"... and how they interpret the dogs behaviors."

The interpretation part is huge in many disciplines. If you especially look at high profile cases, you can have experts for each side presenting opposing interpretations (not even involving animals).

Then it's up to the jury to decide which is more believable.

There's your spooky story for the day.

And, unfortunately, "reasonable doubt" is not a reliable fallback in such a situation.

Reasonable is whatever they say it is.

So it seems that "beyond the reasonable doubts" is a fiction unless one can afford really expensive lawyers.

Even expensive lawyers and experts do not always overcome the court of opinion.

"It’s definitely destroyed my trust in a jury of my peers."

If only they were actual peers. Many of the smart ones know what to say to get out of being on a jury. There are so many people with biases too, and many don't get filtered out because they don't even realize that their belief is based on bias.

>"Many of the smart ones know what to say to get out of being on a jury."

I believe in supremacy of justice as I understand it over a written rule (I know it is flawed but this is me). If I feel that person will be punished unjustly then screw the law and I would vote for nullification as it is my right. I think this will stop from being selected as a juror.

I only recently learned that you can waive your right to a jury, and instead have your case decided by the judge.

I think this would be a very tempting option for me, if I ever found myself in serious legal trouble. I assume a judge would be less susceptible to emotional manipulation, and be intelligent enough to properly weigh the facts.

Of course, then you are at the mercy of one person.

Well actually they will bypass both and offer you a deal you can't refuse.

It's called a plea bargain. "Plea guilty and here is your penalty. And if you don't, here is the stack of charges we'll try to get you for and how much worst it will be. Do you feel lucky, punk?"

Over 95% of cases end this way. Based on exoneration, a fairly significant percentage are actually innocent people who decide that they can't fight it.

If you think this doesn't sound like justice, I absolutely agree.

"and instead have your case decided by the judge."

Oh God no. This is even worse. In my limited experience, judges can be very biased. They tend to be very unaccommodating as to what reasonable doubt is (it's whatever they say it is).

>Then it's up to the jury to decide which is more believable.

And anyone who the prosecutor will stereotype as potentially having too much critical thinking skills or skepticism of the prosecution will get tossed from the jury.

Some of the humans, the subset who's testimony was selected to appear on that show.

A cadaver dog could be useful for finding a carcass, human or otherwise. Once a carcass is found, can't more qualified experts testify about it? Are we talking about cases in which a carcass wasn't found, but was theorized to have been present at some point?! How do we know the carcass was human? How do we know how long ago it was present? If we could be certain of either of those things, how do we know it was the particular human whose murder is being prosecuted?

We can't blame dog enthusiasts for testifying, but it's a judge's job to keep fantasists out. Judges who allow such testimony aren't stupid; they are evil.

When they find a body, it's easy.

It's the cases you'll read about when it says the dog "activated" or "altered" five times on the property, even though nothing was found, and that's somehow used as evidence of something.

That's hideous. Judges who allow that testimony should be impeached and disbarred, at a minimum.

I don't see why judges can't allow bunk testimony, the problem is that juries have been watching way too much CSI:Miami and don't believe any arguments brought up by the defense that forensic 'experts' are reading chicken entrails.

For the same reason that a defendant may not be presented to the jury in handcuffs or in a prison uniform. Because we humans are not able to return to a blank slate, free from biases imparted by information later learned to be false. For methods that are known to be useless, the jury shouldn't be asked to perform the impossible.

Easy to say. But to the extent that it’s easy to get rid of judges they can’t be an effective check on the other branches.

Thread hypothesis is that the judges are encouraging prosecutorial misconduct, i.e. that they are intentionally not acting as a check on the executive branch. For local and state courts, which is what we're talking about, the primary check they embody is against police and prosecutors. When they fail in this duty, absolutely they should be replaced by those who do not fail.

Then the question is, who should get to decide when to replace a judge? Obviously not the executive branch, especially in the context of this particular discussion.

For example, some judges are elected (probably varies by state, but there are some places where that's true), so in those cases a perfectly viable remedy already exists (in theory, at least). Of course, in practice there's nothing to prevent voters from being very pro-prosecutor. Usually the judicial system is the best option for a remedy to that sort of problem, but of course then we're back where we started..

Typically the legislative branch handles impeachment, although in some states the judicial branch would also play a role in the process. We have a norm that officials are not fired for doing their jobs poorly, even to the extent that they intentionally harm people, and that certainly makes various things run more smoothly. Smoothness would have been a more convincing argument back in the day when our government produced acceptable results [0], assuming that day ever occurred. Obviously one would prefer that people not be convicted of murder based on stories told by buffoons about their interactions with dogs. Probably there aren't a great many judges who would allow such a thing. When that has occurred, however, a public proceeding in a legislature would constitute a wonderful reminder for all judges to take their heads out of their asses, which would contribute to justice.

[0] In USA we spend twice as much on health care as any other nation. Our performance against covid has only been better than Peru, Brazil, and several nations in eastern Europe. Every nation in Asia and Africa had fewer deaths per capita than we did.

There's also "dog alerted, after five days of digging we found a single bone fragment 200ft away. Insufficient DNA remains for us to conclusively say it's human, but all the evidence is consistent with human"

That scares the shit out of me if I'm being honest.

years ago I read an article by bruce schneier talking about how he ran an open home network so if someone accessed illegal content he could claim it could have been anyone. His argument was that if it was secured the police would argue it had to have been him.

I got the point but disagreed.

a year or two later I was reading an article about a police officer that got convicted of accessing child pornography on the police computer systems. The chief of police was quoted as saying "we know it was him because he used his password".

My ass went home that night, opened up my home network, and I've ran it that way ever since.

of course it's not that simple, understanding why that chief of police was wrong (I'm not making any claims about whether that police officer did or didn't access that material) in his confidence is what caused me to suddenly strongly agree with Bruce Schneier.

So when I hear things like your dog story, I just know that confidence has to be misplaced, even if I don't fully understand why (although in this case I do).

Those aren't really the same thing. You can go to the next level of detail on the password question. Was the officer reliably in the area, was his password well known, is it trivial for anyone to find the password. Whereas wifi at your home, there are endless ways to get it, plus did you share it with anyone.

Good luck making those arguments to law enforcement.

Arguing with law enforcement is a losing battle. You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride, etc.

Or, when a dog's "evidence" is used to get a warrant. The argument is that the right to privacy does not exist for illegal actions, and a dog will only alert for illegal contraband. So a baseless fishing expedition without any reasonable justification is rendered legal based on pseudoscience.

This is like saying "Dont hate the player hate the game"

No I am perfectly capable of rightly placing blame on both. In this context the Cops, prosecutors and judges all have an ethical duty to the truth. All 3 seem to have forgotten that underlying obligation in the system

They want that "win", that conviction, that revenge, or what ever.

So yes I will blame the judge for letting bad "evidence" in that lacks proper foundation, but I will also blame the cop that is presenting the "evidence" and the prosecutor that presented the "evidence"

Our systems have layers for a reason, we can not and should not have to relay solely upon the Judge as the first, last and only line of defense here.

> In this context the Cops, prosecutors and judges all have an ethical duty to the truth. All 3 seem to have forgotten that underlying obligation in the system

Could you clarify: are you referring to every single member of those 3 groups, or just some?

And if it's just some, then roughly speaking, what fraction do you mean, and what evidence supports that?

Depends on which part of that quote...

I believe every single member of all 3 have an ethical duty to the truth

I think a significant number of all 3 groups have forgotten that, or believe something else take precedent further I believe every member of all 3 groups knows about a co-member of the group that has ignored or violated their ethical duty and looked the other way, or actively covered for that abuse

I think it's important to note that cops, prosecutors, judges, etc. are trained and encouraged to "listen to the science" and "don't rely on your gut." Of course, many disregard this, due to corruption or other moral failings. But many do follow this advice, and sometimes it results in presenting faulty evidence simply because they have been taught faulty science.

In addition to rooting out corruption and dismantling immoral incentives, we need to seriously re-examine the forensic science that is the backbone of many cases. People--including judges, juries, cops, and lawyers--are far too willing to blindly trust "science," and it can have extremely scary outcomes. We need more replication of studies and better science education for our criminal justice professionals.

the bigger problem is we have lost the true meaning of "science" or rather the "scientific method" as a huge part of forensic "science" has no connection with the "scientific method" upto and including the foundational "science" of fingerprints which is more of interpretive art than science

Too much of science today is Hypothesis -> Gather Data to support, reject any that does not -> Report Conclusions -> Burn Heretics

Also, in the US precedent sets if something is scientific in the eyes of the court, not science.

well, one potential nefarious use of dogs is the parallel construction of evidence that was gathered illegally in some way. That's, I assume, what psychics are for.

primarily the bad use of cadaver dogs isn’t in finding buried bodies but in allegedly being able to say that the body was somewhere else before it was moved, like the trunk of a car or a bedroom etc. cadaver dogs are basically used to frame suspects by claiming that the dog smelled the dead body somewhere where only the suspect could have been, therefore proving they killed the person. it’s complete bullshit. can dogs detect corpses? i think they can. can they detect where a corpse was, but no longer is, days or weeks or even years later? absolutely not, but cadaver dog handlers will testify under oath that they can

> (yes, I occasionally indulge in true crime, sue me!)

Sounds like civil court rather than criminal.

"2biteencryption", name checks out

Similarly, handler beliefs affect scent detection dog outcomes to at least some degree as indicated in this study:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3078300/

> No conditions contained drug or explosive scent; any alerting response was incorrect

> Within marked conditions, handlers reported that dogs alerted more at marked locations than other locations.

> The overwhelming number of incorrect alerts identified across conditions confirms that handler beliefs affect performance. Further, the directed pattern of alerts in conditions containing a marker compared with the pattern of alerts in the condition with unmarked decoy scent suggests that human influence on handler beliefs affects alerts to a greater degree than dog influence on handler beliefs

I found this to be very telling. It at the very least warrants more study. At the worst and in my opinion, warrants elimination of dog scent detection as the sole factor in a search.

Check out this article from the National Detector Dog Association - 'The Double-Blind Attack'. These people seriously don't believe in science.

https://nndda.org/the-double-blind-attack/

Wow. Everything in that article reads as an admission that canine units are utterly useless, even as the article tries to defend their use. The primary argument seems to be that dogs need constant and immediate reinforcement in order to be effective, and therefore double-blind studies are not effective measurements. This same argument would also imply that canine units are not effective in the field, since the handler wouldn't be able to provide accurate reinforcement.

Wow!

> Results in confusion and frustration in the canine – As stated previously, under doubleblind testing, the determination of the team’s accuracy cannot be made at the time of the alert. Therefore, to provide or withhold a reward from the canine under such a condition can result in confusing and frustrating the canine, which will lead to an increase chance of incorrect responses.

Juxtapose that with the real world. I am not an expert but I sincerely doubt that K9s in airports get treats every time they correctly identify a illicit source. That is why they are trained constantly(I presume). Testing for one hour or one day will likely not have an effect on the long term ability of the dog to correctly sniff illicit sources.

The NNDDA article is addressing the "double blind attack", which in my opinion is their way of redirecting from the notion that the K9s should not be used as a gold standard to ascertain probable cause. I would have to think more on the subject to comment on reasonable suspicion. If they truly believed in the idea that handlers are benign, they would embrace the double blind process.

Reminds me of audiophiles. When the scientific method is the enemy, you are dealing with some massive psychological effects that people refuse to acknowledge.

Suppose you have a grand piano recording set up something like this https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59e4eb2464b05f... or like this https://i0.wp.com/royerlabs.com/photos/rec_tips/piano/Mancin...

Not only you have a multitrack recording to play with when mixing/mastering, but the tracks are naturally frequency weighted due to spatial positioning. Mix these tracks into stereo with some panning and play it on a decent set up with large-ish (say 5m) scene. You end up with unnaturally large grand piano spanning the whole scene. It does not sound "natural", but gives fake perception of "scene".

The whole audio field is weird constant chase between production, recording and reproduction (e.g. in the 90s V shaped frequency profile used to be quite prevalent to sound good on boomboxes) which gives perfect breeding grounds for audiophilic mysticism. No set up will ever be able to "naturally reproduce" both rock concert and chamber orchestra.

I have noticed that there are two types of audiophiles. The first kind has certain collection of records and strive for a set up that gives them the same goosebumps they felt first time hearing the recording/concert, the second kind lives off giving goosebumps to their audiophile friends bringing their own records. Both live in constant grind for perfection that they will never achieve.

> I sincerely doubt that K9s in airports get treats every time they correctly identify a illicit source.

Why do you doubt that? When people say "treat" they don't mean a full day at the spa. It's a bite of something tasty, or a bit of play with a tennis ball while the dog handler says "goood booooooy".

they absolutely treat the dog for finding contraband. that’s how you train them to alert on the smell. the problem is that this means they might alert for nothing at all, just because they want a treat

If that would be treated seriously, it would mean that detector dogs are impossible to use in case where they need to find or detect something.

So they are completely useless.

Is nndda.org actually serious representation of them?

Oh, they're extremely useful, just not for the thing you think. They manufacture cause for searches. It's a form of evidence laundering.

And yes, the NNDDA is one of several organizations that certifies police dogs.

A bit similar in the story of the counting horse from Germany in the early 20th century: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

My wife had tulip bulbs from Amsterdam in her carryon and the beagle at customs immediately identified her. It was amazing.

That said I’m sure even without training them to do so they look to their handlers for cues.

I know guys who smoked a lot of pot when they were younger. Would even fly with a small stash.

Never got caught or had a dog alert on them. They also didn't look like stoners. Whatever your stereotype is of how a stoner looks (and there are a few).

The 9/11 attackers were all clean shaven and dressed in business casual.

While I've seen roaming dogs in airports this was in customs and she passed by everyone. I'd certainly tell those friends to not try that on an international flight judging by that experience.

My one friend came from an English family so mostly flew to the UK.

As I understand it, buying drugs there is not a problem. No need to fly with them.

> immediately identified her.

How many others were "immediately identified" but were not carrying bulbs?

0. The handler even immediately asked if we had tulip bulbs - though I'm guessing that was just because she knew where we came from.

Was she aware of the bulbs being a potential issue? Maybe she sweated or showed other signs.

I don't think she was nervous about it as we got them in the airport, though she was confused as to whether or not we needed to declare them.

There is a point. In the USA, not giving them permission allows your lawyer to fight the case on the ground that it was an illegal detention. Case law has set precedent that without reasonable suspicion officers cannot extend your detention in a traffic stop just to bring a dog in. Never ever give permission to search.

There is a point. I understand your friends point though. In the USA, not giving them permission allows your lawyer to fight the case on the ground that it was an illegal detention. Case law has set precedent that without reasonable suspicion officers cannot extend your detention in a traffic stop just to bring a dog in(Rodriguez v united states 2015). Never ever give permission to search.

I know he's your friend, but "don't take legal advice from your opponent" applies here. It may be true that they will inevitably find a reason to search your car. It may not be true that the ensuing search will be legal and hold up in court.

Of course, there is a nonzero chance you will not survive to see a court date, but that's a different policing issue.

At this point, I'm convinced sniffer dogs are the dowsing rods of our time: basically just serving as psychological salve to reinforce a feeling of safety.

Are you saying the "use" of sniffer dogs, or that sniffer dogs are unable to accurately determine individual scents ?

The use of sniffer dogs in schools and airports.

I can tell you the drug sniffing dogs in use in Queensland, Australia in the late 2000s absolutely were basically “dowsing rods” (I was involved in illicit things at the time and went past/was sniffed by drug dogs over a dozen times and was never caught or searched despite having illegal drugs on my person, without much of an attempt to hide them). I’ve shown my partner how the handlers give a signal to the dogs to “mark” someone for a “probable cause” search too.

I would be fascinated to know how many and to what extent police techniques that appear to stretch believably are really tools to perform parallel reconstruction and get around shady sources of evidence.

Probably a lot of them. The US justice system has a lot of good things, but parallel reconstruction, constantly using the easiest way to get info even if it is illegal. Of course the latest thing is spying on all of us either through apps on our phones or just asking the phone company directly.

The entire industry, yes industry, of "expert witnesses" is murky.

Not just murky. Surf around and you can find companies offering these types of experts as a service. These experts are often experts in a surprisingly wide variety of fields, too.

> But the humans who testify on the dogs' behalf have a cult-like behavior about what the dogs can realistically detect, and how they interpret the dogs behaviors.

There was a scandal here in .cz regarding forensic odorology using dogs, as a report came out where the authors basically found out they were unable to test it, because the dog-operators either did not understand what is a double-blind experiment, or they even actively sabotaged it. It is then implied that when they do the identification for real, they are not blind to who the suspect/control is. (report, unfortunately only in Czech: https://jenda.hrach.eu/f2/salamoun-testovani-pachovych-stop.... google translate: https://jenda.hrach.eu/f2/salamoun-testovani-pachovych-stop-... )

It's clear that this resistance to being reasonably tested is because the handlers are obviously influencing the dogs. It's freaking irritating. A lot of that is drug war bs. I thought only us law enforcement would be resistant to evaluation.

The more "system" you have the more often you'll hear "sorry, but that's just how the system works" and nobody will ever be able to (or want to) do anything about the problem.

And there's a lot of system around here in EU. Applies to healthcare, social care and of course police as well.

I did volunteer search and rescue for a bit and people were split on weather dogs were even useful in that context either. Some people thought they were indispensable and some thought they were useless.