You're Wrong About - CSI: Junk Science with Josie Duffy Rice

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

Josie Duffy Rice and Sarah discuss the role of junk science in the criminal justice system. It is a big turkey to carve up and Josie serves Sarah a bleakly empowering feast.   Here’s where to find JosieJosie on TwitterJosie's websiteCorrection (February 22, 2022): The initial release of this episode included the suggestion that medical examiners do not need MDs. In the unedited conversation, Josie corrected herself on this point, but we inadvertently removed it in the edit. The episode has since been edited to remove any confusion regarding this point. Support us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase Some articles referred to in this episode:https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-forensic-science-commission-blood-spatter-evidence-testimony-murder-case-joe-bryanhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTa-PWdjX-Qhttps://features.propublica.org/blood-spatter/joe-bryan-conviction-blood-spatter-forensic-evidence/https://forensicdental.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/bitemark-analysis-problems-disclosed-10-years-ago-by-cbs-60-minutes/ Links: https://twitter.com/jduffyrice http://www.josieduffyrice.com/ http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good http://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

And so it just seems kind of ridiculous that we're soldiering bravely forward with the system that we invented kind of before science as we now know it even existed. Since no two people have identical fingerprints, fingerprinting has long been considered a foolproof way of fingering the guilty. What is it? It's never been tested. It's never been shown to be accurate. And one of the main reasons they were wrongly convicted in the first place was bad forensic evidence. They have quote the best by their own admission can make such a glaring error in a high profile case when they knew the world was watching. What is happening in the counties in areas where we don't quote have the best of the best. I'm Sarah Marshall and this

is You're Wrong About. Today's episode is CSI Junk Science. We are going to Junk Science and we are going with Josie Duffy Rice. Josie Duffy Rice is a journalist, writer, podcast host, and consultant whose work is primarily focused on prosecutors, prisons, and other criminal justice issues. Currently, she's a co-host of What A Day. She's also the creator and co-host of the podcast Justice in America. And I am so excited to get to talk to her about Junk Science because she is writing a book about all of this right now. And we get to go out to coffee with her and hear about all of her most unbelievable research. I am so excited about this episode because Junk Science is one of my passions as a person who lives in the world today. I think

it's an area of systemic injustice where the truth is both very obvious and sometimes funny, or funny if it wasn't so sad, or funny because it's all so terrible. And Josie is someone who is qualified and passionate to tell us exactly what is going on in this world of faulty forensics. You may notice a thread is emerging in the episodes that we've been doing recently. We had the true crime episode with Emma Burquist last fall. And now we're continuing into well true crime outside of cable and supermarket books. True crime of the kind that is happening all around us every day. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being part of this conversation. Thank you for coming out to coffee with us. Here's the episode.

How many years did other people in authority know that forensic evidence was wrong? And how long had they known it? And why are they fighting it so? Where is the truth? And I've been thinking about calling this year wrong about CSI because I feel like that stands in for Americans' blind faith about forensics. Yeah, I love it. I love it. Junk science in particular has been interesting to me because really what I recognize about the criminal justice system is that it's based in storytelling. The ways in which people end up in the system and get convicted of crimes is ultimately rooted very often in what kind of stories the system tells about itself and what kind of stories we tell ourselves. When we are using science in

a way that essentially is contrary to its actual goals, we will generate unreliable evidence about the guilt of other people, but reliable evidence about our own more nebulous guilt as human beings. Yes, I think that's right. What we are always searching for is some certainty. So much of this to me is fascinating, especially in this moment where we see kind of the battle of science playing out all the time because of COVID, right? Since March of 2020, I think you can really see how people weaponize science and how uncomfortable people are with science not being certain when scientists sort of started to say like, we're not sure how scary that is for people and how the mix of science and politics makes it really difficult to discern what's right, what's actually real,

and what we should be doing. To me, there's something very powerful and disturbing about the idea that we love the idea of evidence so much and we want it so badly that we're, that desire means that we accept evidence as a matter of faith, which is contrary to the concept of evidence. Yeah, absolutely. We've brought in a big turkey to carve up. What are we going to talk about? How do you divide up the subject? I mean, I think that when people think about forensic science, they probably think mostly of DNA, fingerprints. These are kind of like the tangible parts of a criminal charge or criminal evidence that we think of as like being the proof. I think of David Caruso taking off his sunglasses. Exactly. Right, like the NCIS, the CSI, the SVU,

I mean, like even non-police-oriented movies, even movies we all love, like all of them that involve like a criminal case tend to involve forensic evidence. Right, I feel like even pretty little liars is like, has teenagers understanding how DNA works. Exactly, exactly. So the National Institute of Justice defines forensic science and names 12 categories. And that includes like toxicology, crime scene evidence, arson evidence, firearms. There's autontology, which is teeth analysis, basically like forensic dentistry. And then there's like the ways that we analyze those categories, right? And the main one of those is pattern matching evidence. And I think that's probably the biggest category of forensic science that is like

a real problem. This is the breast of the turkey. Yeah, this is a breadth of it. I insist I'm using this turkey metaphor. I'm sure it's going to get weird. I love it. I love it, please. Let's go with the turkey. Let's make it happen. So the most common type of pattern matching evidence is DNA analysis, what we found data in a scene, we tested the data of the sky, it matches 99% match, which is a variation on watching more or any sort of story where we're trying to find a relative, or you're trying to prove if you're the father, or you're trying to prove whether this person is the culprit, right? But there are lots of other kinds of pattern matching evidence as well. And so when we say pattern matching, we're saying like, here's one thing, we're trying to see if this

other thing matches it. I mean, it's like pretty straightforward. So there's fingerprint analysis, right, matching fingerprints to the prints of a suspect. There's microscopic hair analysis, which says we found hair in one place, we're trying to prove it's the hair of this person. There's firearm analysis, it looks at whether or not bullets and shell casings come from a certain gun, shoe prints, tire tracks, is this the car that we saw see their tire tracks in the driveway of the house where the guy is dead. The my cousin Vinnie defends famously. Yes, hand writing, you know, like, and that comes in a lot with forgery and identity stealing, those kinds of crimes, right? There's also like bite mark analysis, right? We find bite marks on a victim's body,

and we try to match them to someone else's teeth prints, all of these ways that we think about proof. And so when you find a conclusive match, what they call it is individualization, you know, this bullet matches this shell casing, or this shell casing came from this gun, it could not be any other one. For years, this is literally a ton of the evidence that was used in cases to convict people. I think it's worth noting off the bat, if you have a trial, right, if you even get into the pattern matching evidence part of a criminal case, plea negotiations are complicated or whatever it is, maybe at that point you bring them in. But generally, you think of this as like trial preparation, prosecutor is going to need to prove their case to the judge or to a jury that

this evidence proves that this person did something wrong, probably this person has decided to go to trial, which means that they're claiming they're innocent, or at least that they're claiming there are extenuating circumstances to their actions. And when we're in a system where at minimum 90% of things are pled out before they go to trial, people tend to only go to trial if they're refusing to plea, or they're really asserting their innocence. This is a really big generalization, so you know, criminal cases are complicated, the reasons people make decisions you are always complicated. But it's not to say that people who plea are definitely guilty, it's just to say that people who decide to go to trial believe that they can, that the other side can't prove that they

did something. When this evidence comes up and it's being used, it correlates with, to me, a higher chance that it's inaccurate. You know, you're talking about cases in which the defense is saying, I didn't do this. They're not presenting bullet casings in front of a jury if the defendant has said, yeah, I actually did do this, I'll take the plea. In our heads, that's the beginning of a criminal case. But generally, in the criminal system, that's not only rare, it's after pre-trial motions, it's after PrEP, it's after, like there's just so much that goes into before the trial even begins. It's not just the quality of the evidence that's a problem, it's the times that we use it, because it's the times in which someone is really saying like, this was not me.

There's so many other forms of junk science that seem surreal to me, because they're so absurd, and they really just indicate to me how the criminal justice system has like completely flown the coup. So good example, relying on dogs, like dog sniffing. I use kind of mental image of a dog in judges' robes with a gavel, like it's like a golden retriever. We do know that you can train dogs to find some things, right? So we do know that you can like train dogs to help find a dead body or something. And we have taken that to be an indication that dogs can do way more than we really think that they can probably do. I feel like I have to have told you this story before, because I'm obsessed with it, but- Tell me, I can't wait. Okay. There was this amazing story

about this cadaver dog handler named Sandra Anderson, who worked in the Upper Midwest in the 90s, I think, through the early aughts. And she always found evidence. She had this cadaver dog named Eagle, who is a Doberman mix, who just always found evidence. And so when they had a cold case, they were like, get Sandra and Eagle. They always find evidence. So like, you can see where this is going. Right, right. I can see it from a mile away. Right. And so what of course happened was that she like was getting bone fragments sent to her from a guy that she had who worked, I don't know if it was the coroner's office, but somewhere where he had access to bone fragments in Louisiana, he was supplying her with fragments. And then she would like keep bone fragments in like her

pant leg and shake one out at a crime scene and be like, Eagle's alerting, he found a bone fragment. And she like put her own blood on a hacksaw that she planted in the basement of another guy. No, it looked really bad. And I have to imagine her rationale was like, this guy looks really bad. He definitely did it. I've decided he did it. And so I'm going to supply just like Al Pacino in that Alaska movie. Right. Wow. This is an incredible story. I'm now looking at pictures of Sandra Anderson and Eagle. And I think that law enforcement is a job where many people go in not thinking, you know what? What I want to do is plant evidence at crime scenes. But lots of people end up doing that. Right. And drug science is a real problem, right? But it's not the problem.

Because the problem is that we function in a system that encourages the worst of law enforcement in so many ways. Cent lineups are a kind of common practice where basically a dog is like introduced to a sent sample that has been collected from a crime scene or collected from a piece of evidence. And then they try to match that with sometimes like things in containers that have like similar sense in them that maybe belong to like different people. They are basically trying to like match one smell with another. I don't think I have to emphasize that like dogs can't tell us how sure they are. We can't be sure what they're thinking. So it's not to say that like maybe the dog never picks the right sample. It's to say that like we are relying on a very inexact practice to

determine guilt of someone. We are taking one skill that dogs have. Sure, they're better at smelling than we are. They can like maybe find a dead body like faster than we're going to be able to smell one out. That all I hear. That is a very different thing than like being able to match sent dogs can't say to us. Like I actually don't know how to do that. And I also would imagine that like that you know the handler dog relationship you're communicating a lot to them that you might not be aware that you're saying through your body language and so on. Absolutely. I mean that's that's a huge part of it. So sent lineups which basically like connect the smell of a suspect to the smell of something on the crime scene. Right. I mean in a weird way they reflect what

you see in like all sorts of lineups including like eyewitness lineups which again is another example of junk science. We know now that eyewitness lineups like are very unreliable. People often pick the wrong person. We saw it recently I think in the case of we were talking about this a few weeks ago Sarah in the case of the woman who wrote Lucky Alice Siebold who picked the wrong person during a lineup and was coerced by prosecutors to still testify against the guy that they had identified right. There is a perception I think in particular with eyewitness lineups. Something horrible happens and you later have to go in and identify a witness. There's a perception that like in moments of crisis we are more observant than we are other

times. That's just not necessarily the case because you're in a state of panic does not mean you're more likely to like identify the right guy. And what we know is that people don't do a very good job of like identifying people who aren't the same race as them. Right. There's like drastic confusion that happens when we ask people to identify someone in a lineup and it happens all the time that they identify the wrong person. We also see like case after case where the police manipulate pictures in a photo lineup for example they'll remove a suspect's tattoo or they will like lighten the skin color to make them look more like the person that the witness has suspected. And we also know that like very often if a witness comes in and says I actually

can't identify I don't know. I don't know if he's in this lineup like that they are pushed to think harder. Another like really crazy form of junk science to me is hypnotism has been used in cases in our criminal justice system over the years where they hypnotize a witness and they ask them a question and they say something under hypnosis that brings back a memory that they didn't know they had or whatever it is. Right. Very big in the satanic panic it must be noted. Exactly. Exactly. This idea of recovered memory right that like that witnesses and people who have like been victims of crime or for whatever reason have been told they're victims of crime or whatever it is can be basically manipulated into having memories. I didn't remember this

before but I remember it now it's come back to me. I have this recovered memory because prosecutors or police are saying to you this happened to you. Right. Do you remember this happening to you and you start to be convinced that maybe it did right. Like you said it has happened a lot in satanic panic. You see it a lot in child abuse cases. You see it in a lot of like cases that involve any sort of needing a memory from a child especially if they're an adult now and it's just another example of how unreliable we are like assessing our own our own ability to like interpret events. The term recovered memory is so broad and I think has so many different meanings at this point that it feels like we need further sort of subcategories of description because that could

mean that you have a therapist who repeatedly hypnotizes you and asks you to just keep talking and say whatever comes to mind and it's like I know you've been abused and this was a trend that happened in the 80s where therapists were trained with this idea that if you are fucked up to use the clinical terminology then there's some kind of memory of trauma that you have buried and you need to unearth and once you have reacted out and re-experience it then you'll be free and like speaking as someone who is you know using pop psychology of this moment and understands that like I have trauma to work through and I need therapy and also that like I'm just kind of like this and I can't snap out of it that's tough to accept but I mostly accept it and then also I

think that there are so many things that we want to believe as humans and we want to feel that we can have greater certainty about things and we keep coming back to these very human desires and I feel like to me it's important to make the distinction between like I don't expect every single human being to like know how to avoid wrongful conviction and to police their desires and longings in that direction. I just think the people who put on robes every day or have some kind of really important official expert role within the legal system should work really really hard doing that. If we are going to have a criminal justice system like we want it to err on the side of being way too careful to not convict someone rather than like way too encompassing of all the possible

ways that you could convict someone and that again is like kind of why junk science I find really interesting because it mirrors the same the bigger issues in criminal justice to me because it lays bare the willingness to believe anything as long as it will result in a conviction. I feel like these are all based on the idea that we have buried within us access to objective fact which I don't think is true. I think our memories are very unreliable they can sometimes be extremely good often they're not but it also occurred to me like well even if we could replay a crime as it happened like in a courtroom in front of jurors people still wouldn't agree over what they had just watched. Right we forget almost every single thing that happens to us in

fact by tonight we will have forgotten most everything that happened to us today. Thank God we're recording this conversation or else I would forget all the stuff you're telling me. I know you shape all of your perceptions on your memory right like our entire viewpoint of the world is framed by shaped by our memory we would like believe our memory we like tend to generally trust ourselves it's really uncomfortable to think about how random and unreliable yeah I'm like trying to think of a better word for unreliable but I can't and unreliable our own memories are right. Yeah it opens up a lot of weird questions about like truly the nature of the self. What always like has just infuriated me about the ubiquity of junk science in so many cases

it seems to be taking advantage not only of a defendant who is drastically at risk but of the people who are responsible for determining his future his or her future. Another one that I think probably will resonate with more people than any of the others in terms of their own experience is breathalyzers. Breathalyzers are seen as science right that you breathe into this machine it tells you exactly how much alcohol is in your system and if you're too drunk to drive you know if you blow a point zero seven in many states like you can walk away and if you blow a point zero nine like you can't right you're arrested. I would contend that if I put iser at the end of anything it would sound sciency right like if you came to my house and I would be like

okay this is the takeoff schuselizer area right right you're like oh very fancy right very remarkable. I gotta do what this robot says yeah when they're working their absolute best maybe they're somewhat reliable but they're like a scientific machine handed to a law enforcement agent that is not actually an expert at calibrating it using it necessarily there's a lot of user error the difference between what it is at its best and what it is on average is pretty drastic and I always was like surprised the New York Times did and wrote an article a couple years ago where they were like breathalyzers aren't reliable I thought it was going to be a huge thing you know and it turns out like it barely made a splash um but you know a million Americans a year are arrested for drunk

driving these are machines that are used regularly to determine whether or not someone has been which it's also just such a crime with such moral implications right like right you hear that someone arrested for drunk driving and it feels selfish reckless very fucked up the reality is that like the breathalyzer is not reliable enough to really be able to determine with certainty that someone has been actually driving impaired I think the New York Times article that came out this was in 2019 that I was written said that the breathalyzers generate wrong results with quote alarming frequency they're marketed as precise to the third decimal place and that is spoiler alert very often not true sometimes results were 40 percent too high between 2018 and 2019 judges

in a couple of states Massachusetts and New Jersey namely throughout like 30,000 breath tests after starting to realize like these weren't super reliable wow but to be clear breathalyzers are still used everywhere I mean this is not this did not end breathalyzers right and most people didn't read this article right often sometimes you're not you haven't been pulled over right you show up to like a traffic do you guys have those like the what are they called um oh yeah the checkpoints or whatever the checkpoints right you show up to a checkpoint you show up to it's not always like you looked like you were driving drunk so they pulled you over often it's like you know you have to blow a straight reading in order to like keep driving and people are finding out that like

they've been accused of driving drunk when they haven't and then I feel like there's this dual lobster trap effect I think this is how lobster traps work where well it has to be because if it's a trap you can't leave you can enter but you can't go so yes you know once you you become a part of the system like once you have a breathalyzer test that is suggests that you've have been drinking too much then like you are in the trap now and there's this very foundational idea the way we think about the system in America that once you're in it you deserve to have the most uphill climb imaginable to try and get out and then also that like once we start believing in something as a people we can't just like snap our fingers and start unbelieving in it

it would be great if we could but like it's actually hard for us to do even when we're trying once you start thinking that you can't trust anything a system like this falls apart right and you can see how for example like what we know about what cop how cops spend their time right is that they don't often spend their time looking at violent crime they're not really out there getting murderers every day but a lot of their time is spent doing traffic control part of their reason that they can justify spending so much time doing traffic work is because they say that there are a lot of people driving drunk part of the reason they say they're all people driving drunk is because a million people a year are convicted of that crime part of the

reason a million people a year convicted of that crime is because they're blowing more than 0.08 on a breathalyzer and once you start to unravel are those breathalysers reliable then you really start to have a conversation about like is this how police should be spending our time all of these like forms of evidence are undergirding other choices and systems that like we also take at face value because of what the results of these junk science tells us i mean it's bad enough that the science is bad what the science is like holding up is even scarier to me you can't help but be some angry i've missed many funerals many weddings graduations i think we have to first realize that a small town likes to believe in their authority not that they wanted to hear what they heard

but the fact that they were hearing it then it caused a doubt a doubt not only about my character maybe about mickey's character but what did he really kill mickey i will start with some of my the stories that like really stick with me and one of them is a story of this guy joe bryan in texas so pam calloff is a writer for pro publica the new york times magazine she is right for the texas interviewing i'm like her biggest fan so there's that i will be secretary of her fan club and you can be president yeah she's an incredible incredible writer who really has focused a lot of her time and efforts on junk science in particular the case is about a man named joe bryan who lived in a really small town called clifton in central texas

this is the 80s he's married to a woman named mickey bryan they both work in education she teaches at the elementary school and i think he's a principal of the high school they're known around town they're loved around town right they have no kids they're just this really normal couple in texas it's october this is in 1985 joe bryan goes to a conference and he's across the state at this point and one night his wife is shot and killed nobody really realizes this until the next day she doesn't show up to work people kind of get worried they go to her house and they find her dead i mean this is in the middle of nowhere there doesn't seem to be any really clear reason someone would shoot her i mean it must have been a very shocking crime yeah so joe bryan

is in austin he's at the texas association of secondary schools principals annual conference he's there and he gets someone pulls him aside the executive director of the organization pulls him aside and says your wife has been killed and he's like shocked basically what happens in this case i think really embody is a lot of what we see in forensic science which is that the people who are working on this case are small town cops this is not the fbi storming in to figure out who killed mickey bryan right these are local police officers local law enforcement who don't always have the resources the training or the background to be analyzing crime scenes frankly for most police officers in the country they're in places where there are very few murders ever this is not

like every police officer is like the ones you see in csi or svu this seems kind of like changing attire where it's like yeah i technically know how to do that but like i don't have to do it even every year right i think a lot of times it's like you changing attire and a lot of times it's like me changing attire which is like i have no idea how to do that and you're like what is youtube say what does youtube say about how to enter a crime scene right exactly like i can imagine that like showing up to a crime scene and knowing that evidence needs to be analyzed that doesn't make me capable of analyzing that evidence right right and it's just all this stuff that you you have to do a job constantly to like i think see all the little blind spots that you have as a novice

that's right so joe brian goes home the local police bring in some texas rangers they bring in a detective with another police department in a different county and his name is robert thorman and he's trained and he says he's trained in a forensic discipline called bloodstain pattern analysis people who are bloodstain pattern analysts come into a crime scene they see where the blood has splattered over here and they look for like patterns among blood on a crime scene of someone having been shot my first thought always about this is that this is dexter's job okay i think first episode of dexter he's like here's exactly what happened i forgot about that yeah i should be watched dexter and of course he's i guess supposed to be extra great at it because

he's a practicing serial killer but yeah right because he's a killer what that is is basically people who come into a crime scene and look at what has happened with blood in particular when a gun is involved when a gunshot is involved what has happened with the person's blood that will give them an indicator of what happened during the shooting right so were they shot at close range were they shot for a way where did the blood hit the wall all of these are questions that this forensic discipline looks into the reason this story is particularly interesting to me is because pam coliff really looks into what it means to be an expert right and the reality is that if your expertise is reliant on bad science is it an expertise here's a guy who went to a training

class usually which is maybe about a week long maybe less the people who go to these training classes tend to be a cop or a detective or whatever it may be and they don't tend to have any like scientific background they're not scientific experts right they're going to a class where they are taught a practice that like isn't actually reliable and then they go and they offer their expertise in cases you see it all the time in trials where it says i'm an expert at firearm forensics right i'm an expert at matching firearms and bullets i've testified in 200 cases and you hear that you're like yeah you must be an expert but if in 200 cases your evidence is bad it doesn't really matter maybe you're like really good at testifying like you're good at sitting there and

saying stuff this reminds me of a we're going on a little journey i promise it's going somewhere a youtube video i watched recently by the youtuber big joel who i think is great about the new Aladdin and how we kind of get into this question of like what does make me a prince mean because if you make someone a prince but they don't have a place that they are prince of and you don't have evidence of that and they're not related to anyone who's in power then what is the power and everyone's like well he's a prince if it looks like a prince and it walks like a prince and like it's a prince and i feel like that's how courtroom expertise works as well it's like if i if people in the past believe or if you look like people's idea of an expert then you're an expert and also you have

that i know there's a term for this but the thing where when you first learn about something you're like wow i know all about this and then if you keep going with it then i think the more you know the less sure you feel about stuff yeah absolutely my goal has been to make people more comfortable with the idea of not knowing because i think not knowing is very scary for people to really engage with how unreliable and unfair and brutal the system is you really have to be able to grapple with the lack of clarity yeah that's a story about bloodstain analysis which i think is just one of the many kinds of junk science that is unreliable and when i say unreliable it doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't an expert who could come into a certain scene and be able to

tell something by the evidence it's just to say that like what they might be able to tell may not align with like the prosecution's theory of what actually happened and it's one thing to say like it seems like she got shot from this side because the blood is over here it's another thing to say like it seems like she got shot from this side it must have been someone she knew or else she would have run or there are all these kind of like ways in which we extrapolate from the little evidence that you actually can determine from some of this stuff that makes junk science even more chunky this reminds me of my beef with Sherlock Holmes where i feel like we continue to have like i love Sherlock Holmes obviously we all do but i feel like we have this expectation

that like a true detective that there are in the world these people even if there aren't that many of them who can look at someone and be like i've deduced that you had mushroom soup earlier today and you went to this school and you fear terriers or whatever yeah and i just don't think i think that people can i think it's like gambling like some people are really good at gambling but did they know what's going to happen no right also the truth is that there's a lot at play here that also is reflective of the ways we fool ourselves right like i don't think that most expert witnesses who deal in pattern matching evidence who get up there and think i am bullshitting everybody right i think they believe it when someone tells you that you're an expert in something

over and over again and that you have filled all the qualifications of experts it's very easy to be sure and what you did to it reminds me of like i think everybody has that friend who's like always thinks the worst thing is going to happen and then whenever you're like but i wouldn't jump to that they're like well i was right that one time remember the time i didn't wear my lucky sock and got in a bus accident these are ways in which like you convince yourself you have more certainty about the situation than you do which feels good even as it's doomongering law enforcement including a sky robert thurman basically finger joe brian for the crime it's a shocking result for the people in the town these are people who don't seem to have any skeletons in their closet there's like

a couple more elements of the case that make people think he's involved bottom line is that they kind of conclude that she's been killed by someone she must have known and so all of these played into the fact that a couple years after that joe brian gets convicted of murdering his wife and is sent to prison where he remained until just a couple years ago this was in 1985 so we're talking about over 30 years i think over 35 years of this man you know serving a sentence for murder for a murder that he almost definitely did not commit and this would involve him traveling hours and hours to and from the murder scene in the middle of the night right right the reason that i think about this story when i think about junk science is because i think what's

important to remember is that forensic science will eat believe to be reliable forensic science and reliable experts in forensic science when they tell us something it allows us to suspend our other beliefs to an dramatic dramatic extent so joe brian was across the state he was in austin that this would have required him to leave his hotel in austin drive hours and hours and hours to his town a hundred miles away from dallas kill his wife drive back we have no motive we have no idea of why he would want to do that and we have nobody who saw him leave his hotel at austin he was there the night before he's their first thing in the morning i mean in general that's really hard to believe and one of the only ways you would be maybe be willing to believe that

as a jury member or even as a prosecutor is if someone is telling you this is what the evidence says the evidence says he killed his wife yeah i mean i know that in many of these actual trials that happen there is sinisterness of some kind there is some kind of intent more nefarious than we must get to the bottom of this but i feel like there's also right alongside of that this thing of like so desperately wanting to be freed by a higher power and not wanting to be the ultimate authority on something like i think plenty of people do want to be the ultimate authority on something and that's that worries me as well but like this thing where you're like well this is a real head scratcher it's really hard to know what to think but the science says that this guy did it

so my hands are tied yeah exactly i think that's exactly right it's very difficult to ask a jury full of people to determine beyond a reasonable doubt someone's guilt especially in a case like this where there's a lot of reasons why someone should be like what i always think back to a case about a guy who left his who was accused of leaving his child in the car on purpose you always hear about those horrible cases where a child's in the car and dies and how horrible that is for the parent who made a mistake but this guy was accused of doing it on purpose and i remember that like when it first happened when you when they interviewed the witnesses who watched him who were there when he found his child they describe how he was distraught

and he was horrified and how sad it was and how they describe him as having a very genuine reaction later after he's been arrested and accused their perception of that moment changes drastically right all of a sudden it kind of seemed fake they thought something was up and it's the same thing with joe brian right like here was this beloved high school principal and not only was he accused by a system of killing his wife but he suddenly found his whole small town had turned against him they had reshaped their own perception of him into someone who like could do this and they had basically marked him as a murderer it's really remarkable what our brains will do when we think about science as something where it's like well it doesn't matter how i interpret

this is what the science said actually the science is dependent on interpretation right there are elements of a criminal case that maybe are more reliable or that like we should be focused on or that like there are other things that we should be prioritizing that don't get prioritized because forensic science tends to tends to take up all the space in the room can you tell me about learning that that robert thorman had signed an affidavit saying that he was in fact incorrect in some of his testimony oh yes i was elated and humbled about the fact that it had to be difficult for him to admit that he was wrong hoping that his confession that he was wrong will help other people incarcerated in prison who had junk science

that convicted them but you also have to realize that he didn't have the proper training that he needed to do what he did so we talked about blood stain analysis which i think is one that like shows up in a lot of those shows another big one that i think about a lot is bite mark evidence so i brought up earlier forensic odontology that could mean something like if you can't identify a corpse you try to match their teeth records to maybe people who are missing and try to see if like that's the right person but forensic odontology can also encompass bite mark analysis which means that a crime happens maybe the victim was bitten bite marks involved somehow and there's someone who comes in and says these bite marks match this guy i always even

before i started looking to junk science thought that was kind of weird i was like how can they possibly be sure you certainly can't test it against anything right you can't ask someone to rebite someone under the same circumstances exactly rodley balco who writes for the washington post and has been looking into junk science and looking at it for years he wrote a book with a guy named tucker caring tenants called the cadaver king and the country dentists and it focuses on one main case in mississippi but really is looking at these experts in mississippi one of whom really deals in bite mark analysis so his name is michael west for years he was the go to bite mark analysis guy in mississippi criminal cases as you can imagine mississippi does not have the

fairest or best criminal justice system in the country the problems in the criminal justice system are reflective of all the problems in mississippi right low investment dated practices racism austerity all of this plays into the problems that you see in the criminal justice system there and so this guy michael west ends up being the guy that they go to to analyze bite marks the stuff that he basically ended up getting away with is unbelievable so in 1992 there was a woman named louise i think you pronounce her last name kiko she's killed and this is actually in louise and i'm not in mississippi but they brought him in from mississippi for this case she's killed the primary suspect is her husband i'm telling a lot of cases where the

husband seems to actually be innocent but it is true that most of the times when a woman is killed it's by someone she knows and often her partner so it's not crazy that the primary suspect is her husband right they were estranged they had like a bad relationship but there is no physical evidence tying him to the scene and he says he doesn't he didn't do it this case goes unsolved for about a year and then the sheriff calls in michael west to do bite mark analysis no bite marks were found on her during the autopsy though which does present a problem of bringing in a guy to do bite mark analysis on her body basically they assume her body 14 months after her death and michael west said that under a special uv light using a technique that he's the only

person who knows how to use he might find something that hadn't been seen previously they assume the body so he can look at it he says that under alternative light the pattern of a bite mark has appeared they found a curved pattern that matched four of her ex-husband's teeth to the perfect match on her shoulder there was also the problem that he couldn't photograph or document what he'd seen oh this is like how Mormonism was invented yeah exactly we have all the documents but we're not going to share them with you he said that he had actually tried to preserve the bite mark and promel to hide but it had quote unquote faded away he argued this in front of a jury and he was an expert and this man was convicted no forensic

science is more controversial and no practitioner more suspect than a former bourbon street bouncer named dr michael west while bite mark analysis has been allowed into evidence for decades its degree of accuracy has never been scientifically validated in the laboratory you know this is a guy who has pulled up bodies that have been in swamps for months and said that he can tell you that there is a bite mark on it and it perfectly matches this person and we're not talking about oh it could match this person right he's sitting in front of a jury saying there is a point zero zero one chance this isn't this guy he is using numbers that we associate it with DNA analysis he's using them with right mark analysis and he is telling juries that he is positive that this guy is the one who

did it or the one who bit the victim this is sending people to prison for the rest of their life and i assume he's using the super computer of his brain to calculate these odds right right like like there's such a world of difference between being like it could be the defendant's teeth versus like oh it is and it's like this person has been roommates with alligators and snapping turtles for like six weeks at this point like really with a lot of this evidence right like there's not really a database you're running it against you're not putting it in the machine and matching it to all these other people most of the time you're coming out pattern matching evidence these odds are made up odds right 99.9 it's like according to what even if this is the bite mark according to what

he seems like one who there's at least an argument to be made that he knew he was bullshitting but i don't think it was probably always that way what you often see in these cases is that working in law enforcement is hard in a lot of ways and can be depressing in a lot of ways right and one of the things that it does is it can really convince you that everybody is hiding a crime or capable of a crime that your instincts are pretty perfect because you thought it was a sky and it ended up being a sky another example of confirmation bias and so it's not just that like someone like michael west or someone like these experts who these detectives who say they're experts because they've testified in all these cases it's not just that they have confirmation

bias about the evidence it's that they have confirmation bias about the suspect and so this leads them to look at any evidence in light of what they think this guy would have done and the reason they have confirmation bias about the suspect is because they've seen a lot they start to believe i think if we think this guy did it he did it this is like a perspective that i think really pervades law enforcement and drives so much of the wrongdoing we see in that field right so much of the injustice there are tons more cases about pattern matching evidence i could go on forever i mean the fbi's hair analysis department had to basically admit that there were countless cases dozens hundreds of cases where they had probably used fake evidence

because they were matching one hair follicle to another which turns out not to actually be something that you can do with dna or where they just like these follicles are identical so this is not like getting dna from hair this is like looking at a follicle under a microscope looking at another follicle under a microscope and saying that they're they must have come from the same head a follicle is like when you pull out a hair and it's got like a little sack attached to it right or is it just the hair itself no i think it's just the hair itself okay i mean i remember this happened with kasey anthony right they found one here in her car like this happens all the time we found a hair on the scene and i think more recently as dna analysis has gotten

more sophisticated you're trying to get dna from the hair but very often historically it's just analyzing did this hair come out of this head it turns out that not every person has immediately identifiable hair that couldn't be matched to anybody else even under a microscope yeah they're not cabbage patch kids their hairs i mean i feel like that's something that could be like a nice it's like harmony it's harmony for other evidence it's like well these hairs look pretty similar but who can say thank you yeah yeah in this case the fbi's microscopic hair comparison unit that's what it was called found hair matches in 2,500 cases over 20 years and the fbi starts reviewing these cases a few years ago and they publicly acknowledged that the unit had given flawed

testimony in 95 of those cases 95 percent when you do that kind of oversight and you're like oh man we really messed this up for decades do you have to do anything else aside from that how does that work yeah it depends on a lot of stuff is there a prosecutor willing to revisit the case is this the only evidence that led to the conviction like in other words there's an unguaranteed right to be retried but now often like if you appeal then probably maybe hopefully a judge or a court will grant your appeal and allow you to be retried but that doesn't always happen and it's not a guarantee so when the fbi starts reviewing the cases that they had in this microscopic hair analysis unit of the first 268 cases that they reviewed 32 of the defendants

had been sentenced to death and 14 of those 32 had already been executed even if the fbi had said everybody that we testified in you're out of prison get out harm has already been done you've already been in prison for years you've already lost tons of your life like even in times when people are willing to say like this evidence actually wasn't reliable it doesn't erase the fact that someone was sentenced according to evidence by someone who said they were an expert and they weren't i feel like if you've been through a trial there's already harm right like even if they're like not guilty it's like well i've just lost all my money and i've spent however many months on this yeah fingerprint analysis was like the original forensic evidence right i think it was

in the early 20th century where there was a case where they used fingerprint analysis and it was like a huge deal it's what we had before dna they're like cd roms or something yeah so fingerprint analysis is more reliable maybe than like bite marks or the hair analysis but it's still not as reliable as like people tend to think it is so in 2016 the president's council of advisors on science and technology which was called pcast released a report it was basically a report saying like forensic science and especially pattern matching evidence is not nearly as reliable as we have thought it was and it obviously had major implications or should have had major implications on tons of evidence used in cases and tons of evidence that had already been used

the report found that the science around fingerprint matching is quote foundationally valid but that it still has a really big false positive rate ranging from like one in 306 to one in 18 oh my god right it's like one in 306 as a jury member those might be odds you're willing to take one in 18 is a very different case right when the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt yeah you might remember the story the story of this guy named brandon mayfield so in 2004 during the madrid terrorist bombings they pulled a fingerprint off of a bag that was uncovered near the scene of the crime right near the scene of the bombs and they sent this fingerprint to law enforcement around the world the fbi finds a match and they find this guy brandon mayfield and he

lives in oregon he's never been to spain that is obviously a false positive but he got arrested this is like the most oregon thing ever to like be accused of committing a crime in a country you've never been to just two months earlier terrorists had bombed four commuter trains in madrid killing almost 200 people an international investigation led to brandon mayfield monas husband an american lawyer who converted to islam mayfield was arrested after this smudged partial print found on a bag of detonators was matched to his and and you know what's wild about this case is like the spain had written a letter fbi says we have a match spain writes a letter and they say don't think it's him it doesn't make any sense okay and fbi arrests him anyway a month later

well there's like listen dana the aliens pulled this off somehow when we're going to get to the bottom of it and that's exactly it right you're they're willing to kind of talk themselves into knots to make a scenario where this guy who like by all accounts has nothing to do with this terrorist attack in a different country in a country where he's never been is not tied to any of the like people or issues or anything the fact that the fbi would arrest him is so scary to me because like that could happen to really anybody right so that's just an example of fingerprints where it's not just that there are false positives law enforcement is willing to act on those false positives even when it's very clear they're false positive i have a question for you based on a

pattern that's emerging already in our stories which is like why do you think that people to me kind of surprisingly quick to believe that someone who has like no motive nothing that would suggest they would do anything like this committed a crime that is both logistically very difficult for them and also doesn't appear to benefit them in any way often law enforcement prosecutors etc their job is to like quote unquote touch the bad guys you know keep crime off the streets they start to believe that like anybody is capable of anything you see it all the time when people talk about motive you know they were jealous of this person who they worked with or they were jealous of their ex or they had this childhood trauma that like rose up in this moment and led

them to kill even though there was no reason no motivation no connection no belief and i think popular culture does that too right like you want to see the movie where you don't expect the ending etc etc life and so i think it is a combination of like belief that you can never really know what a person is capable of doing and people do crazy things for crazy reasons all the time right the difference between possible and likely is so wide is it possible that brain and mayfield somehow got really into this like group of people who wanted to do this major terrorist bombing and there was no evidence of that he sent his bag over to them and they like put the like sure like maybe it's possible like is it remotely likely in any reasonable

conception of anything no the ways in which regular civilians interact with the criminal justice system and understand it and that includes in popular culture it makes all of us believe that like there's way more randomness and uncertainty among what's likely to happen to you than there really is we rely on this evidence to show us what people did but this evidence that we rely on in its own way is dependent on what we think people would do it seems weird on the face of it but the more i think about it the more it makes sense that we would find comfort in the idea that like why would someone kill somebody and it's like well this inner evil that was always there just emerged and they snapped and yeah that's just what people are like when i think in reality there's

often like a much longer narrative to speak of the only trial that i know of having occurred in the 90s the oj simpson trial it's like if you take the perspective that he's guilty then it's like how could we have known and well you really could have like you could have figured out where this was all going years and years in advance and it implicates us as a society that we don't notice the crimes that we're building towards the last thing i'll say about this is that DNA analysis is also a pattern matching evidence right you're taking DNA from one person and you're seeing if it matches in a sample of DNA i know that someone else is a sample found on a crime scene what i think is worth noting about DNA is that like it's certainly more reliable than all of these other

forms of evidence and if you have well preserved and also single source DNA it is pretty reliable i mean like overwhelmingly reliable and by single source DNA i'm saying if you have DNA from one person in one sample and you're comparing it to one person's DNA in another sample that is a pretty reliable practice the problem is that there are other forms of DNA samples there is simple mixture DNA which involves DNA from two individuals and then there's complex mixture DNA which includes samples from multiple people and typically DNA analysis is either a single source or a simple mixture which means it's like more objective if you're looking at a complex mixture sample it's very difficult to like separate out one person's DNA from another's from another's

then you're back to kind of not being able to rely on the analysis even DNA analysis should be scrutinized not every single time but just saying DNA matches on the scene doesn't mean much right another example of that is trace DNA so there is a great podcast i guess i probably am not allowed to say that because i was a consulting producer on it so i'm like giving myself a compliment oh i'm sure that's part of why it was great no you can say that it's called a suspect and it was hosted and produced by a guy Matt share who's a friend of mine and it's about a man in in seattle who was at a party a halloween party in 2008 only black guy there didn't know anybody else at the party was held at a apartment complex of like younger kids right out of college

who were like working in tech and lived in this apartment complex and the party was like moving from apartment to apartment there are a lot of people there everybody's drunk the next morning one of the women who was hosting the party is dead and this guy gets fingered for the crime one of the reasons they accused him of the crime was because they found his DNA on the scene well it was a party so number one it's not super shocking that like maybe his day and was on the scene when i go to a party i make sure to take all my DNA back home with me it's very rude to leave it at the apartment nothing ever comes off but they did find his DNA on the scene they weren't wrong what they found on the scene was trace DNA a sample of DNA that was like smaller than what the

eye could see basically a tiny particle that's tinier than a tiny tiny particle and they concluded that like he killed this woman and if you present that to a jury if you say yeah his DNA is on the scene here's what this sample shows here's what his DNA shows same guy it would not be surprising at all for them to conduct people over that this is like us weekly headline writing where it's like jennifer aniston is very sad and it's like yeah do we know that someone said it there you go but it's also like just to show how much our DNA gets everywhere right you walk by someone on the street trace DNA could definitely be on them right hopefully we're more conscious of that than ever like yeah i assume that everywhere i go i'm just leaving this little trail of breadcrumbs but you

know immanuel fair who the podcast is about sat in jail for a decade being accused of this murder this is not an example of junk science but this is junk science adjacent so when someone dies especially under like questionable circumstances right we tend to send their body to a corner to someone that then will determine a cause of death and that cause of death will like determine what police do going forward and at least for me whenever i heard the word coroner or whenever i watched svu you know it's always like a very technologically advanced room with it seems to be full of like really cool computers and like you know all these tools and you know then she says like probably died about six o'clock probably strangled whatever levidity in the tissues lenny

he was on his back when he died whatever yeah i guess made that up it's always something like that now i think it's worth noting it's not that everything that coroner is a medical examer is do is unscientific because some of it is based in science but it is the actual role that is less of a science-based role than i think we're thought to believe i thought coroners were doctors i definitely thought that but it turns out that in a lot of places number one the county corner is an elected position and you don't have to have any expertise whatsoever i think the assumption has always been that like only people who would have expertise would take these jobs right or be interested in them and i think it is true that like typically we're talking about people who maybe

have previously worked in a morgue or previously like worked with frankly dead bodies like it's unlikely i think it's like fair to say it's unlikely that like i'm gonna randomly run for coroner the job asks for a certain kind of person with a certain kind of expertise but that doesn't erase the fact that we're talking about people who often don't have the training or the expertise to determine cause of death beyond reasonable doubt and that there's not really kind of like a regular standard or like a regular body coming in to determine whether or not a coroner or medical examiner is qualified to be like analyzing the cases that they're taking this can have like all sorts of consequences many of which i don't even have to describe because i'm sure people

listening could imagine them but it's particularly notable when you think about what kind of connections to law enforcement medical examiners and coroners have so just recently within the past couple months there was a report released i think by the university of washington that determined that like there have actually been many more people killed by police shootings than records show maybe twice as many and part of the reason that there's such a disparity between people who have been killed by police and what the numbers say about who has been killed by police is because of coroners determining cause of death which is another way of saying that coroners and medical examiners have protected police by determining a different cause of death than like what actually happened

because like the one thing maybe law and order did depict correctly that we have these experts who belong to the police and the prosecution essentially or if they don't belong to them then it's like they know each other they're working in the same ecosystem and it's to me it's weird having a system where trials are adversarial but the prosecution has the experts essentially and the defense is like well find your own goddamn experts that's a huge part of the problem prosecutors have at their disposal other arms of the state or at least state sanctioned bodies like law enforcement like the coroner like the medical examiner as functionally working on their side the same goes for like crime labs you see it all the time with crime labs the truth is that like they're not objective

it is a yet another kind of like obstacle many defendants have to face or i think what's actually often common too is that medical examiner is determining something with suicide that feels questionable or determining something was natural causes that feels questionable a lot of people who die in police custody or die in a police interaction are said to have died of quote excited delirium which is not an actual thing that's something Victorian women die of in novels yeah yeah exactly exactly we're talking about science that is similar to what they had like the 1400s it's just to say that like because a coroner said it or medical examiner like it's worth finding out who those people are i think it's also worth noting that like in some states including

california sheriffs and coroners are the same people you elect a sheriff coroner sheriff hyphen coroner i mean that's a cool title but it's still a conflict of interest it's a huge conflict of interest first of all i don't think someone has the time to be very good at both of those jobs and have the expertise necessary for me to elect them but second of all you can imagine what happens when a sheriff's deputy is accused of killing someone they're like no i didn't case closed yeah i i have investigated myself and that is not what happened yeah i yeah the person charged with making the decision of what scientific and what's not is the judge a judge is not a scientist they don't know very often when we are deciding people's futures we're

flying blind and so are the people in the room that are charged with making objective accurate nonpartisan decisions in an actual scenario like that probably what should happen is that a judge should break for the day at least the day go and do some research you couldn't do enough research to like actually become an expert but at least could come back and say like i've made a slightly more informed ruling about whether or not this evidence is reliable or not so often when we are determining someone's future we are asking people who have a pretty good grasp sometimes on the law or a pretty good grasp sometimes on procedure but how irrelevant that is when we're talking about a topic of which they know nothing the american legal system is based on essentially the british legal system

right ish yeah ish i think ish is right ish ish ish but anyway it's like even dating from the beginning of the u.s legal system like science at that time was like you know a feather in a rock will fall at the same rate in a vacuum it's like okay that's nice and in the first Sherlock Holmes story Sherlock Holmes is like very preoccupied with the idea that he might have invented a test that will tell you if a blood stain like is blood or not like is it blood or is it juice and so it just seems kind of ridiculous that we're soldiering bravely forward with the system that we invented kind of before science as we now know it even existed i think it's very hard for people who are not especially not in the sciences to understand that science is always evolving

that what we understand today could be very different than what we understand in 50 years and that like every single time we're talking about you know this is the best scientist in the world at the beginning of covid we're giving advice that was based on less information than they have now and when people change their minds they're accused of like lying or just trying to like win political points or whatever it is right when like the actual reality is that like people's understanding changes the more information they get and you also think about how like scientific analysis has been used to perpetuate our most depraved institutions right phrenology eugenics black men are more dangerous or more likely to wait rate that has been seen as scientifically

based for lots of this criminal justice system's existence if you are the defendant and you are facing the entire power of the state and you are saying like i didn't do something how overwhelmingly enormous burden that is given all the different kind of ways in which your guilt can be assumed we tend to think the more types of forensic evidence that can be collected and analyzed the better and i'm just not sure that's true it's very symbolic to me how a system like this is created and perpetuated which is confirmation bias holding systemic analysis to a much lower standard than we hold any other kind of like scientific evidence and a lot of people believing that they have supernatural knowledge of something that they actually don't i think

we all are not all of us but certainly i and a lot of other people are really drawn to the idea of surrender to some kind of higher power and i think that the way we deal with that like sometimes we need to remind ourselves to keep it in our personal lives because the idea of science as this higher power within legal system or the law as a higher power which i think is an idea that i have felt very drawn to at times and i think i feel about the american legal system at this moment with like all the information that i have the way uh season two steve brady felt about his relationship with miranda which is and i quote there's good stuff here and i have like real reverence like i remember feeling on january six of the last year i was very shocked that i felt

the sense of violation about people essentially taking over a government building and i think you can even have that reverence and like love of the law and still be like this is a car that we have been driving for 240 years and that is like too long to to not do some structural changes in the interest of fairness and honesty i think it's worth mentioning that like not every time that junk science is used is the outcome wrong so you think about like cases in which the right guy was put away and there was that expert witness who testified it creates i think what radley balco referred to as a guardian angel complex in people once you start to say this evidence is not reliable this is not good like you are presenting as fact something that is like

at best a maybe people are very outraged by that the experts in this field who have made careers out of this who have like believed their own hype start to say like do you know how many child killers i've put away i'm responsible for justice in all of these cases and you're trying to tell me that i'm not you know it's hard to tell people presenting this evidence as fact is inaccurate and therefore it is wrong to do that even if you're testifying against someone who did the wrong thing our system does not say that like people who are guilty no longer have the right to accurate testimony these are the same people prosecutors law enforcement etc who tend to say if i get to the right result it doesn't matter how i got there right and that we've doubled up on

blind spots and it feels like there's this idea of like well both these systems are objective so like we can just completely take our hands off the wheel in a sense every year here comes this list of people who have been exonerated and it kind of analyzes like what went wrong was their prosecutor misconduct was that based on bad science why was the wrongful conviction happening but it really undersells and underestimates how many people are wrongfully convicted how many of those people will never have their evidence reexamined or their case reheard how many of those people pled guilty because that was like a better call or less risky than going to trial where they're going to face 30 years instead of two and so are not entitled to ever like even appeal their sentence because

they pled and how many people just kind of get lost to the system these kind of mistakes define their whole life we're talking a lot today about innocent people or people who are wrongfully convicted as a rule like i don't actually like to focus on innocent people that much because i think innocent people get a little bit too much attention in this system what you learn is that there are a lot of guilty people who like maybe still shouldn't be in a system like this right and so when i think of junk science i just encourage people to not think of it as an isolated problem but indicative of the broader failures the broader rot of what we consider to be the quote unquote best criminal justice system in the world the need to change the system like reflects the need to kind of

change ourselves too maybe we've reached what is probably my favorite kind of conclusion which is i would call bleakly empowering because like this is all of our responsibility it's all of our problem hooray yeah i think that's right this is important for everybody what we end up focusing on is like what the defendant did and whether or not they're deserving of a system better than this and i would just argue that we all are do not ever quit if you're truly innocent don't ever quit keep fighting it because the only way to correct a justice system is to keep fighting it and to bring out the warrants and moles and everything else that are there that they can correct on it's not always not perfect but it's

all we have but we can't quit we have to continue to work with it thank you for listening to this episode thank you to our incredible guest Josie Duffy Rice and if you want to send her tips about junk science in your neighborhood go to JosieDuffyRice.com if you want to support this podcast and listen to some bonus episodes go to patreon.com slash you're wrong about thank you to Carolyn Kendrick our wonderful editor and producer if you're interested in the clips you heard in this episode or in any of the articles that we referenced in this conversation you can find them in the show notes check them out see you soon