I can’t quote more than that but I’ll just add that in many of cases the hair analysis was not the only evidence, so hopefully there aren’t thousands of wrongful convictions, although there are possibly a large number.
I have to wonder how many other forensic “experts” are full of crap. I seem to recall bite mark evidence being discredited. What else? Shaken baby syndrome? Arson experts? Fingerprints? Do I even need to mention so-called facilitated communications?
Do we put too much trust in “forensic science”? How much of it is really science? How much has been subjected to proper peer reviewed studies? Is it ever fabricated or just plain mistaken and, if so, how can we know?
Basically every bit of “forensic science” is hand-waving woo developed outside all scientific norms, and practiced by people who are given financial incentives to lie.
The stuff you listed is part of the junk – the entire notion that you can inspect the charred remains of a burnt building and determine whether it was arson is garbage, as is just about any use of fingerprints. Don’t forget handwriting matches, ballistic matching of bullets to guns, and bite mark analysis.
The only thing regularly used in court that I can think of with any real validity is DNA matching, and even then, it’s being done by labs that work for the police and are clearly told that their continued employment depends on giving the results the police want.
First, physical evidence is not used nearly as often in real life as many would think, and it doesn’t really improve conviction rates:
Second, no one type of evidence is all it’s cracked up to be, which is the reason why most trials have multiple types or pieces of evidence employed to convict a defendant. We now know things like eyewitness testimony and confessions are often unreliable as well. The point being that it’s hard to solve and crime, and no piece of evidence including DNA is conclusive of guilt in a great number of circumstances. So while it’s troubling that an entire branch of “science” seems to have been undermined, I am not sure we should be as troubled by this in terms of getting the wrong results.
Personally, I’m troubled both by the junkification of science to railroad defendants and the fact that the American education system produced even one person who can say with a straight face “Well, he was probably guilty anyway.”
It’s also ironic that the person cited by our local “anyone who is arrested must be guilty” vigilante is a “professor of criminal justice.” A person with no scientific training who works in a fake discipline designed to give aspiring security guards something to major in at community college thinks that the police are always right. What a surprise.
He has a doctorate in social work. I have no idea if that involves substantial scientific training but presumably it requires at least some psychology and statistics.
The standards for responsible use of data in social science today are pretty low, and I’m guessing they were even worse in a social work program in the 1980s. He’s certainly bringing enormous biases to the table when looking at the question of whether the police lie. Part of the issue, for those who have been following the WaPo’s articles, is that even professional defense witnesses won’t challenge the basis of garbage like hair analysis because they’d be out of a job too if they couldn’t discuss the particulars of every case in court.
I want to debate this, but I’m too disgusted. Is there anyone who didn’t believe the US had never executed an innocent person, who will now have the scales fall from their eyes?
Cops and prosecutors decide who’s guilty and lean on them, and there’s no science in most of this bullshit diagnosis - hair, fire patterns, bite analysis, even fingerprints.
We certainly put innocent people to death because we have the death penalty. That in and of itself has nothing to do with this.
Did you read the article I linked to? The fact is the the use of physical evidence by and large doesn’t increase conviction rates, so the idea that faulty hair comparisons alone led to these people’s deaths is dubious. Doesn’t make it right, but it is likely not supported by the evidence. Unless you have a cite to offer or a compelling reason to think people died because of this, I think you should rethink this.
Your position is that prosecutors should be allowed to lie in court because the defendant was probably going to be convicted anyway, and this in and of itself isn’t an indictment of the justice system but merely a reflection of the fact that everyone is probably guilty of like, original sin or something.
Would you be more comfortable living in North Korea? Certainly any reasonable person would be happier with you there than possibly serving on a jury here.
How about the one I cited upthread? Getting fingered by your criminal pals isn’t enough to let Texas execute a guy, but a hair that was not his got him executed.
The Innocence Project says 9 people have been executed in these 268 cases. I’m trying to find the other 4. Would you be interested in looking? Or is it just easier to assume the hair didn’t matter?
There is no scientific validity whatsoever to hair analysis, ballistic matching, arson investigation, bite mark matching, handwriting analysis, or fingerprint matching.
All of these techniques were developed within police and prosecution environments and not by scientists, and none of them have survived proper scientific review.
In addition to the fact that the underlying techniques are just as valid as phrenology or psychic readings, it is also the case that “crime labs” are staffed by employees of the police and prosecutor and understand that their job is to get convictions, not do honest science. In many cases, this is reinforced by an explicit policy of not paying the crime lab unless a “match” is found.
These are all true facts. Asserting that “he was probably guilty anyway” or trying to start a debate about the death penalty do not change either the above objectively true facts, nor the moral consequences of ignoring them.