Re:It's legal for police to use deception in interrogations....
by jyounker on Saturday November 09, 2024 @12:12PM
(#42095512)
This seems like a stretch. As far as I know, usually DNA evidence in exonerations is more along the lines of, "The DNA is 98% match for a known killer who was arrested for similar crime a few years later."
Re:It's legal for police to use deception in interrogations....
by d1sxeyes on Wednesday November 13, 2024 @02:34PM
(#42129124)
Even that is problematic. A 98% match means there’s a 1 in 50 chance that the sample is not from the person that it’s been matched to. How many cases do you have to cross match with how many felons before you get a false positive? It’s probably not as many as you think, but I don’t have the numbers to do the maths with.
Suggested reading on this topic: https://freakonomics.com/2008/08/are-the-fbis-probabilities-...
If the guy who done it was blonde, 6’2”, driving a red Mercedes, and he wrapped the body in a green rug, and it turns out that the bloodstains on green rug of the 6’2” blonde guy with the red Mercedes that you arrested for it are only actually 70% likely to be the victim’s rather than 99.5%, while LEGALLY the guy in prison now can benefit from the presumption of innocence, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable if he moved in downstairs.
Proven innocence would be “oh we have irrefutable video evidence that this guy was two states away at the time”.