One of the things that scares me about the US criminal justice system is that it relies almost entirely on magical thinking and torture to secure convictions. I don't believe anyone is guilty unless they were literally photographed holding the bloody knife while standing over the body and even then I'll need some convincing to rule out potential mitigating circumstances.
Reminds me of a time someone posted a clip at me of John Douglas, the guy who invented profiling or whatever, talking about the Zodiac killer.
He literally is just rambling nonsense, just saying bullshit off the top of his head like "At home he has a diary that he uses to talk to himself and carry on conversations" or "He threatens kids because he feels they are experiencing the childhood he never had", purely armchair psychology, and since he invented this shit he gets to coast by on the assumption that he has some reasoning that would make this reasonable, but with profiling you never have to show your work lmao.
There was a criminology professor at the university I attended that achieved minor renown for a book he had written on abnormal psychology and serial killers. He often flew around the country providing expert trial testimony for prosecutors.
During the DC sniper attacks the fucking guy must've been invited on 50 national broadcasts in the span of a week (and according to him was even tapped by the FBI) to leverage his "expertise" and provide a suspect profile. Every appearance his claims would become more and more outrageous and sensationalized until he was basically just describing Vincent D'Onofrio from that shitty 2000 movie The Cell.
Man, I thought it was funny when the suspect was revealed to be suspect(s) and basically the exact opposite of his expert profile in every way.
I also recall reflecting on the likelihood that this was probably not the first time he had ever been so absolutely wrong. I wonder how many people with harmless sex things or autism or just run of the mill weirdos have been locked up for murder without a shred of physical evidence because a criminal psychologist phantasied a profile to fit them?
The one time I've really heard of a profile being accurate is Richard Chase(Big CW if you google him for mutilation, sexual assault and harming children), and thats cause some random cop who took a course in profiling once just made some kinda reasonable guesses like "this guy is probably really fucking filthy and covered in blood!" or "he's probably white cause if he was black and skulking around white middle class neighborhoods we would have been called immediately" and "he's probably done something weird and fucked up before this".
And the profile also literally didn't even fucking matter or make a difference in the slightest, because he just flat out left handprints and shoeprints all over, plus he was wandering around in a blood caked jacket, so IIRC someone just gave a tip about this dirty blood smelling weirdo going around bothering people and they checked him out. What a success story for the field of criminal profiling!
Yeah, I should have actually put a CW in beforehand I just realized, extremely brutal shit going on with him.
Yeah, theres some debate over how much was him "getting off" on it and how much would be fueled by the long term delusions, but the situation of being stuck with delusions of your blood turning to powder or your heart stopping and having your arteries stolen, for years on end without treatment, is just a complete nightmare to read about. Then to at least get some kind of meds to try and treat it(regardless of how fucked up the side effects in themselves can be) and being released into the care of his parents, just to have the mother wean him off them, absolutely fucked.
Here's a profile for a type of criminal: carries a gun at all times, wears blue, regularly murders minorities.
The killer also has a history of domestic violence, is a registered Republican voter and has severe entitlement issues. The tendency to just pump victims full of lead shows they're prone to outbursts of anger due to their deep-seated insecurities and have a world view in which all people are either victims or criminals.
Murder mystery as a genre did a massive damage to the society by convincing people that the police is good at solving murders. I believe that a large number of people are actually skeptical or cynical about the performance of the police, but they kept thinking about the murders and serial killers and thought "Without the police, who would solve all the murders?".
Except of course, in reality the police actually fucking sucks at solving murders and mysteries.
Something like 90% of solved murder cases involve either the cops catching the suspect standing over the body or there's enough circumstantial evidence the suspect admits guilt.
Or they browbeat someone into pleading guilty by threatening to execute them if they keep insisting they are innocent.
Yeah, something like 99% of federal cases result in convictions, which is really easy to do when you just pick someone to accuse and say "If you confess you get 3 years and probation, if you don't confess you'll die in a concrete box."
need a murder mystery subversion where the cops just forge evidence every step of the way through "forensics"
I love the idea of a crime mystery show where cops are the bad guys. Who would the good guys be?
Nah... The people want some heroes to cheer for:
In the criminal justice system police brutality, systemic racism and class oppression is fought by an elite squad of ????. These are their stories. Du-Dummm!
KopBusters (2022)
Join Barry Cooper, Comrade Chris Hansen, and a medium channeling the ghost of Christopher Dorner as they bust dirty police departments and serve justice on behalf of the people.
The good guys are the Anarchist prisoner support group who right letters to all the wrongly convicted innocent prisoners.
You mean the police procedural, right?
Because classic mystery stories focus way more on what actually solves murders - detective grunt work like alibis, motives, timelines, etc
Profiling is especially harmful. It's like the FBI knew that vast majority of serial killers where born in disfunctional families and neighbourhoods, but instead improving the material conditions of these families, especially with healthcare, they invented this bullshit pop culture version of serial killers, where the perpetrator is the master of deceit, literally the devil, and the profiler is the tortured soul that is trying to understnd the dark side of human psyche.
Same thing they teach at Chiropractic schools or phrenology institutes or homeopathy conferences.
i guess the only option is to keep throwing people in prison until the killing stops
💯 and that made-up magic survives cuz juries buy that shit. Dumb ass nerds who show up and make it through jury selection are all the CSI Miami loving types who worship cops and love make-believe.
Bit cheeky to ask but does anyone have any info on how unreliable forensics is? Like an article or something? Its something on my radar I have not really had a chance to properly look at.
Theres's a :the-podcast: about it Link to ep/transcript, sorry no non-pod sources at the top of my head but they do mention some things in there you can follow up on.
And meanwhile cops do fuck all with actual legitimate evidence sources like rape kits
A few years back the Danish Data Protection Agency found out that there was several major errors in the cell phone data the police had been using in criminal cases to establish the location of offices and by extension their owners. The system would sometimes mess up the locations of a caller and the phone receiving the call.
The agency also criticised the police for having done nothing to check the quality of data before using it in court. The courts and prosecutors and defenders also deserves blame as they never challenged the quality of the data.
All the non-computer people just assumed that when the computer said something then it must also be true. Why wouldn't it be, after all computers are magic and incorruptible truth-machines.
And even then cell phone data is often thought to be more precise than it really is. Often it is assumed that a phone connects to the nearest cell phone mast but that is not always the case, especially in built-up areas where the signal from the closest mast is not always the strongest. These data can have up to 30 km of inaccuracy.
All the non-computer people just assumed that when the computer said something then it must also be true. Why wouldn’t it be, after all computers are magic and incorruptible truth-machines.
Yeah, you can trust a computer if you're know what you're doing and not. Societally, though? Fucking hell no.
Poland had some AI driven nonsense for their benefits claims for a while. Except of course it was always, in the end, a human who said "yeah do whatever". Except basically none of them ever did, it got so bad with it they just tossed it.
My experience with the United States court system, civil and criminal, have convinced me that it operates more or less just like the education and I guess every other system. If you have money and can afford an attorney, you're basically safe outside of something ABSURDLY egregious (if even that). If you don't: get fucked.
Didn't do it? Tough shit you're still going to spend three years in Riker's, lose your job house car and kids, get horrible trauma, and essentially lose everything you ever had and good luck getting back on your feet.
Eyewitness memory is a fun one, because everyone overestimates their ability to accurately remember things, and cops and judges put a lot of stake in people's testimony regarding their memories.
But witness identification accuracy goes way way down (from an already poor baseline) the less similar the target is to the witness, say they are a different race. The cross-race effect is very powerful*.
So you end up with a White witness who is extremely confident (confidence has no correlation with memory accuracy) that that Black guy was the one who robbed the store. And the legal system goes "hey she seems pretty sure, and she probably has a good memory because I have a good memory." But the science disagrees.
*Interestingly, the cross-race effect has less to do with one's own race than that of the people you live and grew up around. A White kid growing up in a majority-Black neighborhood would likely be somewhat less likely to misidentify Black people than people of other races. Probably the best way to mitigate this problem as a whole, is to stop segregating society so much. Also back in college I helped run labs where people would do a photo lineup and then say why they identified their target. Surprise surprise, it turns out the really easy ways to distinguish White people (hair color, eye color, freckles) doesn't work nearly as well with other ethnic groups!
White people with the same hair color are the bane of my existence. When I'm introduced to an old white guy at work, I always say "nice to see you" because I have literally no idea whether we have met before.
This is just speculation, but reading this makes me imagine that forensics professors, and probably anyone who probably spoke to one ever, are never on juries lol. Can you imagine the jury room "So the entire case of the prosecution is basically palm reading, I know because I'm a palm reading professor"
Making sure no one in the jury stand is capable of understanding what's going on or evaluating any of the evidence critically is the primary role of the prosecuting attorney during Jury selection. Well, I guess they also try to remove black people, anyone who has ever interacted with the cops in an adversarial setting, and in cases involving sexual violence they try to remove all women.
I don’t believe anyone is guilty unless they were literally photographed holding the bloody knife while standing over the body and even then I’ll need some convincing to rule out potential mitigating circumstances.
The antithesis of this is that plenty of real crime (e.g., not Drug War bullshit) undeniably occurs, and until we have a radical shift in the underlying political structure of the U.S. people are going to look for some measure of justice in the horrible criminal legal system that currently exists.
The synthesis would be something like:
- Shifting the conversation to preventing crime (by eliminating poverty and guaranteeing basic needs) instead of picking up the pieces afterwards.
- Hammering the idea that in a free society there will be some risk, and some crimes will not result in a conviction.
- Highlighting that many people who probably committed a crime are punished heavily even if they're never convicted (just by interaction with the horrible system we have).
This is all in addition to the million ways we could make immediate improvements to the existing system.
