If The Glove Don’t Fit- Fake Forensic Science

So once I was on a jury in a civil case. The plaintiff contended he was in a parked car that was struck by another vehicle and suffered debilitating injuries that resulted in disability for which he should be compensated. The defendant was the insurance company of the vehicle that struck him.

That his car was struck by that vehicle was not contested, the 2 major points in dispute were whether the plaintiff was actually in the car at the time it was struck and whether he suffered disabling injury.

Well, 12 Angry Men time. I actually agreed with the insurance company that there was no proof he’d suffered injury. He was already 30% disabled before the accident (we’ll call it that, it was on purpose which was also uncontested) and the only testimony supporting further damage was from a chiropractor (they are not physicians though they’d like you to think so) who had no baseline from before the incident.

Case closed right? Not really. We were also subjected to 3 days of testimony about the circumstances of the accident with the Plaintiff recounting his version of events and the insurance company responding with the driver of the other vehicle and a “forensic” accident investigator who was a former Policeman before taking up the lucrative profession of testalying.

Both drivers were lying because they agreed that they were in a section of town (not Stars Hollow) “inspecting a construction site” that they were both working on… at midnight. The only reason people go to that place at midnight is to buy drugs. But you know, they can be forgiven a bit because you don’t want to admit in court that you were out buying drugs on a street corner. One reason is that it’s illegal and another is that it makes you look stupid. You don’t have a regular dealer?

The “forensic” presentation was a patent falsehood from start to finish. The description of the accident presented by the “expert” violated every law of physics starting with the Second Law of Thermodynamics as I was able to easily demonstrate in the jury room using a leftover lunch straw.

We argued about that for quite a while. As Milgram demonstrated, put on a lab coat and many if not most folks will believe any outrageous thing you say which is why Police and Prosecutors have been able to get away with this scam for decades and decades.

Forensic science is in the middle of an upheaval. How will it change under Trump?
by Aviva Shen, Think Progress
3/2/17

Forensic science disciplines used to convict countless people over the past century have been exposed as junk in recent years. Crime lab after crime lab has been shuttered after staffers were caught contaminating or fabricating results.

Reading about a new crime lab scandal every week, Lentini told the audience, “I’m just embarrassed.”

The problem is not isolated to a few bad apples cutting corners in small town labs. Tens of thousands of convictions have been thrown into doubt all over the country as crime lab abuses come to light. The FBI’s lab formally admitted that for decades, almost all of their examiners’ testimony identifying suspects based on hair analysis was wrongly skewed in favor of prosecutors.

But a far bigger challenge is that the science itself is suspect. In recent years, scientists have determined many common forensic science practices— such as fingerprinting, bitemarks, and firearm analysis—have no objective scientific basis whatsoever.
…
In 2009, the National Academy of Science released a report that concluded many common forensic practices were being used in court “without any meaningful scientific validation.” The report confirmed that identifications based on pattern-matching—tooth marks on a body to a specific person’s teeth, or tread patterns to a particular shoe—were, at a minimum, prone to error and human bias.

In the final months of Obama’s presidency, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), a group of scientists, judges, and legal experts, released an exhaustive report that most forensic fields were lacking in scientific rigor, and many have no foundational validity, meaning a practice has not been empirically tested and there is no way to calculate an error rate.

“I know this is something a lot of people are quite upset about,” former AAFS president and law professor Carol Henderson said of the PCAST report at the conference’s opening plenary. But, she said, “if we don’t talk about the issue then it’s not going to get resolved.”
…
The phrase “reasonable scientific certainty” can carry enormous weight with juries accustomed to trusting in scientific objectivity. But it has no real scientific basis.

“It’s a phrase that’s meaningless really. It’s a legal crutch that’s being used by lawyers, usually,” said John Butler, vice-chair of the National Commission on Forensic Science.

Much to the delight of my jury mates I eventually gave up trying to convince them that apples fall down unless by quantum fluke and moved them to the medical evidence which was entirely lacking. Cops, Lawyers, “Experts”, and Snitches in general lie all the time and mostly for the same reasons- to get something they want and avoid appearing stupid.