SCOTUS? That civil rights trampling, Bush suckling, damn right win... Wait. I now have better protection against the government? wha??

ellesar: You bunch of hippies eschewing the greatness of fewer drug addicts getting prosecuted for breaking the law will change your turn when your famillies end up dead because some drug addict gets off and inevitably escalates his criminal activity to murder. You may not think that smoking pot is all that illegal but its a proven gateway drug to things like herione. All of that leads to stealing which leads to murdering and worse.


Prove it.

vertiaset: give me doughnuts

vertiaset: give me doughnuts

"Rights, sir, human rights. The Bible, the Code of Hammurabi and of Justinian, Magna Carta, the Constitution of the United States, Fundamental Declarations of the Martian colonies, the Statutes of Alpha Three. Gentlemen, these documents all speak of rights. Rights of the accused to a trial by his peers, to be represented by counsel, the rights of cross-examination, but most importantly, the right to be confronted by the witnesses against him, a right to which my client has been denied. ... The most devastating witness against my client is not a human being. It's a machine, an information system. ... I repeat, I speak of rights. A machine has none. A man must. My client has the right to face his accuser, and if you do not grant him that right, you have brought us down to the level of the machine. Indeed, you have elevated that machine above us."

Edited for truth.



You mean edited out of ignorance and prejudice.

No, I was right. Your book has no place in a court of law.

Sure it does. Why? Because it is an important historical document in the development of Western Jurisprudence. If you do not acknowledge this then you are ignorant. If you do and still believe the way you do then you are prejudiced.

I suspect, based on your posts, that it is a combination of both.

Your knowledge of both the bible, and the development of our system of laws, is sadly lacking. It verges on pathetic.

ellesar: Well guess you are proof of what pot does to your brain. Random stupidity quoted in bullet form FTW!

EVerything I said is supported by life...

Clean and sober, but not as foolish as you sound.

I'm not falling for it, troll.

Take your non-rebuttal and character assassination to some other thread.

/assassin, derived from the word hashishin, smokers of opium tar. See drugs cause murder!
TA-DA!
//go away tard butt

Dracolich: First off, they should be there because of the reasons in JefferyScott's comments.

Most of his arguments could have been handled by someone with general knowledge of the field and the procedures each testing facility uses.

Dracolich: Furthermore, the sample itself was the evidence. The evidence was looked over by the technician who formed a conclusion about it and then made an accusation by the very act of interpretation of those results.

What are you talking about? Lab techs don't know anything about the case, they are just handed samples and told to do something with it. For all they know, they could be getting someone off of a murder/rape charge. They simply say what is or isn't true based on the results they get.

Dracolich: Easy example of this: test a shows heroine in the bloodstream. Sample 1 tests positive for test a. The logical conclusion here is that there is no logical conclusion. To say that there's been heroine use violates the correlation/causation thing. You need a person at this point to clarify why they don't think it could be anything else like poppy seeds in food that they ate. This person could be wrong. It happens a lot with chemical testing, and new tests replace old ones all the time because it's very difficult to find a perfect test for organic compounds.

Lab techs don't get any back story, they are only given a sample and told to test for xxxxxxxx. Any clarification of what other things it could have been can be made by someone with general knowledge of the subject matter from the test results. In fact, the lab tech would be the last person who would know this because they wouldn't of known if poppy seeds were eaten earlier or anything like that. They simply get numbers, document them, and then say what they mean. If the numbers look off and you want to argue their interpretation then sure, bring the tech in. Otherwise, it is just a huge cost to the state and probably hurts the defense rather than helps them. Not only will the jury have a 99% certainty looking at them, they will have the lab tech there telling them everything was done 100% correctly and by the book.

tedbundee: brukmann: KickahaOta: Marcus Aurelius: Let's hope this puts a nail into the coffin of red light and speed cameras at the same time.

/i call the speed camera as my next witness

This is always brought up in discussions like this. Which is sort of unfortunate, because it's always wrong.

A speed camera is not a witness, any more than the speed limit sign on the highway is a witness, or any more than the radar gun in a patrol car is a witness. A speed camera is a piece of machinery. It is a tool. It has no independent intentions. It does not give testimony. You cannot cross-examine it.

The picture produced by a speed camera is a piece of evidence. You cannot cross-examine the picture either.

If you believe that the speed camera is inaccurate, then there are any number of ways you can present that argument in court. But cross-examining a piece of machinery is not one of those ways.

Okay smart-guy... I think you have to explain to us troglodytes how the printout of a piece of machinery in a lab is different than the image produced by a camera or the output of a velocimeter? Because there is a signature of a lab tech on the piece of paper that certifies his belief in the results of the machine's output? That's the same as someone signing off on the calibration of a speed camera. His belief is based on trusting something beyond his own senses. Unless they have people that swish the blood around in their mouth of which i'm not aware...

Anyone?

I'm gonna take a swing at this:

The evidence produced by a lab is affected by the person carrying out the procedure. The evidence produced by a camera is automated and should produce identical results each time.

However, maybe you could argue about how soon the light goes from yellow to red versus other intersections and call in whoever programs them and cross-examines them?


That's probably close to the answer. My main objection is that people often inflate the importance of labs and doctors. If they read A, B, C on a screen and report to the court A, B, C indisputably implies X, the interpretation might as well have been entirely mechanical, like a picture. The machine to do every part of that mechanical process has simply not been invented yet.

Google, i would like my Tricorder now plz.

Pathman: NuttierThanEver: benlonghair: NuttierThanEver: Just another example of how the legal system continues to fark it up when dealing with science.

What? This is a great ruling. Instead of juries being told that "this is science, that makes it true," defense attorneys can cross examine the tech who will explain that these tests aren't necessarily perfect.

You can present the data on the sensitivity and specificity of a test and then present data that sheds light on the risks of false positives of any tests without having to demand that the tech who put the test in a machine 1000 miles away be present to question directly. You want to cross examine the tech that collected the samples? Fine, that makes sense.
But demanding to have a lab tech be present just explain that it was he that but chemical A into beaker B and then hit the switch on the PCR machine is just assinine.

this.

/scientist
//farking up a PCR right now.

DNA evidence is actually one of the most "transparent" processes currently admissable. This is due to the heavy push-back of defense when it was first introduced and juries didn't know what to make of it. The forensics that are widely accepted as fact, such as fingerprinting, are the ones that need serious help.

Read the Popular Mechanics article on fingerprint interpretation and the fact that only 2 out of 6 "experts" get the same result on the same fingerprint as the last time THEY looked at it.

Psychomancer: give me doughnuts: Firemarshalbill: give me doughnuts: vertiaset: give me doughnuts


Sorry for the knee-jerk reaction, but I've been in most of the circuit and district courthouses in Kentucky, and far too many of them had the Ten Commandments posted prominently behind the judge. Always got my shorts in a wad whenever I saw it.

Because you are a douche.

Wow. As an citizen, you suck.

ATTENTION: ELLESAR IS EITHER A TRUE, MOUTH-BREATHING IDIOT WHO PAID BEST BUY TO CONFIGURE HIS COMPUTER AND INTERNET CONNECTION OR YOU ARE ALL BEING TROLLED BY AN UNORIGINAL AND UNFUNNY PERSON.

Don't feed him.

Denial_of_Death: KickahaOta: A speed camera is not a witness, any more than the speed limit sign on the highway is a witness, or any more than the radar gun in a patrol car is a witness. A speed camera is a piece of machinery. It is a tool. It has no independent intentions. It does not give testimony. You cannot cross-examine it.

Disagrees:



"Rights, sir, human rights. The Bible, the Code of Hammurabi and of Justinian, Magna Carta, the Constitution of the United States, Fundamental Declarations of the Martian colonies, the Statutes of Alpha Three. Gentlemen, these documents all speak of rights. Rights of the accused to a trial by his peers, to be represented by counsel, the rights of cross-examination, but most importantly, the right to be confronted by the witnesses against him, a right to which my client has been denied. ... The most devastating witness against my client is not a human being. It's a machine, an information system. ... I repeat, I speak of rights. A machine has none. A man must. My client has the right to face his accuser, and if you do not grant him that right, you have brought us down to the level of the machine. Indeed, you have elevated that machine above us."

Wow, Samuel T. Cogley, attorney. Did not expect to see him here.

Also, where the hands bagged?

///Hardly obscure.

dragyne:
I'd rather let a million murders free than convict an innocent man

False choice.

Zoultan: SCOTUS? That civil rights trampling, Bush suckling, damn right win... Wait. I now have better protection against the government? wha??

The great Republican hate machine has to go underground now. They realized their tea-bagging was weak. The best way to help their chances of survival at this point is to restore the power of drunken hillbillies to resist authority. Once they return to the presidency this will of course be overturned immediately and they will bring the iron fist down again with an even bigger S.H.I.E.L.D.

/whargarrrbll off

tedbundee: brukmann:
Okay smart-guy... I think you have to explain to us troglodytes how the printout of a piece of machinery in a lab is different than the image produced by a camera or the output of a velocimeter? Because there is a signature of a lab tech on the piece of paper that certifies his belief in the results of the machine's output? That's the same as someone signing off on the calibration of a speed camera. His belief is based on trusting something beyond his own senses. Unless they have people that swish the blood around in their mouth of which i'm not aware...

Anyone?

I'm gonna take a swing at this:

The evidence produced by a lab is affected by the person carrying out the procedure. The evidence produced by a camera is automated and should produce identical results each time.

However, maybe you could argue about how soon the light goes from yellow to red versus other intersections and call in whoever programs them and cross-examines them?

I'll take a simpler swing at this.

The person who ran the lab test is a person. People can be cross-examined.

The speed camera is a machine. Machines cannot be cross-examined.

Let me put it back in terms of the case that started all this: The police seized a substance that they thought might be drugs. They sent that substance to a lab. An employee of the lab ran some tests, then wrote up a certificate that said 'I have tested this substance in accordance with standard procedures, and I conclude that this substance is illegal drugs.'

Now, if the prosecutor introduced, say, the output from one of the testing machines, then that would be a piece of evidence. It would not be testimony. The testing machine could not be cross-examined. The defense could introduce all sorts of other objections -- "How do we know what was tested? How do we know the machine was calibrated? How do we know there wasn't cross-contamination?" and so on -- and there would be all sorts of ways that those angles could be pursued in court. But "I want to cross-examine the machine" would not be a valid objection.

That's not what the prosecutor did. The prosecutor introduced the certificate, prepared by the lab employee, as evidence that the substance in question was illegal drugs. That certificate was prepared by a human being. It was unquestionably prepared with the intent of being used in a particular trial. That certificate was testimony. If that same human being had stood up in court and said the same thing, the defense would have the right to cross-examine him. And the Supreme Court ruled that that right didn't go away simply because the employee wrote his conclusions down on a piece of paper rather than giving them directly to the jury.

Harmania: ellesar: SpectroBoy: ellesar:
You can dismiss this all you like, but claiming I'm trolling is a cheesey way to avoid the points I'm making. Its not that hard to understand.

This is like raising a kid. When you let the kid get away scott free when he does small things, you end up having to beat them silly when they do buig things. Because of your inaction, it will happen, its only a matter of time before they progress to something really really bad. Then whos fault is it? Yours because you could've nipped it in the bud early on.

Same deal here. Guys starting smoking pot, which leads to Meth, which leads to coke, herione, silly smack, jenk'em, etc. Then as their habit grows, their ability to gather the resources to provide for their habit is diminished. So they start stealing which leads to murder. Now if they are stopped early on, they get the help they need and don't progress to the really bad stuff.

The slippery slope/gateway drug argument has never been proven, and for good reason. The connection doesn't exist. If it were true, wouldn't everyone who drank alcohol or ingested nicotine would go through this same process? What does happen more often is that people who are fed this incredibly fallacious logic in place of actual information discount all of it when they find out some of it is untrue. Every year, students are told that smoking marijuana will automatically lead to cocaine, heroin, Satanism, and rampant UFIA. When they smoke marijuana once (as many teenagers do) and discover that these things do not come to pass, why should they trust any of the other information they've been given about drugs and addiction?

Your argument has no real merit - it's spouting the same crap we've been getting since Reefer Madness, and has never come to pass.

(Not to mention that taking a bit more are with your spelling/editing would make you look less like a troll.)

I type fast, so I misspell alot. If that's all you have to say, then you don't have much. Its the internet, not a freaking term paper.

How do you explain the millions of people who start with things like pot and end up taking much harder substances? I never said that everyone would end up that way, but a statstically significant number of them do. That's proven in drug rehabs around the world, which I have been to a number of.

You just want to ignore reality and spread your misinformation so you can smoke pot when you get off from work. You discount all the evidence to the contrary but stating "well its been proven no true", except that it hasn't and you are wrnog. So I will use your tactic "its all been proven true"! You are no different than those who say the world was created totally at random and that all of the millions of conditioins came together to create this planet all on their own. Its statstically impossible, but ignore that and continue on with your reality, all the while claiming to be scientific.

Well this is the easiest way to end the war on drugs.

I was on a grand jury in NY for a month and almost all of the cases were drugs with a written report from the lab. There is no way those guys will be able to make every court date, and they aren't going to hire three times as many scientists.

griffer: ellesar: Well guess you are proof of what pot does to your brain. Random stupidity quoted in bullet form FTW!

EVerything I said is supported by life...

Clean and sober, but not as foolish as you sound.

I'm not falling for it, troll.

Take your non-rebuttal and character assassination to some other thread.

/assassin, derived from the word hashishin, smokers of opium tar. See drugs cause murder!
TA-DA!
//go away tard butt


Oooh you can call me a name, just not refute anything I have to say. For someone claiming to be so smart and above it all, you have a weak game. Using big words to say "I have nothing to say" doesn't make you cool junior. Just because I don't fall in line with the party line here like a good little hippie doesn't make your claims true. And just because your little hippie friends chime in agreement with you doesn't make it true either. Life tells us what's true and life says you are wrong.

VelcroFez: The dissenting opinion was pretty brutal:

"It is remarkable that the Court so confidently disregards a century of jurisprudence. We learn now that we have misinterpreted the Confrontation Clause - hardly an arcane or seldom-used provision of the Constitution - for the first 218 years of its existence."

Look, just because Scalia said it doesn't mean it's wrong. The Confrontation Clause says you get to CONFRONT THE WITNESSES AGAINST YOU. If the Court has been interpreting it wrong all this time, then yay Scalia for finally rectifying the problem.

I think Ginsberg dissents sometimes just because she can.

ju66l3r: dragyne:
I'd rather let a million murders free than convict an innocent man

False choice.

Please elaborate.

griffer: ATTENTION: ELLESAR IS EITHER A TRUE, MOUTH-BREATHING IDIOT WHO PAID BEST BUY TO CONFIGURE HIS COMPUTER AND INTERNET CONNECTION OR YOU ARE ALL BEING TROLLED BY AN UNORIGINAL AND UNFUNNY PERSON.


Don't feed him.


lol, you really are pathetic. You are no different than the Westboro loons. Just shout that a person has nothing to say and don't deal with any arguement against what you have to say. Its been done time and time again in history and its just as pathetic and sorry now as it always has been.

The opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, has prosecutors and judges shaking their heads in disgust and defense lawyers nodding with satisfaction at the notion that the Constitution's Sixth Amendment guarantee that defendants "shall enjoy the right ... to be confronted with the witnesses against him" is not satisfied by a sheet of paper.

So now it's time for another court case to decide if a lab technician performing a DNA test qualifies as a "witness" against the defendant, or if the result of his analysis qualifies simply as "evidence".

Absence of witnesses is not absence of evidence.

First of all, the ruling states that lab analysts are the people who will be required to testify, not lab technicians. There is a difference. A lab tech performs the experiments, but the lab analyst looks at the results of the experiment and uses it to judge the case. On CSI Grissom is a lab analyst, while Hodges is a lab tech. Grissom should testify in a case, because his opinion of an experiment determines whether a person is innocent or guilty, while Hodges shouldn't have to, since Hodges merely mixes the solution. For instance, in order to get authorship on a paper, you have to provide analysis and insight, not merely obey the orders of the person who will look at your results.

This ruling makes sense, since the lab analyst looks at the evidence and becomes a witness as to what the evidence happens to be saying.

sinisterben: CygnusDarius: gorgor: If they swear on a bible God should show up.

/then we can kill him again

god-mode on.

IDDQD

IDSPISPOPD

ellesar: SpectroBoy: ellesar: You bunch of hippies eschewing the greatness of fewer drug addicts getting prosecuted for breaking the law will change your turn when your famillies end up dead because some drug addict gets off and inevitably escalates his criminal activity to murder. You may not think that smoking pot is all that illegal but its a proven gateway drug to things like herione. All of that leads to stealing which leads to murdering and worse.

Most of those druggers get a benefit from being in jail, they get rehibilitated and taught how not be a drain on society. Now they won't have that, they will jus tprogress to murder as studies have shown. Way to go SCOTUS! You've doomed all the hippies.

Not bad. You stayed in character and seemed to be making a point of sorts. I give it a 7/10 on the trollometer.


...WHARGRBL....

I didn't reply at first 'cause it looked like you were trolling. In case you're not:

I'll just point out that pot is apparently a gateway to the presidency, not to other drugs. Disagree if you like, but it's well-known that since 1992, EVERY president has admitted to smoking. Of course, you're also free to ignore the medical marijuana patients, too... After all, they're all on the hard stuff now too, aren't they?

Denis Leary said it best:

"Marijuana doesn't lead to other drugs - it leads to farking carpentry!"

KickahaOta:

I basically already responded to this, CTRL-F for brukmann to see, it's only a few posts up. I think we are pretty much at an impasse, and regardless of what we say this will be heavily tested in the near future. I just believe that i would hit the procedural angle hard to try to drag fully electronic processes or lab processes either in or out of the realm of this decision depending on what side of the road my client was standing.

SchlingFocker: I LOVE that rationale. The longer we've been doing something wrong, the more validity the wrong action gains.

Stare decisis: Latin for "never admit a mistake".

treesloth: I'm very much outside of the field of forensics, so maybe you could explain this. How would positive and negative controls work in the case of, say, DNA testing? That seems (to my decidedly inexpert mind) a binary thing-- it either matches or doesn't, with extremely high levels of probability. To do controls do you throw in known-different DNA, such as from a chicken, as well as a sample from the suspect?

Kinda. For whatever protocol you're running, you test it on something you know will give a result, and something you know won't. If either of those don't match correctly, you know you farked the protocol up, or one of your materials is contaminated, or whatever.

DamnYankees: MasterThief: I'm not sure this is going to have as big an impact as everyone thinks.

I think the argument is (at least mine is), that since it likely *won't* have much of any impact, doing it is just a waste of time and effort. It's pointlessly clogging up the system and wasting the time of lab techs.

I love this argument:

Expediency trumps the Constitution.

Classic.

ellesar: You bunch of hippies eschewing the greatness of fewer drug addicts getting prosecuted for breaking the law will change your turn when your famillies end up dead because some drug addict gets off and inevitably escalates his criminal activity to murder. You may not think that smoking pot is all that illegal but its a proven gateway drug to things like herione. All of that leads to stealing which leads to murdering and worse.

Most of those druggers get a benefit from being in jail, they get rehibilitated and taught how not be a drain on society. Now they won't have that, they will jus tprogress to murder as studies have shown. Way to go SCOTUS! You've doomed all the hippies.


Please.

Good. You can't question a piece of paper that says you're guilty of something and most people don't have the financial resources to pay for expert testimony. I also think that since the piece of paper is essentially a witness against the defendant proclaiming his guilt it's the burden of the state to show why that is true, either by producing the lab tech or providing a witness who has the qualifications to explain the test(s) and any problems that can occur during the test(s) or problems with the test(s) as far as ranges of error and possible causes of false readings.

The second would probably cost less in smaller jurisdictions by having the expert witness on contract and large cities usually have the labs close enough to produce the lab tech without the expense of per diem or a hotel.

I think that prosecutors don't like this because it'll cause them to lose many more cases and end up costing them their jobs. I say tough titty. Start prosecuting using valid evidence and witnesses instead of a piece of paper.

fnorgby: Can you say someone's constitutional rights are denied if they do have the right to confront the witness but just choose not to?

This will be another way around the ruling. Simply get defendants to sign a waiver, not requiring the lab techs to present their test results in person.

//Probably won't work in real life, though.

dragyne: ju66l3r: dragyne:
I'd rather let a million murders free than convict an innocent man

False choice.

Please elaborate.

You don't have to let the murderers go free just to be sure one isn't innocent. Nor do you have to lock up the innocent just to be sure you got all the murderers. Our system isn't perfect, it's human just like the people that make it up. But instead of putting in a safeguard against scientific fraud, all that's introduced is a method which at best hamstrings the prosecution and at worst allows the guilty to go free by questioning the very basic tenets of science (namely, did the observation actually happen and does the conclusion draw from the observation). Instead of letting the defense vilify the scientists for purposes good AND nefarious, abstract them from either side's position and blind them as to their decision's outcome in the matter. The scientist should be considered no more of an "accuser" than the DNA or chemical itself that they are testing.

There are ways to both sentence the guilty while equally redeeming the innocent that don't preclude either, but questioning the science doesn't further either of these goals without stomping on the ability to perform the other.

ellesar: lol

I am a conservative. More right wing than you can imagine.

I wasn't addressing you, and you haven't made any arguments to refute, son.

ellesar: Oooh you can call me a name

Yup.

Nothing to refute.

ellesar: a freaking term paper.

How's the learnin' up in the big ol' university there, college boy?

ellesar: so you can smoke pot

Anecdotes, straw men, made up stats, and ad hominem attacks do not an argument make.

/maybe you should take a rhetoric and debate course to get beyond the "hippy-yo'momma" level of discourse

MrBERZERKER: no, they arent. look at the crack epidemic of the 80s. look at what meth is doing to the rural parts of the country. it enters middle class neighborhoods and decimates them. the fact that someone is tyring to "make a buck" doesnt make it ok.

I think the point that everyone here is trying to make is that simple possession shouldn't put you in jail. with the hard stuff, being a dealer probably should, but how many people get busted for having an ounce on them and spend a year or more in jail due to the minimum sentences that have been imposed is asinine.

Radioactive Ass: Good. You can't question a piece of paper that says you're guilty of something and most people don't have the financial resources to pay for expert testimony. I also think that since the piece of paper is essentially a witness against the defendant proclaiming his guilt it's the burden of the state to show why that is true, either by producing the lab tech or providing a witness who has the qualifications to explain the test(s) and any problems that can occur during the test(s) or problems with the test(s) as far as ranges of error and possible causes of false readings.

The second would probably cost less in smaller jurisdictions by having the expert witness on contract and large cities usually have the labs close enough to produce the lab tech without the expense of per diem or a hotel.

I think that prosecutors don't like this because it'll cause them to lose many more cases and end up costing them their jobs. I say tough titty. Start prosecuting using valid evidence and witnesses instead of a piece of paper.

Or, alternatively, stop using lab analysis as the sole basis for your case. Time the pendulum swung back from all that fun CSI trace evidence, DNA and microscopic analysis of paint chips and hair follicles, and back into hard police work and questioning of witnesses and tracking down evidence. If prosecutors have gotten lazy the last decade or so, letting the labs do all the heavy lifting, then it serves them right.

SpectroBoy: Since we currently put people in jail at a higher rate than Russia South Africa, and China I think maybe slowing down the incarceration machine is a good thing. It might force that machine to focus on actual bad guys.

[graph]

How come the hippies never show us graphs about crime rates in all these other countries? I'm sure they can find one that shows the murder rate in Rwanda is lower than the U.S. because they don't imprison as many people as the U.S.

Excellent. Interesting breakdown of justices, too. Science is reliable, but the people who perform it are not always so, and this ruling helps to install a proper safeguard against that problem.

What I'm looking forward to, however, is a likely increase in usage and quality of local crime labs. When testifying doesn't involve a multi-hour drive or plane ride, it becomes a much smaller burden on techs, not to mention cheaper for the crime lab itself, and so decentralization makes much more sense.

ju66l3r: dragyne: ju66l3r: dragyne:
I'd rather let a million murders free than convict an innocent man

False choice.

Please elaborate.

You don't have to let the murderers go free just to be sure one isn't innocent. Nor do you have to lock up the innocent just to be sure you got all the murderers. Our system isn't perfect, it's human just like the people that make it up. But instead of putting in a safeguard against scientific fraud, all that's introduced is a method which at best hamstrings the prosecution and at worst allows the guilty to go free by questioning the very basic tenets of science (namely, did the observation actually happen and does the conclusion draw from the observation). Instead of letting the defense vilify the scientists for purposes good AND nefarious, abstract them from either side's position and blind them as to their decision's outcome in the matter. The scientist should be considered no more of an "accuser" than the DNA or chemical itself that they are testing.

There are ways to both sentence the guilty while equally redeeming the innocent that don't preclude either, but questioning the science doesn't further either of these goals without stomping on the ability to perform the other.

There are many safeguards against every type of thing and most of those things are questionable in a court of law. I do not want any avenue closed to any defendent for expediencies sake. I would rather see someone let go for a procedural mishap than deny someone evidence that may be to their favor.

If you want oversight you are still talking a large expenditure to maintain and investigate claims of wrongdoing. So it takes the burden off of the court. However there is no such oversight currently and standards differ between labs. Therfore there needs to be some protection to the defendent who more often than not does not have the same financial resources as the state to be able to be defended properly.

Asgate: Ryan2065: fnorgby: NO it goddamn doesn't. Don't be naive. It means that prosecutors will have to prioritize when and where they use the scientific evidence. Murderers and rapists I'm betting are going to be high on that list.

Right, because having a lab tech take a whole day to travel and testify in one case isn't going to slow down the process at all.

Is there anything that says the tech has to testify in-person? Given the video teleconferencing technologies today, couldn't a Lab tech testify from their lab? They can still be 'confronted' for all realistic purposes.

well, we can just have a CGI person responding, no need to have the ACTUAL technician there...

Ryan2065: Dracolich: First off, they should be there because of the reasons in JefferyScott's comments.

Most of his arguments could have been handled by someone with general knowledge of the field and the procedures each testing facility uses.

Dracolich: Furthermore, the sample itself was the evidence. The evidence was looked over by the technician who formed a conclusion about it and then made an accusation by the very act of interpretation of those results.

What are you talking about? Lab techs don't know anything about the case, they are just handed samples and told to do something with it. For all they know, they could be getting someone off of a murder/rape charge. They simply say what is or isn't true based on the results they get.

Dracolich: Easy example of this: test a shows heroine in the bloodstream. Sample 1 tests positive for test a. The logical conclusion here is that there is no logical conclusion. To say that there's been heroine use violates the correlation/causation thing. You need a person at this point to clarify why they don't think it could be anything else like poppy seeds in food that they ate. This person could be wrong. It happens a lot with chemical testing, and new tests replace old ones all the time because it's very difficult to find a perfect test for organic compounds.

Lab techs don't get any back story, they are only given a sample and told to test for xxxxxxxx. Any clarification of what other things it could have been can be made by someone with general knowledge of the subject matter from the test results. In fact, the lab tech would be the last person who would know this because they wouldn't of known if poppy seeds were eaten earlier or anything like that. They simply get numbers, document them, and then say what they mean. If the numbers look off and you want to argue their interpretation then sure, bring the tech in. Otherwise, it is just a huge cost to the state and probably hurts the defense rather than helps them. Not only will the jury have a 99% certainty looking at them, they will have the lab tech there telling them everything was done 100% correctly and by the book.

Ok, I accept that you're probably used to the "garbage in, garbage out" folks from CSI, but analytical organic chemistry is rarely like that. It's a competitive field and you will never see a lab doing that kind of work without a chemist at least supervising and calling the shots.

If you honestly believe that labs operate like your desk calculator and don't involve any experience-based judgment calls or unusual protein interactions, then I'd suggest you tour an analytical organic chem lab. Yes, there will be techs, but I don't advise asking them difficult questions about what they're doing. If you arrive close to closing time and say that you're interested in the field, they'll probably give you a quick tour and answer your questions.

It's true that there are many compounds where there's an SOP, but that doesn't mean that that's all there is to it. Those results are reviewed and a decision is made whether further testing is necessary. If you keep in mind what I said about uncertainty earlier, it means this is a judgment call and whoever made that call can only go so far as to say "I think the answer is ____." That's it. That's as far as science goes. In the end, it all ends up with "I think the answer is ____." If your life were in the balance, you may want some clarification of how certain they are about what they think. A lawyer presenting the findings probably has no idea why certain tests were done or not done.

eqtworld: If they let real scientists into the courtroom, there is no way the murder of the unborn would have been given a pass during Roe v Wade

what's stupid about that is, if you beat a woman and her unborn child dies, it is murder. if she wants to get rid of it, she can have an abortion and that is legal. Choose one or the other.
Personally, i feel that if they don't want to have themselves contributing to the gene pool, so be it.

dragyne: I'd rather let a million murders free than convict an innocent man

So you'd prefer to risk the lives of maybe another million potential victims for the sake of one innocent man. Solid numerical reasoning.

Does this mean that 'doctorates' from the Holy University of Mail Order Diploma won't be able to testify in Creationist trials as though they actual experts?

WillOfGod:

DNA evidence is actually one of the most "transparent" processes currently admissable. This is due to the heavy push-back of defense when it was first introduced and juries didn't know what to make of it. The forensics that are widely accepted as fact, such as fingerprinting, are the ones that need serious help.

Read the Popular Mechanics article on fingerprint interpretation and the fact that only 2 out of 6 "experts" get the same result on the same fingerprint as the last time THEY looked at it.

that is a good point. i didnt think of that!

things like fingerprints...handwriting analysis etc... does that fall under the scope of science as it pertains to this ruling?

TheDrizzle-Superhero: Wow...don't know when we'll ever see those alliances on a decision again.

I would bet one billion dollars that we don't.

Very nicely played.

Simple solution to most of this problem: legalize MOST illegal narcotics.

Yet another problem it would solve.

Ellesar is so full of shiate his eyes are even brown.

Gateway drug? Seriously? Are you a child?

... the Code of Hammurabi ...

Actually, I looked at that thing on Wikipedia and its pretty barbaric. I'm not sure I would look to the Code of Hammurabi for my rights.

"Back off man, I'm a scientist."

MrBERZERKER: people seem to think too many drug cases are being prosecuted, and i agree to some extent. but just because its "non-violent" doesnt make it victimless. is it a good think when a suspect is not prosecuted for selling crack cocaine to an undercover cop? its "non-violent," but what is the impact of this activity on entire neighborhoods and cities? the unexagerated answer is it destroys them.

In addition to the other pointful comments, it's worth pointing out that the seriously damaging effects actually come from the prohibition itself. On the one hand, banning a substance drives up the price and makes it a target for organized crime; very few liquor stores today are run by the mob, but it alcohol is how Al Capone made his money. On the other, it's been demonstrated that banning a low-level substance (coca or opium, for instance) shifts trade and consumption into more concentrated forms because of the increased profit margin, feeding both violence and addiction.

I seem to recall flipping through a recent issue of Popular Science magazine and reading an article in which in summary basically stated that "there is NO actual science whatsoever in so-called 'forensic science' as is used to incriminate thousands of innocent people" ....or something like that.