Seen in light of http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc... this looks like a systemic problem and not an innocent mistake. If crime labs were doing science, they would have run enough control samples to quickly discover the mistake. But the error "may have affected thousands of cases going back to 1999". I don't think forensic science, as currently practiced in the United States, deserves the name "science". And the errors are all in the same direction: towards conviction.
It's a travesty that the forensics lab works as an ally and partner to police and prosecution. Way too many perverse incentives to go off into the weeds on pseudoscience and bad science and, as we had in Massachusetts, outright fraud. Forensics labs should be blind to the cases they are working on, and should be sent QA samples unrelated to cases to measure their error rate, and have no direct communication with law enforcement and prosecutors.
In fact, I don't know why that is not currently the case. Surely there must be some blind testing, and processes to stop, for example, a technician testing the blood samples on their wife's murder.
So I would be surprised if most of what you say is not already true, but also surprised if it werent
Well I haven't done any research on the current state of affairs in this particular matter but it's been shown time and time again that the people that make the laws are pretty far from being an expert in the things they are making laws for. There is also no incentive to have subject matter experts weigh in on things when it would probably go against your major donors. I hope Lawrence Lessig or someone can actually change the finance laws for the better.
- The prosecution, police and crime lab are solely focused on conviction, and
- the judge is like a referee, focused on procedure
It's like "trial by combat" in Game of Thrones. Alternatives exist. Germany has an inquisitorial system where judges actively investigate the facts of the case.
Prosecutors within in the US technically only have a responsibility to administer justice rather than convict. [1] Thats why they have to bring forward evidence which supports that the defendant is not guilty.
- The way this is practiced is may however differ depending on the particular prosecutor.
This is an individual problem rather than there being an inherently adversarial system.
> This is an individual problem rather than there being an inherently adversarial system.
It's both. My guess is that the vast majority of prosecutors do think about justice as well as about winning. But consider the incentives:
+ All lawyers tend to want a high win rate, because wins serve as a marker of professional competence. Wins help to bring in more work --- no one wants to have to sit around waiting for the phone to ring --- as well as more-prestigious and better-paying work.
+ Prosecutors in particular want the Ws to enhance (i) their chances of promotion within the government system (and, in the case of elected district attorneys, their chances of re-election) as well as (ii) their ability to move to lucrative private-sector jobs as defense attorneys, or even a TV gig as an anchor or reality-show host.
For example, the Houston Chronicle recently reported that the assistant U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted financial fraudster R. Allen Stanford just moved to the giant Jones Day law firm to do white-collar criminal defense work. You can be sure he'll earn far more money in private practice than he ever did in government service. [1]
As another example, former Houston state prosecutor Kelly Siegler is one of the hosts of a cold-case-files series on the TNT cable-TV network; it's a safe bet that she'll make more money doing that than in her old job. [2]
The average defendant in the US is poor or indigent, often lacks much of a formal education, and is usually at the mercy of whatever overworked public defender they were assigned. Go ask any lawyer you know about how much weight their demands carry or how realistic a chance they have of getting evidence that has the patina of scientific certainty thrown out. I bet you discover they have about as much hope of that as a gnat trying to stop a locomotive.
Public defenders are at least politically and professionally incentivized to win cases even if they are not provided the resources to do so. In my county, the appointed defender is private and is paid per case. He is strongly incentivized to take as many cases as possible and spend as little time as possible actually defending people. "Take the plea deal" might be the best advice, but only because the system is rigged against the defendant. You don't have to be poor or indigent, either. The middle class are also in danger and even if they win their case their lives are often ruined and they experience significant financial hardships.
Defendants are weak the state is strong. There is no such thing as a fair trial in this country, holding on to that sort of wishful thinking prevents us from progressing toward anything that approximates fairness.
>Having a public defender represent you when they have hundreds of other cases concurrently is useless.
This could turn into a good thing (for the defendant). Simply argue that the state provided you with incompetent representation and therefore any continued proceedings by the court are unconstitutional.
If I were any of the jailed people I would sue the hell out of these people. In fact if I was a class action law firm, I would bring a class action lawsuit against all these corrupt morons.
I often hear people say this, but do you actually have the ~20-200+k to actually sue in this case? Because, the vast majority of people out there really don't have the option to just sue. And, I think that's part of why are justice system stays so broken. Many people only find out how corrupt it is after there in it's cross-hairs.
That's the thing, the just system isn't really broken, it's doing exactly what it's designed to do, protect the rich. The poor have never gotten a fair shake nor particularly liked the so called "justice system" nor the police who enforce it. Police are not your friends and the law is designed by and for the benefit of the rich and really always has been.
Yes. The biggest, most helpful systemic change would be for all forensics labs to be under the control of the city/states medical rather than the police force.
Some city's do it this way, and it makes a big difference. Otherwise forensics budgets are always competing with "more policemen". Guess what, policemen win almost every time.
A commenter named "Godfroi Shagnasty" notes that the headline of this article is misleading because DNA as evidence isn't in question in this article. Rather, the fallible thing is the process by which law enforcement analyzes DNA matches in "mixtures" of DNA from multiple people like the kind found on doorknobs and such.
Although the headline is highly editorialized, it's clear that DNA evidence is just as fallible to bad science as any other form of evidence and that we must treat all forms of evidence with respect and skepticism if we are to find the truth.
1 in 40 false matches rather than one in a million, throughout thousands of cases? Outrageous.
I don't think the heading is misleading or editorialized, just abbreviated. DNA is just a chemical. The headline is referring (in an abbreviated way) to the process of DNA testing. Analyzing the results is part of the process. If the analysis is wrong, the results are wrong.
How about "labs are fallible"? I think the point is, while forensic "science" are still using lie detectors and other very questionable techniques that just can not work reliably, it's a bit strange to paint DNA itself as fallible. DNA can work, if the lab is competent. Lie detectors and other voodoo can not.
This article brings up problems with current PCR-based STR genotyping methods, but lacks information about technologies that are competing to be the future of forensic genotyping. Here's some more context on the NGS technologies that are set to replace it:
Illumina is pursuing mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequencing. An advantage here is that cells contain many copies of mtDNA sequences (as opposed to just one copy of each gDNA haplotype), and mtDNA contains hyper-variable regions which confer strong individual specificity. This is potentially advantageous in crime scene samples, where the DNA could be damaged through degradation processes like sun exposure. http://www.illumina.com/areas-of-interest/forensic-genomics/...
Ion Torrent/ThermoFisher are going after the same STR targets, but using their Torrent and Proton NGS platforms (rather than PCR). Unlike regular PCR methods, this can provide things like allele frequency estimates, and can call more than one base into variable regions (which provides more information, and can potentially be used to infer things like height, ethnicity, hair or eye color). https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/industrial/human-ide...
Carlos Bustamante (a Stanford Professor, and world expert in ancient genomics / diverse population genomics: https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/carlos-bustamante) has founded IdentifyGenomics, which is a startup focused on new methods for forensic DNA sequencing (disclosure: I know Carlos, but I'm not involved in his startup).
Definitely an important problem, and will be interesting to who succeeds in converting forensic investigators to use NGS at scale.
Hopefully the underlying use of [mt]DNA in cases also gets some attention and reform. Simply identifying some kind of physical connection is hardly damning; it is inherently circumstantial. It's actually quite rare to finding damning DNA evidence unless the inference directly ties to the crime, i.e. with semen in sexual assault cases or blood in a suspect's car.
It's scary to think prosecutors have been pitching DNA as infallible, damning evidence all along. It means getting a defense attorney off their game might very well lead to an incorrect conviction (think Serial, though obviously the circumstances there are more tied to the use of the cell phone records). I don't think that technology is going to bring us easier convictions for a while yet (e.g. statistical analysis of evidence leading to inference ala Watson might be interesting). Somehow this isn't reflected in how juries have chosen, though, so I think public education about it (even via entertainment) might be the most effective way to change this.
More than that, DNA evidence isn't that difficult to fabricate (Source: http://zidbits.com/2012/06/can-dna-be-faked/). If someone wanted to create fake DNA and leave it at the scene of a crime to frame someone, it wouldn't be all that difficult or expensive (relatively speaking, of course).
It takes some technology that most people don't have (like a centrifuge) but the actual process is simple and can be achieved by anyone with familiarity with the equipment itself.
Totally agree here - would be easy to fabricate DNA oligos with given mtDNA or STR sequences, especially if you know forensic investigators are only going to use very small target sequences for identification purposes.
This could be a case for using shotgun / whole genome sequencing - we'd expect to see a more even distribution of genome coverage than one would get by leaving targeted oligos behind. But this isn't likely to happen anytime soon; the costs are far too high (10-100X greater than targeted sequencing).
In the meantime though, one highly feasible avenue for spotting synthetic DNA oligo fragments is the presence and position of nucleosomes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosome), which are DNA-associated protein complexes that occur in DNA from organisms, but not in synthetic DNA oligos. These have been used successfully to trace tissue of origin in cell free DNA in humans, and have specific signals related to chromatin/genome topological state. The only way I can think of to fake this signal would be to have a cell culture from the person you're trying to imitate. Granted, this too is not completely unreasonable - there are now very robust commercially available protocols for deriving iPSCs from small dermal fibroblast samples.
You seem pretty knowledgeable about this stuff. Assuming the businesses you mention plan to provide evidence for use in court, how are they going to reassure the public that they aren't selling crap "forensic science" like we've seen with "bite patterns" in Mississippi?
Good question. This problem affects multiple steps of a NGS-based forensics product: sample collection, DNA extraction, library preparation, the sequencing itself, alignment/assembly, and statistical variant interpretation all have potential for large biases/error modes that could affect the specificity of these types of methods.
Separately, and outside the forensics realm, there's a trend towards increased regulation of DNA sequencing. For example, NIST has developed/is developing methods to evaluate sequencing platforms: http://www.nist.gov/mml/bbd/dna-022514.cfm. This is relevant to other sequencing applications too (e.g. personalized medicine, somatic tumor profiling, etc). The FDA are also involved here, but more focused on medical applications.
So, I think collectively through both the increase in the forensics community regulating forensics NGS applications, and more broadly the biomedical science/technology community regulating general NGS platforms, we'll see good technology validation standards (at least in the U.S.). But the significantly higher complexity of these systems does introduce more opportunity for error, so it's entirely possible we'll see similar biases in NGS based forensics.
>"[Juries] are even willing to go a step further and say, 'We'll convict on the basis of DNA, even in the face of evidence — non-DNA evidence — that this isn't the perpetrator," Murphy says.
Juries are largely representative of the general population. As such, most have been conditioned by television crime dramas such as Law & Order, CSI and NCIS to view DNA evidence as infallible techno-wizardry that always catches the bad guys.
Ever see a mainstream crime drama end with the arrest and conviction of someone totally innocent, the credits roll, and that's it? Neither have I.
Instead, we have the stereotype of law enforcement being completely incorruptible, with the evidence technicians themselves cast as well-meaning nerds who are equally infallible, because gosh, they're just super geeky scientists who are super smart.
"When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty." - Norm Crosby
> Ever see a mainstream crime drama end with the arrest and conviction of someone totally innocent, the credits roll, and that's it? Neither have I.
Justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_(2006_TV_series) is a legal drama that sometimes the innocent are convicted or the criminal walk free. It is a fantastic show all around in my opinion, but sadly it got cancelled after one season due to low ratings. Perhaps that fact validate your position even more, in that people don't like to face the fact that the judicial system is fallible.
I think I've seen in "The Good Wife" many times an innocent person being arrested/convicted in the light of false or falsely interpreted evidence. Those didn't include false DNA results though.
State crime labs are simply a rubber stamp on whatever story the prosecutor has decided on presenting ahead of time. It's not well known, but crime labs are paid per conviction [1]. Intentional contamination of evidence, falsification of results, and the use of unreliable methods are entirely routine and expected within these departments. They are corrupt through and through. No state crime lab report should ever be considered at all credible in any way.
Occasionally large-scale corruption comes to light such as when a Boston crime lab falsified drug tests on a massive scale [2] or New York state police were found to have fabricated fingerprint evidence for nearly a decade [3]. The "forensics" field has been embroiled in a steady stream of scandals [4]. Far from being isolated incidents, this is the norm within law enforcement.
The relevant passage in the source for this claim[1]:
Funding crime labs through court-assessed fees creates another channel for bias to enter crime lab analyses. In jurisdictions with this practice the crime lab receives a sum of money for each conviction of a given type. Ray Wickenheiser says, “Collection of court costs is the only stable source of funding for the Acadiana Crime Lab. $10 is received for each guilty plea or verdict from each speeding ticket, and $50 from each DWI (Driving While Impaired) and drug offense.”117 In Broward County, Florida, “Monies deposited in the Trust Fund are principally court costs assessed upon conviction of driving or boating under the influence ($50) or selling, manufacturing, delivery, or possession of a controlled substance ($100).”118
Several state statutory schemes require defendants to pay crime laboratory fees upon conviction. North Carolina General Statutes require, “[f]or the services of” the state or local crime lab, that judges in criminal cases assess a $600 fee to be charged “upon conviction” and remitted to the law enforcement agency containing the lab whenever that lab “performed DNA analysis of the crime, tests of bodily fluids of the defendant for the presence of alcohol or controlled substances, or analysis of any controlled substance possessed by the defendant or the defendant's agent.”119 Illinois crime labs receive fees upon convictions for sex offenses, controlled substance offenses, and those involving driving under the influence.120 Mississippi statues require crime laboratory fees for various conviction types, including arson, aiding suicide, and driving while intoxicated.121 Similar provisions exist in Alabama, New Mexico, Kentucky, New Jersey, Virginia, and, until recently, Michigan.122
Other states have broadened the scope even further. Washington statutes require a $100 crime lab fee for any conviction that involves lab analysis.123 Kansas statutes require offenders “to pay a separate court cost of $400 for every individual offense if forensic science or laboratory services or forensic computer examination services are provided in connection with the investigation.”124 In addition to those already listed, the following states also require crime lab fees in connection with various conviction types: Arizona, California, Missouri, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.125
Glen Whitman and Roger Koppl point out that “the very choice to submit a suspect's sample to the lab makes the lab more inclined (than it would be otherwise) to announce a match, indicating that the suspect is guilty.”126 The forensic scientist must evaluate ambiguous evidence, but give, generally, a binary judgment that the evidence does or does not match. Whitman and Koppl explain why the probabilities given in DNA testimony are not usually an exception to this binary nature of forensic-science testimony.127 In this situation, even the most rational scientist must choose what to say. The choice will usually be influenced by scientific analysis done in the crime lab. But if the evidence is ambiguous, as it often is, then two other factors matter even for perfectly rational forensic scientists. The scientist is more likely to inculpate the defendant (1) the higher the forensic scientist's “prior” probability of guilt, which is the probability before the forensic evidence is examined, and (2) the weaker the scientist's desire is to avoid convicting the innocent relative to her desire to convict the guilty.
So, the claim does appear to be true, at least in some states.
This is an issue that Roger Kopel has been tackling for years now. His main research has been in the social epistemology of forensic science. He has argued that there is a bias towards conviction. In 2008, he published an article arguing that it was necessary to move away from the "monopoly epistemics" towards "democratic epistemics." See his paper here: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...
> "When they retested it, the likelihood that it could be someone else was, I think, one in 30-something, one in 40. So it was a significant probability that it could be someone else," Torres says.
No. That is the probability that the test would have claimed a match with a particular person, conditioning on it not being the right person. In order to calculate the probability that it was someone else, you need to know the probability of it having been the right person prior to the test being performed. If you take a sample and test it against everyone in a big enough database, with a 1-in-30 false positive rate, then you will definitely end up accusing someone falsely.
'...threatens to undermine the deep faith people have placed in the technology.
'"And it's not faith they should not have had to begin with," says Keith Inman, who teaches forensic science at California State University, East Bay.'
And that's clearly wrong. Someone without sufficient statistical ability and without any incentive to look for problems dreamed up a protocol and it was accepted (with "deep faith" no less) without justification.
And the academics who should be the most disinterested seekers after truth isn't willing to call this mistaken, but we're supposed to pretend no one could have seen this coming.
Most people treat science as an infallible religion. I've had people argue with me here, on HN [1] that we should not question the scientists but should accept everything they say unconditionally. [2]
[1] I am pointing this out because HN readers are presumably more intelligent than "most people" on average.
> the deep faith people have placed in the technology.
Faith in technology or people who work for and are paid by the police and who know that DNA matches are good for repeat business? It's a complete scandal that DNA testing does not follow a line-up approach: here are 100 samples, one may be the suspect, tell us which one if any matches the evidence. So called partial/mixed matching will become the hair analysis scandal of this decade.
In 1953 a human chimera was reported in the British Medical Journal. A woman was found to have blood containing two different blood types. Apparently this resulted from her twin brother's cells living in her body.[14] More recently, a study found that such blood group chimerism is not rare.[15]
I've long believed (since early 90's, when I first learned about DNA tests and molecular biology) there are a collection of phenomena that make the common assumptions in DNA forensic testing much less firm than ... well, the users of those products assume.
Combine the unethical public policy of elected aggressive prosecutors, and a public loss of concern about innocents being jailed, and we get this. There was a time when it was heinous to think of an innocent being jailed such that it was vastly preferred a guilty person would go free. No longer.
What passes for DNA matching in U.S. courts is about as fit for purpose as "lie detectors" or "breathalizers". When the purpose is enabling police and prosecutors to put people behind bars with impunity, and justice being "seen to be done", they fit quite well.
I'm not quite sure if the situation around the world is much different, but I would believe that we're a little more sane in Europe when it comes to admitting evidence based more on witchcraft than solid engineering.
Another problem of DNA testing that is hinted at in the article is that as more and more people enter the databases the probability of false positives increases. A 1 in a million chance sounds reasonable when you are testing one person, but with many people tested the probability rises non-intuitively quickly (see: Birthday paradox). For example if you test 100 people the probability of a false positive rises to around 1/200.
The reason the Birthday Paradox is surprising is that there are N people, but the number of possible matches rises like N^2. The "paradox" occurs because success is defined as any one of the N-choose-2 matches happening.
The analog here is there are M people in the database, and N crimes, so the chance of a single failure (mistaken match) is kind of like N*M.
But I'm not sure that's the correct metric; I think you really care about the amortized cost of a mistaken match across all N crimes. So you don't see the "paradoxical" quadratic increase.
I admit I'm being a bit fussy -- just testing the extent of the analogy.
You are of course correct that the database size is growing, and the number of samples that can be collected, even from one crime, also can be made to grow.
> But I'm not sure that's the correct metric; I think you really care about the amortized cost of a mistaken match across all N crimes. So you don't see the "paradoxical" quadratic increase.
It seems to me what we should really care about is the number of people falsely convicted, which is false-positive-rate-per-defendant * number-of-defendants. Since the size of the database (and therefore the false positive rate) is related to the number of defendants, the number of falsely convicted people increases quadratically with the number of people subjected to DNA testing.
So, how many people have been sentenced to death, based on this shaky evidence?
As an aside, even if "one in a million" were true, we're talking about 300+ matches in the US and 7000+ in the world.
IMHO, then the correct question to ask is: "given there are 300 people in the US whose DNA matches the one of the murderer, how likely is it that the defendent is the murderer?"
The sort of "DNA analysis" discussed in the article is old technology. You just test multiple samples for the occurrence of some set of marker sequences, and then estimate the probability that matching occurrence could be due to chance.
So you're comparing a suspect's DNA with DNA from a crime scene. And you find the same set of marker sequences. But maybe the crime-scene DNA is a mixture. However, with a mixture you'd expect to see additional marker sequences in the crime-scene DNA.
But it depends. Many of the marker sequences are racial. So maybe it's more likely for two people of a given race to look like one person. And maybe there was racial bias in marker selection. It's a mess.
Bottom line, with current technology, people should not be convicted based on the occurrence of marker sequences. Nothing less than complete DNA sequences should be admissible.
Having finished yesterday "Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA" it is kind of funny to see this trending on HN today.
My knowledge of biology and genetics is kind of basic, but I did enjoy the book, and I was wondering what other people that are more into the field might think about it.
Here's the thing, DNA can accurately identify the source, if there is no "contamination" with other DNA, if there is contamination, then they have many orders of magnitude less accuracy in reconstructing the DNA and thus identifying the sources. But the issue is juries tend to think of accuracy in terms of uncontaminated DNA samples.
Now, npr, they always, always, ALWAYS take the side of the underdog, no matter the less favorable actual odds. They put more faith in soft science results (child psych says this is good for kids) than results from scientific studies (study showed none to negative impact).
Example, people in Seattle placing signs saying No Californians, it gets a chuckle, could you imagine a similar sign saying "No [insert poor country demonym]. NPR would be outraged, with reason, but you don't see the outrage when the same bias is projected against the relatively better off.
> Now, npr, they always, always, ALWAYS take the side of the underdog, no matter the less favorable actual odds. They put more faith in soft science results than results from scientific studies
Oh give me a break. NPR is a standard mainstream news organization, with a higher journalistic standard than most. They don’t by any means “always always ALWAYS” do anything, except try their best to discover topical news stories and report them fairly. Like other mainstream news organizations, they aim for political neutrality, tend to analyze stories in line with the “consensus”, and shy away from saying anything which deeply challenges the dominant power structure.
You might argue that standards of evidence in science-related journalism are weak across the board, but let’s not pretend that there’s some problem with NPR in particular that wouldn’t equally apply to, e.g., the New York Times, the Associated Press, the BBC, Le Monde, or the Economist.
Ok, when was the last time they had something negative about an underdog class? It's not as if only people on the top, politically economically, socially do bad things.
The Giant Pool of Money episode of This American Life -- on of their most popular episodes in the history of NPR -- does not skimp on the role of low quality borrowers in the financial crisis - http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/t...
I don't see how that statement would be inherently contradictory?
"X is a Y Z, with a greater W than most" I think would generally be interpreted as "X is a Y Z with a greater W than most Y Zs"
So, X would have a more than 50th percentile ranking in Y Zs, when ranking by W.
I don't see why it would be impossible for a standard mainstream news organization to have a greater than 50 percentile ranking when ordering standard mainstream news organizations be journalistic standards.
Sorry, been busy with baseball the last couple of days...
Clever bit going all-variable when there is no frame of reference, starting point, or baseline.
On its face, if it is a standard, mainstream organization, it has srandard, mainstream standards. However, there may be some source that indicates otherwise (the call in the second half of my statement).
If you set your bar this low, did you have to dig a trench first? What did you do when you hit the water table? Did ground heat ever become a problem as you edged closer to the Mantle?
The thing is, it is possible to distinguish samples of DNA in mixtures (and it can work fairly well). But the technique they used to do so was outdated and no one particularly bothered to find how well it worked. I mentioned in my comment above that their misstep was only applicable to "mixtures" and that DNA analysis as a whole still makes sense.
I would not extrapolate the error in the headline across the entirety of NPR, though. The reporting in this article was factual and (AFAICT) unbiased. Although I believe that "soft sciences" as opposed to "hard sciences" exist, and that NPR can be biased (they have been in the past), I do not believe this discredits NPR entirely. The mistake they are reporting allegedly affects thousands of cases. That statement is unlikely to be a result of bias.
It is very hard to prevent bias at the publishing outlet level (and very easy to introduce it). I recommend that people get their facts from a number of sources and that they listen to every opinion they can find.
> I would not extrapolate the error in the headline across the entirety of NPR, though. The reporting in this article was factual and (AFAICT) unbiased.
It's worth pointing out that journalists almost never get to write the headlines for their articles. Headlines often drive them crazy.
I think one other thing we can take from this is that DNA alone is insufficient to establish guilt, we need corroborating evidence. Just because someone's DNA was probably on a knob does not imply that person was the burglar. Maybe they were a repair person, but they could have been a burglar, if they returned afterwards and broke in, for example. Of course lawyers will point that out, but sometimes people think DNA = guilt.
The issue with npr is they like to have the image of being unbiased. If you can suffer through their pledge drives, you hear their listeners fawn and claim them to be the purveyors of truth and unbias and they, the journalists and interns, truly seem to believe they are.
Lets say an underdog commits a crime, something if done by a top dog, they would take it at face value) They did the crime, jail them. If it's an underdog, well, maybe there were deficiencies in society which contributed to their criminal behavior and thus perhaps that should be taken into account when they are tried.
> ... DNA from the crime
scene was matched to
his client with a
certainty of more than a
million to one. That
is, you'd have to go
through more than a
million people to find
somebody else who'd
match the sample.
Nope. False. Grotesque,
outrageous, brain-dead incompetence.
Instead, even with the "certainty"
of one million to one, might
find a "match" in the next
person or not in 10 million people.
Also, where'd they get this certainty
stuff? I have an excellent background,
thank you, in pure and applied probability,
and we don't use certainty like that
or, really, hardly at all.
Police work with DNA and
associated probability calculations?
This is from a Saturday morning
TV rerun of some old movie of
The Three Stooges, right?
With me on a jury, as soon as the
prosecutor presents
evidence from a police
lab and/or collected by
the police, especially
DNA evidence, I'll be
tempted to stand in
the jury box
and call for
acquittal via acclamation,
dismissal of the prosecutor
and police for incompetence,
and their prosecution for fraud!
As soon as a prosecutor presents
DNA evidence, I know he's talking
total nonsense and, then, tough to
get
a conviction.
Or, commonly a prosecutor will
want to show that the defendant
has a background of lying, etc.
Well, as soon as a prosecutor
presents DNA evidence, I have
to strongly suspect that he
is lying or at least incompetent.
Can't convict; have to acquit.
(1) Police departments? (2) The
biochemistry and probability
theory of work with DNA?
Two things that should never
be combined!
Police? Working with advanced,
delicate topics in science
and math? What a joke -- what
The Three Stooges could make
of that. Now definitely material
for SNL!
