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by razeh 993 days ago
No. When it comes to evaluating forensic evidence lawyers are, by training, too process oriented to solve the problems. Ask a prosecutor what the error rate is for fingerprints or DNA evidence and you’ll get a blank stare. They don’t even try to measure it.
2 comments
paiute 993 days ago
A lot of doctors are process oriented as well. Which is fine most of the time. But I was similarly disturbed when a specialist had zero clue what the approx half life of one of the primary drugs they use was. There was a situation that didn’t fit the book and i just looked it up for them on the spot. They didn’t like me.
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zamadatix 993 days ago
You're telling me no defense lawyer thinks about arguing the evidence is unreliable or are you just saying the prosecution throws everything they can find at their side of the case? The former seems extremely hard to believe (lest you're about to become the greatest defense lawmaker of all time due to wisdom shared in a short HN comment) and the latter seems to be evidence of the system working both well and as designed, not evidence it's badly faulty.
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TedDoesntTalk 993 days ago
> latter seems to be evidence of the system working both well and as designed

Prosecutors in America have one goal: close the case. At any cost, close the case. They are not interested in justice. They are not interested in finding the one who actually committed the crime. They are interested in closing the case. If that is “working as designed”, then we need to change the design.

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zamadatix 993 days ago
And the opposite is true of the defense. The result is a 3rd party gets to hear all of the evidence either side could come up with and weight the outcome based on all of that instead of 2 interested parties trying to figure it out themselves.

There are of course ways to improve the legal system, more equal access to quality representation is my preferred improvement regardless of system, but you can't just look at one element of the system in isolation and declare the whole concept bad. That's "The CPU produces waste heat so we need to remove it completely" type logic where you find one thing that sounds unambiguously bad and ignore that it could be a symptom of great net positive function of that thing. Doesn't mean it's perfect either, just means it needs more than a shallow dismissal.

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bluGill 993 days ago
Sure, but the accused should have a lawyer who is screaming about anything that is unreliable.
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razeh 992 days ago
There’s no practical way for a defense lawyer to find out what the error rate is for, say, a state lab. Occasionally organizations can do this, for example the innocence project figured out that the FBI’s hair analysis was bogus for decades (https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-testimony-on-mic...).
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TedDoesntTalk 993 days ago
Have you seen the caseloads of public defenders?
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