Comments on: Forensic Delusions

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 20:19:03 +0000

Roger and Chris, I’m not endorsing particular solutions to produce more skepticism and rigor relative to other ones here; here I’m more endorsing that entire class of solutions relative to the status quo.

By: Roger Koppl

Roger Koppl — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 14:30:31 +0000

Robin, We can refine your point about merely appearing to get the bad guys. Conviction rates are an important criterion for judging police and prosecution. But that criterion discourages them from doing the very thing we most wish for them to do, namely, discriminate between the guilty and the innocent. All potential suspects become fungible and the police and prosecution have an incentive to go after anyone they think might be easy to convict. (We have a multitask problem in criminal justice.) Basic integrity and decency in police and prosecutors mitigate the problem greatly, but it’s still there. And some police and prosecutors are unscrupulous, of course. There is some evidence that police sometimes just go after poor, uneducated, or mentally weak persons, who may be easier to convict. Since crime labs are organized under the police, they have an incentive to support the police and prosecution position. These organizational problems in the criminal justice system tend to create forensic science errors. I address some of the issues in this comment on a paper by Richard A. Posner. Posner’s reply at page 140. This way of looking at it leads you to different solutions than those proposed by Scheck and Neufeld. It is hard to exaggerate the good they have done in this area, but their reform ideas are built around the idea of oversight, which carries the risk of regulatory capture and misses many of the organizational issues at the root of the problem.

By: Hamish Barney

Hamish Barney — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 01:05:10 +0000

This reminds me of Leeson's work the effectiveness of medieval trial by ordeal. That they worked because most people believed that they worked. Maybe we haven't made as much progress in criminal justice as we would like to think.

By: Chris Hibbert

Chris Hibbert — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:05:24 +0000

Are there any non governmental approaches available to try to address these problems? I’m concerned that a new agency would inherently be political, and the constituency that most cared about the results would be investigators and prosecutors, and so the results and findings would be skewed toward them. I realize that most funding for research comes from federal coffers, so it’s pretty hard to think of an alternative source for underwriting new research, but it’s pretty dispiriting to think that the only way to fight this broken system is to argue for funding that is likely to be highjacked by the people with the most to gain from allowing them to continue using flawed techniques.

By: komponisto

komponisto — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:35:03 +0000

This was my first thought too; unfortunately in most cases it’s absurdly difficult to convince people that someone convicted of a crime is actually innocent. (The main exceptions are when the case is a proxy for some larger political battle.)

By: Roger Koppl

Roger Koppl — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:57:27 +0000

Robin,

Click on my name for a different perspective on forensic science errors. IMHO we need checks and balances, not command and cotrol.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 11:34:47 +0000

If we don’t approve a process to create the evidence that would throw out such evidence, it will continue to be accepted.

By: Steven Schreiber

Steven Schreiber — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 11:10:50 +0000

It depends. The issue with scientific reports which indicate that a forensic method does not have any real backing is that they can directly effect court decisions.

Forensic reform would arrive because too many cases are thrown out when defense attorneys produce research showing that the testimony is unreliable because analysis of the forensic evidence is necessarily faulty. In that case, no amount of sputtering about accreditation will do any good because you may as well have presented spectral evidence.

By: Lo Statuz

Lo Statuz — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:43:43 +0000

The application of DNA testing to old convictions revealed that a lot of those convicted were not guilty. This provides a rare research opportunity. It’s rare because there’s an independent standard against which to check the actual verdicts.

Some questions I can think of:
Do juries give better or worse results than bench trials?
Do public defenders give better or worse results than private defense lawyers?
How often do not-guilty defendants accept plea bargains?
Are there any demographic characteristics of defendants that make results better or worse?
Do appointed judges give better or worse results than elected judges?

By: komponisto

komponisto — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:40:35 +0000

The sentencing report...hasn’t yet made it online

Correction: here it is.