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More than 150 men and women incarcerated in US jails were exonerated in 2018, according to a recent report from a registry that traces wrongful convictions. Together, these people spent more than 1,600 years in prison, a record for the database containing data dating back to 1989.
The main culprit of the conviction of innocents was the official fault, according to the report by the national register of exemptions. Nearly one-third of these cases involved a police corruption ploy in Chicago, in which a police officer charged people with drug charges.
Another important factor in wrongful convictions across the country was misleading forensic evidencee. A close look at these cases reveals that experts in areas such as hair analysis, bite marks and DNA analysis have used exaggerated statistical claims to reinforce non-assertions. scientists.
Once the experts have acquired the necessary qualifications to speak in a courtroom, the words that escape them are limited.
"An expert can say what he wants," said Simon Cole, the director of the registry and professor of criminology, law and society at UC-Irvine.
This includes offering invented odds such as "one in a million" or "one in 129,600," says the registry.
"The problem with medico-legal evidence is that the diagnosis is exaggerated," said Barbara O'Brien, a professor at the Michigan State University School of Law and author of the report. A hair sample at the crime scene that looks like a suspect's hair "gets dressed with this scientific certainty that is not justified, "she said.
Here are three examples from the study files.
The tool: microscopic comparison of the hair
In 2013, the F.B.I. have reported that a testimony stating that a microscopic comparison of hair could produce a "match" between two hair was scientifically invalid.
Four years later, a man by the name of Glenn Payne was still struggling with the consequences of three deceptive gambling games. In 1990, at the age of 28, he was accused of sexually abusing his 2-year-old neighbor. During his arrest, Mr. Payne was asked to undress. A hair was left on a sheet of butcher paper. The investigators spotted a second hair on a tablecloth draped over the girl.
In court, a lab analyst said that the butcher's paper hair had a 1 in 2,700 chance of matching someone other than the victim and that the hair of the tablecloth had a 1 in 48 chance of belonging to someone else. One other than Mr. Payne. He then multiplied these numbers to get a "1 out of 129,600" chance of any event other than a random event.
In 2017, lawyers who were reviewing the case contacted the analyst. He acknowledged that the statistical evidence was invalid. He should have stated "that the hair sample found on the defendant could have come from the victim and that the hair sample found on the sheet used to cover the victim could have come from the accused ".
A new medical report also suggested that the charges resulted from a misunderstanding. The little girl was not abused, she concluded: she had a strep infection.
The tool: corresponding bite marks
O'Brien said the bite analysis was even more wrong than comparing the hair. Often, you can not even know if an injury is a bite mark, she said. "It does not even exceed the slightest suggestion of scientific reality."
This cost of pseudoscience Steven Chaney decades of his life. In 1987, Mr. Chaney was accused of murdering a couple who had sold him drugs.
At trial, a medical consultant said he compared a wax model from Mr. Chaney's mouth to a mark on the victim's arm. Mr. Chaney's upper and lower arches "match" the bite, he said, adding that "only one in a million people" could have made that impression.
In 2018, an appellate judge concluded that "the scientific knowledge underlying the field of bite mark comparisons has evolved" since Chaney's trial "in a manner that contradicts the scientific evidence upon which the state has trial is founded ".
Although this is an extreme example, Cole said, exaggerated probabilities are commonplace. "Often, they simply say that this person is the source of the bite mark or that it's virtually impossible not to be the source of the bite mark," he said.
It remains concerned that, even though this type of analysis has been largely disavowed by forensic scientists, "no court in the United States has said that untrue evidence should not be admissible in the courts" .
The tool: the tactile amplification of DNA
DNA evidence analysis continues to be much more scientifically respected than older methods of pairing hair samples and bite marks, but Mayer Herskovic's case is a reminder of how testimony about genetic probabilities can be misleading in the courts.
In 2013, while a group of men were attacking a victim, an assailant grabbed his shoe and threw it on a nearby roof. The genetic sample taken from the shoe was too small to be useful.
But the office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York had developed software that he thought could amplify the samples. At trial, one expert stated that the probability that the shoe sample contained Mr. Herskovic's DNA was 133 times greater than the probability that it came from a stranger.
He was found guilty. Two years later, a higher court concluded that the expert witness had oversold this new technique. Mr Herskovic was exonerated. And the office of the medical examiner gave up the amplification tool.
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