Worth noting that the submitter of this story, user ClintEhrlich, played a main role in freeing the wrongly-convicted man. He posted about it on HN a couple years back, in a highly upvoted and discussed thread (500+ upvotes, 200+ comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010760
Simpson is being paroled for a robbery conviction 9 years ago but of course his most famous run-in with the law was when he was acquitted of double-murder despite a huge amount of forensic evidence linking him to the homicides (he later lost a civil suit, which has a lower standard of evidence).
In the case described by the OP, the jury voted to convict in the total absence of physical, forensic evidence. It's astonishing that this profiler's beliefs were enough to sway the jury beyond a reasonable doubt but even more grotesque is how a clusterfuck of dumb, unverified assumptions led the profiler to his conclusions. He blames the detectives for not doing "Investigation 101", and says he would not have testified if only he had known the detectives were so negligent.
As much blame as the profiler deserves (he basically comes off as reliable as a psychic), seems like a large portion of blame should go to the district attorney, who presumably knew he was so short of evidence that he had to base his case on the profiler's testimony. Can't imagine what was going through the jury's heads; prosecutors often complain how modern juries demand the presence of DNA because of how TV dramas like CSI portray and hype DNA and other evidence as ubiquitous and unimpeachable, but this jury seems to have had the completely opposite mindset.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments, Prof Nguyen.
There is plenty of blame to go around for the cascade of errors that led to Ray Jennings spending 11 years behind bars for a murder he didn't commit. But most of the institutions responsible for the tragedy — from the D.A.'s office to the judiciary — have owned up to their mistakes.
Not so for Mark Safarik. Despite retracting his opinion in court, he is now publicly insinuating that Ray may actually have been guilty, repeating the very falsities that my father and I debunked in order to overturn the false conviction.
Everything that Safarik says in the article — from the supposed evidence of sexual assault, to the fact that Ray should have been able to see the killer — is addressed and refuted in our initial 34-page letter to the Conviction Review Unit. The truth is available for anyone who cares to read it: http://www.ehrlichfirm.com/jennings/Ray-Jennings-Letter-to-C...
I note that, before we even hired a profiling expert, I was able to point out gross errors in Safarik's work merely by contrasting his testimony to the standards listed in the behavioral-profiling "bible" that he contributed to at the FBI. (See Letter, pp. 20-22.) This is supposed to be the profiling equivalent of the DSM, but Safarik blew off the numerous criteria that contravened his thesis.
Safarik's attempt to shift all the blame to the local detectives is unpersuasive. Their failure to interview everyone at the crime scene was obvious from the investigative materials that Safarik was provided by the Sheriff's Department's. Indeed, Safarik was specifically cross-examined about that failure when he took the stand, yet he clung to his opinion, and thereby allowed an innocent man to be convicted of murder.
Only Safarik himself is responsible for basing his analysis on the false premise that Ray was the only person present who could have committed the crime. When he presented his "expert" opinion, Safarik acknowledged the presence of other individuals in the parking lot around the time of the murder, but inexplicably brushed that fact aside because it did not fit his desired conclusion.
If Safarik is the best that the "science" of profiling can offer, it has no place in our courts.
I can imagine that profiling might have a use in generating leads for investigators to follow, perhaps leading them to actual evidence. But it can't be considered evidence itself.
The moment in the story where I lost all respect for this profiler was the description of how he insisted a "tell" implied lying. There are no known generic reliable tells for lying and anyone claiming there is are basically disqualifying themselves from being an authority on behaviour.
There are reliable tells that imply "pacifying behaviours" for stress, and those can be useful to pay attention to in order to get people to trip up in interrogations, but there are many possible reasons for that kind of stress, including an interrogation itself being a stressor. But people who try to identify lies based on their theories of such tells without intimately knowing that person in advance generally do no better than chance.
(A good book on the subject, which gives a very sober assessment of what body language can actually reliably tell us vs. where you need to thread carefully is Joe Navarro's "What Every Body is Saying" - Navarro is a former FBI agent and trainer)
You know the saying "if you like sausages never go to the sausage factory"? Well I've got some bad news for you about the justice system.
We like to think of courts and juries in the idealistic view given to us in school. Its just like "12 Angry Men". Everyone gets their fair shake in court. Even if 11 people want to convict and go home the 12th one will stand up right? After all, you're a reasonable person. You can't imagine just convicting a guy without a reasonable discussion. Surely enough of your fellow citizens are the same?
The truth is a shocking amount of people in society just have deference to authority figures. They'll trust whatever expert the prosecution produces. You would think that courts have standards for what counts as experts, but the truth is the standards are horribly lacking. Shows like CSI give the average citizen a cops and robbers view of reality. When is the last time an episode of CSI didn't end with the guy getting caught and convicted? Have they ever made a mistake in CSI? Made an ambiguous decision?
And why wouldn't the DA choose to prosecute as much as possible? You don't want to appear weak on crime. After all, you have an election to win if you want to keep your job.
Trial by jury is only as good as the society within which it exists.
> When is the last time an episode of CSI didn't end with the guy getting caught and convicted? Have they ever made a mistake in CSI? Made an ambiguous decision?
Actually there was one episode where they knowingly sent down an innocent man in CSI:Miami. A mentally challenged man had been unwittingly framed by his brother for a murder he didn't commit. The piece of evidence that sends him to jail if I recall correctly was a tie used in the crime that the brother asked his mentally challenged brother to retrieve from the back of the truck putting his DNA or fingerprint on it. The team know the kid they're sending down is innocent, but the evidence is the evidence and their hands are tied.
I can't for the life of me find a link to the episode. Perhaps someone with more Google-fu than me could assist.
It seems the jury was basing their faith in the profiler on another famous crime drama, namely Sherlock Holmes.
>The driver’s-side window of the victim’s car had been lowered several inches, suggesting to the profiler that the teen had rolled it down when someone who looked trustworthy approached. And her tube top was askew — a sign, the profiler said, of a botched sexual assault.
In Sherlock Holmes stories, that is a fairly reasonable inference. Here, for example, is an exert from the story "The Hound of the Baskervilles":
>The address, you observe is printed in rough characters. But the Times is a paper which is seldom found in any hands but those of the highly educated. We may take it, therefore, that the letter was composed by an educated man who wished to pose as an uneducated one, and his effort to conceal his own writing suggests that that writing might be known, or come to be known, by you.
The issue is in real life, this sort of inference is absolutely absurd. There are a dozen other possible explanations that fit the evidence, and to make such wild speculations gets you nowhere except chasing dead ends and accusing innocent men. It works in Holmes' stories because, and this is very important, they are fictitious. Doyle can have Sherlock spout any kind of insane gibberish, and still have him be right in the end.
Though I can't fault lay persons for not understanding why this technique is faulty, both because pop culture treats it as valid and because it's a classic instance of sampling bias: Say 100 profilers failed spectacularly, and 10 succeed and produce perfect profiles. The 100 failures aren't interesting or worth talking about, some stranger not being correct one time is not a good story. The 10 successes get talked about endlessly at conferences, at the local bar, when people give advice to each other. Old veteran cops 20 years later still talk about that one time a profiler solved a cold case in a snap. So, over years, a mythology is built up and the objective abysmal quality of profiling is hidden by the fact everyone everywhere has heard of the 10 successes while the 100 failures are lost to the dustbin of history. Rather, appropriately, like Doyle's own real life attempts to play detective - the dozens of times he was humiliated are (mostly) forgotten, while the handful of successes are the stuff of (nerdy) legend.
Samuel Vimes dreamed about Clues. He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen* and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!
Well said! I grew up reading Sherlock Holmes, and enjoyed it, but I recently revisited some stories and was enraged by how much general BS there as in all the inferences. Just a bunch of ridiculous (often not even true) stereotypes slapped together and an infallible hero spouting them.
The books would have caused a thousands kinds of outrage had they been written today.
For jury, imagine a bunch of people who fall for every rhetorical and statistical fallacy in the book, love a good story and are led by emotions and prejudices rather than facts and reasoning.
My feeling has always been that we should reengineer our jury system. Jurists should be professionals, not a random nobody pulled from the community. They should be independent, private employees with a code of ethics and training in skepticism and the sciences of statistics and evidence. Also, they could specialize in fields relevant to certain cases. In our current system, we look for the most ignorant juries so that the lawyers can fill their heads with whatever knowledge they please, unencumbered by facts.
In the new system, professional jurists would be paid for by the courts, but not directly employed by them or the government. The prosecution and defense could have their pick that they must agree on just like now, but they would be basing their pick on the professional reputation of the jurist, not exploitable characteristics or ignorance.
I have heard that the intent of the term "trial by peers" was that the jury should be full of people with understanding and similarly experienced to the accused, so they would be well-versed in the specific nuance and details around the accusations. Like if a banker was on trial for financial crimes, the jury should be randomly selected bankers.
Jury selection today specifically selects against "peers" of the accused. (and as you also mentioned, against "peers" of anything in general :-P )
> I have heard that the intent of the term "trial by peers" was that the jury should be full of people with understanding and similarly experienced to the accused
You have heard wrong. The term is a rephrasing of a guarantee in Magna Carta [0], and refers to the right to be judged by others of the same formal social station.
[0] in one English translation, “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.”
Peers is a word that could be unpacked to mean more than just fellow citizens though, and to prove that it originally meant only fellow citizens runs into all the problems inherent in authorial intent multiplied by the number of people who worked on the constitution. Hence the need for supreme court interpretation.
Peers in context have been interpreted to mean your fellow citizens, nothing more.
Although I'd like to note that letting a jury of bankers sit on a financial crime might mean no banker ever got convicted. So the whole more exacting definition of peers argument has some definite problems.
> Peers is a word that could be unpacked to mean more than just fellow citizens though, and to prove that it originally meant only fellow citizens runs into all the problems inherent in authorial intent multiplied by the number of people who worked on the constitution.
No, it absolutely does not, because neither the phrase nor any alternative phrase on the subject incorporating a reference to “peers” appears in the Constitution, which instead provides (in the Sixth Amendment) for an “impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law”. (It is a common rephrasing of a guarantee—“the lawful judgment of his peers”—in Magna Carta which unmistakably was an product of the barons’ insistence that members of their formal social station should render verdicts against them.)
>Jurists should be professionals, not a random nobody pulled from the community.
[...]
In the new system, professional jurists would be paid for by the courts, but not directly employed by them or the government.
Jurist are as impartial as you can get. Making someone a paid professional jurist doesn't magically strip them of all their biases. Courts are intimately familiar with this, precisely when they ask jurists "Do you think Police are less likely to lie under oath than a normal person" in voir dire because judges know that police are just as corruptible as the rest of us.
Your proposal is basically creating a system by which a lawyer cannot ensure that your are judged by a jury of your peers. The problems with the judicial system are people based /not/ jury based.
Jury duty is the one chance that citizens can make a direct action in the power of the state and you are proposing changing that and some how having the government to pay that person but also simultaneously not being paid by the government.
What I am proposing would certainly require a Constitutional amendment (in the US, at least). It is a departure from the "jury of your peers", which is the intention. The specificity of modern scientific evidence warrants rethinking the way we select juries. A jury of normal citizens is just not equipped, educationally, for the job. Specialists are required with intimate subject knowledge.
I am proposing that the expense of the jury be covered by the court (as it is now for citizen juries, and it is also is with public defenders), but that they not be employees of the court. Again, like public defenders.
It certainly wouldn't be a perfect system, but I believe it plugs some of the holes that have appeared in our current system of jury selection.
The court should not permit speculative testimony of this nature to be counted as evidence in the same way that lie detector tests are inadmissible or hearsay.
It's shocking how much "evidence-ish" stuff is permitted, and how evidence is processed by labs integrated with law enforcement and prosecuting bodies. In an era of big data, it's easy to see how "profiling" will turn out to be about as good as a divining rod.
tl;dr: cop goes for a 160h course, gets a Drug Recognition Expert certificate, then his opinion "based on his training" is enough to establish probable cause and make an arrest and then you sit in jail for however long it takes for tests to get back (if that even helps because "tests come back wrong all the time")
Profiling, like much of "criminal science" such as Arson Investigation is a large part unsubstantiated bullshit. It's amazing how poorly regulated all of it is and how many innocent people are in prison, or executed, because of it.
Profiling is probably better-than-nothing as an investigative technique, that is, e.g., as a tool to choose where to focus resources to look for meaningful evidence. What it probably should not be mistaken for is a scientific source of evidence on its own.
Unfair sarcasm. DNA is one of the very few forensic tools with any hard science behind it. Even fingerprints can lead to highly conflicting "expert" opinions.
> DNA is one of the very few forensic tools with any hard science behind it.
forensic toxicology and chemistry also work fine (they use the same tools and techniques that analytical chemists use for assaying unknown substances, or your doctor's office uses for measuring how much of your pain killer is in your system).
the problems from those labs come when the government-run ones decide they're on team blue, instead of team truth, and start making shit up.
Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors
...
The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed
Hair isn't DNA. The tests done on it are comparative afaik.
In fact, in the linked article it says that DNA exonerated people tried based on hair comparison – 25% of those exonerated to boot. Sounds like DNA is great.
What you seem to have a problem with, which is valid, is procedures, how evidence is introduced, and how the authority/validity of that evidence is communicated to the court, correct me if I'm wrong.
Hair testing is not considered proper DNA testing, as far as I understand. In fact the article you linked to mentions that wrongfully convicted persons were often exonerated via subsequent DNA tests.
This Safarik guy sounds like a real piece of shit. Absolutely zero remorse for telling a tall tale in front of a judge and jury which led to a man spending 11 years in prison for something he didn't do.
> “Like other killers I’ve known, he’s also arrogant and narcissistic — fatal traits that led to his demise,” Safarik says. “This was all his doing…. Ultimately, he was responsible for it.”
I only see arrogance and narcissism coming from one person in the story told, and it wasn't from Jennings.
His ego does seem completely out of control. Safarik seems to take himself way too seriously while simultaneously treating other people with little regard
Thank you! That same thought had been sitting at the back of my head, but I could not quite put it into words.
If I had made a mistake - even an honest mistake, the kind where one could not have done any better - that caused somebody to be falsely convicted - not even of murder: any kind of crime that is serious enough to end up in court! - I strongly think that I would feel absolutely terrible about it and at the very least apologize to that person. Beg for forgiveness, actually.
I've been skeptical of FBI profilers ever since they declared that the Unabomber had attended college or trade school but not graduated. [1] It turned out that he had a PhD and had been a professor.
The big crime is how little epistemological support there is for some of the big forensic tools (fingerprints, DNA, bite marks, arson spread, etc), how little interest there is in researching these areas, and how trusted they are.
But I am curious: apart from TV shows, how important is this kind of evidence in most trials? Is it actually uncommon?
From what I understand DNA has gotten pretty good when used responsibly, but the rest are no better than reading a chicken's entrails. Have I perhaps been misinformed about DNA?
The problem with DNA is that the theoretical random match probability gets thrown at the jury (like one in whatever billion), while in reality the error rate is dominated by lab error (like one in a hundred). But judges tend to exclude evidence of lab error rates (I guess to avoid people thinking the other way, that DNA isn't reliable).
It's one version of the epidemiological fallacy. My impression, which may be wishful thinking, is that prosecutors are better educated about these things now and that this kind of thing is less common.
I've heard plenty of anecdotes that suggest that this is true of many prosecutors, but other anecdotes showing that there are also good ones out there.
Viewing it "good ones" versus "bad ones" terms is misleading. Prosecutors work in situations where (1) they constantly view the worst aspects of society; (2) the bulk of their job involves people who are obviously guilty.[1] There's some prosecutors who are just downright unethical. But for the most part, within the model of "better to let X guilty people go free than to put Y innocent people in prison," prosecutors are people who select different numbers for X and Y than other people.
I think juries should be clearly educated on the limitations of DNA testing, and other kinds of forensic evidence should be banned. Then again, I recognize that for every person unjustly convicted based on lab error, there are a dozen who just want to throw that possibility out there hoping to confuse the jury enough to get an acquittal.
[1] Courtrooms are open to the public, and I'd encourage everyone to go to your local federal courthouse and sit in on a dozen sentencing proceedings.
Is comparing fingerprints really "no better than reading a chicken's entrails?" I could understand things like trying to guess based on similarities with a partial print, but comparing two full prints seems like it would be pretty easy.
You would think, but even "experts" on fingerprinting call it at best an art. It can be affected by bias[1], and there's no standard for declaring a match[2](same case as [1]).
> I could understand things like trying to guess based on similarities with a partial print
That's really the rub, pun intended I guess, there are no clean neatly pressed fingerprints left on object collected by police, generally speaking.
It's easier for evidence to say the person is innocent than guilty. Ex: a blurry video of a white guy. It's in no way enough to show which white person did it, but it is enough to show no black person did.
The top comment under which my comment falls is about police use of forensic "science".
>The big crime is how little epistemological support there is for some of the big forensic tools (fingerprints, DNA, bite marks, arson spread, etc), how little interest there is in researching these areas, and how trusted they are.
But I am curious: apart from TV shows, how important is this kind of evidence in most trials? Is it actually uncommon?
Some years ago I worked on a project where they wanted to do fingerprint classification and comparison with computer vision. I was amazed how much human judgment is involved in the process. Even with full prints a lot is up to the examiner and two examiners won't necessarily give you the same result.
Regarding fingerprints, in the wake of the Brandon Mayfield case which raised serious questions about the accuracy of fingerprint identification by the FBI, the National Academy of Sciences was asked to perform a scientific assessment. Initial results were published in:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
Bradford T. Ulery, 7733–7738, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1018707108
Accuracy and reliability of forensic latent fingerprint decisions
Bradford T. Ulerya, R. Austin Hicklina, JoAnn Buscagliab,1, and Maria Antonia Robertsc
Edited by Stephen E. Fienberg, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, and approved March 31, 2011 (received for review December 16, 2010)
ABSTRACT
The interpretation of forensic fingerprint evidence relies on the expertise of latent print examiners. The National Research Council of the National Academies and the legal and forensic sciences communities have called for research to measure the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners’ decisions, a challenging and complex problem in need of systematic analysis. Our research is focused on the development of empirical approaches to studying this problem. Here, we report on the first large-scale study of the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners’ decisions, in which 169 latent print examiners each compared approximately 100 pairs of latent and exemplar fingerprints from a pool of 744 pairs. The fingerprints were selected to include a range of attributes and quality encountered in forensic casework, and to be comparable to searches of an automated fingerprint identification system containing more than 58 million subjects. This study evaluated examiners on key decision points in the fingerprint examination process; procedures used operationally include additional safeguards designed to minimize errors. Five examiners made false positive errors for an overall false positive rate of 0.1%. Eighty-five percent of examiners made at least one false negative error for an overall false negative rate of 7.5%. Independent examination of the same comparisons by different participants (analogous to blind verification) was found to detect all false positive errors and the majority of false negative errors in this study. Examiners frequently differed on whether fingerprints were suitable for reaching a conclusion.
aNoblis, 3150 Fairview Park Drive, Falls Church, VA 22042;
R. Austin Hicklin
aNoblis, 3150 Fairview Park Drive, Falls Church, VA 22042;
JoAnn Buscaglia
bCounterterrorism and Forensic Science Research Unit, Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory Division, 2501 Investigation Parkway, Quantico, VA 22135; and
Maria Antonia Roberts
cLatent Print Support Unit, Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory Division, 2501 Investigation Parkway, Quantico, VA 22135
One might wonder why such an assessment was not done a long time ago.
Just a comment, whether a 0.1 percent false positive rate is "small" is a subjective value judgement. Would you drive across a bridge that had a 1 in 1000 (0.1 percent) chance of collapsing and killing you as you drove across it? No, probably not.
In addition, the 0.1 percent false positive rate is based on a small sample of around 1000 cases. The Federal fingerprint databases such as the ones used in the Brandon Mayfield case have millions of people in them and may eventually have all US citizens (over 300 million people) in them. How does this "small" rate extrapolate when a fingerprint is compared to every fingerprint in the US or the world?
First, we have no idea how "unique" fingerprints actually are. Silly, eh?
Second, have we programmed a computer to do it? At this point, something like "fingerprint analysis" should be quite open to machine learning. If we can't program a machine to do it, then probably humans aren't actually accurate either.
For example: "Progress" In Fire Investigation: Moving from Witchcraft and Folklore to the Misuse of Models and the Abuse of Science[2](PDF; not as good as the title; depressing) from [3].
> how little interest there is
One challenge is the forensic expert "system" is extremely heterogeneous. In funding, honesty and integrity, professionalism, research, oversight and regulation.
> how important is this kind of evidence in most trials
And since most "trials" are plea bargains, how important in pleas?
And the US plea bargain system is its own pit of systemic dysfunction.
> But I am curious: apart from TV shows, how important is this kind of evidence in most trials?
I think it's fairly widely used as part of the evidence, but I don't think statistics are kept, and even if they were it's hard to know how important it is in convincing juries. When the issue with fiber analysis and the admission of it's nesr complete lack of validity by the FBI broke, there were hundreds of criminal convictions, dozens of death penalty convictions, and several who had already received the death penalty identified directly tied to FBI testimony on fiber analysis, and concerns of tens of thousands of convictions based on work by locsl, FBI-trained, fiber analysts.
So, its at least not insignificant in potential impact.
Is there any possibility of this man Safarik being punished? Can Safarik be sued and held accountable for destroying eleven years of an innocent man's life?
I feel like some sort punishment is due towards ruthless opportunistic people like these. (I would say the same about the people who pursued Swartz even after MIT & JSTOR dropped the case.)
>I feel like some sort punishment is due towards ruthless opportunistic people like these. (I would say the same about the people who pursued Swartz even after MIT & JSTOR dropped the case.)
How could you possibly prosecute people for the Swartz case? They were simply seeking the punishment that the law specifies. If you don't like the law, then lobby to have it changed. If you want it to be less vigorously enforced, then vote for a President/Governor/DA that will enforce it less vigorously. You can't put people in jail for following the law.
There is following the law, and there is knowingly conviction of an innocent. This is the second one, and IMO there really should be penalties for this.
Now I'm wondering what it would be like if fake honeypot cases with actors scripted with an obviously inappropriate implicit offer of a seemingly lucrative reward for straying from true justice were routinely run as a part of policy to catch bad lawyers and judges. I don't see how it could hurt for them to be subjected to ongoing surprise tests of whether they're worthy of being involved in the justice system. Heck, let's extend it to politicians while we're at it.
What is fair compensation for innocent victims put behind bars?
When wrongly convicted inmates are freed from prison, I think it reasonable to remunerate them per year of jail time, with accelerating penalties (as more years are lost to jail, opportunity is taken away at an accelerating rate; 20 years lost to prison is far more than 10 times worse than 2 years lost to prison, for example).
The base rate of $550,000 tax-free per year for lost work/family/life opportunity and pain/suffering seems eminently fair to me, with escalating amounts per year, as stated before. Probably could get behind a permanent waiver of personal income tax for life on any income under $200,000/year as well.
I agree that the victims of false imprisonment deserve a heck of a lot more than they get now, but one thing to consider is that mandating things like this may lead to fewer convictions being overturned due to the costs it would incur. It wouldn't help at all if the requirements just keep more innocent people in prison longer.
"Safarik spent more than a decade studying serial killings, sexual assaults and stalking cases."
no history of gang crime, "didn't have a boyfriend or a criminal record", "wallet left", "Mustang wasn’t taken", "parking lot was lighted and patrolled", Her tube top was pulled down exposing her breasts." -> "sexual assault”. "wipes his hand over his brow" -> guilty.
Imagine Safarik was a Machine Learning algorithm. More than a decade's worth of training data led to a model that predicted Jennings to be guilty.
The counter-evidence (phone missing, no scratch marks) wasn't part of the model.
In his defence, Safarik denies "assigning too much weight to [evidence]. It was the totality of things that shaped his finding."
Likewise, it is difficult to fix errors in a Machine Learning model once it is trained. The "totality of things" is the history of other crimes the model has investigated.
Can Deep Learning do the same job as criminal profilers? Are they as accurate? Should their predictions be trusted, when the consequence of failure is 11 years of prison for an innocent man?
Evidence handling and testing should be independent of law enforcement and prosecution. It should be handled the way environmental testing or weights-and-measures are tested by state authorities - with no incentive to "win" on behalf of prosecutors.
I remember this case from when it happened. I can't believe it's been that long. It seemed pretty obvious at the time that the parking lot guard was innocent. The DA was stuck on the idea that if he was doing his job he would have made her leave. And if he didn't make her leave, he must have murdered her. It just didn't pass the sniff test.
Edit: it's an ironic coincidence that this follow-up feature was published on the same day of the news of O.J. Simpson's parole: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-oj-simpson-parole-board-...
Simpson is being paroled for a robbery conviction 9 years ago but of course his most famous run-in with the law was when he was acquitted of double-murder despite a huge amount of forensic evidence linking him to the homicides (he later lost a civil suit, which has a lower standard of evidence).
In the case described by the OP, the jury voted to convict in the total absence of physical, forensic evidence. It's astonishing that this profiler's beliefs were enough to sway the jury beyond a reasonable doubt but even more grotesque is how a clusterfuck of dumb, unverified assumptions led the profiler to his conclusions. He blames the detectives for not doing "Investigation 101", and says he would not have testified if only he had known the detectives were so negligent.
As much blame as the profiler deserves (he basically comes off as reliable as a psychic), seems like a large portion of blame should go to the district attorney, who presumably knew he was so short of evidence that he had to base his case on the profiler's testimony. Can't imagine what was going through the jury's heads; prosecutors often complain how modern juries demand the presence of DNA because of how TV dramas like CSI portray and hype DNA and other evidence as ubiquitous and unimpeachable, but this jury seems to have had the completely opposite mindset.