Years ago I remember reading an article with historians trying to figure out what the heck kind of disease would put Tiny Tim in a leg brace and eventually kill him but could magically be cured with a giant bag of money.
Rickets. The answer was rickets. This kid was dying of vitamin d deficiency he literally just needed some cod liver oil shoved down his gullet and a trip to the beach it makes me so mad
Unfortunately due to TV shows that stress forensic investigation, juries are demanding this kind of evidence at trial, and have little idea of how untested and unreliable it really is.
Hair analysis alone has been used in thousands of trials. The FBI is reviewing 2500 cases out of “21000 federal and state requests to the FBI’s hair-comparison unit between 1972 and 1999″. Even if this review exonerates some of those convictions, that doesn’t even begin to cover the hundreds of state and local “experts” trained by the FBI in this bogus “hair analysis” technique to do things like this:
Santae Tribble served 28 years for a murder based on FBI testimony about a single strand of hair. He was exonerated in 2012. It was later revealed that one of the hairs presented at trial came from a dog.
So anyway remember anytime you hear about “forensic evidence” that a lot of it is bullcrap and not scientifically validated and a lot of so-called experts are just pulling conclusions out of their ass.
the forensic hair analysis thing is terrible, the FBI literally invented a branch of forensic psuedoscience with no evidence behind it in order to boost conviction rates, then taught the bogus technique to thousands of forensic investigators in the us and around the world. we have no idea how many people have been wrongfully convicted, and this is just one in a very long list of forensic techniques that lack rigorous scientific evaluation
They’ve made up entirely new fake techniques since the last time I posted about this. Like “9-11 Call Analysis” which is supposed to identify from a person’s voice on a phone call whether they are lying. Surprise surprise: it doesn’t work.
Despite the seeming pervasiveness of the technique, researchers who have studied 911 calls have not been able to corroborate [the original] claims. A 2020 study from the FBI warned against using 911 call analysis to bring actual cases. A separate FBI study in 2022 said applying 911 analysis may actually increase bias. And academic studies from researchers at Villanova and James Madison universities came to similar conclusions. Ultimately, five studies have not been able to find scientific evidence that 911 call analysis works.
There’s also something called SCAN – Scientific Content Analysis – that examines the statements given to the police for falsehood. This one is actually kind of promising because it uses a real scientific analysis, a grammatical formula, to map out a written personal account kind of like using an AI algorithm to diagram a sentence which can reveal that actually no I’m lying it’s total garbage
So why are there even more forensics techniques that don’t work every few years? If forensics is fake science, why do we keep inventing more of it?
Well, because like I said way too many years ago why have I been here so long, forensics are not created by scientists, they’re created by police. And the justice system is interested in convictions, not uncovering the truth, and these techniques get you convictions. Many of them are wrongful convictions, but oh well.
Anyway in conclusion, John Oliver agrees with me and ACAB
it disturbs me that a significant number of people think that the issue with sexual violence, gendered violence, and misogyny is sexual desire rather than dehumanization, so they are relentlessly suspicious of others’ (and their own) desires while simultaneously never at all interrogating others’ (and their own) dehumanizing beliefs about other people, both within and outside of sexual contexts
amhrancas 