computer forensics is currently in much the same state that arson forensics was at the time Texas sentenced Willingham to death. as far as I know, it hasn't killed anyone, yet...
I don't know about killed, but every time I read a blurb buried somewhere about a child porn trial (based, invariably, on the contents of a computer), I think back to one or two known cases of someone planting CP on another computer and trying to frame the owner...
There was the company that sold the US a system to find hidden messages in Al Jazera videos - I think that got a few people a trip to the orange suited holiday camp before everybody discovered it was a con
Magical thinking alive and well in america. The New Yorker paints a picture of good evidence finally being heard. Reality tells a different story.
"Days before the meeting, however, Gov. Rick Perry replaced the commission chairman with Bradley, district attorney in Williamson County. The session at which Beyler was scheduled to speak was canceled, and the fire expert never appeared before the body."
"But the Texas Forensic Science Commission panel heading the inquiry also found insufficient evidence to prove that state Deputy Fire Marshal Manuel Vasquez and Corsicana Assistant Fire Chief Douglas Fogg were negligent or guilty of misconduct in their arson work."
As a foreigner it is absolutely fascinating to me how sound the basic tenets of the American justice system are and yet the system itself manages to be flawed and bizarrely vindictive. These arson convictions sure take a very interesting view of the phrase "beyond a reasonable doubt."
As compared to... what? A northern European system, I'm guessing. They're the only ones which aren't prima facie equally flawed and bizarre (like Japan's 99% conviction rate).
That's actually an interesting question. I'm Northern European, and my first thought was that the parent is right - that'd never happen here - our system is just and fair.
On closer inspection however I see a lot of my own bias:
- I'm not American, and so I believe that my system is better than yours.
- I read sites like Reddit daily, which is infested with stories of wronddoing, police violence and what have you. Since a lot of the userbase is from the US and the site generally is US centric I'll be exposed to a lot more US based wrongdoing which will bias my opinion.
- The US has a larger population than Northern Europe, which means that even if the two systems are exactly the same there will be more injustices done in the US.
So which is it? I don't know, but I do know that if I hadn't stopped to think I'd agree with the parent poster.
> At least we don't have death sentences where I live.
Are people more likely to die in jail than outside? If so, you have death sentences, you just don't admit that you're pulling the trigger.
Death penalty opponents claim that there are about 10 innocents who have been executed. (The actual claim is less, but 10, or even 100 suffices for our purposes.)
The vast majority of people who die in prison are not executed. Instead, they're killed by prison life, including life-without-parole. Unless you want to argue that the innocent are more likely to get death sentences than other sentences, you're stuck arguing that most sentences don't end in death. While true, that isn't enough to make the case.
Note that folks who get a death sentence get far more review and the like than folks who don't.
The numbers are pretty straightforward. Folks who yell about the death penalty killing innocents are either innumerate or care about the death penalty, not killing innocents. There's nothing wrong with the latter, when done honestly.
"Are people more likely to die in jail than outside?"
I don't know - do you? It seems very likely that they live longer even in jail than if they are being executed by death sentence, though.
Of course even being in jail as an innocent is a tragedy, but my personal feeling is that being executed is even worse.
I've never been to a prison and I don't know how the prison experiences vary by country. Somehow I have a hard time believing that in my country the infamous shower rapes are the norm. But I don't know.
I am surprised that the claim is only 10 innocents who have been executed. Even just casually reading I have a feeling that I read about more cases (and definitely about more cases who have been on death row but were freed in time, maybe because of the initiative of that law professor with his students?). Maybe you mean 10 innocents per year?
Perhaps it is also less likely that a case is being resolved after a death sentence, because there is less incentive to look into it. While people are still on death row, there might be more urgency to trying to prove their innocence.
I'm thinking point is that with a death sentence, there is a possibility that something will exonerate the person before they die in prison. If the person is sentenced to immediate death, there are no do-overs. If we find out that an innocent person was executed, who get the blame? No one.
> I'm thinking point is that with a death sentence, there is a possibility that something will exonerate the person before they die in prison.
Did you mean "life sentence"? If so, that's nice, but it doesn't happen.
> If the person is sentenced to immediate death, there are no do-overs.
There is no "sentenced to immediate death" in the US. The closest was Timothy McVeigh and his case was extremely special.
Texas, which is among the fastest, is currently executing folks convicted in the mid 90s. CA hasn't executed anyone since 2006.
> we find out that an innocent person was executed, who get the blame? No one.
Like I said, we kill innocents all the time. They die from "prison live", not being executed. They don't get any attention, which pretty much demonstrates that the death penalty is the issue, not innocents dying because of being wrongly convicted.
As I wrote, there's nothing wrong with being against the death penalty, but don't tell us you're against innocents dying because they were wrongly convicted.
No, I don't think it's really relevant. First, Switzerland is not in northern europe. Second, the program mentioned in the article appears to have been shut down more than thirty years ago. Third, it looks like the Swiss used to lock up troubled teens. While of course, teens are children, it does't read like they were locking up ten year olds to fold laundry.
I'm a Forensic Biologist, working mostly on DNA evidence. This article does not surprise me in the least. The National Academy of Science is also not surprised. They issued a report about a year ago examining the forensic sciences in the US and found that many fields do not have enough core research. My favorite example is blood spatter analysis (think Dexter). This field is completely built around crime scene experience. It's only been within the last decade that some serious research has been undertaken to provide a scientific basis for the opinions offered in court.
Now, it's not bad if your particular field has a few areas that are still lacking in basic research. But you have a DUTY to express this in court. For example, in this case, the expert can say that based on his 40 years in the field, this is his opinion, but he should note that there is no scientific support, and he should always declare if there is any disagreement within the community.
Forensic science is an amazing field...unfortunately the practitioners tend to mess it up.
It is interesting how long it has taken for forensics (even just some small aspects) to be approached in a scientific way. It is very disappointing when you consider how many people's lives and livelyhoods depend on forensics. I wonder what other systems depend on anecdotes and apprenticeships for expertise, that really ought to be approached scientifically.
> It is interesting how long it has taken for forensics (even just some small aspects) to be approached in a scientific way
I know someone who contracts out to forensics labs and police depts. The situation is basically a mess. "Experts" are selling "expertise" to people who are not familiar with the domain. So it just comes down to convincing the prosecutor, attorney, judge, a member of a jury, that you are an "expert". That can be done by clever sales techniques: look professional, know how to use lots of buzz words, and stuff like that.
Then the more a certain "expert" is invited to testify or to examine evidence they accrue "credibility" regardless if they ended up making shit up on the spot or not. This "expert" has been invited by appear at 10 trials, so they must be good. Or "look he worked with 3 police departments, he must be good".
The fundamental problem is those who are not experts in a domain need to find expert, so that opens a possibility for "clever salesmanship" therefore my friend's business...
I am not aware of an attempt to scientifically approach software engineering generally (though it seems like the type of thing that would have been tried). I have seen some pretty scientific approaches to performance and efficiency. What do you think should be done? Perhaps more peer review. Blinded testing of code complexity and development difficulty for different code systems?
When people say they think software engineering should be approached more scientifically, usually what they mean is that they want a scientifically-verified process that repeatably produces optimal results. Unfortunately, what science has been done has generally shown that good people produce good software, bad people produce bad software, and that it doesn't seem to much matter what process you lay on top of them. (To the extent that sounds tautological, well, I'm summarizing here.) It is broadly accurate to say that what scientific evidence there is about software engineering leads to the conclusion that science isn't going to give us that science-approved unified single process that people are asking for. So we'll continue to hear this complaint for at least the next several decades.
(Science can nibble around the edges of the problem of software engineering, but even what results we have strike me as likely to suffer from the usual problems of taking small isolated samples from an n-dimensional space and then trying to extrapolate. For one thing, almost every study you've ever heard of that establishes some "fact" about software engineering was done on students. Scientifically speaking, there's no particular reason to expect such results to translate to professionals in any particular manner.)
It links to a much more detailed article. Expecting a short radio piece to go into enormous detail is a bit unreasonable, and picking the biggest one - that fire investigators didn't even know how long a normal, non-accelerated fire would take to start - is pretty good at showing just how bad the state of the "art" was/is.
