I wish! Most forensic evidence is down to interpretation by individuals or as a result of running a computer programme written by individuals and the comparators input by individuals. Wherever people are involved, you are going to get mistakes. Improper handling of evidence will produce flawed results and visual matching of evidence against comparators is a subjective exercise
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...lysis-methods/
Some excerpts.......
In 2009, a Houston police crime lab audit found irregularities in more than half of fingerprint examinations sampled. Officials hired consultants to review 4,300 cases and work through a 6,000 case backlog.
Houston shut its police crime lab's DNA division for several years after 2002 because of problems with the education and training of examiners, misleading testimony and improper evidence storage, leading to at least three exonerations and retesting of thousands of cases.
Professionals declared erroneous handwriting matches or genuine signatures in 6.5 percent and 3.4 percent of cases, respectively, in recent studies.
The Santa Clara County, Calif., district attorney replaced his crime lab chief after a murder case was dropped in 2007 and a wrongful armed robbery conviction was overturned in 2003 because of errors by a laboratory fiber expert.
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation eliminated its bloodstain pattern analysis unit in 2011 after an examiner was videotaped celebrating after reproducing a result sought by a prosecutor.
CSI and NCIS are not real life.......if only because they tend to catch the mistakes before a conviction....mostly.
I am not against the death penalty per se. I would never say I was, because I know nobody who has been murdered...my opinion might well become more polarised if that ever happened.....but I'm inclined to think I would need to be a lot more certain of a righteous conviction than is possible currently. An eye for an eye only works if you can be certain the eye you are taking actually belongs to the killer. Any convenient person's eye does not give the same closure.
As it is presently, I am against the death penalty because there are still too many mistakes being made in investigation and forensics, through incompetence, poor training etc. I do believe that, until we can prove, without any reasonable doubt, the guilt of an individual, executing that individual is little different to murder in itself. I wouldn't commit murder myself....why would I approve the state doing it in my name?
I'd make life imprisonment life imprisonment, though....but can anyone explain to me, why is it murder if you regularly carry a knife or gun out with you and use them to kill someone once.....either when sober or under the influence of drink or drugs.....and is
not murder if you get into a car, and kill someone either by driving under the influence of drink or drugs... or by driving at speed recklessly or dangerously even when sober?
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