Legal Domestic Propaganda : NEWS

"To understand the potential costs of failing to engage at the level of method, consider theInnocence Project’s recent investigation of 268 criminal trials in which evidence from hair analysis had been used to convict defendants. In 257 of those cases, the organization found forensic testimony by FBI scientists to be flawed — a conclusion the FBI does not dispute. What is more, each inaccurate analysis overstated the strength of hair evidence in favor of the prosecution. Thirty-two defendants in those cases were eventually sentenced to death, of whom fourteen have either died in prison or have been executed. This is an extreme example of how straightforwardly deferring to expert opinion — without considering how those opinions were arrived at — is not only an inadequate truth-seeking strategy, but a potentially harmful one."

Robert Herritt, "Hard to Believe," The New Atlantis, Number 48, Winter 2016, pp. 79–89. Retrieved Sept 6th 2016 7:45pm

Legal Domestic Propaganda

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The Myth of Scientific Infallibility

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