One of our clients at $Job is a testing laboratory for mold & asbestos samples - just from building inspectors & such. To maintain their modest accreditations, every single Analyst (person looking at submitted samples through a microscope) at that lab has to perform daily duplicates & replicates of their own & their coworkers' results (and achieve fairly demanding levels of consistency on those). Then they trade samples with other labs weekly or monthly, to demonstrate further consistency & accuracy of results. Then the accrediting inspectors come through to inspect regularly. Then...<p>Where the hell were the grown-ups, let alone an inspector who actually understood laboratory QC, when the FBI was running a Keystone Cops clown lab for years?
Ridiculous. So much of law enforcement and forensic "science" is just pretext or pseudoscientific supportive structure for good old gut feelings.
> The DOJ, FBI, Innocence Project, and NACDL (National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers) have been working jointly on this review and share the same goal of ensuring the integrity of the American justice system in all respects. All of the parties are committed to addressing this situation properly and will continue to work together in a collaborative and professional manner.<p>This is the only thing keeping the cynicism at bay for me when I read stories like this. It's horrifying to think of how many people might be falsely imprisoned.
If you or I lie to the court, it is perjury. When it is the FBI, who are granted an additional level of professional authority and trust in their testimony 'because reasons' (even though no testimony should automatically be elevated over other) it's just harmless 'errors made in statements by FBI examiners' as phrased in this article.<p>Having gone through the system, it's all lies. Let's start with plea agreements. You have to agree in your plea that you were not coerced or threatened into taking your plea, yet everyone know that the prosecutor threatens you with taking the plea or facing an extra 10-30 years as the 'trial tax' (google it) that get's applied if you dare exercise your constitutional right to trial. But the judge, prosecutor, everyone looks the other way and ignores that blatant threat made against you. The judge knows that the prosecutor placing that clause in the plea is being disingenuous, the prosecutor knows they are. If justice is served by a five year sentence in a plea, how is that same justice served and applied fairly when adding 15 years simply for going to trial? Either a crime warrants a 5 year sentence, or a 15 year sentence. But sentencing is based not on your crime, but on the prosecutor and judge being annoyed if you exercise your constitutional rights. There is a reason that plea agreements were considered unconstitutional up until the 60s when the police/judicial state started undermining constitutional rights.<p>Acceptability of forensic evidence such as lie detector tests is not based on science but on precedence. If a court has accepted it as science before, then it is extremely hard for you to challenge it, even when it was complete garbage like lie detector tests. The current language is 'you can't be convicted solely based on lie detector tests' after a lot of people paid a lot of experts and took a lot of 'trial tax' to try and get lie detectors removed completely.
It doesn't seem that they will take action to prevent failures of a similar general kind occurring again. There should be legislation regarding the quality of forensic analysis of all kinds.
So, if this is used in a trial where I am on the jury, I'll assume it implies a 90% chance the evidence says the defendant is innocent, plus a 5 to 9.9% chance of a false positive with the underlying test.<p>Got it. Moving on.<p>Edit: I was being snarky but, on reflection, if they are falling back on hair analysis, it implies they have a piece of the guilty party's hair and the defendant's hair, but are not willing to present the results of a $1000 genotyping test.<p>A 99% probability of innocence is probably about right in that part of the criminal prosecution decision tree.
96% FALSE POSITIVE RATE (falsely accused) for a non-DNA hair analysis???!!!<p>I want to know more about its false negative rate (how many got away with it scot-free).