The person's guilt must be proven beyond all reasonable doubt. If you are accusing him there is a range of possible proof. If all you have is based on an unreadable codebase, that takes 100 years to read, that's your (the prosecution's) fuckup. As a jury I would not convict.

I don't want prosecutors sleeping on the job, bringing in fraudsters laymen and psychics to accuse people, etc.

The prosecutor should use a company that can present independent proof that their system actually works.

So what if I say i need to review camera footage of me doing a crime and it will take me 100 years to validate it?

You need to establish reasonable timelines for this or any guilty person will claim any technology used will take 100 years to verify.

There is no reason you can’t analyze a DNA analysis codebase in 6 months. Unless you also need to verify the science.

I am not clear what you are arguing - it there a real problem where people invent fantastical amount of time to review simple evidence?

The claim about the amount of time was not made by the defendant, it was from the company that produced the code.

Thanks for the clarification -- I actually misread it and thought the defendant was making the claim. With it being the company, then I agree that the company has an obligation to make review simple enough that it can be done in a reasonable amount of time (from someone knowledgeable in the field -- I still don't think we need to allow someone 10 years to understand statistics and progreamming before even beginning the code review) or recuse the tool from use in a trial.

We should flip the responsibility. How does the company providing the software prove it is not flawed.

As long as he’s actually reading the code, and still in jail unable to hurt anyone, let him have it. He’ll likely pass before that time is reached and if he’s just wasting time he’ll get bored having to spend hours a day looking at code that he doesn’t care to look at. I get what you’re saying but my point is him wasting time reading code isn’t hurting anyone and is a better use of an inmates time than sitting around.

If he’s in jail doing it then that’s fine.

For practical purposes its not in the interest of justice to punish people before we have found them guilty as a matter of law and justice. If it really requires 8 years of work to prove whether the tools they are using work or not then they haven't independently validated their work in the first place ergo we have no reason to suppose it works.

We should either pay for multiple people to work on it so we can have the answer in less than 8 years or we shouldn't use it at all.

The burden of proof does not suddenly fall on the defendant just because one for-profit conviction company can’t back up their product.

Who said they can’t back it up? The defendant claimed he needed to review it. The company presumably has done its own validation.

There is no reason to presume they did their own validation correctly absent proof of same.

Hopefully they have to have demonstrated some level of quality to be used as legal evidence in convicting someone. Although, I would hope "code analysis" is an infinitesimal part of the validation with the majority being real world end to end tests. (e.g. we can take 10,000 samples, divide them in two, mix them, then use our tool to pair up the samples with 100% accuracy).

I think this is the crux of the problem. If the defendant gets to decide when validation is sufficient then should they ever say it is sufficient?

When the jury agrees the evidence is there beyond a reasonable doubt. No one should trust any black box when it comes to criminal prosecution.

So the prosecution can present its case and say they gave the defendant the code for 9 months and here are five other independent reviews. The defense can argue they needed more time. The jury then decides if there is reasonable doubt.

If the company can't show that the process has been independantly validated it probably should be tossed before the jury hears it.

There are papers that do validation of TrueAllelle. I don't know the product well enough to know if it is the same one used in the article, but there isn't info in the article to know if independent validation was done or not.

>presumably

>their own validation

That is not how things are proven.

“You don’t need to know how we came to this scientific conclusion.” An appeal to authority doesn’t fly in science and it certainly doesn’t in law.

Such code should have tests, analysis, and documentation that ought to go a long way towards proving it correct in the time required to transmit data. If they can't produce THAT then they shouldn't use it in a court of law at all.