Radley Balko has an amazing tale:
After 10 years in prison, including two spent on death row, Ray Krone was exonerated and released from prison in 2002.
But Krone’s lawyer wasn’t quite finished. In addition to his job as a criminal defense attorney, Christopher Plourd is a legal specialist in forensic science, having served on several government commissions looking at the role of DNA testing in the criminal justice system.
Plourd was livid that his client could have been convicted not once, but twice, based on obviously erroneous testimony that was presented as scientific. It seemed to confirm what Plourd and other critics of bite-mark analysis have long suspected—that there is little “science” behind the method at all. So in 2001, the lawyer decided to conduct a “proficiency test” on some unknowing and prominent bite-mark expert.
Plourd chose Mississippi dentist Michael West for his test. West had long been under fire for dubious testimony in dozens of criminal cases, including one in which he claimed to be able to match the bite marks in a half-eaten bologna sandwich found at the crime scene to the dentition of a defendant. I’ve written extensively on West over the last few years, most recently in a feature about the 1992 Louisiana murder trial and eventual conviction of Jimmie Duncan. In that case, I obtained a video showing West repeatedly jamming Duncan’s dental mold into the body of the young girl Duncan was accused of killing. Forensic specialists say that what West does in the video isn’t a remotely acceptable method of analysis, and may amount to criminal evidence tampering. Duncan is on death row in Louisiana, based in part on West’s analysis.
***In October 2001, working for Plourd, a private investigator named James Rix sent West the decade-old photographs of the bite marks on Ancona’s breast. Rix told West that the photos were from the three-year-old unsolved murder of a college student in Idaho. Rix then sent West a dental mold of his own teeth, but told him that they came from the chief suspect in the case. He also sent a check for $750, West’s retainer fee.
Two months later, West sent Rix a letter and accompanying 20-minute video. In the video, West meticulously explains the methodology he uses to match bite marks to dental molds. Using the photo of Ancona’s bitten breast and Rix’s own dental mold, West then reaches the conclusion Plourd and Rix suspected he would: That the mold and the photos were a definite match.
I’m kind of speechless, to be honest. I don’t know what kind of human being would just make up testimony that could sentence a man to death, assist the actual murderer in getting away with his crime, and all for the sum of $750.00. Maybe he just believes his own bs? Even then, what excuse is that? You are supposed to be a subject matter expert. This is stunning.
SGEW
It is possible, I suppose, that Mr. West D.D.S. trusts his own “methodology,” and truly believes that he’s solving crimes.
For instance, not all phrenologists were charlatans – surely some of them really did believe that those lumps above your ears were signs of cognitive defects (or mental brilliance or sexual hysteria or whatever). Incompetence before malice, etc.
So saying, revoke this joker’s license and prosecute him for criminal negligence, at least. Motive and knowing culpability can be determined at trial.
Svensker
Just finished reading John Grisham’s non-fiction book, “Innocent Man,” about a group of people convicted on the same kind of spurious “scientific” evidence. Horrifying. Apparently it happens all the time.
Dave Ruddell
I was at a workshop at the American Academy of Forensic Science meeting in 2007 about this case. They had all the major players from Ray’s side of the case (strangely, the DA, odontologist and others from the prosecution side didn’t want to come.) The final speaker was Ray himself. I remember thinking about halfway through his talk “Wow, he seems kinda bitter”. Then I remembered, he was on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. I’m amazed he isn’t far more bitter.
I’m a forensic scientist, and bite-mark analysis is (often) an embarassment to the field, and leads some to label forensics as junk science. I’m fortunate to work in a speciality that is well documented scientifically, and at a lab that is very careful about stating the limits of our examinations.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
The worst part is that, due to underfunding, defense attorneys representing indigent clients are often forced to rely on the prosecution’s expert witnesses for criminal cases. A death penalty case can be particularly expensive- forensics experts, psychological experts, ballistics experts, etc. Your average Defender General budget isn’t going to begin to foot the bill for it. The defense isn’t going to be able to afford all of the expert witnesses that the State can throw out there. Taxpayers would rather foot the bill to convict criminals than to defend the accused. Simple as that.
I can remember in law school, a speaker at my school said that they should pass laws making the death penalty illegal for those who can pay more than $75,000 in their own defense. Functionally, he said, that’s what ends up happening. Other than Mr. Capano down in Delaware, how many wealthy defendants are on death row now? If you can afford to hire your own expert witnesses, you can generally avoid capital punishment.
wilfred
Maybe spurious science ‘works’ because of the way science has been elevated to infallibility, starting with Sherlock Holmes and ending with the current onslaught of all these CSI and miracle doctor detective shows.
cleek
someone who, under different circumstances, would be a murderer himself.
lotus
Michael West is infamous in Mississippi. Try his name on the Search box here — outrageousness like this is par for his course. He and Steven Hayne, the state’s unofficial “medical examiner” for years, sent nobody-knows-how-many innocent people to prison (including Death Row) before the Mississippi Innocence Project got involved and put a stop to them.
JGabriel
John Cole:
I don’t know what we should call them either – “Evil”, maybe – but in my experience, such people usually self-identify, at least in America, as: Conservative or Republican.
I know that sounds glib, but I’m actually somewhat serious here. The philosophy that making a buck for one’s self is such a high moral priority that the end justifies the means of destroying other people’s lives to achieve it, is pretty much the root of everything one despises about Conservativism.
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Dennis-SGMM
“Bite mark analysis?” WTF? I’m neither a scientist nor a dentist and I can think of a half-dozen reasons why it would be inaccurate – particularly when the bite pattern in one medium is applied to another. This is about one step removed from Cesare Lambroso’s advocacy for using “atavistic stigmata” to identify “born criminals”.
HyperIon
How can you be a regular visitor to H&R (yeah, you took them off the blogroll recently but you posted something about them last week) and NOT have seen this discussed before? Balko has been flogging this (and the home invasion story in Md) for many many months (years?).
ppcli
It could also be that he genuinely believes that “if the police think you’re the prime suspect, then you’re surely guilty”. So he thinks he’s helping the police get the convictions that (he believes) would otherwise be impossible because of (as he would put it) “liberal, activist judges”.
.
Same despicable result, of course, but in my experience most people who do truly evil things need to be able to tell themselves a cover story.
DougJ
“It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. ”
—Raymond Chandler
Steve V
At least that little anecdote will be enough to get that West clown dinged as an expert in any subsequent trial.
Brien Jackson
Welcome to the American criminal justice system.
That’s rather mild, really.
Ugh
It would be interesting if the American people were willing to actually pay for the justice they demand, such that criminal defendants had the same resources at their disposal as prosecuters, and that those who end up in jail are not subject to abuse from their fellow prisoners and guards. Each of those is a massive scandal in and of itself.
Instead, we just want to be Tough on Crime™ and don’t care when innocent people are sent to prison and prisoners are horribly abused. They’re “criminals” and deserve what they get.
John Cole
@HyperIon: I’ve posted about this several times. This is a new story.
I guess what I mean is I have known about it for a while, yet it still has the capacity to shock me. Not much does anymore, but this does.
El Cid
Why, a man who properly puts his faith in the power of the free market as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. If he were wrong, surely people wouldn’t be paying him for his services.
What, do you librul whiners want oppressive Daddy Big Government manipulating just who can and cannot sell their wares with the already too-soci@alist jury trial system?
What we need to do is make sure that more of the criminal trial system is managed by free market values, including the judge and the jury. We’ve only begun our journey to propertarian paradise.
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
@Svensker: I just searched for that in the Toronto library and downloaded the eBook version, which is playing now. Thanks for the pointer!
freelancer
This is definitely the case in terms of jury perception, but it’s also the willingness of shameless quacks, frauds, and pseudo-scientists to lie for personal gain.
Want a depressing read? What’s the Harm.net has documented cases of people maimed, financially ruined, or killed by junk science, con artists, and an overall lack of critical thinking.
Beej
Stories like this are the proper retort to those who want to limit appeals for convicted felons. I don’t have the numbers, and I’m too lazy this morning to Google it, but a large percentage of those who are sentenced to double digit prison time and receive the death penalty are represented by public defenders who have neither the time nor the resources to hire their own experts to contest the prosecution’s experts. The balance of power is nearly always with a prosecutor. This power includes a mindset in at least some jurors that “if he was arrested, he must be guilty of something”. When most of those who are convicted labor under this kind of handicap, why should we be willing to cut off the number of appeals allowed? If you really want to limit the number of appeals, do away with the death penalty.
Martin
The kind of person that as a taxpayer would be pissed that the state is spending $750 on scrub stock, but if he’s going to have to live around them, might as well be the beneficiary of the $750.
Radley Balko
@El Cid
What we need to do is make sure that more of the criminal trial system is managed by free market values, including the judge and the jury. We’ve only begun our journey to propertarian paradise.
Actually, market competition is exactly what forensic science needs. In Mississippi, the state has a monopoly on forensics. Prosecutors pick medical examiners and other experts whom they can trust to give them the results they need to secure a conviction. Usually, indigent defendants aren’t even given money to hire their own experts (and 90+ percent of defendants in Mississippi are indigent). In other states, forensic labs work directly for the state. They sometimes even report to the state attorney general. This creates huge problems, as even good scientists can’t help but be influenced by subtle bias when their boss is also the person who is relying on them for a given result.
What we need is more private labs brought into the system as a form of peer review, and a way to provide quality control on state labs and the good ol’ boy networks like the one in Mississippi. Here are some ideas on how such a system would work:
http://www.slate.com/id/2197284/pagenum/all/
So your snark is misplaced. Bad forensics is the result of state monopolies on forensic experts. It has nothing to do with runaway free markets.
Michael
Radley, its fun to see you still worshipping at the cult of your beloved gin-sodden party whore, that idiot Rand.
For every smart thing you say, you’ve got about 10 idiot statements, most attributable to the fetid hot air that rushed out of her mouth.
trollhattan
This sort of thing is why I’ll never be empaneled on a capital crime jury. Even if I “believed” in the death penalty I cannot possibly believe in the machinery of the system within which it’s administered.
I’m frequently reminded of the zeal with with Dubya and Gonzo executed prisoners in Texas and what might have transpired in 2000 had folks been paying at least a little attention.
El Cid
@Radley Balko: No, what we really need are trial systems like that more common in Western Europe, where the experts are in the service of the judiciary, rather than hired hacks in the service of either the prosecution or the defense.
Of course, clearly it would be harmful to have Big Gubmit regyoolayshuns on the use of experts for criminal trials, as we’ve learned from our experiments with an anti-regulatory approach to derivatives investments.
My snark is, of course, in place, and free market ideologues are simultaneously free to preach their utopian rhetoric about their fantasy free market paradises anywhere.
Radley Balko
Michael,
Did you have an actual substantive response to my comment? Or is name-calling and ad hominem all you have?
Have you studied the forensics system? Have you reported on it? Have you researched it? I have, for much of the last three years. You don’t have to be a free market ideologue to understand the problems with a state monopoly on forensic science when the state’s primary motivation is to put people in prison. Do you not understand the concept of peer review? Do you not understand how it would improve the quality of science in the courtroom?
Incidentally, I’m not a fan of Ayn Rand. So you’ll have to find some other cliched attack to hide behind instead of actually trying to comprehend what I’m arguing.
It’s amazing how quickly the “open mind” of a leftist snaps shut at the mere mention of the phrase “free market.” Pathetic, really. I’m talking about reforms that would prevent innocent people from being sent to prison — or to death row. You’d think that would be an effort the left could get behind. Instead, you drag out your Ayn Rand insult generator and completely ignore the point I’m making.
DanSmoot'sGhost
Concerns about anonymity prevent me from saying much about why I am saying this, and if anyone chooses to think I am just pulling it out of my ass, so be it, but I assure you, I am not.
Many, if not most, prosecutorial agencies today are engaging in practices that amount to “do whatever it takes to get a conviction.” That means exactly what it says.
What you describe here doesn’t shock me. What shocks me is that so little of this stuff gets exposed, or investigated. What shocks me is the extent to which the public looks away from prosecutorial abuses and takes the expedient “law and order no matter what it costs” approach to these things.
It’s not unlike the “give me national security at any cost” attitude that led to the Cheney administration and the abuse of intelligence to deliver perceived security.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but if the people don’t want abusive intel and abusive criminal prosecution in order to feel safe, then they have to go out and elect governments that won’t do these things. Which means, they have to pay attention, and ask questions, and most importantly, take responsibility for the governments they choose. It’s in their interests, because safety at the cost of abuse of power is not real safety at all.
Good government is possible. But only if the people choose it.
wilfred
@DanSmoot’sGhost: @Radley Balko:
Both of these comments imply that since science is not being ‘done’ anymore but rather produced, it in turn creates similar production and/or instrumentality. Base and superstructure, no?
I remember being impressed when I read that Bugliosi told Manson that the duty of the district attorney was to make sure that he got a fair trial.
DanSmoot'sGhost
@wilfred:
Bugliosi strikes me as being an honest guy. Most prosecutors are. It’s just an impression in his case, I could be wrong.
But enough are walking a tightrope between ethics and conviction rates to impugn the entire system. And even though most prosecutors want to do the right thing, there is a culture in that field … not unlike the culture that can overtake a law enforcement agency … that it’s Us Against Them and that Ends Justify Means.
Combine that with the great power of these officials and agencies to operate in a cloud of mystery and lack of oversight and you have all the ingredients needed for abuse of these powers.
This situation exists exactly because the public wants safety and doesn’t want to ask how it works. This is true in law enforcement just as it is true in national security.
The public holds the key. The public has the true ultimate power.
Martin
But you just said that West was paid $750. That’s not a state monopoly, that’s a private contractor. The free market was in place and failed. Anyone could have hired him and anyone could have hired his parallel universe twin dentist for $750 to refute the evidence.
And yet you toss out this:
Now, that strikes me as extremely suspicious, that a population which cannot make up more than about 1/4 of the state population at most makes up 90+% of the criminals. Perhaps the problem is the continuing embrace of race and class warfare by law enforcement in the south. These problems don’t seem to exist to anywhere near the same degree in the north or west, which is also suspicious.
Sound less like a free market problem (since you already documented the free market failure) and more like a regulation and possibly civil rights problem.
Michael D.
Someone who wants you to come back time and again and keep paying him $750, maybe?
DanSmoot'sGhost
You might want to invite your local public defenders office out for drinks and check that assertion out with them.
Ecks
Balko, I read your article and it seem eminently reasonable, and the reforms you suggest really would be great ideas. I just wouldn’t describe them as a “free market” solution. That would imply, to my mind, commercial labs services being bid upon by prosecutors and defenders, with the motive of turning a profit, and pressures to come to the conclusion their client demanded in as non-transparent a way as possible. But that’s not at all what you’re suggesting.
You suggest an entirely sensible regulatory approach with testing placed under neutral authority, the testing seperated from the analysis, testers never being allowed to consult with police or prosecutors or know anything about the case other than the direct evidence they are looking at, and random unannounced confirming of results by third party labs. In other words, the sort of thing the IOC already does when testing for drug use in sports, etc.
The problem here isn’t your solution, it’s your label of your solution.
eemom
fwiw, there are legal mechanisms to keep junk science out of court. Every state and the federal courts have rules restricting the admissibility of expert testimony — in some the rule is that it must be based on a methodology that is “generally accepted” in the relevant scientific community, and others use more specific “indicia of reliability.” It would be the government’s burden to meet the standard if the defense attorney filed a motion to exclude.
These rules apply in criminal as well as civil cases, but I am not a criminal lawyer so I have no idea of what the real world practice is in these kinds of cases.
El Cid
@Radley Balko: You know what? If you’re serious, and not just taking an opportunity to spout anti-gubmit monopoly rhetoric, then I’d be willing to admit that I read you wrong. We can all do that. Many of us lefties oppose all sorts of things, and are willing to support better options whenever they’re better.
If the facts of the matter are that in this particular system and in this particular reality we’re unlikely to get a disinterested judiciary-supported approach to scientific expertise, and that the better available option than small tyranny favoritism of unreviewed experts would be some wider set of systematized and approved expertise, I’d express nothing but support for it.
Both governments and markets have inherent un- and anti-democratic and tyrannical tendencies, and only the actual context can indicate in which areas lie the biggest problems. (There’s an extent to which there are things such as professional and academic organizations are really part of neither sphere, or possess properties of both, though clearly they aren’t formally part of the government. But governments often form quasi-governmental relationships with all sorts of non-governmental organizations.)
It is truly rare to see as a blog comment an actual, honest attempt to argue to use the best of market possibilities to resolve a dilemma created by an unfair or inadequate existing system that, yes, a lot of us make the mistake of hearing more of the same blather when it’s an actual response. If so, then in this case I admit to lazily being over hasty in responding without really following up, seeing as how I’m just here because business is slow and most of my other tasks I’ve finished up.
Ecks
Believe it. Indigent people are:
a) more prone to crime (both because they have higher rates of desperation that push them to do things that might otherwise not be wise, and because “the law in it’s magnificent equanimity forbids rich man as well as poor from begging and sleeping under bridges”)
b) are FAR more prone to getting caught for the crimes they do commit (they take place in more public areas that are more heavily monitored by the police).
c) are FAR more likely to be prosecuted for the crimes they are caught for (don’t have access to lawyers to scare off police, talk them out of trouble, respectable parents to come in and smooth everything over for them, upper middle class social skills that would let them impress police officers as a “good guy”, and are outright stereotyped as trouble makers to start with).
They’re also more likely to be convicted when they are tried too, for many of the same reasons. Any reasonably close look at the criminal justice system will make readily apparent a whole lot of the class biases that most Americans don’t believe exist.
Martin
Well, I know they can’t do that (my cousin is a DA), so how is a free market solution possible? Are the free marketeers really suggesting that we give public defenders a budget equal to that of the DA? Because that’s the only way this is going to work.
So the free-market solution is to dump even more money into government? Is this an honest argument being made here?
Radley Balko
Martin,
But you just said that West was paid $750. That’s not a state monopoly, that’s a private contractor. The free market was in place and failed. Anyone could have hired him and anyone could have hired his parallel universe twin dentist for $750 to refute the evidence.
You clearly don’t understand the difference between a free market and government cronyism.
Now, that strikes me as extremely suspicious, that a population which cannot make up more than about 1/4 of the state population at most makes up 90+% of the criminals.
I have no idea what this means. “Indigent” means you can’t afford a private attorney. A felony charge that goes to trial can cost upwards of $20,000, much more than that for a murder charge. And yes, the poor do make up the vast majority of the accused criminals in Mississippi. This surprises you?
Perhaps the problem is the continuing embrace of race and class warfare by law enforcement in the south.
Well, yes. That absolutely is part of the problem.
These problems don’t seem to exist to anywhere near the same degree in the north or west, which is also suspicious.
Louisiana and Mississippi are particularly bad. But this is a nationwide problem. Alabama actually has a pretty good forensics system. So does Georgia. Chicago’s is awful. There have been numerous forensic scandals in California, as well as in Maryland, Ohio, and even in the FBI’s crime lab. So no, it isn’t necessarily a southern problem.
Sound less like a free market problem (since you already documented the free market failure) and more like a regulation and possibly civil rights problem.
The use of outright frauds in forensics, like Hayne and West, is a civil rights and government corruption problem. The way unintended bias creeps into the work of even well-intentioned forensic scientists is a problem that stems from the state monopoly on forensics. Read the Slate piece. There are peer-reviewed studies backing this up.
J
Radley Balko is a national treasure. Even those of you who don’t like his solutions or employers wouldn’t know this was happening without him. He’s one of the few out there digging up the truth about all kinds of deep systemic corruption in the legal system.
Go hit the donate button on his site.
mvr
Much “scientific” evidence used to convict people is pretty iffy, partly because of what goes on in some state crime labs. (This is not to say that there can’t be good scientific evidence, nor to say that eyewitnesses are especially reliable either.) Some 20+ years ago I worked as a legal investigator and we did a lot of cases involving car crimes, most often DUII, but sometimes manslaughter as well. In order to have a breath testing machine certified there were supposed to be studies done to validate each model of machine. At that time the state of Oregon claimed to have a “study” to that effect from an NHTSA scientist and this was used as the legal basis for admitting evidence from Intoxilizer machines. I recall calling him and talking to him about the study. He told me that he had never done any such study. In effect for many years the police used a machine that they were willing to testify was highly reliable, based on a study that was never done.
One reason for this was the lack of genuine research backgrounds for the folks who ran the crime lab. As I recall (from a distance of 25 years) the director of the lab had a BA in chemistry — a perfectly respectable degree, but not what you want the top guy in a lab to have as his highest credential. Probably there was field training of various sorts on top of that, but I’d want someone better trained for that post. These people would testify that the machines never malfunctioned and given their lab coats they were taken seriously by unwitting jurors.
Much of the science behind scientific evidence shows that there are positive correlations between certain sorts of evidence and what they are supposed to be evidence of. But often these are just strong correlations. (And with bite marks it is obviously worse than that, judging from the above story.) Crime lab technicians then testify about this evidence in terms that does not reflect the non-certain nature of the evidence. And judges and juries who are often not all that well educated about science themselves often eat it up.
Often you could tell the better scientists from the rest precisely by how unwilling they were to give unhedged answers to questions about which one could at most have probabilistic knowledge.
Martin
Oh, I believe it, but this:
tells me that law enforcement is not being applied equally.
And this:
tells me that the judicial system is not be applied equally.
Those are the real problems. 90+% of the crimes aren’t being perpetrated by this group, it’s that 90% of the incarcerations are coming from this group.
Ecks
@mvr: I think following up more generically on this point, the level of scientific competence in the population at large is very low.
And by “scientific competence” I don’t mean an in depth knowledge of bosons or anything, just of a critical mindset that is comfortable with probabilistic thinking, incremental evidence weighting one conclusion more than another, etc.
And perhaps this isn’t surprising as it’s a hard skill to teach even when you have a bunch of relatively bright and quasi-motivated students who you are locked up with for an hour at a time for no other purpose than getting them to master these skills.
I suspect it is unreasonable to expect much scientific sophistication from jurors, which underlines the need to have truly independent and competent scientific testimony given to them, with all due caveats about degrees of uncertainty. Which means we really badly need the kinds of reforms Radley is recommending in his Slate article. Really, the things he suggests are not rocket science. Other testing regimes (sports drug testing etc) have figured this sort of thing out. But there must be fantastic institutional resistance to change – large organizations are usually loathe to change the way they think in profound ways like this, unless they are strongly forced to.
Ecks
@Martin: True and true.
Though, to be completely fair, these things are also true to varying extents in pretty much every country. You can go to Toronto or Paris or London or Kuala Lumpur, or Flowery-Village-upon-the-Wolds, and you’ll find similar dynamics. The differences aren’t over whether they exist, only how pronounced and brutal they are.
Michael D.
These days, I am about at liberal as they come. But I’m actually embarrassed at the vitriol being directed at Radley Balko here by some. I’ve read a lot of the work he has done and, if ANYTHING, Radley has brought a lot of light to the problems in the criminal justice system in this country. Because of his work, innocent people get helped. Many of these people are very poor and don’t have access to the type of defense maybe you or I could afford. He’s helping EXACTLY the kind of people that most of you here demand that we be more helpful OF.
But then again, most of the attacks I’ve seen directed at Radley amount to: Nice work on this! But you’re still a glibtatd and therefore, anything you say or any good you do is automatically canceled out.
Oh, and to not know Radley is not a big fan of Ayn Rand – as anyone who reads him regularly DOES – shows that your criticisms of him aren’t based on what you know he does, but rather, who you THINK he is.
You spent the past 8 years bitching (appropriately, I think) that liberals didn’t have a voice. Now that we DO have a voice, you want to make sure other voices are silenced. Do you see the ironic stupidity in that?
It really is pathetic.
JGabriel
@Radley Balko:
Goddamit, I just fixed my irony meter and now you had to blow it up again!
Seriously, there’s a difference? Maybe in theory, but in practice?
Because I’m seeing a lot of investment banks get bailed out that should have failed under a free market, since they weren’t officially regulated by the governement – which leaves cronyism as the primary mechanism by which they lobby for and receive funds.
Funny how they’re always for a free market until they have losses they want to socialize.
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Martin
I don’t question that. I question the means to fix it. The courts are already willing to accept bad science, so why would they distinguish between the current situation and one with more players? That doesn’t strike me as a free market problem. It strikes me as a problem of the courts not being able to differentiate between good evidence and bad. That’s a regulatory problem within the forensics field – they need to pull their shit together, talk to the states about better licensing and regulation, and for the sake of their own field, make sure that bad science doesn’t make it into the courtroom. That’s what other disciplines such as medicine and engineering have done, and the stakes are now such that forensics should do the same. The question really is, why aren’t the forensics professional orgs acting more forcefully here to draw a clearer line on what should and shouldn’t be admissible and who should and shouldn’t be able to pass themselves off as an expert? It seems to me that the dental experts are testifying on their dental license not on any forensics one. That would seem to me to be the biggest problem here.
Ecks
@Martin: Except if you read Radley’s article, this is pretty much exactly what he IS recommending. I’m just not sure why he keeps referring to this as a “market” approach. As far as I can tell you are in near 100% agreement with him over everything but the label.
Wile E. Quixote
@JGabriel
Shorter JGabriel.
JGabriel
@Wile E. Quixote:
Right, Wile. Because:
is a sophisticated response.
Get over yourself, jackass. I pretty much agree with Balko’s recommendations, but also agree with El Cid and others here that calling those recommendations a “free market solution” is twisting those words beyond meaning.
.
Martin
Yeah, I don’t see how it’s a market approach at all. What I’m describing is that the professional organization approach the state to exclude participants from the process that haven’t met the relevant standards. That’s normally 100% the opposite of what free marketeers demand, and in order for it to function, the state needs to back up the licensing. It’s a regulatory solution that originates with the market, but requires the state to function. Libertarians usually blow a gasket over these kinds of solutions.
NutellaonToast
I’m a spectroscoptist and I know that I’m ALWAYS seeing signal that later turns out to be noise. Of course, when I’m wrong I find out through subsequent experiments and no one dies. This man is, I’m guessing, just fucking crazy. He thinks he can do this analysis and convinces himself that he sees patterns where there aren’t any.
I still say he should be fucking locked up, though.
MTiffany
If you don’t know what kind of human being would do such a thing, I do, and I’ll share. They’re the kind of people that think the government is always the problem and the laissez-faire free market is always the best answer.
John Cole
I can’t take you kids anywhere. Jesus.
Martin
Just to be clear – I’m not attacking the research or the problem, but rather how the solution is being framed here. That matters because if the people with the power to do something decide that this needs to be a market solution, like running our prisons or fighting our wars is steadily becoming, then you’re going to get results like we see with running our prisons or fighting our wars.
When we engage in public debate about these matters, positions become steadily distilled down into these free market/big government types of arguments. This isn’t a big government failure. It is, in fact, equally a market failure because the practitioners, independent of who employs them, aren’t protecting their discipline. Those peer-review studies mean fuckall if there is no mechanism to restrict how evidence moves into a courtroom when there is peer-reviewed research which shows that it’s crap. In the case of some areas of forensics, there isn’t even the appearance that a peer-reviewed study should be respected.
Giving vouchers to public defenders is a good component of the solution (as are all of the details of what he presents in the Slate piece), but on its own it does little to ensure that equally shitty expert evidence won’t just be introduced by the defense. To suggest that this might get sussed out in the courtroom is absurd. After all, who in that room is qualified to discern which of the two experts is full of shit? Yes, you have forensics professional societies working to do precisely that, but they have no ability to influence each and every courtroom, and ultimately that’s what needs to happen. The problem here isn’t that the courts have insufficient opportunity to work out which expert is right or wrong due to a lack of experts on the defense side, it’s that the label ‘expert’ should never have been granted to the guy working for the prosecution.
Statistically, it can be argued that we have a working system now, unless you’re at the receiving end of a bogus felony conviction, and it’s the minority of cases that we’re focusing on. Statistical solutions like ‘free markets’ create long tails (which in many situations we want), they don’t eliminate them (which in this case we don’t). Regulation and oversight eliminates them.
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
@Martin:
Uh, that is one of the oddest non sequiturs I have ever seen in response to a post of mine, and I’ve seen a lot of them.
I have never used the phrase “free market solution” and have no idea what it suggests in this context.
The public defenders I know are overworked and underpaid people who work their asses off and do the best they can up against a well funded and powerful and arrogant opposition.
As for “throwing money at government,” it costs more to imprison an innocent person for a week than it would cost to fund a defense expert witness in the example that we see in this thread, so I have no idea what the hell that remark is supposed to mean. False security always costs more than good security, in my view.
gypsy howell
Same kind of human beings as these :
Sounds like the pay rate was about the same – around a thousand bucks per young life destroyed. Nice work if you can get it.
Recall
Why don’t they use a system like they use for lineups?
KRK
@Michael D.:
Well, yeah. The “attacks” on Balko in this thread are assholish. But there are actually only a couple of those. Balko has totally failed to respond to the several commenters who’ve pointed out that his “free market” solution — which those commenters like — is for the government to put a lot more money into the criminal justice system and to adopt and enforce a lot more regulatory oversight of that system. That is, using tax money and government coercion to ensure that the scientific evidence used in trials of indigent defendants is as sound as such evidence in the trials of the wealthy. Sounds great. Let’s get that rolling. But why does Balko think it’s remotely “free market”?
Mike
John, you’ve been dumping on Reason’s Hit & Run over the past few months (and I must admit that I have found it less interesting since the election). You’ve gotta admit that Radley Balko’s really been doing yeoman’s service with his investigative reporting on abuses by police and prosecutors.
JR
John, if you only knew some of the crap that’s been going on in fire investigation over the past 20 years, you wouldn’t be so shocked. Google “Beverly Jean Long” or “Cameron Todd Willingham” sometime and check out how cavalierly the state approached the evidentiary analyses.
We need some major overhauls to our approach to forensic science. We’ve needed them for decades.
Comrade Kevin
@KRK:
When a “libertarian” likes something, it’s “free market”.
Radley Balko
Nothing is going to be completely free market when the state controls the courts and justice system (which, yes, I happen to agree is the only practical arrangement).
The solutions Koppl and I propose make the system more free market by bringing in private labs to oversee the testing going on in state labs, or, preferably, to do all of the testing themselves. Having every third or fourth piece of evidence checked by other labs, without letting the official lab know when it’s happening, ensures best practices and will eliminate bias.
It will also harness the competitive interests of the private lab to actively find mistakes by the state lab — or by whatever private lab they’re double-checking. The incentive is now to for labs to find errors made by other labs,as opposed to the current system, where the incentive is for whoever is working for the prosecution to come to conclusions that will support a conviction. Labs that discover major errors will get positive publicity and, presumably, there will be public pressure to give those labs future contracts.
Giving defendants vouchers to hire their own experts is a stop-gap until a more thorough, science-based solution like the one above can be implemented (though I wouldn’t oppose continuing to do so even after).
No, this system wouldn’t be purely free market. But as I said, you’re never going to get that in the criminal justice system. But the system Koppl proposes and that I support would harness some basic components of the free market and private sector to make the whole of forensics more science-based and less prone to bias.