You say that as if these were mistakes or unfortunate culminations of circumstance. The man committed fraud and sent innocent, grieving parents to prison by proxy. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that to be 0.00% and punish those harshly who exceed that metric.

If I'm a juror, and the evidence presented happens to have a false positive rate of 1%, that certainly meets my understanding of "a reasonable doubt."

I would need a very very big pile of very clear cut evidence to find someone guilty of a crime where the likely outcome is a substantial prison time.

It's all tradeoffs, but "his blood was found on the murder weapon" wouldn't be sufficient for me - some childhood enemy could easily have planted a bunch of forensic evidence next to a crime scene.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of crimes don't produce evidence that rises to the level you call for.

After all, if my next door neighbour barged into my house and beat me up, the only evidence would be my visible injuries and my statement that it was my neighbour.

I'm not sure if I'd prefer a society where he would be convicted, or where he wouldn't.

Maybe your neighbour has a nicer car than you which makes you feel insecure so you decide to beat yourself up and go to the police saying your neighbour did it.

Considering that possibility, I don't want to put your neighbour in prison.

And presumably, if having been denied justice I pursue revenge instead, I can barge into his home and beat him up, as he did to me, and avoid punishment for the same reason?

While I admire your devotion to Blackstone's Ratio, this doesn't seem like a recipe for stability and rule of law to me.

A murderer kills less than 1% of all the people they meet. Does that mean we should just accept their behavior?

A murderer who kills 1% of the people he meets has certainly committed a crime. A person who has a 99% chance of being a murderer has not certainly committed a crime.

That is depending on your threshold of certainty. 1% is not that high considering that, according to the OJJDP, 5 milion people were arrested for serious charges in 2019 so with a 1% false positive rate that would be 100,000 people falsely imprisoned every year.

It does not have to be and really can't be 0% but 1% is unreasonably high in my opinion. If it can't be helped then it can't be helped but that isn't necessarily the case with these devices.

The doctor did not have the _potential_ to fake evidence. He _did_ fake evidence.

Is it bad that I'd guess you would be excluded from a jury if you admitted this upfront?

The wikipedia page is heartbreaking. Griefing parents sent to jail, their other children taken away and placed in foster care... So many lifes made miserable by one person...

Additionally it could be made a requirement that, like in professional sports, two or three blood drafts are taken - one sample is analyzed and one is either kept until the case is closed or analyzed at a different lab if the evidence is contested.

This method doesn't protect against evidence tampering. Someone can just take a drop of that blood and smear it on the victims clothes. Now it doesn't matter how many labs analyze it, it's always going to come back a match...

From the Wikipedia page

> In June 2005, the Chief Coroner of Ontario ordered a review of 44 autopsies carried out by Smith. Thirteen of these cases had resulted in criminal charges and convictions. The report was released in April 2007, indicating that there were substantial problems with 20 of the autopsies.

That sounds more like 45% to me.

Also this bit from the article about a baby that allegedly had a skull fracture:

> Later exhumation of the child and examination of the skull have shown that there was no skull fracture. It is thought Dr. Smith confused the normal gap between the baby's skull plates for an injury.

Holy shit that is bad. Even as a lay person I know about these gaps.

> there are gaps between skull plates.

Between Baby skull plates, not adult ones ;-)

They grow together at some point.

I edited my post to make it clear I don't think skulls have gaps in general.

> Holy shit that is bad. Even as a lay person I know that there are gaps between skull plates.

Sure, but can you tell them apart from a fracture caused by injury? Presumably someone knowledgeable in medicine should be able to, but maybe it is one of those things that isn't as obvious as we, the uneducated outsider, might think.

That's an extremely flawed argument. If you can't explain it to a layman then you don't understand it. If you can't tell whether it's a gap or a fracture -- you can't get a conviction.

"It just looks like it" is not a valid reason.

It is possible that they could have well supported their assessment with evidence and still been wrong.

Interestingly there's an area of psychology called Naturalistic Decision Making which studies how experts make decisions that they can't explain. (Example: a firefighter may be able to pinpoint where a fire is before they enter a house and see it.)

I know, but that is reason for suspicion, not evidence for a conviction.

If the error goes against innocent people, then it must be unacceptable. If the error sides with the “would-be” criminal, that is more acceptable as we, as a society, have decided that letting a few bad folks go is preferred to imprisoning innocents.

> as we, as a society, have decided that letting a few bad folks go is preferred to imprisoning innocents.

We, as a society, like to say this because it makes us feel good.

But a critical analysis of our actions reveals that we don't believe it for a second. We are happy to write overbroad laws that allow most behaviors to be criminalized, over police marginalized communities, and place those who have been convicted by this flawed system in deeply dysfunctional prisons that may well violate their human rights.

The end result of that tiny little error rate was tens of millions in settlements and legal costs, families permanently separated by government mandate, and multiple people spending more than a decade in prison.