Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 546: Forensic Science Deep Dive Discussion

Episode Date: October 19, 2020

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This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. recording in the future in the past no in the past they're in the future for the future. In the past. No, in the past. No, we're in the past. They're in the future, Tom. For the future. This is cognitive dissonance. This is a COVID prevention, hopefully we need to get it, bank episode. This is a 2020 show if ever there was one. What if we get sick?

It really is. Here's something in the can. And it's also depressing, right? So it's got the added benefit. Oh, yeah. I guess I didn't think of it that way. Yeah. The added benefit of it being horribly depressing.

Yeah. It's sort of like, hey, guys, here's something you weren't worried about. Yeah. Here's an hour of that. This is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode, we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad.

It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome mat. This is episode number... Insert episode number here. It's episode 540 sick because he's sick episode 546 thank you i'm real sick episode number yeah so this is another in our installment of what if we get sick let's put an episode in the can episodes um and we're going to do a deep dive today on forensic science

and how good it is. I think I did the homework right, Cecil? How good it is? You know, Tom, I wanted to start this with one of these moments where you realize that you've taken something for granted for way too long., so maybe a year ago, you and I had a conversation about them making a murderer and about false convictions and specifically talking about Brendan Dassey. I don't know if you remember

Brendan Dassey. Yeah, yeah. The kid? The kid who's, he's a young kid who just, he was shy and awkward and maybe a little not as intelligent as everyone else. And he, he was

essentially labeled a liar by people in the police office and people who reviewed the footage of his interrogations because he would look down and then he would agree to stuff that he wasn't, you know, he agreed to a confession that he, that he, he says he hasn't done. And which at this point really feels absurd and, and silly when you talk about, when you listen to the confession in its entirety, it totally sounds like they're leading him, et cetera. And I remember you telling me when we were doing that episode, you had said that when people lie, there really is no way to tell. People say they can tell, but you really can't tell. And I remember hearing that and thinking, well, that's not what I've heard my whole life and through the media, right? But that's true. That's a true thing. It's just

you can't really know. People are different. People are awkward, more awkward than others. Others are more confident. And so you can't just look at one subset of all the people and say, this is absolutely how everyone lies, right? Because there's just no way to do that. You can't do that. And so I had always taken it for granted, just like I had always taken almost all of these things that we're going to talk about today completely for granted. Now, in my, in my defense, I'm not, well, I don't spend a lot of time around this stuff. I don't listen to a ton of true crime stuff. I don't watch a ton of true crime stuff. So I'm not, I'm not immersed in it. And I'm also not like a person who watches any of the dramas either

about this stuff. Right. So I just always presumed that it was true. But it's not only that it's been debunked, it's been debunked, Tom, for 10 years. Yeah. The forensic science is, it suffers from some poor labeling because they use the word science. Yeah.

And it's forensic folklore. It is. It's really all that it is. It's forensic anecdotes. Yeah. It's forensic wives tales it's fucking complete bullshit here's your forensics almanac you're exactly yeah yeah it's it is you know it's so funny because like i do kind of enjoy the true crime genre and i listen to some of that

stuff and watch some of that stuff on occasion and um you know so when when you suggested doing this episode i was like oh cool i'm of familiar, like in broad strokes familiar. I'd never done any like serious reading on it, but I was in broad strokes familiar with some of the problems in some of those fields of forensic science. When I started going through the reading, I was like, oh, that's not only worse than I thought and broader in scope than I thought, but it's worse for bad reasons. Sure. To your point, like 10 years ago, the National Academy of Sciences came out and they were like,

you know, maybe we should use some science. Yeah. Have you guys maybe thought of that? Yeah. There's a whole report. Yeah. So a little background outside being glib, like the National Academy of Science issued in 2009, they issued a report, hey, we should connect the law and science because up to now they've been wholly disconnected.

And what they really mean by that is that this subset of disciplines, and discipline is a rather strong word, the subset of disciplines has been entirely disconnected from any of the rigors of real academic sciences. And it relies entirely on a set of rules, the precedent rules of the legal system. Sure. Yeah. It's all the precedent. Yeah. Because something in the legal, in science, just everybody should know this, but just in broad strokes of science, the way things works is there's a hypothesis and it's tested. And then the results of that hypothesis and the test are published for peer review. Then they're replicated. And that goes through this rigorous sort of testing process before something is deemed to be reliable. And when something is deemed to be reliable, it seemed to be reliable within certain percentages or degrees of accuracy. And so there's all these caveats to things, right?

And there's people who have tested and vetted this. And that's in broad strokes, that's part of what makes science different than the earth is flat because I said it. The forensic science field really emerged as a response from law enforcement and by law enforcement as a way for them to say, well, we need to find out the whodunits. I bet this will work. This seems reasonable. Look, I did it. And then it goes to a judge who says, yeah, I'm a law talking guy, but not a science reading man. I'll let it into the court. Then it gets led into court and then it works, you know, so it proves efficacy in terms of, and the efficacy is prosecutorial efficacy, right? It becomes valuable for the prosecution to create a conviction. And then that establishes a legal

precedent. So now what I mean by that is now in the legal system, the law has said this is something which is admissible. And then in the prosecutorial system, we've established a precedent that this is something which is valuable in order to sway juries. And that's how forensic science takes root and takes hold. Notice that it has none of the trappings of actual science. Right. And that's a really important procedural distinction between forensic science and like physics or like chemistry. Yeah.

So then these experts, and we'll talk about that, I'm sure at some point, just to give you the broad strokes. So the National Academy of Science in 2009, which is a shockingly recent timeframe, they issued a paper that was basically like, okay, here's some recommendations. First, use science. Yeah. Here's how it works. And I'm not even really kidding. Yeah, yeah.

You know, they had some recommendations like maybe everyone should do things the same way. like maybe everyone should do things the same way. If you're going to like say like this kind of analysis is valuable, can we just all agree that we all just do it the same way? Just nah, you know, crazy. Basic assumptions to try to like bring science as a process into the forensics field. And distressingly in 2017, Jeff Sessions was like, you know, we don't need science muddying up our profession. Well, he's a prosecutor, right? And so he's coming at it. And not to blame Jeff Sessions for not being a disgusting, awful person, right? Jeff

Sessions is a bad person. But Jeff Sessions also is coming from it from a prosecutorial standpoint where he looks at this and says, well, I've been using this stuff for years. There's no reason not to do this. And so his mindset is of the prosecutor. think that's influenced me many, many times throughout the years, even though I'm not somebody who consumes a lot of this, I do consume enough of it and see enough of it. And it's the pop culture. Oh my God. Pop culture makes it seem like you can fucking feed somebody's like barely tiny latent print into a, into a computer and it will shit out one person out of 7 billion. And they will make it seem like one person, they get a bite analysis and it seems like they put it in computer and it spits out one person.

And that always goes in sort of the way science goes, which is I collect my evidence and then I draw a conclusion from that evidence. And what it's taking out of the process is that the police already have someone in custody that they want this evidence to prosecute. So they make the evidence look like that guy's stuff because they're biased already on who they want to do it. That's a super important point. Confirmation bias is a real problem in terms of cognitive biases, and they actively promote the confirmation bias.

Tell me where this doesn't sound insane. They will go to the lab, and these labs are total bullshit. They'll go to the forensics lab, and they'll say, I think Tom did it. Here are the details of the crime, and they'll make it sound salacious and like, you got to get this guy.

Did all this terrible shit. And here's the evidence that we have that Tom did it. Can you look at this and find something that basically shows me that Tom did it? And then the lab's like, yeah, that's literally the reason we are in business. Because they're businesses. These aren't non-for-profit laboratories. They're businesses. These aren't non-for-profit laboratories. They're businesses. Their customer is coming to him and saying, what can you find that shows that Tom did this? And then they,

that's not science at all. There's nothing scientific about that. If you were in the fucking record player business and someone came to you and said, I really need a record player. And you said, well, hold on, let's just double check and make sure you need a record player. Right. They probably wouldn't come back to your business again. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. These labs, Cecil, all the pop culture makes it seem like, first of all, it makes it seem like computers do the work, right? Right. So computers don't do most of this work outside of DNA. So we'll exclude DNA, but that's got some issues that we'll talk about. Sure. Outside and not issues with the science of DNA itself, but just

issues with how it's done. When you watch these TV shows and movies and even like some documentary films, they show like you put in this partial print, it scans through and the computer does the work. Yeah. But the computer doesn't do most of this work. Most of the work is done by people. Most of forensic science, science and fucking deep air quotes, is done by just some dude. And that some dude was trained by some other guy that was just some dude that was accredited and certified by somebody that made it up last night. There's nothing behind it. These labs overwhelmed with volume, incredibly low standards, and here's how low they are. There's no standards. They don't have them. They lack standards. There's no standards.

There is no requirement for certification. There is no national set of standards for these labs. There's no federal agency that oversees everybody. There's only just a hodgepodge of labs all over the country. And like you said, I read an article, Tom, we're talking about all the different problems with it, and that's what this national

report lays out, is all the different problems with science. And that's, I think, where we're starting. You know, we talked about how it's not science, how it's masquerading as science. And you said experts. I got a quote from a ProPublica article I want to read. One afternoon early last year,

I punched in my credit card information. I paid $495 to the American College of Forensics Examiners, International Inc., and registered for an online course. After about 90 minutes of video instruction, I took an impressive sounding credential that could help establish my qualifications to be an expert witness in a criminal and civil trials. For another $50, they emailed me a white lab coat after sending me my certificate. It took $450, a couple hours of their time,

and a hundred fucking question test. Online. And online. With the open book. With open book. Open book. fucking question test and they and online with open book and they're able to now with that because there's all this bullshit language in court where they might introduce him and say

him or her and say well this person is certified by the American College of Forensics Examiners International Inc. That sounds impressive. That sounds impressive and That sounds impressive. And suddenly everybody in the jury says, oh, well, that person is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, unless the defense attorney knows it's, you know, basically self-published certificates,

then they won't question it. And so people hear it. And that's, I think, one of the biggest problems with this is that we make presumptions in the court specifically about the validity of things based on how impressive they sound. One of the things we talked about specifically on the false conviction show that we did was when we talked about that to a degree of scientific certainty bullshit comment they make. And they make that in the forensics field all the time. And it doesn't mean anything. And the same thing here, this doesn't mean anything either. And, but, but when

we hear it, we expect because they're saying it's forensic science, that science is 100%. And so when somebody presents something to you, even if it's weird or doesn't, you know, like we, like we're going to talk about a lot of this different pseudoscience when we get into each one, even if it's a pseudoscience, when they say, well, yeah, this is forensic science, and we know this did a thing, then we suddenly presume that it's 100% accurate because it's science. Right. It's so funny because if you know science, you know science doesn't work in 100%. Science doesn't work in terms of absolutes. Science doesn't work in terms of absolutes.

Science is very careful never to use language that even suggests absolutes. But because forensic science as a field is not scientific and it carries none of the same gravitas, well, it carries all of the gravitas with none of the rigor of actual science. It uses these bullshit phrases and terms that are really invented to sway a jury. That forensic science as a field developed by law enforcement for law enforcement. And law enforcement and the prosecution are on the same side. They're on the same team. So they've created an entire industry of easily certifiable and accredited experts, accredited and certified by themselves for themselves, that have an entire language which is rhetorical. What I mean by that is the value of that language

is not valuable in terms of conveying real information. It's valuable in terms of conveying drama and certainty in order to sway the opinion of the decision makers. The decision makers are the jury. So they've created an entire language, an entire rhetoric that is exclusive of the scientific field that is only for the forensic science field. And that's specifically designed language to sway the minds of juries. And remember, juries are typically underrepresentative of educated peoples, right? People try to get people booted from juries. Oftentimes, we've seen a ton of studies of this.

Most of the population isn't college educated. And they actively work on the prosecution side to remove the most educated people from the jury pool. So you have a group, and I'm not shitting on jurors at all. Like I'm not, the only thing I'm suggesting is this is a group of people who is going to have most of their information about what science is and how it works

delivered to them through media, through TV shows like CSI and Dexter and not from classes. And it's in your best interest as a prosecutor to try to tell a story that is going to convince people. And who's easier to convince? Somebody who's going to poke holes in it or somebody who's just going to swallow it.

And that's just the very fact of it. And that's not to say that highly educated people can't be stupid. Because we've seen that many times in the past. But there's a chance, probably a better chance, if you went through more schooling, that you might have encountered more arguments, more argumentation, more of that stuff, and be able to pick apart.

Well, no, that's rhetorical. That's bullshit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, everybody in a liberal arts school has to go through a basic philosophy 101 class with a tiny section of logic. So maybe they remember that. If you're like a bio major, you know, you're probably not going to buy into some of this stuff. You know, if you're a chem major, if you're a physics major, even, you know, you're probably not going to buy it. You're going to be like,

wait a minute, how could you know the things you're saying, you know, why are you saying that like, this is a certainty? You're a scientist talking about certainties. That's not the language we use. It would immediately call into question your validity. But the prosecution specifically hires experts. And remember, these experts are paid. It's not like a public service that people are doing. So it's a paid industry that self-supports and self-regulates. And that's always a problem, right? When your client is hiring you to confirm what they want and your entire system is a closed system with no outside regulation, there's no way for it to have any real credibility, just structurally.

Yeah. And I want to go back to another similar cottage industry that is run by the police. I don't know, Tom, if you watched the documentary where they went through, it's on Netflix, about the drug labs. So it was a documentary that popped maybe about a half a year ago, and it was about these two women in these drug labs that falsified a bunch of stuff. One woman falsified a bunch of stuff to further her career. And another woman falsified a bunch of stuff because she was high all the time. And she was using the drugs in the lab. So she was stealing drugs from the lab, replacing it with baby powder and other shit so she could get high off of the drugs in the lab.

She was doing the real meth right out of the vial that they have that is the sample. That's actually kind of a great supply. Yeah, she was constantly doing for the control group,

they have pure drugs. Right. And so she was using some of that pure drugs and then replacing some of it and all this. And there's, there's, and we're talking, you know, so many false positives that they had because they fucked up. And then they had this person who was on drugs doing, you know, do, and I'm not, and I don't, when I say on drugs, I don't care that people do drugs, right? I don't, don't? Don't misunderstand me and make it seem like I'm moralizing about drug use. Because I'm not moralizing about drug use. I don't care about drug use.

But this person is inebriated at work, right? And so that is something to be concerned about, especially when you're doing things that require you to be careful. Well, clearly your ethics have been compromised here. Absolutely. And more often than not, they want to see these, the cops who are giving you these orders and want you to run this drug stuff to make sure that this is real drugs,

they want to see this come back positive. And if it comes back positive, there's also a money incentive for police departments to make drug busts too. So there's always this money incentive behind everything. But in this documentary, they just show these two people who want to essentially please the police officers and then also do the things that they were doing. And they railroaded so many different people because there was no regulation, there was no oversight, and there was no code of ethics. And that, you know, all these things that you would have in all these other independent areas where you would want to get an independent voice, it's not independent. It's not an

independent voice. It should be, but it's not. And that's the one, probably if not the biggest problem, one of the biggest problems with it. It's amazing to me that you can say to somebody who's purporting to be the scientist, here's some things, whatever they are, like the discipline doesn't actually matter for this. Here's some things I'd like you to find this out of it. Yeah.

Science strives so hard to remove the human bias, the whole like blind and double blind procedures. And it just removes that because it's not intending to do science. It was never intending to do science. Yeah. You can never argue to me that there's any like scientific credibility

or even a real significant ethical desire to have scientific credibility when you take one of the fundamental tenets of removing human bias, which is the blind and double-blind process, and you purposefully circumvent that, right? Yeah, yeah, right. And the lab technicians are guilty.

What they say, as guilty as the prosecution, they say like, oh, the more information we know, then we'll know what we're looking for. What the fuck are you talking about? That's not how science are. That's just not like, we'll know what we're looking for. Like if you send fingerprints in, man, I got to tell you, the fingerprints thing upset me a little bit. Yeah, fingerprints at least.

Fingerprints at least. But like when you send fingerprints in, it shouldn't be like, well, I got these partial fingerprints lifted and I think they probably belong to Tom and here's the thing, beat his grandmother up and this and that. So if you can help me match these to Tom, that would be awesome. I'm incentivized to do the right thing, right? Tom's a bad guy. Tom beat up his grandmother. We just need this one thing. And yeah, I looked at that and the whirls and swirls look close enough for me to be able to say, ding, ding, ding, winner, winner, chicken dinner. So I'll put my stamp of approval on it. That's not science anymore. There's nothing scientific that happened in that process. And

that is a frequent piece of process. Yeah. Well, let's talk about some of the individual things before we, you know, we might talk about some other individual cases as we work our way through. But let's talk about some of the individual forensic sciences that are passed off as a fact, as passed off as science. I want to start with bite marks. Oh, my God. Bite marks is utter bullshit and something that i 100 thought was real until last week so it's one of those things you know i had no idea and you know i'll use myself as example of somebody who just all i've seen is you know the one or two shows out there where they they they throw it in a computer and then some sexy

3d version of it comes up and it shows my gosh, this is an absolute match. And what, what I watched, one of the things I watched, uh, was a documentary series on Netflix for this. We watched a documentary series on Netflix and I want to get the name right so people can watch it if they want. And it's only the first three episodes. It's called The Innocence Files. And on those first three episodes, it's mostly about these two gentlemen who wind up

being accused of raping a toddler. Both of them are accused of two separate toddlers. So when within a year apart, a toddler goes missing, is found by a water area, and is dead, raped and dead. And so, I'm sorry, content warning. We're going to be talking about, this is forensic science, so I suspect you will know that there is going to be a trigger warning about rape, about sexual assault, about murder and violence in this episode.

So if that's something that makes you queasy, I apologize for not giving you a content warning before now, but I'm making a content warning now. So they find a guy who's tangentially related to the woman, and then they do a bite mark analysis. And they did a bite mark analysis of several of the people that were related to this woman. And they hire a bite mark analysis of several of the people that were related to this woman. And they hire this guy. He's a forensic odontologist, which is somebody who matches bite marks to teeth, like teeth casings.

And he goes through this whole process of showing how it was this guy who bit this toddler's wrist. And so that's the guy. Now, there's no other link whatsoever to this guy who bit this toddler's wrist. And so that's the guy. Now, there's no other link whatsoever to this guy, to this. In fact, he has dozens of people who put him at a club while this murder is taking place. Dozens of people are on the stand. They ignore all that and they prosecute him for capital murder. The next, within a year, an exact copycat of that crime happens.

Yeah, right. In a town where they're like, we've never had a capital murder in this county. So like, this isn't like Nuxaby County, Mississippi. They're like, geez, we've never even had a capital murder. Weird that two basically identical victims had the same like identical crime happen to them

that were dumped in like exactly the same kind of place. Yeah. And then Tom, but to add to that, they were also investigated by the same officer, prosecuted by the same prosecutor. Right. Yeah. You know, so like disparate people

didn't connect the dots. Like, oh, I didn't read that news story. Yeah. That was your story. Yeah. That was, it's essentially the same thing. Sorry, it's just outrageous. And so they prosecute another guy who again is tangible. He's related. In this sense, he's closer to the murder

than the other guy was because he was in the house when the girl went missing. But so was the mom. Yeah, he was asleep next to the mom. He was next to the mom. And so- Exactly. And was next to the mom. Sleeping. Exactly.

And so they prosecute him. Well, they come to find out in this whole thing that this odontologist is taking the teeth molds and he's going to the body and he's finding anything that looks remotely like a fucking bite mark. And then he's manipulating the teeth in some way so he can match a tooth with a mark. And he's not using the bottom teeth. He's only, at certain points, it looks like the way he's describing it is a person just going after them with their top teeth only. It's like Roger Ebert is attacking people.

It's so crazy. It's so crazy. It's so crazy. And they eventually overturned the case because it's absolute bullshit. They find DNA evidence to exonerate one of the guys. And then the guy who did the actual murder of one of the kids admits to the murder of the other child.

And so both of them are eventually released from prison after 15, 20 years in prison. We're not talking about a short amount of time. It's not just a few weeks in prison. We're talking years and years of their life are gone. And it's because this whole concept is so individual-based. You look at something and you try to make it fit the thing. something and you try to make it fit the thing. The guy, one of the guys who was an actual suspect and was questioned and gave his teeth was not matched to the girl. And then the most egregious

piece of this is that when they found the second girl, they found her with a bunch of marks all over her body. And they literally could not tell whether they were marks made from, they thought they might've been done with crawdads. You don't even know. You can't even be sure. And when they sent out as a test to a hundred different forensic odontologists, they sent out bite mark. Now, bite marks that they said, these are either A, bite marks, B, not bite marks, or C, I can't tell whether these are bite marks. And they sent out a bunch of these. Every single one of them came back about a third. Nobody was able to say this is 100% conclusively a bite mark because bite mark analysis is feng shui.

Yeah, it's complete and utter bullshit. It's such bullshit, but it doesn't matter how bullshit it is. In that case, there was another bite mark expert who was the fake bite mark. I can't say that bite mark experts hero who was hooked the stand and was like, what the fuck? This is bad. You're doing bad in a bad sign. You're doing bad science for fake science for fake science. You're not even good at that. And the other guy, but the other guy was more compelling to the jury. That was something that like just really stood out as I read these articles. The thing to remember about forensic science, like just grabs me and holds me is it doesn't have

to be true if it's compelling. And the thing is the guy who was like, yeah, this is the dude who did it and whatever. He makes these stone molds of the teeth and he goes to the autopsy and he films himself putting these things on the corpse, on the body of the deceased, being like, nom, nom, nom, and like does shitty little like bite chompies at the thing because it makes for a compelling video. It has like, that's like, you've never seen anybody science that way ever. Your fucking seventh grade science teacher, if you were going to be like, well, my science project is nom, nom, nom. They'd be like, get the fuck out of here and do some research sure but it makes for a compelling video trifold for the science you have to redo it can't do that

anymore yeah it makes for compelling video yeah people people believe it because it's easy because they believe what they see with their eyes because it tells a story. Prosecution is all about weaving a narrative. This guy's put tons of people, like he's like the premier bullshit artist for bite marks in like the world. He's been like called a trillion times, you know? And you're like undergirding all of this. There's no rigor. There's no science. There's no agreement among so-called experts whatsoever. There's nothing at all to it. Just nothing. It's just,

like you said, you can't even tell if they were bite marks. And I was thinking when I was watching that documentary in particular too, like those bodies were like found in water.

Their bodies swell and they decompose. They change. Shit happens. I don't want to be too gross. Things happen to bodies. Oh, I wonder how they're going to like address that. They just don't. And they just don't.

They just don't. Because no, why do I need to address that? Right. And one of the articles called into question, I thought this was great because I was thinking the same thing. So it validated my concern. There isn't even any real reason, scientific reason to suppose that human skin is a good medium to take an impression of a bite. Yeah. If you bite something, yeah. Will it leave a mark? Yes. But will it leave a mark that has enough specificity in the skin that it can be conclusively used as a mold to match up again. No, there's no reason to think that. There's literally not any reasons that anybody should think that human skin is a proper medium to create a mold or impression. And that seems like it would

be fundamental to the idea of bite mark analysis. And they're just, yeah, but it's still legal everywhere, but weirdly in North Dakota. I laughed when I heard that everywhere, but North somehow North Dakota is like, all right, you guys can pull some shit over our eyes. They need to, but not this one.

They need to figure out which horse bit you up there. I got to say the worst part about that documentary. One, it's, it's how shitty that guy is because most of this stuff what makes me crazy is is that we've also had this conversation too where you and i have talked about this many times where when someone's confronted with something and it goes against their worldview they dig their heels in and there's nothing more uh there's no more better

example than that of that than the prosecutors and their eyewitnesses. Especially in this. They dig their heels in. One point, I could not believe this guy said it. This guy who is the forensic odontologist who is accusing these two people, these two other people of biting

this girl. By the way, the killer never said he bit either of the girls. So they might not even have had bite marks on them, right? Because he admitted to it. So they might not have even had a bite mark. And one of the supposed bites was in a weird place on the foot.

He's like, well, is he supposed to grab her foot, angle his head, bite her on the biscuit? Yeah. It's just like a weird place to have a mark. Yeah. I remember watching one a long time ago, Cecil. It wasn't one of these. They had all these bite marks and doing all this bite mark analysis. And then they later discovered, too late, they later discovered it was turtles. Yeah. Turtles had bitten the body. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing is you don't,

it's one of those things, like you said, you don't know that the human body is a good medium for even putting this stuff on because most of the time it's just a bruise after death or a bruise during, you know, struggle. And so it's hard to know even what a bite mark is. Like I said, they tested a hundred different people and they got a hundred different answers. So there's no way to say that that's actually science. But one of the things that this guy says is because when he writes these two letters, this is back to the odontologist in the documentary who said that those two other people had bitten these young girls. In his written testimony, he said it is, and I don't know exactly, but essentially it is without doubt that these two gentlemen did this. I mean, it's essentially what he said it is, and I don't know exactly, but essentially it is without doubt that these two

gentlemen did this. I mean, it's essentially what he said. And he would not recant that even throughout when the DNA evidence comes back and all this. And at one point he looks at the camera and he says, well, I never said he raped and killed her. I just said he bit her. And I thought to myself, what is happening in your world where two different guys somehow let their girlfriend's baby out with another guy out by the river and they let a guy rape her so that they can bite her

and they're two different people. What is happening in your brain that thinks that that's a real thing that happened? The rapist shows up at your door and you're like, all right, hang on. You can have her, but let me bite her first. I just want to bite her first. Just let me have a bite.

Is it like an old coin where you have to bite it? Don't take any wooden toddlers. I'll tell you, man. It was very, very enlightening to see that this was bullshit. Because, you know, it seems like it might be scientific. It's science-y, right? It's science-y right it's science-y it's got some of the trappings of science and some of those trappings genuinely are they do it in a room that's away from other stuff so they make it sound like a lab and then they do it uh with lab

coats on so those are a couple of things it's got the trappings of science yeah they put on the theater of science that's a huge part of this is they, they, we've been sold the idea of the theater of science and we've been sold that idea in large part, as you'd mentioned it earlier in the show by the media, you know? So we think we know what science visually looks like.

And like, we think we have this idea of what science sounds like. Yeah. And so if you can create the theater of science, you can create a story or narrative of scientific certainty and scientific principles and scientific procedures. And that's most of what forensic science trades on. It trades on the theater of science without doing any of the actual work of science.

The bite mark analysis, yeah, it looks like they're certainly doing work. It's not like they're not doing work. Like they make these impressions, these teeth molds, you know, and then they, you know, they look at the molds very carefully with a jeweler's eyeball thing. And they're doing the theater.

They've got all the props, you know, and they've got all the pieces and the lighting and the director and everybody. They just don't have the script. They've got like nothing that underlies any of it. Yeah. And in another documentary that I saw, there was a guy who got wrongfully convicted of the murder of someone else and he had two gaps

in his teeth, right? So he had two gaps. He essentially had one gap on the front of his teeth and then he had two gaps right next to his incisors, one on either side, right? Whereas canines, I guess, were gone and he just had his molars afterwards. So imagine somebody with, you know, that has lost a couple of teeth. Well, on this particular bite mark, there was one gap, but not two. But the interpretation of the forensic odontologist was that he, when he bit like a dog, kind of shook his head and turned, and that's what caused the one blank area to be filled. And that's the real problem here, is that there is no objective way to look at this. They have to look at it and then use human interpretation, which is inherently flawed, to try to come up with a way in which

this happened. And that's why it's not science. It's like we said earlier, it's holding your, licking your finger and trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing right now. In fact, that's way more scientific. That's way more scientific than what they do. Right. Yeah, that one was crazy because you're like, okay, that just doesn't, he literally doesn't even have teeth there. And he's like, okay, but it would have made that mark if he,

and you're just like, okay, but maybe, maybe that one would have arrived at a different conclusion had they not tainted the idea of the evidence first, right? But they don't do that. They don't give them like,

here's 10 set of impressions. One of them came from a suspect. You could even do it in like this shitty, and it would always be bullshit, but they don't even try to avoid bullshit. You know, eyewitness testimony is problematic. And we all, we know that we're not really going to go into that too much here,

but like eyewitness testimony is problematic, but we do do some things to try to avoid some of those problems with lineups, right? So you get a lineup. It's like, there's one suspect and there's like five other guys, or however many the number is, five other guys standing there. And the reason is like, if you just put one guy there and you're like, is that the guy? That's kind of some bullshit, right? It's bullshit for obvious reasons. If you just take one dental impression and you don't reasons. If you just take one dental impression and you don't shuffle it with like 12 other dental impressions and then say which one matches, and then if an acceptable answer is not none of these

match, right? It's just, it's inherently bullshit. They have one sample. There's no control. There's no randomization. They know what they're looking for before they start looking. None of that is how science are. Well, and then they start, then they start looking. None of that is how science are. Well, and then they start manipulating the jaw to make it. What if he unhinged his jaw like a Crest commercial? Well, that's the thing though, Tom, is that this guy specifically in this video, when he's showing people, he's got what he has is an impression of the teeth. He doesn't have a restrictive cheek that is trying to push in front. He doesn't have a tongue or, you know, the rest of the mouth or the limitations of a jaw.

He doesn't have any of that stuff. What he has is the upper part of the teeth. And he's just showing you where it might actually attach, where it might actually fit up, where these two spots look like they're part of this particular part of this guy's face. And it doesn't even make any sense. How do you do that? What do you do? You run at somebody with just your incisors bearing at them? What are you, a bunny? What is happening? Like a saber-toothed rapist, just like. It doesn't even make any sense, but that's the kind of thing. It's good theater though. And that guy did a good job of his video. It's dark. There's a dead body on a table. He's moving this thing around. It's dramatic and it sells the jury. The jury looks at it and says, no, that, that,

that makes sense. I guess that's right. I'm going to disregard these 15 other people who were at the club with this guy. Instead, I'm just going to go with what this one expert says. It's fucking nuts. So let's talk about hair for a minute. Oh my God. Hair analysis is also bullshit. Again, another thing that I thought, oh, you know, it's science-y. It makes sense. Oh, if I cut a hair and there's two hairs and they come from the same place. Maybe you can match them up. And they always do this. They always show this under a microscope. Yeah, yeah, it looks cool. Yeah, whenever you see this in a fucking CSI

or not even a CSI, most of the times in other places where you're talking about forensics of any kind, there's always, they move it, they twist it, and then they do it. And I think we should talk in conjunction with all the bullet casing stuff because this is the same thing.

It's the same idea. It's they move it, they move it they turn it they twist it and then it shows oh no these grooves were exactly made by this perfect thing right and both of them are highly highly set up for interpretation in fact one i want to read this i know it's what you're going to read i bet so so a judge vacated a murder conviction of of this person in 2012 because of a faulty hair sample. The prosecution claimed the odds of the hair did not belong to this guy were 10 in a million to one. The Times reported DNA testing ultimately revealed that the hair samples didn't match and that one of the strands belonged to a dog. That would be. The best part is that guy's getting interviewed.

The best part is that guy's getting interviewed. The best part is that guy's getting interviewed by John Oliver. And he says, I think the dog did it. That's hilarious. It's so good. Guy has to send to you after all that time. In that same article, they said something like 257 out of 269 hair sample analysis were problematic.

96% of the 268 cases. That's not even like flip a coin. Like a coin, you would be way safer. And that's actually really important. So I'm joking a little bit, but I thought about this too. Like you would be safer in rock, paper, scissors for freedom. Yep. You would be safer with flip a coin for freedom because it's not just that this is not objective.

It's that it is a deck stacked against you. It is a deck specifically manipulated so that only the cards which will defeat you come up first, right? Yeah. That is how this system is, because it's adversarial. It's how it's literally designed to work.

So there is not like, oh man, like flip a coin. Maybe it'll come up positive. Maybe it'll come up negative. That would actually be a way more fair system because you can only have 96% wrong if you're looking to make things happen. Exactly, right? That's intentionally wrong.

Yeah, it's intentionally wrong because you're going out of your way to try to put this piece with this piece and they don't fit, but you're making them fit anyway. It's the way Tom builds Ikea furniture, right? It's like, these two pieces don't go together, but after I'm done with them,

they fucking will. They will and they will like it. They will be together and they will be custom, motherfucker. Nobody has furniture like I've got furniture. One of the things too about bite marks and about this that really, again, go to speak to the narrative

that the prosecution is trying to tell is that bite marks and hair analysis, they're inherently animalistic, right? When you talk about bite marks, you talk about how savage that is, right? How animalistic that is. And then you talk about hair. Hair is one of those things. I mean, we're hairless apes for Christ's sakes. We don't think hair is one of those things that makes you more sophisticated. We think hair is one of those things that makes you more savage. And so when you talk about these things, you're also using evidence that is in some ways

drawing a jury into, well, yeah, but that guy's kind of an animal. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It absolutely dehumanizes the suspect in a way that's like, holy shit, we got to put, it creates an obligation. One of the jurors said something crazy. The jury said something like, well, you know, I mean, we had this and they didn't have any other suspects, so we voted to convict. And I was like, holy fuck, because you didn't have any other suspects, you're like, well, I mean, it's this answer. And that's part of the psychology, though. It's like, it's this answer or no answer. And that's a scary proposition because, and again, it all plays together into the trappings of science, right?

So people think that science will yield a definitive answer and definitive answers are psychologically comforting in the face of terrible atrocities, right? And understandably so. So there's a toddler who's abducted and raped and tortured, murdered, dumped in a creek. It is a psychologically untenable position to say, we don't know who did it. If it's not this guy, then the answer is that guy's still out there maybe hunting another kid.

That is a place nobody wants to psychologically find themselves in. It is way more comforting to think, wow, we got that guy. We found him. They're not going to kill anybody else. We can get justice for this little girl. That is a more, so we're primed already going in. We are primed to want to say, these guys did a good job. They're on the side of justice. They're on the side of keeping our community safe. Juries are from the community, right? It's a jury of your peers from the community.

So we are all primed psychologically before we walk in to want to believe that this evidence is good evidence. So the bar is not the same kind of bar that you would find because there's no objectivity to the jury either. The jury is a community pool of people and they live in a neighborhood or in a county or in a state where some little girl just got raped and murdered. If it's not that guy, then the only thing you have to think is, we don't know who did it. That guy's still out there. I've got a little girl.

It is way more psychologically comforting to allow yourself to believe that the guy sitting in front of you is the guy that did it. Yeah. And so the evidence doesn't have to be scientifically credible in order to be compelling.

Right, absolutely. And that's real important. And they know this. Yeah. This isn't like Cecil and I's real important. And they know this. Yeah. This isn't like Cecil and I fucking discovered this. The prosecutors know this. Everybody knows this. This is not difficult shit to understand.

These people are like better educated than you and I. They know what they're fucking doing, Cecil. Well, and then they also, I think that there's a mixture, right? I think they know what they're doing. But then when you also hear them speak, they also talk about how they constantly want to help these victims. And I do think that there might be something to that, right? There's a feeling in their head that they want to help this person who was a victim of this crime and the family who was the victim of their loved one getting murdered. But what they forget is when they prosecute the wrong person, they create a brand new victim, right? You're making a brand new victim, but that never enters

their head because they're so laser focused on what they're doing. They're forgetting about all the damage that they're causing in their wake. And this is not a tiny amount of people in our system that get prosecuted wrongly. There's a lot of people that get prosecuted wrongly in our system that get prosecuted wrongly. There's a lot of people that get prosecuted wrongly in our system. And you've created another victim and then you've let the perpetrator go out to re-offend. Possibly, yeah, re-offend. They frequently re-offend. Depending on the crime, like they were talking about rape in one of these articles. Rape is a crime which is one of the most frequently re-offended. Even after somebody gets out of prison, they get out of prison for rape, then they rape some more. That's just a frequency. If you don't get the right perpetrator for these crimes, then that person has now acted with impunity. And so there is a likelihood or a possibility at the very least that somebody else will continue

to be victimized as well. So like getting this shit right is incredibly important on all sides of the equation. You get it wrong. You didn't do justice for the victim. You get it wrong. You created another victim by sending some poor motherfucker to jail and ruining that person's life and ruining their family's life. You know, it's, that's a terrible, horrifying injustice. That is, that is state-sponsored kidnapping is what that shit is. That's fucking awful. And it should be thought of that way. That is, and every horror and brutality that is visited upon that person

while they're in jail should be subject to review and condemnation. It also allows for the actual perpetrator of the crime to go free and to potentially commit way more crimes. More crimes. You know? Absolutely.

It's a real fucking problem. I want to mention that the firearms thing. Oh my God. The FBI abandoned. I believe this too. Yeah, I believe it too. The FBI abandoned unreliable examinations of bullet lead meant to show crime scene bullets matched other bullets owned by defendants only after providing such testimony in more

than 2,500 cases over a period of decades. So they gave up on it. Yeah. They gave up on it. But all that other stuff still stands. It's like when we legalize marijuana and there's still people who are just with petty, they have possession charges

and they're still stuck in jail. Right. And we say, well, why is that? I thought we legalized it. Well, that happened before. Yeah. That's the same thing. Yeah.

It's the same thing. Well, that happened before. Well, you went back and said that that's bullshit or we can't rely on it anymore. Maybe they're not saying it's bullshit, but they're saying they can't rely on it anymore and they're not using it. Let me explain this one because there's actually two kinds of bullet or casing analysis. Yeah, there are two different kinds. So there's the one, the FBI that you just mentioned.

So I had never heard of this one before. This was kind of interesting. So the idea was that the lead in the bullet picked up a sort of subatomic signature from where it was, basically. Yeah, an orgone generator. Yeah. And then,

this is crazy. Yeah, exactly. So the lead itself the lead that lead would be atomically similar to the lead of the other bullets you would own because they would all be in the same place picking up the same subatomic kind of radiation right so the fbi had this fucking super fancy nuclear fucking reactor laboratory that only a handful of agents were trained on how to use this fucking super fancy nuclear uber factory generator they have to take an online course to and i like the whole thing is just fucking nonsense it's utter nonsense like that bullet it's not it's not just that like that bullet can only match this person's other collection of bullets or whatever.

It can match thousands and thousands of other bullets. There's nothing at all to it. It's utter fucking nonsense. And the FBI's like, well, we should probably stop doing nonsense. Let's just stop doing that. And I'm just thinking of like, you've got a whole fucking particle accelerator in Virginia where I'm goofing around. a particle accelerator in like Virginia where I'm goofing around.

Yeah. You've got like a whole like nuclear lab and all these people are like, I know I'm one of the only agents trained to do this bullshit. Yeah. The other one is-

A lot of money is invested in these things, man. Yeah, absolutely. A lot of time and energy and money and like, and I do think like for what I was goofing, like a lot of good faith too.

A lot of good faith of good people is invested in trying to learn these processes that have just never been scientifically vetted at all. Yeah. Let's talk about bloodstain pattern analysis and blood analysis. Dexter.

Impressions from, you know, different footprints and whatnot that are in blood. This stuff is also notoriously bad. And they are trying, I know that there are people out there trying to figure it out. And they're trying, they are using some science

to figure out the fluid dynamics of blood. But blood is very complicated. It's way more complicated than red food coloring mixed with red dye, right? Or whatever. It's got a coagulant in it that starts to coagulate. It can be mixed with things to change the way in which it spreads and moves because its viscosity can change. It can be either shot out through an artery or it can spill out because it's been caught under the skin or whatever.

So there's all these different ways. And so the fluid dynamics aren't just perfect every time. They are, again, they necessarily have to be interpreted. And that causes real problems because, again, they come to the person and say, we think this is how it happened. And then they just match it to how it happened, how they were told. Yeah. One of the guys said something like, it's just fluid under pressure. It's just, I, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, uh,

hydro pressure dynamics or some bullshit, you know? And like, I remember thinking like, yeah, I, you know, in this, yes, except for like, like you, like Cecil mentioned, like not all fluids are the same. Like blood is an extremely complex fluid. It like can form these long strings behave in ways that that other liquids don't behave. But also, when I was reading through some of this, what occurred to me is we're fairly good at predicting the weather a couple of days out, right? And we're fairly good at that because even though there's a tremendous number of variables involved in weather analysis, if you're looking at a short time span, you can get pretty good. And we are, we have gotten pretty good at comparing that.

But we are absolute shit at predicting the weather out past four or five days, right? It's just, it's just the whole system just falls apart. We have no idea where hurricanes are going to land. Big, giant events. We are absolute shit. And I wonder if something like a crime scene and all of the hundreds or thousands or millions of variables, like you mentioned, the blood, the weapon, the struggle, the surfaces, the

temperature, when you start adding that up, does it not seem like predicting the weather next month? Yeah. Right. It feels like it's way out, way farther out than just a day. Right. Where it's just like the number of variables are just so great that yes, is it possible in a theoretical sense to scientifically predict the weather?

Yeah, because the weather is just a set of physical interactions in the world. So in that sense, yes, it is possible to predict the weather a year in advance, right? At some point, the variables become so complex and so varied, and the unknowns begin to add up and stack up in ways that are just too intense for you to really say with certainty. And that's the problem. Without certainty, how are you sending a man or woman to jail? Yep. Yep. That's the thing.

Like blood spatter analysis, fuck, it seems like one of those things that's, it's suggestive of maybe something. I can see like where blood spatter analysis might lead an investigation, but not enter into court.

You know what I mean? Yeah. It might lead an investigator to be like, you know, I think that this might've happened. Let's go check it out. Let's go do some footwork and check this out. Going into court and like having your fucking strings that point from like blood droplet to single source.

There's nothing behind that. Again, it's also so sciencey and looks so sciencey. It looks good. You know, it looks, it's amazing. It's the, we found a serial killer with push pins and thread. It looks good. You know, it looks, it's, it's amazing. It's the, it's the, uh, we found a serial killer with push pins and, and thread. Yeah. Right. It's amazing what they do with this, with this, uh, this blood pattern analysis. I want to talk about, there's a, there's a, uh, a, a podcast and a, uh, and a, uh, website called the appeal. And I want to read

just the, the, the bullet points here for what's wrong with pattern matching evidence. And this goes to bullets, this goes to fingerprints, this goes to blood pattern analysis, this goes to all the pattern matching stuff. And I'm just going to read the bullet points. Conclusions are based on widely held but unproven assumptions. So that's number one. Examiners often don't actually know whether certain features that they rely upon to declare a match are unique or even rare. There are no objective standards

to guide how examiners reach their conclusions. And this can lead to inconsistent and incompatible conclusions, right? So without those things, there's no way that it can be standardized across everywhere. So if you get Dexter from Chicago, he's going to have a totally different idea of what Dexter from LA and Dexter from New York and Dexter from Miami are going to say. That's feng shui then, man.

Yeah, I know. I know. I know. And like, I'm laughing, but it's actually not funny at all. These things are still, a blood spatter analysis is kind of losing a little bit of its heyday, but not that much. After the show Dexter came out, there was a spate of people who were signing up to be blood spatter technicians. People were like, that looks fun. That looks interesting. That looks like a fascinating way to look at what happened in the world and recreate

backwards. Telling a story backwards from evidence is always necessarily challenging to do. If you have no reliability as to these standards and no like, one of the things that you've mentioned, I think was that came up time and time again in our reading, there's no reason to believe that some of these things are unique, right? some of these things are unique, right? So there's a reliance on the idea that because things match, that they are one in the same. But a lot of things match other things, you know? And one of the things that I thought of is, and I don't know if you've ever seen this, but so when you buy a puzzle, did you do puzzles at all? Are you a puzzle guy? Yeah. When I was a kid, I did. I'm sure.

Manufacturers of puzzles use the same cutouts, like the same cuts for many, many different puzzles. And so you can buy puzzles of a puppy dog in a castle and you can put the same puzzle together because they don't cut a unique pattern every time. They just put a unique overlay on it. Sure. So something can match, but not be unique at all.

If it's not unique, the matching doesn't matter. The matching is an irrelevance, right? But that happens all the time. There's an assumption that there is a uniqueness to things that we've never actually tested whether or not and demonstrated and done the work to find out that there is a uniqueness. And it's only valuable if like, if you say like, oh, this hair is a match. And like, let's say it is. And you're like, okay, what's a fucking match? Well, what does that mean? Well, fucking maybe nothing.

Because what if, I mean, I have got like what, a few hundred thousand hairs on your head? I don't even know how many. You got a lot of fucking hairs on your head? You got a lot of hairs on your head? What don't even know how many. You got a lot of fucking hairs on your head? Sure. You got a lot of hairs on your head? What if some of our hairs just, what if 1% of all hair matches? Yeah. And there's no way to know that, right?

We're like 0.1%. We don't know. We have no idea about that. Yeah, yeah. The same is true of fingerprints. Yeah, yeah. That blew me away. Yeah, yeah.

I had no idea the fingerprint thing, man. Yeah, yeah. I want to talk, before we get into fingerprints, I want to end with, right? Okay, I'm sorry. That's a big reveal. And it's one of those things that everybody just agrees with. It's just one of those things

that we just all think is true. But I want to talk about, I still want to talk about this pattern, this blood pattern spatter stuff, because, you know, the biggest problem I think with it, Tom, is that it presumes that the crime scene is 100% integrity, that it has

integrity 100% and nobody brushed up against anything, nobody moved anything, nobody stepped in a puddle and moved that forward. You look at the OJ crime scene, and this was brought up on something that I watched, where they're talking about OJ's crime scene. Well, the OJ crime scene when Michelle Brown Simpson, I think was her name, and Donald something or Dave something, I forget the guy's name. Anyway, they were both murdered

and there's just so much fucking blood. There's just blood everywhere. It's like someone had a fucking super soaker full of blood. It's everywhere. But when the investigators came, they despoiled the crime scene. Everything was,

they tromped through blood. They dragged it all over the place. They move stuff around. And if there's no real standards on how you enter places and who gets to go in and who's real, you know, if there's none of that stuff, like that's a national standard across, then who knows who goes in there? What did somebody bring the, did somebody bring a dog in and the dog runs up against something? Or did somebody come in and, you know, shuffle their feet or brush a wall or move something? And so there's no, there's no way to know that the crime scene was not despoiled. And we presume when we hear this stuff that it's pristine. We make it because we're talking about science. So we know that there's got to be some sort of controls that you have, but there might not be. And so you wind up with something that could be completely bogus and it could, again, go towards the conviction of a person who didn't do it. Let's talk about, let's, okay, let's move into, I think at this

point we've covered most of this stuff, but I definitely want to talk about fingerprints. Yeah, man. And I want to tell a story about fingerprints that got told maybe four or five different times through different mediums. John Oliver talked about it. A bunch of other people talked about it. And I'm going to tell the story about the fingerprints

that is the most, I think the reason why everything gets turned up on its head, the reason why everybody looks at fingerprints now and says, I'm not so sure is because of this story. So a bombing happens in Spain and in Spain, a bunch of bombs go off. I want to say 2,500 people are injured. Over a hundred people die. Just a terrorist attack in Spain just decimates a whole bunch of places. And there's multiple bombs all over the place, Spain just decimates a whole bunch of places. And there's multiple bombs all over the place,

hurts and kills a bunch of people. They find a truck blocks away from the actual explosions with bomb making materials in it. And there's a bag. Bag has latent fingerprints on it. So they take some fingerprints off this bag. They run it through the Interpol database. The Interpol database shits it out to all the other places in the world. And the FBI happens to be one of those places. A US soldier now turned lawyer is in Portland, Oregon, where federal agents are currently kidnapping people. And he is pinged because he was in the army. So he's pinged.

It's a match. And it's not a match by one or two similarities. It's a match by 17 similarities in his fingerprint. He is married to a Muslim woman. He just recently represented a Muslim client who was accused of terrorism. The FBI taps his phone. The FBI waits a month. Then they go in and arrest him. They send this print out to three different FBI analysts. Those FBI analysts all come back and say, yep, it's 100% him.

And they say, Tom, 100% him. Yeah, well, that's a very high percentage. It turns out... It's not 110%, which is the most. The only way you could get 110% print is if you touch the top of a deodorant thing and that's the only way.

But anyway, it comes back. This guy hires his own fingerprint expert. Hires his own fingerprint expert. The fingerprint expert looks at it, gets in front of a court case

and says, yeah, no, it's him. Literally fire. He hires the defense, hires a fingerprint expert that then accuses the defendant that it was him. They should have He hires the defense, hires a fingerprint expert that then accuses the defendant that it was him. They should have prepped that guy

a little better for the example. Like, what are you going to say? I just, you know what? Surprise us. You know what? We're not even, what we're going to do is we're going to wheel you in

with a sheet over your head and we're just going to reveal you and then you can reveal it. So four or five days later, Interpol comes back or some, I think maybe it might've been the Spanish national government comes back with a match. And it's a guy from Algeria that has a,

that it's his, it's his fingerprint, unknown terrorist. It's his fingerprint. This guy looking at death, the death penalty for 25 days that he's in custody. He thinks that they, they say all these different people come back and say, it's a match, it's a match, it's a match. But it wasn't a match. And we've always gone in

this assumption that everybody's fingerprints are unique. But the thing is, and that may or may not be true, right? You can't make that a testable claim because you can't test everybody's fingerprints, but you can make it more and more as you get more and more fingerprints, you can come closer and closer to that truth. Whether it's true or not. But the fact is that the way fingerprints are gathered

are not perfect. The way fingerprints are interpreted are not perfect, and that causes the human error in that causes problems. It's so funny because fingerprinting is the, in language terms, it's the Kleenex of identification, right? It's become ubiquitous with the idea of uniqueness or individuality.

Like they even refer to DNA as DNA fingerprinting, you know? It was just, so as to suggest, it is a perfectly unique characteristic of only one person. But in our reading, like, one of the things that really jumped out at me is, we started doing this before we knew if they were genuinely unique. Right. That's fucking crazy. That's absolutely fucking bonkers.

Again, if you don't solve the uniqueness problem, you have no reason to say this is you because it is has to be you. It's maybe you, you know, and I'm sure like everybody's like seeing that thing on the internet, you know, like these people met their doppelgangers and here's their reaction. You know, seen that thing on the internet, you know, like these people met their doppelgangers and here's their reaction. You know, sometimes people look alike. Yeah. Really, really, really, really, really alike. Like, holy shit. Two totally unrelated people with totally unrelated genetics produce a baby that grows into a person that looks holy shit. Just like another contemporary person. looks, holy shit, just like another contemporary person. Fingerprints, if we've never tested to be sure that they're actually unique to only one person, that strikes me as a deeply problematic, quote unquote, science, right?

And we don't talk about fingerprints in terms of probability. There is a, you know, we talk about like the fingerprints are a match. And then the de facto assumption, which has mostly been delivered to us through like cultural means, is that if the fingerprints are a match, this person is that person, right? We don't do the science part. We also don't talk about how more often than not, like they don't pick up a real fingerprint. It's not like somebody is like, oh, you know, before I commit this crime, I'm going to roll my hands in this ink pad and then walk around putting fucking Paw Patrol prints all over everything. What they get are like smudges.

They get latent prints. They get partial prints side of the finger, yeah so like and the database, and this is something else that I've tried to look up and tried to get some real numbers on I couldn't get anything that I found like real credible, it's not like everybody has their fingerprint in the database there's not like some giant database where everybody's fingerprints

are, that's not a thing we have, you have fingerprints if you have a reason to have been fingerprinted, which means that you've been arrested before. That would be a reason that you've been fingerprinted. You're military. That would be a reason you're fingerprinted. You're law enforcement. That would be a reason you're fingerprinted. If you're Tom, I've never been fingerprinted. Why would I have ever been fingerprinted? So nobody's got my fingerprints. So we don't have this massive 7 billion person database.

We don't have a massive 327 million person database. We have a database of known criminals and some others. Military and cops. Yeah. So we're not running fingerprints against everybody. And it only pops up with this one answer. And like a lot of the fingerprint analysis who feeds the machines the logic to do the to do the comparison well

people do and people are like people want to find patterns that's what we want we're pattern recognition animals so maybe there is no uniqueness to fingerprints that is of any maybe the uniqueness one of the things I read that I thought was interesting is like, maybe they are unique, but they're unique in such a complex and difficult to discern way that they're, it's not visually useful. Yeah. You know, if there is a complexity to fingerprints that I can't hold them up and get it right 100% of the time, and they don't, because one of the things that I read was, you know, when they do an analysis and then they go back and do the same analysis,

about 10% of the time it's wrong. Yeah. If there's a one in 10 chance that like the answer is a fucking shruggy, that's not good sciencing. But people go to fucking prison forever because their fingerprints found you at the scene, man. Yeah.

Fingerprints were on that knife. Yep. And it's one- One of the studies was one in 18. Yep. And it's one, one of the, one of the studies was one in 18. So better, but still terrible. Right. And then the other one was one in six. That's one in six, one in six, man. That's you. Okay. That's you walking up and somebody handing you a Yahtzee die and you saying, and you rolling that. And if you got the one, sorry, buddy, snake eyes. Right.

Gotcha. That is terrifying. I want to read something else. It says, one study of 169 fingerprint examiners found a 7.5% false negatives, in which examiners concluded the two prints from the same person came from different people. 0.1% false positives positives where two prints were incorrectly said from the same source. When some of the examiners were tested

on some of the same prints after seven months, they repeated only 90% of their exclusions and 89% of their individualizations. Right. That again means that it's fucking highly subjective. It's just subjective. It's not science. It's someone who's... And you know, I'm not saying that these people aren't maybe highly trained. They might not be though,

because especially when we talk about, I again, saw somebody get certified again for fingerprints in a pretty short amount of time. I went to college, a lot of college myself, and I took a bunch of classes in different stuff. And I have master's degrees and bachelor's degrees and things like that. And I, in some ways I have a master's degree and I could call myself a expert on some things, right? And I took maybe a 20 weeks, 20 total week classes on those things, right? And that's intensive classes in a graduate level setting. I personally don't consider myself an expert on those things. I personally don't think I'm an expert. I think I'm knowledgeable in them, but I don't consider myself an expert.

I'll tell you what, I certainly wouldn't take the stand and look somebody in the eye and say, no, you're a hundred percent whatever, because I only had 20 hours of training in this, right? But I had master's level degree training in it. That's a high level. In some ways, that's a terminal degree for some people in this country where there's no higher, there's no PhD in some things in this country. The terminal degree is the master's level. So I had a level of training in some things that feasibly could make me an expert that I only spent 20 hours on. That's not a lot of time, man. 20 hours itself is not a lot of time.

And then you start thinking about, well, these courses, some of these courses are weekend courses that they've taken. And they're just a cop, right? They're a cop who's done cop work forever. And then they just go to a weekend course and now they get a brand new certification

in some of this stuff. And some of this stuff is fingerprinted. Yep. I mean, we've also seen, because again, these accreditation and certification programs are a for-profit system. Do you remember when we got our concealed carry?

Yeah. Remember how fucking easy that testing was? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the hardest thing was writing the check. Exactly. Yeah. Because the incentive there is like,

imagine all the bad reviews if a 100 people show up and only six people get a fucking concealed carry, right? No one's going to patronize that business anymore. So the same is true of any of these kind of programs that operate without independent oversight. A program that operates for profit without independent oversight is incentivized to put people through a weekend course and pass them. It's incentivized to pass people through that course, not to fail people out of that course. These courses are going to be easy. They're not going to have significant intellectual rigor required because that's not good for business. It's crazy. One of the other things, and it came

up less frequently in our reading, but one thing that we touched on in the beginning of the show, but I just think it's being sold as a kind of psychological science, especially by the media, is the idea that you can read people's micro-expressions or that a camera can catch people's micro-expressions. And micro-express expressions are like quick expressions, small muscle movements that last a short period of time. Not like a big, like a big, expressive route. Right. But there, there is a completely horseshit idea that people behave the same way under pressure. They don't behave the same way under pressure. Some people laugh at a funeral,

right? Some people, when they're nervous, when something hurts, sometimes I will laugh at it. I remember I did physical therapy, long time, I did physical therapy and this guy, the therapist had this like horrible Klingon death blade thing. He would like roll it down my shoulder. I've had that on my knee and it's the worst. It hurts. It genuinely hurts. I laughed like I was being tickled because it hurt. My body just made me laugh. I didn't find it funny. Tickling actually isn't funny. It's just a response that you have. But my point is there is no science at all that suggests that under duress people show their true colors. There is no science at all that suggests that under duress, people show their true colors. There is no science at all that shows that micro-expressions are a real thing at all. Micro-expressions are just some

bullshit made up for TV. That's not a real thing. There's no science at all that says when people look this way or that way, it means they're lying or they're thinking or they're, you know, what, and all of that's made up. All of that shit is completely made up. And there is a narrative that floats around out there that people with a lot of experience, detectives, interrogators, et cetera, are good or better than the average person at determining whether someone is lying.

And the science that has been done there shows that they are no better than you or I at determining whether somebody's lying. And we are notoriously bad at figuring out if people are lying to us. We don't know. Like lie detection and like emotional response detection and like, oh, that's a sign that somebody is satisfied or smug or remorseful or what. All of that is horseshit. All of it. There's nothing to any of it at all, but it's used. It's used.

And people are still trained to believe these things. One of the podcasts we listened to brought up, somebody was saying like, I was trained to believe that when somebody like looks up into the right, that means they're lying. This was somebody whose job is in law enforcement and prosecution. And they were trained by other people. And they would go on and train other people if they had not come to believe

that that was bullshit. It's made up. All that shit is made up. You put somebody who's on the spectrum under duress. You put somebody who has emotional issues on- Somebody who's just awkward. Awkward. Or just anybody, honestly, because there is no continuity of emotional reaction that can be presumed for people. Well, and then there's also the, the, the fact that there's, there's no good answer to that. There's no good, you can't sit down in front of a police officer and have a good answer for how you act because you either were too, too calm, or you were too nervous, or you laughed too much, or you laughed too little. They just,

they want to make you guilty, man. That's it. That's the end of the story. So they're going to find a way to make it seem like you're guilty and whatever you do, because they're coming in with the conclusion already, which is the problem with all this stuff. They're coming in with the conclusion that you did it already. And so that's the real issue. And the media, like you said, the media around this, and I don't want to talk about media as like news reporting,

because first off, news reporting is sometimes very bad on this stuff. Luckily, we were able to find a ton of stuff that really pointed out all the flaws in this, but there is some news reporting that's really terrible on this. But then there's also many, many pop culture shows that show that this stuff is true.

This lying stuff that you're talking about, all the different forensic stuff that we're talking about. And I think it's hard for us to separate this fictional reality of we always catch the bad guy with the reality of it's actually really hard to catch a bad guy sometimes. Right. The total like solve rate for murder is something like 30, 35%. Yeah.

Factor in that some of those people are falsely arrested and falsely accused. Right. Yeah. Solve is in fucking air quotes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We're not good at this. We should not fool ourselves into believing that

we are good at the business of solving crime. Yeah. And we are using tools which make us worse at it and make us less safe as a result and compound the issues around justice and around egregious miscarriages of justice. And DNA is not exempt from this. No, that was shocking to me. DNA is not exempt from this. There's a part of this article, one of these articles, Forensics Gone Wrong,

and I think this is a science article, and it says that investigators, when they wind up collecting, sometimes the amount that they collect is very small. So it can be 25 or 30 cells, which can sometimes suffice to get a DNA sample. This heightened sensitivity of this new process can easily create false positives.

Analysts are picking up DNA transferred from one person to another by the way of an object that both of them could have touched or from one piece of evidence to another by a crime scene investigator's that both of them could have touched or from one piece of evidence to another by a crime scene investigators lab tax or et cetera, et cetera. And then it says DNA analysis can become trickier when a mix of DNA from various potential suspects is found in a single crime scene sample. With a single sample analysis, look at two sets of peaks at a given locus, one for the victim and one for the

perpetrator. With mixtures, they're looking at a bunch of peaks with no indication of which pairs go together or which source they came from. So it's problematic in the sense that we always presume that it's a pristine crime scene and that things are handled in a pristine way because it's science. And it's not always done that way. Yeah, because part of the problem is specimen collection. And so they did a thing where they gathered up a bunch of stuff from people and they handled it. And so you transfer some DNA from the handling of items and they put them in bags and then they grabbed a bunch of kitchen knives or whatever and put those in bags. And then they didn't properly keep the items entirely segregated.

And they were easily able to transfer DNA from one set of specimens to another set of specimens, even though it was all part of a test. Even though the people from the original set had never handled these kitchen knives, had never even seen them before. from the original set had never handled these kitchen knives had never even seen them before so like it's possible to transfer dna through bad specimen collection from one object to another object through the course of like crime scene evidence collection that's just a thing that happens sometimes so that's interesting because like the d as a thing is, is good. The, the problem is it relies on, on that, like you said, the human error of collecting that stuff and storing it and dealing with it properly. And then being honest about saying, look, this is a tiny, tiny sample of DNA because it's such a small sample of DNA. The possibility of contamination is X. We don't say that shit. Instead, we're like,

DNA is like a jillion percent true and positive. Your DNA was on the knife. You held the knife. You done did it. And that's how we tell that story because, again, this is all being done not to discover truth, but to obtain a conviction. That's the goal of a prosecutor is to obtain a conviction. By the time it gets to the prosecutor, the prosecutor's job is not to find out, do I have the right guy I'm prosecuting? His job is to prosecute the guy in front of him.

Before we end today, I want to talk a little bit about some things that I saw that were sort of on the verge of not being accepted, but are certainly being researched as ways to better interpret, better preserve evidence so we can go back to it in the future. And while I don't know that these are, I don't know the scientific rigor that is being done to make sure that these happen correctly,

I do know that they're both being done at universities. And so there is some sort of research that is going into this. The first is I saw something that showed, it was, I want to say it was Sweden, but I can't be sure, where they're taking bodies that instead of cutting them open

and doing a traditional autopsy by the coroner, they are putting them through a CT scan, creating a 3D of the x-ray, a 3D x-ray of that person. And then they're taking a MRI scan and doing a 3D MRI of that person. And then they're putting those two things together so that they can then peel

back all the skin, look at the bones, see if they're disturbed, look and see. And in one particular instance, they were showing, this one see. And in one particular instance, they were showing this one person just said, when someone's strangled, they try to breathe and they can't breathe out. And sometimes gases can get trapped inside the neck area,

gases from your lungs. And you can't tell that when you're cutting into somebody, but you can tell that when you're looking at an MRI because you can see that the gases have pockets or whatever, and you just wouldn't be able to find that in a regular person. You'd have to look for other markers that would show that that person has been strangled. And so this is going to open up new

ways. Now, that also may open up new ways for people to get prosecuted easier for shit they didn't do too, right? I'm not saying that it's going to be 100% flawless, but it does also then keep a data record of all that stuff and hopefully in

perpetuity because data's cheap so we could feasibly have that to then you don't have to exhume a body anymore. You could just go back and say, well, let's look at this thing. I MRI'd the body and I x-rayed it so now I know the teeth pattern. I know where this was broken. I know. So you'll have that forever. And so the defense then should have access to that as well to then look at it and say, no, you were wrong about this and this and this and this. And so that may also help exonerate

people. So that's, I think, an important step forward to having that evidence always available in the future. And the same thing goes for another one, which was happening, I think, in North Carolina, where they would wheel in a laser scanner into rooms, be the first person at the crime scene, and then scan the rooms in this whole house. So they would essentially scan the whole house with a high laser to tell where everything is, high res cameras to pick everything up. And then they would use video game software to map it onto something. Create a 3D version of the actual crime scene. Again, I don't know, again, I think I feel like this is all going to be related to how people interpret still. You're not getting away from

the interpretation of all this data, but what you are getting is, again, another piece of data that you could then, as the defense, look at and say, no, there's no way I could have saw that. That person could have saw that person from here or whatever. And so preserving the crime scenes in some ways and hopefully making it so that there's less human error

in the collection process of preserving those crime scenes is going to be, I think, a better step in stopping people from being wrongfully convicted. Yeah, that's real. That's some real interesting shit. One last thing I wanted to just note, and I'd forgotten about this until now, is just one of the things that came across in our reading, and you're talking about wrongful conviction. Again, that's one of the huge concerns that Cecil and I have around this bullshit forensic evidence. And one of the things that I read that was shocking is the Supreme Court ruled that inmates

do not have a right to have DNA tested. You do not have a constitutional right to have your DNA tested. You do not have a constitutional right to have your DNA tested. So even if DNA is available and might be something which would exonerate you, there's a reasonable probability that that DNA would be. So there was something collected and it was never tested because your conviction happened before DNA was a thing. We have no constitutional right at all to have that tested. This is important shit because the appeals process is broken. The appeals process is a bullshit process. It is a garbage process that just doesn't work. I mean, it just does not work. And we don't have, once we throw somebody in the garbage can of prison, there is, for most

of those people, there is no recourse. And there is no reason for them to be hopeful that in any time, in anything approaching a reasonable timeframe, that their case will be re-adjudicated, that evidence will be re-evaluated. None of that happens. The appeals process in this country is a fucking joke. So getting this wrong is a goddamn tragedy and we have no effective means for correcting for that. So it's just really fucking important if we're going to have a forensic science system that maybe it has some fucking science involved in it. Got to get it right. Got to get it right. And these are people's lives on the balance. You know what I mean? Like, I understand and I do empathize with people that have been affected by crime. And I empathize with people who have been hurt. And I empathize with people

who want to make sure that those people don't hurt other people. I'm with you. I'm 100% with you. But what I don't want to see is somebody who's wrongfully convicted go away for 20 years. I want us to be more careful than that. This is someone's life in the balance. You can't, like you said earlier, when we talk about the jurors, well, somebody's got it. Somebody did it. This guy's the only guy that was around. So I guess that's him. The wrong place at wrong time is not science. And that's how they gather a lot of these people to then start testing on them. So we need to, I think, do a lot better. And hopefully, you know, maybe the next president will put this back into motion again.

Because I know that there was some things that they were putting in motion once this report came out. And there was some things that they were starting to put together. And then Sessions came in and said, nah, fuck all that bullshit. And so now we're back.

We're not back to square one, but we are certainly back in a position where we need to move forward with better science, more regulation, federal standards, federal oversight, and hopefully there's a better path forward to people who have been wrongfully convicted and people who are going to be convicted

that actually did the crime instead of just fucking throwing a dart. One in fucking 18 chance that it's the wrong person. One in six that it's the wrong person. God. Is that so awful? It's it's the wrong person. God. Because that's so awful. It's terrifying as fuck, dude. God.

Well, that's the episode. We hope you enjoyed this deep dive into forensics. Forensic. You hit it? Because, Tom. We'll leave you as always with the skeptics greed credulity is not a virtue it's fortune cookie cutter mommy issue hypno babylon bullshit

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