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The Washington Post has a story about flawed FBI science, and its effects on hundreds of cases prior to the year 2000.
The FBI has admitted that virtually all of their elite examiners have given tainted testimony overstating forensic hair matches.
The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory's microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country's largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.
Hair match wasn't the ONLY evidence in these cases. But in many cases it may have been the only evidence that placed defendants at the scene. However, 32 of these cases were death penalty cases, and 14 of those defendants have been executed.
All of these cases are now going to be reviewed.
This is the second major use of junk science the FBI has been forced to admit. There was the whole Bullet Lead Analysis used for decades to claim that the lead in bullets used in a crime matched batches of bullets the defendant had access to.
Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, commended the FBI and department for the collaboration but said, "The FBI's three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @08:06AM
You ought to refuse to run any code you did not write or evaluate fully yourself and doesn't run on hardware you assembled yourself or have been able to fully evaluate yourself, after all it such code was written, designed, and built by people with degrees in computer science and engineering which just aren't good enough for you, and you really ought to check everything out first yourself.
In the same way, you ought to stop using any motor vehicle you did not design and build yourself or whose design that you in your infinite wisdom have learned how to evaluate properly, as they were made only under the supervision of people with degrees in mechanical engineering, and you ought not to just take them at their word when they tell you that the car won't explode when you turn the ignition.
In the same way, you ought not to eat any food you did not harvest from plants you cultivated by your own hand or from animals you did not breed yourself from stock that you have personally evaluated, as you shouldn't trust these experts in agriculture not to feed you something that will cause you to develop some nasty disease later on. After all, these agriculturists aren't willing to turn over verified and verifiable data that their products are safe!
It takes most of a human lifetime to become an expert in any of these fields, and obviously no one person can develop the expertise to properly evaluate everything we use on their own. There are, fortunately, communities of such experts, and if they concur about something, then there's a pretty good chance that they're right, most especially if reality bears their conclusions out. Millions of people aren't dying from motorcars exploding after all. At some point you have to trust someone, but you don't trust them blindly either. You see who they are and who they work for, and if they are really impartial. Toyota's engineers might tell you their motorcar's brakes are fine, but there are other engineers working for the NTSB who also evaluate their designs and see if they actually are as fine as Toyota's engineers say they are.
The same is true of climate science. It also takes a significant part of a human lifetime to become an expert in climatology enough to evaluate climate data and models, and it's not something one can pick up from just a few minutes with Google, no matter what one might think. There is a community of such experts who examine each others' data and models, and they largely agree with one another about the conclusions, excepting a few sceptics who have largely been shown to be under the control of vested interests who stand to lose a lot if action is taken on global warming. And while this is still open to debate, reality does seem to be bearing their conclusions out. The climate is changing for the warmer. Polar ice is melting and global sea levels are rising as a result.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 20 2015, @10:19AM
That's a pretty lame attempt to draw analogies. Automobiles are sold to members of the public, many of whom tear into those automobiles, and alter them in any number of ways. In fact, I've done so, with older, less sophisticated models. My sons have done so. One of my sons enjoys modifying motorcycles. Those machines are verifiable by any motorhead with minimal education. Change out part A for part B, and you will alter these parameters. I've known genuine mental midgets who could perform these tasks.
Agriculture and animal husbandry. Right here on my own property, we breed sheep and goats. My duaghter in law and granddaughter know everything about the breeds they are interested in, and they know a hell of a lot about other breeds. No one in my family has cultivated and/or engineered a new tomatoe, or melon, but several of us know how the various cultivars were produced.
Most of a human lifetime to become an expert? Uh-huh - maybe. On the other hand, maybe it takes a lifetime to bullshit other people into believing that you're an expert. A nineteen year old kid making outrageous claims is usually just laughed at. A fifty nine year old man WITH DEMONSTRABLE WEALTH can often pass himself off as an "expert".
Whatever. You place your faith in those people you choose, and allow me to place my own faith in whatever I choose. I don't accept your global warming - climate change "experts" as worthy of my faith.
Once again - I learned of global warming in 1963, listening to my third grade teacher explaining about the interglacial period that we are blessed with today. These "experts" probably learned the same lessons that I did, and immediately started imagining how they could profit from the natural causes and effects being explained to them. To bad I didn't think of that, huh? I could have beaten Al Gore to those carbon credit dollars! With all that money, I might have also had time to invent the internets!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @03:45AM
> Once again - I learned of global warming in 1963, listening to my third grade teacher explaining about the interglacial period that we are blessed with today.
When lecturing about global warming I suggest you always lead with that fact.
It will really help your audience to understand where you are coming from.