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.