> The Phantom of Heilbronn, often alternatively referred to as the "Woman Without a Face", was a hypothesized unknown female serial killer whose existence was inferred from DNA evidence found at numerous crime scenes in Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009. The six murders among these included that of police officer Michèle Kiesewetter, in Heilbronn, Germany on 25 April 2007.
> The only connection between the crimes was the presence of DNA from a single female, which had been recovered from 40 crime scenes, ranging from murders to burglaries. In late March 2009, investigators concluded that there was no "phantom criminal", and the DNA had already been present on the cotton swabs used for collecting DNA samples; it belonged to a woman who worked at the factory where they were made.[1]
Lydia Fairchild was told that her two children were not a genetic match with her and that therefore, biologically, she could not be their mother. The state accused Fairchild of fraud and filed a lawsuit against her. Researchers later determined that the genetic mismatch was due to chimerism.
The DNA information did show relation, but suggested that she was the aunt rather than the mother of the children. In some sense, due to mosaicism, the mother was her own sister. One "sister" showed up in the cheek swabs, and the other "sister" produced the eggs.
To keep it short, it was all a contamination of the swabs used by forensics. The DNA belonged to a worker in a factory where the swabs were produced. It took the police 15 years to find out. 15 years!
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if that woman had by accident become a suspect in a crime and her DNA run through the police's DNA database.
Throughout my career as scientist (I'm an ex-scientist now) and machine learning, I came to the conclusion that false positive rates must be kept extremely low for people to trust the system, because of the consequence of false positives.
It is one of those things that reminds me that most people with a science degree do not actually practice science.
The people who don't understand the limitations of science and possible errors in certain methods are clueless jurors and the cops who pay a random person $800 to sit on the stand, say they are "and expert" and claim there's a trillion to one odds that two people could have "the same" DNA, even though that isn't even remotely what was tested!
Courts allow basically anything as long as you can pay a guy to say they are an expert and parrot whatever you want. But somehow that's treated as if it's the fault of biologists and others who do DNA analysis?
Maybe our courts shouldn't be based on "Trust anything a cop says, period"
Thinking that scientists have always known the limitations kind of proves my point about even most highly educated people not understanding science.
The rot has metastasized into plain view with hokum like "911 call psychology", maliciously incompetent evidence handling, arson analysis, bullet analysis, civil forfeiture, and has even compromised previously honorable and integrity-backed professions with embarrassments like shaken baby syndrome.
Bring any of this up and you'll get excluded from jury duty at /voir dire/.
Hair sample that put a man in prison turned out to be dog hair - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110088 - Jan 2024 (41 comments)
Back in the 90s police had found DNA on her leggings/pantyhose, which years later matched with him.
But they could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the DNA had gotten there through direct physical contact - as his DNA could have gotten there by them simply sharing some surface, like sitting on the same chair at a gas station.
It's horrifying.
"Civil rights advocates object to [familial DNA] because it means that simply being related to an offender can make you a person of interest." If Hampikian knows that DNA can snare the innocent, shouldn't he be opposing any use of familial DNA rather than helping people use it in their appeals?
Frankly, they had no probable cause to compell a DNA sample from that guys son. Probable cause is supposed to be that by a preponderance of the evidence that the person has committed the crime. That's clearly not the case as it could be anyone in that family, and with multiple suspects it's not 'more likely than not' that the individual is guilty. Instead the courts allow fishing trips.
Really? IANAL, but this sounds like a muddling of what is required for arrest and what is the evidentiary standard for resolving a civil case in the US.
I think realistically the trigger for a search or an arrest is going to be much less than what is necessary to successfully convict in a criminal case or to prevail in a civil case.
This story isn't even about DNA evidence.
Confessions could still be used by police as leads. While all "eyewitness testimony" is defective evidence, confessions are the most defective of all. Humans have weird psychology, but the psychology around confessions is the weirdest of all. It's why it's been exploited by the Catholic religion (and others). It causes strange (and not always unpleasant) emotions in those confessing, those hearing the confession, and even those confessing falsely. It causes them in those who confess because they were coerced, it causes them in those who choose to falsely confess without coercion. To those who are familiar with them, those pleasant feelings can become an irresistible temptation to falsely confess.
On top of that, it's been what, nearly 70 years since shows like the Twilight Zone introduced the idea to everyone that in unusual circumstances we might have done things we don't even remember. So when someone starts to break after long and even tortuous interrogations, they might themselves start to worry that they are guilty and their memories are faulty.
The purpose of confession in the religious sense has nothing to do with the purpose of confession in the judicial sense. The judicial purpose is to convict you of a crime. The religious purpose is to examine your flaws with a trusted counselor (in this case a member of the clergy), and try to become a better person. I hope it's obvious why these are not the same.
Literally 98% of cases plea out^1, bypassing the entire system of court procedure that is supposed to resolve these issues.
1:https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...
For ever Dollar a government gives to the prosecutors office, a dollar should be budgeted for public defense.
currently in most states is like 10%, if that
I remember seeing that the standard for what was reasonable search and seizure in my state was set at preponderance of the evidence. It seems to be in line with other states/fed where you need evidence supporting that the crime has been committed or the object exists in a specific place. This can be, and often is, just an affidavit from the officer(s). Being a one sided process, being more likely than not is satisfied if there isnt an issue with the affidavit like missing element of the crime or unrealiable testimony. The problem comes up when the judges aren't viewing these with an open mind or to the standarss that states set (often these are handled by magistrates that do not hold a law degree nor have passed the bar). Often times the elements of the crimes defined in statue haven't even been claimed to have been met in the affidavit.
As an example, there might be someone operating a still at their residence. Just the sight of a still does not provide probable cause (only reasonable suspicion, and even that could be arguable). For probable cause to be met, you would have to prove that it was used for alcohol and that the person didn't have a fuel distillation permit or was selling it, etc (and probably one or two other small things in the statute). This is specific to my state. Other states may have more stringent rules about even owning a still.
"I think realistically the trigger for a search or an arrest is going to be much less than what is necessary to successfully convict in a criminal case or to prevail in a civil case."
It is less than the standard for conviction. All it needs is to show the elements of the crime have been claimed to have been met in the affidavit. Although they aren't even meeting this standard in every case. Or in some cases the officers have lied or made mistakes.
It's not exactly the same as a civil case since the warrant process is ex parte and does not need to consider defenses to the charge. It's just the same level of proof but applied to one-sided testimony. For example, you might have shot someone in self defense and the witnesses all agree it was self defense. They can still charge you (in most states) and make you prove that defense in court. You could get into some malicious prosecution stuff here, but according to probable cause you have satisfied all the elements of the crime and can be charged. Proving your defense then happens at the trial.
IANAL either, but have some criminal justice background. These are just what I have seen as it applies in my state.
it's not a bad idea, but it's obviously ripe for just an additional layer of bureaucratic waste. clearly, there is a lack of trust that the police could handle evidence properly. so the natural follow up is who is trust worthy? how would it work? cops are called to the scene, but are then only there to "secure it" until some 3rd party comes along to collect evidence? what's the purpose of a detective at that point? we're not just shifting that role from a police agency to some 3rd party. are we going to re-establish the Pinkertons? if the detectives are no longer a role in the police, then more than likely those that would be attracted to that role would just join the 3rd party instead. so you haven't solved anything other than these people are no longer part of the police but are still involved.
our current system is so broken and evil that i wonder if just getting rid of it entirely wouldn't actually be better and more ethical. even with the problem of releasing however many violent offenders back in the wild. "it might be even more beaurocratic" isn't really going to convince me of anything.
i dont know what the best alternative solution is, im a software engineer. i just know that the current solution is depraved and should be torn down and replaced.
That's completely irrelevant, if both confessions work the same way. And they do. There's no switch in the human brain that says "this is a judicial confession, be the sharpest least emotional being you've ever been". You may hope that the confession in the judicial sense acts as evidence, but when this clearly fails to be the case, over and over, for decades and centuries, creating a truly unknown and uncountable number of false convictions...
Well, then reasonable people don't whine "but they're supposed to be different!". If you can't see this, then I question your right to sit on a jury. You're simply unsafe for the rest of us to allow you to ever be involved in the process. It's very unfortunate that so many people who should rightfully be institutionalized for feeble-mindedness are allowed to do things like wander freely, vote, and use sharp tools.
This has little to do with your Sunday Priest.
> In fiscal year 2022, only 290 of 71,954 defendants in federal criminal cases – about 0.4% – went to trial and were acquitted, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest available statistics from the federal judiciary. Another 1,379 went to trial and were found guilty (1.9%).
So 1669 defendants went to trial, and 1379 were found guilty, roughly 80%.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/14/fewer-tha...
And in most other places where it’s even an option it’s subject to much more rigorous scrutiny and pushback than here.
It will never go away here without a lot of effort, because prosecutors love it because they get to hype their “conviction rates” for re election. There are huge swathes of evidence of people pleading out while factually innocent because they can’t afford the cost (public defenders aren’t incentivized here - you need your own counsel), stress, inconvenience, and beyond.
Plea bargains, as implemented in the US, are a huge system drive by perverse incentives.
1. the federal law enforcement, and prosecutors are prefect humans that only ever go after the guilty
2. The system is sooo skewed in favor of the government that fighting them is pointless, likely due to immense corruption in the system it self
Since no humans are perfect, I think the stronger case is for #2 to be reality
Imagine you offer a great soccer player a million dollars if he can shoot 50 goals in a row, and he gets to choose the defenders and goalies. He's probably going to choose children to go against him.
99.9% of criminal cases that go to trial in Japan end in a guilty verdict.
So maybe some humans are perfect enough?
If the feds have a high bar before opening a case, it's not immediately unreasonable that most of the cases are managed with plea bargains.
It might be better to look at the process beginning with arrests or beginning with investigations.
I can't find what percentage of that total pleaded guilty, but I did find[2]: "Of the 39 successful appellants in the Post Office Scandal, 35 had pleaded guilty to at least one charge against them."
Personally, I'm not feeling 100% confident in the adversarial system right now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal [2] https://evidencebasedjustice.exeter.ac.uk/false-guilty-pleas...
i.e a prosecutor should not be allowed to plead out a felony to a misdemeanor, that should be by default viewed as unethically coercive
still not something we should be proud of
You can't be one-in-a-trillion confident about any particular DNA result, even if that's what the nominal probability from the DNA analysis itself seems to say, because it is objectively observable that there are plenty of other sources of errors of all sorts. You can only get down to that "noise floor" of probabilities. This can still be a very useful result, but it's important to not let it be any more important that it deserves.
Even if you have a magic machine that you can point at someone and it goes "boop" if they are guilty, you still must consider the probability that someone faked the "boop", or has swapped in a different shell that looks the same but makes the same "boop" when someone remotely triggers it or that the speaker was broken so even though the magic machine tried to "boop" nobody could hear it. All of these are quite realistic and of a much higher probability than the magic machine existing in the first place.
(This is also arguably the root problem with the still-popular "The computer said it so it must be true". Even if you assume the computer really is 100% accurate, which itself is a transparently false proposition when examined in daylight, there's still plenty of other reasons why one should not give the computer too much confidence.)
You could predict someone's behavior, but why not simply hedge against every possibility?
Magic does involve a good amount of sleight of hand, but it mostly relies on getting people to accept flawed premises. The most essential part of any given trick is the bit where you tell them what's going to happen: even as they reject it and try to bring skepticism to bear, they're often working off of (carefully placed) incorrect assumptions.
So they trust experts without even knowing what questions to ask, or how to assess evidence, or evaluate certainty, or when they should get more opinions.
Not unlike the Post Office convictions. Then there were the Roy Meadows convictions. Many others, and I am sure many other people who have not been able to prove their innocence.
The entire basis for being so enamored with science, as so many of us are, is that it provides a method for establishing facts without needing trust.
Despite the noise to the contrary, we live in a highly literate age, and are a species filled with curiosity and compassion. There's no reason that scientific findings - especially those used to underwrite public policy - cannot be made easy to understand and straightforward to replicate.
What interventions might those be? I'm only aware of the interventions that time and time again have been proven to be highly effective that were implemented here, masking, improved guidelines for hygiene, distancing, and vaccination.
One of the vaccines was recalled due to causing potentially fatal blood clots: https://www.pfpdocs.com/jj-vaccine-recall
Lockdowns were roundly rejected by an enormous chorus of the top experts in relevant fields, and yet somehow the messaging was spun to make it sound like there was significant debate. And of course, no actual data was ever made available by proponents for the rest of us to even consider, let alone replicate. This is what I mean by the "trust the science" message being a contradiction in terms.
Of the interventions you mention: masking was not shown "time and time again" to be highly - or even moderately - effective. The dearth of rigorous study on the matter is bizarre. The Bangladesh study showed no statistically significant effect for cloth masks, and very modest effects for others - certainly nowhere near enough to justify mandates.
I'm not very aware of the literature on distancing - can you provide sources to research which you think shows that it has "time and time again proven to be highly effective"?
Vaccination of course appeared incredible out of the gate, but we now know that there was significant unblinding during phase III, and the real-world results have not lived up to either the safety or efficacy claims. So, while the vaccines are a great achievement, I'm not sure we can draw the conclusions that the scientific method was as rigorously adopted as we might hope in the context of this discussion about the pitfalls of "trust the science" in matters of public policy. Instead, profit seems to have motivated a relatively shoddy series of rollouts. Moreover, the fallout over the disastrous booster approval cost us a number of experts who resigned in protest (obviously Gruber and Krause are the most notable, but there were many others both at FDA and in academia). So I think it still belongs in the 'loss' column as science-based policy goes.
(The founders were of course criticized as being too left wing; have they over-corrected?)
The "founders" of this appear to be a single crank that dedicates all of his time to his hatred of reasonable responses to a disease.
> The "founders" of this appear to be a single crank
I presume the "single crank" to whom you refer here is the author of the piece whose headling you've partially quoted, Kevin Bardosh, who is a professor of public health, expert and front-line responder on arbovirus epidemics (the threat of which still loom large), and widely regarded as an up-and-comer in this field.
The actual founders are unassailable - Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan are Oxford powerhouses, among the top minds in the world on the subject matter, and have published many of the most influential and enduring pieces over their decades of professorship. Other than crude trolling, I cannot fathom what might drive you to the conclusion that their are either invisible (per your use of the word "single") or that they lack the expertise required to take the positions they take.
You'll note that the editor in chief (who happens to be a friend of mine) is a professor of epidemiology at Stanford and a senior fellow at The Hoover Institution. In addition to his work at CG, he has also worked closely throughout the pandemic in his publishing and advocacy with professors from the other three of the top 5.
Like... I hate credentialism too, but if that's your angle, it seems bizarre to attempt to smear the top professors at the world's top medical schools as cranks.
As for your quote:
> Anthony Fauci is finally facing his reckoning
...this strikes me as roundly true. Fauci was a respected professional in his field, albeit surely a PITA bureaucrat for those who depend on NIH grants for research (and perhaps already with one strike given his half-assedness and homophobia early in the AIDS pandemic, but that was fashionable then I guess).
He threw it all away in the past 3 years. His response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been almost all wrong at almost every moment. He misinterpreted the significance of the Diamond Princess dataset. He misled the public about the empirical foundations of social distancing. He unambiguously lied to Congress about the presence of gain-of-function research, which he personally greenlit. I mean... that's pretty bad.
He's not going to be sitting at the cool kid's table anymore. And yeah, he is facing a long road of reckoning ahead for what he's done.