Barbara Ehrenreich: 'Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?'

But criminal forensics has a deeper problem of basic validity. Bite marks, blood-splatter patterns, ballistics, and hair, fiber and handwriting analysis sound compelling in the courtroom, but much of the “science” behind forensic science rests on surprisingly shaky foundations. Many well-established forms of evidence are the product of highly subjective analysis by people with minimal credentials—according to the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors, no advanced degree is required for a career in forensics. And even the most experienced and respected professionals can come to inaccurate conclusions, because the body of research behind the majority of the forensic sciences is incomplete, and the established methodologies are often inexact. “There is no scientific foundation for it,” says Arizona State University law professor Michael Saks. “As you begin to unpack it you find it’s a lot of loosey-goosey stuff.”

Forensic "science": Popular Mechanics explores the uneasy history of forensic science, developed (as the article's subhead puts it) "not developed by scientists" but by "cops who were guided by little more than common sense." Some truly eye-opening anecdotes here:

A 2006 study by the University of Southampton in England asked six veteran fingerprint examiners to study prints taken from actual criminal cases. The experts were not told that they had previously examined the same prints. The researchers’ goal was to determine if contextual information—for example, some prints included a notation that the suspect had already confessed—would affect the results. But the experiment revealed a far more serious problem: The analyses of fingerprint examiners were often inconsistent regardless of context. Only two of the six experts reached the same conclusions on second examination as they had on the first.

Ballistics has similar flaws. A subsection of tool-mark analysis, ballistics matching is predicated on the theory that when a bullet is fired, unique marks are left on the slug by the barrel of the gun. Consequently, two bullets fired from the same gun should bear the identical marks. Yet there are no accepted standards for what constitutes a match between bullets. Juries are left to trust expert witnesses. “‘I know it when I see it’ is often an acceptable response,” says Adina Schwartz, a law professor and ballistics expert with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Via MeFi, where commenters like Optimus Chyme point out the problems go much deeper:

I'm an avid reader of criminology textbooks; the best/most interesting book in my little collection is probably "Practical Homicide Investigation," 3rd edition. It is extremely detailed and well-researched and much beloved in the field.

And it has a chapter about psychics.

Not "this is bullshit and you should ignore it." A whole chapter that says, more or less "if you are really stuck, you might want to consult with a psychic." This is in the definitive homicide investigation handbook for professional law enforcement.

So, uh, no: I'm not very surprised by this.

Monday late night politics.

* Strange things are happening in South Carolina, where Governor Mark Sanford has been missing for four days. Reports are that the governor has made contact, but the governor's office won't confirm that's true. (UPDATE: The governor's office is now saying that Sanford is on the Appalachian Trail, a mere 2000 miles long.)

* Waxman-Markey Watch: In the comments Alex drops an A-bomb to describe one of the key antagonists on this bill, Colin Peterson. Apparently the bill is unlikely to be debated this week. Yale e360 had a roundup of opinions on Waxman-Markey that's worth reading, with Climate Progress providing a roundup of the roundup. Krugman (also via CP) had a recent column on the bill, too, coming out in favor of it.

* Mexico has decriminalized small amounts of drugs. Good.

* 'Eco-Friendly Meat Could Begin With Mini-Cows.' Gross.

* Dystopia is now: Bill Simmon takes a good, hard look at reports that Lancaster, PA, will soon be putting in so many security cameras that it will take a volunteer Stasi comprised of local busybodies to watch them all and determines that this may be the least worst alternative for our privacy-robbed future. Frankly I think Bill's got this one wrong: open-source surveillance is a police state, just one with slightly better branding. Call me Sisyphus Q. Luddite if you must but I don't think panoptic surveillance is some historical inevitability; it can and should be resisted, not embraced.

* And Ta-Nehisi Coates calls for a reality check regarding Martin Luther King. (NB: He's already walked the post back.)

Josh Marshall's post on tonight's terror arrests in New York raises once again the question of the extent to which the government's own investigative procedures are creating terrorists it can then arrest. (There's a great This American Life on this subject involving an "arms trader" sentenced to 47 years in prison after purchasing a dud missile from one government informant in order to sell it to another. This is not the only such case.) This is, we should take pains to remember, an extremely fraught question—these men, after all, did by all accounts plant what they believed to be bombs outside a synagogues—and a telling reminder of the difficulties inherent to prosecutions that we might naively assume were open and shut.

Links for Wednesday.

* First-gen Sierra adventure games in your browser. Your childhood says come back home, all is forgiven.

* The setup for this Flash Forward show seems pretty good, but man do I wish Brannon Braga weren't involved.

* McSweeney's has the syllabus for "ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era."

* Long-time Republican strategist declares defeat in NY-20, while Norm Coleman presses on in the courts with his unique metaphysical argument that he is the only logically possible winner in the Minnesota Senate race.

* David Simon on Bill Moyers.

* Roberto Bolaño, 2666, and the Ciudad Juárez murders.

* What happens when you "run government like a business."

* I don't agree with everything Amanda Marcotte has to say about prostitution here, but she's certainly right about Eliot Spitzer; it's completely insane to me that some people actually seem willing to give the guy another chance.

* The best article about the "sexting" crisis you're likely to read.

He then told the parents and teens to line up if they wanted to view the photos, which were printed out onto index cards. As the 17-year-old who took semi-nude self-portraits waited in line, she realized that Mr. Skumanick and other investigators had viewed the pictures. When the adults began to crowd around Mr. Skumanick, the 17-year-old worried they could see her photo and recalls she said, "I think the worst punishment is knowing that all you old guys saw me naked. I just think you guys are all just perverts."

If your laws allow people to be charged with distributing child pornography for sending other people naked pictures of themselves, you need some new laws.

* Nate Silver thinks the libertarians are taking over the Republican Party. That would certainly be a huge improvement, as long as we're not just talking about glibertarians.

* The headline reads, "Obama keeps prosecutions on the table."

Salon's indispensible Glenn Greenwald is all over the RNC "thoughtcrime" arrests.

There is clearly an intent on the part of law enforcement authorities here to engage in extreme and highly intimidating raids against those who are planning to protest the Convention. The DNC in Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether. Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined.

Firedoglake has a lot more. They're talking about this at Boing Boing and MetaFilter, too.

Midnight links.

* A mandatory evacuation has been ordered in New Orleans—and Gustav is looking very ugly.

* Somebody shut up Michael Moore. This guy, too.

* Apparently you can now arrest people for intent to protest. Good to know.

* Flowers for Algernon: The Blog. Via MeFi. See it now before the DMCA takedown.

* Steve Benen has a good roundup of shocked reactions to the Palin pick from both Alaskans and Republicans. (Apparently Romney and Pawlenty are not happy either.) Or take this from an off-the-record Bushite:

If it said something admirable about President Bush that he chose a running mate who would be more helpful in governing than in campaigning, what does it say about Senator McCain that he did the opposite? One of the most loyal Bushies calls the selection “disrespectful to the office of the presidency.”

And this, from the Politico:

Whatever you think of the pick, here are six things it tells us about McCain:

1. He’s desperate.
2. He’s willing to gamble — bigtime.
3. He’s worried about the political implications of his age.
4. He’s not worried about the actuarial implications of his age.
5. He’s worried about his conservative base.
6. At the end of the day, McCain is still McCain.

Don't talk to the cops: Prof. James Duane of the Regent University School of Law and Officer George Bruch of the Virginia Beach Police Department explain why you shouldn't ever talk to the cops about a crime under any circumstances without your lawyer present.





(I know, I know, it's Pat Robertson's law school, but he's right anyway.)

And here's a nice Miranda flashback from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

...a detective does his job in the only possible way. He follows the requirements of the law to the letter -- or close enough so as not to jeopardize his case. Just as carefully, he ignores that law's spirit and intent. He becomes a salesman, a huckster as thieving and silver-tongued as any man who ever moved used cars or aluminum siding -- more so, in fact, when you consider that he's selling long prison terms to customers who have no genuine need for the product.

A few more while I'm feeling fiery.

* Speaking of our entrenched class of professional morons, there's been a lot of good commentary today on the strikingly poor job Brokaw did interviewing Gore last Sunday. Just for starters, here's Grist and OpenLeft.

* For some reason, The Nation now has a sex column. The subject of this and presumably every edition: How hot does Barack Obama make you?

Pretty hot, I guess.

* Inside Homeland Security Hell: Nine-Months-Pregnant Edition. More at Daily Kos.

By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.

After she was discharged from the hospital, Mrs. Villegas was separated from her nursing infant for two days and barred from taking a breast pump into the jail, her lawyer and a doctor familiar with the case said. Her breasts became infected, and the newborn boy developed jaundice, they said.

Steal a Hot Pocket, get tasered and die. That's the law in North Carolina.

Last year, officers used Tasers 138 times. Officers are to use them to prevent, whenever possible, the escalation to the use of deadly force.

Here is the situation that made this use of a taser necessary to prevent the escalation to deady force:

Around lunchtime, Turner had come home to eat and told his mom that he had stolen a couple of Hot Pockets from the store. A supervisor planned to get a district manager involved and he feared disciplinary action, she said.

She said she told him to go back to the store and face up to what happened.

...

Officers responded to a disturbance call at the grocery store about 1:15 p.m. When they arrived, they saw Turner throwing something at a store manager, according to a CMPD news release issued Thursday night. The release does not say what the object was, and a police spokeswoman could not be reached.

According to the release, Turner appeared to be agitated, refused all commands and advanced toward the police officer. The officer then used his Taser to get Turner under control, the release said.

Darryl Turner was 17 years old. Via Pandagon.

A new report has some sobering stats about America's prison mentality: More than 1% of the adult population of the country is currently incarcerated, including 1 in 36 adult Hispanic males and 1 in 9 African-American males aged 20-34. (!)

These are numbers that speak for themselves.

Here's a PDF of the full study. Via MeFi.

Some random links I've been hanging onto this weekend:

* Congratulations to Girl-Wonder.org, finally getting their memorial for Stephanie Brown (Robin IV) in the Batcave. Finally, there's no more sexism in comics. At last.

* Here's Shift, a quick but enjoyable platform game that relies on rotating the playing field for its gimmick.

* Deal to end writer's strike near?

* There were five accidental taser deaths in January. It's a good thing these things are non-lethal...

* And finally, via MeFi, here's an interesting article wrestling with the tough questions at the margins of of attorney-client privilege. The MeFi comments have a lot of other good links on the same subject. I recognize intellectually the reasons why one ought to be a absolutist in favor of procedural protections like attorney-client privilege, but I have to admit that in practice I feel willing to sacrifice ironclad rules in favor of results that seem plainly more just. The important point for me is that the Law is only a proxy for justice, an approximation of it; the Law and justice are not the same thing.

The question, always, is where the move away from strict legal proceduralism stops—and the impossibility of drawing any sort of line short of pure absolutism inevitably pushes me, dialectically, back towards absolutism again...

Random links before I get back to work:

* How America Lost the War on Drugs. In Rolling Stone.

* An astoundingly complete timeline of the Planets of the Apes universe. Via Cynical-C.

* A man who walked into a police station five years after he was presumed dead in a canoeing accident has told officers he has no memory of what happened to him. Either this guy is a zombie, Jesus, a clone, or he was kidnapped by aliens. There are no other possibilities. Via MeFi.

* Rudy Giuliani: The Security Candidate.

This week's unnecessary tasering comes to us from the great state of Utah, where a state trooper decided to use non-lethal force to protect himself from a motorist trying to talk his way out of a ticket. The officer in question is "under internal investigation" but still on active duty. We have video. More discussion at Bitter Laughter, Cynical-C, and MetaFilter. For a look at the other point of view, check out the thread in the Policeman Forum at officer.com, where every tasering is a good tasering.



In other police state news, firefighters are being asked by the Department of Homeland Security to snoop in people's homes while putting out fires.

Day after Thanksgiving news update:

* American consumers have been forced to do the safety tests the federal government won't.

* Welcome to George Bush's America, Part 512: Probable cause no longer required for search warrants. Via MeFi and Matt Yglesias.

* The United States's prison population has quadrupled since 1980, despite the well-documented decrease in the crime rate during the 1990s. It currently stands at around 2.2 million behind bars and 4.8 million more on probation or parole—the highest rate in the world. China, a authoritarian state of 1.3 billion people, comes in at number 2 with 1.5 million incarcerated, though in fairness some people estimate that China's prison population may actually be much higher. If this offends you, check out "Unlocking America," a forty-page proposal for prison reform. Also via MeFi.

* "It's one minute before 12." An hour-long lecture explains what we all already know to be true: growth and expansion simply cannot last forever.

* Finally, Noam Chomsky explains the manufacturing of the Iran "crisis." Via Crooks and Liars.

Another pseudoepisode of "The Show" from Ze this week: "Privacy."

The same week Chicago police tasered a mentally ill 82-year-old woman, Canadian police taser and kill a 40-year-old non-English-speaking Polish immigrant (suspected of double parking), 24 seconds after arriving on the scene. Second link via MeFi.

UPDATE: Correction, I screwed up this post a bit. There were three incidents: the elderly woman who was tasered on Tuesday, the 40-year-old immigrant who was tasered to death on Oct. 26th 24 seconds after the police arrived, and a 68-year-old stroke victim who was tasered yesterday on suspicion of double parking. I apologize for the error.

"It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile": The pain-ray Silent Guardian is here, and the future is bright.

Copwatchers: A YouTube portal dedicated to video evidence of police brutality. Via MetaFilter.

Vatician City is about to become the world's first carbon-neutral state, while back in the U.S.S.R. airport screeners are collecting extensive data on air travelers, including personal items they carry and books they're reading, and storing the data for years. Both links via MeFi.



That's Paul McCartney rocking Red Square in 2003. History is strange sometimes. Just another example: even an hour ago I never would have predicted I'd ever have anything nice to say about Pope Benedict.