Are courts keeping “junk science” out of the courtroom?

Re:Are courts keeping “junk science” out of the courtroom? by tyingq on Monday February 17, 2020 @01:08PM (#22349360)

I heard an interesting one on a Dateline. Cops had some DNA they could not match. So they did phenotyping and turned the info (hair color, eye color, etc) into a sketch. And that was enough to get court orders for people that matched the sketch to submit DNA samples.

There was a video of the police department announcing it, and even endorsing the company (Parabon) in the announcement.

Maybe not complete junk science, but sketchy legal ground to me.

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Re:Are courts keeping “junk science” out of the courtroom? by SQueeeeeL on Monday February 17, 2020 @02:29PM (#22349971)

It's sketchy legal ground. Basically they could say "everyone with blonde hair and brown eyes must submit", and through other extralegal means have found out the culprit had blonde hair and brown eyes. They manufactured a way to search and arrest them.

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Re:Are courts keeping “junk science” out of the courtroom? by rtkwe on Monday February 17, 2020 @06:38PM (#22352025)

My question is was this everyone over a large area or were they going to a pool of people they already had some suspicion on. If they have a group of suspects and are using this to narrow down who to actually have submit samples it's more ok to me.

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Re:Are courts keeping “junk science” out of the courtroom? by tyingq on Monday February 17, 2020 @07:28PM (#22352332)

From an existing pool.

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Re:Are courts keeping “junk science” out of the courtroom? by Mirioron on Monday February 17, 2020 @02:36PM (#22350024)

And then all that data sits in a database forever.

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