[julian37]

Not sure if you mean it the way I read it, but that's a false dichotomy. Even if the penalty in question would have only been a single day in jail, or a $50 fine, it's still terribly wrong to rely on results produced by closed-source, non-peer reviewed software when determining a person's guilt or innocence.

EDIT: that is not to say that blindly relying on open source software is any better. From my point of view the ideal would be both the use of peer-reviewed software AND requirements to manually double- and triple check the results produced by said software.