Fifth Avenue Forum

Cellphone video of New York City police officers ignoring people who brazenly dumped water on them went viral this week, escalating a debate about how much abuse officers should tolerate in an age when they have been ordered to show restraint.

In cases like this, where there is no doubt, I'd be totally OK with it.

Beyond reasonable doubt is not beyond all doubt

You have the FBI sending out expert witnesses to testify that their hair, bite mark, and arson evidence was proof beyond all reasonable doubt, only for it to come out that all such evidence was junk science.

Beyond reasonable doubt is not beyond all doubt

yes.. I'm not a lawyer but proving anything with 0 doubt seems a little unlikely

You have the FBI sending out expert witnesses to testify that their hair, bite mark, and arson evidence was proof beyond all reasonable doubt, only for it to come out that all such evidence was junk science.

My recollection here was that the scientists were junk, not the science, i.e. fabricating bogus results.

THE PRESIDENT’S COUNCIL of Advisors on Science and Technology has concluded that forensic bite-mark evidence is not scientifically valid and is unlikely ever to be validated, according to a draft report obtained by The Intercept. The report, titled “Forensic Science in Criminal Courts: Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature-Comparison Methods,” is marked as a “predecisional” draft created August 26 that is not to be quoted or distributed, though the title page suggests the report will be made public sometime this month.

In what The Guardian has called a “judicial catastrophe” of epic proportions, the FBI and Justice Department have admitted that in over 95 percent of trials revisited in a historic review, agents gave flawed testimony based on the pseudoscience of hair analysis.

Spencer S. Hsu at The Washington Post broke the story late last week, reporting that the extent of the problem was unveiled during a review of thousands of cases in which forensic testimony led to a conviction. These included 268 trials that incorporated microscopic hair analysis, a pseudoscientific technique in which forensic experts use microscopes to “match” hairs found on crime scenes to defendants.

Lee’s case is by no means unique, says renowned fire scientist John Lentini, who has seen a lot of bad science applied to arson investigations in his 40-plus years studying fires. But Lentini, who testified as an expert on Lee’s behalf on appeal, says Lee’s case is one of the worst he’s seen.

Lentini got involved in the early 1990s after a colleague sent him a transcript of the trial. He was so incensed by what he read that he called Lee’s lawyer and offered to work on the case for free. But the lawyer said that wouldn’t be necessary because Lee’s supporters in the Korean-American community raised enough money to cover his legal fees.

Lentini says prosecutors employed nearly every fire science myth in the book. “It’s the ultimate triumph of junk science,” he says.

The arrests took place during battalion formation in a “public display for the entire unit to see,” the Marine Corps said.

I hear this time and again...do any of the links go from [minute after conviction] to [end of life]?

And let's not forget about appeals: in Idaho, the State Appellate Public Defenders office spent about 44 times more time on a typical death penalty appeal than on a life sentence appeal(downloads as a pdf): almost 8,000 hours per capital defendant compared to about 180 hours per non-death penalty defendant. New York state projected that the death penalty costs the state $1.8 million per case just through trial and initial appeal.
It costs more to house death penalty prisoners, as well. In Kansas, housing prisoners on death row costs more than twice as much per year ($49,380) as for prisoners in the general population ($24,690). In California, incarceration costs for death penalty prisoners totaled more than $1 billion from 1978 to 2011 (total costs outside of incarceration were another $3 billion). By the numbers, the annual cost of the death penalty in the state of California is $137 million compared to the cost of lifetime incarceration of $11.5 million.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/nyre ... rrest.html

Cellphone video of New York City police officers ignoring people who brazenly dumped water on them went viral this week, escalating a debate about how much abuse officers should tolerate in an age when they have been ordered to show restraint.

Stuff like this is why I pretty much don't get up in arms where there are cases of police brutality, of the non-death type. They're dealing with stuff like this when they're probably just trying to do their damn job.

The point of tasing someone is to immobilize them

Is that what happened? They tased somebody for throwing water on them? The article was firewalled for me.