SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the take-a-deep-breath-before-reading dept.
These Machines Can Put You in Jail. Don't Trust Them.
A million Americans a year are arrested for drunken driving, and most stops begin the same way: flashing blue lights in the rearview mirror, then a battery of tests that might include standing on one foot or reciting the alphabet.
What matters most, though, happens next. By the side of the road or at the police station, the drivers blow into a miniature science lab that estimates the concentration of alcohol in their blood. If the level is 0.08 or higher, they are all but certain to be convicted of a crime.
But those tests — a bedrock of the criminal justice system — are often unreliable, a New York Times investigation found. The devices, found in virtually every police station in America, generate skewed results with alarming frequency, even though they are marketed as precise to the third decimal place.
Judges in Massachusetts and New Jersey have thrown out more than 30,000 breath tests in the past 12 months alone, largely because of human errors and lax governmental oversight. Across the country, thousands of other tests also have been invalidated in recent years.
The machines are sensitive scientific instruments, and in many cases they haven't been properly calibrated, yielding results that were at times 40 percent too high. Maintaining machines is up to police departments that sometimes have shoddy standards and lack expertise. In some cities, lab officials have used stale or home-brewed chemical solutions that warped results. In Massachusetts, officers used a machine with rats nesting inside.
[...] Technical experts have found serious programming mistakes in the machines' software. States have picked devices that their own experts didn't trust and have disabled safeguards meant to ensure the tests' accuracy.
[...] Yet the tests have become all but unavoidable. Every state punishes drivers who refuse to take one when ordered by a police officer.
I strongly suggest reading the entire article. Breath-taking and sobering is an understatement.
Also at CNET
(Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 05 2019, @05:06PM (3 children)
*Almost all of the the "DNA tests" they do for crime scenes are not full genome sequencing, but visual spot test electrophoresis, which can distinguish on among about 20-50 people before getting duplicate results from chance.
*Fingerprint experts will often give different analyses to the same finger-prints if the image is rotated a few degrees.
*The central crime lab in my state had a huge scandal because one of their employees was just writing conclusion reports agreeing with whatever the arresting officer said without doing any tests
*The most popular interrogation method(crying when punishments are described is treated as a sign of guilt) is known to have a high false confession rate, and the very person convicted using it turned out to be innocent
*Everything you've ever heard about eyewitness testimony being bad
The great thing is none of those are so bad as to be inadmissible in court, like lie detectors or body language analysis. Just flawed in ways not nearly enough people appreciate.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 05 2019, @07:11PM (1 child)
Couple all of the above with Milgram's results (mindless obedience authority), and you've got kangaroos with rubber stamps on their feet loose in the justice system.
One of the worst frameworks left by the founding fathers was to be tried by a jury of one's peers - not that I have a better suggestion, but it's the at the crux of courtroom injustice.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @07:48PM
In most jurisdictions you have the option of a bench trial [wikipedia.org].
Unfortunately, most state and local judges are *elected*, which gives them an incentive to increase the rate at which "criminals" are caged.
In fact, this 2010 documentary [imdb.com] about abuses in the Massachusetts criminal justice system gives a great overview of how corruption works.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @10:00PM
A favorite story of mine is how a buddy of mine accidentally submitted the same fingerprints to a fingerprint expert once during a deposition. The look on his face when I pointed out a few days later that the expert said none of the fingerprints matched, even though the expert had identical (but differently cropped) fingerprint images in the set he examined, was priceless. I really wish I could have seen the expert's face when confronted by that in court, but the prosecutor dismissed the charge for unrelated reasons so that never happened.