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Showing posts from August, 2018

The folly of forensics: lessons from my egg roll.

If you made it all the way through my very long Skeptic article on the criminal-justice system, you know that eyewitness identifications — once viewed as the gold standard of guilt in criminal cases, especially rapes — are now being revealed as the shaky evidentiary tool that law-enforcement officials a lway s p rivately knew them to be. In fully 75% of the DNA-based exonerations wrought by the In nocence Project , there had been a positive ID at trial . Tonight I got a lesson from my egg roll in why so-called "forensics science" should probably be the next to go out the window. Some background. Sunday night after dinner I swept and vacuumed, and this morning my wife and I were both out of the house early without eating breakfast. In other words, nothing took place on the kitchen table all day until dinner. I was the first to arrive home, and in fact, when I walked into the house at about 4: 30, with the sun streaming through the blinds and across the hardwood floors of t