Legal Studies Exam #2

Human trafficking

• Most victims are coerced or tricked rather than physically forced, most perpetrators are romantic partners or family members

• Sex trafficking is more reported than labor trafficking

• Child sex trafficking is an issue but…

  • Popular claims about child trafficking is misleading

    • In 2024, 1 in 7 children reported missing were likely victims of sex trafficking

  • Children are sometimes charged with criminal offenses for being trafficked, half of US states have laws that protect kids from being prosecuted for prostitution

What are human trafficking rumors?

• White Passenger Vans

• Zip ties and marked windows

• Overpriced cabinets

• Unclaimed packages

• Hot dogs and pizza codes

What is the White-slave act of 1910?

• Prohibits transporting any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery

  • Response to growing conspiracy that foreigners were running an organized slave trade that forced white women into prostitution

What was the Satanic Panic?

• Over 12,000 cases reported of Satanic ritual abuse

  • Allegations of sexual abuse, infanticide, forced abortion, cannibalism, kidnapping, torture, among others

• Kicked off a huge burst of accusations about the ritual abuse of children by daycare workers, politicians, teachers, and strangers

• There is no evidence that this ever occurred

What was Michelle Remembers?

• Memoir of a woman who claimed she was abused by a satanic cult when she was 5

  • Also claims the cult summoned Satan, but that Jesus, Mary, and Michael all spoke to her as well

• Written with her psychiatrist who ended up marrying her

• Psychiatrist became consultant for law enforcement, who started holding conferences and trainings about Satanic ritual abuse

What are the two imagined sides of the Satanic Panic?

• Teenagers & Evil Influences

  • White suburban teens who withdraw from their families and participate in antisocial deviant acts with a satanic flavor

    • Dungeons and dragons, heavy metal music, tarot cards, etc.

• Children & Satanic Conspiracy

  • White, suburban children abused physically, sexually, and psychologically by organized satanic cults

    • Innocent children abused at school or daycare, or kidnapped off the street

What are the social factors related to the Satanic Panic?

• Rise of daycare utilization

• Religious affiliation in the US was polarizing, with some people becoming less religious and growing numbers of people identified as atheists

• New focus on child abuse

• Attempts to corroborate abuse claims in law enforcement and psychiatry

What are the media factors related to the Satanic Panic?

• Ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which required coverage of controversial issues of public importance

• New formats like talk shows, documentary specials, televangelist programs, and partisan opinion shows fell into a gray area between news and entertainment

What was Pizzagate?

• A theory built around the idea that Comet Ping Pong, a popular pizzeria in Washington DC, was a hub of sex trafficking and abuse catering to the Democratic elite

  • Specifically, ritual Satanic abuse of children

  • Originally associated with alt-right and some Trump supporters

What did Qanon do?

• A baroque set of conspiracy theories alleging without evidence that the world is controlled by a secret cabal of Satan-worpshipping pedophiles who are abducting children

• elements of Qanon theories reached the mainstream, some did not

  • #savethechildren

  • The rich pedophiles thing

Who was Jeffrey Epstein?

• extremely wealthy financier with social connections to some of the most influential people in the US and abroad, ran a sex trafficking ring with hundreds of victims over decades

  • Pleaded guilty to solicitation of a minor & soliciting prostitution in 2008

  • In 2019 he was arrested again and died in federal custody, authorities categorize his death as a suicide but questions remain

What did Qanon and Trump claim about the Epstein Files?

• Qanon affiliates demanded the Epstein files and incorporated his crimes into the larger conspiratorial cabal framework

• Trump’s 2024 campaign rallied supporters and promised to release the list, arguing that the Biden administration was keeping it a secret to protect pedophiles

What do people believe about the Epstein List?

• many believe that an individual being outed by the list would lead to their criminal prosecution and social fall from grace

  • That is not always what happens when credible accusations of abuse are made

  • #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein

  • Trump has already been accused of sexual misconduct, including rape, by multiple women and girls, with accusantions as far back ast the 70s

What is True Crime?

• Over half of American adults consume true crime content, with a slight majority of women viewers

• Most viewers list interest in mysteries as their primary reason for consumption

• Only 17% of true crime consumers say they do so for the excitement of it, but those consumers tend to believe others consume true crime for that reason

  • Good fan/bad fan division from the reading

What are the harms of True Crime?

• Sensationalism

• Glorification or justification of violence

• Limited attention to issues of rights, use of force by law enforcement, etc.

• Retroactive storytelling

  • Filling in the gaps in misleading or incomplete ways

• Profit from pain

• Offenders as inhuman, animalistic, rage monsters or cold and calculating, biologically or psychologically deficient

How was Ted Bundy portrayed in Bundy movie?

• Serial killer active through the 1970s with over 30 victims, all young white women

• Bundy as a typical true crime subject: construed as psycho/sociopathic, smart, calculating, violent, deceptive

Common serial killer tropes in Bundy movie?

the dog can sense there is something wrong, wandering around with a knife

What is scripted crime media?

• Overwhelmingly individually oriented

• “Ripped from the headlines” crime media takes elements of well-known true crimes and fictionalizes the, to varying degrees for a tv show

• Writers and showrunners are overwhelmingly white, casts are more diverse than they used to be but they are used in uneven and sometimes problematic ways

Common police tropes?

• Common theme and structure with police characters whose “personal demons” play against the backdrop of a case of the week structure

• “Bending the rules” framed as necessary for justice in an inefficient system that allows bad guys to get away with it

What is copoganda?

• Use of police consultants can influence tv content

• Viewers of crime dramas are more likely to believe that

  • Police are successful at combating crime, misconduct generally doesn’t lead to false confessions, and that when force is used, it’s typically necessary for an arrest rather than as a form of street justice

What happened to Gabby Petito?

• September of 2021: reported missing after not returning from road trip she went on with her fiance and shared online for van life content

• Social media sharing missing posters snowballed into large scale social and news media coverage of her disappearance

• Outrage over police treatment of Petito in an August traffic stop

  • 911 call from witness reported her fiance had hit her before they left, other people saw her hit him

  • Police pulled van over for driving erratically, questioned both Laundrie and Petito, and reported Petito as the aggressor, characterized as a mental breakdown

  • Made no arrest

What is Missing White Woman Syndrome?

• Petito’s disappearance is an example, where white women reported missing receive a higher volume of news coverage than women of color

• News coverage can shape law enforcement efforts, lead to useful evidence, and improve case outcomes

• Critics of the Petito coverage weren’t saying she should’ve received less media attention: they were arguing women of color should receive the same

What is MMIW?

• In Wyoming, the homicide rate of indigenous women was 6.4 times higher than for white women

  • Less than 3% of the population but 21% of the state’s homicide victims

  • News coverage of indigenous women was more likely to contain violent language, portray the victim in a negative light, etc.

Who was Celeste Rivas Hernandez?

• 14 yr olds body was found dismembered in the trunk of 20 yr old D4vd’s car

  • She had been reported missing multiple times, appeared to running away from home

• Great deal of online speculation among fans about their relationship, photos of them together, allegedly during the times when she was reported missing

  • LAPD has been extremely quiet about the case, PI hired by D4vd’s former landlord putting out information

• Substantially less coverage than Petito despite potential celebrity perpetrator, shocking circumstances, possible sexual relationship with child victim

What are common police statistics?

• In 2022, 18.5% of the US population over 16 years old interacted with police in person

• Traffic stops were still the most common type of police-inititated contact

• White people’s contact with police is more likely self-initiated 

Statistics concerning self-initiated contact?

• Nearly 30 million people contacted police in 2022, but only half of these people ever reported possible crimes

• 25% of contacts were people seeking help with non-crime emergencies

• 26% were other non-emergencies

• 3% were neighborhood watch contacts

• For the remaining half of self-initiated contacts, most appear to be for minor nonviolent crimes

• Overall, the majority of 911 calls are nonemergency calls for service and noncriminal complaints

Police-initiated contact facts?

• Traffic stops are primary form of police-initiated contact for all groups, but black drivers are more likely to be stopped

• Black drivers are also significantly more likely to be searched, ticketed, or arrested during a traffic stop

• Police can stop people on the street for suspected criminal activity

What is Whren v US?

Any traffic offense committed by a driver is sufficient legal reason to stop them, even if police intend to pull the car over to investigate some other suspected crime

What is stop and frisk?

broad term used to describe police using a lower legal standard than probable cause – the threshold required to make an arrest – to temporarily stop, detain, question, and physically frisk someone

Stop and frisk statistics nationally vs regionally?

• Nationally, people of color and whites appear to be about as likely to be stopped on the street by police in general

• Regionally, racial disparities in police practices are quite dramatic, especially where departments have specific stop and frisk policies

  • DC: 70% of those stopped and frisked were Black in 2022-23

  • NYC: 2003-23 - 90% of the people stopped and frisked were people of color

The negatives of field drug tests?

• There are approximately 1.5 million drug arrests in the US each year, and about half of them rely on presumptive field tests

• In 49 states, field drug test results aren’t admissible at trial- but because cases are overwhelmingly settled by pleas, not trials, this is not protective

• Approximately 30,000 people who do not possess controlled substances are arrested each year and falsely implicated by a presumptive color-based test

  • Black people arrested for false positive at a rate 3x higher than whites

  • 89% of prosecutors allow guilty pleas without confirmatory testing

Connections between policing and racism?

• Police patrol communities of color more often than white communities, though people of color in white neighborhoods are also subject to suspicion from police

• Police officers do not need to hold explicit racist beliefs  to produce racist effects

• When police exceed their legally allowed behavior, their conduct is difficult to challenge

What are the negative consequences of heavily policed communities?

1. Negative mental and physical health outcomes

2. Reduction in academic achievement for youth

3. Economic damages

4. Lower community and civic engagement

• Police violence appears to have a stronger negative effect on resident wellbeing compared to community violence, but violence isn’t necessary to produce these negative outcomes

Portrayals of cops in COPS?

• Disproportionate representation of violent crime, drug crime, and sex work relative to the proportion of overall arrests in USA

• cops are effective and violent on COPS

• shows police as hard-working, personable, and under siege from hostile suspects who flee, curse at, and fight them in seemingly every episode

How is the process the punishment?

Stops, searches, arrests, use of force, pretrial detention, and the criminal case process are all punishing to those accused, but not yet convicted, of crimes

How dangerous is policing?

• Widespread war on cops discourse implies that movements against police brutality have increased violence against police officers, the evidence doesn’t back up these claims

• Harm doesn’t just come from the natural environment, but also from intentional actions of others

• Despite emphasis on homicides, more cops kill themselves every year than are killed by suspects, with at least 184 officer suicides yearly compared to an average of 57 homicides a year

• Police culture is not particularly friendly to mental health concerns, which are often interpreted as weakness and may be punished

What is the danger imperative?

• A cultural frame… that emphasizes potential violence and the need to provide for officer safety at all times

• Leads to increase in distrust, hostility, and violence against citizens 

  • Interpretations of ambiguous events through danger imperative leads to the perception of the event as threatening

• Danger imperative also leads police to behave in ways that are more dangerous to themselves, like driving without seatbelts, engaging in high-speed pursuits, and more

How does the “war on cops” add fuel to the fire?

• Common conflation of anti-police attitudes with violence against police

• statistics for those who “engaged in action toward police” with a category for complained

How does the media cover violence against police?

Extensive news focus on violence against police officers, which can lead to inaccuracies in reporting

Christopher Ransom and Cheryl Williams cases?

• In 2019, Christopher Ransom attempted to rob a store using an imitation gun

  • Eight police officers responded, with seven officers firing a total of 42 shots in 11 seconds

  • One shot struck and killed a police officer

  • Ransom charged with second-degree murder and sentenced to 33 years in prison

High Speed Chase statistics?

• At least 11,500 people have died in high-speed police chases between 1979-2013

  • Almost certainly an undercount

  • 2008 research in Minnesota found that 35% to 40% of chases resulted in a crash

  • Police often suspect fleeing drivers are wanted for a serious offense

• Chases are dangerous to civilians, suspects, and police alike

US police killing statistics?

• US leads other democracies in police killings

• Per 10 million people the US has 33.5 police killings

• Police internationally kill significantly fewer people

  • Firearm prevalence in the US does not fully explain the disparity

How is there a misuse of felony murder laws?

• Lakeith Smith was 15 when a police officer shot and killed his friend, he’s spending decades in prison for his friend’s death

• Timothy Jones got a felony murder charge after police in his pursuit crashed into a car of an innocent bystander, he spent 28 years

How has popular media focused on people who were killed by police and unarmed?

• The innocence, or lack thereof, of the killed person is generally the basis for the appropriateness of the killing

  • Tamir Rice, 12 yr old Black boy in Cleveland, shot by police within 2 seconds of their arrival on the scene 

• Innocence arguments justify some violence against some people - and frame police use of force as a n issue of individual bad apples or inaccurate judgement calls, instead of a result of systemic issues with training and police culture 

What are tools for reducing harm for policing?

• Alternative Emergency Response

• Violence Intervention Programs

• Health-centered responses

• Civilianization Initiatives

• The issue with American policing: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

What are the two general portrayals of “good cops” in pop culture?

1. Guardians/warriors

   1. Most fictional portrayals, TV characters, etc.

   2. Strong police who protect the innocent from ruthless criminals

2. Friendly neighborhood cops

   1. Family friendly cop media, like Basketball Cop who played basketball with teens instead of writing a noise citation

   2. Same genre as cop gives shoes to homeless man - depictions or reports of police who behave selflessly

What are guardian/warrior cops?

• Police trained to see themselves as dividing line between lawlessness and order

• Police films, like End of Watch, are a good example of this trope

  • End of Watch scene evokes constant feeling of threat from everyone on patrol

How are bad cops portrayed in media from good/bad cop trope?

• Bad cop in the trope is usually not a bad guy - the police are playing a role to secure compliance from the suspect

• Contrasted with evil criminals, bad cops become necessary evils to get the job done

• Even though bad cop characters are generally written as morally gray at best, they tend to maintain a semblance of the noble character

How does the Bobby White case exemplify the good/bad cop trope?

•  White slams teenager into police cruiser twice after stopping him for riding through a stop sign and having improper lighting on his bicycle

• Basketball video filmed and posted a few months after GPD secured racial bias, use of force, and reporting bias training for officers of White playing with black teenagers

• Social media confusion: how could White be the face of community policing, colorblind treatment, and friendly cops and have been so brutal here?

How are dirty cops framed in the media?

• framed as those who engage in misconduct that doesn’t result in putting the bad guy away or behavior that risks the safety of other cops

• Data unclear on frequency of police crime

  • Data incomplete because of the “blue code of silence” which encourages police to refuse to report misconduct, corruption, or crime committed by other cops

What does the movie Training Day represent?

• It’s not necessarily anti-police as much as it is a sensationalist acknowledgement of police corruption and tacit affirmation that cops can become ‘criminals’ too

• The good cop, whose intervention saves a young woman from assault, wins in the end, with the dirty cop meeting his end at the hands of Russian mobsters he had wronged

What are themes in police media?

• Brotherhood of Police

  • Police whose partners or close coworkers are injured on the job are more likely to have misconduct complaints filed against them afterward

    • Effect is stronger when the person who hurt your partner is black

• Masculinity and toughness

• Danger and threat: danger imperative

• Protecting the community

What did Jon Burge and CPD do?

• CPD aided and abetted the torture of suspects for years - this was not one bad apple, but an entire group of police who had direct knowledge in torture

• Blue Wall of Silence is a big part of this

What are cop enclaves and what do they insinuate?

• Most cops in metropolitan police departments don’t live in the city that employs them

• In cities with residency requirements, like Chicago, “cop enclaves” appear

• These neighborhoods are policed rather differently - in Chicago, traffic stops are distributed in a racially disparate manner, with Black and Hispanic majority neighborhoods seeing the most stops

What is vigilantism?

• The extralegal prevention, investigation, or punishment of offenses

  • extralegal = an action goes beyond the law, which implies an action that is moving in the same direction as the law, but exceeding its scope or severity

How were Lynch mobs a form of vigilante justice?

• Overwhelmingly committed by whites, with Black victims

• False accusations were rampant

• Lynchings also occurred as part of “race riots” that defended white supremacist laws and/or social order

• Victims sometimes taken from jailhouses to be lynched, law enforcement generally complied with lych mob demands, and some were active participants

Are all superheroes vigilantes?

• Some work with or for military & law enforcement, others work privately and sometimes collaborate with officials, some framed as solutions to a broken justice system and corrupt police

• Race and gender interact with ideas of acceptable heroic violence

• Framed as in line with the spirit of the law, or doing what the law “should” do

How do superheroes actively perpetuate racism, sexism, etc.?

• Superheroes usually distinguished by not killing their foes, but they routinely brutalize them

• Portrayals of superheroes “foes” as evil, conniving, menacing dangers continues to misrepresent crime as common and violent

How is the Punisher and Death Note antiheroes?

• The Punisher: Kills without hesitation, but only “criminals” 

  • Support for the Punisher by US police and military seems confusing given the character’s violence against police, but makes more sense in the context of disconnect between officers’ views of policing and citizen demands for accountability, reductions in use of force, etc.

• Death Note:  centers on a criminal killing protagonist and his attempts to avoid law enforcement

• The framing of the vigilantism issue is somewhat different than in most American media, though it shares a sharp dehumanization of “criminals” as a class of people

How are police seen as vigilantes?

• Law enforcement use of the Punisher logo has been documented over the past 20+ years

• Perceptions of a “war on police” and police identity and culture becoming more distant from civilian life may influence police perceptions of state legitimacy and regulation

What is identity shopping?

the strategic maneuvering of police officers between their roles as state agents and private citizens

How is revenge seen in the CJS?

• Gary Plauche publicly shot and killed the man charged with kidnapping and sexually assaulted his child

  • Pleaded no contest to manslaughter charge and sentenced to a 7 year suspended sentence

• Americans appear more likely to support vigilante violence against sex offenders than other types of offenders

What are examples of proactive vigilantes?

• Predator catchers on Tiktok and other social media 

• In response to supposedly inefficient law enforcement, people pose as youth online and lure would-be predators to a location where they are filmed, berated, and sometimes attacked physically

• Does not always result in criminal charges

How is the Joker a vigilante?

Joker as a revolutionary figure fighting a system that ignored his needs and pain

What is the Luigi Mangione case?

• Luigi Mangione, accused and charged with the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024

  • Allegedly shot Thompson three times from 20 feet away striking him in the back and leg as he walked to an investors’ meeting

  • Has become somewhat of a vigilante folk hero, especially among younger Americans and very liberal respondents

• Some discussion of the issues with the US healthcare system and the harm caused by insurance company practices

What is Margaret’s position on the Luigi case?

We need to be braver than just cheering on a rich white kid who shot a CEO in the back, we need the courage to imagine a world with systems that are fair and just and nonviolent, so we can actually make those systems happen

How are amateur sleuths good?

• Online Sleuths choose their cases and don’t have to juggle multiple at once if they don’t want

• Online sleuths are often motivated by passion, rather than working on cases for their job

• Amateur investigators are potentially more approachable to witnesses with something to hide than the police

• Amateur sleuths can learn tactics that are less familiar to police investigators who have access to and experience with conventional methods

• In cases police have deprioritized amateur sleuths can pressure for additional media and law enforcement attention

What kinds of cases do amateur sleuths take on?

• Missing persons, unidentified bodies, and unsolved homicides are the overwhelming focus of online sleuths

• Lower priority cases for the police

• By collecting information about a case and compiling it in a comprehensive, shareable, format, people may be able to help locate missing people or find those responsible for their appearance

How to ID Jane and John Doe’s

• Police, medical examiners, and forensic artists sometimes call on the public for tips based on artist reconstructions 

• Internet forums help push law enforcement to reconsider old cases

• Comparing known missing persons from police databases with Jane & john Does of similar descriptions

What is the DoeNetwork?

a non-profit volunteer organization devoted to assisting investigating agencies in bringing closure to national and international cold cases

What is the DNA Doe Project?

• nonprofit that organizes and analyzes genetic genealogy for unidentified persons

  • Work with medical examiners and investigators to secure usable DNA samples from unidentified bodies

  • Compare tested DNA with more far-reaching techniques than law enforcement is usually able to, including by comparison with public ancestry DNA databases

What was the Billy Newton case?

• gay man in the LA porn business murdered in 1990 whose case went cold

  • Captured the attention of Clark Williams in 2021 who retraced the investigation and focused in on a porn producer who knew Billy and was rather involved in the original police case

  • In the process of combing through film credits looking for people to interview about the now-deceased producer, found an unfamiliar name of Billy Houston, and searched additional details

  • Houston appeared in a newspaper article years later for the skinhead gang-related murder of a gay man in Oklahoma

  • Williams ordered a book that interviewed him and he admitted to an additional murder

  • Contacted LAPD and secured a confession from him was already incarcerated for life

How are internet sleuths bad?

• Online clout chasers can sensationalize active cases, making claims without evidence that reach thousands of viewers and taint investigations

• Even when content is meant to be helpful and restrained, the online environment rewards constant updates and new information, which reduces incentives to move slowly

• Victim blaming gets clicks

• Spectacle of family pain

How have internet sleuths impacted the Celeste Rivas Hernandez case?

• Sensationalist advertising of Youtube commentary investigation channels

• Victim blaming on reddit of Celeste & her family

• Unfounded speculation that COD was a drug overdose

• Simultaneously, online sleuths are providing some of the higher-quality deep dives into D4VDs streams, discord, etc. showing or discussing Celeste

What are the ugly parts of internet sleuthing?

• Falsely accusing people of horrible acts is part and parcel for some amateur sleuth communities, with reddit being infamous for it

• Moderating online spaces is difficult, overwhelmingly unpaid, and disincentivized in many cases, making it a wild west for accuracy of content at times

How did reddit affect the Boston Marathon Bombing case?

• 2013: Created r/findbostonbomber, combing through thousands of photos from the marathon bombing and aftermath to ID suspicious people who might be responsible

  • Over emphasis on “muslim looking” people

    • Falsely accused many people, including Saudi student, Indian American student who had gone missing, and Moroccan American high school athletes

  • New York Post ran an image of the suspects falsely claiming the authorities were looking for them

  • Devastating to the family of missing college student, who were harassed by the public and learned later he was already dead at the time of the bombing

What are the general rules concerning amateur sleuthing?

• Amateur sleuthing is best when mainstream sources of info and investigation have gone cold and when it is directed at finding victims, not perpetrators

• Amateur sleuthing may not help at all but sometimes can be useful

• Amateur sleuths come by the hobby because they truly care about the case or event

What is the CSI effect?

• theory that proposes the popularity of CSI has increased juror expectations for forensic evidence in criminal trials, disadvantaging the prosecution

• Acquittal data shows that if the CSI effect influenced acquittal rates in the US, the effect was small and short-lived

• Despite the lack of evidence, media reporting overwhelmingly claims that the CSI effect is real, negatively impacts prosecutors, and benefits criminal defendants

What is the strong prosecutors effect?

jurors are acquitting in cases lacking forensic evidence in which they would have been convicted but for the creation of CSI and similar television programs

What is the weak prosecutors effect?

prosecutors now question potential jurors about their television viewing habits in voir dire, present negative evidence testimony, discuss CSI in summations, etc.

What is the Daubert v Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals case?

• 1993 court case that requires federal courts to exercise a gatekeeping function with respect to the admissibility of expert evidence

  • Flexible standard that centers jurisdictional discretion

  • Prosecutors benefit most from including wide variety of evidence, and pro-prosecution bias may lead judges to admit instead of exclude

  • When judges are unfamiliar with the science, they are just as likely as anyone else to defer to the apparent authority and the structure of the system also presses for admission over exclusion

How do trials and experts influence the CJS?

• Trials where we tend to imagine forensic evidence playing out, are rare

• Expert witnesses are hired to present forensic evidence in court

• Defendants are disadvantaged in recruiting expert witnesses in criminal trials

  • Federally-funded appointed attorneys often need to request, advance approval from the presiding trial judge to secure funding to hire a witness and requests can be denied

  • Prosecutors can take their time providing disclosure of their experts to defense attorneys

  • Testimony on the (un)reliability of eyewitness identification is routinely excluded from court

What are examples of pattern matching?

• Friction ridge analysis

• Impression evidence

• Hair and fiber evidence comparison

How do fingerprint analyses work?

• If examiner determines prints (known suspect print and unknown latent print) are of adequate quality, they visually compare the two and evaluate points of similarity

• Assumes that friction ridge patterns are unique and stable (some evidence for this)

  • Does not imply that anyone can reliably discern whether or not two friction ridge impressions were made by the same person

Is bite mark analysis reliable?

• Heavily critiqued for lacking scientific rigor

• Marks are compared to suspects teeth, without controls

• There is no established science indicating what percentage of the population or subgroup of the population could’ve produced the bite

• Uniqueness of teeth is unclear, skin moves, swells, heals, and stretches

Are lie detectors reliable?

• Polygraphs had poor scientific foundation

• Often not admissible in US criminal courts but are admissible when both sides want it to be included

• Police are allowed to request suspects voluntarily take a polygraph and may lie about the results to extract confessions

• Pop culture polygraphs continue to imply that forensic science can determine truthfulness

How reliable is DNA evidence?

• DNA analysis under ideal circumstances is extremely accurate, but crime scenes are not always ideal

  • Relatively few cases have DNA evidence (10% of murders)

  • Contamination and misclassification of samples can happen, especially when initially collecting samples

  • When investigators find a mixture of several people’s DNA at a crime scene, it’s up to the analyst to tease apart the contributors

  • There are many ways in which trace DNA can be deposited at the crime scene that doesn’t incriminate the suspect

• Human error in DNA analysis is much more likely than finding two random DNA matches, but DNA testing accuracy rates are usually based on random match probability

How is there bias in forensic science?

• Task-irrelevant and stereotype-confirming info can shape subjective determinations by forensic examiners

  • When comparing 2 mismatched fingerprints, examiners were twice as likely to falsely match them when the suspect and crime description were stereotypically concordant

• Forensic labs are often funded by prosecutor’s offices or law enforcement, and experts sometimes work for these agencies directly

what is a bias cascade?

when experts doing forensics are aware of details on the early stage investigation, allowing early stage information to bias procedures later

What is a bias snowball?

when results of one process compound bias into larger disadvantages later

How can science language lead to misrepresentation?

• In trials that resulted in wrongful conviction and later exoneration, 60% involved invalid forensic testimony

• Scientific language can generate an air of credibility and increase the persuasiveness of claims it accompanies 

• Cultural power of science talk and scientific modes of explanation gives expert witnesses a great deal of sway in court

How do wrongful convictions related to forensic evidence happen?

• Most errors related to forensic evidence are not identification or classification errors by forensic scientists

• More often, forensic reports or testimony miscommunicate results, do not conform to established standards, or fail to provide appropriate limiting information

How are trials a performance instead of fact-finding?

• Spectacle and storytelling as central to trials

• Trial narratives capitalize on hegemonic ideas of race, gender, class, and more to provide explanations that juries find convincing

  • Appropriate performances of hegemonic gender, sexuality, race, and class may generate goodwill with the audience (jury)

What does language has its limits mean?

words matter in combination with ‘role’, making criminal defendants’ speech significantly less able to carry the legal gravitas afforded to lawyers’

How are defense attorneys portrayed as villains?

• Zealously representing the guilty (usually the obviously guilty), generally in ways the audience is meant to find unethical, misleading, or outright illegal

• Goes against the popular “theme that a good lawyer betrays the bad client,” disregarding actual guilt and launching a full defense of someone known to the defense to be guilty, ex. Billy Flynn, Chicago

How are defense attorneys portrayed as heroes?

• Zealously representing the innocent, generally in ways the audience is meant to find acceptable and ethical 

  • Ex. Atticus Finch, respectable & morally sound

• Refuses to defend those who are guilty of the crime they are accused of

How are heroic defense attorneys seen as tragic?

• Heroic defense attorneys don’t always win - but their losses are seen as tragic

• Sticking to a moral code and not breaking the rules is a common ‘requirement’ for heroic defenders, even if their ethics make it impossible for them to win

• Above all, in general, the people they defend should be innocent and nonthreatening

how are winning defense attorneys portrayed?

• “Winning” defense attorneys are villains, not heroes, in popular culture

  • At best they’re morally “gray”

• Conduct often flouts court procedure, and sometimes is outright illegal

  • But in popular culture depictions, they’re rarely punished for these transgressions - they get shouted at and then they’re back in court

• Bombastic, chaotic characters whose motives are generally ego and money; little to no respect for the sanctity of law or legal procedure 

What are defense attorneys like in reality?

• focus on attorneys defending high-profile cases in the context of a jury-trial, but this misses the majority of US criminal cases, which are low-level offenses dealt with through plea bargaining

• increasing of caseloads dramatically & requiring attorneys to “triage” which of their clients should receive more or less of their time and resources 

• defense attorneys can be outright punished by other courtroom professionals for attempting to negotiate for their clients 

• To maintain credibility with judges and prosecutors, defense attorneys strategically invoke the rights of their clients based on the defender's perception of their worthiness (race, class, prior record, etc.)

What’s the innocence defense?

they didn’t do it (or there isn’t enough evidence)