Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Bastards of Forensic Science
Episode Date: April 23, 2024Forensic Science is supposed to provide perfect certainty in the most serious criminal cases. What if it's all a bunch of bullshit? Robert sits down with Dr. Kaveh Hoda to talk about all the myriad co...ns in forensic "science.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast on the internet
that you're currently listening to,
unless you're one of those weird people
who's trying to maximize your intellectual benefit
because you listen to too many weird YouTube grifters
and you've got a different earbud
to a different phone in each ear,
and you're like double podcasting as you read a book
because that's gonna get you the most knowledge
so that you can probably put a bunch of scam books
up on Amazon or get into fucking, I don't know,
real estate fraud.
God, the internet's a great place.
And one of the great things about the internet
is the guest we're bringing on today.
And as a doctor, obviously, Dr.
Kavehoda has made a vow to first do no harm,
which is weird because every time we have him on this show, he kills it.
Kava, welcome to the program.
That was fantastic. I know.
I know. I thought about the one this morning and I was just waiting to use it.
Goodness, I'm going to steal that.
Another day working our fingers to the bone in the podcast minds. Good and I was just waiting to use it. Goodness, I'm gonna steal that. Another day working our fingers to the bone
in the podcast minds, good buddy.
I'm happy to be back.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yes, yes.
Now, Kava, this is coming during a difficult time.
I actually wrote most of this episode
in the bone marrow transplant ward
and then the ICU that my dad was in
as I was doing overnights watching him.
And I have a question for you,
because the hospital I'm at,
I'm not gonna give the precise name,
but I'm in North Texas.
The hospital I'm at, at the bottom floor,
next to like one of the restaurants, has an antique store.
And this antique store is so crowded with stuff
that you can barely walk in it.
And the proprietor and only employee
is a man who seems to be in his 80s
and wears, at least as far as I can tell,
only like three-piece suits.
And I'm, is he the, is this the devil?
Have I found the devil?
Kama, is that?
Wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on.
Let's back up just a moment
because you said there was restaurants
and an antique store.
There's an antique store in the hospital.
It's next to a subway.
That is.
Next to a subway so unin.
I know why you'd want a subway in a hospital,
because you need food at the hospital
when you're watching.
Because nothing says hospital ambiance,
like expired lunch meat.
I don't understand.
I mean, my California mind cannot comprehend.
I've never worked or been in a hospital
in which there are more than, I mean, there is a cafeteria,
but not anything I would say is close to a restaurant.
Yeah, they've got a couple little cafes.
It's certainly nothing like,
nothing that resembles an antique store.
Maybe a gift shop with balloons.
What?
Why are you going to an antique store in the hospital?
What is happening in Texas?
I mentioned this to my doctor brother
who practices in Texas.
And he was like, he was like, oh yeah.
And I was like, what do you mean, oh yeah?
He's like, he's like.
But why?
But why?
He was not fazed by it.
And I was like, this is, I'm like, what is happening there?
And yes, it is the devil.
Yeah, there's no way this is not a needful thing.
No, that's exactly what I was gonna say.
Right, right.
Yeah, don't, there's some weird gin monkey paw thing
to anything that person sells.
Don't buy it.
Cause I've been talking to the nurses too.
And every nurse I ask is like, I have no fucking idea.
It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make any sense.
Unless they built the hospital on the antique store
and the antique store was like,
you cannot change the antique store.
The antique store was there first.
They just had to put a house or a hospital around it.
It's been here forever.
It's been here forever.
Sometimes death is better.
Some say it's older than the hills themselves.
Right.
Kaveh. Yes. Ha ha ha.
Kaveh.
Yes.
You're a scientist as a doctor.
Yeah.
A kind of scientist.
Yeah, sort of.
Scientific method is something I understand.
Yeah.
Yeah, you utilize science.
Correct.
What do you know, how do you feel about forensic science?
You know, stuff like fingerprinting,
you know, DNA analysis, that kind of jazz?
Well, it is interesting.
I feel like there are certain parts of it
that are very interesting to me
and seem to have some good evidence behind it,
like toxicology, DNA stuff.
I think we've gotten fairly good at that.
That's like a, it's like a science, but I don't know.
I mean, a lot of it seems to me, and maybe you'll
correct me if I'm wrong here.
I'm guessing not, because that's what
the topic of today's show is.
But I feel like just because you label something a science
doesn't necessarily mean it's a science.
Like Scientology, for example.
You know what I mean?
So I feel like there might be some parts of forensic science
that are not.
Can I tell you a little bit of a back story on this one?
Sure, please.
So when I was in medical school, I did my psychiatry rotation in a jail.
So, I actually did forensic psychiatry.
And I sat down with a warden once who considered himself like a world expert.
And there were a lot of great people that worked in the jail, believe it or not.
Social workers and stuff I worked with that were amazing. But I'm not talking about them.
I'm talking about this warden who ran it,
who was like an expert in like micro-expressions.
Oh God, oh that's my favorite cop bullshit science.
Yeah, and I remember he sat me down
for like this lecture about it to like go over it.
And it was like fun.
I'm like, will this work?
And I try, like if I look up into the left,
does that mean the person's lying?
You know what I mean?
There's all these little tiny things I was looking for,
but I'm like, I can't believe this is a real science.
Someone would really need to convince me
of the research behind it before I ever like allowed that
in court, not that I'm a judge or anything,
but you know what I mean?
So I'm torn on forensic science
is the long, is a short answer to that
Yeah, I had a fuck I had a fucking cop in Brady, Texas
Pull me over and repeatedly tell me as he was waiting for the dogs because I wouldn't let him search my car
That like I've been trained to recognize lying and I believe that you are lying because like you did this or did that
When you say that you don't have any marijuana in the car
Didn't have any marijuana in the car, but I still wasn't gonna let him fucking search me.
Yeah, no, the best advice I ever got about being an adult
was from my speech and debate coach who got fired
because he had not disclosed that he had an arrest
on his record or something right after this.
But told us if you ever have to lie to a judge,
don't break eye contact.
Just look, a judge or a cop, just look them right in the eye
and tell them what they need to hear for you to go home.
And by God has it worked.
Yeah, no, that's gotten me out of trouble a lot of times.
Yeah.
But yes, as that introduction kind of makes it clear,
there are sciences within forensics,
like for example, matching DNA.
If there's blood at the scene of a murder
that does not belong to the victim,
and then you find a person with an injury
and their blood matches that blood,
might suggest that they're the murder, right?
There's real science there.
I don't think anyone would argue with that.
Likewise, you find some fingerprints at the scene
on a murder weapon, they match another dude, you know, a person that you catch later, that might suggest that, you know, that person
did the murder. However, while both of those things are sciences, both fingerprinting and
DNA analysis do not work as well as people often believe. And there's kind of this whole field
that's grown up around them
because of how solid the actual scientific basis
in both fingerprinting and DNA analysis is.
They've provided sort of like an umbrella
under which a lot of other, or like a canopy
under which like this kind of mushroom cloud
of toxic fake forensic science has also grown up.
I was mixing my metaphors there,
but I think it's forgivable.
Yeah, yeah, I got it.
Anyway, that's what we're talking about today
because all forensic science is a bastard.
That's not entirely true,
but it's as true as forensic science is.
So we'll allow, you know.
On May 30th, 1997, a Boston police officer
entered the backyard of a house in Jamaica
Plain.
He engaged in a short struggle with an unknown person who ambushed the officer and managed
to gain access to his service weapon.
The assailant fired twice, wounding the officer, whose last words before losing consciousness
probably sounded something like, oi, you from Boston.
Sorry, Sophie.
What?
That really, that really hurt.
I was not gonna do my award winning Boston accent.
And the best part is I had no idea it was coming.
That's why it worked so well.
I knew it was coming.
I have the script.
It was a sneak attack.
It really got me.
I mean, look, we've all known Boston cops.
They all sound like that when they get shot.
Oh, it's uncanny, it's uncanny.
Yeah.
Anyway, he survives, so it's not in bad taste.
After shooting the officer, the assailant-
Isn't it though?
Isn't it though?
I don't think so.
I'm not sure you're off the hook, but go on.
I think I'm fine.
I'm letting you have this one.
This fucking Boston police.
It's been so long since I brought the Boston accent out.
The people have demanded it.
I did see color go back into your cheeks when you said it.
You're more alive now than you were two minutes ago.
Yeah.
That's why I got into podcasting,
is to do that Boston accent.
We just got sidetracked by dictators.
So after shooting this cop with his own gun,
which has to be embarrassing as a cop, the assailant started
shooting at a bystander who was standing by a second story
window watching. Thankfully doesn't hit this random person.
And then he flees the scene, leaving behind nothing but a
baseball hat that was knocked off in the struggle. He breaks
into a home near where the shooting had taken
place because he was thirsty. A family is there and they like watch while he
drinks a glass of water and then leaves the cop's gun and his sweatshirt behind.
Now this seems like well that's a lot of evidence you should probably be able to
track this guy down right? Yeah. A ton of witnesses. Right. Yeah.
Anyway, it takes about two weeks for the injured officer to be
well enough to sit in front of a photo array of suspects and
potentially identify somebody. And he picks a guy out of this
lineup, a man named Stephen Cowens, C-O-W-A-N-S.
And he does this on two separate occasions. So the police think,
well, that's probably a pretty good ID.
The person who had been shot at from his second floor ID'd Cohen's too.
Now that sounds again, this is one of those things where if you see this in like a cop
show where you'd be like, well, then it's obviously him, right?
He got ID'd by both people at the scene.
But here's the thing.
And this is something I hope people are getting more aware of.
Eyewitness accounts and identifications are garbage. They're oftentimes
worse than nothing at all. People are terrible at recognizing shit that's happening. I remember
this one moment during the protests in 2020 where somebody pulled a gun after driving their car
through a chunk of the protest. The first thing I heard from a bunch of different people was a guy
just pulled an AR-15 on a bunch of protesters. And I looked over to Garrison
and I'll say, I'll bet you fucking anything it was a handgun. And as soon as pictures
come out, so it's a nine millimeter handgun. And it's not, people aren't trying to like
be lie or fantasize. It's like your memory is bad. We're bad at remembering things that
happened to us.
Yeah. I mean, I assume especially when you're not expecting to, you know, memorize things when it just happens and like catching
it and then looking back. Yeah.
Yeah. And this is why when they train people to, you know, do
jobs like, you know, whatever FBI agents and stuff, there is
training in like how to try and like analyze a scene and I think
it's debatable as to how well that works. But it is a thing
that you need to try and train because we're not naturally good at it.
Now, part of why I bring up the fact
that these are terrible IDs is that both,
the cop is kind of ambushed.
He doesn't get a good look at this guy who shoots him.
He's ambushed and horribly injured.
And the guy who looks at him from that second story window
and then get shot at is not close to him, right? The two who identify Coens as the guy who like looks at him from that second story window and then get shot at is not close to him, right?
The two who identify Cohen's as the guy.
The family in the house
that the assailant forced their way into,
see this, the assailant at close range
and they don't ID Cohen's.
Now, as a journalist,
if I'm just trying to like determine
what I think is more credible,
I'm gonna be more credible to the family
who was right next to the guy and not shot.
The guy in your living room, that makes sense.
You might be able to recognize that guy.
That's a decent ID probably, right?
You have a better shot.
You have a better shot.
Yeah, certainly.
So the fact that these folks who had been closest
to the shooter and spent the most time with him
didn't ID Cohen's should have been a warning,
but their testimony is not what cinched Cohen's conviction
and he is convicted of this crime.
Instead, prosecutors used a fingerprint
found on the glass of water
the assailant drank from in their home.
They bring in a fingerprint expert,
he concludes the latent print matches Cohen's left thumb.
And that sounds pretty bulletproof, right?
Fingerprints are real.
Matching fingerprints is a real thing you can do.
Seems like a good idea. So, Cohen's goes off the prison where he's going to stay for more than six years.
He does not accept this conviction because, spoilers, he's innocent.
So, he fights this as much as he can from prison and the Innocence Project worked with Cohen's for several years and in
this as much as he can from prison. And the Innocence Project worked with Coens for several years
and in 2003, they succeeded in pushing
the Suffolk Superior Court to release the glass mug
that that latent fingerprint had been taken from,
swabs of the mug, the baseball hat and the sweatshirt
that the assailant had left behind to do DNA testing
and see if any of it matched Coens.
And the DNA tests are conclusive.
While the DNA on the hat matched the DNA from the swab,
so they knew that the hat that was left at the scene where the hat matched the DNA from the swab so they knew that
the hat that was left at the scene where the officer was shot belonged to the same person
who drank from that mug, neither test matched Cohen's. Oh wow. Right? Yeah. Tests on the
sweatshirt reveal the same thing and with this new evidence, the Suffolk DA reanalyzed the
fingerprint match that had been used to convict Cohen's. Upon reexamination, it was concluded that the fingerprint was not left by Cohen's.
On January 23rd, 2004, he was released.
He lived in freedom for the next three years until he was shot to death
in 2007 in his own home.
A fright, a really depressing number of Innocence Project.
People who get like released die very soon after getting released
For a variety of reasons including a lot of them, you know, go back into situations where their living situation isn't very safe
Yeah, because the time they've spent in prison certainly didn't give them the ability to get into a safer one. Exactly
I mean, it's also like they they probably pick people who are at risk anyways
Those are the people that are being accused of this are people who probably aren't in fantastic situations
to begin with.
Then they go to jail.
They spend whatever amount of time not making money,
earning an income, learning anything,
advancing their lives, and then they
have to try and start over.
A lot of them are going to be much worse off.
So yeah, I'm not shocked to hear that, I guess.
Yeah.
Now, Cohen's story from the use of unreliable forensic science to convict him to his tragic early death after release is again
Very common and just as common as the fact that he was a black man and the officer he was accused of wounding was white
Next to me, and it's so fucked up. I'm sorry that I didn't have to ask his color
No, no, no, yeah, of course
That was gonna be the the situation here that they were gonna just find another guy that matched the color and that was going to be the situation here, that they were going to just find another
guy that matched the color and that was it.
Yeah.
It happens quite often.
Now next to DNA testing, fingerprint matching is one of the most reliable methods of forensic
analysis we have.
But that fact, which is undeniable, does not mean that it's reliable enough you would want
to risk your freedom
on it.
It does not mean that it's perfect.
It doesn't mean that you can take an expert saying this fingerprint belongs to this person
as red.
You simply can't rely on any of that because there's a big difference between the actual
science behind fingerprints and fingerprint forensic
science. Right? Fingerprinting experts, prosecutors, and law enforcement like to
portray it as a thing of objective science where you get a hundred percent
confirmation of a perpetrator's presence of a crime scene because you matched
them to a fingerprint and that is not true. Basically everything you've ever
heard about forensic science and fingerprint science is
a lie.
And outside of stuff like fingerprints and blood, which do at least have a basis in science,
most of what is done in the forensic field, or at least a lot of it, has more in common
with witchcraft than science.
So I'm starting with fingerprinting, both because people should know that it does not
work the way they think it does, and because it kind of kickstarts the field of forensic science in the modern
sense.
And in the US, that starts in 1911, when fingerprinting first is used in a court case.
So unlike most of what we're talking today, again, this does have real use in catching
people who have done bad things.
The first case in which fingerprints were introduced as evidence was the 1910 trial
of Thomas Jennings, who was accused of murdering Clarence Hiller.
I'm going to quote now from an article by General Mnuchin in Issues in Science and Technology.
Quote, the defendant was linked to the crime by some suspicious circumstantial evidence,
but there was nothing definitive against him.
However, the Hiller family had just finished painting their house, and on the railing of
their back porch, four fingers of a left hand had been imprinted in the still wet paint.
The prosecution wanted to introduce expert testimony, concluding that these fingerprints
belonged to none other than Thomas Jennings.
Four witnesses from various bureaus of identification testified for the prosecution, and all concluded
that the fingerprints on the rail were made by the defendant's hand.
The judge allowed their testimony and Jennings was convicted.
The defendant argued unsuccessfully on appeal that the prints were improperly admitted.
Citing authorities such as the Encyclopedia Britannica and a treatise on handwriting identification,
the court emphasized that, standard authorities on scientific subjects discussed the use of
fingerprints as a system of identification, concluding that experience has shown it to be reliable.
And, you know, that's all good.
This is probably a case of fingerprinting being used to actually, like,
convict a guy who did a crime, you know?
And it's interesting to me that human beings have pretty much always known
that there was potential in fingerprints as a method of identification.
The idea that they are unique to each individual goes back very far.
Ancient Babylonians used fingerprint indentations as part of their records for business transactions.
But fingerprinting didn't enter the criminal justice system in an organized way until the
mid-1800s.
Like most innovations in criminal justice, it was first tested by the British Raj in
India, initially as part of a fraud prevention measure.
A major breakthrough came a few years later in the 1870s, courtesy of a Scottish doctor,
Henry Faldes, who was a missionary in Japan.
Faldes started inking his co-workers' fingerprints after noticing fingerprints trapped in 2000-year-old
pottery shirts.
This led to the first recorded case of a solved crime due to fingerprints.
One of his employees was stealing booze from the hospital and drinking it from a beaker.
Fowls found a print on the glass and matched it to the culprit.
That is apparently the first time a quote unquote crime.
Whom's amongst us in medicine does not occasionally use a beaker for that purpose.
Come on.
Yeah. That's a crime now. That's a crime.
Yeah. It's bullshit. This is the first great injustice caused by fingerprinting.
Exactly. It's interesting to hear this because it's like, we talked about some of the forensic
science stuff before, the stuff I'm a little more familiar with, like DNA and toxicology.
The reason I know about those is because they're kind of
born out of like research, out of like universities,
hospitals, peer reviewed journals, et cetera.
But like some of these other things seem like they're
born out of like law enforcement,
which is like a big difference it feels like.
And fundamentally not scientific.
And even when they're quote unquote using science,
their goal is not scientific
because it's always starting from a,
there's a crime and I need to identify who did it.
And usually I think it, I know who did it,
and I'm trying to find evidence to prove it.
That's gonna be one of the recurrent problems in this field.
Not with every case, but it's pretty frequent.
So Fowlds, he's kind of like the first real,
like, person who's trying to study fingerprints,
like, in an actual scientific measure.
And he does some cool stuff.
He, like, scrapes the ridges off of his fingertips
and then waits for them to grow back
and fingerprints himself again to confirm
that if you, like, fuck up your fingerprints,
they grow back the same way.
He's the guy who, like, found that children's fingerprints remain your fingerprints, they grow back the same way. He's the guy who like found that children's fingerprints
remain the same as they grow up.
And in 1880, he wrote a letter to the journal Nature
and suggested that police should use fingerprints
to identify suspects.
And again, this is not initially like a,
in order to catch them, it's more of like a,
when you have people arrested, we can do fingerprints
and that can help us sort through people.
The idea, though, of using them as part of,
in a forensic sense, starts to pick up steam.
And in 1892, a eugenicist and scientist
named Sir Francis Galton publishes
a book called Fingerprints, which
outlines the first attempt at a scientific classification
of fingerprints based on patterns of arches, loops,
and whorls.
Now, around the same time, this French cop named Bertillon developed his own method of
measuring people's bodies in order to identify criminals.
And as you might have guessed, the science of fingerprinting has always been deeply tied
to scientific racism as these guys all believe that criminals have physiological differences
from law-abiding citizens.
Bertillon's measuring people's bodies straight.
How can you tell from measurements
if someone's gonna commit crimes?
What does their scum look like?
Exactly, these beliefs go hand in hand with the idea
that some races are more inclined
to criminality than others.
But as is always the case with this kind of science,
you have this mix of stuff that's absolute racist,
hogwash, and actual science. And some of what they're doing and trying to like
Classify fingerprints is actual science and is rigorous
The classification system for fingerprints that wins out at the end of the 19th century is a modification of Galton's
It was tested by British police in India and adopted by Scotland Yard in 1901
Fingerprints were accepted for the first time in English courts in 1902, and of course the first recorded court case in the US using fingerprint evidence
is like 1910 and 1911, as previously discussed.
By the mid-century, fingerprinting has cemented itself as the most scientific and unimpeachable
tool for confirming guilt. A whole industry of experts grows up alongside the discipline,
and hundreds of men and women begin to make their careers as experts on fingerprinting for the police
and the court system. In case studies published in scientific journals and in statements to
the media, these experts reinforced the idea that fingerprinting was a hard, objective
science. Mnookin writes, quote, writers on fingerprinting routinely emphasize that fingerprint
identification could not be erroneous. Unlike so much other expert evidence, which could writes, quote, writers on fingerprinting routinely emphasized that fingerprint identification
could not be erroneous.
Unlike so much other expert evidence, which could be and generally was disputed by other
qualified experts, fingerprint examiners seemed always to agree.
Generally, the defendants in fingerprinting cases did not offer fingerprint experts of
their own because no one challenged fingerprinting in court, either its theoretical foundations
or for the most part, the operation of the technique in that particular instance.
It seemed especially powerful.
The idea that fingerprints could provide definite matches was not contested in court.
In the early trials in which fingerprints were introduced, some defendants argued that fingerprinting
was not a legitimate form of evidence.
But typically, defendants did not introduce fingerprint experts of their own.
Fingerprinting thus avoided the spectacle of clashing experts on both sides of a case
whose contradictory testimony befuddled jurors and frustrated judges.
And so you see why this is so powerful, right? Every other kind of expert you might bring
into a court case, there could be a counter expert to say, here's another explanation.
But if fingerprinting is a hard science, there can't be.
It's like DNA, right?
There can't be two opinions on whether or not
someone's DNA matches, right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
No, I mean, if I have the facts right about the O.J. Simpson
case, that was part of the problem,
is that the defense never actually had their own DNA
expert, because I don't think they could find someone that
would do it.
But this is a major issue in general nowadays, maybe forever.
You have someone who seems like a very authoritative figure.
Maybe they have some titles behind their name.
They speak in a certain way.
Listen to my podcast, recent episode about Andrew Huberman, for example.
They seem like a very learned man of books.
Who's a jury to say at that point, well, this person seems to know what they're saying.
This person seems very worldly and intelligent and they seem to be an expert and they're the authority on it.
So yeah, okay, yeah, obviously this is the person that did the crime.
Yeah. And that is like, that's what happens, right?
And it's this kind of sea change in the way that the justice system works because suddenly
you have this thing that is in a total class of its own as far as evidence goes, right?
Now here's the thing, fingerprinting is not like DNA analysis, and by the way, DNA analysis,
while it is real and does work quite well, also isn't perfect.
There are errors.
People make mistakes.
There are mistakes and that is a thing that can happen. But it is an objective science, right? Like there's a lot of study
on that. The fingerprints analysis is not an objective science in the way that you would
consider anything from like medical science to be an objective science. One of the pieces
of evidence for that is that there are no like from state
to state, what counts as a fingerprint ID differs wildly, right? So there's a case,
Daubert that is kind of the case that currently establishes like what counts as science when
you're like introducing expert evidence into court, right. And under the Daubert judgment,
judges are supposed to examine whether or not,
judge whether or not something can be admitted
based on whether or not the expert evidence
has been adequately tested, if it has a known error rate,
and if there's standards and techniques
that control the operation and subject to peer review.
Which sounds reasonable, but judges are not scientists, right? And they often mistake stuff
that sounds like evidence of peer review, but really isn't. And some of the evidence for this
is that like fingerprinting examiners often use point counting, which is a method where you count
the number of ridge characteristics on the prints in order to like say these are identical prints.
But there was no nationally recognized fixed requirement
for how many points of similarity are needed.
Some states it's six, some states it's nine,
some states it's 12, that's not science.
Yeah.
And I'm so glad you brought up error rate studies
because that's sort of like an important part
of like determining if a test will be a good one or not, you know?
Yeah.
And it feels like judges are, not a lawyer, but it feels like judges are more likely to
allow evidence to come in, even if it's sort of questionable, because they're worried about
maybe excluding something that would be important.
So they'll allow it to go in, even if it's sort of like they don't understand the science.
My guess is they would be more willing to allow it than to be strict about excluding
it unless they understood the science really well.
Yeah.
And the problem is that all of these people have really impressive sounding credentials
and they are all part of what appear to be scientific bodies.
And in fact, in a lot of cases, we'll talk about some of these organizations are bodies that a lot of what they do is scientific, but there's just not actually oversight, right?
Like Menouken sums up kind of the current state of how like messy this is well when
they write, local practices vary and no established minimum or norm exists.
Others reject point counting for a more holistic approach.
Either way, there are no generally agreed upon standards
for determining precisely when to declare a match.
Although fingerprint experts insist that a qualified expert
can infallibly know when two fingerprints match,
there is in fact no carefully articulated protocol
for ensuring that different experts
reach the same conclusion.
And that's a problem, right?
Imagine if like cancer diagnosis worked this way.
If like every hospital was like, well, this is what we consider cancers.
I mean, you know, also part of the thing is to some degree,
there is uncertainty in medicine.
Like, say if you had a pathology report and you take a biopsy of something
and a pathologist looks at it, they do have criteria.
They have to be like, OK, is there a certain amount of these types of cells I'm seeing?
And if there's a question, then they reach out
to someone else to review it and second, you know,
and look over it.
But that is known to us, like in medicine.
We're known to like, okay, this is the degree
of certainty we have here.
It's not 100%, but this is what we have.
And sometimes that happens.
So there's a transparency there that's important.
You know what I mean? And likewise, you know, there is a transparency there that's important. You know what I mean?
And likewise, there is a science within the approach
of fingerprint analysis because people have fingerprints
and we know they're generally unique to each person
based on the best data that we have.
But these people are not getting up and saying,
based on this established framework
that is universally agreed upon,
there's this percentage of likelihood that this is a match.
They're saying, I can tell as an expert,
this is infallibly a match.
Right, right.
It's so much more valuable as an expert.
Right, right.
Yeah, and it's messy.
So fingerprinting takes off,
and again, the fact that this is really deeply flawed
and fucks
a lot of people over, it doesn't mean that's what it does in the majority of cases.
I'm not saying that.
I actually kind of suspect that in the majority of cases, it's reasonably good, but that still
leaves a lot of people to fall through the cracks and get their lives ruined by imperfect
and badly applied scientific reasoning.
There was no serious questioning of fingerprinting as a method of forensic science until the
end of the 20th century when DNA profiling began to enter common use.
This questioning started ironically with questions by defendants as to the legitimacy of DNA
matches.
Right?
So DNA evidence starts being introduced in court cases and because the science is so
new and is not as straightforward to understand as
matching to fingerprints
There's a lot more debate in debate in court cases about what it means to match DNA samples and how likely it is that such
Matches might be made an error and that kind of causes some people to go
Did we ever subject fingerprinting to this level of scrutiny? Perhaps we should
We might want to look into this, you know?
Because it hadn't had to answer these questions, right?
It was important, I mean, not to say that Western medicine
and universities and all the stuff that I'm used to
is like the end all be all, but because again,
it didn't come out of those places
where it was already a part of the process, you know?
It was baked into it.
And by the way, it's good that DNA matching
was subject to a lot of scrutiny.
Everything should when people's lives are on the line, right?
Exactly, yeah.
Yeah.
So the sheer act of publicly debating the matter brings new scrutiny to fingerprinting.
And once DNA science was accepted, because it is the best thing we've got when it comes
to this sort of stuff, it helps to ignite a new series of questions as to whether or
not fingerprinting was as rock solid
a discipline as its expert practitioners claimed.
One of the first things you'll hear,
and I'm sure everyone listening to this podcast
has heard the claim,
no two people have the same fingerprints, right?
Now, how would you prove that?
I mean, I suppose you would have to do a ton of testing and you would have to test a bunch
of people and see if there is any people that have the same one and you'd have to have a
pretty big N or number of people involved in this study to prove it.
It doesn't really exist.
Now it is based on the sheer number of people who have been fingerprinted, very likely that
fingerprints are unique.
But this is just common wisdom that started being said.
It isn't something that was introduced
that people started claiming
because they had done a big study, right?
Again, the sheer length of time
that we have been doing fingerprinting,
pretty likely that this is the case,
but it was not something people started saying
because they had a good fucking reason to say it.
It was something people started claiming as an advertising method, right?
Interesting.
And the fact that it is likely true doesn't mean that that's not kind of sketchy.
Right.
And we're dealing with people's lives again.
Again, yeah.
We're being boring stuff.
Exactly.
Speaking of advertising and sketchy, it's about that time.
It's about that time.
This podcast is supported entirely
by the concept of DNA
DNA
Get some
Do be a silicon based life form? No, you're not
If you do get one of those like spit into a thing
Mm-hmm. Oh, don't do those things, people. Those things are bullshit.
They're gonna sell your fucking data
to somebody sketchy. If you do get an ad for that,
that wasn't our fault.
Yeah, yeah.
Also, I might take their money in the future,
but it's bullshit, you know?
It's bullshit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm Scott Weinberger,
journalist and former deputy sheriff.
In my new podcast series, Cold-Blooded, the Apollo Jim Murders, I'm embedded in the cold
case investigation into the death of firefighter Billy Halpert.
It's just a little shame, you know, that they took him from us.
Experience this investigation in a truly unique way knocking on doors uncovering new
evidence including the DNA of a potential killer.
My name is Danny Smith. I'm detective. Uh, with the New York Police Department.
This is Scott Weinberger. We're actually reopening an old case and your name
came up untangling secrets that may reveal the answers to not only one
murder, but almost a dozen.
I thought they were going to kill me. So I kept my mouth shut and I didn't say anything.
All these years I didn't say anything.
Listen to Cold-Blooded, the Apologin Murders on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Neil Strauss, host of the Tenderfoot TV True Crime podcast, To Live and Die in
LA. I'm here to tell you about the new podcast I've been undercover investigating for the
last year and a half. It's called To Die For. Here's a clip.
All these girls were sent out into the world and they were told, try to meet important men, try to attach yourself to important men.
The voice you're hearing is a Russian model agent telling me about spies sent out to seduce
men with political power.
The war in Ukraine is also being fought by all these girls that are all over important cities.
For the first time, a military-trained seduction spy
reveals how the Russian government turned sex and love into a deadly weapon.
If you want to kill your target, it's easy.
You just seduce him, take him somewhere, start having sex,
and then he's very vulnerable so you can kill him easily.
To Die For is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Danielle Moody here, host of the Woke F Daily podcast.
We've been with iHeart's outspoken network for a year and what a year it has been.
Every weekday I navigate our rapidly changing world
alongside our series of fabulous expert guests.
As we head deeper into 2024
and yet another life-changing election cycle,
Woke AF Daily is here to keep you sane and woke.
Woke, not just to the latest headlines,
but also to the collective power we all have.
Woke to the need to build community with those around us.
Woke to how to avoid burnout and woke to the ways we can all find joy in the madness.
Make Woke F Daily with Danielle Moody your podcast destination for 2024 election news and analysis.
And tune in to hear the ways I am working
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Listen to Woke app daily season five
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
And I just want to say to our listeners
who are Silicon based life forms,
I actually, I don't have any issue with Silicon based life.
You know, I'm a big rock monster fan.
I think you guys should have the same rights that the rest of us have.
I'm looking forward to our first rock monster president.
You know, I assume it'll be like the guy from Galaxy Quest.
And I think that would be a lot better for this country to be honest.
Who can say they wouldn't prefer a rock monster
to the choices we're currently looking at?
Yeah, better rock or, ah, boy,
I was looking for a red or dead sort of thing,
but I couldn't with rock or, yeah,
go rock or you sock.
Yeah, I don't think he's going to be able to, like,
accomplish a lot proactively,
but I do think if we were to let a rock monster loose in Congress,
it would be generally good for everyone.
It's the little things just like that scene in Galaxy.
Just like that scene in Galaxy.
It's the simple things in my opinion.
Everybody in that movie knocks it out of the park. Even Tim Allen.
And I hate Tim Allen.
I thought the same exact thing.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Anyway, I can already hear some people saying,
you know, I get that the whole finger,
every fingerprint is unique thing isn't something
that you can conclusively prove,
but you just admitted it's probably true.
You're just kind of splitting hairs
by complaining about experts claiming
that they're sure of something.
And I don't think I am splitting hairs here.
The power of fingerprinting in the criminal justice system
comes from its presumed unimpeachability.
People have been killed repeatedly in large numbers
on the certainty that fingerprint analysts
know what they're doing.
And we have data that shows they often don't.
Here's Mnuchin again, quote,
"'Although some FBI proficiency tests show examiners making few or no errors, these
tests have been criticized even by other fingerprint examiners as unrealistically easy.
Other proficiency tests shown more disturbing results.
In one 1995 test, 34% of test takers made an erroneous identification, especially when
an examiner evaluates a partial
latent print, a print that may be smudged, distorted, and incomplete.
It is impossible, on the basis of our current knowledge, to have any real idea of how likely
she is to make an honest mistake.
And maybe it's much less, but honestly, if 10% of the time, an average fingerprint examiner
is fucking up, that's a size of an
error rate.
That's a lot.
Especially if your life is on the line.
And 34% is real fucking bad.
Yeah, that's a big number.
This is fine if you are making this kind of data aware, if the jury is aware of it.
And if you were saying stuff like, you know, we got some imperfect fingerprints, and they suggest it might be
this person, but our level of confidence is maybe 59%, or
whatever, right that so we think that it's likely, but we can't
prove it. You give that information to a jury, I think a
reasonably intelligent person can put that in context with
other evidence. Exactly. That's not how it's presented a lot of
the time.
You don't have to throw it out. I mean, you should use it, but we need to at least know
the limitations of it and at least be transparent with the science or lack thereof behind it.
This is where we get to the problem where there's not a lot of counter experts.
When there are, it's because someone has the money to pay for them.
The people who do not have the ability to like introduce the doubt that ought to
be present with a lot of these fingerprint analyses are like poor people, you know?
And that's who gets often, you know, it's not a bunch of rich people going to prison
for bad fingerprint analysis primarily.
They can afford the people. I mean, there's DAs who are overworked, I'm sure, trying to like
defend them. How are they going to get that together. I mean, there are DAs who are overworked, I'm sure, trying to defend them.
How are they going to get that together?
I just, yeah, it sounds like it would be a massive undertaking.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, it's too much to ask for the average public defender who is already dealing
with way too many fucking cases on zero money.
Yeah.
So, published studies on fingerprinting tend to be case studies where after conviction an expert will walk the reader through this process
That looks to a layman like a scientific study
But it's not that's analyzing a case in which like somebody got convicted and walking through your work as opposed to like
actually trying to objectively find good data on how often the matches these
people make are right. Because there's not really, again, there's not really any good way to do that.
You often don't find out that someone's been wrongly convicted on the basis of, it'll take 10,
15, 20 years, right? Getting this kind of information on how flawed this field has
took a lot of time and a lot of people have gotten hurt in the interim.
In 2004, Brandon Mayfield was a lawyer in Portland, Oregon, and a pretty prominent one
too.
He had recently represented the so-called Portland Seven, a group of local Muslims who'd
been convicted of conspiring to support the Taliban after 9-11.
That year he went on vacation to Madrid and my God god this man picked the worst time to go on vacation
to Madrid anyone has ever picked. A group of Islamic extremists carried out a terrorist
attack on a commuter train while he was in Madrid that killed nearly 200 people. Because the FBI be
how the FBI do they flew in to help out the Spanish authorities and they identified a partial print on a plastic bag that had contained
Detonators and traced it to Brandon
Brandon who was on their shit list because he had defended these guys they had accused of supporting the Taliban in the book
Junk Science Innocence Project lawyer Chris Fabricant writes to the FBI Mayfield looked good for it
Spanish fingerprint experts disagreed, but the FBI would not back down. A court-appointed expert conducted
an additional examination and confirmed the FBI's conclusions. Mayfield remained
jailed virtually incommunicado for weeks. Only after Spanish police associated
the fingerprints with an Algerian national named Daud Onane did the FBI
admit it was wrong and Mayfield was finally released.
After which he successfully sued for $2 million
and elicited something rarer than money from the FBI,
a public apology.
Oh wow, good on him.
Strong, strong work.
Yeah, very rare.
It shows you how much they fucked up, right?
And also they made the mistake of going
after a fucking lawyer.
Thankfully, I mean, this is obviously, my heart goes out to him for how stressful this
must have been, but at least he had the capacity to defend himself.
Now with hindsight, we can see that the prime reasons the FBI went after Mayfield was that
he himself was a convert to Islam who had represented accused terrorists.
But at the time they argued that their experts
couldn't be biased.
They were using unimpeachable science,
even though their experts disagreed with Spanish experts
who were presumably using the same science.
And this is-
They were more expert, they were more expert-er.
If you're, again, framing this
to the people making choices accurately,
that's no worse than saying like,
well, this doctor says someone likely has this syndrome, but this doctor has a different
conclusion because this is just not something we understand well, right?
But that's not how it's being presented.
It came out later that the court appointed expert brought in for Mayfield's case, the
guy who found a match that matched the FBI's case, had been informed before doing his analysis
that the elite FBI fingerprint analysts had found a match
before he made his report, right?
So that is, like that's bad science.
If someone is conducting, is attempting to like analyze
a fingerprint to determine if it's a match,
you shouldn't tell them beforehand that another analyst
has made a match
because that could prejudice them, right?
It's not blinded study.
It's very unblinded.
I don't know, open-eyed.
Yeah, but that happens all the time with this shit
because again, it has this, it's dressed as science,
but it's not treated that way by a lot of its practitioners,
which is again, a lot of the people
who are criticizing these bad identifications are fingerprint analysts
who do treat it as a science.
My issue is not that those people don't exist,
it's that it is not standardized
that that's the expectation for how a fingerprint analyst
should operate, you know?
This was a public enough fuck up
that a cognitive neuroscientist conducted a rare study into how cognitive bias might inform results in forensic studies.
He got six fingerprint experts and he gave them eight sets of prints to analyze.
Unbeknownst, I love this study.
Oh, I love, I was about to say, I love studies like this. They're the best.
This one's real fun because unbeknownst to them, all the sets they were analyzing came from
previous cases they had analyzed.
So all of these guys had gotten these prints before and made IDs and court cases and then
they're given the same prints but not told they're the same prints.
Oh, that's fucking fantastic.
Two thirds of them came to different conclusions while analyzing the same fingerprints a second time.
That's so amazing.
You know what it reminds me of?
If I made tangent for just one moment,
one of my favorite studies I ever saw,
it was a study of like wine connoisseurs.
Cause you know how there's people who love wine.
They've done this, some variation of the study
a number of times where they took like a bottle of wine and they had it in like a paper bag and they had another bottle of wine in a paper
bag and they said to them, they said, Hey, look, these are like wine aficionados people
who are like, you know, sommeliers, et cetera. And they say, yeah, they said this one is
like a hundred dollar bottle of wine. This one's like a $10 bottle of wine. Um, rate,
review them, use different, use whatever words you want to describe them.
And they would generally rate them very differently.
They would describe them very differently.
And they were the same exact bottle of wine.
And it was just like so objective,
how objective this thing can be.
This happens a lot.
It happens with pot, right?
There's a lot of pots where people are like,
well, this one will get you this kind of well, this one will get you this kind of high
and this one will get you this kind of high.
And like, that's kind of true in that different levels of like different cannabinoids can
affect the high, but like a lot of what people say about like different strains of pot is
bunk and the same thing happens with kratom where they'll be like, well, they've got
this kind and this kind and this kind.
It's like, well, it's just kind of matters how much of the active ingredient is in it.
But it's also like, you know, with a wine sommelier
or with, you know, drug nerds or whatever,
what's the harm of some guy being like,
I know all of the wines that have the best wine taste.
It's fine, you're not hurting anybody.
The worst case scenario is some rich people pay more money
for a fancier wine experience.
With the fingerprint stuff, it's a real problem.
But I do think it's kind of worth comparing to that sommelier study because it is really
similar.
And again, the point here is not that fingerprint analysis is bunk science or useless.
It's that fingerprint analysts are not performing objective science.
They are making judgments based on their opinions.
They are often being informed ahead of time.
We think this guy did it.
Can you tell us if the fingerprint matches?
Which is not how it should work.
It's the same thing with like,
you'll hear a lot about how great fucking police dogs are
and how they can identify if you've got a little bit
of a speck of marijuana in a fucking car or whatever,
full of stuff
They've got these incredible noses and dog noses are that incredible also That's not how police dogs work police dogs are primarily paying attention to when the police officer
expects to find
Drugs and where and alerting off of that. That's how they work
Ask me how I know
Ask me how I know. I really want to know.
Just because I beat him once.
Can we talk about this?
Can we talk about it?
I had gotten pulled over and this is like fucking 15 years over, pulled over with pot
in a car.
They brought the dogs out.
I had been told by an old head that like, yeah man, if you get caught, if you get pulled
over by the police dogs, look anywhere but at the car.
Do not look at the vehicle while they're doing anything because the cop is watching you to
see when you get nervous, when the dog gets to a part of your car where the drugs are.
And then the cop will either that his, he believed that the cops had a secret signal
to the dogs.
I think it's actually more likely that you tense up when the dog
gets near where the drugs are. The cop sees you tense up and the dog sees the cop tense
up. You know, maybe both of those things are happening. There have been studies on this
though. You can actually read into this. They do not work as well as they say they do. It
is easy for police dogs to be biased because the dog doesn't know what it's actually doing.
Right? Right. Right. Right. Dog is trying to make people happy.
That's all the dogs trying to do. Yeah.
So you want me to smell? Yeah, I'll smell now.
You want me? OK, yeah, sure.
Again, dogs are capable of of of that kind of scent analysis,
but that doesn't mean that's what they're always doing.
Just like fingerprint analysts are capable of analyzing fingerprints
on the scene and matching them to a person.
But that doesn't
mean that's what they're doing every time they claim they're doing that.
Right.
Yeah.
Yep.
Bias be a thing.
Bias.
And this is the case with every other kind of investigative technique in criminal justice,
but forensic science is not treated that way.
Part of why is that there's an awful lot of money in ensuring that it is treated as hard scientific truth. The success fingerprint experts have enjoyed in this arena has inspired
other would-be experts to build their own careers, peddling science much more questionable
than fingerprint analysis. But you know what's a lot more questionable than even that, Cave?
Boy, I hope it's some sort of very morally questionable ad.
It is, it is.
It's an ad for, I don't know.
I don't actually know what's more morally questionable
than our current advertisers.
So just buy whatever they're selling.
I'm Scott Weinberger, journalist
and former deputy sheriff.
In my new podcast series, Cold-Blooded,
the Apollo Jim Murders, I'm embedded in the cold case investigation into the death
of firefighter Billy Halpern.
She's too ashamed, you know, that they took him from us.
Experienced this investigation in a truly unique way.
Knocking on doors, uncovering new evidence, including the DNA
of a potential killer.
My name is Danny Smith.
I'm a detective with the Myanmar Police Department.
This is Scott Weinberger.
We're actually reopening an old case and your name came up.
Untangling secrets that may reveal the answers to not only one murder but almost a dozen.
I thought they were going to kill me so I kept my mouth shut and I didn't say anything.
All these years I didn't say anything all these years.
I didn't say anything.
Listen to Cold-Blooded, the Apollo Jim Murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Neil Strauss, host of the Tenderfoot TV True Crime Podcast, To Live and Die in
LA.
I'm here to tell you about the new podcast
I've been undercover investigating for the last year and a half. It's called To Die For.
Here's a clip.
All these girls were sent out into the world and they were told, try to meet important
men, try to attach yourself to important men.
The voice you're hearing is a Russian model agent, telling me about spies sent out to
seduce men with political power.
The war in Ukraine is also being fought by all these girls that are all over important
cities.
For the first time, a military-trained seduction spy reveals how the Russian government turned
sex and love into a deadly weapon.
If you want to kill your target, it's easy.
You just seduce him, take him somewhere,
start having sex, and then he's very vulnerable
so you can kill him easily.
To Die For is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Tamika DeMallory.
And it's your boy, Mike Saunders General.
And we are your hosts of TMI.
New year, new name, new energy, but...
Same old.
And catch us every Wednesday on the Black Effect Network breaking down social and civil
rights issues, pop culture and politics in hopes of pushing our culture forward to make
the world a better place for generations to come.
But that's not all.
We will also have special guests to add their thoughts on the topics, as well as break down
different political issues with local activists in their community. have special guests to add their thoughts on the topics, as well as break down different
political issues with local activists in their community.
If you like to be informed and to expand your thoughts, listen to TMI on the Black Effect
Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
That's right.
We're back, Kava. Yeah, I'm back too.
Fingerprint analysis is fun.
By fun, I mean it's infuriating how often
it does not work the way it's supposed to,
but it is at least based in real stuff.
Now I'm gonna bring us to a true villain, to some absolute
real bullshit forensic science.
And of course the true villain of this episode, Kava, is history's
greatest monster, dentists.
Got me again.
Got me again.
A D A B baby. All dead. Yes. I didn't expect it. Got me again. Got me again. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
A-D-A-B, baby.
All that, yes.
No good dentists.
No good dentists, right.
Right.
So, this part of the story starts in September, 1982, when 22-year-old Teresa Perrin noticed
a sailor hitchhiking near her coastal Virginia home.
Seeing sailors in uniform was not odd where
she lived. There was an aircraft carrier dock nearby, and her husband worked at a nearby naval
base. But when she failed to pick this man up, he screamed at her. And later in the day, she noticed
a similar looking man in a sailor uniform loitering outside her house as she dried her laundry.
She went on with her day somewhat agitated until her husband came home.
She was finally able to get to sleep. She wakes up in the middle of the night to see
a man in a sailor's uniform standing above her. He beats her husband to death with a
crowbar while he sleeps and then he rapes Teresa repeatedly. The granular details of
that, I mean, this goes on. I am telling you these start, this is a hideous fucking case.
What happens to this woman is just an absolute nightmare.
And the whole time she's basically doing everything she can
to like make, keep him happy
because her kids are also in the house
and she doesn't want him to kill them too.
It's just a fucking nightmare.
One thing I do, again,
I'm not gonna try to go into too much detail,
but I do have to note for what comes next
that when the man raped her for the second time, he bit her repeatedly on the thighs. Hard enough to leave a mark.
This is crucial to what comes next.
Teresa survives, thankfully, and the case immediately, obviously, becomes the biggest news in town, right?
This guy gets away, and it's, of course people freak out, right?
There is some
Unbelievably violent horrible man on the loose like yeah, a literal monster on the loose
This is one of those cases where everyone panics and it's like yeah, man
I wouldn't go I'd be sleeping with a fucking gun every night
Yeah, I would be putting the family in the fucking panic room and have a rifle by my goddamn side.
Like you don't already.
Like I don't already.
So Teresa was given a rape kit by a doctor
and her injuries were documented in detail.
She was shown mugshots,
but no clear culprit materialized.
A security guard at the base reported
that he had seen a sailor with blood on his uniform
enter the shipyard gate at 2 30 a.m
I will note that like that seems like well obviously that's the guy if you've known Navy men a
Sailor showing up with blood on their uniform at 2 30 in the morning to go to bed not uncommon doesn't mean they've necessarily
committed a murder
Sometimes that's just how sailors be
Sometimes that's just how sailors be. Given the time Teresa said the assault had taken place,
this guy could not have been the culprit, right?
2.30 a.m. according to her, and again,
she's awake with this guy, he's there for hours.
According to when she said the assault took place,
this guy with blood on his uniform
couldn't have been the one who did it.
It had to have just been a coincidence.
But the DA in this case has the security guard hypnotized the security guard who said yeah
This guy came in at 2 30 a.m. And after being hypnotized the security guard says no no no he came in at 5 a.m. Now
That's already very questionable. I can't think of a softer science than
Hypnotism yes, that is wow that is that is the chinchilla fur of Very questionable. I can't think of a softer science than hypnosis. Yeah, than hypnotism, yes.
That is the chinchilla fur of forensic science.
It's...
It's such a, that was so nice.
Sometimes I'm so proud of you.
That reference right there was one of the,
mwah, beautiful, beautiful moment, beautiful.
So unfortunately, and this is, you know,
we'll talk about hypnotism some other day.
This is kind of really at a peak point in the early 80s of hypnotism being introduced
into court cases.
This also plays into the satanic panic, which is happening around the same time.
But they decided to have Teresa, the DA has Teresa hypnotized as well.
And after being hypnotized, she claims that the sailor who attacked her was definitely the same guy as the hitchhiking sailor
who had yelled at her earlier.
Obviously a shitload of sailors are in town.
The idea that one of them would be a murderer and a rapist
and not the same guy who just like yelled at her randomly
when she drove past him in town,
pretty actually good odds that they're not the same guy.
But the DA, once that's an easier line of logic,
so the DA has her hypnotized
and then she changes her story, right?
To be like, I'm sure it was the same guy.
So again, already just from a fact standpoint,
we're not off to a great start with this case,
with trying to track down the culprit.
Yeah, that's like the reals like movie of the week,
sort of like we use hypnosis,
it's a brand new science out of Europe
to like get these people to like open up their minds more.
Oh, it's terrible, that's so depressing.
It's rough stuff, it's rough stuff.
And based on this very flawed information,
it is decided that the man who had attacked her
must be a sailor on the nearby USS Carl Vinson.
Now again, this is the aircraft carrier that's in town.
Pretty good chance that the guy who attacked her was, but also not the only sailors in
town.
The district attorney on the case, Willard Robinson, asked the captain of the Carl Vinson
to provide the state with dental records for all 1300 of
the sailors under his command.
That way a dental expert could analyze them.
He had already had an expert analyze Teresa's bites and the expert had concluded that the
assailant had possessed a pointed front tooth that was misaligned.
Now extensive analysis did not come forward with any clear identification.
The case languished and the family started complaining
to elected officials and both the DA and Navy
felt extreme pressure to resolve the case.
Then in March, a 26 year old sailor on the Vinson,
Keith Allen Harward, was arrested over a domestic dispute.
He was drunk as hell during this fight
and is alleged to have bitten his girlfriend.
Again, that sounds damning until I note that he bites her after she hits him with a frying
pan, which does make it sound less like this guy is a biting psychopath and more like,
well, this was just a real bad relationship.
That's a very toxic relationship.
The frying pan is an interesting touch.
That's a nice touch.
I mean, yeah, again, you wouldn't call this good behavior, but it's hardly like evidence
that this man is a murderer.
But once he's in custody,
you have got a sailor and he bit somebody, you know?
Not surprising.
He's a biter.
He's a biter.
Yeah, yeah, right?
So he starts to look pretty good
to this increasingly desperate DA
who was really getting pressured to solve this fucking case.
Now, because this guy was on the Carl Vinson
and they'd provided dental records to the state,
this guy's teeth had already been looked at
and experts had analyzed his teeth
and said he couldn't be the man who had bit Teresa, right?
So that's a problem.
Now, I'm gonna read from a writeup
in the National Registry of Exonerations,
which should give you an idea of where this case ends up. Quote, Harward had been among those whose teeth were examined in the National Registry of Exonerations, which should give you an idea of where this case ends up.
Quote, Harward had been among those whose teeth were examined in the immediate aftermath
of the investigation, but he had been ruled out as the source of the bite marks on Teresa
by a civilian dental consultant working with a Newport News City medical examiner.
When Harward came to court, Teresa was there, but could not identify him as the attacker.
At that point, police asked Harward to submit to a
second procedure to obtain a cast of his teeth. The cast was sent to Lowell Levine, then a budding
superstar in the fledgling field of bite mark analysis, who had gained fame for his testimony
linking bite marks to serial killer Ted Bundy and to Nazi war criminal Joseph Mengele. Levine
concluded that Harward was responsible for the bite marks on Teresa's body.
Police showed a photographic lineup to Wade who selected Harward's picture as the man
who came through the security gate with a blood-spattered uniform.
On May 16th, 1983, police arrested Harward on charges of capital murder, rape, robbery,
and burglary.
He is ultimately convicted and he is sentenced to life in prison. He
appealed that and the Virginia Supreme Court did grant him a new trial. In 1986
Levine testified at this, that's the bite mark guy, testified at this second trial
that there was a quote very very very very high degree of probability that
Harward's teeth had made the bite marks. Now that's not scientific language.
So he followed by assuring jurors there that there was a quote, practical impossibility
that someone else would have all these characteristics that Levine found in the bite marks.
And again, what we have here is a real science that is providing cover for a pseudoscience
because dental analysis is very real, very real thing.
You can like, like that's how you got, we identify dead bodies and stuff by their dental
records all the time.
You know, dental analysis is a thing.
This guy is good at dental analysis, bite mark analysis, not a thing in the same way.
I'm going to say you can never identify a bite mark and match them to someone's teeth,
but it is not the same as identifying someone by their dental records.
Can I give an example of this?
Yeah, yeah, please.
Wrestling with my three children and somebody bit me, it left a mark and I was like, all
right, I should be able to determine because it was really deep into my flesh,
which one of the little bastards did this.
And when I held up all their teeth to the bite,
they all looked like they could have gone in.
They all looked like they could have been the one.
There's no way to tell.
There's no way to tell.
I know that's not scientific,
I'm just telling you my experience,
but I feel like I see where you're going with this.
Your experience does hint at the actual science, which is that
you have two problems, key problems when it comes to try to identify a
bite mark in this way.
If the person who is bit survives as Teresa does, once you are bit,
you start to heal that process of reacting to the injury, which includes swelling up,
which can include getting infected,
which can include, which eventually includes
like the healing of the injury, starts immediately.
So by the time your injuries are analyzed,
and it's likely, you know, cops generally,
when they come under the scene of a rape and murder,
the first thing you're doing
is not carefully documenting the bite marks
in such a way that it will be helpful to a forensic dentist necessarily.
Already that bite mark has started to change, right?
In fact, it's going to change immediately because generally like when you bite someone
hard enough, they swell up and that's going to alter the look of that bite mark.
Likewise, if you've got a corpse that, you know, someone got murdered and they were bit,
decomposition also starts immediately.
So you cannot say that the skin,
like human skin is not like a dental cast.
You know?
Right.
And you're exactly right.
There is a difference between someone analyzing teeth,
remains of teeth, and being like,
these belong to this person, or et cetera.
There's a difference between that and saying,
well, this bite is related to this person
because there's all these other factors that tie into that.
There's mechanical factors and all these variables
that like, it seems like it would be difficult.
Maybe there are scientists who can prove me wrong on that,
but I could see this being a much more difficult process
than just identifying teeth.
It is, again, I'm not saying it's a thing you could never do, but it is not in any way
the same kind of thing as identifying someone from their dental records.
But because Levine is the guy who got famous identifying people from their dental records
and now he is testifying about bite marks, it sure seems like the same thing to the,
to again, the people who are not dentists or scientists.
He's an authority.
He's an authority.
Exactly.
Exactly. How you do not believe him.
Now, Harward's testimony, again,
because the Supreme Court gives him the second case
after Levine says, it's impossible for someone else
to have all the characteristics I found in these bite marks.
Harward's testimony includes some pretty good counter
evidence to exonerate him, including the fact
that he had an alibi.
During the time Teresa had been attacked,
he had been at a mandatory drug and alcohol abuse program
after being caught aboard with weed.
He had an alibi.
Also, Teresa specifically recalled the rank
on the man's uniform because again,
her husband works at the naval base.
She knows this kind of stuff.
And Harward's rank insignia did not match the insignia
she recalled seeing
on her attacker.
None of this mattered.
Harward was sentenced again largely on the strength of the bite mark analysis and would
spend 30 years in prison.
Now again, just as a spoiler, he's innocent.
Let's take a look at this expert, Lowell Levine.
At the time of the case, he was the most prominent bite mark analyst in the country.
His CV took a full half hour to read in court, and that was a strategy on behalf of the prosecution.
In the early 1970s though, before this case begins, he was just another dentist.
It's generally a little bit of a, this is debatable, but like some people will argue
that dentists struggle with depression
and dissatisfaction in their jobs at high levels
compared to other health professionals.
High rates of suicide I've been told.
Compared to other health professionals, yeah.
There's some evidence of that,
although it is actually kind of inconclusive.
It is worth noting that between 2003 and 2021 alone,
the number of dentists experiencing
extreme anxiety tripled.
Again, that might have more to do with COVID than anything else.
I don't know.
It's inconclusive, but I bring this up just because the young Dr. Levine seemed kind of
unfulfilled in his career cleaning teeth and more interested in the sexy, daring work of
a forensic detective.
He wrote an article for New York Journal of Medicine titled Dentistry and Emerging Forensic
Science.
Byte Mark analysis had never been used in a court case before, but Levine pitched the
idea as Chris Fabricant notes in the book Junk Science.
To truly gain acceptance by his colleagues as a forensic scientist and recognition as
an expert, Levine advocated for some sort
of certification.
The dentists had to more than contribute to victim identification.
Byte marks could be very valuable to be able to establish the identity of the perpetrator
of the bite for legal purposes, Levine argued.
But he also acknowledged that there was a sea of knowledge we must accumulate before
we are willing to make positive identifications in court involving homicide cases and he was candid about
the lack of an objective scientific basis to the new technique. As a result
bite marks will never be truly comparable to a fingerprint since we
cannot reproduce the three dimensions of the bitten surface. So that's what he
writes in the 70s and that's all kind of reasonable. I think it's very
reasonable. I feel for the think it's very reasonable.
I feel for the guy, I'll tell you why.
I'm a gastroenterologist, as you know,
and I've been pitching this idea
of being a forensic proctologist
and solving crimes through the dead anus,
like reading rings on trees sort of thing.
Right, right.
I've been pitching the show to NBC for a while.
I haven't gotten any positive feedback yet,
but I'm not gonna stop, because I think there's something to this.
And so I understand where this guy's coming from. I get it.
Yeah, it's like mind hunter, but for butts. Butt hunter.
Butt hunter.
Yeah.
Well, there it is. Nailed it.
Ma'am, ma'am, I know you're very distraught right now because your whole family was murdered,
but what can you tell me about what the inside of the man's ass probably looked like?
We're gonna need to look at your husband's butt hole.
I'm sorry.
So again, this guy writes like 10 years or so before the Harward case, bite marks will
never be comparable to a fingerprint.
They can't be for very basic reasons.
Ten years later though, Levine is a board certified member
of the American Board of Forensic Odontology.
And he testifies scientific certainty
that Mr. Harward caused the bite mark
on Teresa Perrone's leg.
I think 10 years ago he said,
you couldn't do with bite marks.
And his certainty was so convincing
that the two dentists who had ruled
that Harward hadn't been the biter
changed their testimony based on his.
So how he and his colleagues accomplished this was that they forced their way into the American
Academy of Forensic Sciences and as he'd written, created a board certifying entity to ensure
they could back up their claims whenever they would analyze a bite mark with titles that
sounded impressive to judges and juries.
This all started with a conference at a hotel in Chicago with Levine and seven other dentists
who had been working ad hoc as experts for prosecutors at local medical examiner offices.
They recognized how much money and respect could be theirs if they locked down a more
formal role and they knew the AAFS was the way to do it.
The American Academy of Forensic Sciences was the most influential body in the field,
and membership was seen as something of a rubber stamp that whatever forensic science
you were pushing is the real shit.
This is a very clever plan.
These odontologists knew that if they get in and
if they, you know, have suddenly a certification, that's going to make it impossible for any layman
defense attorney to question their claims, which is going to make them very valuable for prosecutors.
They are looking at what's happened with fingerprint experts and they want the same thing for bite marks.
The AAFS obviously includes a lot of real experts because there are real forensic scientists
and people in the AFS are trying their level best to help solve horrible crimes.
But it also includes a lot of grifter assholes who want money and respect and don't care
how many people get wrongly convicted for that to be possible.
So when, you know, again, I say all this book because I'm deeply critical of this organization
for what comes
next and also I think a lot of the people who are not odontologists in this organization
probably see what Levine and the others are claiming about bite marks and assume they
know their shit because they're doctors.
Yeah.
Sort of.
And because, not just because of that, odontologists had always been a big part of forensics because
dental records are, that's a real way to identify remains, you know?
So these folks feel like Levine and his crew are the real deal, even though bite mark analysis
has nothing to do with ID and corpses via dental records.
And I want to read a quote from Fabricant's book, just sort of laying into how flawed
this is.
Bite mark analysis involves subjective interpretation of a bruise on skin and guessing whether it
could have been made by teeth, and if so, whether a particular suspect's teeth made
the mark.
Few appreciate that the sub-disciplines of forensic odontology have nothing whatsoever
to do with each other, though they can be made to sound like they do.
Forensic dentists identify people through their teeth, and through the bite marks their
teeth make. that sounds straightforward
But it's actually more like a geologist claiming that because he can identify rocks
He can identify the rock that was used to bash someone's skull and geologists out there
There's a lot of money for you if you want to take that one up
so
Business idea number 33. Yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah
using real forensic dentistry as cover Levine and cadre of, I can't call them grifters
legally, but I'm very critical of these people, slide into the AAFS.
They are accepted despite the fact that there's not a lot of them and crucially, there's not
any rigorous scientific data laying out the objective best practices for comparing bite
marks to teeth.
A lot of real experts might point out that there are deep flaws in the, again, what everything
I've said about like tissue, it's kind of the only really good bite marks that you can
do a cast of someone's teeth and match to the bite mark is what are called, it's basically
like cartilage bites, right?
Like if you get bit in the nose, you can sometimes get a really good bite mark from that because
cartilage keeps the mark better.
It doesn't heal as well.
Right.
So, this is, again, these guys are real dentists.
They know this.
They know that if they want to make the case that this is a real science, they need a famous
court case that they solve with bite mark analysis.
And because very few bite marks can actually be analyzed
with rigorous science, they're kind of like waiting
for a while to find the perfect case
to like make a big splash with.
This is a tough thing.
You need a case that's horrific enough
that it captures imaginations and gets media attention
and bite marks need to be involved somehow.
And most importantly, the suspect needs to be poor
You know so that he can hire experts of his own
And it's it's so it's such a bummer to take a step back for a second and be like there is enough
Bite related crime like there's a vicious attack so
Terrible that people are biting in this animalistic way
Victims biting people like this is like a thing that's developing that's that's kind of a weird concept for me to understand
Like that. Yeah, yeah common enough that this is even something that they're trying to look for
Yeah, yeah, it is people are the worst
In February of 1974
Levine and his colleagues got their dream case a
Levine and his colleagues got their dream case. A 73-year-old woman was beaten, stabbed in the genitals, and murdered.
She had been bitten on the tip of her nose, and it created the perfect bite mark for forensic
dentistry.
Levine had written two years prior about the need for such a 3D bite mark, which was rare
to establish the legitimacy of his field.
Now they had it.
The prosecutor in this case suspected that Walter Marx was the guilty party because he
had rented a room from her.
But there was no actual evidence that he had committed the crime.
So the prosecutor reached out to three dentists and they responded by saying the judge needed
to subpoena Marx for a cast of his teeth.
Marx refused and so a judge jailed him for six weeks until he complied.
Now Fabricant notes that the mere process of forcing someone to have a mold taken is
biasing.
It could bias the people analyzing that mold because, well, why would this be taken unless
there was a reason to believe this guy was guilty?
Those structures were set up within the field of bite mark analysis to ensure the people
comparing molds of wounds and teeth were objective, right?
Looking at the information purely as information rather than acting as paid members of a prosecution
team.
Jerry Vale, one of the dentists brought in for the case, was over the moon with excitement
about the quality of the bite marks in this specific case.
He convinced the judge that he was an expert and Marx was convicted.
The prosecutor later told the LA Times, there is no question, but this case is going to
go down as the most significant bite mark case in forensic history.
People v. Marx became the foundational case in the field of bite mark analysis, even though
it opened by acknowledging no established science of identifying persons from bite marks.
So that's good. The problem here, and you're probably going to go into,
is that this is the fundamental difference
between law and science, is that now this is set as precedent.
Now, in the legal sense, they're going to be like, OK, well,
we've done this one thing.
And it seems that, I mean, if what I've watched on TV
is correct, again, I'm not a lawyer, if what I've seen is correct, then it's like they're going to use that as
precedent later in another case. Whereas science is the opposite. You don't go based on precedent,
you go based on things are constantly changing. It's always evolving. It should be,
this should be progressing. It's a problem with COVID, for example, you know, with our knowledge
on COVID. If science was based on precedent,
like oncologists would be like, well,
we really think this chemotherapy thing might help me.
Like, well, no, no, no, I'm sorry.
We established with precedent
that we melt people's cancer with fire, you know?
Like that's what we've been doing for 1300 years.
The precedent is clear.
Right, but now it's a precedent
and that's all you need in law.
Like precedent from a hundred years ago about whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, Kava, that's the end of part one.
In part two, we have a lot more things that
are going to make you angry.
But first, why don't you make the audience
know where your pluggables are?
Yes.
You can find my podcast, The House of Pod.
It is a humor adjacent medical podcast. We look at the intersections
of public health and social justice sometimes and pop culture and it's fun. And if you like
Behind the Bastards, you're probably going to like our show. We're similar, but not as good.
So check us out with that's a pretty good sell, right? We're not as good check this out anywhere You get podcasts and if you want to follow me on socials
The cave look up cave MD or look at the house of pod
You know Kava I found this is one of my life hacks that you listeners at home can take
People really like and trust you more when you use self deprecating humor
So I've started whenever I meet new people saying, hi, I'm Robert.
And just so you know, three years ago,
I was involved in a hit and run that killed seven people.
Yeah, that's a great way to break the ice.
It makes him trust you like, oh, you know, this guy's not,
you know, all, you know, up in his own bullshit about stuff, right?
You know, he makes mistakes just like me.
He killed seven people in a hit and run, you know?
And they're like, this is a Wendy's, sir.
What do you know? And they're like, this is a Wendy's sir. What are you doing?
I have a hamburger.
All right.
That's all I got.
Part one's done.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,
or check us out on the iHeart radio app,
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I'm Scott Weinberger,
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