CSI: Junk Science with Josie Duffy Rice
00:00And so it just seems kind of ridiculous that we're soldiering bravely forward with the systemthat 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 afoolproof way of fingering the guilty. What is it? It's never been tested. It's never been shownto be accurate. And one of the main reasons they were wrongly convicted in the first placewas bad forensic evidence. They have quote the best by their own admission can make such a glaringerror in a high profile case when they knew the world was watching. What is happening in thecounties in areas where we don't quote have the best of the best. I'm Sarah Marshall and this
00:51is You're Wrong About. Today's episode is CSI Junk Science. We are going to Junk Scienceand 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 criminaljustice issues. Currently, she's a co-host of What A Day. She's also the creator and co-hostof the podcast Justice in America. And I am so excited to get to talk to her about Junk Sciencebecause she is writing a book about all of this right now. And we get to go out to coffee withher and hear about all of her most unbelievable research. I am so excited about this episodebecause Junk Science is one of my passions as a person who lives in the world today. I think
01:41it'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 whois 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 hadthe true crime episode with Emma Burquist last fall. And now we're continuing intowell true crime outside of cable and supermarket books. True crime of the kind that is happeningall around us every day. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being part of thisconversation. Thank you for coming out to coffee with us. Here's the episode.
02:38How 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 standsin 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 thecriminal justice system is that it's based in storytelling. The ways in which people end up inthe system and get convicted of crimes is ultimately rooted very often in what kind of stories thesystem tells about itself and what kind of stories we tell ourselves. When we are using science in
03:29a way that essentially is contrary to its actual goals, we will generate unreliable evidence aboutthe 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 thisto me is fascinating, especially in this moment where we see kind of the battle of science playingout all the time because of COVID, right? Since March of 2020, I think you can really seehow people weaponize science and how uncomfortable people are with science not being certain whenscientists sort of started to say like, we're not sure how scary that is for people and how the mixof science and politics makes it really difficult to discern what's right, what's actually real,
04:22and what we should be doing. To me, there's something very powerful and disturbing aboutthe 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 conceptof evidence. Yeah, absolutely. We've brought in a big turkey to carve up. What are we going totalk about? How do you divide up the subject? I mean, I think that when people think aboutforensic science, they probably think mostly of DNA, fingerprints. These are kind of like thetangible 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,
05:07I mean, like even non-police-oriented movies, even movies we all love, like all of them thatinvolve like a criminal case tend to involve forensic evidence. Right, I feel like evenpretty 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. Andthat includes like toxicology, crime scene evidence, arson evidence, firearms. There'sautontology, which is teeth analysis, basically like forensic dentistry. And then there's likethe ways that we analyze those categories, right? And the main one of those is patternmatching evidence. And I think that's probably the biggest category of forensic science that is like
05:52a real problem. This is the breast of the turkey. Yeah, this is a breadth of it. I insist I'm usingthis turkey metaphor. I'm sure it's going to get weird. I love it. I love it, please. Let's go withthe turkey. Let's make it happen. So the most common type of pattern matching evidence is DNAanalysis, 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 isthe culprit, right? But there are lots of other kinds of pattern matching evidence as well. Andso when we say pattern matching, we're saying like, here's one thing, we're trying to see if this
06:35other 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 certaingun, shoe prints, tire tracks, is this the car that we saw see their tire tracks in the drivewayof the house where the guy is dead. The my cousin Vinnie defends famously. Yes, hand writing, youknow, 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,
07:17and we try to match them to someone else's teeth prints, all of these ways that we think aboutproof. 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 notbe any other one. For years, this is literally a ton of the evidence that was used in cases toconvict people. I think it's worth noting off the bat, if you have a trial, right, if you even getinto the pattern matching evidence part of a criminal case, plea negotiations are complicatedor whatever it is, maybe at that point you bring them in. But generally, you think of this as liketrial preparation, prosecutor is going to need to prove their case to the judge or to a jury that
08:00this evidence proves that this person did something wrong, probably this person has decided to go totrial, which means that they're claiming they're innocent, or at least that they're claiming thereare 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 refusingto plea, or they're really asserting their innocence. This is a really big generalization, soyou know, criminal cases are complicated, the reasons people make decisions you are alwayscomplicated. But it's not to say that people who plea are definitely guilty, it's just to say thatpeople who decide to go to trial believe that they can, that the other side can't prove that they
08:38did something. When this evidence comes up and it's being used, it correlates with, to me, a higherchance 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 defendanthas said, yeah, I actually did do this, I'll take the plea. In our heads, that's the beginning of acriminal case. But generally, in the criminal system, that's not only rare, it's after pre-trialmotions, it's after PrEP, it's after, like there's just so much that goes into before the trial evenbegins. 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.
09:21There'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 completelyflown the coup. So good example, relying on dogs, like dog sniffing. I use kind of mentalimage of a dog in judges' robes with a gavel, like it's like a golden retriever. We do know that youcan train dogs to find some things, right? So we do know that you can like train dogs to help find adead body or something. And we have taken that to be an indication that dogs can do way more than wereally 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
10:10about this cadaver dog handler named Sandra Anderson, who worked in the Upper Midwest inthe 90s, I think, through the early aughts. And she always found evidence. She had this cadaver dognamed 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 thisis going. Right, right. I can see it from a mile away. Right. And so what of course happened wasthat she like was getting bone fragments sent to her from a guy that she had who worked, I don'tknow 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
10:53pant 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 Pacinoin that Alaska movie. Right. Wow. This is an incredible story. I'm now looking at pictures ofSandra Anderson and Eagle. And I think that law enforcement is a job where many people go innot thinking, you know what? What I want to do is plant evidence at crime scenes. But lots of peopleend up doing that. Right. And drug science is a real problem, right? But it's not the problem.
11:40Because the problem is that we function in a system that encourages the worst of law enforcement inso many ways. Cent lineups are a kind of common practice where basically a dog is like introducedto 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 similarsense in them that maybe belong to like different people. They are basically trying to like matchone smell with another. I don't think I have to emphasize that like dogs can't tell us how surethey are. We can't be sure what they're thinking. So it's not to say that like maybe the dog neverpicks the right sample. It's to say that like we are relying on a very inexact practice to
12:24determine guilt of someone. We are taking one skill that dogs have. Sure, they're better atsmelling than we are. They can like maybe find a dead body like faster than we're going to be ableto smell one out. That all I hear. That is a very different thing than like being able to match sentdogs can't say to us. Like I actually don't know how to do that. And I also would imagine that likethat you know the handler dog relationship you're communicating a lot to them that you might notbe aware that you're saying through your body language and so on. Absolutely. I mean that'sthat's a huge part of it. So sent lineups which basically like connect the smell of a suspectto the smell of something on the crime scene. Right. I mean in a weird way they reflect what
13:04you see in like all sorts of lineups including like eyewitness lineups which again is anotherexample 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 talkingabout this a few weeks ago Sarah in the case of the woman who wrote Lucky Alice Siebold whopicked the wrong person during a lineup and was coerced by prosecutors to still testify againstthe guy that they had identified right. There is a perception I think in particular witheyewitness 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
13:42times. That's just not necessarily the case because you're in a state of panic does not meanyou're more likely to like identify the right guy. And what we know is that people don't do a verygood job of like identifying people who aren't the same race as them. Right. There's like drasticconfusion that happens when we ask people to identify someone in a lineup and it happensall the time that they identify the wrong person. We also see like case after case wherethe police manipulate pictures in a photo lineup for example they'll remove a suspect's tattooor they will like lighten the skin color to make them look more like the person that the witnesshas suspected. And we also know that like very often if a witness comes in and says I actually
14:24can't identify I don't know. I don't know if he's in this lineup like that they are pushed to thinkharder. Another like really crazy form of junk science to me is hypnotism has been used in casesin our criminal justice system over the years where they hypnotize a witness and theyask them a question and they say something under hypnosis that brings back a memory that theydidn'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 whohave like been victims of crime or for whatever reason have been told they're victims of crimeor whatever it is can be basically manipulated into having memories. I didn't remember this
15:08before but I remember it now it's come back to me. I have this recovered memory because prosecutorsor police are saying to you this happened to you. Right. Do you remember this happening to you andyou start to be convinced that maybe it did right. Like you said it has happened a lot insatanic panic. You see it a lot in child abuse cases. You see it in a lot of like cases thatinvolve any sort of needing a memory from a child especially if they're an adult now and it's justanother example of how unreliable we are like assessing our own our own ability to like interpretevents. The term recovered memory is so broad and I think has so many different meanings at thispoint that it feels like we need further sort of subcategories of description because that could
15:47mean that you have a therapist who repeatedly hypnotizes you and asks you to just keep talkingand say whatever comes to mind and it's like I know you've been abused and this was a trend thathappened in the 80s where therapists were trained with this idea that if you are fucked up to usethe clinical terminology then there's some kind of memory of trauma that you have buried and you needto unearth and once you have reacted out and re-experience it then you'll be free and likespeaking as someone who is you know using pop psychology of this moment and understands thatlike I have trauma to work through and I need therapy and also that like I'm just kind of likethis and I can't snap out of it that's tough to accept but I mostly accept it and then also I
16:33think that there are so many things that we want to believe as humans and we want to feelthat we can have greater certainty about things and we keep coming back to these very human desiresand I feel like to me it's important to make the distinction between like I don't expect every singlehuman being to like know how to avoid wrongful conviction and to police their desires and longingsin that direction. I just think the people who put on robes every day or have some kind of reallyimportant 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 beingway too careful to not convict someone rather than like way too encompassing of all the possible
17:16ways that you could convict someone and that again is like kind of why junk science I findreally interesting because it mirrors the same the bigger issues in criminal justice to me becauseit 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 objectivefact which I don't think is true. I think our memories are very unreliable they can sometimesbe extremely good often they're not but it also occurred to me like well even if we couldreplay a crime as it happened like in a courtroom in front of jurors people still wouldn't agreeover what they had just watched. Right we forget almost every single thing that happens to us in
17:58fact by tonight we will have forgotten most everything that happened to us today. ThankGod 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 viewpointof the world is framed by shaped by our memory we would like believe our memory we like tend togenerally trust ourselves it's really uncomfortable to think about how random and unreliable yeah I'mlike trying to think of a better word for unreliable but I can't and unreliable our own memories areright. 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
18:38it seems to be taking advantage not only of a defendant who is drastically at risk but of thepeople who are responsible for determining his future his or her future. Another one that Ithink probably will resonate with more people than any of the others in terms of their ownexperience is breathalyzers. Breathalyzers are seen as science right that you breathe into thismachine it tells you exactly how much alcohol is in your system and if you're too drunk to driveyou know if you blow a point zero seven in many states like you can walk away and if you blow apoint zero nine like you can't right you're arrested. I would contend that if I put iser atthe end of anything it would sound sciency right like if you came to my house and I would be like
19:21okay 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 somewhatreliable but they're like a scientific machine handed to a law enforcement agent that is notactually an expert at calibrating it using it necessarily there's a lot of user error thedifference between what it is at its best and what it is on average is pretty drastic and I alwayswas like surprised the New York Times did and wrote an article a couple years ago where they werelike breathalyzers aren't reliable I thought it was going to be a huge thing you know and it turnsout like it barely made a splash um but you know a million Americans a year are arrested for drunk
20:07driving these are machines that are used regularly to determine whether or not someone has been whichit's also just such a crime with such moral implications right like right you hear thatsomeone arrested for drunk driving and it feels selfish reckless very fucked up the reality isthat like the breathalyzer is not reliable enough to really be able to determine with certaintythat someone has been actually driving impaired I think the New York Times article that came outthis was in 2019 that I was written said that the breathalyzers generate wrong results with quotealarming frequency they're marketed as precise to the third decimal place and that is spoiler alertvery often not true sometimes results were 40 percent too high between 2018 and 2019 judges
20:56in a couple of states Massachusetts and New Jersey namely throughout like 30,000 breath testsafter starting to realize like these weren't super reliable wow but to be clear breathalyzers arestill used everywhere I mean this is not this did not end breathalyzers right and most people didn'tread this article right often sometimes you're not you haven't been pulled over right you show up tolike a traffic do you guys have those like the what are they called um oh yeah the checkpoints orwhatever the checkpoints right you show up to a checkpoint you show up to it's not always likeyou looked like you were driving drunk so they pulled you over often it's like you know you have toblow a straight reading in order to like keep driving and people are finding out that like
21:36they've been accused of driving drunk when they haven't and then I feel like there's this duallobster trap effect I think this is how lobster traps work where well it has to be because ifit's a trap you can't leave you can enter but you can't go so yes you know once you you becomea part of the system like once you have a breathalyzer test that is suggests that you'vehave been drinking too much then like you are in the trap now and there's this very foundational ideathe way we think about the system in America that once you're in it you deserve to havethe most uphill climb imaginable to try and get out and then also that like once we start believingin something as a people we can't just like snap our fingers and start unbelieving in it
22:20it would be great if we could but like it's actually hard for us to do even when we're tryingonce you start thinking that you can't trust anything a system like this falls apart rightand you can see how for example like what we know about what cop how cops spend their time right isthat they don't often spend their time looking at violent crime they're not really out theregetting murderers every day but a lot of their time is spent doing traffic control part oftheir reason that they can justify spending so much time doing traffic work is because theysay that there are a lot of people driving drunk part of the reason they say they're allpeople driving drunk is because a million people a year are convicted of that crime part of the
22:54reason a million people a year convicted of that crime is because they're blowing more than 0.08 ona breathalyzer and once you start to unravel are those breathalysers reliable then you really startto have a conversation about like is this how police should be spending our time all of theselike forms of evidence are undergirding other choices and systems that like we also take atface value because of what the results of these junk science tells us i mean it's bad enough thatthe science is bad what the science is like holding up is even scarier to me you can't help but besome angry i've missed many funerals many weddings graduations i think we have to first realize thata small town likes to believe in their authority not that they wanted to hear what they heard
23:44but the fact that they were hearing it then it caused a doubt a doubt not only about my charactermaybe about mickey's character but what did he really kill mickey i will start with some of mythe stories that like really stick with me and one of them is a story of this guy joe bryanin texas so pam calloff is a writer for pro publica the new york times magazine she isright for the texas interviewing i'm like her biggest fan so there's that i will be secretaryof her fan club and you can be president yeah she's an incredible incredible writer who reallyhas focused a lot of her time and efforts on junk science in particular the case is abouta man named joe bryan who lived in a really small town called clifton in central texas
24:32this is the 80s he's married to a woman named mickey bryan they both work in education she teachesat the elementary school and i think he's a principal of the high school they're known aroundtown they're loved around town right they have no kids they're just this really normal couple intexas it's october this is in 1985 joe bryan goes to a conference and he's across the state at thispoint and one night his wife is shot and killed nobody really realizes this until the next dayshe doesn't show up to work people kind of get worried they go to her house and they find herdead i mean this is in the middle of nowhere there doesn't seem to be any really clear reasonsomeone would shoot her i mean it must have been a very shocking crime yeah so joe bryan
25:20is in austin he's at the texas association of secondary schools principals annual conferencehe's there and he gets someone pulls him aside the executive director of the organization pullshim aside and says your wife has been killed and he's like shocked basically what happens in thiscase i think really embody is a lot of what we see in forensic science which is that the peoplewho are working on this case are small town cops this is not the fbi storming in to figure out whokilled mickey bryan right these are local police officers local law enforcement who don't alwayshave the resources the training or the background to be analyzing crime scenes frankly for mostpolice officers in the country they're in places where there are very few murders ever this is not
26:06like every police officer is like the ones you see in csi or svu this seems kind of likechanging attire where it's like yeah i technically know how to do that but like i don't have to doit even every year right i think a lot of times it's like you changing attire and a lot of timesit's like me changing attire which is like i have no idea how to do that and you're like what isyoutube say what does youtube say about how to enter a crime scene right exactly like i can imaginethat like showing up to a crime scene and knowing that evidence needs to be analyzed that doesn'tmake me capable of analyzing that evidence right right and it's just all this stuff that you youhave to do a job constantly to like i think see all the little blind spots that you have as a novice
26:50that's right so joe brian goes home the local police bring in some texas rangers they bring ina detective with another police department in a different county and his name is robert thormanand he's trained and he says he's trained in a forensic discipline called bloodstain patternanalysis people who are bloodstain pattern analysts come into a crime scene they see wherethe blood has splattered over here and they look for like patterns among blood on a crime scene ofsomeone having been shot my first thought always about this is that this is dexter's job okay ithink first episode of dexter he's like here's exactly what happened i forgot about that yeahi should be watched dexter and of course he's i guess supposed to be extra great at it because
27:35he's a practicing serial killer but yeah right because he's a killer what that is is basicallypeople who come into a crime scene and look at what has happened with blood in particular when a gunis involved when a gunshot is involved what has happened with the person's blood that will givethem an indicator of what happened during the shooting right so were they shot at close rangewere they shot for a way where did the blood hit the wall all of these are questions that this forensicdiscipline looks into the reason this story is particularly interesting to me is becausepam coliff really looks into what it means to be an expert right and the reality is that if yourexpertise is reliant on bad science is it an expertise here's a guy who went to a training
28:20class usually which is maybe about a week long maybe less the people who go to these trainingclasses tend to be a cop or a detective or whatever it may be and they don't tend to have any likescientific background they're not scientific experts right they're going to a class where theyare taught a practice that like isn't actually reliable and then they go and they offer theirexpertise in cases you see it all the time in trials where it says i'm an expert at firearmforensics right i'm an expert at matching firearms and bullets i've testified in 200 cases and youhear that you're like yeah you must be an expert but if in 200 cases your evidence is bad it doesn'treally matter maybe you're like really good at testifying like you're good at sitting there and
29:02saying stuff this reminds me of a we're going on a little journey i promise it's going somewhere ayoutube video i watched recently by the youtuber big joel who i think is great about the new Aladdinand how we kind of get into this question of like what does make me a prince mean because if youmake someone a prince but they don't have a place that they are prince of and you don't have evidenceof that and they're not related to anyone who's in power then what is the power and everyone's likewell he's a prince if it looks like a prince and it walks like a prince and like it's a princeand i feel like that's how courtroom expertise works as well it's like if i if people in the pastbelieve or if you look like people's idea of an expert then you're an expert and also you have
29:45that i know there's a term for this but the thing where when you first learn about somethingyou're like wow i know all about this and then if you keep going with it then i think the moreyou know the less sure you feel about stuff yeah absolutely my goal has been to make people morecomfortable with the idea of not knowing because i think not knowing is very scary for people toreally engage with how unreliable and unfair and brutal the system is you really have to be ableto grapple with the lack of clarity yeah that's a story about bloodstain analysis which i thinkis just one of the many kinds of junk science that is unreliable and when i say unreliable itdoesn't necessarily mean that there isn't an expert who could come into a certain scene and be able to
30:30tell something by the evidence it's just to say that like what they might be able to tellmay not align with like the prosecution's theory of what actually happened and it's one thing tosay like it seems like she got shot from this side because the blood is over here it's another thingto say like it seems like she got shot from this side it must have been someone she knew or elseshe would have run or there are all these kind of like ways in which we extrapolate from thelittle evidence that you actually can determine from some of this stuff that makes junk scienceeven more chunky this reminds me of my beef with Sherlock Holmes where i feel like we continueto have like i love Sherlock Holmes obviously we all do but i feel like we have this expectation
31:09that like a true detective that there are in the world these people even if there aren't that manyof them who can look at someone and be like i've deduced that you had mushroom soup earlier todayand you went to this school and you fear terriers or whatever yeah and i just don't think i thinkthat people can i think it's like gambling like some people are really good at gambling butdid they know what's going to happen no right also the truth is that there's a lot at play herethat also is reflective of the ways we fool ourselves right like i don't think that mostexpert witnesses who deal in pattern matching evidence who get up there and think i am bullshittingeverybody right i think they believe it when someone tells you that you're an expert in something
31:54over and over again and that you have filled all the qualifications of experts it's very easy tobe sure and what you did to it reminds me of like i think everybody has that friend who's like alwaysthinks the worst thing is going to happen and then whenever you're like but i wouldn't jump to thatthey're like well i was right that one time remember the time i didn't wear my lucky sock and got in abus accident these are ways in which like you convince yourself you have more certainty aboutthe situation than you do which feels good even as it's doomongering law enforcement includinga sky robert thurman basically finger joe brian for the crime it's a shocking result for thepeople in the town these are people who don't seem to have any skeletons in their closet there's like
32:36a couple more elements of the case that make people think he's involved bottom line is thatthey kind of conclude that she's been killed by someone she must have known and so all of theseplayed into the fact that a couple years after that joe brian gets convicted of murdering his wifeand is sent to prison where he remained until just a couple years ago this was in 1985 so we'retalking about over 30 years i think over 35 years of this man you know serving a sentence for murderfor a murder that he almost definitely did not commit and this would involve him travelinghours and hours to and from the murder scene in the middle of the night right right the reasonthat i think about this story when i think about junk science is because i think what's
33:17important to remember is that forensic science will eat believe to be reliable forensic scienceand reliable experts in forensic science when they tell us something it allows us to suspend ourother beliefs to an dramatic dramatic extent so joe brian was across the state he was in austinthat this would have required him to leave his hotel in austin drive hours and hours and hours tohis town a hundred miles away from dallas kill his wife drive back we have no motive we have noidea of why he would want to do that and we have nobody who saw him leave his hotel at austinhe was there the night before he's their first thing in the morning i mean in general that'sreally hard to believe and one of the only ways you would be maybe be willing to believe that
34:03as a jury member or even as a prosecutor is if someone is telling you this is what the evidencesays the evidence says he killed his wife yeah i mean i know that in many of these actual trialsthat happen there is sinisterness of some kind there is some kind of intent more nefarious thanwe must get to the bottom of this but i feel like there's also right alongside of that thisthing of like so desperately wanting to be freed by a higher power and not wanting to be the ultimateauthority on something like i think plenty of people do want to be the ultimate authority onsomething and that's that worries me as well but like this thing where you're like well this is areal head scratcher it's really hard to know what to think but the science says that this guy did it
34:47so my hands are tied yeah exactly i think that's exactly right it's very difficult to ask a juryfull of people to determine beyond a reasonable doubt someone's guilt especially in a case likethis where there's a lot of reasons why someone should be like what i always think back to a caseabout a guy who left his who was accused of leaving his child in the car on purposeyou always hear about those horrible cases where a child's in the car and dies andhow horrible that is for the parent who made a mistake but this guy was accused of doing it onpurpose and i remember that like when it first happened when you when they interviewed thewitnesses who watched him who were there when he found his child they describe how he was distraught
35:27and he was horrified and how sad it was and how they describe him as having a very genuine reactionlater after he's been arrested and accused their perception of that moment changes drasticallyright all of a sudden it kind of seemed fake they thought something was up and it's the same thingwith joe brian right like here was this beloved high school principal and not only was he accusedby a system of killing his wife but he suddenly found his whole small town had turned against himthey had reshaped their own perception of him into someone who like could do thisand they had basically marked him as a murderer it's really remarkable what our brains will dowhen we think about science as something where it's like well it doesn't matter how i interpret
36:07this is what the science said actually the science is dependent on interpretation rightthere are elements of a criminal case that maybe are more reliable or that like we should be focusedon or that like there are other things that we should be prioritizing that don't get prioritizedbecause forensic science tends to tends to take up all the space in the roomcan you tell me about learning that that robert thorman had signed an affidavit saying that hewas in fact incorrect in some of his testimony oh yes i was elated and humbled about the factthat it had to be difficult for him to admit that he was wrong hoping that his confessionthat he was wrong will help other people incarcerated in prison who had junk science
36:58that convicted them but you also have to realize that he didn't have the proper training that heneeded to do what he did so we talked about blood stain analysis which i think is one that likeshows up in a lot of those shows another big one that i think about a lot is bite mark evidenceso i brought up earlier forensic odontology that could mean something like if you can'tidentify a corpse you try to match their teeth records to maybe people who are missing and tryto see if like that's the right person but forensic odontology can also encompass bitemark analysis which means that a crime happens maybe the victim was bitten bite marks involvedsomehow and there's someone who comes in and says these bite marks match this guy i always even
37:47before i started looking to junk science thought that was kind of weird i was like how can theypossibly be sure you certainly can't test it against anything right you can't ask someone torebite someone under the same circumstances exactly rodley balco who writes for the washington postand has been looking into junk science and looking at it for years he wrote a book with a guy namedtucker caring tenants called the cadaver king and the country dentists and it focuses on onemain case in mississippi but really is looking at these experts in mississippi one of whomreally deals in bite mark analysis so his name is michael west for years he was the go to bitemark analysis guy in mississippi criminal cases as you can imagine mississippi does not have the
38:30fairest or best criminal justice system in the country the problems in the criminal justicesystem are reflective of all the problems in mississippi right low investment dated practicesracism austerity all of this plays into the problems that you see in the criminal justicesystem there and so this guy michael west ends up being the guy that they go to to analyze bitemarks the stuff that he basically ended up getting away with is unbelievable so in 1992there was a woman named louise i think you pronounce her last name kiko she's killed andthis is actually in louise and i'm not in mississippi but they brought him in from mississippifor this case she's killed the primary suspect is her husband i'm telling a lot of cases where the
39:12husband seems to actually be innocent but it is true that most of the times when a woman is killedit's by someone she knows and often her partner so it's not crazy that the primary suspect isher husband right they were estranged they had like a bad relationship but there is no physicalevidence tying him to the scene and he says he doesn't he didn't do it this case goes unsolvedfor about a year and then the sheriff calls in michael west to do bite mark analysis no bitemarks were found on her during the autopsy though which does present a problem of bringing in a guyto do bite mark analysis on her body basically they assume her body 14 months after her deathand michael west said that under a special uv light using a technique that he's the only
39:54person who knows how to use he might find something that hadn't been seen previouslythey assume the body so he can look at it he says that under alternative lightthe pattern of a bite mark has appeared they found a curved pattern that matched four ofher ex-husband's teeth to the perfect match on her shoulder there was also the problem that hecouldn't photograph or document what he'd seen oh this is like how Mormonism was invented yeahexactly we have all the documents but we're not going to share them with you he said that he hadactually tried to preserve the bite mark and promel to hide but it had quote unquote faded awayhe argued this in front of a jury and he was an expert and this man was convicted no forensic
40:36science is more controversial and no practitioner more suspect than a former bourbon street bouncernamed dr michael west while bite mark analysis has been allowed into evidence for decades its degreeof accuracy has never been scientifically validated in the laboratory you know this is a guy whohas pulled up bodies that have been in swamps for months and said that he can tell you that thereis a bite mark on it and it perfectly matches this person and we're not talking about oh it couldmatch this person right he's sitting in front of a jury saying there is a point zero zero one chancethis isn't this guy he is using numbers that we associate it with DNA analysis he's using themwith right mark analysis and he is telling juries that he is positive that this guy is the one who
41:22did it or the one who bit the victim this is sending people to prison for the rest of their lifeand i assume he's using the super computer of his brain to calculate these odds right right likelike there's such a world of difference between being like it could be the defendant's teeth versuslike oh it is and it's like this person has been roommates with alligators and snapping turtlesfor like six weeks at this point like really with a lot of this evidence right like there's not reallya database you're running it against you're not putting it in the machine and matching it to allthese other people most of the time you're coming out pattern matching evidence these odds are madeup odds right 99.9 it's like according to what even if this is the bite mark according to what
42:06he seems like one who there's at least an argument to be made that he knew he was bullshittingbut i don't think it was probably always that way what you often see in these cases is thatworking in law enforcement is hard in a lot of ways and can be depressing in a lot of waysright and one of the things that it does is it can really convince you that everybody is hiding acrime or capable of a crime that your instincts are pretty perfect because you thought it wasa sky and it ended up being a sky another example of confirmation bias and so it's not just thatlike someone like michael west or someone like these experts who these detectives who say they'reexperts because they've testified in all these cases it's not just that they have confirmation
42:43bias about the evidence it's that they have confirmation bias about the suspect and so thisleads them to look at any evidence in light of what they think this guy would have doneand the reason they have confirmation bias about the suspect is because they've seen a lotthey start to believe i think if we think this guy did it he did it this is like a perspectivethat i think really pervades law enforcement and drives so much of the wrongdoing we see in thatfield right so much of the injustice there are tons more cases about pattern matching evidencei could go on forever i mean the fbi's hair analysis department had to basically admit thatthere were countless cases dozens hundreds of cases where they had probably used fake evidence
43:27because they were matching one hair follicle to another which turns out not to actually besomething that you can do with dna or where they just like these follicles are identicalso this is not like getting dna from hair this is like looking at a follicle under a microscopelooking at another follicle under a microscope and saying that they're they must have come fromthe same head a follicle is like when you pull out a hair and it's got like a little sack attachedto it right or is it just the hair itself no i think it's just the hair itself okay i mean iremember this happened with kasey anthony right they found one here in her car like this happensall the time we found a hair on the scene and i think more recently as dna analysis has gotten
44:05more sophisticated you're trying to get dna from the hair but very often historically it's justanalyzing did this hair come out of this head it turns out that not every person has immediatelyidentifiable hair that couldn't be matched to anybody else even under a microscope yeah they'renot cabbage patch kids their hairs i mean i feel like that's something that could be like a niceit's like harmony it's harmony for other evidence it's like well these hairs look pretty similarbut who can say thank you yeah yeah in this case the fbi's microscopic hair comparison unit that'swhat it was called found hair matches in 2,500 cases over 20 years and the fbi starts reviewingthese cases a few years ago and they publicly acknowledged that the unit had given flawed
44:49testimony in 95 of those cases 95 percent when you do that kind of oversight and you're like oh manwe really messed this up for decades do you have to do anything else aside from that howdoes that work yeah it depends on a lot of stuff is there a prosecutor willing to revisit the caseis this the only evidence that led to the conviction like in other words there's anunguaranteed right to be retried but now often like if you appeal then probably maybe hopefullya judge or a court will grant your appeal and allow you to be retried but that doesn't alwayshappen and it's not a guarantee so when the fbi starts reviewing the cases that they had in thismicroscopic hair analysis unit of the first 268 cases that they reviewed 32 of the defendants
45:33had been sentenced to death and 14 of those 32 had already been executed even if the fbi had saideverybody that we testified in you're out of prison get out harm has already been done you'vealready been in prison for years you've already lost tons of your life like even in times whenpeople are willing to say like this evidence actually wasn't reliable it doesn't erase thefact that someone was sentenced according to evidence by someone who said they were an expertand they weren't i feel like if you've been through a trial there's already harm right like even ifthey're like not guilty it's like well i've just lost all my money and i've spent however many monthson this yeah fingerprint analysis was like the original forensic evidence right i think it was
46:16in the early 20th century where there was a case where they used fingerprint analysis and it waslike a huge deal it's what we had before dna they're like cd roms or something yeah so fingerprintanalysis is more reliable maybe than like bite marks or the hair analysis but it's still notas reliable as like people tend to think it is so in 2016 the president's council of advisorson science and technology which was called pcast released a report it was basically a report sayinglike forensic science and especially pattern matching evidence is not nearly as reliable aswe have thought it was and it obviously had major implications or should have had majorimplications on tons of evidence used in cases and tons of evidence that had already been used
46:57the report found that the science around fingerprint matching is quote foundationally validbut that it still has a really big false positive rate ranging from like one in 306 to one in 18oh my god right it's like one in 306 as a jury member those might be odds you're willing to takeone in 18 is a very different case right when the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt yeahyou might remember the story the story of this guy named brandon mayfield so in 2004 during themadrid terrorist bombings they pulled a fingerprint off of a bag that was uncovered near the scene ofthe crime right near the scene of the bombs and they sent this fingerprint to law enforcementaround the world the fbi finds a match and they find this guy brandon mayfield and he
47:44lives in oregon he's never been to spain that is obviously a false positive but he got arrestedthis is like the most oregon thing ever to like be accused of committing a crime in a country you'venever been to just two months earlier terrorists had bombed four commuter trains in madrid killingalmost 200 people an international investigation led to brandon mayfield monas husband an americanlawyer who converted to islam mayfield was arrested after this smudged partial printfound on a bag of detonators was matched to his and and you know what's wild about this case islike the spain had written a letter fbi says we have a match spain writes a letter and they saydon't think it's him it doesn't make any sense okay and fbi arrests him anyway a month later
48:36well there's like listen dana the aliens pulled this off somehow when we're going to get to thebottom of it and that's exactly it right you're they're willing to kind of talk themselves intoknots to make a scenario where this guy who like by all accounts has nothing to do with this terroristattack in a different country in a country where he's never been is not tied to any of the likepeople or issues or anything the fact that the fbi would arrest him is so scary to me because likethat could happen to really anybody right so that's just an example of fingerprints whereit's not just that there are false positives law enforcement is willing to act on those falsepositives even when it's very clear they're false positive i have a question for you based on a
49:17pattern that's emerging already in our stories which is like why do you think that people to mekind of surprisingly quick to believe that someone who has like no motive nothing that wouldsuggest they would do anything like this committed a crime that is both logistically very difficultfor them and also doesn't appear to benefit them in any way often law enforcement prosecutorsetc their job is to like quote unquote touch the bad guys you know keep crime off the streetsthey start to believe that like anybody is capable of anything you see it all the time when peopletalk about motive you know they were jealous of this person who they worked with or they werejealous of their ex or they had this childhood trauma that like rose up in this moment and led
49:58them to kill even though there was no reason no motivation no connection no belief and i thinkpopular culture does that too right like you want to see the movie where you don't expect the endingetc etc life and so i think it is a combination of like belief that you can never really knowwhat a person is capable of doing and people do crazy things for crazy reasons all the time rightthe difference between possible and likely is so wide is it possible that brain andmayfield somehow got really into this like group of people who wanted to do this majorterrorist bombing and there was no evidence of that he sent his bag over to them and they likeput the like sure like maybe it's possible like is it remotely likely in any reasonable
50:43conception of anything no the ways in which regular civilians interact with the criminaljustice system and understand it and that includes in popular culture it makes all of us believe thatlike there's way more randomness and uncertainty among what's likely to happen to you than therereally is we rely on this evidence to show us what people did but this evidence that we rely onin its own way is dependent on what we think people would do it seems weird on the face of it butthe more i think about it the more it makes sense that we would find comfort in the idea that likewhy would someone kill somebody and it's like well this inner evil that was always there justemerged and they snapped and yeah that's just what people are like when i think in reality there's
51:22often like a much longer narrative to speak of the only trial that i know of having occurred inthe 90s the oj simpson trial it's like if you take the perspective that he's guilty then it's likehow could we have known and well you really could have like you could have figured out where thiswas all going years and years in advance and it implicates us as a society that we don'tnotice the crimes that we're building towards the last thing i'll say about this is that DNA analysisis also a pattern matching evidence right you're taking DNA from one person and you're seeing ifit matches in a sample of DNA i know that someone else is a sample found on a crime scene what ithink is worth noting about DNA is that like it's certainly more reliable than all of these other
52:02forms of evidence and if you have well preserved and also single source DNA it is pretty reliable imean like overwhelmingly reliable and by single source DNA i'm saying if you have DNA from oneperson in one sample and you're comparing it to one person's DNA in another sample that is a prettyreliable practice the problem is that there are other forms of DNA samples there is simplemixture DNA which involves DNA from two individuals and then there's complex mixture DNAwhich includes samples from multiple people and typically DNA analysis is either a single sourceor a simple mixture which means it's like more objective if you're looking at a complex mixturesample it's very difficult to like separate out one person's DNA from another's from another's
52:48then you're back to kind of not being able to rely on the analysis even DNA analysisshould be scrutinized not every single time but just saying DNA matches on the scene doesn'tmean much right another example of that is trace DNA so there is a great podcast i guess i probablyam not allowed to say that because i was a consulting producer on it so i'm like givingmyself a compliment oh i'm sure that's part of why it was great no you can say that it's called asuspect and it was hosted and produced by a guy Matt share who's a friend of mine and it's abouta man in in seattle who was at a party a halloween party in 2008 only black guy there didn't knowanybody else at the party was held at a apartment complex of like younger kids right out of college
53:32who were like working in tech and lived in this apartment complex and the party was like movingfrom apartment to apartment there are a lot of people there everybody's drunk the next morningone of the women who was hosting the party is dead and this guy gets fingered for the crimeone of the reasons they accused him of the crime was because they found his DNA on the scenewell it was a party so number one it's not super shocking that like maybe his day and was on thescene when i go to a party i make sure to take all my DNA back home with me it's very rude to leaveit at the apartment nothing ever comes off but they did find his DNA on the scene they weren'twrong what they found on the scene was trace DNA a sample of DNA that was like smaller than what the
54:11eye could see basically a tiny particle that's tinier than a tiny tiny particle and they concludedthat like he killed this woman and if you present that to a jury if you say yeah his DNA is on thescene here's what this sample shows here's what his DNA shows same guy it would not be surprising atall for them to conduct people over that this is like us weekly headline writing where it's likejennifer aniston is very sad and it's like yeah do we know that someone said it there you go butit's also like just to show how much our DNA gets everywhere right you walk by someone on the streettrace DNA could definitely be on them right hopefully we're more conscious of that than everlike yeah i assume that everywhere i go i'm just leaving this little trail of breadcrumbs but you
54:50know immanuel fair who the podcast is about sat in jail for a decade being accused of this murderthis is not an example of junk science but this is junk science adjacent so when someone diesespecially under like questionable circumstances right we tend to send their body to a cornerto someone that then will determine a cause of death and that cause of death will like determinewhat police do going forward and at least for me whenever i heard the word coroner or wheneveri watched svu you know it's always like a very technologically advanced room with it seems tobe full of like really cool computers and like you know all these tools and you know then she sayslike probably died about six o'clock probably strangled whatever levidity in the tissues lenny
55:36he was on his back when he died whatever yeah i guess made that up it's always something like thatnow i think it's worth noting it's not that everything that coroner is a medical examer isdo is unscientific because some of it is based in science but it is the actual role that isless of a science-based role than i think we're thought to believe i thought coroners were doctorsi definitely thought that but it turns out that in a lot of places number one the county corneris an elected position and you don't have to have any expertise whatsoever i think the assumptionhas always been that like only people who would have expertise would take these jobs right or beinterested in them and i think it is true that like typically we're talking about people who maybe
56:21have previously worked in a morgue or previously like worked with frankly dead bodies like it'sunlikely i think it's like fair to say it's unlikely that like i'm gonna randomly run forcoroner the job asks for a certain kind of person with a certain kind of expertise but that doesn'terase the fact that we're talking about people who often don't have the training or the expertiseto determine cause of death beyond reasonable doubt and that there's not really kind of like aregular standard or like a regular body coming in to determine whether or not a coroner or medicalexaminer is qualified to be like analyzing the cases that they're taking this can have likeall sorts of consequences many of which i don't even have to describe because i'm sure people
57:00listening could imagine them but it's particularly notable when you think about what kind of connectionsto law enforcement medical examiners and coroners have so just recently within the past couplemonths there was a report released i think by the university of washington that determined that likethere have actually been many more people killed by police shootings than records show maybe twiceas many and part of the reason that there's such a disparity between people who have been killedby police and what the numbers say about who has been killed by police is because of coronersdetermining cause of death which is another way of saying that coroners and medical examinershave protected police by determining a different cause of death than like what actually happened
57:42because like the one thing maybe law and order did depict correctly that we have these experts whobelong to the police and the prosecution essentially or if they don't belong to them thenit's like they know each other they're working in the same ecosystem and it's to me it's weirdhaving a system where trials are adversarial but the prosecution has the experts essentially andthe defense is like well find your own goddamn experts that's a huge part of the problem prosecutorshave at their disposal other arms of the state or at least state sanctioned bodies like law enforcementlike the coroner like the medical examiner as functionally working on their side the same goesfor like crime labs you see it all the time with crime labs the truth is that like they're not objective
58:27it is a yet another kind of like obstacle many defendants have to face or i think what's actuallyoften common too is that medical examiner is determining something with suicide that feelsquestionable or determining something was natural causes that feels questionable a lot of people whodie in police custody or die in a police interaction are said to have died of quote excited deliriumwhich is not an actual thing that's something Victorian women die of in novels yeah yeahexactly exactly we're talking about science that is similar to what they had like the 1400sit's just to say that like because a coroner said it or medical examiner like it's worthfinding out who those people are i think it's also worth noting that like in some states including
59:08california sheriffs and coroners are the same people you elect a sheriff coroner sheriff hyphencoroner i mean that's a cool title but it's still a conflict of interest it's a huge conflict ofinterest first of all i don't think someone has the time to be very good at both of thosejobs and have the expertise necessary for me to elect them but second of all you can imaginewhat happens when a sheriff's deputy is accused of killing someone they're like no i didn'tcase closed yeah i i have investigated myself and that is not what happened yeah i yeahthe person charged with making the decision of what scientific and what's not is the judgea judge is not a scientist they don't know very often when we are deciding people's futures we're
59:49flying blind and so are the people in the room that are charged with making objective accuratenonpartisan decisions in an actual scenario like that probably what should happen is that a judgeshould break for the day at least the day go and do some research you couldn't do enough research tolike actually become an expert but at least could come back and say like i've made a slightly moreinformed ruling about whether or not this evidence is reliable or not so often when we are determiningsomeone's future we are asking people who have a pretty good grasp sometimes on the law or a prettygood grasp sometimes on procedure but how irrelevant that is when we're talking about a topic of whichthey know nothing the american legal system is based on essentially the british legal system
01:00:37right ish yeah ish i think ish is right ish ish ish but anyway it's like even dating from thebeginning of the u.s legal system like science at that time was like you know a feather in a rockwill fall at the same rate in a vacuum it's like okay that's nice and in the first Sherlock Holmesstory Sherlock Holmes is like very preoccupied with the idea that he might have invented a testthat will tell you if a blood stain like is blood or not like is it blood or is it juice and so itjust seems kind of ridiculous that we're soldiering bravely forward with the system that we inventedkind of before science as we now know it even existed i think it's very hard for people whoare not especially not in the sciences to understand that science is always evolving
01:01:21that what we understand today could be very different than what we understand in 50 yearsand that like every single time we're talking about you know this is the best scientist in theworld at the beginning of covid we're giving advice that was based on less information than they havenow and when people change their minds they're accused of like lying or just trying to likewin political points or whatever it is right when like the actual reality is that like people'sunderstanding changes the more information they get and you also think about how like scientificanalysis has been used to perpetuate our most depraved institutions right phrenology eugenicsblack men are more dangerous or more likely to wait rate that has been seen as scientifically
01:02:01based for lots of this criminal justice system's existence if you are the defendant and you arefacing the entire power of the state and you are saying like i didn't do something how overwhelminglyenormous burden that is given all the different kind of ways in which your guilt can be assumedwe tend to think the more types of forensic evidence that can be collected and analyzedthe better and i'm just not sure that's true it's very symbolic to me how a system like thisis created and perpetuated which is confirmation bias holding systemic analysis to a muchlower standard than we hold any other kind of like scientific evidence and a lot of peoplebelieving that they have supernatural knowledge of something that they actually don't i think
01:02:51we all are not all of us but certainly i and a lot of other people are really drawn to the ideaof surrender to some kind of higher power and i think that the way we deal with that like sometimeswe need to remind ourselves to keep it in our personal lives because the idea of science as thishigher power within legal system or the law as a higher power which i think is an idea that ihave felt very drawn to at times and i think i feel about the american legal system at this momentwith like all the information that i have the way uh season two steve brady felt about hisrelationship with miranda which is and i quote there's good stuff here and i have like realreverence like i remember feeling on january six of the last year i was very shocked that i felt
01:03:37the sense of violation about people essentially taking over a government building and i thinkyou can even have that reverence and like love of the law and still be like this is a car that wehave been driving for 240 years and that is like too long to to not do some structural changesin the interest of fairness and honesty i think it's worth mentioning that like not every timethat junk science is used is the outcome wrong so you think about like cases in which the rightguy was put away and there was that expert witness who testified it creates i think whatradley balco referred to as a guardian angel complex in people once you start to say thisevidence is not reliable this is not good like you are presenting as fact something that is like
01:04:29at best a maybe people are very outraged by that the experts in this field who have made careersout of this who have like believed their own hype start to say like do you know how manychild killers i've put away i'm responsible for justice in all of these cases and you're tryingto tell me that i'm not you know it's hard to tell people presenting this evidence as fact isinaccurate and therefore it is wrong to do that even if you're testifying against someone who didthe wrong thing our system does not say that like people who are guilty no longer have the right toaccurate testimony these are the same people prosecutors law enforcement etc who tend to sayif i get to the right result it doesn't matter how i got there right and that we've doubled up on
01:05:12blind spots and it feels like there's this idea of like well both these systems are objective solike we can just completely take our hands off the wheel in a sense every year here comes this listof people who have been exonerated and it kind of analyzes like what went wrong was their prosecutormisconduct was that based on bad science why was the wrongful conviction happening but it reallyundersells and underestimates how many people are wrongfully convicted how many of those peoplewill never have their evidence reexamined or their case reheard how many of those people pled guiltybecause that was like a better call or less risky than going to trial where they're going to face30 years instead of two and so are not entitled to ever like even appeal their sentence because
01:05:54they pled and how many people just kind of get lost to the system these kind of mistakes definetheir whole life we're talking a lot today about innocent people or people who are wrongfully convictedas a rule like i don't actually like to focus on innocent people that much because i think innocentpeople get a little bit too much attention in this system what you learn is that there are a lot ofguilty people who like maybe still shouldn't be in a system like this right and so when i think ofjunk science i just encourage people to not think of it as an isolated problem but indicative of thebroader failures the broader rot of what we consider to be the quote unquote best criminaljustice system in the world the need to change the system like reflects the need to kind of
01:06:36change ourselves too maybe we've reached what is probably my favorite kind of conclusion which isi would call bleakly empowering because like this is all of our responsibility it's all of ourproblem hooray yeah i think that's right this is important for everybody what we end up focusingon is like what the defendant did and whether or not they're deserving of a system better than thisand i would just argue that we all aredo not ever quit if you're truly innocent don't ever quit keep fighting it because the only wayto correct a justice system is to keep fighting it and to bring out the warrants and moles andeverything else that are there that they can correct on it's not always not perfect but it's
01:07:29all we have but we can't quit we have to continue to work with itthank you for listening to this episode thank you to our incredible guest Josie Duffy Riceand if you want to send her tips about junk science in your neighborhood go to JosieDuffyRice.comif you want to support this podcast and listen to some bonus episodes go to patreon.com slashyou're wrong about thank you to Carolyn Kendrick our wonderful editor and producer if you'reinterested in the clips you heard in this episode or in any of the articles that wereferenced in this conversation you can find them in the show notes check them out see you soon
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