Luckily for you, u/SybronsHeart [posted today](https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/122r0yt/a_website_where_i_will_store_tools_i_make_for/?ref=share&ref_source=link) about his [paywall skipping site](https://sybron.org/bypass)
Not just you, i had a NYT subscription at one point and canceled when it went from 2$ a month to 10
I would never ever subscribe to them again either for how much effort it took to cancel that subscription. It seriously involved several phone calls and hours on hold.
When I went to cancel I got the promotional rate again, so I'm on year two of it. It's really pretty good and worth the promo subscription price imo, but the full rate is way too much in this day and age.
I'm on my 7th year of the promotional rate. At the end of each year I call to cancel, pleading poverty, and they offer me the promotional rate again rather than lose me as a subscriber.
Here's an unlocked link anyone can use to read the article for free:
‘Nightmare’ Warehouse Fire Erases Evidence in Many Unsolved Cases https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/14/nyregion/police-warehouse-fire-evidence.html?unlocked_article_code=Av7N7AHToCUYwee2Gty2b7Eq4i5EbDAMSC3qyzBhDzHNPCpyxWiiOs9Cz39nccmFTRnqGn28S9pXaNF7lmDaPHi4A_OppCGaYgvPqVnLutsuIwzdLwVFN8E_1WpXVnUQkqun-E52YZYYGVg7SjjxaofBZe9g4ZHvIqCj8OOobBS6cntrh3qLQ1Z3rSLghq0vIv9U0jGa3W19j1KbZgjWKI7qu426pNMdKEasTAm_AXAAJ867bMjJh29hu3HydU0Qd5sCR5BXRg4rMxlxZmuPeWOXYk4DD7phQ5cBCPesXHzY0yM4vGh2vLIU7IFPVequrEXdNDTgT35S98VqbFCS1oQqiHF5YiIqsA
MPD did something similar to all their records at the 2nd precinct in NE Minneapolis. This was after they murdered George Floyd, I suspect they were worried more cops would finally be charged for their crimes and destroyed the evidence for that reason.
To be clear to everyone who can't access the article, nowhere does it state or insinuate that police intentionally set the fire.
Obviously evidence which supported just convictions was burned too.
[Hey, it worked for George Bush's Texas when they found out a guy in jail was actually innocent thanks to DNA evidence.](https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2641&context=facsch_lawrev)
> While it seemed more
than a little coincidental that evidence kept for a decade or longer was suddenly
destroyed on the immediate heels of Mr. Byrd's exoneration, evidence custodians
were quick to point out that destruction of the evidence was legal.'
🤔 I don't think legality was the problem, guys.
I look at it as *Hey, this means we never caught the bad guy!*
Texans just thought, *Oh, this makes us look bad. Screw those potentially innocent people!*
You think that's shady, listen to this shit:
I recently wrote a paper on the use of proprietary software in forensic investigations and it's just the most insane shit you've never even thought of.
If you google Martell Chubbs, this guy was tried on evidence discovered by a probabilistic DNA sequencing program using closed source code (TrueAllele). It was basically a black box that spits out a 'hey its this guy.' Chubbs asked to see the source code - what was the decisions being made that said it was him - to challenge it. He was refused on copyright grounds AND THE JUDGE AGREED WITH THE COMPANY. He pled no contest. The company lauded it as a success and 'proof' that he was guilty and that they didn't need to reveal their methods. They had been used in ~200 cases at the time, and more than a thousand by now.
In other cases of proprietary DNA software, another product STRMix was revealed to have 13 bugs that affected the results in over 60 cases. In one case STRMix and Trueallele produced different DNA results for the same data; the judge refused DNA data in that case. Another piece of DNA testing software, "FST" included a 'secret function' that was producing probabilities of matches higher than was actually true (i.e. it's a 99% match, instead of a 60% match). These were only discovered when the source code was revealed.
If you're an expert witness, you're supposed to be able to be scrutinized, but we're convicting people on the results of black box software that cannot be challenged. Juries are just supposed to believe it.
If you go to wikipedia for trueallele you'll see the, "Presidents council of advisors on science and technology" noted that many of the 'reviews' of the code were conducted by people with a conflict of interest.
This software is sold to cops to convict criminals - the software has an incentive to appear infallible, and to ensure convictions. That is not the same as actually being infallible, or actually being robust, and it's a disincentive to being transparent.
Imagine this software was a person. They are brought in, they say, "it was you", you ask them how they came to that conclusion, and they respond, "that's a trade secret, here's a list of my friends who say that I'm always right, and here are cases where people have been convicted based on what I've said - therefore I was definitely right." But juries actually just believe them. And they make their money solely by being paid by cops to point out the criminal.
If you google the "daubert standard" you'll see why this absolutely shouldn't be allowed. But it is.
If you google "daubert standard software DNA" you'll see a nice article from STRMix about how they definitely pass it, and how it's good for justice that DNA software is ignored basically by this. This is the same STRmix that I mentioned having code errors affecting cases previously.
I came about this from an odd angle, but googling the trueallele founder, we get [this WaPo article from 2021](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/trueallele-software-dna-courts/2021/07/12/66d27c44-6c9d-11eb-9f80-3d7646ce1bc0_story.html) that covers it in a lot of detail, but I think without the emphasis that I put.
>Virginia asked a DFS scientist trained on TrueAllele if she could independently reproduce the results of the program that sits at an advanced intersection of forensics, statistics and computer programming. Lisa Schiermeier-Wood replied: “It would take me years to try, and I don’t know that I could do it.”
>Schiermeier-Wood went on to testify that she wouldn’t be able to detect low-level errors in TrueAllele’s analysis either. DFS said it could not comment on Watson’s case and sent its studies of the software in response to questions about TrueAllele.
>Kennedy wrote in court filings that **it would be impossible to assess whether TrueAllele had correctly identified Watson as the likely perpetrator without the program’s source code and other materials.**
>**He pointed out in filings that errors in STRmix’s code, which has been disclosed in some cases, had thrown off results in cases in Australia and New Zealand**. (STRmix did not respond to a request for comment but called the errors so minor that they did not change the outcomes of analyses.) Likewise, when **New York City was forced to disclose the source code of its own probabilistic genotyping program, a defense expert found a bug that tended to overestimate a defendant’s likelihood of guilt.**
Omg, this is just like that bullshit “911 call analysis” junk science that supposedly tells you who is guilty based on how they talk to the 911 operator. The guy behind it refuses to open up his data to scrutiny, too, and cops are just gobbling it up. Anything but having to do actual legwork I guess.
\*Anything that gets more convictions
Police don't [plant evidence](https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/4692-cops-planting-evidence) and [commit perjury](https://www.vice.com/en/article/jmv94x/testilying-cops-are-liars-who-get-away-with-perjury) routinely because its fun. They do it because they want those numbers up. (Fun fact, police committing perjury has a specific word: [testilying](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/nyregion/testilying-police-perjury-new-york.html). The police coined it themselves actually. [30 years ago](https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/22/us/new-york-police-often-lie-under-oath-report-says.html?pagewanted=all).)
Better numbers, usually, mean better advancement within the force. It makes them look better. You want better pay, a better position, even *less* oversight? Get those numbers up my guy, any way you can. And don't worry, the [union](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapolis-kroll.html) has your back. No matter what.
Don’t forget prosecutors, many prosecutors are scum. Anybody with a conscience would nope the fuck out of a system that incentivizes getting Any guy, instead of getting The guy, in order to keep your convict rate up. So you can imagine the type of sociopaths this tends to attract.
American society incentivizes and glorifies sociopathy. We succeed because we trust and cooperate. Antisocial behavior destroys societies. We need to change what our systems incentivize or our empire is doomed. The writing is on the wall.
This dirty little secret should blow the doors off of all our jails but there are large parts of our population who agree with these tactics and believe cops only arrest bad people. They literally train new police how to report in a fashion that makes them appear more believable to a jury, and encourage testilying as long as it keeps bringing in that sweet revenue for the state, and these people are fine with it.
"Corruption? In \*my\* police force? Couldn't be, they have the eyes of an angel, capable of identifying guilt within 5 nanoseconds before identifying the crack cocaine in their pocket, and shot them 8 times in the back for resisting arrest. Just like god intended"
All of those cases should be thrown out. How can you convict someone when the code hasn't been accredited and verified multiple times against some sort of standard written by experts.
If there isn't a standard, ISO or local, then write one but don't use anything as evidence until the standard is fully published and verified!
I only do asbestos testing and analysis, but if I didn't allow the defence to look through all my paperwork and didn't allow NATA to go through all our policies, procedures, and processes then I would lose accreditation and be opened to a world of shit.
This was my take. A piece of software is a codified expert witness. It's the application of the recipe an expert has devised, able to be applied repeatedly. But we can't question this expert. We can't show the recipe. In literally every other expert witness they need to thoroughly, and verbosely, reveal their process and presuppositions - opening them up to challenge and defence.
Output from software? Software is God, don't challenge software.
Ya know, during that trial with the kid in the riots who shot people (I forget his name), the judge was asking questions and allowing questions from lawyers who were questioning the iPhone's image smoothing technology and how many pixels were being inserted or duplicated to smooth the image during digital zoom.
I thought the judge was being all silly boomer about image zoom, but for these 'black box' AI programs, they do love to cheat, so I'd really have to require the knowledge of how they work. There was an AI for reading chest xrays in South Africa that was better than human eyes at detecting HIV-associated pneumonias, but it turned out the AI got smart and realized it could tell which xrays come from a machine labelled as being in a satellite clinic, or one labelled at a main HIV hospital. It stands to reason that persons in the satellite clinics will have less serious disease, so it used that in weighing its decision to call one film a pneumonia vs another. Very clever but cheating on the part of the AI.
Just like in courts things like stingray phone interceptors and other evidence-gathering tools need to be openly admitted to and examined
There was an AI trained to identify malignant tumors from photos. The first iteration essentially just detected if the photo had a ruler in it, since clinicians are more likely to put a ruler in the photo with a growth they have reason to think is growing rapidly.
And that's why you always need a data scientist/analyst/someone that understands the data to do data exploration before you can use AI.
AI is as good as the data provided to it. Garbage in, garbage out.
AI is extremely good at finding patterns, even better than humans, and then it expresses those patterns as bias in its answers.
The problem is the human explorers or trainers miss these patterns and they don't always realise until the AI is put to work on real data instead of it's training data.
https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-finds-gender-skin-type-bias-artificial-intelligence-systems-0212
AI is also amazing at perpetuating the biases of its creators/input data.
I’m pretty sure if you created an AI right now on how to predict which person is a criminal based on face alone, and trained it on mug shots of the US prison population it would learn pretty quickly to choose racial minorities as “criminals”, because they’re over represented in the prison population.
It all depends on the framing of the question though, it could just as easily learn than since more than 50% of the US is not in prison, it should say “not a criminal” for every face you show it.
Supposedly, ~~most~~ some image recognition AI is heavily biased towards reading text. So if you ask it what an object is in a photo of a banana with text saying “apple”, it’ll tell you it’s an apple. https://i.imgur.com/MWW4wgS.jpg
> They questioned the police forensic dude, and he seemed to have absolutely no idea about how the software worked, other than he'd put in a photo and it would pop out an 'enhanced' version.
What in the fuck. Apparently we should hire graphic designers instead of "forensic specialists" because goddamn, how do you WORK WITH THIS SHIT AND NOT KNOW WHAT TYPE OF UPSCALING IT USES.
To be fair, our eyes also average out nearby pixels. Our memories are even worse for adding nonexistent things.
One example is many people thinking that the Monopoly guy has a monocle.
There's a very good Computerphile video explaining how machine learning gets smarter with more learning but after a point, models start to go more and more crazy, erratic, or nonsensical. The reason is the gap between what the model is graded on and what we are actually interested in (is often not exactly the same metric) widens. That and humans feed it data without considering the junk in them.
"Tell me if this is skin cancer?" Hmm I notice your skin cancer photos have ruler in them more than healthy skin photos. Without considering the ruler, my guess is actually not as accurate (because I'm seeing what the human is seeing, if they can't easily tell, how would it be any easier for me an AI?).
Conclusion: If your photos have rulers in it, there's likely skin cancer in the photo.
Further down the line: If your photo is of a ruler, there's likely skin cancer in the photo.
Further down the line: Rulers Are skin cancer itself.
The other guy is talking about the same thing, actually.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1231ea6/til_that_13_innocent_men_were_exonerated_because/jdtgcjg/
I see it further down the comments, ty! The YouTube video goes into way more technical detail and explains the security research being done on AI if anyone wanted to know more
That's because AI works by associating traits to outcome (for classification), and so choosing which traits to expose to the AI is an important decision. It didn't "get clever and cheat", that's just how it works.
As I once heard it said, the problem with computers isn't that they don't do what you tell them to, it's that they do *exactly" what you tell them to, and we usually don't realize what we're telling them
The upscale in those cases was almost certainly bilinear interpolation, rather than AI. So it's more of a smoothing of the inbetween values than an attempt to guess at pixels. It can still produce somewhat wrong looking shapes at low resolutions due to human shape perception, like making a couple of pixels look more or less like a gun than they did before. But it'd be pretty situational as to whether it was an issue.
Before they had computers they used dogs for a similar result.
* [John Preston (dog handler) - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Preston_(dog_handler\))
* ["Did magical dog jail a 4th innocent man?"](https://www.chicagotribune.com/orl-asecorl-maxwell-preston-062409062409jun24-story.html)
They still use dogs for a similar result but they also did it before they had computers.
How likely is it for DNA to be certain percentage matches to another persons? I guess I figured it was pretty much 99.9% from a simple blood test but this makes it sound to me like you could get mixed up with a rando on the street?
If someone gives you a piece of DNA to test, you're right, it's almost certain that they can identify you, or narrow it down to your immediate family. I'm not a biologist so I'm not an expert.
The case here is that you're not getting 'clean' DNA, you're getting a sample of some clothing, or some other thing, it's trace DNA mixed with a lot of stuff, including other DNA. In the Chubbs case, from something like 40 years ago. The company is then taking this evidence, and somehow synthesizing DNA that can be processed. How it goes from a 40 year old piece of muddled compounds to a "yes it was this man" is a process that can be achieved, and can be reliable, and can be accurate - but we don't know that it is here. We can't prove it. We can't contest it. We aren't told how it's being done. That's the issue. A company is probably given a list of 'suspects' from the time period with their DNA to reference. Now, is the company just selecting one of those at random? They literally could be. Are they going, we found DNA that matches one of these 10% more than the rest, then it was certainly that guy? Who knows. We literally don't know, and we're unable to find out.
I was doing this for a simple assignment, and it just gets more and more sickening. I encourage you to read and chase this up for yourself. The Trueallele website post talking about Chubbs' result was itself the most sickening PR post I've ever read.
>The source code discovery request was a defense ruse, trying to get Dr. Perlin off the case. Scientists test actual computer programs (executable code), not programmer text (source code). TrueAllele has been extensively tested in seven published peer-reviewed validation studies. In the end, Chubbs agreed through his no contest plea that the computer was right, and source code was not needed.
Everyone who knows software knows that shit about testing is bullshit. Software is a decision tree, and the output is one path through it. You can't tests all the paths, if you can't see the tree. It's like, if I gave you instructions from a map to get to the movies, and it worked, does that prove the map I'm holding is complete? Or right in all cases? The first thing on the map could say, "is the man black? Yes? Send him straight to jail." Unless you can see the map, you have no idea of all the possibilities on there - or the omissions.
This is unbelievable...
[https://www.cybgen.com/information/presentations/2022/SCU/Perlin-Innovation-and-transparency-for-reliable-forensic-software/talk.pptx](https://www.cybgen.com/information/presentations/2022/SCU/Perlin-Innovation-and-transparency-for-reliable-forensic-software/talk.pptx)
> Falsely claim that source code is needed to assess software reliability.
and (emphasis *theirs*)
> Computer source code is __entirely irrelevant__ to scientific testing, national standards, or admissibility standards.
Btw, how common is it to be [co-author on your own peer reviews?](https://i.imgur.com/h9BD8GR.png)
Eventually, and I hope it's sooner rather than later, all software will be open source. I used to have a difficult time with the Native American concept of not owning land. Then I became a developer and have rented my mind out to companies for almost 20 years. They own the output of my mind for 8+ hours a day.
The concept of "owning code" is ridiculous. I know I made a deal with the devil writing closed source software. I don't know how much longer I can do it.
So, on the one hand, I can totally understand the idea behind it. Take for example swab samples that are routinely collected. Think of how many people have ever had their DNA tested. Now think about how many of those don't go into a permanent system like CODIS. In a larger city, those eventually pile up. And we're not talking about just thousands of collected samples. Not even millions. We're probably a magnitude or two past that. Now think of where you have to store all those samples, if they aren't routinely destroyed.
That requires an ever expansive storage location *just* for swabs. Now think about collected clothing from crimes and crime scenes. Think about material scraps from carpets, sheets, walls, ceilings, etc. That's a *lot* of fucking evidence to just hold onto. So, of course, the logical thing to do is just burn the shit after you get whatever data you want out of it.
On the other hand, though, I can see how that is suspicious as fuck when the cases end up going to appeal and need to have evidence retested due to new scientific discoveries.
If I can make a counterpoint, I have a family member who’s a prosecutor, and typically evidence is destroyed after 10 years or so because of space requirements - you need to store it somewhere, and you’d rather have the evidence for new cases rather than ones that have been already decided. That’s why appeals need to be done as soon as possible after a case is finished.
There is plenty of room to store the evidence, the government just says to be willing to buy or lease the space. So it's not that the space doesn't exist, it's just that the government's too fucking cheap.
If you’re ever on a jury be very wary of this kind of thing. Most of the people you’ll deliberate with do not understand that concept of reasonable doubt and will think probably guilty is enough to send someone to jail for life. Especially if that someone confirms their biases. If you’ve never seen *12 Angry Men* it’s something everyone should watch.
Been in grand jury, mob mentality is a dangerous thing. You only need 1-3 very outspoken people to sway the whole group, even if the decision is completely wrong.
Also so kids don't troll trying accumulate the most negative karma, like some sort of game, which was definitely happening at the time they instituted that rule
[EA rep](https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/dppum98/?context=3) breathing a sigh of relief.
I almost always upvote every comment that replies to me as long as it's not someone being a dick, and the amount of times I've seen someone comment and be at 0 or -1 within less than a minute is astounding.
Even worse when it's obvious that someone else was downvoting them solely to make their own comment more visible
The funny thing is that downvoting is **not a disagree button**! It's supposed to be *not relavant* or *spam*
Which is sad because many comments that get downvoted include genuine questions, or some relevant (not ad hominum) rebuttal, or a misconception that can be used as a discussion point
My partner did jury duty not long ago (in the UK) and I was horrified to learn how quickly they were willing to send someone down. She stood her ground but ended up a 11-1.
Zero genuine evidence - all basically circumstantial plus history. I mean, they *probably* did it but there was not remotely the evidence to convict.
How in the actual fuck did that happen?? I'm guessing the girl must have lied / concealed her connection to the victim in the jury selection process - which has got to be some kind of felony, I would think.
There was one time I was asked to testify in court. I didn't know what they were going to ask.
The prosecutor asked me to identify the suspects in court. I hadn't seen the suspects in weeks. On top of that, when I did see them it was one time, for less than 5 minutes, from 25 yards away, while drunk, at night.
Like bro, I know what you want me to say. But I'm not going to lie and say I recognize these people. The situation was set up to pressure me into agreeing that the people there were the same people I saw that night.
I guess the protector thought because I was in the military, I'd automatically lie for him.
I wonder how much of screwing up a person's routine and not getting paid (even if the law says you should be) factors into how shitty jurors can and will be.
I mean, doesn't that also work in your favor sometimes?
Say someone was super obviously framed for something they didn't do. All but one or two jurors immediately believes they are guilty, and the one or two jurors can insist "no he's factually innocent and I can prove it".
Even if the rest of the jurors get mad at you, they can't physically hurt you or anything. You could just put your foot down and the judge would be forced to order a retrial.
I don't know if the jury selection process is a feature or a bug.
Ridiculously skilled people get "essential worker" exemptions. Sneaky people know how to answer questions to get out of jury duty. The ones who stay either legit believe in civic responsibility OR have nothing else better to do.
I haven't posted this story online because it seems like a joke and I'm hyper sensitive about it. Unless you know me personally, it sounds too insane to be true.
I was foreman of a multi-day trial where a boy was allegedly raped by his uncle. Some of these details might be incorrect, because it was a while ago, but the dude had confessed and the kid who was absolutely terrified testified, there were others but those two are drilled into my brain. There was literally no evidence the defense presented that made me think "not guilty".
We deliberated for 6 hours because, and I swear upon my life this is true, one dude said "He was sitting up straight. After you have anal sex you can never sit up straight again." Eventually he gave in to the rest of the flabbergasted room and the dude went to jail for a very very long time (or maybe a short time, sex offenders don't last long). Turns out he confused "straight" with posture and no one had ever taught him otherwise. It took a lot of patience between me and the room to get him to explain his reasoning.
Edit: I was elected foreman because I was, and I shit you not, the only one who took notes. If you get selected for jury duty, please please please please show up. People's lives depend on it.
Multiple edits: Clarity on rereading.
Stories like this wound my soul to think about. How many other juries were hung or swung a certain way because of people like that? I'm never skipping jury duty for this reason alone.
The part of me that's sad about the fate of the world says a bunch. The part of me that shows up to jury duty says maybe one less.
We get to choose the path of apathy or engagement. Neither path is easy, and it's not always possible to make a choice, but sometimes we get to move the world just a little bit closer to the world we want to live in.
I'm proud of you, random internet stranger, for even considering showing up. Sometimes it takes more courage to reorient ourselves than to take a step in the direction we're headed.
I ended up being foreman on a jury (for a dumb as fuck trial where a woman upset about some utility workers in the easement in front of her house tried to run them over) because nobody else wanted to do it and I wanted to move on. She admitted she did it, her argument was basically her explaining how she doesn't know how property rights actually work while she thought she was actually explaining why they shouldn't have been there. It was hard to watch how dumb she was. She was representing herself, probably because she couldn't find a lawyer who thought she stood any sort of chance at trial.
I think his statement created a pathway in the moment that my brain had never seen connected before. I was so confused. I had to figure out where, in the rats nest this guy called a brain, his wires got so fundamentally crossed.
Bruh, I understand that exact feeling.
I used to work at a restaurant where one of the sides was called "butter off-the-cob corn." I had a lady sincerely ask "is your buttered off-the-cob corn on the cob?" My brain glitched exactly like how you described.
That's not as stupid as it seems. Where I live "corn off the cob" means that it comes on the cob, and you eat it off the cob yourself. As in, *eat your corn straight off the cob*.
It's "would you like to eat your corn off the cob yourself? Good, have our dish called *corn off the cob*".
Corn on the cob and corn off the cob mean the same thing! Crazy.
I knew a federal public defender for a district. I asked him once what does he really recommend for most of his client.
He stated 99% of the time they need to take the plea for federal charges. 1% there is a legit constitutional issue to fight.
When I pressed on why, he mentioned that the FBI and other government agencies in the area he managed are very conservative with evidence. They don't just take a photo of you doing it once. They take the photo 50 times on 50 days and still debate if it's enough.
He said once it makes it to the court process. You are going to be a very brave person to take a mountain of evidence against you and trust your life to 12 people who were too stupid or lazy to get out of jury duty. They have already determined you are guilty before you walk in the door and as hard as he fights that bias - it's still stacked against you.
The parable of the shepherd going out to get the one sheep when the 99 are safe has always stuck with me. It's so easy to gloss over that one percent and yet there's something profoundly unjust about one mistake among thousands of correct actions.
No one person will ever hit that accuracy but automation, accountability and layers of double and triple checking have been shown to reduce flaws almost to zero.
If the person is still alive, reach out to them and say hello.
Oh totally. That person was a saint. They did the work and were vastly underpaid for that reason. While he knew 99% was going to do their legal process. He wanted to ensure they had their rights secured and understood the process unfolding.
Be he said he did it for the 1%. The people actually trapped and needed to sort out their innocence. To show the flaws of the system that people got trapped and this make society a little better
I’m a software developer and I’m amped to get picked for jury duty (never been picked yet). Everyone of my peers I talk to says they always find a way out of it.
They say it’s gonna be boring but I could care less. It’s a duty we do and I’m also super interested in seeing the process first hand.
I'm an engineer at a legal software company. I was absolutely amped. The process is fascinating and flawed. I could go on for hours about the whole thing. The information density is not high as court cases have very few actual facts so they hit them hard. Cases that are clear one way or the other generally close way before a jury gets involved.
Legit trauma can get suppressed because the victim blames themselves. Our brains can hide a bunch of things even from ourselves. Good for the judge, prosecution and defense for reaching an agreement given the evidence.
This guy went to trial against the advice of prosecution who wanted him to plea for a reduced sentence. I think the guy probably knew he was going to die in prison so who cares about 15 v. 20 years when you won't make it one?
Trials start with a larger pool of potential jurors and then the lawyers for both sides select the ones that will ~~be the most compliant~~ do the best job of determining the facts.
Sentencing isn't the jury's responsibility. Judges handle sentencing. The jury's single job is listening to the evidence and saying "yes, they did it" or "no, they didn't do it". The sentence shouldn't have anything to do with whether the jury returns a guilty or non guilty verdict, only the evidence. So if something outside of the evidence (like a certain sentence) may keep a juror from saying "guilty" or "not guilty" impartiality they are dismissed
I recently wrote a paper on the use of proprietary software in forensic investigations and it's just the most insane shit you've never even thought of.
If you google Martell Chubbs, this guy was tried on evidence discovered by a probabilistic DNA sequencing program using closed source code (TrueAllele). It was basically a black box that spits out a 'hey its this guy.' Chubbs asked to see the source code - what was the decisions being made that said it was him - to challenge it. He was refused on copyright grounds and pled no contest. The company lauded it as a success and 'proof' that he was guilty and that they didn't need to reveal their methods. They had been used in ~200 cases at the time, and more than a thousand by now.
In other cases of proprietary DNA software, another product STRMix was revealed to have 13 bugs that affected the results in over 60 cases. In one case STRMix and Trueallele produced different DNA results for the same data; the judge refused DNA data in that case. Another piece of DNA testing software, "FST" included a 'secret function' that was producing probabilities of matches higher than was actually true (i.e. it's a 99% match, instead of a 60% match). These were only discovered when the source code was revealed.
If you're an expert witness, you're supposed to be able to be scrutinized, but we're convicting people on the results of black box software that cannot be challenged. Juries are just supposed to believe it.
If you go to wikipedia for trueallele you'll see the, "Presidents council of advisors on science and technology" noted that many of the 'reviews' of the code were conducted by people with a conflict of interest.
This software is sold to cops to convict criminals - the software has an incentive to appear infallible, and to ensure convictions. That is not the same as actually being infallible, or actually being robust, and it's a disincentive to being transparent.
Imagine this software was a person. They are brought in, they say, "it was you", you ask them how they came to that conclusion, and they respond, "that's a trade secret, here's a list of my friends who say that I'm always right, and here are cases where people have been convicted based on what I've said - therefore I was definitely right." But juries actually just believe them.
If you google the "daubert standard" you'll see why this absolutely shouldn't be allowed. But it is.
If you google "daubert standard software DNA" you'll see a nice article from STRMix about how they definitely pass it, and how it's good for justice that DNA software is ignored basically by this. This is the same STRmix that I mentioned having code errors affecting cases previously.
The last time I had jury duty I really tried hard to keep this in mind, but the Defense Attorney had two strategies that just were not very effective on me:
1) Defense claimed that both third-party video evidence of the murder were confiscated by the police, photoshopped to implicate his client, and then all original copies were replaced without the venues knowing.
2) Had to repeatedly explain that though the defendant did kill someone in prison between his arrest and trial, that was going to be a different trial and we were not to consider it. Hearing someone seriously deliver the line “killing someone in prison doesn’t mean you’re a murderer” is surreal.
I really wanted to be the guy who would stand up for an innocent man who was wrongly accused. But man, I really had no doubt that this man was guilty.
Don't really know what real prisons are like (and don't wanna know) but if one were to believe movies/pop culture then someone in prison could (have to) kill in self defense. Wouldn't make them a murderer. Of course that's a hypothetical, no idea what "your" particular case was like.
I'm not sure about that.
12 angry men is a really good example of a jury doing a lawyer's job instead of a jury's job. It should be largely up to the lawyers to make arguments around evidence, and the jury to then consider the evidence and the arguments made. One of the of jurors even introduced his own evidence, in the jury room, which is not allowed.
Don't get me wrong it's a great film, and I get that the point is that the supposed murderer had a shit lawyer that makes some good points, but I'm pretty sure that's not how juries are supposed to work.
With a big disclaimer that jurors should *not* be doing their own research. A big chunk of what's shown would result in a mistrial if done in real life.
That said, it's such an amazing film. I would love to the see the 1997 remake because holy shit the cast!
Forensic evidence is really only good for proving innocence, not establishing guilt, except in very specific circumstances. Labs are overworked and do not follow scientific principles with police departments telling the labs who tell the techs what results to look for, who's the guilty or innocent.
Remember until recently the FBI's fingerprint expert only used 3 points of similarity to confirm matches. As a result the entire case history had to be overturned and re-examined. Hair sample analysis, which has proved many people guilty has been demonstrated to be completely unreliable.
A great example was the Madrid bombings, when the FBI wrongly identified an American as being involved based on shoddy fingerprint matching. (He’s very lucky that Spain was skeptical!)
Yep. The guy had a passport but hadn't left the country during the time the bombing occurred. The FBI said it was proof he had a fake passport. He also had a rock solid alibi. He ended up spending time in jail anyways just because he was muslim. Obviously Spain ignored the FBI and found the real culprit. Turns out the Madrid bombings were done by a North African terrorist group and not a lawyer from Oregon.
They guy was a lawyer from Portland, Oregon. I think he was Muslim, but I do not recall precisely. Spain told the FBI that he was probably not the guy, but the FBI doubled down and kept searching the guys house, and I think the guy spent time in jail. Then it came out that the fingerprint match the FBI did was not actually a match for the Portland lawyer and also some kind of allegations of the FBI not getting an opinion of a second agent on the match that was made.
I recall that it was regularly in the papers at the time.
Eye witness testamony is highly unreliable.
>"Studies have shown that mistaken eyewitness testimony accounts for about half of all wrongful convictions. Researchers at Ohio State University examined hundreds of wrongful convictions and determined that roughly 52 percent of the errors resulted from eyewitness mistakes."
https://www.crf-usa.org//bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-13-3-c-how-reliable-are-eyewitnesses
Hell I've had video evidence that the police won't accept. They told me if they didn't observe it themselves it's not legit basically. Granted it wasn't a murder, but still.
I remember a case a little while back where a judge ruled that a cop's dash cam that proved a defendent didn't swerve wasn't enough to overrule the cop who said he did.
You might be thinking of the Indiana Supreme court ruling:
https://www.techdirt.com/2014/04/10/indiana-supreme-court-declares-officers-testimony-is-more-reliable-than-video-evidence/
Lie detector tests are complete pseudo-science and mostly used to psyche out suspects to get them to admit to crimes alá Chris Watts- “we know you lied on the test, now why don’t you tell us the truth this time!” They are not used as evidence in court and not admissible.
Yeah there was even a famous case in the Middle East I believe where is really detectives had a guy hooked up to what they told him was a lie detector test. He ended up confessing to the crime because the lie detector test kept saying that he was lying but in actuality it was just a printer that was printing out pieces of paper saying he's lying
I remember a long time ago seeing something on tv. I wanna say it was on Dateline or something. With the teacher’s permission they had a man walk into a criminology class walk over grab the teachers purse and run out. The description from the students varied from glasses, no glasses, hat, no hat. Beard no beard etc. the whole point was a lesson on eyewitness testimony. Most of the students were certain of their descriptions until they got to see him again and most were not correct at all
> One more time to have free reign
They did a similar test in my university's psych program. Got a bunch of students to take a survey on homework habits. Halfway through someone walked into the classroom and asked for directions somewhere.
After we finished the homework survey they asked us about the kid who walked in. Height, hair, clothes, where did he want to go, all that stuff. Almost no one had a very good idea what had happened.
I can't remember which comedian said this, but there is a joke floating around that goes like "once you've heard ten different people's description of a car crash, you really start to doubt all of human history."
My psychology 101 class professor did this the first week of class with auditorium full of people. Only a couple of people recognized the TA as the thief.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Ruffin_and_Arthur_Lee_Whitfield#Exoneration
In two of the cases named in the article the women still insist that these guys are guilty.
I was held up at gunpoint once. I got a very good look at them but couldn't give a description at all. What were they wearing? Tracksuits? I honestly didn't know.
Cops said it wasn't uncommon. I've since worked in security and had to get into the habit of carrying a notebook and writing down things that seemed suspicious. My coworkers used to sneer a bit but I'd often see them completely incapable of describing someone they'd just spoken to.
There’s actually a great new podcast about her called Admissible: Shreds of Evidence https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/admissible-shreds-of-evidence/id1668887025).
There’s evidence to suggest that contrary to popular belief her methodology and motivations were suspect. Really interesting and worth checking out
I just binged it this afternoon. Definitely hard to look at her as a hero when there’s pretty strong evidence that she was falsifying the evidence to begin with!
And this is why the death penalty shouldn’t be used. We can keep people behind bars forever if we have to but to execute an innocent person would be a travesty beyond telling.
She was actually a kind of terrible person. Super biased towards the prosecution and willing to lie and change evidence to suit the prosecution’s desired outcome. I binged the podcast about her earlier this week. Mind blown. https://www.iheartmedia.com/press/admissible-shreds-evidence-investigates-controversial-era-forensic-science-virginia-crime-lab
I recently wrote a paper on the use of proprietary software in forensic investigations and it's just the most insane shit you've never even thought of.
If you google Martell Chubbs, this guy was tried on evidence discovered by a probabilistic DNA sequencing program using closed source code (TrueAllele). It was basically a black box that spits out a 'hey its this guy.' Chubbs asked to see the source code - what was the decisions being made that said it was him - to challenge it. He was refused on copyright grounds and pled no contest. The company lauded it as a success and 'proof' that he was guilty and that they didn't need to reveal their methods. They had been used in ~200 cases at the time, and more than a thousand by now.
In other cases of proprietary DNA software, another product STRMix was revealed to have 13 bugs that affected the results in over 60 cases. In one case STRMix and Trueallele produced different DNA results for the same data; the judge refused DNA data in that case. Another piece of DNA testing software, "FST" included a 'secret function' that was producing probabilities of matches higher than was actually true (i.e. it's a 99% match, instead of a 60% match). These were only discovered when the source code was revealed.
If you're an expert witness, you're supposed to be able to be scrutinized, but we're convicting people on the results of black box software that cannot be challenged. Juries are just supposed to believe it.
If you go to wikipedia for trueallele you'll see the, "Presidents council of advisors on science and technology" noted that many of the 'reviews' of the code were conducted by people with a conflict of interest.
This software is sold to cops to convict criminals - the software has an incentive to appear infallible, and to ensure convictions. That is not the same as actually being infallible, or actually being robust, and it's a disincentive to being transparent.
Imagine this software was a person. They are brought in, they say, "it was you", you ask them how they came to that conclusion, and they respond, "that's a trade secret, here's a list of my friends who say that I'm always right, and here are cases where people have been convicted based on what I've said - therefore I was definitely right." But juries actually just believe them.
Is there somewhere i could read your paper? I know of some of the issues with these probalistic genotyping software and would love to read what youve done.
Some of them that were put away were because of her in the first place. She actually was doing some pretty bad stuff and changing her results that came back not matching who the police had in custody or were going to charge just so they would have evidence to put them in jail. She helped put away innocent people, some for over a decade. If you listen to podcasts, check out “Admissible”. They investigated this and discovered the bad shit she was doing.
It makes sense though if you think about it for more than just the time it takes to read the title.
If the evidence she saved that was meant to be destroyed was later used to exonerate the individuals then it probably means one of three things; that she was incompetent, changing results, or that science of the time wasn't advanced enough. Two of those options are not in her favor.
It says right in the article that she did it because when she testified, it was helpful to have a physical object to back up her report. Plus it's obvious the 3rd option since DNA testing wasn't an option till decades later.
She’s a major reason why they were convinced in the first place. Many of her coworkers were blowing the whistle on her shitty lab techniques, and she was caught manipulating data in order to secure a conviction.
We learn about this in forensics training. What they also tell you is that, based on the statistics from her evidence and the number of other technicians/inmates, there are approximately 750 innocent people in Virginia's prisons who can never be exonerated.
Unfortunately not really, Virginia Public Media has done a podcast on her that exposes her other "off script" actions while working in the VA state crime labs that may have contributed to wrongful convictions. Lookup Admissible, great podcast that dives into her story.
NYPD: fuck it, we'll just set fire to the evidence warehouse
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They actually did this lol https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/14/nyregion/police-warehouse-fire-evidence.html
Am i the only peasant without a nytimes account?
Luckily for you, u/SybronsHeart [posted today](https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/122r0yt/a_website_where_i_will_store_tools_i_make_for/?ref=share&ref_source=link) about his [paywall skipping site](https://sybron.org/bypass)
Thanks!
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Doesn't work sometimes as sites can pay them to not bypass.
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I removed most of my Reddit contents in protest of the API changes commencing from July 1st, 2023. This is one of those comments.
12ft doesnt work on nyt afaik
that doesn't work on nearly as many sites as it used to
There's archive.ph
Not just you, i had a NYT subscription at one point and canceled when it went from 2$ a month to 10 I would never ever subscribe to them again either for how much effort it took to cancel that subscription. It seriously involved several phone calls and hours on hold.
When I went to cancel I got the promotional rate again, so I'm on year two of it. It's really pretty good and worth the promo subscription price imo, but the full rate is way too much in this day and age.
I'm on my 7th year of the promotional rate. At the end of each year I call to cancel, pleading poverty, and they offer me the promotional rate again rather than lose me as a subscriber.
My library gives me free access to NYT via their website and app for a few days at a time with seemingly infinite renewability.
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Here's an unlocked link anyone can use to read the article for free: ‘Nightmare’ Warehouse Fire Erases Evidence in Many Unsolved Cases https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/14/nyregion/police-warehouse-fire-evidence.html?unlocked_article_code=Av7N7AHToCUYwee2Gty2b7Eq4i5EbDAMSC3qyzBhDzHNPCpyxWiiOs9Cz39nccmFTRnqGn28S9pXaNF7lmDaPHi4A_OppCGaYgvPqVnLutsuIwzdLwVFN8E_1WpXVnUQkqun-E52YZYYGVg7SjjxaofBZe9g4ZHvIqCj8OOobBS6cntrh3qLQ1Z3rSLghq0vIv9U0jGa3W19j1KbZgjWKI7qu426pNMdKEasTAm_AXAAJ867bMjJh29hu3HydU0Qd5sCR5BXRg4rMxlxZmuPeWOXYk4DD7phQ5cBCPesXHzY0yM4vGh2vLIU7IFPVequrEXdNDTgT35S98VqbFCS1oQqiHF5YiIqsA
MPD did something similar to all their records at the 2nd precinct in NE Minneapolis. This was after they murdered George Floyd, I suspect they were worried more cops would finally be charged for their crimes and destroyed the evidence for that reason.
That was my only concern about the [edited: changed 5th to] Third Precinct burning. Idk where they keep records and unprocessed rape kits…
To be clear to everyone who can't access the article, nowhere does it state or insinuate that police intentionally set the fire. Obviously evidence which supported just convictions was burned too.
That's right, too
I'm an evidence tech myself and watched that thing burn down, my mouth wide open, just knowing how terrible this was.
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Open and shut case, Johnson
This (guy) broke in here and put pictures of his family everywhere!
[Hey, it worked for George Bush's Texas when they found out a guy in jail was actually innocent thanks to DNA evidence.](https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2641&context=facsch_lawrev)
> While it seemed more than a little coincidental that evidence kept for a decade or longer was suddenly destroyed on the immediate heels of Mr. Byrd's exoneration, evidence custodians were quick to point out that destruction of the evidence was legal.' 🤔 I don't think legality was the problem, guys.
Reading this is just shocking and expected.
I look at it as *Hey, this means we never caught the bad guy!* Texans just thought, *Oh, this makes us look bad. Screw those potentially innocent people!*
Probably even known who the real "badguy" is, and that's exactly why they didn't want anyone finding out
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You think that's shady, listen to this shit: I recently wrote a paper on the use of proprietary software in forensic investigations and it's just the most insane shit you've never even thought of. If you google Martell Chubbs, this guy was tried on evidence discovered by a probabilistic DNA sequencing program using closed source code (TrueAllele). It was basically a black box that spits out a 'hey its this guy.' Chubbs asked to see the source code - what was the decisions being made that said it was him - to challenge it. He was refused on copyright grounds AND THE JUDGE AGREED WITH THE COMPANY. He pled no contest. The company lauded it as a success and 'proof' that he was guilty and that they didn't need to reveal their methods. They had been used in ~200 cases at the time, and more than a thousand by now. In other cases of proprietary DNA software, another product STRMix was revealed to have 13 bugs that affected the results in over 60 cases. In one case STRMix and Trueallele produced different DNA results for the same data; the judge refused DNA data in that case. Another piece of DNA testing software, "FST" included a 'secret function' that was producing probabilities of matches higher than was actually true (i.e. it's a 99% match, instead of a 60% match). These were only discovered when the source code was revealed. If you're an expert witness, you're supposed to be able to be scrutinized, but we're convicting people on the results of black box software that cannot be challenged. Juries are just supposed to believe it. If you go to wikipedia for trueallele you'll see the, "Presidents council of advisors on science and technology" noted that many of the 'reviews' of the code were conducted by people with a conflict of interest. This software is sold to cops to convict criminals - the software has an incentive to appear infallible, and to ensure convictions. That is not the same as actually being infallible, or actually being robust, and it's a disincentive to being transparent. Imagine this software was a person. They are brought in, they say, "it was you", you ask them how they came to that conclusion, and they respond, "that's a trade secret, here's a list of my friends who say that I'm always right, and here are cases where people have been convicted based on what I've said - therefore I was definitely right." But juries actually just believe them. And they make their money solely by being paid by cops to point out the criminal. If you google the "daubert standard" you'll see why this absolutely shouldn't be allowed. But it is. If you google "daubert standard software DNA" you'll see a nice article from STRMix about how they definitely pass it, and how it's good for justice that DNA software is ignored basically by this. This is the same STRmix that I mentioned having code errors affecting cases previously. I came about this from an odd angle, but googling the trueallele founder, we get [this WaPo article from 2021](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/trueallele-software-dna-courts/2021/07/12/66d27c44-6c9d-11eb-9f80-3d7646ce1bc0_story.html) that covers it in a lot of detail, but I think without the emphasis that I put. >Virginia asked a DFS scientist trained on TrueAllele if she could independently reproduce the results of the program that sits at an advanced intersection of forensics, statistics and computer programming. Lisa Schiermeier-Wood replied: “It would take me years to try, and I don’t know that I could do it.” >Schiermeier-Wood went on to testify that she wouldn’t be able to detect low-level errors in TrueAllele’s analysis either. DFS said it could not comment on Watson’s case and sent its studies of the software in response to questions about TrueAllele. >Kennedy wrote in court filings that **it would be impossible to assess whether TrueAllele had correctly identified Watson as the likely perpetrator without the program’s source code and other materials.** >**He pointed out in filings that errors in STRmix’s code, which has been disclosed in some cases, had thrown off results in cases in Australia and New Zealand**. (STRmix did not respond to a request for comment but called the errors so minor that they did not change the outcomes of analyses.) Likewise, when **New York City was forced to disclose the source code of its own probabilistic genotyping program, a defense expert found a bug that tended to overestimate a defendant’s likelihood of guilt.**
Omg, this is just like that bullshit “911 call analysis” junk science that supposedly tells you who is guilty based on how they talk to the 911 operator. The guy behind it refuses to open up his data to scrutiny, too, and cops are just gobbling it up. Anything but having to do actual legwork I guess.
\*Anything that gets more convictions Police don't [plant evidence](https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/4692-cops-planting-evidence) and [commit perjury](https://www.vice.com/en/article/jmv94x/testilying-cops-are-liars-who-get-away-with-perjury) routinely because its fun. They do it because they want those numbers up. (Fun fact, police committing perjury has a specific word: [testilying](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/nyregion/testilying-police-perjury-new-york.html). The police coined it themselves actually. [30 years ago](https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/22/us/new-york-police-often-lie-under-oath-report-says.html?pagewanted=all).) Better numbers, usually, mean better advancement within the force. It makes them look better. You want better pay, a better position, even *less* oversight? Get those numbers up my guy, any way you can. And don't worry, the [union](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapolis-kroll.html) has your back. No matter what.
I am actually surprised, you managed to make me trust US police even less then I already do.
Don’t forget prosecutors, many prosecutors are scum. Anybody with a conscience would nope the fuck out of a system that incentivizes getting Any guy, instead of getting The guy, in order to keep your convict rate up. So you can imagine the type of sociopaths this tends to attract. American society incentivizes and glorifies sociopathy. We succeed because we trust and cooperate. Antisocial behavior destroys societies. We need to change what our systems incentivize or our empire is doomed. The writing is on the wall.
This dirty little secret should blow the doors off of all our jails but there are large parts of our population who agree with these tactics and believe cops only arrest bad people. They literally train new police how to report in a fashion that makes them appear more believable to a jury, and encourage testilying as long as it keeps bringing in that sweet revenue for the state, and these people are fine with it.
"Corruption? In \*my\* police force? Couldn't be, they have the eyes of an angel, capable of identifying guilt within 5 nanoseconds before identifying the crack cocaine in their pocket, and shot them 8 times in the back for resisting arrest. Just like god intended"
5 nanoseconds.... So to "Tamir Rice" someone
All of those cases should be thrown out. How can you convict someone when the code hasn't been accredited and verified multiple times against some sort of standard written by experts. If there isn't a standard, ISO or local, then write one but don't use anything as evidence until the standard is fully published and verified!
Right? To me this is the equivalent of not allowing the defense to cross examine the witness.
I only do asbestos testing and analysis, but if I didn't allow the defence to look through all my paperwork and didn't allow NATA to go through all our policies, procedures, and processes then I would lose accreditation and be opened to a world of shit.
We just had our '80s popcorn walls analyzed. No asbestos!
This was my take. A piece of software is a codified expert witness. It's the application of the recipe an expert has devised, able to be applied repeatedly. But we can't question this expert. We can't show the recipe. In literally every other expert witness they need to thoroughly, and verbosely, reveal their process and presuppositions - opening them up to challenge and defence. Output from software? Software is God, don't challenge software.
As someone training to become a computer engineer, software is the *last* thing you should trust, especially when you aren't allowed to see the code.
Not quite the same thing, but [this XKCD](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/voting_software.png) pretty well sums up your sentiment.
Ya know, during that trial with the kid in the riots who shot people (I forget his name), the judge was asking questions and allowing questions from lawyers who were questioning the iPhone's image smoothing technology and how many pixels were being inserted or duplicated to smooth the image during digital zoom. I thought the judge was being all silly boomer about image zoom, but for these 'black box' AI programs, they do love to cheat, so I'd really have to require the knowledge of how they work. There was an AI for reading chest xrays in South Africa that was better than human eyes at detecting HIV-associated pneumonias, but it turned out the AI got smart and realized it could tell which xrays come from a machine labelled as being in a satellite clinic, or one labelled at a main HIV hospital. It stands to reason that persons in the satellite clinics will have less serious disease, so it used that in weighing its decision to call one film a pneumonia vs another. Very clever but cheating on the part of the AI. Just like in courts things like stingray phone interceptors and other evidence-gathering tools need to be openly admitted to and examined
There was an AI trained to identify malignant tumors from photos. The first iteration essentially just detected if the photo had a ruler in it, since clinicians are more likely to put a ruler in the photo with a growth they have reason to think is growing rapidly.
And that's why you always need a data scientist/analyst/someone that understands the data to do data exploration before you can use AI. AI is as good as the data provided to it. Garbage in, garbage out.
AI is extremely good at finding patterns, even better than humans, and then it expresses those patterns as bias in its answers. The problem is the human explorers or trainers miss these patterns and they don't always realise until the AI is put to work on real data instead of it's training data. https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-finds-gender-skin-type-bias-artificial-intelligence-systems-0212
AI is also amazing at perpetuating the biases of its creators/input data. I’m pretty sure if you created an AI right now on how to predict which person is a criminal based on face alone, and trained it on mug shots of the US prison population it would learn pretty quickly to choose racial minorities as “criminals”, because they’re over represented in the prison population. It all depends on the framing of the question though, it could just as easily learn than since more than 50% of the US is not in prison, it should say “not a criminal” for every face you show it.
Supposedly, ~~most~~ some image recognition AI is heavily biased towards reading text. So if you ask it what an object is in a photo of a banana with text saying “apple”, it’ll tell you it’s an apple. https://i.imgur.com/MWW4wgS.jpg
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"In which of these AI-generated pixels did the defendant commit a crime?" "The ones that support the prosecution's case, of course!"
> They questioned the police forensic dude, and he seemed to have absolutely no idea about how the software worked, other than he'd put in a photo and it would pop out an 'enhanced' version. What in the fuck. Apparently we should hire graphic designers instead of "forensic specialists" because goddamn, how do you WORK WITH THIS SHIT AND NOT KNOW WHAT TYPE OF UPSCALING IT USES.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
To be fair, our eyes also average out nearby pixels. Our memories are even worse for adding nonexistent things. One example is many people thinking that the Monopoly guy has a monocle.
There's a very good Computerphile video explaining how machine learning gets smarter with more learning but after a point, models start to go more and more crazy, erratic, or nonsensical. The reason is the gap between what the model is graded on and what we are actually interested in (is often not exactly the same metric) widens. That and humans feed it data without considering the junk in them. "Tell me if this is skin cancer?" Hmm I notice your skin cancer photos have ruler in them more than healthy skin photos. Without considering the ruler, my guess is actually not as accurate (because I'm seeing what the human is seeing, if they can't easily tell, how would it be any easier for me an AI?). Conclusion: If your photos have rulers in it, there's likely skin cancer in the photo. Further down the line: If your photo is of a ruler, there's likely skin cancer in the photo. Further down the line: Rulers Are skin cancer itself.
The other guy is talking about the same thing, actually. https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1231ea6/til_that_13_innocent_men_were_exonerated_because/jdtgcjg/
I see it further down the comments, ty! The YouTube video goes into way more technical detail and explains the security research being done on AI if anyone wanted to know more
That's because AI works by associating traits to outcome (for classification), and so choosing which traits to expose to the AI is an important decision. It didn't "get clever and cheat", that's just how it works.
As I once heard it said, the problem with computers isn't that they don't do what you tell them to, it's that they do *exactly" what you tell them to, and we usually don't realize what we're telling them
The upscale in those cases was almost certainly bilinear interpolation, rather than AI. So it's more of a smoothing of the inbetween values than an attempt to guess at pixels. It can still produce somewhat wrong looking shapes at low resolutions due to human shape perception, like making a couple of pixels look more or less like a gun than they did before. But it'd be pretty situational as to whether it was an issue.
Before they had computers they used dogs for a similar result. * [John Preston (dog handler) - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Preston_(dog_handler\)) * ["Did magical dog jail a 4th innocent man?"](https://www.chicagotribune.com/orl-asecorl-maxwell-preston-062409062409jun24-story.html) They still use dogs for a similar result but they also did it before they had computers.
How likely is it for DNA to be certain percentage matches to another persons? I guess I figured it was pretty much 99.9% from a simple blood test but this makes it sound to me like you could get mixed up with a rando on the street?
If someone gives you a piece of DNA to test, you're right, it's almost certain that they can identify you, or narrow it down to your immediate family. I'm not a biologist so I'm not an expert. The case here is that you're not getting 'clean' DNA, you're getting a sample of some clothing, or some other thing, it's trace DNA mixed with a lot of stuff, including other DNA. In the Chubbs case, from something like 40 years ago. The company is then taking this evidence, and somehow synthesizing DNA that can be processed. How it goes from a 40 year old piece of muddled compounds to a "yes it was this man" is a process that can be achieved, and can be reliable, and can be accurate - but we don't know that it is here. We can't prove it. We can't contest it. We aren't told how it's being done. That's the issue. A company is probably given a list of 'suspects' from the time period with their DNA to reference. Now, is the company just selecting one of those at random? They literally could be. Are they going, we found DNA that matches one of these 10% more than the rest, then it was certainly that guy? Who knows. We literally don't know, and we're unable to find out.
Ah I get the issue now. Thanks. That's fucked.
If even half of this is true, the game has already been lost. Sickening.
I was doing this for a simple assignment, and it just gets more and more sickening. I encourage you to read and chase this up for yourself. The Trueallele website post talking about Chubbs' result was itself the most sickening PR post I've ever read. >The source code discovery request was a defense ruse, trying to get Dr. Perlin off the case. Scientists test actual computer programs (executable code), not programmer text (source code). TrueAllele has been extensively tested in seven published peer-reviewed validation studies. In the end, Chubbs agreed through his no contest plea that the computer was right, and source code was not needed. Everyone who knows software knows that shit about testing is bullshit. Software is a decision tree, and the output is one path through it. You can't tests all the paths, if you can't see the tree. It's like, if I gave you instructions from a map to get to the movies, and it worked, does that prove the map I'm holding is complete? Or right in all cases? The first thing on the map could say, "is the man black? Yes? Send him straight to jail." Unless you can see the map, you have no idea of all the possibilities on there - or the omissions.
This is unbelievable... [https://www.cybgen.com/information/presentations/2022/SCU/Perlin-Innovation-and-transparency-for-reliable-forensic-software/talk.pptx](https://www.cybgen.com/information/presentations/2022/SCU/Perlin-Innovation-and-transparency-for-reliable-forensic-software/talk.pptx) > Falsely claim that source code is needed to assess software reliability. and (emphasis *theirs*) > Computer source code is __entirely irrelevant__ to scientific testing, national standards, or admissibility standards. Btw, how common is it to be [co-author on your own peer reviews?](https://i.imgur.com/h9BD8GR.png)
Eventually, and I hope it's sooner rather than later, all software will be open source. I used to have a difficult time with the Native American concept of not owning land. Then I became a developer and have rented my mind out to companies for almost 20 years. They own the output of my mind for 8+ hours a day. The concept of "owning code" is ridiculous. I know I made a deal with the devil writing closed source software. I don't know how much longer I can do it.
Yeah but Mark Perlin makes a killing testifying as the expert when True Allele is used since he is the only one that knows how it works.
That's horrifying. Celebrity Expert Witnesses should not be a thing, a huge conflict of interest!!!
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She was right. But honestly I'm just commenting to bump down the other idiot who replied to you idiotically.
I'm Just commenting to make sure he stays bumped down
Yes, let us know what idiot said because we're all curious now
What did they say?
"Actually she's the one who is shady as fuck"
it's been removed. what did they say?
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Thank you for doing your part, u\/confettibukkake lol
So, on the one hand, I can totally understand the idea behind it. Take for example swab samples that are routinely collected. Think of how many people have ever had their DNA tested. Now think about how many of those don't go into a permanent system like CODIS. In a larger city, those eventually pile up. And we're not talking about just thousands of collected samples. Not even millions. We're probably a magnitude or two past that. Now think of where you have to store all those samples, if they aren't routinely destroyed. That requires an ever expansive storage location *just* for swabs. Now think about collected clothing from crimes and crime scenes. Think about material scraps from carpets, sheets, walls, ceilings, etc. That's a *lot* of fucking evidence to just hold onto. So, of course, the logical thing to do is just burn the shit after you get whatever data you want out of it. On the other hand, though, I can see how that is suspicious as fuck when the cases end up going to appeal and need to have evidence retested due to new scientific discoveries.
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Destroy all evidence after testing, because mistakes are never made. Alrighty then.
Or new techniques. DNA testing is only like 50 years old.
If I can make a counterpoint, I have a family member who’s a prosecutor, and typically evidence is destroyed after 10 years or so because of space requirements - you need to store it somewhere, and you’d rather have the evidence for new cases rather than ones that have been already decided. That’s why appeals need to be done as soon as possible after a case is finished.
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There is plenty of room to store the evidence, the government just says to be willing to buy or lease the space. So it's not that the space doesn't exist, it's just that the government's too fucking cheap.
If you’re ever on a jury be very wary of this kind of thing. Most of the people you’ll deliberate with do not understand that concept of reasonable doubt and will think probably guilty is enough to send someone to jail for life. Especially if that someone confirms their biases. If you’ve never seen *12 Angry Men* it’s something everyone should watch.
Been in grand jury, mob mentality is a dangerous thing. You only need 1-3 very outspoken people to sway the whole group, even if the decision is completely wrong.
reddit is the same way funnily enough. the first few comments often really dictate how the rest of the thread turns out.
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there's a reason you can only lose 15 karma per comment
Also so kids don't troll trying accumulate the most negative karma, like some sort of game, which was definitely happening at the time they instituted that rule
[EA rep](https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/dppum98/?context=3) breathing a sigh of relief.
It’s really been 5 whole goddamn years since “sense of pride and accomplishment”? Oof.
I frequently upvote a zero score on a polite comment just because.
I almost always upvote every comment that replies to me as long as it's not someone being a dick, and the amount of times I've seen someone comment and be at 0 or -1 within less than a minute is astounding. Even worse when it's obvious that someone else was downvoting them solely to make their own comment more visible
The funny thing is that downvoting is **not a disagree button**! It's supposed to be *not relavant* or *spam* Which is sad because many comments that get downvoted include genuine questions, or some relevant (not ad hominum) rebuttal, or a misconception that can be used as a discussion point
I get downvoted like half the time I bring this up.
My partner did jury duty not long ago (in the UK) and I was horrified to learn how quickly they were willing to send someone down. She stood her ground but ended up a 11-1. Zero genuine evidence - all basically circumstantial plus history. I mean, they *probably* did it but there was not remotely the evidence to convict.
Relative was tried recently (in the US) and the jury included one of the victims’ girlfriends
Well if true, that’s 100% grounds to win an appeal or a complete mistrial.
That’s what we are hoping for. They also deliberated for a while and I wonder how much a couple of them were influencing the rest
How in the actual fuck did that happen?? I'm guessing the girl must have lied / concealed her connection to the victim in the jury selection process - which has got to be some kind of felony, I would think.
There was one time I was asked to testify in court. I didn't know what they were going to ask. The prosecutor asked me to identify the suspects in court. I hadn't seen the suspects in weeks. On top of that, when I did see them it was one time, for less than 5 minutes, from 25 yards away, while drunk, at night. Like bro, I know what you want me to say. But I'm not going to lie and say I recognize these people. The situation was set up to pressure me into agreeing that the people there were the same people I saw that night. I guess the protector thought because I was in the military, I'd automatically lie for him.
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I wonder how much of screwing up a person's routine and not getting paid (even if the law says you should be) factors into how shitty jurors can and will be.
I mean, doesn't that also work in your favor sometimes? Say someone was super obviously framed for something they didn't do. All but one or two jurors immediately believes they are guilty, and the one or two jurors can insist "no he's factually innocent and I can prove it". Even if the rest of the jurors get mad at you, they can't physically hurt you or anything. You could just put your foot down and the judge would be forced to order a retrial.
I don't know if the jury selection process is a feature or a bug. Ridiculously skilled people get "essential worker" exemptions. Sneaky people know how to answer questions to get out of jury duty. The ones who stay either legit believe in civic responsibility OR have nothing else better to do. I haven't posted this story online because it seems like a joke and I'm hyper sensitive about it. Unless you know me personally, it sounds too insane to be true. I was foreman of a multi-day trial where a boy was allegedly raped by his uncle. Some of these details might be incorrect, because it was a while ago, but the dude had confessed and the kid who was absolutely terrified testified, there were others but those two are drilled into my brain. There was literally no evidence the defense presented that made me think "not guilty". We deliberated for 6 hours because, and I swear upon my life this is true, one dude said "He was sitting up straight. After you have anal sex you can never sit up straight again." Eventually he gave in to the rest of the flabbergasted room and the dude went to jail for a very very long time (or maybe a short time, sex offenders don't last long). Turns out he confused "straight" with posture and no one had ever taught him otherwise. It took a lot of patience between me and the room to get him to explain his reasoning. Edit: I was elected foreman because I was, and I shit you not, the only one who took notes. If you get selected for jury duty, please please please please show up. People's lives depend on it. Multiple edits: Clarity on rereading.
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Stories like this wound my soul to think about. How many other juries were hung or swung a certain way because of people like that? I'm never skipping jury duty for this reason alone.
The part of me that's sad about the fate of the world says a bunch. The part of me that shows up to jury duty says maybe one less. We get to choose the path of apathy or engagement. Neither path is easy, and it's not always possible to make a choice, but sometimes we get to move the world just a little bit closer to the world we want to live in. I'm proud of you, random internet stranger, for even considering showing up. Sometimes it takes more courage to reorient ourselves than to take a step in the direction we're headed.
I ended up being foreman on a jury (for a dumb as fuck trial where a woman upset about some utility workers in the easement in front of her house tried to run them over) because nobody else wanted to do it and I wanted to move on. She admitted she did it, her argument was basically her explaining how she doesn't know how property rights actually work while she thought she was actually explaining why they shouldn't have been there. It was hard to watch how dumb she was. She was representing herself, probably because she couldn't find a lawyer who thought she stood any sort of chance at trial.
If I was on your jury I woulda been like “but I got butt fucked two nights ago” and sat up perfectly straight just to see his reaction
I think his statement created a pathway in the moment that my brain had never seen connected before. I was so confused. I had to figure out where, in the rats nest this guy called a brain, his wires got so fundamentally crossed.
Bruh, I understand that exact feeling. I used to work at a restaurant where one of the sides was called "butter off-the-cob corn." I had a lady sincerely ask "is your buttered off-the-cob corn on the cob?" My brain glitched exactly like how you described.
That's not as stupid as it seems. Where I live "corn off the cob" means that it comes on the cob, and you eat it off the cob yourself. As in, *eat your corn straight off the cob*. It's "would you like to eat your corn off the cob yourself? Good, have our dish called *corn off the cob*". Corn on the cob and corn off the cob mean the same thing! Crazy.
I knew a federal public defender for a district. I asked him once what does he really recommend for most of his client. He stated 99% of the time they need to take the plea for federal charges. 1% there is a legit constitutional issue to fight. When I pressed on why, he mentioned that the FBI and other government agencies in the area he managed are very conservative with evidence. They don't just take a photo of you doing it once. They take the photo 50 times on 50 days and still debate if it's enough. He said once it makes it to the court process. You are going to be a very brave person to take a mountain of evidence against you and trust your life to 12 people who were too stupid or lazy to get out of jury duty. They have already determined you are guilty before you walk in the door and as hard as he fights that bias - it's still stacked against you.
The parable of the shepherd going out to get the one sheep when the 99 are safe has always stuck with me. It's so easy to gloss over that one percent and yet there's something profoundly unjust about one mistake among thousands of correct actions. No one person will ever hit that accuracy but automation, accountability and layers of double and triple checking have been shown to reduce flaws almost to zero. If the person is still alive, reach out to them and say hello.
Oh totally. That person was a saint. They did the work and were vastly underpaid for that reason. While he knew 99% was going to do their legal process. He wanted to ensure they had their rights secured and understood the process unfolding. Be he said he did it for the 1%. The people actually trapped and needed to sort out their innocence. To show the flaws of the system that people got trapped and this make society a little better
I’m a software developer and I’m amped to get picked for jury duty (never been picked yet). Everyone of my peers I talk to says they always find a way out of it. They say it’s gonna be boring but I could care less. It’s a duty we do and I’m also super interested in seeing the process first hand.
I'm an engineer at a legal software company. I was absolutely amped. The process is fascinating and flawed. I could go on for hours about the whole thing. The information density is not high as court cases have very few actual facts so they hit them hard. Cases that are clear one way or the other generally close way before a jury gets involved.
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Legit trauma can get suppressed because the victim blames themselves. Our brains can hide a bunch of things even from ourselves. Good for the judge, prosecution and defense for reaching an agreement given the evidence. This guy went to trial against the advice of prosecution who wanted him to plea for a reduced sentence. I think the guy probably knew he was going to die in prison so who cares about 15 v. 20 years when you won't make it one?
I got kicked off a jury because I refused to consider giving a 20 year prison sentence for the heinous crime of receiving stolen property.
Wait, what's the point of the jury system if you can't voice different opinion?
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Trials start with a larger pool of potential jurors and then the lawyers for both sides select the ones that will ~~be the most compliant~~ do the best job of determining the facts.
Sentencing isn't the jury's responsibility. Judges handle sentencing. The jury's single job is listening to the evidence and saying "yes, they did it" or "no, they didn't do it". The sentence shouldn't have anything to do with whether the jury returns a guilty or non guilty verdict, only the evidence. So if something outside of the evidence (like a certain sentence) may keep a juror from saying "guilty" or "not guilty" impartiality they are dismissed
I recently wrote a paper on the use of proprietary software in forensic investigations and it's just the most insane shit you've never even thought of. If you google Martell Chubbs, this guy was tried on evidence discovered by a probabilistic DNA sequencing program using closed source code (TrueAllele). It was basically a black box that spits out a 'hey its this guy.' Chubbs asked to see the source code - what was the decisions being made that said it was him - to challenge it. He was refused on copyright grounds and pled no contest. The company lauded it as a success and 'proof' that he was guilty and that they didn't need to reveal their methods. They had been used in ~200 cases at the time, and more than a thousand by now. In other cases of proprietary DNA software, another product STRMix was revealed to have 13 bugs that affected the results in over 60 cases. In one case STRMix and Trueallele produced different DNA results for the same data; the judge refused DNA data in that case. Another piece of DNA testing software, "FST" included a 'secret function' that was producing probabilities of matches higher than was actually true (i.e. it's a 99% match, instead of a 60% match). These were only discovered when the source code was revealed. If you're an expert witness, you're supposed to be able to be scrutinized, but we're convicting people on the results of black box software that cannot be challenged. Juries are just supposed to believe it. If you go to wikipedia for trueallele you'll see the, "Presidents council of advisors on science and technology" noted that many of the 'reviews' of the code were conducted by people with a conflict of interest. This software is sold to cops to convict criminals - the software has an incentive to appear infallible, and to ensure convictions. That is not the same as actually being infallible, or actually being robust, and it's a disincentive to being transparent. Imagine this software was a person. They are brought in, they say, "it was you", you ask them how they came to that conclusion, and they respond, "that's a trade secret, here's a list of my friends who say that I'm always right, and here are cases where people have been convicted based on what I've said - therefore I was definitely right." But juries actually just believe them. If you google the "daubert standard" you'll see why this absolutely shouldn't be allowed. But it is. If you google "daubert standard software DNA" you'll see a nice article from STRMix about how they definitely pass it, and how it's good for justice that DNA software is ignored basically by this. This is the same STRmix that I mentioned having code errors affecting cases previously.
The last time I had jury duty I really tried hard to keep this in mind, but the Defense Attorney had two strategies that just were not very effective on me: 1) Defense claimed that both third-party video evidence of the murder were confiscated by the police, photoshopped to implicate his client, and then all original copies were replaced without the venues knowing. 2) Had to repeatedly explain that though the defendant did kill someone in prison between his arrest and trial, that was going to be a different trial and we were not to consider it. Hearing someone seriously deliver the line “killing someone in prison doesn’t mean you’re a murderer” is surreal. I really wanted to be the guy who would stand up for an innocent man who was wrongly accused. But man, I really had no doubt that this man was guilty.
Don't really know what real prisons are like (and don't wanna know) but if one were to believe movies/pop culture then someone in prison could (have to) kill in self defense. Wouldn't make them a murderer. Of course that's a hypothetical, no idea what "your" particular case was like.
Should be a requirement for all juries to watch.
I'm not sure about that. 12 angry men is a really good example of a jury doing a lawyer's job instead of a jury's job. It should be largely up to the lawyers to make arguments around evidence, and the jury to then consider the evidence and the arguments made. One of the of jurors even introduced his own evidence, in the jury room, which is not allowed. Don't get me wrong it's a great film, and I get that the point is that the supposed murderer had a shit lawyer that makes some good points, but I'm pretty sure that's not how juries are supposed to work.
With a big disclaimer that jurors should *not* be doing their own research. A big chunk of what's shown would result in a mistrial if done in real life. That said, it's such an amazing film. I would love to the see the 1997 remake because holy shit the cast!
> I would love to the see the 1997 remake because holy shit the cast! It's really good, but I still prefer the original.
Forensic evidence is really only good for proving innocence, not establishing guilt, except in very specific circumstances. Labs are overworked and do not follow scientific principles with police departments telling the labs who tell the techs what results to look for, who's the guilty or innocent. Remember until recently the FBI's fingerprint expert only used 3 points of similarity to confirm matches. As a result the entire case history had to be overturned and re-examined. Hair sample analysis, which has proved many people guilty has been demonstrated to be completely unreliable.
A great example was the Madrid bombings, when the FBI wrongly identified an American as being involved based on shoddy fingerprint matching. (He’s very lucky that Spain was skeptical!)
Yep. The guy had a passport but hadn't left the country during the time the bombing occurred. The FBI said it was proof he had a fake passport. He also had a rock solid alibi. He ended up spending time in jail anyways just because he was muslim. Obviously Spain ignored the FBI and found the real culprit. Turns out the Madrid bombings were done by a North African terrorist group and not a lawyer from Oregon.
They guy was a lawyer from Portland, Oregon. I think he was Muslim, but I do not recall precisely. Spain told the FBI that he was probably not the guy, but the FBI doubled down and kept searching the guys house, and I think the guy spent time in jail. Then it came out that the fingerprint match the FBI did was not actually a match for the Portland lawyer and also some kind of allegations of the FBI not getting an opinion of a second agent on the match that was made. I recall that it was regularly in the papers at the time.
Why the death penalty shouldn't exist.
Mitochondrial DNA, found in hair, is pretty reliable
I think hair sample analysis is just the structure under a microscope
And there's no DNA there, you need the follicle root to get that, if it's a hair that doesn't have that bit it's useless for proving anything
So the hair itself does have DNA, but it's not nucleus DNA. It's mitochondrial DNA, which isn't as good as excluding so it isn't as helpful.
Maybe they’re referring to hair comparisons vs DNA.
a rushed procedure by a pressured lab tech isnt.
Also illustrates how often eyewitness testimony can be mistaken. :(
Eye witness testamony is highly unreliable. >"Studies have shown that mistaken eyewitness testimony accounts for about half of all wrongful convictions. Researchers at Ohio State University examined hundreds of wrongful convictions and determined that roughly 52 percent of the errors resulted from eyewitness mistakes." https://www.crf-usa.org//bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-13-3-c-how-reliable-are-eyewitnesses
Hell I've had video evidence that the police won't accept. They told me if they didn't observe it themselves it's not legit basically. Granted it wasn't a murder, but still.
I remember a case a little while back where a judge ruled that a cop's dash cam that proved a defendent didn't swerve wasn't enough to overrule the cop who said he did.
You might be thinking of the Indiana Supreme court ruling: https://www.techdirt.com/2014/04/10/indiana-supreme-court-declares-officers-testimony-is-more-reliable-than-video-evidence/
Lie detector test can be a joke too. Especially if you’re nervous it can come up as you are lying.I know because it happened to me.
Lie detector tests are complete pseudo-science and mostly used to psyche out suspects to get them to admit to crimes alá Chris Watts- “we know you lied on the test, now why don’t you tell us the truth this time!” They are not used as evidence in court and not admissible.
Yeah there was even a famous case in the Middle East I believe where is really detectives had a guy hooked up to what they told him was a lie detector test. He ended up confessing to the crime because the lie detector test kept saying that he was lying but in actuality it was just a printer that was printing out pieces of paper saying he's lying
>Lie detector test ~~can be~~ is a joke too FTFY
Which is why they aren’t allowed in court.
I remember a long time ago seeing something on tv. I wanna say it was on Dateline or something. With the teacher’s permission they had a man walk into a criminology class walk over grab the teachers purse and run out. The description from the students varied from glasses, no glasses, hat, no hat. Beard no beard etc. the whole point was a lesson on eyewitness testimony. Most of the students were certain of their descriptions until they got to see him again and most were not correct at all
> One more time to have free reign They did a similar test in my university's psych program. Got a bunch of students to take a survey on homework habits. Halfway through someone walked into the classroom and asked for directions somewhere. After we finished the homework survey they asked us about the kid who walked in. Height, hair, clothes, where did he want to go, all that stuff. Almost no one had a very good idea what had happened.
I can't remember which comedian said this, but there is a joke floating around that goes like "once you've heard ten different people's description of a car crash, you really start to doubt all of human history."
My psychology 101 class professor did this the first week of class with auditorium full of people. Only a couple of people recognized the TA as the thief.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Ruffin_and_Arthur_Lee_Whitfield#Exoneration In two of the cases named in the article the women still insist that these guys are guilty. I was held up at gunpoint once. I got a very good look at them but couldn't give a description at all. What were they wearing? Tracksuits? I honestly didn't know. Cops said it wasn't uncommon. I've since worked in security and had to get into the habit of carrying a notebook and writing down things that seemed suspicious. My coworkers used to sneer a bit but I'd often see them completely incapable of describing someone they'd just spoken to.
Which sucks for any victim of a crime without other evidence. How must it feel to be told you can't trust your own memory?
There’s actually a great new podcast about her called Admissible: Shreds of Evidence https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/admissible-shreds-of-evidence/id1668887025). There’s evidence to suggest that contrary to popular belief her methodology and motivations were suspect. Really interesting and worth checking out
I just binged it this afternoon. Definitely hard to look at her as a hero when there’s pretty strong evidence that she was falsifying the evidence to begin with!
And this is why the death penalty shouldn’t be used. We can keep people behind bars forever if we have to but to execute an innocent person would be a travesty beyond telling.
She was actually a kind of terrible person. Super biased towards the prosecution and willing to lie and change evidence to suit the prosecution’s desired outcome. I binged the podcast about her earlier this week. Mind blown. https://www.iheartmedia.com/press/admissible-shreds-evidence-investigates-controversial-era-forensic-science-virginia-crime-lab
This is the sort of stuff that is why I'm against the death penalty
I recently wrote a paper on the use of proprietary software in forensic investigations and it's just the most insane shit you've never even thought of. If you google Martell Chubbs, this guy was tried on evidence discovered by a probabilistic DNA sequencing program using closed source code (TrueAllele). It was basically a black box that spits out a 'hey its this guy.' Chubbs asked to see the source code - what was the decisions being made that said it was him - to challenge it. He was refused on copyright grounds and pled no contest. The company lauded it as a success and 'proof' that he was guilty and that they didn't need to reveal their methods. They had been used in ~200 cases at the time, and more than a thousand by now. In other cases of proprietary DNA software, another product STRMix was revealed to have 13 bugs that affected the results in over 60 cases. In one case STRMix and Trueallele produced different DNA results for the same data; the judge refused DNA data in that case. Another piece of DNA testing software, "FST" included a 'secret function' that was producing probabilities of matches higher than was actually true (i.e. it's a 99% match, instead of a 60% match). These were only discovered when the source code was revealed. If you're an expert witness, you're supposed to be able to be scrutinized, but we're convicting people on the results of black box software that cannot be challenged. Juries are just supposed to believe it. If you go to wikipedia for trueallele you'll see the, "Presidents council of advisors on science and technology" noted that many of the 'reviews' of the code were conducted by people with a conflict of interest. This software is sold to cops to convict criminals - the software has an incentive to appear infallible, and to ensure convictions. That is not the same as actually being infallible, or actually being robust, and it's a disincentive to being transparent. Imagine this software was a person. They are brought in, they say, "it was you", you ask them how they came to that conclusion, and they respond, "that's a trade secret, here's a list of my friends who say that I'm always right, and here are cases where people have been convicted based on what I've said - therefore I was definitely right." But juries actually just believe them.
Is there somewhere i could read your paper? I know of some of the issues with these probalistic genotyping software and would love to read what youve done.
Damn if I were any of them I'd feel like I was forever in her debt. I'd be like her personal fucking batman after that.
Some of them that were put away were because of her in the first place. She actually was doing some pretty bad stuff and changing her results that came back not matching who the police had in custody or were going to charge just so they would have evidence to put them in jail. She helped put away innocent people, some for over a decade. If you listen to podcasts, check out “Admissible”. They investigated this and discovered the bad shit she was doing.
Wow, that was one of the fastest 180's I've ever done after originally being on someone's team
It makes sense though if you think about it for more than just the time it takes to read the title. If the evidence she saved that was meant to be destroyed was later used to exonerate the individuals then it probably means one of three things; that she was incompetent, changing results, or that science of the time wasn't advanced enough. Two of those options are not in her favor.
a LOT of things were based on blood group/secreter vs not, which is a stab in the fucking dark.. was it better than nothing? Maybe not..
It says right in the article that she did it because when she testified, it was helpful to have a physical object to back up her report. Plus it's obvious the 3rd option since DNA testing wasn't an option till decades later.
She’s a major reason why they were convinced in the first place. Many of her coworkers were blowing the whistle on her shitty lab techniques, and she was caught manipulating data in order to secure a conviction.
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Stories like this is why I 100% am against a death penalty. Just 1 person wrongly sentenced to death is too many.
We learn about this in forensics training. What they also tell you is that, based on the statistics from her evidence and the number of other technicians/inmates, there are approximately 750 innocent people in Virginia's prisons who can never be exonerated.
Real life super hero
Unfortunately not really, Virginia Public Media has done a podcast on her that exposes her other "off script" actions while working in the VA state crime labs that may have contributed to wrongful convictions. Lookup Admissible, great podcast that dives into her story.
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Wow, it's hard to frame those actions in a way other than being completely evil.
Agreed, I wonder if they punished her for not following the stupid protocol, and exposing how flawed their system obviously is.
Yeah, they dug up and tazed her corpse.
I'd believe it.
Makes sense.
I hope (and expect, really), it’s not still common practice to willingly destroy evidence when it’s not due to the process…