Speaker 1: Also media. Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the
Speaker 1: only podcast on the Internet that you're currently listening to
Speaker 1: unless you're one of those weird people who's like trying
Speaker 1: to trying to like maximize your intellectual benefit because you
Speaker 1: listen to too many weird YouTube grifters and you've got
Speaker 1: a different earbud to a different phone in each ear,
Speaker 1: and you're like double podcasting as you read a book
Speaker 1: because that's going to get you the most knowledge so
Speaker 1: that you can probably put a bunch of scam books
Speaker 1: up on Amazon or get into fucking, I don't know,
Speaker 1: real estate fraud. God, the Internet's a great place and
Speaker 1: one of the great things about the Internet is the
Speaker 1: guest we're bringing on today. And as a doctor obviously,
Speaker 1: doctor cave Joda has made a vow to first do
Speaker 1: no harm, which is weird because every time we have
Speaker 1: him on the show, he kills it.
Speaker 2: Kava.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the program was fantastic.
Speaker 1: I know, I thought about the Woe this morning and
Speaker 1: I was just waiting to use it.
Speaker 3: Goodness, I'm going to steal that another day. Working her
Speaker 3: fingers to the bone in the podcast Minds Good Buddies'
Speaker 3: Happy to be back. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, now, Cava. This is a coming during a
Speaker 1: difficult time. Actually wrote most of this episode in the
Speaker 1: bone marrow transplant ward and then the ICU that my
Speaker 1: dad was in as I was doing overnights watching him.
Speaker 1: And I have a question for you because the hospital
Speaker 1: I'm at, I'm not going to give the precise name,
Speaker 1: but I'm in North Texas. The hospital I'm at, and
Speaker 1: the bottom floor next to like one of the restaurants
Speaker 1: has an antique store. And this antique store is so
Speaker 1: crowded with stuff that you can barely walk in it.
Speaker 1: And the proprietor and only employee is a man who
Speaker 1: seems to be in his eighties. And where's at least
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, only like three piece suits.
Speaker 1: And I'm is he the Is this the devil? I
Speaker 1: found the devil?
Speaker 2: Wait?
Speaker 3: Wait, wait, wait, hold on, let's let's back up just
Speaker 3: a moment. Because you said there is restaurants and an
Speaker 3: antique store.
Speaker 1: There's an antique store in the hospital.
Speaker 3: It's next to a sub hospital that.
Speaker 1: Is next to a subway, so on in I know
Speaker 1: why you'd want a subway in a hospital, because what
Speaker 1: you need food at the hospital when you're watching.
Speaker 3: Nothing nothing said says hospital ambiance, like expired lunch.
Speaker 2: I don't understand.
Speaker 3: I mean, my California mind cannot comprehend. I've never worked
Speaker 3: or been in a hospital in which there are more
Speaker 3: than I mean, there's a cafeteria, but not anything. I
Speaker 3: would say it's close to a restaurant, it's nothing like
Speaker 3: nothing that resembles an antique store maybe against ball. Why
Speaker 3: are you going to an antique store in the hospital.
Speaker 3: What is happenings?
Speaker 1: I mentioned this too, why a doctor brother who practice
Speaker 1: I don't know it and he was like, he was like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, And I was like, what do you mean?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, He's like why but why He.
Speaker 1: Was not phrased by it, and I was like, this
Speaker 1: is I'm like, what is happening there anyway?
Speaker 3: And yes it is the devil?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's there's no way. This is not a needful
Speaker 1: thing kind of situation here right right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, don't there's some weird gin monkey paw think anything
Speaker 3: that person sells, don't buy it.
Speaker 1: Because I've been talking to the nurses too, and every
Speaker 1: nurse I ask it is like, I have.
Speaker 2: No fing idea.
Speaker 3: It doesn't make any sense make any sense unless they
Speaker 3: built the hospital on the antique store and the antique
Speaker 3: store was like, YESO, the.
Speaker 1: Antique store was there first.
Speaker 3: They just had to put out house forever. It's been
Speaker 3: here forever.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's older than the hills themselves, right Cove. Yes,
Speaker 1: you're a scientist as a doctor scientist.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sort of scientific method is something I understand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you utilize science, correct. What do you know? How
Speaker 1: do you feel about forensic science? You know, stuff like fingerprinting,
Speaker 1: you know, DNA analysis, that kind of jazz.
Speaker 3: Will it is interesting. I feel like there are certain
Speaker 3: parts of it that are very interesting to me and
Speaker 3: seem to have, you know, some good evidence behind it,
Speaker 3: like toxicology, DNA stuff. I think we've gotten fairly good
Speaker 3: at that. That's a it's like a science. But I
Speaker 3: don't know. I mean a lot of it seems to me.
Speaker 3: Maybe you'll correct me if I'm wrong here. I'm guessing
Speaker 3: not because that's what the topic of the Today Show is.
Speaker 3: But I feel like just because you label something a
Speaker 3: science doesn't necessarily mean it's a science, like scientology for example.
Speaker 3: You know, so, I feel like there might be some
Speaker 3: parts of forensic science that are not Can I tell
Speaker 3: you a little bit of a backstory on this one?
Speaker 2: Sure? Please? So when I was.
Speaker 3: In medical school, I did my psychiatry rotation in a jail,
Speaker 3: so I actually did forensic psychiatry. And I sat down
Speaker 3: with a warden once who considered himself like a world expert.
Speaker 3: And there were a lot of great people that worked
Speaker 3: in the jill believe it or not, social workers and
Speaker 3: stuff I worked with that were amazing. But I'm not
Speaker 3: talking about that. I'm talking about this warden who who
Speaker 3: ran it, who was like an expert in like micro expressions.
Speaker 1: Someone's line, it's my favorite cop bullshit science.
Speaker 2: And I remember he.
Speaker 3: Sad me down for like this lecture about it to
Speaker 3: like go over it and me it was like fun,
Speaker 3: I'm like, will this work? And I try, like if
Speaker 3: I look up into the left, does that mean the
Speaker 3: person's lying?
Speaker 2: You know what I mean.
Speaker 3: There's all these little tiny things I was looking for,
Speaker 3: But I'm like, I just I can't believe this is
Speaker 3: a real science. Someone would really need to convince me
Speaker 3: of the of the research behind it before I ever
Speaker 3: like allowed that in court. Not that I'm a judge
Speaker 3: or anything, but you know what I mean, that's so
Speaker 3: I'm torn on forensic science? Is the long is a
Speaker 3: short answer to that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I had a fucking cop and Brady Texas pull
Speaker 1: me over and repeatedly tell me as he was waiting
Speaker 1: for the dogs because I wouldn't let him search my
Speaker 1: car that, like, I've been trained to recognize lying, and
Speaker 1: I believe that you are lying because like you did
Speaker 1: this or did that when you say that you don't
Speaker 1: have any marijuana in the car, and they didn't have
Speaker 1: any marijuana in the car, but I still wasn't gonna
Speaker 1: let them fucking search me.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, The best advice I ever got about being an
Speaker 1: adult was from my speech and debate coach who got
Speaker 1: fired because he had not disclosed that he had an
Speaker 1: arrest on his record or something right after this, but
Speaker 1: told us, if you ever have to lie to would judge,
Speaker 1: don't break eye contact. Just look a judge or a cop.
Speaker 1: Just look them right in the eye and tell them
Speaker 1: what they need to hear for you to go home.
Speaker 1: And by god, has it worked.
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: No, that's gotten me out of trouble a lot of times.
Speaker 1: But yes, as that as that introduction kind of makes
Speaker 1: it clear, there are sciences within forensics, like, for example,
Speaker 1: matching DNA. You know, if there's blood at the scene
Speaker 1: of a murder that does not belong to the victim,
Speaker 1: and then you find a person with an injury and
Speaker 1: their blood matches, that blood might suggest that they're the murder. Right,
Speaker 1: there's real science there. I don't think anyone would would
Speaker 1: argue with that. Likewise, you find some fingerprints at the
Speaker 1: scene on a murder weapon, they match another dude, you know,
Speaker 1: a person that you catch later, that might suggest that
Speaker 1: you know that person did the murder. However, while both
Speaker 1: of those things are sciences, both fingerprinting and DNA analysis
Speaker 1: do not work as well as people often believe, and
Speaker 1: there's kind of this whole field that's grown up around
Speaker 1: them because of how solid the actual scientific basis in
Speaker 1: both fingerprinting and DNA analysis is. They've provided sort of
Speaker 1: like an umbrella under which a lot of other or
Speaker 1: like a canopy under which like this kind of mushroom
Speaker 1: cloud of toxic fake forensic science has also grown up.
Speaker 1: I was mixing my metaphors there, but I think it's forgivable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I got it.
Speaker 1: Anyway, that's what we're talking about today, because all forensic
Speaker 1: science is a bastard. That's not entirely true, but it's
Speaker 1: as true as forensic science is. So well, we'll allow
Speaker 1: you know. On May thirtieth, nineteen ninety seven, a Boston
Speaker 1: police officer entered the backyard of a house in Jamaica.
Speaker 1: Plane he engaged in a short struggle with an unknown
Speaker 1: person who ambushed the officer and managed to gain access
Speaker 1: to his service weapon. The assailant fired twice, wounding the officer,
Speaker 1: whose last words before losing consciousness probably sound in something like.
Speaker 3: Oil you've Boston.
Speaker 1: Sorry, sylthily what I wasn't gonna not gonna do my
Speaker 1: award winning Boston accents.
Speaker 3: And the best part is I had no idea was
Speaker 3: coming that I know. Really, it was a sneak attacked.
Speaker 1: I mean, we've all known Boston cops. They all sound
Speaker 1: like that when you get shot Henny Kenny. Anyway, he survives,
Speaker 1: so it's not in bad taste after shooting the officer
Speaker 1: the assailant, isn't it.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure you're off the hook, but go on,
Speaker 3: I think I'm fine.
Speaker 1: I'm letting you have this one. After it's been so
Speaker 1: long since I brought the Boston accent out the people
Speaker 1: have demanded. I did see like color go back into
Speaker 1: your cheeks when he said, you're like more a lot
Speaker 1: now than you were two minutes ago. Yeah, that's why
Speaker 1: I got into podcasting, is to do that Boston accent.
Speaker 1: We just got sidetracked by dictators. So after shooting this
Speaker 1: cop with his own gun, which has to be embarrassing
Speaker 1: as a cop, the assailant started shooting at a bystander
Speaker 1: who was standing by a second story window watching. Thankfully
Speaker 1: doesn't hit this random person, and then he flees the scene,
Speaker 1: leaving behind nothing but a baseball hat that was knocked
Speaker 1: off in the struggle. He breaks into a home near
Speaker 1: where the shooting had taken place because he was thirsty.
Speaker 1: A family is there and they like watch while he
Speaker 1: drinks a glass of water and then leaves the CoP's
Speaker 1: gun and sweatshirt behind. Now this seems like, well that's
Speaker 1: a lot of evidence. You shoul probably be able to track
Speaker 1: this guy down, right, A ton of witnesses leaves this
Speaker 1: sweatshirt behind. Yeah, anyway, it takes about two weeks for
Speaker 1: the injured officer to be well enough to sit in
Speaker 1: front of a photo array of suspects and like potentially
Speaker 1: identify somebody, and he picks a guy out of this lineup,
Speaker 1: a man named Stephen Cohens Cowa NS And he does
Speaker 1: this on two separate occasions, so the police think, well,
Speaker 1: that's probably a pretty good id. The person who had
Speaker 1: been shot at from his second floor idd Cohen's two.
Speaker 1: Now that sounds again. This is one of those things
Speaker 1: where if you see this in like a cop show,
Speaker 1: where you'd be like, well, then it's obviously him, right,
Speaker 1: he got id by both people at the scene. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing, and this is something I hope people
Speaker 1: are getting more aware of. Eyewitness accounts and identifications are garbage.
Speaker 1: They're oftentimes worse than nothing at all. People are terrible
Speaker 1: at recognizing shit that's had. I remember this one moment
Speaker 1: during the protests and where like somebody pulled a gun
Speaker 1: after like driving their car through a chunk of the protest,
Speaker 1: And the first thing I heard from like a bunch
Speaker 1: of different people was like a guy just pulled an
Speaker 1: AR fifteen and a bunch of protesters and I looked
Speaker 1: over to Garrison and I'll say, I'll bet you fucking
Speaker 1: anything it was a handgun. And as soon as pictures
Speaker 1: come out, so it's a nine millimeter handgun. And it's
Speaker 1: not people aren't trying to like be lie or fantasized.
Speaker 1: It's like memory is bad. We're bad remembering things that
Speaker 1: happened to us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I assume, especially when you're not expecting to,
Speaker 3: you know, memorize things when it just happens and like
Speaker 3: catching it and then looking back.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And this is why when they train people to
Speaker 1: you know, do jobs, like you know whatever, FBI agents
Speaker 1: and stuff, there is training and like how to try
Speaker 1: and like analyze a scene. And and I think it's
Speaker 1: debatable as to how well that works, but it is
Speaker 1: a thing that you need to try and train because
Speaker 1: we're not naturally good at it. Now. Part of why
Speaker 1: I bring up the fact that these are terrible ideas
Speaker 1: is that both the you know, the cop is kind
Speaker 1: of ambushed. He doesn't get a good look at this
Speaker 1: guy who shoots him. He's ambushed and horribly injured. And
Speaker 1: the fam or and the guy who like looks at
Speaker 1: him from that second story window and then get shot
Speaker 1: at is not close to him, right. The two who
Speaker 1: identify Cohen's as the guy. The family in the house
Speaker 1: that the assailants forced their way into see this the
Speaker 1: assailant at close range, and they don't ID Cohens. Now,
Speaker 1: as a journalist, if I if I'm just trying to
Speaker 1: determine what i think is more credible, I'm going to
Speaker 1: be more credible to the family who.
Speaker 3: Was right next to the guy and shot the guy
Speaker 3: in your living room, that that makes sense. You might
Speaker 3: be able to recognize that that's a decent ID. Probably right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you have a better shot. You have a bear shot. Yeah,
Speaker 3: certainly so. The fact that these folks who had been
Speaker 3: closest to the shooter and spent the most time with
Speaker 3: him didn't id Cohen's should have been a warning. But
Speaker 3: their testimony is not what cinched Cohen's conviction, and he
Speaker 3: is convicted of this crime. Instead, prosecutors used a fingerprint
Speaker 3: found on the glass of water the assailant drank from
Speaker 3: it in their home. They bring in a fingerprint expert.
Speaker 3: He concludes the Layton print matches Cohen's left thumb, and
Speaker 3: that sounds pretty bulletproof. Right, fingerprints are real. Matching fingerprints
Speaker 3: is a real thing you can do. Seems like a
Speaker 3: good id. So Cohens goes off the prison where he's
Speaker 3: going to stay for more than six years. He does
Speaker 3: not accept this conviction because spoilers. He's innocent, so he
Speaker 3: fights this as much as he can from prison, and
Speaker 3: the Innocence Project worked with Cohens for several years, and
Speaker 3: in two thousand and three they succeeded in pushing the
Speaker 3: Suffolk Superior Court to release the glass mug that that
Speaker 3: latent fingerprint had been taken from swabs of the mug,
Speaker 3: the baseball hat, and the sweatshirt that the assailant had
Speaker 3: left behind to do DNA testing and see if any
Speaker 3: of it matched Cohen's and the DNA tests are conclusive.
Speaker 3: While the DNA on the hat matched the DNA from
Speaker 3: the swabs, so they knew that the hat that was
Speaker 3: left at the scene where the officer was shot belonged
Speaker 3: to the same person who drank from that mug, neither
Speaker 3: test matched Cohen's. Right yeah, tests on the sweatshirt reveal
Speaker 3: the same thing, and with this new evidence, the Suffolk
Speaker 3: DA reanalyzed the fingerprint match that had been used to
Speaker 3: convict Cohen's Upon re examination, it was concluded that the
Speaker 3: fingerprint was not left by Cohens. On January twenty third,
Speaker 3: two thousand and four, he was released. He lived in
Speaker 3: freedom for the next three years until he was shot
Speaker 3: to death in two thousand and seven in his own home.
Speaker 1: A fright. A really depressing number of Innocence Project people
Speaker 1: who get like released die very soon after getting released
Speaker 1: for a variety of reasons. Inclaning, A lot of them,
Speaker 1: you know, go back into situations where their living situation
Speaker 1: isn't very safe. Yeah, because the time they've spent in
Speaker 1: prison certainly didn't give them the ability to get into
Speaker 1: a saber one exactly.
Speaker 3: I mean it's also like they probably picked people who
Speaker 3: are at risk anyways, those are the people they are
Speaker 3: being accused of this, or people who probably aren't in
Speaker 3: a fantastic situation to begin with.
Speaker 2: Then they go to.
Speaker 3: Jail, they spend whatever amount of time not making money,
Speaker 3: earning an income, learning anything, advancing their lives, and then
Speaker 3: they have to try and start over. A lot of
Speaker 3: them are going to be much worse off. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm not shocked to hear that, I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, Cohenes's story from the use of unreliable forensic science
Speaker 1: to convict him to his tragic early death after release
Speaker 1: is again very common and just as common as the
Speaker 1: fact that he was a black man, and the officer
Speaker 1: he was accused of wounding was white next to DNA, So.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry that I didn't even have to ask his color.
Speaker 2: No you. Yeah, of course, figure that.
Speaker 3: Was going to be the situation here, that they were
Speaker 3: gonna just find another guy that matched the color and
Speaker 3: that was it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it happens quite often now next to DNA testing.
Speaker 1: Fingerprint matching is one of the most reliable methods of
Speaker 1: forensic analysis we have. But that fact, which is undeniable,
Speaker 1: does not mean that it's reliable enough you would want
Speaker 1: to risk your freedom on it. It does not mean
Speaker 1: that it's perfect, and it doesn't mean that you can
Speaker 1: take an expert saying this fingerprint belongs to this person
Speaker 1: as red right.
Speaker 2: None of that is.
Speaker 1: You simply can't rely on any of that because there's
Speaker 1: a big difference between the actual science behind fingerprints and
Speaker 1: fingerprint forensic science.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Fingerprinting experts, prosecutors and law enforcement like to portray it
Speaker 1: as a thing of objective science where you get one
Speaker 1: hundred percent confirmation of a perpetrator's presence of a crime
Speaker 1: scene because you matched them to a fingerprint, and that
Speaker 1: is not true. Basically, everything you've ever heard about forensic
Speaker 1: science and fingerprint science is a lie. And outside of
Speaker 1: stuff like fingerprints and blood, which do at least have
Speaker 1: a basis in science, most of what is done in
Speaker 1: the forensic field, or at least a lot of it,
Speaker 1: has more in common with witchcraft than science. So I'm
Speaker 1: starting with fingerprinting both because people should know that it
Speaker 1: does not work the way they think it does, and
Speaker 1: because it kind of kickstarts the field of forensic science
Speaker 1: in the modern sense and in the US that starts
Speaker 1: in nineteen eleven when fingerprinting first is used in a
Speaker 1: court case. So unlike most of what we're talking today, again,
Speaker 1: this does have real use in catching people who have
Speaker 1: done bad things. The first case in which fingerprints were
Speaker 1: introduced as evidence was the nineteen to ten trial of
Speaker 1: Thomas Jennings, who was accused of murdering Clarence Hiller. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote now from an article by General
Speaker 1: Nuken in Issues in Science and Technology. Quote the defendant
Speaker 1: was linked to the crime by some suspicious, circumstantial evidence,
Speaker 1: but there was nothing definitive against him. However, the Hiller
Speaker 1: family had just finished painting their house and on the
Speaker 1: railing of their back porch. Four fingers of a left
Speaker 1: hand had been imprinted in the still wet paint. The
Speaker 1: prosecution wanted to introduce expert testimony, concluding that these fingerprints
Speaker 1: belonged to none other than Thomas Jennings. Four witnesses from
Speaker 1: various bureaus of identification testified for the prosecution, and all
Speaker 1: concluded that the fingerprints on the rail were made by
Speaker 1: the defendant's hand. The judge allowed their testimony and Jennings
Speaker 1: was convicted. The defendant argued unsuccessfully on appeal that the
Speaker 1: princes were improperly admitted, citing authorities such as the Encyclopedia
Speaker 1: Britannica and a treatise on Handwriting identification. The court emphasized
Speaker 1: that standard authorities on scientific subjects discussed the use of
Speaker 1: fingerprints as a system of identification, concluding that experience has
Speaker 1: shown it to be reliable, and you know, that's all good.
Speaker 1: This is probably a case of fingerprinting being used to actually,
Speaker 1: like convict a guy who did crime. You know, it's
Speaker 1: interesting to me that human beings have pretty much always
Speaker 1: known that there was potential in fingerprints as a method
Speaker 1: of identification. The idea that they are unique to each
Speaker 1: individual goes back very far. Ancient Babylonians used fingerprint indentations
Speaker 1: as part of their records for business transactions. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: fingerprinting didn't enter the criminal justice system in an organized
Speaker 1: way until the mid eighteen hundreds. Like most innovations in
Speaker 1: criminal justice, it was first tested by the British raj
Speaker 1: in India, initially as part of like a fraud prevention measure.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: A major breakthrough came a few years later in the
Speaker 1: eighteen seventies, courtesy of a Scottish doctor, him Falds, who
Speaker 1: was a missionary in Japan. Falds started inking his coworker's
Speaker 1: fingerprints after noticing fingerprints trapped in two thousand year old
Speaker 1: pottery shirts. This led to the first recorded case of
Speaker 1: a solved crime due to fingerprints. One of his employees
Speaker 1: was stealing booze from the hospital and drinking it from
Speaker 1: a beaker. Falds found a print on the glass and
Speaker 1: matched it to the culprit. That is apparently the first time.
Speaker 3: Crime whom's amongst us in medicine does not occasionally use
Speaker 3: a beaker for that purpose. Come on, yeah, it's a crime. Now,
Speaker 3: that's a crime.
Speaker 1: It's bullshit, It's this is the first great injustice caused
Speaker 1: by finger printing exactly.
Speaker 3: You know, it's interesting to hear this because it's like,
Speaker 3: you know, we talked about some of the forensic signed
Speaker 3: stuff before, like the stuff I'm a little more familiar with,
Speaker 3: like DNA and toxicology. The reason I know about those
Speaker 3: is because they're kind of born out of like research,
Speaker 3: out of like universities, hospitals, peer reviewed journals, et cetera.
Speaker 3: But like some of these other things seem like they're
Speaker 3: born out of like law enforcement, which is like a
Speaker 3: big difference. It feels like.
Speaker 1: And fundamentally not scientific. And even when they're quote unquote
Speaker 1: using science, their goal is not scientific because it's always
Speaker 1: starting from a I there's a crime, and I need
Speaker 1: to identify who did it, and usually I think it,
Speaker 1: I know who did it, and I'm trying to find
Speaker 1: evidence to prove it. That's gonna be one of the
Speaker 1: recurrent problems in this field. Not with every case, but
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty frequent, so fouls. He's kind of like
Speaker 1: the first real like a person who's trying to study
Speaker 1: fingerprints like in an actual scientific measure, and he does
Speaker 1: some cool stuff. He like scrapes the ridges off of
Speaker 1: his fingertips and then waits for them to grow back,
Speaker 1: and fingerprints himself again to confirm that if you like
Speaker 1: fuck up your fingerprints, they grow back the same way.
Speaker 1: He's the guy who like found that children's fingerprints remain
Speaker 1: the same as they grow up. And in eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: he wrote a letter to the journal Nature and suggested
Speaker 1: that police should use fingerprints to identify suspects. And again
Speaker 1: this is not initially like a in order to catch them.
Speaker 1: It's more of like a when you have people arrested,
Speaker 1: we can do fingerprints and that can help us, like
Speaker 1: you know, sort through people. The idea, though, of using
Speaker 1: them as part of in like a forensic sense, starts
Speaker 1: to pick up steam, and in eighteen ninety two a
Speaker 1: eugenicist and scientists named Sir Francis Galton publishes a book
Speaker 1: called Fingerprints, which outlines the first attempt at a scientific
Speaker 1: classification of fingerprints based on patterns of arches, loops and
Speaker 1: whirls now. Around the same time, this French cop named
Speaker 1: Bertillon developed his own method of measuring people's bodies in
Speaker 1: order to identify criminals. And as you might have guessed,
Speaker 1: the science of fingerprinting has always been deeply tied to
Speaker 1: scientific racism, as these guys all believe that, like, criminals
Speaker 1: have physiological differences from law abiding citizens, right Bertolan's measuring
Speaker 1: people's bodies straight, Like, how can you tell from measurements
Speaker 1: if someone's going to commit crimes?
Speaker 2: You know what does look like? Exactly?
Speaker 1: Like these beliefs go hand in hand with the idea
Speaker 1: that some races are more inclined to criminality than others.
Speaker 1: But as is always the case with this kind of science,
Speaker 1: you have this mix of like stuff that's absolute races togwash,
Speaker 1: and actual science. And some of what they're doing and
Speaker 1: trying to like classify fingerprints is actual science and is rigorous.
Speaker 1: The classification system for fingerprints that wins out at the
Speaker 1: end of the nineteenth century is a modification of Galton's.
Speaker 1: It was tested by British police in India and adopted
Speaker 1: by Scotland yard in nineteen oh one. Fingerprints were accepted
Speaker 1: for the first time in English courts in nineteen oh two,
Speaker 1: and of course, the first recorded court case in the
Speaker 1: US using fingerprint evidence is like nineteen ten and nineteen
Speaker 1: eleven is previously discussed. By the mid century fingerprinting has
Speaker 1: cemented itself as the most scientific and unimpeachable tool for
Speaker 1: confirming guilt. A whole industry of experts grows up alongside
Speaker 1: the discipline, and hundreds of men and women begin to
Speaker 1: make their careers as experts on fingerprinting for the police
Speaker 1: and the court system. In case studies published in scientific
Speaker 1: journals and in statements to the mess these experts reinforced
Speaker 1: the idea that fingerprinting was a hard, objective science. Manuken writes,
Speaker 1: quote writers on fingerprinting routinely emphasized that fingerprint identification could
Speaker 1: not be erroneous, Unlike so much other expert evidence, which
Speaker 1: could be and generally was disputed by other qualified experts,
Speaker 1: fingerprint examiners seemed always to agree generally, the defendants and
Speaker 1: fingerprinting cases did not offer fingerprint experts of their own,
Speaker 1: Because no one challenged fingerprinting in court, either its theoretical
Speaker 1: foundations or, for the most part, the operation of the technique.
Speaker 1: In that particular instance, it seemed especially powerful. The idea
Speaker 1: that fingerprints could provide definite matches was not contested in court.
Speaker 1: In the early trials in which fingerprints were introduced, some
Speaker 1: defendants argued that fingerprinting was not a legitimate form of evidence,
Speaker 1: but typically defendants did not introduce fingerprint experts of their
Speaker 1: own fingerprinting, thus avoided the spectacle of clashing experts on
Speaker 1: both sides of a case whose contradictory testimony befuddled jurors
Speaker 1: and frustrated judges. And so you see why this is
Speaker 1: so powerful, Right, every other kind of expert you might
Speaker 1: bring into a court case, there could be a counter
Speaker 1: expert to say, here's another explanation. But if fingerprinting is
Speaker 1: a hard science, there can't be It's like DNA, right,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have there can't be two opinions on whether
Speaker 1: or not someone's DNA matches right exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, I mean, like the if I have the facts
Speaker 3: right about the OJ Simpson case. That was part of
Speaker 3: the problem is that the defense never actually had their
Speaker 3: own DNA expert because I don't think they could find
Speaker 3: someone that would do it. But this is like, this
Speaker 3: is a major issue in general nowadays. Maybe forever you
Speaker 3: have someone who seems like a very authoritative figure, maybe
Speaker 3: they have some titles behind their name, they speak in
Speaker 3: a certain way. Listen to my podcast recent episode about
Speaker 3: Andrew Huberman, for example, and they seem like a very
Speaker 3: learned man of books and they can it's who's a
Speaker 3: jury to say at that point, Well, this person seems
Speaker 3: to know what they're saying. This person seems very worldly
Speaker 3: and intelligent, and they seem to be an expert, and
Speaker 3: they're they're the authority on it. So yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 3: obviously this is the person that did the crime.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that is like, that's what happens, right, And
Speaker 1: it's it's this kind of ce change in the way
Speaker 1: that the justice system works, because suddenly you have this
Speaker 1: thing that is in a total class of its own
Speaker 1: as far as evidence goes. Right, Now, here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Fingerprinting is not like DNA analysis and never and by
Speaker 1: the way, DNA analysis, while it is real and does
Speaker 1: work quite well, also isn't perfect. There are errors, people
Speaker 1: make mistakes, there are a mistaken you know that that
Speaker 1: is a thing that can happen. But it is an
Speaker 1: objective science, right, Like there's a lot of study on that.
Speaker 1: The fingerprints analysis is not an objective science in the
Speaker 1: way that you would consider anything from like medical science
Speaker 1: to be an objective science. One of the pieces of
Speaker 1: evidence for that is that there are no like from
Speaker 1: state to state, what counts as a fingerprint ID differs wildly, right.
Speaker 1: So there's a case Daubert that is kind of the
Speaker 1: case that currently establishes like what counts as science when
Speaker 1: you're like introducing expert evidence into court, right, And under
Speaker 1: the Daubert judgment, judges are supposed to examine whether or not,
Speaker 1: like judge, whether or not something can be admitted based
Speaker 1: on whether or not the expert evidence has been adequately tested,
Speaker 1: if it has a known error rate, and if there's
Speaker 1: standards and techniques that like control the operation right, subject
Speaker 1: to peer review, right, which sounds reasonable. But judges are
Speaker 1: not scientists, right, and they often mistake stuff that sounds
Speaker 1: like evidence of peer review but really isn't. And some
Speaker 1: of the evidence for this is that, like fingerprinting, examiners
Speaker 1: often use point counting, which is a method where you
Speaker 1: count the number of ridge characteristics on the prints in
Speaker 1: order to like say these are identical prints. But there
Speaker 1: is no nationally recognized fixed requirement for how many points
Speaker 1: of similarity are needed. Some states at six, some states
Speaker 1: it's nine, some states it's twelve. That's not science, yea.
Speaker 3: And I'm so glad you brought up error rate studies.
Speaker 3: It's sort of like an important part of like determining
Speaker 3: if a test will be a good one or not,
Speaker 3: you know. And it feels like judges are not a lawyer,
Speaker 3: but it feels that judges are more likely to allow
Speaker 3: evidence to come in even if it's sort of questionable,
Speaker 3: because they're worried about maybe like excluding something that would
Speaker 3: be important, so they'll allow it to go in. Yeah,
Speaker 3: even if it's sort of like they don't understand the science.
Speaker 3: My guess is they would be more willing to allow
Speaker 3: it than to be strict about excluding it unless they
Speaker 3: understood the science really well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the problem is that like all of these
Speaker 1: people have really impressive sounding credentials and they are a
Speaker 1: part of what appear to be scientific bodies, and in fact,
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases we'll talk about some of
Speaker 1: these organizations are bodies that a lot of what they
Speaker 1: do is scientific, but there's just not actually oversight, right,
Speaker 1: Like Minuchin sums up kind of the current state of
Speaker 1: how like messy as well. When they write local practices
Speaker 1: vary and no established minimum or norm exists. Others reject
Speaker 1: point counting for a more holistic approach. Either way, there
Speaker 1: are no generally agreed upon standards for determining precisely when
Speaker 1: to declare match. Although fingerprint experts insist that a qualified
Speaker 1: expert can infalliably know when two fingerprints match, there is
Speaker 1: in fact no carefully articulated protocol for ensuring that different
Speaker 1: experts reach the same conclusion. And that's a problem, right.
Speaker 1: It imagined if like cancer diagnosis worked this way, if
Speaker 1: like every hospital was like, well, this is what we
Speaker 1: consider cancers.
Speaker 2: You know, I mean, you know.
Speaker 3: Also part of the thing is this, to some degree,
Speaker 3: there is uncertainty in medicine. Like say, if you had
Speaker 3: a pathology report and you take a biopsy of something
Speaker 3: and sure all just looks at it.
Speaker 2: They do have criteria.
Speaker 3: They have to be like, okay, there're a certain amount
Speaker 3: of these types of cells I'm seeing and if there's
Speaker 3: a question, then they reach out to someone else to
Speaker 3: review it, and second, you know, and look over it.
Speaker 2: But that is known to us. We're known.
Speaker 3: They're like, okay, this is the degree of certainty we
Speaker 3: have here. It's not one hundred percent, but this is
Speaker 3: what we have. And sometimes that happens, so there's a
Speaker 3: transparency there that's important, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: And likewise, you know, there is a science within the
Speaker 1: approach of fingerprint analysis because people have fingerprints, and we know,
Speaker 1: you know, they're generally unique to each person, you know,
Speaker 1: based on the best data that we have. But these
Speaker 1: people are not getting up and saying, you know, based
Speaker 1: on this established, you know framework that is universally agreed upon,
Speaker 1: there's this percentage of likelihood that this is a yes,
Speaker 1: they're saying, I can tell as an expert, this is
Speaker 1: infalliably amassed.
Speaker 3: Right, it's so much more valuable as an expert.
Speaker 1: Right, right, Yeah, it's and it's messy. So fingerprinting takes
Speaker 1: off like and again, you know, the fact that this
Speaker 1: is really deeply flawed and fucks a lot of people
Speaker 1: over it doesn't mean that's what it does in the
Speaker 1: majority of cases. Right, I'm not saying that, I actually
Speaker 1: kind of suspected the majority of cases it's reasonably good, right,
Speaker 1: But that still leaves a lot of people to fall
Speaker 1: through the cracks and get their lives ruined by imperfect
Speaker 1: and badly applied scientific reasoning. There was no serious questioning
Speaker 1: of fingerprinting as a method of forensic science until the
Speaker 1: end of the twentieth century, when DNA profiling began to
Speaker 1: enter common use. This questioning started, ironically, with questions by
Speaker 1: defendants as to the legitimacy of DNA matches. Right, so,
Speaker 1: DNA evidence starts being introduced in court cases, and because
Speaker 1: the science is so new and is not as straightforward
Speaker 1: to understand as matching to fingerprints, there's a lot more
Speaker 1: debate and debate in court cases about what it means
Speaker 1: to match DNA samples and how likely it is that
Speaker 1: such matches might be made in error. And that kind
Speaker 1: of causes some people to go, did we ever subject
Speaker 1: fingerprinting to this level of scrutiny? Perhaps we should, We
Speaker 1: might want to look into this sum you know, because
Speaker 1: it hadn't had to answer these questions.
Speaker 2: Right it was.
Speaker 3: I mean not to say that Western medicine and universities
Speaker 3: and all the stuff I'm used to is like the
Speaker 3: end all be all, but because again, it didn't come
Speaker 3: out of those places where it was already a part
Speaker 3: of the process, you know, it was baked into it.
Speaker 1: And by the way, it's good that DNA matching was
Speaker 1: subject to a lot of scrutiny. Everything should when people's
Speaker 1: lives are on the line exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So the sheer act of publicly debating the matter
Speaker 1: brings new scrutiny to fingerprinting, and once DNA science was
Speaker 1: accepted because it is the best thing we've got, and
Speaker 1: that when it comes to this sort of stuff, it
Speaker 1: helps to ignite a new series of questions as to
Speaker 1: whether or not fingerprinting was as rock solid a discipline
Speaker 1: as its expert practitioners claimed. One of the first things
Speaker 1: you'll hear, and I'm sure everyone listening to this podcast
Speaker 1: has heard, the claim, no two people have the same fingerprints.
Speaker 1: Right now, how would you prove that?
Speaker 3: I mean, I suppose you would have to do a
Speaker 3: ton of testing and you would have to test a
Speaker 3: bunch of people and see if there is any people
Speaker 3: that have the same one, and you'd have to have
Speaker 3: a pretty big n number of people involved in the
Speaker 3: study to prove it.
Speaker 1: It doesn't really exist now. It is based on the
Speaker 1: sheer number of people who have been fingerprinted, very likely
Speaker 1: that fingerprints are unique. But this is just common wisdom
Speaker 1: that started being said. It isn't something that was introduced
Speaker 1: that people started claiming because they had done a big study.
Speaker 1: Right again, the sheer length of time that we have
Speaker 1: been doing finger printing. Pretty likely that this is the case,
Speaker 1: But it was not something people started saying because they
Speaker 1: had a good fucking reason to say it. It was
Speaker 1: something people started claiming as an advertising method, right, interesting,
Speaker 1: And the fact that it is likely true doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that that's not kind of sketchy, right, And we're dealing
Speaker 1: with people's lives again again, Yeah, exactly, Speaking of advertising
Speaker 1: and sketchy, it's about time. Yeah, this podcast is supported
Speaker 1: entirely by the concept of DNA. DNA, get some welding again,
Speaker 1: do be a silicon based life form? No, you're not
Speaker 1: gonna be one of those Like if you do get
Speaker 1: one of those like spit into a thing. M hm, oh,
Speaker 1: don't do those things people. Those things are bullshit. Are
Speaker 1: you sell your fucking data to somebody's.
Speaker 3: Schedule that wasn't our fault?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also, I might take their money in the future, but
Speaker 1: it's bullshit. You know, it's bullshit. Ah, We're back, And
Speaker 1: I just want to say to our listeners who are
Speaker 1: silicon based life forms, I actually I don't have any
Speaker 1: issue with silicon based life you know, I'm a big
Speaker 1: rock Monster fan. I think you guys should have the
Speaker 1: same rights that the rest of us have. I'm looking
Speaker 1: forward to our first rock monster president.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I assume it'll be like the guy from Galaxy Quest,
Speaker 1: and I think that would be a lot better for
Speaker 1: this country. To be honest, man, say they wouldn't prefer
Speaker 1: a rock monster to the choices we're currently looking at.
Speaker 3: Yeah, better, Uh, rock or I was looking for a
Speaker 3: red or or dead sort of thing. Yeah, I couldn't
Speaker 3: with rock or rock or you suck.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't think he's going to be able to like
Speaker 1: accomplish a lot proactively, but I do think if we
Speaker 1: were to let a rock monster loose in Congress, it
Speaker 1: would be generally good for everyone.
Speaker 3: It's the little things, just like that scene and utt things,
Speaker 3: that's the simple.
Speaker 1: Everybody in that movie knocks it out of the park,
Speaker 1: even Tim Allen, and I hate Tim.
Speaker 3: Allen exactly, I thought the same exact thing.
Speaker 1: Anyway. I can already hear some people saying, you know,
Speaker 1: I get that the whole finger every fingerprint is unique
Speaker 1: thing isn't something that you can conclusively prove, But you
Speaker 1: just admitted it's probably true. You're just kind of splitting
Speaker 1: hairs by complaining about experts claiming that they're sure of something,
Speaker 1: and I don't think I am splitting hairs here. The
Speaker 1: power of fingerprinting in criminal justice system comes from its
Speaker 1: presumed unimpeachability. People have been killed repeatedly in large numbers
Speaker 1: on the certainty that fingerprint analysts know what they're doing,
Speaker 1: and we have data that shows they often don't. Here's
Speaker 1: Minucan again quote. Although some FBI proficiency tests show examiners
Speaker 1: making few or no errors, these tests have been criticized
Speaker 1: even by other fingerprint examiners as unrealistically easy. Other proficiency
Speaker 1: tests shown more disturbing results. In one nineteen ninety five tests,
Speaker 1: thirty four percent of test takers made an erroneous identification.
Speaker 1: Especially when an examiner evaluates a partial, latent print, a
Speaker 1: print that may be smudged, distorted, and incomplete, it is impossible,
Speaker 1: on the basis of our current knowledge to have any
Speaker 1: real idea of how likely she is to make an
Speaker 1: honest mistake. And maybe it's much lew, but honestly, if
Speaker 1: ten percent of the time an average fingerprint examiner is
Speaker 1: fucking up, that's a sizeable error rates, especially if your
Speaker 1: life is some line you know and thirty four percent
Speaker 1: is real fucking bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a big number.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is fine if you are making this
Speaker 1: kind of data aware, if the jury is aware of it,
Speaker 1: and if you were saying stuff like, you know, we
Speaker 1: got some imperfect fingerprints and they suggest it might be
Speaker 1: this person, but our level of confidence is maybe fifty
Speaker 1: nine percent or whatever, right that, So we think that
Speaker 1: it's likely, but we can't prove it. You give that
Speaker 1: information to a jury, I think a reasonably intelligent person
Speaker 1: can put that in context with other evidence. That's not
Speaker 1: how it's presented a lot of the time.
Speaker 3: You don't have to throw it out. I mean, you
Speaker 3: should use it, but we need to at least know
Speaker 3: the limitations of it, at least be yes transparent with
Speaker 3: the science or lack thereof behind it.
Speaker 1: And this is where we get to the problem where
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of counter experts and while when
Speaker 1: there are, it's because someone has the money to pay
Speaker 1: for them. So the people who do not have the
Speaker 1: ability to like introduce the doubt that ought to be
Speaker 1: present with a lot of these fingerprint analyzes are like
Speaker 1: poor people, you know, yeah, right, and that's who gets often.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not a bunch of rich people going
Speaker 1: to prison for bad fingerprint analysis. Primarily they can afford
Speaker 1: the people.
Speaker 3: I mean, there are das who are overworked, I'm sure
Speaker 3: trying to like defend them. How are they going to
Speaker 3: get that together? I just yeah, it sounds like it
Speaker 3: would be a massive undertaking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's I mean, yeah, it's too much to ask for,
Speaker 1: like the average public defender who is already dealing with
Speaker 1: way too many fucking cases on zero money.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, published studies on fingerprinting tend to be case studies
Speaker 1: where after conviction, an expert will walk the reader through
Speaker 1: this process that looks to a layman like a scientific study,
Speaker 1: but it's not. That's analyzing a case in which, like
Speaker 1: somebody got convicted and walking through your work, as opposed
Speaker 1: to like actually trying to objectively find good data on
Speaker 1: how often the matches these people make are right, because
Speaker 1: there's not really again, there's not really any good way
Speaker 1: to do that. You often don't find out that someone's
Speaker 1: been wrongly convicted on the basis of it'll take ten, fifteen,
Speaker 1: twenty years, right, How like it's getting this kind of
Speaker 1: information on how flawed this field has took a lot
Speaker 1: of time, and a lot of people have gotten hurt
Speaker 1: in the interim. In two thousand and four, Brandon Mayfield
Speaker 1: was a lawyer in Portland, Oregon, and a pretty prominent
Speaker 1: one too. He had recently represented the so called Portland Seven,
Speaker 1: a group of local Muslims who'd been convicted of conspiring
Speaker 1: to support the Taliban. After nine to eleven that year,
Speaker 1: he went on vacation to Madrid. And my god, this
Speaker 1: man picked the worst time to go on vacation to
Speaker 1: Madrid anyone has ever picked. A group of Islamic extremists
Speaker 1: carried out a terrorist attack on a commuter train while
Speaker 1: he was in Madrid that killed nearly two hundred people.
Speaker 1: Because the FBI be how the FBI do? They flew
Speaker 1: in to help out the Spanish authorities, and they identified
Speaker 1: a partial print on a plastic bag that had contained
Speaker 1: detonators and stick to Brandon, Brandon who was on their
Speaker 1: shit list because he had defended these guys they had
Speaker 1: accused of supporting the Dalaban. In the book Junk Science,
Speaker 1: Innocence Project, lawyer Chris Fabricant writes, to the FBI, Mayfield
Speaker 1: looked good for it. Spanish fingerprint experts disagreed. But the
Speaker 1: FBI would not back down. A court appointed expert conducted
Speaker 1: an additional examination and confirmed the FBI's conclusions. Mayfield remained
Speaker 1: jailed virtually in communicado for weeks. Only after Spanish police
Speaker 1: associated the fingerprints with an Algerian national named Daud o'nane
Speaker 1: did the FBI admit it was wrong, and Mayfield was
Speaker 1: finally released, after which he successfully sued for two million
Speaker 1: dollars and elicited something rarer than money from the FBI
Speaker 1: a public apology.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, good on him. Strong, Yeah, strong work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very rare case. It shows you how much they
Speaker 1: fucked up, right, And also they made the mistake of
Speaker 1: going after a lawyer. Lawyer, right, yeah, thankfully. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is obvious. My heart goes out to him for
Speaker 1: how stressful this must have been. But at least he
Speaker 1: had the capacity to defend himself.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, with hindsight, we can see that the prime reasons
Speaker 1: the FBI went after Mayfield was that he himself was
Speaker 1: a convert to Islam who had represented accused terrorists. But
Speaker 1: at the time, they argued that their experts couldn't be biased.
Speaker 1: They were using unimpeachable science, even though their experts disagreed
Speaker 1: with Spanish experts who were presumably using the same science,
Speaker 1: and they're more experts. They were more experter If you're
Speaker 1: again framing this to the people making choices accurately, that's
Speaker 1: no worse than saying like, well, this doctor says someone
Speaker 1: likely has the syndrome, but this doctor has a different conclusion.
Speaker 1: Because this is just not something we understand well, right,
Speaker 1: But that's not how it's being presented. It came out
Speaker 1: later that the court appointed expert brought in for Mayfield's case,
Speaker 1: the guy who found a match that matched the FBI's case,
Speaker 1: had been informed before doing his analysis that the elite
Speaker 1: FBI fingerprint analysts had found a match before he made
Speaker 1: his report, Right, So that is something like that's bad science.
Speaker 1: If someone is conducting is attempting to analyze a fingerprint determined,
Speaker 1: if it's a match, you shouldn't tell them beforehand that
Speaker 1: another analyst has made a match because that could prejudice them.
Speaker 3: Right, it's not blinded study. It's very unblinded.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but that happens all the time with this shit,
Speaker 1: because again, it has this it's dressed as science, but
Speaker 1: it's not treated that way by a lot of its practitioners,
Speaker 1: which is again a lot of the people who are
Speaker 1: criticizing these bad identifications are fingerprint analysts who do treat
Speaker 1: it as a science. My issue is not that those
Speaker 1: people don't exist, it's that it is not standardized that
Speaker 1: that's the expectation for how a fingerprint analyst should operate.
Speaker 1: You know, this was a public enough fuck up that
Speaker 1: a cognitive neuroscience tist conducted a rare study into how
Speaker 1: cognitive bias mightn't form results in forensic studies. He got
Speaker 1: six fingerprint experts and he gave them eight sets of
Speaker 1: prints to analyze. Unbeknownst I love this.
Speaker 3: Song I love. I was about to say, I love
Speaker 3: studies like this.
Speaker 1: This is this one's real fun because unbeknownst to them,
Speaker 1: all the sets they were analyzing came from previous cases
Speaker 1: they had analyzed. So all of these guys had gotten
Speaker 1: these prints before and made ideas in court cases. Nice
Speaker 1: they're given the same prints, but not told they're the
Speaker 1: same prints. Fantastic Thirds of them came to different conclusions
Speaker 1: while analyzing the same fingerprints a second time.
Speaker 2: That's so amazing.
Speaker 3: You reminds me of if I made if I made
Speaker 3: tangent for just one moment. One of my favorite studies
Speaker 3: I ever saw it was a study of like wine connoisseurs,
Speaker 3: because you know how there's people who love wine. They've
Speaker 3: done this some variation of the study a number of
Speaker 3: times where they took like a bottle of wine and
Speaker 3: they had it in like a paper bag, and they
Speaker 3: had another wine in the paper bag. And they said
Speaker 3: to them, they said, hey, look these are like wine officionados,
Speaker 3: people who are like you know, some all the aids,
Speaker 3: et cetera, and.
Speaker 2: These wine nerds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they said, this one is like one hundred dollars
Speaker 3: bottle of wine. This one's like a ten dollars bottle
Speaker 3: of wine. Rate review them, use different use whatever word
Speaker 3: you want to describe them, and they would, you know,
Speaker 3: generally rate them very differently. They would describe them very differently,
Speaker 3: and they were the same exact bottle of wine. And
Speaker 3: it was just like still objective, How objective this thing
Speaker 3: can be.
Speaker 1: This happens a lot. It happens with pot, right, There's
Speaker 1: a lot of pots where people they're like, well, this
Speaker 1: one will get you this kind of and this one
Speaker 1: will gets you this kind of high and like, that's
Speaker 1: kind of true in that different levels of like different
Speaker 1: cannabinoids can affect the high. But like a lot of
Speaker 1: what people say about like different strains of pot is bunk.
Speaker 1: And the same thing happens with cratim where they'll be like,
Speaker 1: well they've got this kind and this kind and this
Speaker 1: kind is like well, it's just kind of matters how
Speaker 1: much of the active ingredient is in it.
Speaker 2: But it's also like.
Speaker 1: You know, with a wine somalia or with you know,
Speaker 1: drug nerds or whatever, what's the harm of some guy
Speaker 1: being like, I know all of the all of the
Speaker 1: wines that have the best wine text. It's fine, You're
Speaker 1: not hurting anybody. The worst case scenario is some rich
Speaker 1: people pay more money for a fancy or wine experience
Speaker 1: with the fingerprint stuff. It's a real problem. But I
Speaker 1: do think it's it's kind of worth comparing to that
Speaker 1: Somalia study because it is it is a kind of
Speaker 1: like really similar. And again, the point here is not
Speaker 1: that fingerprint analysis is bunk science or useless. It's that
Speaker 1: fingerprint analysts are not performing objective science. They are making
Speaker 1: judgments based on their opinions. They are often being informed
Speaker 1: ahead of time we think this guy did it, can
Speaker 1: you tell us if the fingerprint matches, you know, which
Speaker 1: is not how it should work. It's the same thing
Speaker 1: with like, you'll hear a lot about how great fucking
Speaker 1: police dogs are and how they can identify if you've
Speaker 1: got a little bit of a speck of marijuana and
Speaker 1: you know, a fucking car or whatever full of stuff.
Speaker 1: They've got these incredible noses and dog knows are that incredible. Also,
Speaker 1: that's not how police dogs work. Police dogs are primarily
Speaker 1: paying attention to when the police officer expects to find
Speaker 1: drugs and where an alerting off of that. That's how
Speaker 1: they work. Ask me how I know?
Speaker 2: I really want to know.
Speaker 3: Really, just because I beat them once, can we talk
Speaker 3: about this?
Speaker 1: I had fuck it, I got I'd gotten pulled over
Speaker 1: and this is like fucking fifteen years over, pulled over
Speaker 1: with pot in a car. They brought the dogs out.
Speaker 1: I had been told by an old head that like, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: if you get caught, if you get pulled over by
Speaker 1: the police dogs, look anywhere but at the car. Do
Speaker 1: not look at the vehicle while they're doing anything, because
Speaker 1: the cop is watching you to see when you get
Speaker 1: nervous when the dog gets to a part of your
Speaker 1: car where the drugs are, and then the cop will
Speaker 1: either he believed that the cops had a secret signal
Speaker 1: to the dogs. I think it's actually more likely that
Speaker 1: you tense up when the dog gets near where the
Speaker 1: drugs are. The cop sees you tense up, and the
Speaker 1: dog sees the cop tends up. You know, maybe both
Speaker 1: of those things are happening. There have been studies on this,
Speaker 1: though you can actually read into this. They do not
Speaker 1: work as well as they say they do. It is
Speaker 1: easy for police dogs to be biased because the dog
Speaker 1: doesn't know what it's actually doing. Right, The dog is
Speaker 1: trying to make people happy. That's all the dogs trying
Speaker 1: to do. I'll smell down, okay, yeah, sure again. Dogs
Speaker 1: are capable of that kind of sense analysis, but that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that's what they're always doing. Just like fingerprints
Speaker 1: analysts are capable of analyzing fingerprints on the scene and
Speaker 1: matching them to a person, but that doesn't mean that's
Speaker 1: what they're doing every time they claim they're doing that, right, Yep,
Speaker 1: Bias be a thing. Bias and this is the case
Speaker 1: with every other kind of investigative technique in criminal justice.
Speaker 1: But forensic science is not treated that way. Part of
Speaker 1: why is that there's an awful lot of money in
Speaker 1: ensuring that it is treated as hard scientific truth. The
Speaker 1: success fingerprint experts have enjoyed in this arena has inspired
Speaker 1: other would be experts to build their own careers peddling
Speaker 1: science much more questionable than fingerprint analysis. But you know
Speaker 1: what's a lot more questionable than even that cave.
Speaker 3: Boy, I hope it's some sort of very morally questionable ad.
Speaker 1: It is it is, it's an ad for.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't actually know what's more morally questionable than our
Speaker 1: current advertisers. So just buy whatever they're selling. We're back, cave.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm back too.
Speaker 1: Fingerprint analysis is fun. By fun, I mean it's infuriating
Speaker 1: how often it does not work the way it's supposed to,
Speaker 1: but it is at least based in real stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm going to bring us to a true villain, to
Speaker 1: some absolute, real bullshit forensic science. And of course, the
Speaker 1: true villain of this episode, Kava, is history's greatest monster.
Speaker 2: Tists expect it. Got me again?
Speaker 3: Got me again?
Speaker 2: Adab baby? Yeah, no, good dentist's right, ight.
Speaker 1: So this part of the story starts in September nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two, when twenty two year old Teresa Perrin noticed
Speaker 1: a sailor hitchhiking near her coastal Virginia home. Seeing sailors
Speaker 1: in uniform was not odd where she lived. There was
Speaker 1: an aircraft carrier dock nearby, and her husband worked at
Speaker 1: a nearby naval base. But when she failed to pick
Speaker 1: this man up, he screamed at her, and later in
Speaker 1: the days she noticed a similar looking man in a
Speaker 1: sailor uniform loitering outside her house as she dried her laundry.
Speaker 1: She went on with her day somewhat agitated until her
Speaker 1: husband came home. She was finally able to get to sleep.
Speaker 1: She wakes up in the middle of the night to
Speaker 1: see a man in a sailor's uniform standing above her.
Speaker 1: He beats her husband to death with a crowbar while
Speaker 1: he sleeps, and then he rapes Teresa repeatedly the granular
Speaker 1: details it I mean, this goes on. I am telling
Speaker 1: you these start. This is a hideous fucking case. What
Speaker 1: happens to this woman is just an absolute nightmare. And
Speaker 1: the whole time she's basically doing everything she can to
Speaker 1: like make keep him happy because her kids are also
Speaker 1: in the house and she doesn't want him to kill
Speaker 1: them too. It's just a fucking nightmare.
Speaker 2: One thing I do.
Speaker 1: Again, I'm not going to try to go into too
Speaker 1: much detail, but I do have to note for what
Speaker 1: comes next that when the man raped her for the
Speaker 1: second time, he bit her repeatedly on the thighs, hard
Speaker 1: enough to leave a mark. This is crucial to what
Speaker 1: comes next. Teresa survives, thankfully, and the case immedia obviously
Speaker 1: becomes the biggest news in town. Right, this guy gets away,
Speaker 1: and it's of course people freak out, right there is
Speaker 1: some unbelievably violent, horrible man on the loose, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: a literal monster on the loose. This is one of
Speaker 1: those cases where everyone panics and it's like, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: the reason I'd be sleeping with a fucking gun every night,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, I would be putting the family in
Speaker 1: the fucking panic room and have a rifle by my guy.
Speaker 2: Outside, like.
Speaker 1: I don't already. So Teresa was given a rape kit
Speaker 1: by a doctor and her injuries were documented in detail.
Speaker 1: She was so shown mugshots, but no clear culprit materialized.
Speaker 1: A security guard at the base reported that he had
Speaker 1: seen a sailor with blood on his uniform enter the
Speaker 1: shipyard gate at two thirty am. I will note that
Speaker 1: like that seems like, well, obviously that's the guy. If
Speaker 1: you've known navymen, a sailor showing up with blood on
Speaker 1: their uniform at two thirty in the morning to go
Speaker 1: to bed not uncommon, doesn't mean they've necessarily committed a murder.
Speaker 1: Sometimes that's just how sailors be. Given the time Teresa
Speaker 1: said the assault had taken place, this guy could not
Speaker 1: have been the culprit right two thirty am according to her.
Speaker 1: And again she's awake with this guy. He's there for
Speaker 1: hours according to when she said the assault took place,
Speaker 1: This guy with blood on his uniform couldn't have been
Speaker 1: the one who did it. It had to have just
Speaker 1: been a coincidence. But the DA in this case has
Speaker 1: the security guard hypnotized the security guard who said, yeah,
Speaker 1: this guy came in at two thirty am, and after
Speaker 1: being hypnotized, the security guard says no, no, no, he
Speaker 1: came in at five am. Now that's already very questionable.
Speaker 3: I can't think of a softer science than hypnotism.
Speaker 1: Yes, that is wow, that is that is the chinchilla
Speaker 1: fur a forensic science.
Speaker 3: It's it's such a it was so nice and sometimes
Speaker 3: I'm so proud of you.
Speaker 2: And then that reference right there was.
Speaker 3: One of the beautiful, beautiful moment, beautiful.
Speaker 1: So unfortunately, and this is, you know, we'll talk about
Speaker 1: hypnotism some other day. This is kind of really at
Speaker 1: a peak point in the early eighties of hypnotism being
Speaker 1: introduced into court cases. This also plays into the Satanic Panic,
Speaker 1: which is happening around the same time. But they decided
Speaker 1: to have Teresa. The DA has Teresa hypnotized as well,
Speaker 1: and after being hypnotized, she claims that the sailor who
Speaker 1: attacked her was definitely the same guy as the hitchhiking
Speaker 1: sailor who had yelled at her earlier. Obviously, a shitload
Speaker 1: of sailors are in town. The idea that one of
Speaker 1: them would be a murderer and a rapist and not
Speaker 1: the same guy who just like yelled at her randomly
Speaker 1: when she drove past him in town pretty actually good
Speaker 1: odds that they're not the same guy. But the DA
Speaker 1: once that's an easier like line of logic. So the
Speaker 1: DA you know, has her hypnotized, and then she changes
Speaker 1: her story right to be like, I'm sure it was
Speaker 1: the same guy. So again, already, just from a fact standpoint,
Speaker 1: we're not off to a great start with this case,
Speaker 1: with like trying to track down the culprit based a.
Speaker 3: Real, real eighties like movie of the week sort of like.
Speaker 2: We used hypnosis.
Speaker 3: It's a brand new science out of Europe to like
Speaker 3: get these people to like open up their minds more. Oh,
Speaker 3: it's terrible, it's so depressing.
Speaker 1: It's rough stuff. It's rough stuff. And based on this
Speaker 1: very flawed information, it has decided that the man who
Speaker 1: had attacked her must be a sailor on the nearby
Speaker 1: USS Carl Vinson. Now again, this is the aircraft carrier
Speaker 1: that's in town. Pretty good chance that the guy who
Speaker 1: attacked her was, But also not the only sailors in town.
Speaker 1: So the district attorney on the case, Willard Robinson, asked
Speaker 1: the captain of the Carl Vinson to provide the state
Speaker 1: with dental records for all thirteen hundred of the sailors
Speaker 1: under his command. That way a dental expert could analyze them.
Speaker 1: He had already had an expert analyzed Teresa's bites, and
Speaker 1: the expert had concluded that the assailant had possessed a
Speaker 1: pointed front tooth that was misaligned. Now, extensive analysis did
Speaker 1: not come forward with any clear identification. The case languished,
Speaker 1: and the family started complaining to elected officials in both
Speaker 1: the DA and Navy felt extreme pressure to resolve the case. Then,
Speaker 1: in March, a twenty six year old sailor on the Vincent,
Speaker 1: Keith Allen Harwood, was arrested over a domestic dispute. He
Speaker 1: was drunk as hell during this fight and is alleged
Speaker 1: to have bitten his girlfriend. Again, that sounds damning until
Speaker 1: I note that he bites her after she hits him
Speaker 1: with a frying pan, which does make it sound less
Speaker 1: like this guy is a biting psychopathem and more like, well,
Speaker 1: this was just a real bad relationship.
Speaker 3: That's a very toxic relationship. That the frying that's a
Speaker 3: nice time.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, again, you wouldn't call this good behavior,
Speaker 1: but it's hardly like evidence that this man is a murderer.
Speaker 1: But once he's in custody, you have got a sailor
Speaker 1: and he bits somebody, you know, not he's a surprising
Speaker 1: he's a bier. Yeah, yeah, right, so he starts to
Speaker 1: look pretty good to this increasingly desperate DA who was
Speaker 1: really getting pressured to solve this fucking case now, Because
Speaker 1: this guy was on the Carl Benson and they'd provided
Speaker 1: dental records to the to the state, this guy's teeth
Speaker 1: had already been looked at, and experts had analyzed his
Speaker 1: teeth and said he couldn't be the man who had
Speaker 1: bit Teresa, right, So that's a problem.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I'm going to read from a write up in the
Speaker 1: National Registry of Exonerations which should give you an idea
Speaker 1: of where this case ends up.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: Harward had been among those whose teeth were examined in
Speaker 1: the immediate aftermath of the investigation, but he had been
Speaker 1: ruled out as the source of the bitemarks on Teresa
Speaker 1: by a civilian dental consultant working with a Newport News
Speaker 1: City medical examiner. When Harward came to court, Teresa was
Speaker 1: there but could not identify him as the attacker. At
Speaker 1: that point, police asked Harward to submit to a second
Speaker 1: procedure to obtain a cast of his teeth. The cast
Speaker 1: was sent to Lowell Levine, then a budding superstar in
Speaker 1: the fledgling field of bitemark analysis, who had gained fame
Speaker 1: for his testimony linking bite marks to serial killer Ted
Speaker 1: Bundy and to Nazi war criminal Joseph Mengela. Levine concluded
Speaker 1: that Harward was responsible for the bitemarks on Teresa's body.
Speaker 1: Police showed a photographic lineup to Wade, who selected Harward's
Speaker 1: picture as the man who came through the security gate
Speaker 1: with a blood spattered uniform. On May sixteenth, nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: police arrested Harward on charges of capital murder, rape, robbery,
Speaker 1: and burglary. He is ultimately convicted and he is sentenced
Speaker 1: to life in prison. He appealed that, and the Virginia
Speaker 1: Supreme Court did grant him a new trial in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty six. Levine testified at this that's the bitemark guy
Speaker 1: testified at this second trial that there was a quote
Speaker 1: very very very very high degree of probability that Harward's
Speaker 1: teeth had made the bite marks. Now that's not scientific language.
Speaker 1: So he followed by assuring jurors there that there was
Speaker 1: a quote practical impossibility that someone else would have all
Speaker 1: these characteristics that Levine found in the bite marks. And again,
Speaker 1: what we have here is a real science. That is
Speaker 1: providing cover for a pseudo science, because dental analysis is
Speaker 1: very real, very real thing. You can like, like, that's
Speaker 1: how we identify dead bodies and stuff by their dental
Speaker 1: records all the time. You know, dental analysis.
Speaker 2: Is a thing.
Speaker 1: This guy is good at dental analysis. Bite mark analysis
Speaker 1: not a thing in the same way. I'm going to say.
Speaker 1: You can never identify a bite mark and match them
Speaker 1: to someone's teeth, but it is not the same as
Speaker 1: identifying someone by their dental records.
Speaker 3: Can I give an example of this, Yeah, yeah, please?
Speaker 3: Wrestling with my three children and somebody bit me. It
Speaker 3: left the mark, and I was like, all right, I
Speaker 3: should be able to determine because it was really deep
Speaker 3: into my flesh. Which one of the little bastards did this?
Speaker 3: And when I held up all their teeth like to
Speaker 3: the bite they all looked like they could have gone
Speaker 3: in it all looked like they could have been the one. Like,
Speaker 3: there's no way, there's no way to tell, there's a
Speaker 3: way to tell. I know that's not scientific. I'm just
Speaker 3: telling you my experience, but I feel like I see
Speaker 3: where you're going with this.
Speaker 1: Your experience does hint at the actual science, which is
Speaker 1: that you have two problems, key problems when it comes
Speaker 1: to try to identify a bite mark in this way.
Speaker 1: If the person who is bit survives, as Teresa does,
Speaker 1: once you are bit, you start to heal. That process
Speaker 1: of reacting to the injury, which includes swelling up, which
Speaker 1: could include getting infected, which can include which and eventually
Speaker 1: includes like the healing of the injury starts immediately, so
Speaker 1: by the time your injuries are analyzed, and it's likely
Speaker 1: you know, cops generally when they come under the scene
Speaker 1: of a rape and murder, the first thing you're doing
Speaker 1: is not carefully documenting the bitemarks in such a way
Speaker 1: that it will be helpful to a forensic dentist. Necessarily,
Speaker 1: already that bite mark has started to change, right, In fact,
Speaker 1: it's going to change immediately because generally, like when you
Speaker 1: bite someone hard enough, they swell up, and that's going
Speaker 1: to alter the look of that bitemark. Likewise, if you've
Speaker 1: got a corpse that you know someone got murdered and
Speaker 1: they were bit decomposition also starts immediately, So you cannot
Speaker 1: say that the skin, like human skin is not like
Speaker 1: a dental cast.
Speaker 3: Right, No, right, And you're exactly right, Like there is
Speaker 3: a difference between mean someone analyzing like teeth remains of
Speaker 3: teeth and being like these belong to this person or
Speaker 3: et cetera. You know, there's a difference between that and saying, well,
Speaker 3: this bite is related to this person because of there's
Speaker 3: all these other factors that tie into that, mechanical factors
Speaker 3: and all these variables that like, it seems like it
Speaker 3: would be difficult. Maybe there are scientists who can prove
Speaker 3: me wrong on that, but I could see this being
Speaker 3: a much more difficult process and just identifying teeth.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 1: Again, I'm not saying it's a thing you could never do,
Speaker 1: but it is not in any way the same kind
Speaker 1: of thing as identifying someone from their dental records. But
Speaker 1: because Levion is the guy who got famous identifying people
Speaker 1: from their dental records, and now he is testifying about
Speaker 1: bite marks, it sure seems like the same thing to again,
Speaker 1: the people who are not dentists or science authority.
Speaker 3: He's an authority exactly how you do not believe him?
Speaker 1: Now Harward's testimony again, because he the Supreme would gets
Speaker 1: in the second case, after Lemne says like it's impossible
Speaker 1: for someone else to have all the characteristics I found
Speaker 1: in these bite marks. Hardward's testimony includes some pretty good
Speaker 1: counter evidence to exonerate him, including the fact that he
Speaker 1: had an alibi during the time Teresa had been attacked.
Speaker 1: He had been at a mandatory drug and alcohol abuse
Speaker 1: program after being caught aboard with weed. He had an alibi. Also,
Speaker 1: Teresa specifically recalled the rank on the man's uniform because again,
Speaker 1: her husband works at the naval base. She knows this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff, and Harward's rank insignia did not match
Speaker 1: the signia she recalled seeing on her attacker. None of
Speaker 1: this mattered. Harward was sentenced again largely on the strength
Speaker 1: of the bitemark analysis and would spend thirty years in prison. Now, again,
Speaker 1: just as a spoiler, he's innocent. Let's take a look
Speaker 1: at this expert, Lowell Levine. At the time of the case,
Speaker 1: he was the most prominent bitemark analyst in the country.
Speaker 1: His CV took a full half hour to read in court,
Speaker 1: and like that was a strategy on behalf of the
Speaker 1: prosecution in the early nineteen seventies, though before this case begins,
Speaker 1: he was just another dentist. And it's generally like it's
Speaker 1: a little bit of a this is debatable, but like
Speaker 1: some people will argue that dentists struggle with depression and
Speaker 1: dissatisfaction in their jobs at high levels compared to other
Speaker 1: health professionals.
Speaker 3: High rates a suicide I've been told, yeah, yes, compared
Speaker 3: to other health professionals.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's there's some evidence of that, although it is
Speaker 1: actually kind of inconclusive. It is worth noting that between
Speaker 1: twenty three and twenty twenty one alone, the number of
Speaker 1: dentists experiencing extreme anxiety tripled. Again, that might have more
Speaker 1: to do with COVID than anything else. I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's inconclusive, but I bring this up just because the
Speaker 1: young doctor Levine seemed kind of unfulfilled in his career
Speaker 1: cleaning teeth and more interested in the sexy, daring work
Speaker 1: of a forensic detective. He wrote an article for New
Speaker 1: York Journal of Medicine titled Dentistry and Emerging Forensic Science.
Speaker 1: Bite mark analysis had never been used in a court
Speaker 1: case before, but Levine pitched the idea, as Chris Fabricant
Speaker 1: notes in the book Junk Signs, to truly gain acceptance
Speaker 1: by his colleagues as a forensic scientist and recognition as
Speaker 1: an expert Levine advocated for some sort of certification the
Speaker 1: dentists had to be had to more than contribute to
Speaker 1: victim identification. Bite marks could be very valuable to be
Speaker 1: able to establish the identity of the perpetrator of the
Speaker 1: bite for legal purposes, Levine argued, But he also acknowledged
Speaker 1: that there was a sea of knowledge we must accumulate
Speaker 1: before we are willing to make positive identifications in court
Speaker 1: involving homicide cases, and he was candid about the lack
Speaker 1: of an objective scientific basis to the new technique. As
Speaker 1: a result, bitemarks will never be truly comparable to a fingerprint,
Speaker 1: since we cannot reproduce the three dimensions of the bitten surface.
Speaker 1: So that's what he writes in the seventies. And that's
Speaker 1: all kind of reasonable.
Speaker 3: Can I think it's very reasonable to I feel for
Speaker 3: the guy. I'll tell you why. I'm a gastroentrologist, as
Speaker 3: you know, and I've been pitching this idea of being
Speaker 3: a forensic proctologist and solving crimes through the dead innus,
Speaker 3: like reading rings on tree, the sort of thing, right right,
Speaker 3: I've been pitching the show to NBC for a while.
Speaker 3: I haven't gotten any positive feedback yet, but I'm not
Speaker 3: gonna stop because I think there's something to this, and
Speaker 3: so I understand where this guy is coming from.
Speaker 2: I get it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like mind Hunter but for butts. Butt hunter.
Speaker 2: But yeah, well there it is nailed it.
Speaker 1: Man, ma'am, I know you're very distraught right now because
Speaker 1: your whole family was murdered. But what can you tell
Speaker 1: me about what the insight of the man's ass probably
Speaker 1: looked like?
Speaker 3: We're gonna need to look at your husband's buttle.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: So again in you know, this guy writes, like, ten
Speaker 1: years or so before the Hardward case, bite marks will
Speaker 1: never be comparable to a fingerprint. They can't be for
Speaker 1: very you know, basic reasons. Ten years later, though, Levine
Speaker 1: is a board certified member of the American Board of
Speaker 1: Forensic Odontology, and he testifies scientific certainty that mister Harward
Speaker 1: caused the bitemark on Teresa Peron's leg. I think ten
Speaker 1: years ago he said you couldn't do with bitemarks, and
Speaker 1: his certainty was so convincing that the two dentists who
Speaker 1: had ruled that Harward hadn't been the bier changed their
Speaker 1: testimony based on his Wow. So how he and his
Speaker 1: colleagues accomplished this was that they forced their way into
Speaker 1: the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and, as he'd written it,
Speaker 1: created a board certifying entity to ensure they could back
Speaker 1: up their claims whenever they would analyze a bitemark with
Speaker 1: titles that sounded impressive to judges and juries. This all
Speaker 1: started with a conference at a hotel in Chicago with
Speaker 1: Levine and seven other dentists who had been working ad
Speaker 1: hoc as experts for prosecutors at local medical examiner offices.
Speaker 1: They recognized how much money and respect could be theirs
Speaker 1: if they locked down a more formal role, and they
Speaker 1: knew the AAFS was the way to do it. The
Speaker 1: American Academy of Forensic Sciences was the most influential body
Speaker 1: in the field, and membership was seen as something of
Speaker 1: a rubber stamp that whatever forensic science you were pushing
Speaker 1: is the real shit, so.
Speaker 3: Good stuff, that's how you do it.
Speaker 2: That's yeah, do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this is like a very clever plan. So
Speaker 1: these odontologists knew that if they get in and if
Speaker 1: they you know, have suddenly a certification, that's going to
Speaker 1: make it impossible for any layman defense attorney to question
Speaker 1: their claims, which is going to make them very valuable
Speaker 1: for prosecutors. They are looking at what's happened with fingerprint
Speaker 1: experts and they want the same thing for bite marks.
Speaker 1: The AAFS obviously includes a lot of real experts, because
Speaker 1: there are real forensic scientists and people in the AFS
Speaker 1: are trying their level best who helps all horrible crimes.
Speaker 1: But it also includes a lot of grifter assholes who
Speaker 1: want money in respect and don't care how many people
Speaker 1: get wrongly convicted for that to be possible. So when
Speaker 1: you know, again, I say all this book because I'm
Speaker 1: deeply critical of this organization for what comes next. And
Speaker 1: also I think a lot of the people who are not,
Speaker 1: you know, odontologists in this organization probably see what Levine
Speaker 1: and the others are claiming about bite marks and assume
Speaker 1: they know their's because they're doctors, you know, and because
Speaker 1: not just because of that, odontologists had always been a
Speaker 1: big part of forensics, because dental records are that's a
Speaker 1: real way to identify remains, you know. So these folks
Speaker 1: feel like Levine and his crew are the real deal,
Speaker 1: even though bite mark analysis has nothing to do with
Speaker 1: id in corpses via dental records. And I want to
Speaker 1: read a quote from Fabricat's book, just sort of laying
Speaker 1: into how flawed this is. Bitemark analysis involves subjective interpretation
Speaker 1: of a bruison skin and guessing whether it could have
Speaker 1: been made by teeth, and if so, whether a particular
Speaker 1: suspects teeth made the mark. You appreciate that the sub
Speaker 1: disciplines of forensic odontology have nothing whatsoever to do with
Speaker 1: each other, that they can be made to sound like
Speaker 1: they do. Forensic dentists identify people through their teeth and
Speaker 1: through the bite marks their teeth make. That sounds straightforward,
Speaker 1: but it's actually more like a geologist claiming that because
Speaker 1: he can identify rocks, he can identify the rock that
Speaker 1: was used to bash someone's skull. And geologists out there,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of money for you if you want
Speaker 1: to take that one up.
Speaker 3: So business idea number thirty three is fantastic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, using real forensic dentistry as cover Levine and his
Speaker 1: cadra of I can't call them grifters legally, but I'm
Speaker 1: very critical of these people slide into the AAFS. They
Speaker 1: are accepted despite the fact that very there's not a
Speaker 1: lot of them, and crucially, there's not any rigorous scientific
Speaker 1: data laying out the objective best practices for comparing bite
Speaker 1: marks to teeth. A lot of real experts might point
Speaker 1: out that there are deep flaws in the the iver. Again,
Speaker 1: what everything I've said about like tissue, it's kind of
Speaker 1: the only really good bite marks that you can do
Speaker 1: a cast of someone's teeth and match to the bitemark
Speaker 1: is what are called. It's basically like cartilage bites, right, Like,
Speaker 1: if you get bit in the nose, you can sometimes
Speaker 1: get a really good bitemark from that because cartilage keeps
Speaker 1: the mark better. Yeah, it doesn't heal as well skin, right,
Speaker 1: So this is again these guys are real dentists.
Speaker 2: They know this.
Speaker 1: They know that if they want to make the case
Speaker 1: that this is a real science, they need like a
Speaker 1: famous court case that they solve with bitemark analysis. And
Speaker 1: because very few bitemarks can actually be analyzed with rigorous science,
Speaker 1: they're kind of like waiting for a while to find
Speaker 1: the perfect case to like make a big splash with.
Speaker 1: You know, this is this is a tough thing. You
Speaker 1: need a case that's horrific enough that it captures imaginations
Speaker 1: and gets media attention, and bite marks need to be
Speaker 1: involved somehow, and most importantly, the suspect needs to be poor,
Speaker 1: you know, so that experts.
Speaker 3: It's so it's such a bummer to take a step
Speaker 3: back for a second and be like, there's enough bite
Speaker 3: related crime, Like there's vicious attacks so terrible that people
Speaker 3: are biting in this animalistic way, victims biting people, Like
Speaker 3: this is a thing that's developing. That's that's kind of
Speaker 3: a weird concept for me to understand, Like that's common
Speaker 3: enough that this is even something that they're trying to
Speaker 3: look for.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's it is that.
Speaker 2: People the worst they were weird.
Speaker 1: In February of nineteen seventy four, Levine and his colleagues
Speaker 1: got their dream case. A seventy three year woman was beaten,
Speaker 1: stabbed in the genitals, and murdered. She had been bitten
Speaker 1: on the tip of her nose, and it created the
Speaker 1: perfect bitemark for forensic dentistry. Levine had written two years
Speaker 1: prior about the need for such a three D bitemark,
Speaker 1: which was rare, to establish the legitimacy of his field.
Speaker 1: Now they had it. The prosecutor in this case suspected
Speaker 1: that Walter Marx was the guilty party because he had
Speaker 1: rented a room from her, but there was no actual
Speaker 1: evidence that he had committed the crime. So the prosecutor
Speaker 1: reached out to three dentists and they responded by saying
Speaker 1: the judge needed a subpoena Marx for a cast of
Speaker 1: his teeth. Marx refused, and so a judge jailed him
Speaker 1: for six weeks until he complied. Now, Fabricant notes that
Speaker 1: the mere process of forcing someone to have a mold
Speaker 1: taken is biasing, right, that it can bias, like the
Speaker 1: people analyze that mold because like, well, why would this
Speaker 1: be taken unless they was a reason to believe this
Speaker 1: guy was guilty, you know. And no structures were set
Speaker 1: up within the field of bite mark analysis to ensure
Speaker 1: that people comparing molds of wounds and teeth were objective right,
Speaker 1: looking at the information purely as information, rather than acting
Speaker 1: as paid members of a prosecution team. Jerry Vale, one
Speaker 1: of the dentists brought in for the case, was over
Speaker 1: the moon with excitement about the quality of the bite
Speaker 1: marks in this specific case. He convinced the judge that
Speaker 1: he was an expert, and Marx was convicted. The prosecutor
Speaker 1: later told the La Times there is no question, but
Speaker 1: this case is going to go down as the most
Speaker 1: significant bitemark case in forensic history. People v. Marx became
Speaker 1: the foundational case in the field of bitemark analysis, even
Speaker 1: though it opened by acknowledging no established science of identifying
Speaker 1: persons from bite marks.
Speaker 2: But see that's good.
Speaker 3: The problem here, and you're probably going to go into
Speaker 3: is that, like, this is the fundamental difference between like
Speaker 3: law and science, is that now this is set as precedent.
Speaker 3: Now in the legal sense, they are going to be like, Okay,
Speaker 3: well we've done this one thing and it seems that
Speaker 3: I mean, if what I've watched on TV is correct,
Speaker 3: again not a lawyer, if what I've seen is correct,
Speaker 3: then is like they're going to use that as precedent
Speaker 3: later in another case, whereas science is the opposite. You
Speaker 3: don't go based on precedent. You go based on things
Speaker 3: are constantly changing, it's always evolving. It should be they
Speaker 3: should be progressing. Sort of problem with COVID for example,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 1: With our knowledge of COVID, if science was based on precedent,
Speaker 1: like oncologists would be like, well, we really think this
Speaker 1: chemotherapy thing might help me, Like, well, no, no, no, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: We established with precedent that we melt people's cancer with fire,
Speaker 1: you know, like that's what we've been doing for thirteen
Speaker 1: hundred years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the president is clear, right, but now it's a
Speaker 3: precedent and that's all you need in law, like present
Speaker 3: from one hundred years ago about whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, anyway, cobab that's the end of part one.
Speaker 1: In part two, we have a lot more things that
Speaker 1: are going to make you angry. But first, why don't
Speaker 1: you make the audience know where your pluggables are.
Speaker 3: Yes, you can find my podcast, The House of Pod.
Speaker 3: It is a humor adjacent medical podcast. We look at
Speaker 3: the intersections of public health and social justice sometimes and
Speaker 3: pop culture and it's fun. And if you like Behind
Speaker 3: the Bastards, you're probably gonna like our show. We're similar,
Speaker 3: but not as good. So check us out with that's
Speaker 3: a pretty good sell, right, We're not as good. Check
Speaker 3: us out anywhere you get podcasts. And if you want
Speaker 3: to follow me on socials the Cave, look up CAVEMD,
Speaker 3: or look.
Speaker 2: Up The House of Pod.
Speaker 1: You know, Cava, I've found this is one of my
Speaker 1: life hacks that you listeners at home can take. People
Speaker 1: really like and trust you more when you use self
Speaker 1: deprecating humor. So I've started whenever I meet new people
Speaker 1: saying hi, I'm Robert and just so you know, three
Speaker 1: years ago I was involved in a hit and run
Speaker 1: that killed seven people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great way to bring you guys.
Speaker 1: It makes it, It makes them trust. You're like, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: this guy is not you know all you know, up
Speaker 1: on his own about stuff, right, you know, and he
Speaker 1: makes mistakes just like me. He kills seven people in
Speaker 1: a hit and run, you know.
Speaker 3: And they're like, this is a Wendy sir. What do
Speaker 3: you I have a Hamberg?
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, all right, until I got part one's done, Goodbye, Goodbye.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1: Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.