I read the article you linked to, and it says forensic evidence increases conviction rates a little bit. That alone suggests that somebody has been wrongfully convicted based on faulty forensic evidence. It’s also just one study.
The point is that we don’t know if any one particular piece of forensic evidence was the thing that put it over the top for one or more jurors. We should be disturbed by any invalid evidence that is presented as scientific fact in a trial.
Certainly. I’m not the one minimizing the importance of this report.
I didn’t think you were. I apologize if I gave that impression. I wasn’t responding to you. I was responding to those who are minimizing this problem.
My mistake. Carry on.
I’m willing to make inferences when hair was the only physical evidence that it was damn important in convicting some people.
Go read some more about Claude Jones. It didn’t help his cause that he committed a bank robbery three days later with his two accomplices. Or that he had 11 prior convictions for armed robbery, assault, burglary, and murder. He burned a fellow inmate to death while in a prison in Kansas, so murdering liquor store owner Allen Hilzendager wouldn’t have been something novel for Jones. The Texas Observer article itself states that either Jones or his accomplice Dixon went into the store and shot the guy. The eyewitnesses couldn’t specifically ID Jones, but described a man much like him as the shooter.
Did Jones shoot Hilzendager? I think he did, even with the recanting of Jordan’s (the 2nd accomplice) testimony and the DNA results that show that the hair used to tie Jones to the murder scene came from the victim. Though I think he did, I’d like to eliminate any possible doubt, and I can’t with this set of facts. Was he there? I think it’s reasonable to infer that he was, given his subsequent string of violent robberies with those two men, and the eyewitness testimony describing a man of his build, wearing clothing he wore that day. I believe, but am not sure, that the description given in, e.g., the 1994 Texas CCA appellate opinion, does not describe either Dixon or Jordan. (The dissenting opinion from Judge Baird is interesting reading, FWIW. It starts at Page 16 of the pdf opinion.) Since Jordan later led police to the murder weapon, a .357 Magnum bought by Jordan’s girlfriend, and the weapon was ballistically matched to the bullets recovered from Hilzendager, it seems reasonable that one of those three men committed the murder.
What I can’t figure out is why who shot Hilzendager—Jones or Dixon—even matters. IANAL, but I had thought Texas’s law of parties, Tex. Penal Code Sec. 7.02 would apply and either Jones or Dixon could be found guilty of capital murder if both were found criminally responsible parties to the offense. Maybe the law changed since the time of the murder? Or if Jones wasn’t at the scene, despite the witnesses, then of course he couldn’t be criminally responsible under these facts.
In any event, I’m much more concerned about the Cameron Willingham case being a miscarriage of justice—though I’ve said the last time that we looked at his case here, that I don’t think you can definitively say one way or the other whether he burned his kids to death—than I am that Claude Jones got the needle. Ties in criminal justice should go to the accused, and the state of Texas should not have put Willingham to death. Nor, if DNA testing had been done on the hair in the Hilzendager murder, and if that was the only corroborating non-accomplice evidence used in Jones’s conviction, should Texas have put to death Claude Jones.
As to the larger question of the scientific validity of most forensic techniques, I would have thought that I’d like nothing more than to have them forced to pass a Daubert hearing. But it turns out that Daubert’s rarely used successfully by a criminal defendant to exclude expert testimony in a criminal trial, according to this 2005 article by Peter Neufeld in the American Journal of Public Health. I thought it was interesting, and showed how much slop there is in public crime labs. Aside, are crime labs run in a blind manner—i.e., does a lab tech know when they are performing a procedure who the sample pertains to? And what results the prosecution would like to see? If they aren’t run blind, should they be?
I don’t have an answer about how you get rid of bad science being used to convict people. The vast majority of defendants don’t have the money to hire their own experts, never mind the level of research you’d need to overturn a forensic science technique. What might help is coming down like Leviathan on not just bad science, but fraudulent science like the Houston Crime Lab performed again and again, instead of holding investigation after investigation, closing and re-opening the thing, and nobody going to jail.
Even if it was only one of a number of pieces of physical evidence, can we say for certain that there wasn’t at least one juror who wouldn’t have been convinced if it weren’t for that one extra piece?
Bolding mine.
Holy Flurking Schnitt!!
Gave testimony about results from tests they didn’t even do. I can’t even wrap my head around this. 
Even if the science were 100% proven, when it’s practiced in the real world the human factor is always present.
Hang on, what? We have $300 phones nowadays that can tell people apart based on fingerprints. How is fingerprint matching not valid?
Your phone relies on your fingerprint being close enough to the captured image, and is electronically comparing the entire fingertip, pressed against the phone in exactly the way the phone software asks you to.
Forensic “fingerprint matching” takes real-world remnants of fingerprints and makes pronouncements about them “matching” a person based on nothing more than people taking guesses. As always, these people are not acting on any reliable science and are incentivized to find “matches.” Actually knowing with any certainty that a real-world fingerprint on, say, the remnants of a bomb matches a person as opposed to some other person is essentially impossible. The history of forensic fingerprinting is the same story as the other techniques – a method developed prior to 1910 by a police officer is taken on faith, with no actual modern scientific procedure interfering.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64711-2004May28.html
The problems with fingerprinting are something I find particularly disturbing.
I know that for my whole life I’ve assumed that fingerprints are incontrovertible evidence that someone touched a surface at some point. I think most people make that assumption.
The link posted by Haberdash gave me a forehead slapping moment. It’s all obvious once it’s laid out.
In fact, some of the points it lays out are things that have crossed my mind. How do we know that all prints are unique? How are prints actually compared? How can partial prints be accurate? I just assumed that the experts understood this stuff better than me and knew what they were doing! I suppose we’re all prone to “common knowledge”.
This is what I think is the key issue. Is forensic science being held up to regular scientific standards? Is there any body which is testing the procedures being used to see if they are producing valid results?
If not, then they might as well shut down crime labs and go with psychics. You’d get equally valid results for less money.
And then’s the whole separate issue of integrity. The best testing procedure in the world is useless or worse if the people using it aren’t honest.
That case isn’t really realted to this issue at all. The prosecution erroneously claimed the hair found matched the defendants’ DNA, not that it matched him based on faulty science. They seemingly just lied. Notice that actual testing exposed their lie for the record. While the whole thing is an egregious violation, it has nothing to do with what we are discussing AFAICT.
Sure, I am open to being proved wrong on this point.
No, it doesn’t. A statistical insignificant difference is meaningless. That’s why the researcher unequivocally stated: " Forensics had no bearing on the outcome at all… it was not a significant predictor of the district attorney charging the case and had no relation to actually getting a conviction."
Yes, we should. But that is very different from saying we know if had an effect, or that people have died because of this.
We can reasonably infer that similar factual cases, which differ only based on the presentation of physical evidence, having similar outcomes means that the evidence probably wasn’t as demonstrative in the eyes of jurors.
If we’re discussing the Claude Jones case—the State never claimed the hair’s DNA matched Jones’s. The trial was in 1994; I don’t think DNA comparison testing was mature yet. The witness claimed the hair was similar to Jones’s, and no one else’s at the crime scene, probably via comparison microscopic examination. FWIW, Judge Baird in the opinion I linked didn’t think much of that evidence either. Prescient guy.
It was in reference to the Santae Tribble case linked to earlier. To quote the article:
You have no idea what “statistical” means.
Where do you think I have erred in my understanding?
Whether “cases without forensic evidence” have similar conviction rates to “cases with forensic evidence” does not tell you anything whatsoever about whether the forensic evidence made the difference in the latter cases. You cannot escape the flawed design of this experiment by doing any kind of math on the data gathered under its erroneous assumption. I’m not at all surprised that a “criminal justice” professor made this basic error – and reading the paper, it’s amazing that he made no attempts to his his biases – there are no “convictions” just “successful case outcomes.” Anyone being acquitted is a “failure” because we are all guilty in the eyes of God, according to Ira Sommers and you. This is the mentality of the police, the prosecutor, and the “crime labs” staffed by ditzy grads of “criminal justice” community college programs who understand that their job is to find whatever “matches” they are told to by their bosses.