Part One: The Bastards of Forensic Science

Forensic Science is supposed to provide perfect certainty in the most serious criminal cases. What if it's all a bunch of bullshit? Robert sits down with Dr. Kaveh Hoda to talk about all the myriad cons in forensic "science.”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the
only podcast on the Internet that you're currently listening to
unless you're one of those weird people who's like trying
to trying to like maximize your intellectual benefit because you

(00:23):
listen to too many weird YouTube grifters and you've got
a different earbud to a different phone in each ear,
and you're like double podcasting as you read a book
because that's going to get you the most knowledge so
that you can probably put a bunch of scam books
up on Amazon or get into fucking, I don't know,
real estate fraud. God, the Internet's a great place and

(00:44):
one of the great things about the Internet is the
guest we're bringing on today. And as a doctor obviously,
doctor cave Joda has made a vow to first do
no harm, which is weird because every time we have
him on the show, he kills it.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Kava.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Welcome to the program was fantastic.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
I know, I thought about the Woe this morning and
I was just waiting to use it.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
Goodness, I'm going to steal that another day. Working her
fingers to the bone in the podcast Minds Good Buddies'
Happy to be back. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Yes, yes, now, Cava. This is a coming during a
difficult time. Actually wrote most of this episode in the
bone marrow transplant ward and then the ICU that my
dad was in as I was doing overnights watching him.
And I have a question for you because the hospital
I'm at, I'm not going to give the precise name,
but I'm in North Texas. The hospital I'm at, and

(01:40):
the bottom floor next to like one of the restaurants
has an antique store. And this antique store is so
crowded with stuff that you can barely walk in it.
And the proprietor and only employee is a man who
seems to be in his eighties. And where's at least
as far as I can tell, only like three piece suits.
And I'm is he the Is this the devil? I

(02:02):
found the devil?

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Wait?

Speaker 3 (02:04):
Wait, wait, wait, hold on, let's let's back up just
a moment. Because you said there is restaurants and an
antique store.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
There's an antique store in the hospital.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
It's next to a sub hospital that.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
Is next to a subway, so on in I know
why you'd want a subway in a hospital, because what
you need food at the hospital when you're watching.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
Nothing nothing said says hospital ambiance, like expired lunch.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
I don't understand.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
I mean, my California mind cannot comprehend. I've never worked
or been in a hospital in which there are more
than I mean, there's a cafeteria, but not anything. I
would say it's close to a restaurant, it's nothing like
nothing that resembles an antique store maybe against ball. Why

(02:53):
are you going to an antique store in the hospital.
What is happenings?

Speaker 1 (02:57):
I mentioned this too, why a doctor brother who practice
I don't know it and he was like, he was like,
oh yeah, And I was like, what do you mean?

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Oh yeah, He's like why but why He.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
Was not phrased by it, and I was like, this
is I'm like, what is happening there anyway?

Speaker 3 (03:11):
And yes it is the devil?

Speaker 1 (03:12):
Yeah, there's there's no way. This is not a needful
thing kind of situation here right right?

Speaker 3 (03:18):
Yeah, don't there's some weird gin monkey paw think anything
that person sells, don't buy it.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
Because I've been talking to the nurses too, and every
nurse I ask it is like, I have.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
No fing idea.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
It doesn't make any sense make any sense unless they
built the hospital on the antique store and the antique
store was like, YESO, the.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
Antique store was there first.

Speaker 3 (03:40):
They just had to put out house forever. It's been
here forever.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Sometimes it's older than the hills themselves, right Cove. Yes,
you're a scientist as a doctor scientist.

Speaker 3 (03:57):
Yeah, sort of scientific method is something I understand.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, you utilize science, correct. What do you know? How
do you feel about forensic science? You know, stuff like fingerprinting,
you know, DNA analysis, that kind of jazz.

Speaker 3 (04:12):
Will it is interesting. I feel like there are certain
parts of it that are very interesting to me and
seem to have, you know, some good evidence behind it,
like toxicology, DNA stuff. I think we've gotten fairly good
at that. That's a it's like a science. But I
don't know. I mean a lot of it seems to me.
Maybe you'll correct me if I'm wrong here. I'm guessing

(04:33):
not because that's what the topic of the Today Show is.
But I feel like just because you label something a
science doesn't necessarily mean it's a science, like scientology for example.
You know, so, I feel like there might be some
parts of forensic science that are not Can I tell
you a little bit of a backstory on this one?

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Sure? Please? So when I was.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
In medical school, I did my psychiatry rotation in a jail,
so I actually did forensic psychiatry. And I sat down
with a warden once who considered himself like a world expert.
And there were a lot of great people that worked
in the jill believe it or not, social workers and
stuff I worked with that were amazing. But I'm not
talking about that. I'm talking about this warden who who

(05:14):
ran it, who was like an expert in like micro expressions.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
Someone's line, it's my favorite cop bullshit science.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
And I remember he.

Speaker 3 (05:23):
Sad me down for like this lecture about it to
like go over it and me it was like fun,
I'm like, will this work? And I try, like if
I look up into the left, does that mean the
person's lying?

Speaker 2 (05:32):
You know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
There's all these little tiny things I was looking for,
But I'm like, I just I can't believe this is
a real science. Someone would really need to convince me
of the of the research behind it before I ever
like allowed that in court. Not that I'm a judge
or anything, but you know what I mean, that's so
I'm torn on forensic science? Is the long is a
short answer to that?

Speaker 1 (05:51):
Yeah, I had a fucking cop and Brady Texas pull
me over and repeatedly tell me as he was waiting
for the dogs because I wouldn't let him search my
car that, like, I've been trained to recognize lying, and
I believe that you are lying because like you did
this or did that when you say that you don't
have any marijuana in the car, and they didn't have
any marijuana in the car, but I still wasn't gonna
let them fucking search me.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
No, The best advice I ever got about being an
adult was from my speech and debate coach who got
fired because he had not disclosed that he had an
arrest on his record or something right after this, but
told us, if you ever have to lie to would judge,
don't break eye contact. Just look a judge or a cop.
Just look them right in the eye and tell them

(06:34):
what they need to hear for you to go home.
And by god, has it worked.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (06:38):
No, that's gotten me out of trouble a lot of times.
But yes, as that as that introduction kind of makes
it clear, there are sciences within forensics, like, for example,
matching DNA. You know, if there's blood at the scene
of a murder that does not belong to the victim,
and then you find a person with an injury and

(06:58):
their blood matches, that blood might suggest that they're the murder. Right,
there's real science there. I don't think anyone would would
argue with that. Likewise, you find some fingerprints at the
scene on a murder weapon, they match another dude, you know,
a person that you catch later, that might suggest that
you know that person did the murder. However, while both

(07:19):
of those things are sciences, both fingerprinting and DNA analysis
do not work as well as people often believe, and
there's kind of this whole field that's grown up around
them because of how solid the actual scientific basis in
both fingerprinting and DNA analysis is. They've provided sort of

(07:39):
like an umbrella under which a lot of other or
like a canopy under which like this kind of mushroom
cloud of toxic fake forensic science has also grown up.
I was mixing my metaphors there, but I think it's forgivable.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
Yeah, yeah, I got it.

Speaker 1 (07:54):
Anyway, that's what we're talking about today, because all forensic
science is a bastard. That's not entirely true, but it's
as true as forensic science is. So well, we'll allow
you know. On May thirtieth, nineteen ninety seven, a Boston
police officer entered the backyard of a house in Jamaica.
Plane he engaged in a short struggle with an unknown

(08:16):
person who ambushed the officer and managed to gain access
to his service weapon. The assailant fired twice, wounding the officer,
whose last words before losing consciousness probably sound in something like.

Speaker 3 (08:28):
Oil you've Boston.

Speaker 1 (08:31):
Sorry, sylthily what I wasn't gonna not gonna do my
award winning Boston accents.

Speaker 3 (08:37):
And the best part is I had no idea was
coming that I know. Really, it was a sneak attacked.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
I mean, we've all known Boston cops. They all sound
like that when you get shot Henny Kenny. Anyway, he survives,
so it's not in bad taste after shooting the officer
the assailant, isn't it.

Speaker 3 (08:58):
I'm not sure you're off the hook, but go on,
I think I'm fine.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
I'm letting you have this one. After it's been so
long since I brought the Boston accent out the people
have demanded. I did see like color go back into
your cheeks when he said, you're like more a lot
now than you were two minutes ago. Yeah, that's why

(09:21):
I got into podcasting, is to do that Boston accent.
We just got sidetracked by dictators. So after shooting this
cop with his own gun, which has to be embarrassing
as a cop, the assailant started shooting at a bystander
who was standing by a second story window watching. Thankfully
doesn't hit this random person, and then he flees the scene,

(09:43):
leaving behind nothing but a baseball hat that was knocked
off in the struggle. He breaks into a home near
where the shooting had taken place because he was thirsty.
A family is there and they like watch while he
drinks a glass of water and then leaves the CoP's
gun and sweatshirt behind. Now this seems like, well that's

(10:04):
a lot of evidence. You shoul probably be able to track
this guy down, right, A ton of witnesses leaves this
sweatshirt behind. Yeah, anyway, it takes about two weeks for
the injured officer to be well enough to sit in
front of a photo array of suspects and like potentially
identify somebody, and he picks a guy out of this lineup,
a man named Stephen Cohens Cowa NS And he does

(10:27):
this on two separate occasions, so the police think, well,
that's probably a pretty good id. The person who had
been shot at from his second floor idd Cohen's two.
Now that sounds again. This is one of those things
where if you see this in like a cop show,
where you'd be like, well, then it's obviously him, right,
he got id by both people at the scene. But
here's the thing, and this is something I hope people
are getting more aware of. Eyewitness accounts and identifications are garbage.

(10:51):
They're oftentimes worse than nothing at all. People are terrible
at recognizing shit that's had. I remember this one moment
during the protests and where like somebody pulled a gun
after like driving their car through a chunk of the protest,
And the first thing I heard from like a bunch
of different people was like a guy just pulled an
AR fifteen and a bunch of protesters and I looked

(11:12):
over to Garrison and I'll say, I'll bet you fucking
anything it was a handgun. And as soon as pictures
come out, so it's a nine millimeter handgun. And it's
not people aren't trying to like be lie or fantasized.
It's like memory is bad. We're bad remembering things that
happened to us.

Speaker 3 (11:27):
Yeah, I mean, I assume, especially when you're not expecting to,
you know, memorize things when it just happens and like
catching it and then looking back.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
Yeah. And this is why when they train people to
you know, do jobs, like you know whatever, FBI agents
and stuff, there is training and like how to try
and like analyze a scene. And and I think it's
debatable as to how well that works, but it is
a thing that you need to try and train because
we're not naturally good at it. Now. Part of why
I bring up the fact that these are terrible ideas

(11:57):
is that both the you know, the cop is kind
of ambushed. He doesn't get a good look at this
guy who shoots him. He's ambushed and horribly injured. And
the fam or and the guy who like looks at
him from that second story window and then get shot
at is not close to him, right. The two who
identify Cohen's as the guy. The family in the house
that the assailants forced their way into see this the

(12:19):
assailant at close range, and they don't ID Cohens. Now,
as a journalist, if I if I'm just trying to
determine what i think is more credible, I'm going to
be more credible to the family who.

Speaker 3 (12:31):
Was right next to the guy and shot the guy
in your living room, that that makes sense. You might
be able to recognize that that's a decent ID. Probably right, Yeah,
you have a better shot. You have a bear shot. Yeah,
certainly so. The fact that these folks who had been
closest to the shooter and spent the most time with
him didn't id Cohen's should have been a warning. But
their testimony is not what cinched Cohen's conviction, and he

(12:52):
is convicted of this crime. Instead, prosecutors used a fingerprint
found on the glass of water the assailant drank from
it in their home. They bring in a fingerprint expert.
He concludes the Layton print matches Cohen's left thumb, and
that sounds pretty bulletproof. Right, fingerprints are real. Matching fingerprints
is a real thing you can do. Seems like a

(13:14):
good id. So Cohens goes off the prison where he's
going to stay for more than six years. He does
not accept this conviction because spoilers. He's innocent, so he
fights this as much as he can from prison, and
the Innocence Project worked with Cohens for several years, and
in two thousand and three they succeeded in pushing the
Suffolk Superior Court to release the glass mug that that

(13:35):
latent fingerprint had been taken from swabs of the mug,
the baseball hat, and the sweatshirt that the assailant had
left behind to do DNA testing and see if any
of it matched Cohen's and the DNA tests are conclusive.
While the DNA on the hat matched the DNA from
the swabs, so they knew that the hat that was
left at the scene where the officer was shot belonged
to the same person who drank from that mug, neither

(13:58):
test matched Cohen's. Right yeah, tests on the sweatshirt reveal
the same thing, and with this new evidence, the Suffolk
DA reanalyzed the fingerprint match that had been used to
convict Cohen's Upon re examination, it was concluded that the
fingerprint was not left by Cohens. On January twenty third,
two thousand and four, he was released. He lived in

(14:19):
freedom for the next three years until he was shot
to death in two thousand and seven in his own home.

Speaker 1 (14:25):
A fright. A really depressing number of Innocence Project people
who get like released die very soon after getting released
for a variety of reasons. Inclaning, A lot of them,
you know, go back into situations where their living situation
isn't very safe. Yeah, because the time they've spent in
prison certainly didn't give them the ability to get into
a saber one exactly.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
I mean it's also like they probably picked people who
are at risk anyways, those are the people they are
being accused of this, or people who probably aren't in
a fantastic situation to begin with.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
Then they go to.

Speaker 3 (14:54):
Jail, they spend whatever amount of time not making money,
earning an income, learning anything, advancing their lives, and then
they have to try and start over. A lot of
them are going to be much worse off. So yeah, yeah,
I'm not shocked to hear that, I guess.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:08):
Now, Cohenes's story from the use of unreliable forensic science
to convict him to his tragic early death after release
is again very common and just as common as the
fact that he was a black man, and the officer
he was accused of wounding was white next to DNA, So.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
I'm sorry that I didn't even have to ask his color.
No you. Yeah, of course, figure that.

Speaker 3 (15:28):
Was going to be the situation here, that they were
gonna just find another guy that matched the color and
that was it.

Speaker 1 (15:33):
Yeah, it happens quite often now next to DNA testing.
Fingerprint matching is one of the most reliable methods of
forensic analysis we have. But that fact, which is undeniable,
does not mean that it's reliable enough you would want
to risk your freedom on it. It does not mean
that it's perfect, and it doesn't mean that you can

(15:55):
take an expert saying this fingerprint belongs to this person
as red right.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
None of that is.

Speaker 1 (16:02):
You simply can't rely on any of that because there's
a big difference between the actual science behind fingerprints and
fingerprint forensic science.

Speaker 2 (16:12):
Right.

Speaker 1 (16:13):
Fingerprinting experts, prosecutors and law enforcement like to portray it
as a thing of objective science where you get one
hundred percent confirmation of a perpetrator's presence of a crime
scene because you matched them to a fingerprint, and that
is not true. Basically, everything you've ever heard about forensic
science and fingerprint science is a lie. And outside of

(16:34):
stuff like fingerprints and blood, which do at least have
a basis in science, most of what is done in
the forensic field, or at least a lot of it,
has more in common with witchcraft than science. So I'm
starting with fingerprinting both because people should know that it
does not work the way they think it does, and
because it kind of kickstarts the field of forensic science

(16:55):
in the modern sense and in the US that starts
in nineteen eleven when fingerprinting first is used in a
court case. So unlike most of what we're talking today, again,
this does have real use in catching people who have
done bad things. The first case in which fingerprints were
introduced as evidence was the nineteen to ten trial of
Thomas Jennings, who was accused of murdering Clarence Hiller. And

(17:18):
I'm going to quote now from an article by General
Nuken in Issues in Science and Technology. Quote the defendant
was linked to the crime by some suspicious, circumstantial evidence,
but there was nothing definitive against him. However, the Hiller
family had just finished painting their house and on the
railing of their back porch. Four fingers of a left
hand had been imprinted in the still wet paint. The
prosecution wanted to introduce expert testimony, concluding that these fingerprints

(17:41):
belonged to none other than Thomas Jennings. Four witnesses from
various bureaus of identification testified for the prosecution, and all
concluded that the fingerprints on the rail were made by
the defendant's hand. The judge allowed their testimony and Jennings
was convicted. The defendant argued unsuccessfully on appeal that the
princes were improperly admitted, citing authorities such as the Encyclopedia
Britannica and a treatise on Handwriting identification. The court emphasized

(18:03):
that standard authorities on scientific subjects discussed the use of
fingerprints as a system of identification, concluding that experience has
shown it to be reliable, and you know, that's all good.
This is probably a case of fingerprinting being used to actually,
like convict a guy who did crime. You know, it's
interesting to me that human beings have pretty much always

(18:25):
known that there was potential in fingerprints as a method
of identification. The idea that they are unique to each
individual goes back very far. Ancient Babylonians used fingerprint indentations
as part of their records for business transactions. Yeah, but
fingerprinting didn't enter the criminal justice system in an organized
way until the mid eighteen hundreds. Like most innovations in

(18:48):
criminal justice, it was first tested by the British raj
in India, initially as part of like a fraud prevention measure.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
Right.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
A major breakthrough came a few years later in the
eighteen seventies, courtesy of a Scottish doctor, him Falds, who
was a missionary in Japan. Falds started inking his coworker's
fingerprints after noticing fingerprints trapped in two thousand year old
pottery shirts. This led to the first recorded case of
a solved crime due to fingerprints. One of his employees

(19:14):
was stealing booze from the hospital and drinking it from
a beaker. Falds found a print on the glass and
matched it to the culprit. That is apparently the first time.

Speaker 3 (19:24):
Crime whom's amongst us in medicine does not occasionally use
a beaker for that purpose. Come on, yeah, it's a crime. Now,
that's a crime.

Speaker 1 (19:32):
It's bullshit, It's this is the first great injustice caused
by finger printing exactly.

Speaker 3 (19:39):
You know, it's interesting to hear this because it's like,
you know, we talked about some of the forensic signed
stuff before, like the stuff I'm a little more familiar with,
like DNA and toxicology. The reason I know about those
is because they're kind of born out of like research,
out of like universities, hospitals, peer reviewed journals, et cetera.
But like some of these other things seem like they're

(20:00):
born out of like law enforcement, which is like a
big difference. It feels like.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
And fundamentally not scientific. And even when they're quote unquote
using science, their goal is not scientific because it's always
starting from a I there's a crime, and I need
to identify who did it, and usually I think it,
I know who did it, and I'm trying to find
evidence to prove it. That's gonna be one of the
recurrent problems in this field. Not with every case, but

(20:28):
it's it's pretty frequent, so fouls. He's kind of like
the first real like a person who's trying to study
fingerprints like in an actual scientific measure, and he does
some cool stuff. He like scrapes the ridges off of
his fingertips and then waits for them to grow back,
and fingerprints himself again to confirm that if you like
fuck up your fingerprints, they grow back the same way.

(20:50):
He's the guy who like found that children's fingerprints remain
the same as they grow up. And in eighteen eighty
he wrote a letter to the journal Nature and suggested
that police should use fingerprints to identify suspects. And again
this is not initially like a in order to catch them.
It's more of like a when you have people arrested,
we can do fingerprints and that can help us, like
you know, sort through people. The idea, though, of using

(21:13):
them as part of in like a forensic sense, starts
to pick up steam, and in eighteen ninety two a
eugenicist and scientists named Sir Francis Galton publishes a book
called Fingerprints, which outlines the first attempt at a scientific
classification of fingerprints based on patterns of arches, loops and
whirls now. Around the same time, this French cop named
Bertillon developed his own method of measuring people's bodies in

(21:36):
order to identify criminals. And as you might have guessed,
the science of fingerprinting has always been deeply tied to
scientific racism, as these guys all believe that, like, criminals
have physiological differences from law abiding citizens, right Bertolan's measuring
people's bodies straight, Like, how can you tell from measurements
if someone's going to commit crimes?

Speaker 2 (21:54):
You know what does look like? Exactly?

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Like these beliefs go hand in hand with the idea
that some races are more inclined to criminality than others.
But as is always the case with this kind of science,
you have this mix of like stuff that's absolute races togwash,
and actual science. And some of what they're doing and
trying to like classify fingerprints is actual science and is rigorous.
The classification system for fingerprints that wins out at the

(22:20):
end of the nineteenth century is a modification of Galton's.
It was tested by British police in India and adopted
by Scotland yard in nineteen oh one. Fingerprints were accepted
for the first time in English courts in nineteen oh two,
and of course, the first recorded court case in the
US using fingerprint evidence is like nineteen ten and nineteen
eleven is previously discussed. By the mid century fingerprinting has

(22:41):
cemented itself as the most scientific and unimpeachable tool for
confirming guilt. A whole industry of experts grows up alongside
the discipline, and hundreds of men and women begin to
make their careers as experts on fingerprinting for the police
and the court system. In case studies published in scientific
journals and in statements to the mess these experts reinforced

(23:02):
the idea that fingerprinting was a hard, objective science. Manuken writes,
quote writers on fingerprinting routinely emphasized that fingerprint identification could
not be erroneous, Unlike so much other expert evidence, which
could be and generally was disputed by other qualified experts,
fingerprint examiners seemed always to agree generally, the defendants and

(23:22):
fingerprinting cases did not offer fingerprint experts of their own,
Because no one challenged fingerprinting in court, either its theoretical
foundations or, for the most part, the operation of the technique.
In that particular instance, it seemed especially powerful. The idea
that fingerprints could provide definite matches was not contested in court.
In the early trials in which fingerprints were introduced, some

(23:43):
defendants argued that fingerprinting was not a legitimate form of evidence,
but typically defendants did not introduce fingerprint experts of their
own fingerprinting, thus avoided the spectacle of clashing experts on
both sides of a case whose contradictory testimony befuddled jurors
and frustrated judges. And so you see why this is
so powerful, Right, every other kind of expert you might
bring into a court case, there could be a counter

(24:05):
expert to say, here's another explanation. But if fingerprinting is
a hard science, there can't be It's like DNA, right,
you wouldn't have there can't be two opinions on whether
or not someone's DNA matches right exactly.

Speaker 2 (24:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:17):
No, I mean, like the if I have the facts
right about the OJ Simpson case. That was part of
the problem is that the defense never actually had their
own DNA expert because I don't think they could find
someone that would do it. But this is like, this
is a major issue in general nowadays. Maybe forever you
have someone who seems like a very authoritative figure, maybe

(24:37):
they have some titles behind their name, they speak in
a certain way. Listen to my podcast recent episode about
Andrew Huberman, for example, and they seem like a very
learned man of books and they can it's who's a
jury to say at that point, Well, this person seems
to know what they're saying. This person seems very worldly
and intelligent, and they seem to be an expert, and
they're they're the authority on it. So yeah, okay, yeah,

(24:59):
obviously this is the person that did the crime.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
Yeah, And that is like, that's what happens, right, And
it's it's this kind of ce change in the way
that the justice system works, because suddenly you have this
thing that is in a total class of its own
as far as evidence goes. Right, Now, here's the thing.
Fingerprinting is not like DNA analysis and never and by

(25:22):
the way, DNA analysis, while it is real and does
work quite well, also isn't perfect. There are errors, people
make mistakes, there are a mistaken you know that that
is a thing that can happen. But it is an
objective science, right, Like there's a lot of study on that.
The fingerprints analysis is not an objective science in the
way that you would consider anything from like medical science

(25:45):
to be an objective science. One of the pieces of
evidence for that is that there are no like from
state to state, what counts as a fingerprint ID differs wildly, right.
So there's a case Daubert that is kind of the
case that currently establishes like what counts as science when

(26:06):
you're like introducing expert evidence into court, right, And under
the Daubert judgment, judges are supposed to examine whether or not,
like judge, whether or not something can be admitted based
on whether or not the expert evidence has been adequately tested,
if it has a known error rate, and if there's
standards and techniques that like control the operation right, subject
to peer review, right, which sounds reasonable. But judges are

(26:30):
not scientists, right, and they often mistake stuff that sounds
like evidence of peer review but really isn't. And some
of the evidence for this is that, like fingerprinting, examiners
often use point counting, which is a method where you
count the number of ridge characteristics on the prints in
order to like say these are identical prints. But there

(26:51):
is no nationally recognized fixed requirement for how many points
of similarity are needed. Some states at six, some states
it's nine, some states it's twelve. That's not science, yea.

Speaker 3 (27:03):
And I'm so glad you brought up error rate studies.
It's sort of like an important part of like determining
if a test will be a good one or not,
you know. And it feels like judges are not a lawyer,
but it feels that judges are more likely to allow
evidence to come in even if it's sort of questionable,
because they're worried about maybe like excluding something that would

(27:24):
be important, so they'll allow it to go in. Yeah,
even if it's sort of like they don't understand the science.
My guess is they would be more willing to allow
it than to be strict about excluding it unless they
understood the science really well.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah, And the problem is that like all of these
people have really impressive sounding credentials and they are a
part of what appear to be scientific bodies, and in fact,
in a lot of cases we'll talk about some of
these organizations are bodies that a lot of what they
do is scientific, but there's just not actually oversight, right,
Like Minuchin sums up kind of the current state of

(27:59):
how like messy as well. When they write local practices
vary and no established minimum or norm exists. Others reject
point counting for a more holistic approach. Either way, there
are no generally agreed upon standards for determining precisely when
to declare match. Although fingerprint experts insist that a qualified
expert can infalliably know when two fingerprints match, there is

(28:19):
in fact no carefully articulated protocol for ensuring that different
experts reach the same conclusion. And that's a problem, right.
It imagined if like cancer diagnosis worked this way, if
like every hospital was like, well, this is what we
consider cancers.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
You know, I mean, you know.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
Also part of the thing is this, to some degree,
there is uncertainty in medicine. Like say, if you had
a pathology report and you take a biopsy of something
and sure all just looks at it.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
They do have criteria.

Speaker 3 (28:48):
They have to be like, okay, there're a certain amount
of these types of cells I'm seeing and if there's
a question, then they reach out to someone else to
review it, and second, you know, and look over it.

Speaker 2 (28:57):
But that is known to us. We're known.

Speaker 3 (29:01):
They're like, okay, this is the degree of certainty we
have here. It's not one hundred percent, but this is
what we have. And sometimes that happens, so there's a
transparency there that's important, you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
And likewise, you know, there is a science within the
approach of fingerprint analysis because people have fingerprints, and we know,
you know, they're generally unique to each person, you know,
based on the best data that we have. But these
people are not getting up and saying, you know, based
on this established, you know framework that is universally agreed upon,

(29:32):
there's this percentage of likelihood that this is a yes,
they're saying, I can tell as an expert, this is
infalliably amassed.

Speaker 3 (29:39):
Right, it's so much more valuable as an expert.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
Right, right, Yeah, it's and it's messy. So fingerprinting takes
off like and again, you know, the fact that this
is really deeply flawed and fucks a lot of people
over it doesn't mean that's what it does in the
majority of cases. Right, I'm not saying that, I actually
kind of suspected the majority of cases it's reasonably good, right,
But that still leaves a lot of people to fall

(30:03):
through the cracks and get their lives ruined by imperfect
and badly applied scientific reasoning. There was no serious questioning
of fingerprinting as a method of forensic science until the
end of the twentieth century, when DNA profiling began to
enter common use. This questioning started, ironically, with questions by
defendants as to the legitimacy of DNA matches. Right, so,

(30:27):
DNA evidence starts being introduced in court cases, and because
the science is so new and is not as straightforward
to understand as matching to fingerprints, there's a lot more
debate and debate in court cases about what it means
to match DNA samples and how likely it is that
such matches might be made in error. And that kind
of causes some people to go, did we ever subject
fingerprinting to this level of scrutiny? Perhaps we should, We

(30:50):
might want to look into this sum you know, because
it hadn't had to answer these questions.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
Right it was.

Speaker 3 (30:56):
I mean not to say that Western medicine and universities
and all the stuff I'm used to is like the
end all be all, but because again, it didn't come
out of those places where it was already a part
of the process, you know, it was baked into it.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
And by the way, it's good that DNA matching was
subject to a lot of scrutiny. Everything should when people's
lives are on the line exactly.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
Yeah, So the sheer act of publicly debating the matter
brings new scrutiny to fingerprinting, and once DNA science was
accepted because it is the best thing we've got, and
that when it comes to this sort of stuff, it
helps to ignite a new series of questions as to
whether or not fingerprinting was as rock solid a discipline
as its expert practitioners claimed. One of the first things
you'll hear, and I'm sure everyone listening to this podcast

(31:38):
has heard, the claim, no two people have the same fingerprints.
Right now, how would you prove that?

Speaker 3 (31:46):
I mean, I suppose you would have to do a
ton of testing and you would have to test a
bunch of people and see if there is any people
that have the same one, and you'd have to have
a pretty big n number of people involved in the
study to prove it.

Speaker 1 (32:03):
It doesn't really exist now. It is based on the
sheer number of people who have been fingerprinted, very likely
that fingerprints are unique. But this is just common wisdom
that started being said. It isn't something that was introduced
that people started claiming because they had done a big study.
Right again, the sheer length of time that we have

(32:24):
been doing finger printing. Pretty likely that this is the case,
But it was not something people started saying because they
had a good fucking reason to say it. It was
something people started claiming as an advertising method, right, interesting,
And the fact that it is likely true doesn't mean
that that's not kind of sketchy, right, And we're dealing
with people's lives again again, Yeah, exactly, Speaking of advertising

(32:46):
and sketchy, it's about time. Yeah, this podcast is supported
entirely by the concept of DNA. DNA, get some welding again,
do be a silicon based life form? No, you're not
gonna be one of those Like if you do get
one of those like spit into a thing. M hm, oh,

(33:08):
don't do those things people. Those things are bullshit. Are
you sell your fucking data to somebody's.

Speaker 3 (33:13):
Schedule that wasn't our fault?

Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:18):
Also, I might take their money in the future, but
it's bullshit. You know, it's bullshit. Ah, We're back, And
I just want to say to our listeners who are
silicon based life forms, I actually I don't have any
issue with silicon based life you know, I'm a big

(33:41):
rock Monster fan. I think you guys should have the
same rights that the rest of us have. I'm looking
forward to our first rock monster president.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
You know.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
I assume it'll be like the guy from Galaxy Quest,
and I think that would be a lot better for
this country. To be honest, man, say they wouldn't prefer
a rock monster to the choices we're currently looking at.

Speaker 3 (34:00):
Yeah, better, Uh, rock or I was looking for a
red or or dead sort of thing. Yeah, I couldn't
with rock or rock or you suck.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
I don't think he's going to be able to like
accomplish a lot proactively, but I do think if we
were to let a rock monster loose in Congress, it
would be generally good for everyone.

Speaker 3 (34:21):
It's the little things, just like that scene and utt things,
that's the simple.

Speaker 1 (34:30):
Everybody in that movie knocks it out of the park,
even Tim Allen, and I hate Tim.

Speaker 3 (34:34):
Allen exactly, I thought the same exact thing.

Speaker 1 (34:39):
Anyway. I can already hear some people saying, you know,
I get that the whole finger every fingerprint is unique
thing isn't something that you can conclusively prove, But you
just admitted it's probably true. You're just kind of splitting
hairs by complaining about experts claiming that they're sure of something,
and I don't think I am splitting hairs here. The
power of fingerprinting in criminal justice system comes from its

(35:02):
presumed unimpeachability. People have been killed repeatedly in large numbers
on the certainty that fingerprint analysts know what they're doing,
and we have data that shows they often don't. Here's
Minucan again quote. Although some FBI proficiency tests show examiners
making few or no errors, these tests have been criticized

(35:23):
even by other fingerprint examiners as unrealistically easy. Other proficiency
tests shown more disturbing results. In one nineteen ninety five tests,
thirty four percent of test takers made an erroneous identification.
Especially when an examiner evaluates a partial, latent print, a
print that may be smudged, distorted, and incomplete, it is impossible,
on the basis of our current knowledge to have any

(35:45):
real idea of how likely she is to make an
honest mistake. And maybe it's much lew, but honestly, if
ten percent of the time an average fingerprint examiner is
fucking up, that's a sizeable error rates, especially if your
life is some line you know and thirty four percent
is real fucking bad.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
Yeah, that's a big number.

Speaker 1 (36:07):
I mean, this is fine if you are making this
kind of data aware, if the jury is aware of it,
and if you were saying stuff like, you know, we
got some imperfect fingerprints and they suggest it might be
this person, but our level of confidence is maybe fifty
nine percent or whatever, right that, So we think that
it's likely, but we can't prove it. You give that
information to a jury, I think a reasonably intelligent person

(36:29):
can put that in context with other evidence. That's not
how it's presented a lot of the time.

Speaker 3 (36:34):
You don't have to throw it out. I mean, you
should use it, but we need to at least know
the limitations of it, at least be yes transparent with
the science or lack thereof behind it.

Speaker 1 (36:44):
And this is where we get to the problem where
there's not a lot of counter experts and while when
there are, it's because someone has the money to pay
for them. So the people who do not have the
ability to like introduce the doubt that ought to be
present with a lot of these fingerprint analyzes are like
poor people, you know, yeah, right, and that's who gets often.

(37:04):
You know, it's not a bunch of rich people going
to prison for bad fingerprint analysis. Primarily they can afford
the people.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
I mean, there are das who are overworked, I'm sure
trying to like defend them. How are they going to
get that together? I just yeah, it sounds like it
would be a massive undertaking.

Speaker 1 (37:22):
Yeah, it's I mean, yeah, it's too much to ask for,
like the average public defender who is already dealing with
way too many fucking cases on zero money.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
So, published studies on fingerprinting tend to be case studies
where after conviction, an expert will walk the reader through
this process that looks to a layman like a scientific study,
but it's not. That's analyzing a case in which, like
somebody got convicted and walking through your work, as opposed

(37:52):
to like actually trying to objectively find good data on
how often the matches these people make are right, because
there's not really again, there's not really any good way
to do that. You often don't find out that someone's
been wrongly convicted on the basis of it'll take ten, fifteen,
twenty years, right, How like it's getting this kind of
information on how flawed this field has took a lot

(38:15):
of time, and a lot of people have gotten hurt
in the interim. In two thousand and four, Brandon Mayfield
was a lawyer in Portland, Oregon, and a pretty prominent
one too. He had recently represented the so called Portland Seven,
a group of local Muslims who'd been convicted of conspiring
to support the Taliban. After nine to eleven that year,
he went on vacation to Madrid. And my god, this

(38:36):
man picked the worst time to go on vacation to
Madrid anyone has ever picked. A group of Islamic extremists
carried out a terrorist attack on a commuter train while
he was in Madrid that killed nearly two hundred people.
Because the FBI be how the FBI do? They flew
in to help out the Spanish authorities, and they identified
a partial print on a plastic bag that had contained

(38:58):
detonators and stick to Brandon, Brandon who was on their
shit list because he had defended these guys they had
accused of supporting the Dalaban. In the book Junk Science,
Innocence Project, lawyer Chris Fabricant writes, to the FBI, Mayfield
looked good for it. Spanish fingerprint experts disagreed. But the
FBI would not back down. A court appointed expert conducted

(39:21):
an additional examination and confirmed the FBI's conclusions. Mayfield remained
jailed virtually in communicado for weeks. Only after Spanish police
associated the fingerprints with an Algerian national named Daud o'nane
did the FBI admit it was wrong, and Mayfield was
finally released, after which he successfully sued for two million
dollars and elicited something rarer than money from the FBI

(39:43):
a public apology.

Speaker 2 (39:44):
Oh wow, good on him. Strong, Yeah, strong work.

Speaker 1 (39:49):
Yeah, very rare case. It shows you how much they
fucked up, right, And also they made the mistake of
going after a lawyer. Lawyer, right, yeah, thankfully. I mean,
this is obvious. My heart goes out to him for
how stressful this must have been. But at least he
had the capacity to defend himself.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:06):
Now, with hindsight, we can see that the prime reasons
the FBI went after Mayfield was that he himself was
a convert to Islam who had represented accused terrorists. But
at the time, they argued that their experts couldn't be biased.
They were using unimpeachable science, even though their experts disagreed
with Spanish experts who were presumably using the same science,

(40:27):
and they're more experts. They were more experter If you're
again framing this to the people making choices accurately, that's
no worse than saying like, well, this doctor says someone
likely has the syndrome, but this doctor has a different conclusion.
Because this is just not something we understand well, right,
But that's not how it's being presented. It came out
later that the court appointed expert brought in for Mayfield's case,

(40:50):
the guy who found a match that matched the FBI's case,
had been informed before doing his analysis that the elite
FBI fingerprint analysts had found a match before he made
his report, Right, So that is something like that's bad science.
If someone is conducting is attempting to analyze a fingerprint determined,

(41:10):
if it's a match, you shouldn't tell them beforehand that
another analyst has made a match because that could prejudice them.

Speaker 3 (41:19):
Right, it's not blinded study. It's very unblinded.

Speaker 2 (41:23):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (41:23):
Yeah, yeah, but that happens all the time with this shit,
because again, it has this it's dressed as science, but
it's not treated that way by a lot of its practitioners,
which is again a lot of the people who are
criticizing these bad identifications are fingerprint analysts who do treat
it as a science. My issue is not that those
people don't exist, it's that it is not standardized that

(41:47):
that's the expectation for how a fingerprint analyst should operate.
You know, this was a public enough fuck up that
a cognitive neuroscience tist conducted a rare study into how
cognitive bias mightn't form results in forensic studies. He got
six fingerprint experts and he gave them eight sets of
prints to analyze. Unbeknownst I love this.

Speaker 3 (42:07):
Song I love. I was about to say, I love
studies like this.

Speaker 1 (42:10):
This is this one's real fun because unbeknownst to them,
all the sets they were analyzing came from previous cases
they had analyzed. So all of these guys had gotten
these prints before and made ideas in court cases. Nice
they're given the same prints, but not told they're the
same prints. Fantastic Thirds of them came to different conclusions

(42:35):
while analyzing the same fingerprints a second time.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
That's so amazing.

Speaker 3 (42:40):
You reminds me of if I made if I made
tangent for just one moment. One of my favorite studies
I ever saw it was a study of like wine connoisseurs,
because you know how there's people who love wine. They've
done this some variation of the study a number of
times where they took like a bottle of wine and
they had it in like a paper bag, and they
had another wine in the paper bag. And they said

(43:02):
to them, they said, hey, look these are like wine officionados,
people who are like you know, some all the aids,
et cetera, and.

Speaker 2 (43:08):
These wine nerds.

Speaker 3 (43:09):
Yeah, they said, this one is like one hundred dollars
bottle of wine. This one's like a ten dollars bottle
of wine. Rate review them, use different use whatever word
you want to describe them, and they would, you know,
generally rate them very differently. They would describe them very differently,
and they were the same exact bottle of wine. And
it was just like still objective, How objective this thing

(43:30):
can be.

Speaker 1 (43:31):
This happens a lot. It happens with pot, right, There's
a lot of pots where people they're like, well, this
one will get you this kind of and this one
will gets you this kind of high and like, that's
kind of true in that different levels of like different
cannabinoids can affect the high. But like a lot of
what people say about like different strains of pot is bunk.
And the same thing happens with cratim where they'll be like,
well they've got this kind and this kind and this

(43:52):
kind is like well, it's just kind of matters how
much of the active ingredient is in it.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
But it's also like.

Speaker 1 (44:00):
You know, with a wine somalia or with you know,
drug nerds or whatever, what's the harm of some guy
being like, I know all of the all of the
wines that have the best wine text. It's fine, You're
not hurting anybody. The worst case scenario is some rich
people pay more money for a fancy or wine experience
with the fingerprint stuff. It's a real problem. But I

(44:20):
do think it's it's kind of worth comparing to that
Somalia study because it is it is a kind of
like really similar. And again, the point here is not
that fingerprint analysis is bunk science or useless. It's that
fingerprint analysts are not performing objective science. They are making
judgments based on their opinions. They are often being informed
ahead of time we think this guy did it, can

(44:41):
you tell us if the fingerprint matches, you know, which
is not how it should work. It's the same thing
with like, you'll hear a lot about how great fucking
police dogs are and how they can identify if you've
got a little bit of a speck of marijuana and
you know, a fucking car or whatever full of stuff.
They've got these incredible noses and dog knows are that incredible. Also,

(45:02):
that's not how police dogs work. Police dogs are primarily
paying attention to when the police officer expects to find
drugs and where an alerting off of that. That's how
they work. Ask me how I know?

Speaker 2 (45:15):
I really want to know.

Speaker 3 (45:17):
Really, just because I beat them once, can we talk
about this?

Speaker 1 (45:24):
I had fuck it, I got I'd gotten pulled over
and this is like fucking fifteen years over, pulled over
with pot in a car. They brought the dogs out.
I had been told by an old head that like, yeah, man,
if you get caught, if you get pulled over by
the police dogs, look anywhere but at the car. Do
not look at the vehicle while they're doing anything, because
the cop is watching you to see when you get

(45:44):
nervous when the dog gets to a part of your
car where the drugs are, and then the cop will
either he believed that the cops had a secret signal
to the dogs. I think it's actually more likely that
you tense up when the dog gets near where the
drugs are. The cop sees you tense up, and the
dog sees the cop tends up. You know, maybe both
of those things are happening. There have been studies on this,

(46:06):
though you can actually read into this. They do not
work as well as they say they do. It is
easy for police dogs to be biased because the dog
doesn't know what it's actually doing. Right, The dog is
trying to make people happy. That's all the dogs trying
to do. I'll smell down, okay, yeah, sure again. Dogs
are capable of that kind of sense analysis, but that

(46:28):
doesn't mean that's what they're always doing. Just like fingerprints
analysts are capable of analyzing fingerprints on the scene and
matching them to a person, but that doesn't mean that's
what they're doing every time they claim they're doing that, right, Yep,
Bias be a thing. Bias and this is the case
with every other kind of investigative technique in criminal justice.

(46:50):
But forensic science is not treated that way. Part of
why is that there's an awful lot of money in
ensuring that it is treated as hard scientific truth. The
success fingerprint experts have enjoyed in this arena has inspired
other would be experts to build their own careers peddling
science much more questionable than fingerprint analysis. But you know
what's a lot more questionable than even that cave.

Speaker 3 (47:12):
Boy, I hope it's some sort of very morally questionable ad.

Speaker 1 (47:17):
It is it is, it's an ad for.

Speaker 2 (47:21):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
I don't actually know what's more morally questionable than our
current advertisers. So just buy whatever they're selling. We're back, cave.

Speaker 2 (47:34):
Yeah, I'm back too.

Speaker 1 (47:36):
Fingerprint analysis is fun. By fun, I mean it's infuriating
how often it does not work the way it's supposed to,
but it is at least based in real stuff. Now,
I'm going to bring us to a true villain, to
some absolute, real bullshit forensic science. And of course, the
true villain of this episode, Kava, is history's greatest monster.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
Tists expect it. Got me again?

Speaker 3 (48:06):
Got me again?

Speaker 2 (48:09):
Adab baby? Yeah, no, good dentist's right, ight.

Speaker 1 (48:15):
So this part of the story starts in September nineteen
eighty two, when twenty two year old Teresa Perrin noticed
a sailor hitchhiking near her coastal Virginia home. Seeing sailors
in uniform was not odd where she lived. There was
an aircraft carrier dock nearby, and her husband worked at
a nearby naval base. But when she failed to pick

(48:36):
this man up, he screamed at her, and later in
the days she noticed a similar looking man in a
sailor uniform loitering outside her house as she dried her laundry.
She went on with her day somewhat agitated until her
husband came home. She was finally able to get to sleep.
She wakes up in the middle of the night to
see a man in a sailor's uniform standing above her.

(48:56):
He beats her husband to death with a crowbar while
he sleeps, and then he rapes Teresa repeatedly the granular
details it I mean, this goes on. I am telling
you these start. This is a hideous fucking case. What
happens to this woman is just an absolute nightmare. And
the whole time she's basically doing everything she can to
like make keep him happy because her kids are also

(49:18):
in the house and she doesn't want him to kill
them too. It's just a fucking nightmare.

Speaker 2 (49:23):
One thing I do.

Speaker 1 (49:24):
Again, I'm not going to try to go into too
much detail, but I do have to note for what
comes next that when the man raped her for the
second time, he bit her repeatedly on the thighs, hard
enough to leave a mark. This is crucial to what
comes next. Teresa survives, thankfully, and the case immedia obviously
becomes the biggest news in town. Right, this guy gets away,

(49:45):
and it's of course people freak out, right there is
some unbelievably violent, horrible man on the loose, Like, yeah,
a literal monster on the loose. This is one of
those cases where everyone panics and it's like, yeah, man,
the reason I'd be sleeping with a fucking gun every night,
you know, yeah, I would be putting the family in

(50:06):
the fucking panic room and have a rifle by my guy.

Speaker 2 (50:08):
Outside, like.

Speaker 1 (50:11):
I don't already. So Teresa was given a rape kit
by a doctor and her injuries were documented in detail.
She was so shown mugshots, but no clear culprit materialized.
A security guard at the base reported that he had
seen a sailor with blood on his uniform enter the
shipyard gate at two thirty am. I will note that
like that seems like, well, obviously that's the guy. If

(50:33):
you've known navymen, a sailor showing up with blood on
their uniform at two thirty in the morning to go
to bed not uncommon, doesn't mean they've necessarily committed a murder.
Sometimes that's just how sailors be. Given the time Teresa
said the assault had taken place, this guy could not
have been the culprit right two thirty am according to her.

(50:57):
And again she's awake with this guy. He's there for
hours according to when she said the assault took place,
This guy with blood on his uniform couldn't have been
the one who did it. It had to have just
been a coincidence. But the DA in this case has
the security guard hypnotized the security guard who said, yeah,
this guy came in at two thirty am, and after
being hypnotized, the security guard says no, no, no, he

(51:19):
came in at five am. Now that's already very questionable.

Speaker 3 (51:24):
I can't think of a softer science than hypnotism.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
Yes, that is wow, that is that is the chinchilla
fur a forensic science.

Speaker 3 (51:34):
It's it's such a it was so nice and sometimes
I'm so proud of you.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
And then that reference right there was.

Speaker 3 (51:41):
One of the beautiful, beautiful moment, beautiful.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
So unfortunately, and this is, you know, we'll talk about
hypnotism some other day. This is kind of really at
a peak point in the early eighties of hypnotism being
introduced into court cases. This also plays into the Satanic Panic,
which is happening around the same time. But they decided
to have Teresa. The DA has Teresa hypnotized as well,
and after being hypnotized, she claims that the sailor who

(52:07):
attacked her was definitely the same guy as the hitchhiking
sailor who had yelled at her earlier. Obviously, a shitload
of sailors are in town. The idea that one of
them would be a murderer and a rapist and not
the same guy who just like yelled at her randomly
when she drove past him in town pretty actually good
odds that they're not the same guy. But the DA
once that's an easier like line of logic. So the

(52:30):
DA you know, has her hypnotized, and then she changes
her story right to be like, I'm sure it was
the same guy. So again, already, just from a fact standpoint,
we're not off to a great start with this case,
with like trying to track down the culprit based a.

Speaker 3 (52:47):
Real, real eighties like movie of the week sort of like.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
We used hypnosis.

Speaker 3 (52:53):
It's a brand new science out of Europe to like
get these people to like open up their minds more. Oh,
it's terrible, it's so depressing.

Speaker 1 (53:01):
It's rough stuff. It's rough stuff. And based on this
very flawed information, it has decided that the man who
had attacked her must be a sailor on the nearby
USS Carl Vinson. Now again, this is the aircraft carrier
that's in town. Pretty good chance that the guy who
attacked her was, But also not the only sailors in town.
So the district attorney on the case, Willard Robinson, asked

(53:23):
the captain of the Carl Vinson to provide the state
with dental records for all thirteen hundred of the sailors
under his command. That way a dental expert could analyze them.
He had already had an expert analyzed Teresa's bites, and
the expert had concluded that the assailant had possessed a
pointed front tooth that was misaligned. Now, extensive analysis did

(53:43):
not come forward with any clear identification. The case languished,
and the family started complaining to elected officials in both
the DA and Navy felt extreme pressure to resolve the case. Then,
in March, a twenty six year old sailor on the Vincent,
Keith Allen Harwood, was arrested over a domestic dispute. He
was drunk as hell during this fight and is alleged

(54:04):
to have bitten his girlfriend. Again, that sounds damning until
I note that he bites her after she hits him
with a frying pan, which does make it sound less
like this guy is a biting psychopathem and more like, well,
this was just a real bad relationship.

Speaker 3 (54:17):
That's a very toxic relationship. That the frying that's a
nice time.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
I mean, yeah, again, you wouldn't call this good behavior,
but it's hardly like evidence that this man is a murderer.
But once he's in custody, you have got a sailor
and he bits somebody, you know, not he's a surprising
he's a bier. Yeah, yeah, right, so he starts to
look pretty good to this increasingly desperate DA who was
really getting pressured to solve this fucking case now, Because

(54:46):
this guy was on the Carl Benson and they'd provided
dental records to the to the state, this guy's teeth
had already been looked at, and experts had analyzed his
teeth and said he couldn't be the man who had
bit Teresa, right, So that's a problem.

Speaker 2 (55:01):
Now.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
I'm going to read from a write up in the
National Registry of Exonerations which should give you an idea
of where this case ends up.

Speaker 2 (55:08):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (55:09):
Harward had been among those whose teeth were examined in
the immediate aftermath of the investigation, but he had been
ruled out as the source of the bitemarks on Teresa
by a civilian dental consultant working with a Newport News
City medical examiner. When Harward came to court, Teresa was
there but could not identify him as the attacker. At
that point, police asked Harward to submit to a second

(55:30):
procedure to obtain a cast of his teeth. The cast
was sent to Lowell Levine, then a budding superstar in
the fledgling field of bitemark analysis, who had gained fame
for his testimony linking bite marks to serial killer Ted
Bundy and to Nazi war criminal Joseph Mengela. Levine concluded
that Harward was responsible for the bitemarks on Teresa's body.

(55:50):
Police showed a photographic lineup to Wade, who selected Harward's
picture as the man who came through the security gate
with a blood spattered uniform. On May sixteenth, nineteen eighty three,
police arrested Harward on charges of capital murder, rape, robbery,
and burglary. He is ultimately convicted and he is sentenced
to life in prison. He appealed that, and the Virginia

(56:11):
Supreme Court did grant him a new trial in nineteen
eighty six. Levine testified at this that's the bitemark guy
testified at this second trial that there was a quote
very very very very high degree of probability that Harward's
teeth had made the bite marks. Now that's not scientific language.
So he followed by assuring jurors there that there was
a quote practical impossibility that someone else would have all

(56:34):
these characteristics that Levine found in the bite marks. And again,
what we have here is a real science. That is
providing cover for a pseudo science, because dental analysis is
very real, very real thing. You can like, like, that's
how we identify dead bodies and stuff by their dental
records all the time. You know, dental analysis.

Speaker 2 (56:57):
Is a thing.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
This guy is good at dental analysis. Bite mark analysis
not a thing in the same way. I'm going to say.
You can never identify a bite mark and match them
to someone's teeth, but it is not the same as
identifying someone by their dental records.

Speaker 3 (57:16):
Can I give an example of this, Yeah, yeah, please?
Wrestling with my three children and somebody bit me. It
left the mark, and I was like, all right, I
should be able to determine because it was really deep
into my flesh. Which one of the little bastards did this?
And when I held up all their teeth like to
the bite they all looked like they could have gone

(57:37):
in it all looked like they could have been the one. Like,
there's no way, there's no way to tell, there's a
way to tell. I know that's not scientific. I'm just
telling you my experience, but I feel like I see
where you're going with this.

Speaker 1 (57:47):
Your experience does hint at the actual science, which is
that you have two problems, key problems when it comes
to try to identify a bite mark in this way.
If the person who is bit survives, as Teresa does,
once you are bit, you start to heal. That process
of reacting to the injury, which includes swelling up, which

(58:09):
could include getting infected, which can include which and eventually
includes like the healing of the injury starts immediately, so
by the time your injuries are analyzed, and it's likely
you know, cops generally when they come under the scene
of a rape and murder, the first thing you're doing
is not carefully documenting the bitemarks in such a way
that it will be helpful to a forensic dentist. Necessarily,

(58:31):
already that bite mark has started to change, right, In fact,
it's going to change immediately because generally, like when you
bite someone hard enough, they swell up, and that's going
to alter the look of that bitemark. Likewise, if you've
got a corpse that you know someone got murdered and
they were bit decomposition also starts immediately, So you cannot
say that the skin, like human skin is not like

(58:54):
a dental cast.

Speaker 3 (58:55):
Right, No, right, And you're exactly right, Like there is
a difference between mean someone analyzing like teeth remains of
teeth and being like these belong to this person or
et cetera. You know, there's a difference between that and saying, well,
this bite is related to this person because of there's
all these other factors that tie into that, mechanical factors
and all these variables that like, it seems like it

(59:17):
would be difficult. Maybe there are scientists who can prove
me wrong on that, but I could see this being
a much more difficult process and just identifying teeth.

Speaker 2 (59:25):
It is.

Speaker 1 (59:26):
Again, I'm not saying it's a thing you could never do,
but it is not in any way the same kind
of thing as identifying someone from their dental records. But
because Levion is the guy who got famous identifying people
from their dental records, and now he is testifying about
bite marks, it sure seems like the same thing to again,
the people who are not dentists or science authority.

Speaker 3 (59:45):
He's an authority exactly how you do not believe him?

Speaker 1 (59:49):
Now Harward's testimony again, because he the Supreme would gets
in the second case, after Lemne says like it's impossible
for someone else to have all the characteristics I found
in these bite marks. Hardward's testimony includes some pretty good
counter evidence to exonerate him, including the fact that he
had an alibi during the time Teresa had been attacked.
He had been at a mandatory drug and alcohol abuse

(01:00:11):
program after being caught aboard with weed. He had an alibi. Also,
Teresa specifically recalled the rank on the man's uniform because again,
her husband works at the naval base. She knows this
kind of stuff, and Harward's rank insignia did not match
the signia she recalled seeing on her attacker. None of

(01:00:31):
this mattered. Harward was sentenced again largely on the strength
of the bitemark analysis and would spend thirty years in prison. Now, again,
just as a spoiler, he's innocent. Let's take a look
at this expert, Lowell Levine. At the time of the case,
he was the most prominent bitemark analyst in the country.
His CV took a full half hour to read in court,

(01:00:53):
and like that was a strategy on behalf of the
prosecution in the early nineteen seventies, though before this case begins,
he was just another dentist. And it's generally like it's
a little bit of a this is debatable, but like
some people will argue that dentists struggle with depression and
dissatisfaction in their jobs at high levels compared to other
health professionals.

Speaker 3 (01:01:14):
High rates a suicide I've been told, yeah, yes, compared
to other health professionals.

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
Yeah, there's there's some evidence of that, although it is
actually kind of inconclusive. It is worth noting that between
twenty three and twenty twenty one alone, the number of
dentists experiencing extreme anxiety tripled. Again, that might have more
to do with COVID than anything else. I don't know,
it's inconclusive, but I bring this up just because the
young doctor Levine seemed kind of unfulfilled in his career

(01:01:41):
cleaning teeth and more interested in the sexy, daring work
of a forensic detective. He wrote an article for New
York Journal of Medicine titled Dentistry and Emerging Forensic Science.
Bite mark analysis had never been used in a court
case before, but Levine pitched the idea, as Chris Fabricant
notes in the book Junk Signs, to truly gain acceptance

(01:02:02):
by his colleagues as a forensic scientist and recognition as
an expert Levine advocated for some sort of certification the
dentists had to be had to more than contribute to
victim identification. Bite marks could be very valuable to be
able to establish the identity of the perpetrator of the
bite for legal purposes, Levine argued, But he also acknowledged

(01:02:22):
that there was a sea of knowledge we must accumulate
before we are willing to make positive identifications in court
involving homicide cases, and he was candid about the lack
of an objective scientific basis to the new technique. As
a result, bitemarks will never be truly comparable to a fingerprint,
since we cannot reproduce the three dimensions of the bitten surface.
So that's what he writes in the seventies. And that's

(01:02:44):
all kind of reasonable.

Speaker 3 (01:02:46):
Can I think it's very reasonable to I feel for
the guy. I'll tell you why. I'm a gastroentrologist, as
you know, and I've been pitching this idea of being
a forensic proctologist and solving crimes through the dead innus,
like reading rings on tree, the sort of thing, right right,
I've been pitching the show to NBC for a while.
I haven't gotten any positive feedback yet, but I'm not

(01:03:07):
gonna stop because I think there's something to this, and
so I understand where this guy is coming from.

Speaker 2 (01:03:12):
I get it.

Speaker 1 (01:03:12):
Yeah, it's like mind Hunter but for butts. Butt hunter.

Speaker 2 (01:03:15):
But yeah, well there it is nailed it.

Speaker 1 (01:03:18):
Man, ma'am, I know you're very distraught right now because
your whole family was murdered. But what can you tell
me about what the insight of the man's ass probably
looked like?

Speaker 3 (01:03:28):
We're gonna need to look at your husband's buttle.

Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 (01:03:31):
So again in you know, this guy writes, like, ten
years or so before the Hardward case, bite marks will
never be comparable to a fingerprint. They can't be for
very you know, basic reasons. Ten years later, though, Levine
is a board certified member of the American Board of
Forensic Odontology, and he testifies scientific certainty that mister Harward

(01:03:56):
caused the bitemark on Teresa Peron's leg. I think ten
years ago he said you couldn't do with bitemarks, and
his certainty was so convincing that the two dentists who
had ruled that Harward hadn't been the bier changed their
testimony based on his Wow. So how he and his
colleagues accomplished this was that they forced their way into

(01:04:16):
the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and, as he'd written it,
created a board certifying entity to ensure they could back
up their claims whenever they would analyze a bitemark with
titles that sounded impressive to judges and juries. This all
started with a conference at a hotel in Chicago with
Levine and seven other dentists who had been working ad
hoc as experts for prosecutors at local medical examiner offices.

(01:04:39):
They recognized how much money and respect could be theirs
if they locked down a more formal role, and they
knew the AAFS was the way to do it. The
American Academy of Forensic Sciences was the most influential body
in the field, and membership was seen as something of
a rubber stamp that whatever forensic science you were pushing
is the real shit, so.

Speaker 3 (01:05:00):
Good stuff, that's how you do it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
That's yeah, do it.

Speaker 1 (01:05:04):
Yeah, yeah, this is like a very clever plan. So
these odontologists knew that if they get in and if
they you know, have suddenly a certification, that's going to
make it impossible for any layman defense attorney to question
their claims, which is going to make them very valuable
for prosecutors. They are looking at what's happened with fingerprint
experts and they want the same thing for bite marks.
The AAFS obviously includes a lot of real experts, because

(01:05:26):
there are real forensic scientists and people in the AFS
are trying their level best who helps all horrible crimes.
But it also includes a lot of grifter assholes who
want money in respect and don't care how many people
get wrongly convicted for that to be possible. So when
you know, again, I say all this book because I'm
deeply critical of this organization for what comes next. And

(01:05:48):
also I think a lot of the people who are not,
you know, odontologists in this organization probably see what Levine
and the others are claiming about bite marks and assume
they know their's because they're doctors, you know, and because
not just because of that, odontologists had always been a
big part of forensics, because dental records are that's a

(01:06:09):
real way to identify remains, you know. So these folks
feel like Levine and his crew are the real deal,
even though bite mark analysis has nothing to do with
id in corpses via dental records. And I want to
read a quote from Fabricat's book, just sort of laying
into how flawed this is. Bitemark analysis involves subjective interpretation

(01:06:29):
of a bruison skin and guessing whether it could have
been made by teeth, and if so, whether a particular
suspects teeth made the mark. You appreciate that the sub
disciplines of forensic odontology have nothing whatsoever to do with
each other, that they can be made to sound like
they do. Forensic dentists identify people through their teeth and
through the bite marks their teeth make. That sounds straightforward,
but it's actually more like a geologist claiming that because

(01:06:51):
he can identify rocks, he can identify the rock that
was used to bash someone's skull. And geologists out there,
there's a lot of money for you if you want
to take that one up.

Speaker 3 (01:07:00):
So business idea number thirty three is fantastic.

Speaker 1 (01:07:04):
Yeah, using real forensic dentistry as cover Levine and his
cadra of I can't call them grifters legally, but I'm
very critical of these people slide into the AAFS. They
are accepted despite the fact that very there's not a
lot of them, and crucially, there's not any rigorous scientific
data laying out the objective best practices for comparing bite
marks to teeth. A lot of real experts might point

(01:07:27):
out that there are deep flaws in the the iver. Again,
what everything I've said about like tissue, it's kind of
the only really good bite marks that you can do
a cast of someone's teeth and match to the bitemark
is what are called. It's basically like cartilage bites, right, Like,
if you get bit in the nose, you can sometimes
get a really good bitemark from that because cartilage keeps

(01:07:47):
the mark better. Yeah, it doesn't heal as well skin, right,
So this is again these guys are real dentists.

Speaker 2 (01:07:56):
They know this.

Speaker 1 (01:07:56):
They know that if they want to make the case
that this is a real science, they need like a
famous court case that they solve with bitemark analysis. And
because very few bitemarks can actually be analyzed with rigorous science,
they're kind of like waiting for a while to find
the perfect case to like make a big splash with.

(01:08:17):
You know, this is this is a tough thing. You
need a case that's horrific enough that it captures imaginations
and gets media attention, and bite marks need to be
involved somehow, and most importantly, the suspect needs to be poor,
you know, so that experts.

Speaker 3 (01:08:32):
It's so it's such a bummer to take a step
back for a second and be like, there's enough bite
related crime, Like there's vicious attacks so terrible that people
are biting in this animalistic way, victims biting people, Like
this is a thing that's developing. That's that's kind of
a weird concept for me to understand, Like that's common

(01:08:52):
enough that this is even something that they're trying to
look for.

Speaker 1 (01:08:56):
Yeah, yeah, that's it is that.

Speaker 2 (01:08:58):
People the worst they were weird.

Speaker 1 (01:09:02):
In February of nineteen seventy four, Levine and his colleagues
got their dream case. A seventy three year woman was beaten,
stabbed in the genitals, and murdered. She had been bitten
on the tip of her nose, and it created the
perfect bitemark for forensic dentistry. Levine had written two years
prior about the need for such a three D bitemark,
which was rare, to establish the legitimacy of his field.

(01:09:25):
Now they had it. The prosecutor in this case suspected
that Walter Marx was the guilty party because he had
rented a room from her, but there was no actual
evidence that he had committed the crime. So the prosecutor
reached out to three dentists and they responded by saying
the judge needed a subpoena Marx for a cast of
his teeth. Marx refused, and so a judge jailed him

(01:09:45):
for six weeks until he complied. Now, Fabricant notes that
the mere process of forcing someone to have a mold
taken is biasing, right, that it can bias, like the
people analyze that mold because like, well, why would this
be taken unless they was a reason to believe this
guy was guilty, you know. And no structures were set
up within the field of bite mark analysis to ensure

(01:10:06):
that people comparing molds of wounds and teeth were objective right,
looking at the information purely as information, rather than acting
as paid members of a prosecution team. Jerry Vale, one
of the dentists brought in for the case, was over
the moon with excitement about the quality of the bite
marks in this specific case. He convinced the judge that
he was an expert, and Marx was convicted. The prosecutor

(01:10:27):
later told the La Times there is no question, but
this case is going to go down as the most
significant bitemark case in forensic history. People v. Marx became
the foundational case in the field of bitemark analysis, even
though it opened by acknowledging no established science of identifying
persons from bite marks.

Speaker 2 (01:10:46):
But see that's good.

Speaker 3 (01:10:47):
The problem here, and you're probably going to go into
is that, like, this is the fundamental difference between like
law and science, is that now this is set as precedent.
Now in the legal sense, they are going to be like, Okay,
well we've done this one thing and it seems that
I mean, if what I've watched on TV is correct,

(01:11:08):
again not a lawyer, if what I've seen is correct,
then is like they're going to use that as precedent
later in another case, whereas science is the opposite. You
don't go based on precedent. You go based on things
are constantly changing, it's always evolving. It should be they
should be progressing. Sort of problem with COVID for example,
you know.

Speaker 1 (01:11:25):
With our knowledge of COVID, if science was based on precedent,
like oncologists would be like, well, we really think this
chemotherapy thing might help me, Like, well, no, no, no, I'm sorry.
We established with precedent that we melt people's cancer with fire,
you know, like that's what we've been doing for thirteen
hundred years.

Speaker 3 (01:11:42):
Yeah, the president is clear, right, but now it's a
precedent and that's all you need in law, like present
from one hundred years ago about whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:11:50):
Yeah, yeah, anyway, cobab that's the end of part one.
In part two, we have a lot more things that
are going to make you angry. But first, why don't
you make the audience know where your pluggables are.

Speaker 3 (01:12:02):
Yes, you can find my podcast, The House of Pod.
It is a humor adjacent medical podcast. We look at
the intersections of public health and social justice sometimes and
pop culture and it's fun. And if you like Behind
the Bastards, you're probably gonna like our show. We're similar,
but not as good. So check us out with that's

(01:12:24):
a pretty good sell, right, We're not as good. Check
us out anywhere you get podcasts. And if you want
to follow me on socials the Cave, look up CAVEMD,
or look.

Speaker 2 (01:12:34):
Up The House of Pod.

Speaker 1 (01:12:36):
You know, Cava, I've found this is one of my
life hacks that you listeners at home can take. People
really like and trust you more when you use self
deprecating humor. So I've started whenever I meet new people
saying hi, I'm Robert and just so you know, three
years ago I was involved in a hit and run
that killed seven people.

Speaker 2 (01:12:53):
Yeah, it's a great way to bring you guys.

Speaker 1 (01:12:55):
It makes it, It makes them trust. You're like, oh, you know,
this guy is not you know all you know, up
on his own about stuff, right, you know, and he
makes mistakes just like me. He kills seven people in
a hit and run, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:13:05):
And they're like, this is a Wendy sir. What do
you I have a Hamberg?

Speaker 1 (01:13:13):
Mm hmm, all right, until I got part one's done, Goodbye, Goodbye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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