensic disciplines, there never was any, and DOJ is—after decades of resistance—admitting it.

    One of the forms of evidence is fingerprints, the thing every law enforcement agency makes sure to obtain when booking suspects because it's supposedly so infallible. But like almost everything else law enforcement forensic experts claim are reasonably certain, scientifically-speaking, examination of prints no more guarantees a match than examining bite marks.

    Fingerprint examiners look for “matching points” in prints, but believe it or not, there are no general standards for which points to look at, how many points to look at, or even what counts as a “point.” Not only are there no established standards, there isn’t even general agreement within the forensic analysis community. Some people like eight points, others ten, others twelve. Many examiners insist they can make an identification with just a single point.


    Even more amazingly, in stark contrast to DNA matching, no one knows what the statistical likelihood is of two fingerprints sharing particular points, or whether that likelihood is different for different regions or features of the print. This is the crucial question for any identification methodology, because while each person’s fingerprints may be unique, the examiner doesn’t look at every molecule—the examiner looks at whatever five (or eight, or ten) “points” he or she chooses to look at.

    Why is this process still so vague even after decades of reliance on it for identifying suspects? Well, it's because the DOJ won't allow anyone other than the government to take a look at the collected records.

    Researchers who may have been able to make better determinations on how many points are needed for more definitive matches (or how often false positives are returned by the database) have been locked out by the DOJ.

    But the big fingerprint databases are controlled by DOJ, and DOJ has steadfastly refused to let researchers use them for the types of analyses geneticists do with DNA.

    That’s what makes print analysis so frustrating: the data exists, so fingerprint analysis could be a genuine scientific discipline, with publicly-available databases, peer-reviewed research, known error rates, and accepted methodologies.

    It could be a real body of knowledge about the differential rates of occurrence among populations of particular physical features of our fingerprints. Hopefully one day it will be. But it’s not now, as the DOJ directives finally acknowledge.

    https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...evidence.shtml

  6. #56
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    Fake science was used to convict the San Antonio Four:

    http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/...cience-w444481

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