This is a completely different topic, which was originally meant to be included in yesterday’s post; however, due to its excessive length and being completely unrelated, it got its own post.

Texas, the State of executing innocent people based on fake science

One of the many stories that I could have missed but didn’t. The Guardian: John Grisham on death row prisoner: ‘Texas is about to execute innocent man’. Just the usual when it comes to Texas: they like killing people, and they don’t care if they’re innocent.

Grisham, whose legal thrillers have been turned into such Hollywood blockbusters as The Firm and The Pelican Brief, spoke out on Tuesday about the case of Robert Roberson, 57. Roberson has been on death row in Texas for more than 20 years for violently shaking to death his two-year-old daughter, Nikki.

Roberson is scheduled for execution on 17 October. Should his death by lethal injection go ahead he would be the first person in the US executed on the basis of “shaken baby syndrome” – a medical hypothesis from the 1970s that has been widely debunked as a form of junk science.

“What’s amazing about Robert’s case is that there was no crime,” Grisham told reporters. “In most death conviction cases, you’ve got a murder and somebody did it, but in Robert’s case there was no crime and yet we’re about to kill somebody for it in Texas. It’s so infuriating.”

…

Grisham is not the only public figure to back Roberson in his final countdown to death. More than 30 prominent scientists and doctors, a cross-party group of 84 Texas legislators, 70 lawyers who have represented clients wrongly accused of child abuse, and a range of autism advocacy groups lent their support on Tuesday to this last-ditch effort to reprieve the prisoner.

The clemency petition argues that Roberson’s conviction was based on three serious mistakes. When Nikki was rushed to hospital in February 2002 in a comatose state, medical personnel concluded that she had been violently shaken without looking at her actual medical record.

On the back of that initial error, law enforcement officials and doctors failed to investigate further. As a result, they missed critical symptoms, including that the girl was ill with a fever of 104.5F (40.3C) shortly before she fell unconscious, had undiagnosed pneumonia, and had been given medical drugs that have since been deemed life-threatening for children – all of which could explain her dire state.

The third mistake, the petition argues, is that detectives and medical staff who came into contact with Roberson, unaware that he was autistic, interpreted his non-expressive demeanor as the posture of a callous killer and not as a product of his condition.

Brian Wharton, the lead detective in the case who testified against Roberson at trial, now believes that the entire prosecution that he spearheaded was based on a fallacy. Last year he told the Guardian: “There was no crime scene, no forensic evidence. It was just three words: shaken baby syndrome. Without them, he would be a free man today.”

Shaken baby syndrome, or SBS for short, is a child abuse theory that emerged in the early 1970s. It was hailed as an explanation for why some children presented with severe, and sometimes fatal, illness with signs of internal head trauma but little or no sign of external injury.

An early proponent of the theory was a British pediatric neurosurgeon, Norman Guthkelch, who in 1971 posited that violent shaking of the child could be a possible cause. The concept spread rapidly until it had the status of received knowledge.

…

Doubts have grown about the syndrome to the extent that many authorities now consider it unreliable, including Guthkelch himself who has expressed alarm about how the theory had been used to prosecute thousands of parents for child abuse. Concern has spread across the criminal justice system and 32 individuals convicted on the basis of SBS have been exonerated since 1993, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Grisham likened Roberson’s case to that of Cameron Todd Willingham who was executed by Texas in 2004 for murdering his three young children. Willingham was accused of setting fire to the family home on the basis of forensic arson theories that were found to have been junk science.

“Twenty years ago Texas executed a guy for a crime that never occurred,” Grisham said. “Now here we are 20 years later and we’re down to another execution where there was no crime and where the science has been debunked. Texas is about to execute another innocent man.”

Nothing out of ordinary. This is not specific to Texas, but to many US States: they condemn people based on fake science, but later they don’t exonerate them when the so-called “science” is proven false! THEY JUST DON’T CARE. In this particular case, the fake science hasn’t been used to “prove” the guilt, but even to fabricate a non-existing crime! That’s surreal.

The article mentioned the National Registry of Exonerations. Well, those exhonerations are almost miracles! Why is that so? Because in many U.S. states, even when new evidence such as DNA results becomes available, or when old forensic methods are debunked, it can be very difficult to obtain a new trial or exoneration. The legal system favors the finality of verdicts, and courts are extremely reluctant to reopen cases. More often than not, also the prosecution firmly opposes any revision of a case. To get a post-conviction relief is like fighting with an entire system that refuses to admit that it can sometimes fail!

Also, in many states, defendants do not have an automatic right to a DNA test, even if they are willing to pay for it. Each state has its own laws regarding post-conviction DNA testing, and defendants must meet certain criteria to be eligible. For instance, they would have to prove that the (absence of a) DNA test would have altered the outcome of their trial, which can be a high bar to meet.

Even more cynically, in most U.S. states, exonerated individuals do not receive automatic compensation. Around 38 states and the federal government have some form of compensation law, but the process to actually obtain compensation can be complex and difficult. This contrasts with some European countries where compensation for wrongful imprisonment is automatic once exoneration occurs.

But the Guardian article also mentioned a previous gross miscarriage of justice, the case of Cameron Todd Willingham. Any you really, REALLY HAVE TO READ THIS, as it shows how broken the US judicial system is, and particularly the one in Texas!

I knew about this case, but I’m not sure whether I already read this article in the past or not. Certainly not in 2009, but possibly later.

The above article has about 16,300 words (179 paragraphs), and Firefox has the absurd estimation that you would need “87–111 minutes” to read it. It ain’t quite so, but if you did, it would have been a compelling horror movie about Texas’s judiciary. 😱

Although the story is long, complex, and brilliantly exposed, let me quote the very minimum that allows me to list some major flaws of the judiciary. I will comment on most of them, separately, at the end of the quotes.

Let’s ignore for a while how the investigators concluded (wrongly and unscientifically) that Todd Willingham set fire to the house to kill his three kids, based on the “Sherlock Holmes-like aura of invincibility” of the deputy fire marshal named Manuel Vasquez, supposed to be a great arson investigator. Here’s how the witnesses were manipulated:

[1] Police and fire investigators canvassed the neighborhood, interviewing witnesses. Several, like Father Monaghan, initially portrayed Willingham as devastated by the fire. Yet, over time, an increasing number of witnesses offered damning statements. Diane Barbee said that she had not seen Willingham try to enter the house until after the authorities arrived, as if he were putting on a show. And when the children’s room exploded with flames, she added, he seemed more preoccupied with his car, which he moved down the driveway. Another neighbor reported that when Willingham cried out for his babies he “did not appear to be excited or concerned.” Even Father Monaghan wrote in a statement that, upon further reflection, “things were not as they seemed. I had the feeling that [Willingham] was in complete control.”

Then, the retarded investigators, persuaded that Willingham has poured liquid accelerant (something he didn’t), fabricated this other “proof”:

[2] During the interrogation, Vasquez let Fogg take the lead. Finally, Vasquez turned to Willingham and asked a seemingly random question: had he put on shoes before he fled the house?

“No, sir,” Willingham replied.

A map of the house was on a table between the men, and Vasquez pointed to it. “You walked out this way?” he said.

Willingham said yes.

Vasquez was now convinced that Willingham had killed his children. If the floor had been soaked with a liquid accelerant and the fire had burned low, as the evidence suggested, Willingham could not have run out of the house the way he had described without badly burning his feet. A medical report indicated that his feet had been unscathed.

Willingham insisted that, when he left the house, the fire was still around the top of the walls and not on the floor. “I didn’t have to jump through any flames,” he said. Vasquez believed that this was impossible, and that Willingham had lit the fire as he was retreating—first, torching the children’s room, then the hallway, and then, from the porch, the front door. Vasquez later said of Willingham, “He told me a story of pure fabrication. . . . He just talked and he talked and all he did was lie.”

They just wanted him to be guilty:

[3] Ultimately, the authorities concluded that Willingham was a man without a conscience whose serial crimes had climaxed, almost inexorably, in murder. John Jackson, who was then the assistant district attorney in Corsicana, was assigned to prosecute Willingham’s case. He later told the Dallas Morning News that he considered Willingham to be “an utterly sociopathic individual” who deemed his children “an impediment to his lifestyle.” Or, as the local district attorney, Pat Batchelor, put it, “The children were interfering with his beer drinking and dart throwing.”

Surprisingly enough, the prosecutor was personally opposed to capital punishment, but the law is the law:

[4] Willingham was charged with murder. Because there were multiple victims, he was eligible for the death penalty, under Texas law. Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson, who had ambitions of becoming a judge, was personally opposed to capital punishment. “I don’t think it’s effective in deterring criminals,” he told me. “I just don’t think it works.” He also considered it wasteful: because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas—about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years. Plus, Jackson said, “What’s the recourse if you make a mistake?” Yet his boss, Batchelor, believed that, as he once put it, “certain people who commit bad enough crimes give up the right to live,” and Jackson came to agree that the heinous nature of the crime in the Willingham case—“one of the worst in terms of body count” that he had ever tried—mandated death.

The manipulation of the inmates followed:

[5] Not long after Willingham’s arrest, authorities received a message from a prison inmate named Johnny Webb, who was in the same jail as Willingham. Webb alleged that Willingham had confessed to him that he took “some kind of lighter fluid, squirting [it] around the walls and the floor, and set a fire.” The case against Willingham was considered airtight.

It’s no fun when your own lawyer believes you’re guilty as charged:

[6] Willingham’s lawyers were equally pleased. They had little doubt that he had committed the murders and that, if the case went before a jury, he would be found guilty, and, subsequently, executed. “Everyone thinks defense lawyers must believe their clients are innocent, but that’s seldom true,” Martin told me. “Most of the time, they’re guilty as sin.” He added of Willingham, “All the evidence showed that he was one hundred per cent guilty. He poured accelerant all over the house and put lighter fluid under the kids’ beds.” It was, he said, “a classic arson case”: there were “puddle patterns all over the place—no disputing those.”

The offer to plead guilty (I’ll comment on this later):

[7] And so, shortly before jury selection, Jackson approached Willingham’s attorneys with an extraordinary offer: if their client pleaded guilty, the state would give him a life sentence. “I was really happy when I thought we might have a deal to avoid the death penalty,” Jackson recalls.

…

Martin and Dunn advised Willingham that he should accept the offer, but he refused.

…

Willingham was implacable. “I ain’t gonna plead to something I didn’t do, especially killing my own kids,” he said. It was his final decision. Martin says, “I thought it was nuts at the time—and I think it’s nuts now.”

Willingham’s refusal to accept the deal confirmed the view of the prosecution, and even that of his defense lawyers, that he was an unrepentant killer.

It was a really speedy trial!

[8] The defense had tried to find a fire expert to counter Vasquez and Fogg’s testimony, but the one they contacted concurred with the prosecution. Ultimately, the defense presented only one witness to the jury: the Willinghams’ babysitter, who said she could not believe that Willingham could have killed his children. (Dunn told me that Willingham had wanted to testify, but Martin and Dunn thought that he would make a bad witness.) The trial ended after two days.

During his closing arguments, Jackson said that the puddle configurations and pour patterns were Willingham’s inadvertent “confession,” burned into the floor. Showing a Bible that had been salvaged from the fire, Jackson paraphrased the words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew: “Whomsoever shall harm one of my children, it’s better for a millstone to be hung around his neck and for him to be cast in the sea.”

The jury was out for barely an hour before returning with a unanimous guilty verdict. As Vasquez put it, “The fire does not lie.”

The witnesses’ testimonies were contradictory, and even more so after the authorities had decided that Willingham was a murderer:

[9] As she examined the eyewitness accounts, she noticed several contradictions. Diane Barbee had reported that, before the authorities arrived at the fire, Willingham never tried to get back into the house—yet she had been absent for some time while calling the Fire Department. Meanwhile, her daughter Buffie had reported witnessing Willingham on the porch breaking a window, in an apparent effort to reach his children. And the firemen and police on the scene had described Willingham frantically trying to get into the house.

The witnesses’ testimony also grew more damning after authorities had concluded, in the beginning of January, 1992, that Willingham was likely guilty of murder. In Diane Barbee’s initial statement to authorities, she had portrayed Willingham as “hysterical,” and described the front of the house exploding. But on January 4th, after arson investigators began suspecting Willingham of murder, Barbee suggested that he could have gone back inside to rescue his children, for at the outset she had seen only “smoke coming from out of the front of the house”—smoke that was not “real thick.”

An even starker shift occurred with Father Monaghan’s testimony. In his first statement, he had depicted Willingham as a devastated father who had to be repeatedly restrained from risking his life. Yet, as investigators were preparing to arrest Willingham, he concluded that Willingham had been too emotional (“He seemed to have the type of distress that a woman who had given birth would have upon seeing her children die”); and he expressed a “gut feeling” that Willingham had “something to do with the setting of the fire.”

Dozens of studies have shown that witnesses’ memories of events often change when they are supplied with new contextual information. Itiel Dror, a cognitive psychologist who has done extensive research on eyewitness and expert testimony in criminal investigations, told me, “The mind is not a passive machine. Once you believe in something—once you expect something—it changes the way you perceive information and the way your memory recalls it.”

How can the prosecution declare someone “a sociopath” based on a tattoo and on an Iron Maiden poster?! Is Texas in North Korea?!

[10] Though only the babysitter had appeared as a witness for the defense during the main trial, several family members, including Stacy, testified during the penalty phase, asking the jury to spare Willingham’s life. When Stacy was on the stand, Jackson grilled her about the “significance” of Willingham’s “very large tattoo of a skull, encircled by some kind of a serpent.”

“It’s just a tattoo,” Stacy responded.

“He just likes skulls and snakes. Is that what you’re saying?”

“No. He just had—he got a tattoo on him.”

The prosecution cited such evidence in asserting that Willingham fit the profile of a sociopath, and brought forth two medical experts to confirm the theory. Neither had met Willingham. One of them was Tim Gregory, a psychologist with a master’s degree in marriage and family issues, who had previously gone goose hunting with Jackson, and had not published any research in the field of sociopathic behavior. His practice was devoted to family counselling.

At one point, Jackson showed Gregory Exhibit No. 60—a photograph of an Iron Maiden poster that had hung in Willingham’s house—and asked the psychologist to interpret it. “This one is a picture of a skull, with a fist being punched through the skull,” Gregory said; the image displayed “violence” and “death.” Gregory looked at photographs of other music posters owned by Willingham. “There’s a hooded skull, with wings and a hatchet,” Gregory continued. “And all of these are in fire, depicting—it reminds me of something like Hell. And there’s a picture—a Led Zeppelin picture of a falling angel. . . . I see there’s an association many times with cultive-type of activities. A focus on death, dying. Many times individuals that have a lot of this type of art have interest in satanic-type activities.”

Look what kind of “medical expert” they used:

[11] The other medical expert was James P. Grigson, a forensic psychiatrist. He testified so often for the prosecution in capital-punishment cases that he had become known as Dr. Death. (A Texas appellate judge once wrote that when Grigson appeared on the stand the defendant might as well “commence writing out his last will and testament.”) Grigson suggested that Willingham was an “extremely severe sociopath,” and that “no pill” or treatment could help him. Grigson had previously used nearly the same words in helping to secure a death sentence against Randall Dale Adams, who had been convicted of murdering a police officer, in 1977. After Adams, who had no prior criminal record, spent a dozen years on death row—and once came within seventy-two hours of being executed—new evidence emerged that absolved him, and he was released. In 1995, three years after Willingham’s trial, Grigson was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association for violating ethics. The association stated that Grigson had repeatedly arrived at a “psychiatric diagnosis without first having examined the individuals in question, and for indicating, while testifying in court as an expert witness, that he could predict with 100-per-cent certainty that the individuals would engage in future violent acts.”

Johnny Webb was the guy who claimed that Willingham confessed to him in prison:

[12] As Gilbert chatted with him, she thought that he seemed paranoid. During Willingham’s trial, Webb disclosed that he had been given a diagnosis of “post-traumatic stress disorder” after he was sexually assaulted in prison, in 1988, and that he often suffered from “mental impairment.” Under cross-examination, Webb testified that he had no recollection of a robbery that he had pleaded guilty to only months earlier.

…

Jailhouse informants, many of whom are seeking reduced time or special privileges, are notoriously unreliable. According to a 2004 study by the Center on Wrongful Convictions, at Northwestern University Law School, lying police and jailhouse informants are the leading cause of wrongful convictions in capital cases in the United States. At the time that Webb came forward against Willingham, he was facing charges of robbery and forgery. During Willingham’s trial, another inmate planned to testify that he had overheard Webb saying to another prisoner that he was hoping to “get time cut,” but the testimony was ruled inadmissible, because it was hearsay. Webb, who pleaded guilty to the robbery and forgery charges, received a sentence of fifteen years. Jackson, the prosecutor, told me that he generally considered Webb “an unreliable kind of guy,” but added, “I saw no real motive for him to make a statement like this if it wasn’t true. We didn’t cut him any slack.”

The “scientific evidence of arson” was the only “proof” left that so far hadn’t been challenged:

[13] Aside from the scientific evidence of arson, the case against Willingham did not stand up to scrutiny. Jackson, the prosecutor, said of Webb’s testimony, “You can take it or leave it.” Even the refrigerator’s placement by the back door of the house turned out to be innocuous; there were two refrigerators in the cramped kitchen, and one of them was by the back door. Jimmie Hensley, the police detective, and Douglas Fogg, the assistant fire chief, both of whom investigated the fire, told me recently that they had never believed that the fridge was part of the arson plot. “It didn’t have nothing to do with the fire,” Fogg said.

The blind and arrogant belief that “the system is perfect”:

[14] The fear that an innocent person might be executed has long haunted jurors and lawyers and judges. During America’s Colonial period, dozens of crimes were punishable by death, including horse thievery, blasphemy, “man-stealing,” and highway robbery. After independence, the number of crimes eligible for the death penalty was gradually reduced, but doubts persisted over whether legal procedures were sufficient to prevent an innocent person from being executed. In 1868, John Stuart Mill made one of the most eloquent defenses of capital punishment, arguing that executing a murderer did not display a wanton disregard for life but, rather, proof of its value. “We show, on the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it by the adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself,” he said. For Mill, there was one counterargument that carried weight—“that if by an error of justice an innocent person is put to death, the mistake can never be corrected.”

The modern legal system, with its lengthy appeals process and clemency boards, was widely assumed to protect the kind of “error of justice” that Mill feared. In 2000, while George W. Bush was governor of Texas, he said, “I know there are some in the country who don’t care for the death penalty, but . . . we’ve adequately answered innocence or guilt.” His top policy adviser on issues of criminal justice emphasized that there is “super due process to make sure that no innocent defendants are executed.”

Texas had a governor who wasn’t a retard:

[15] In recent years, though, questions have mounted over whether the system is fail-safe. Since 1976, more than a hundred and thirty people on death row have been exonerated. DNA testing, which was developed in the eighties, saved seventeen of them, but the technique can be used only in rare instances. Barry Scheck, a co-founder of the Innocence Project, which has used DNA testing to exonerate prisoners, estimates that about eighty per cent of felonies do not involve biological evidence.

In 2000, after thirteen people on death row in Illinois were exonerated, George Ryan, who was then governor of the state, suspended the death penalty. Though he had been a longtime advocate of capital punishment, he declared that he could no longer support a system that has “come so close to the ultimate nightmare—the state’s taking of innocent life.” Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has said that the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person would be a constitutionally intolerable event.”

Two random cases of wrongly executed people:

[16] In 1993, Ruben Cantu was executed in Texas for fatally shooting a man during a robbery. Years later, a second victim, who survived the shooting, told the Houston Chronicle that he had been pressured by police to identify Cantu as the gunman, even though he believed Cantu to be innocent. Sam Millsap, the district attorney in the case, who had once supported capital punishment (“I’m no wild-eyed, pointy-headed liberal”), said that he was disturbed by the thought that he had made a mistake.

In 1995, Larry Griffin was put to death in Missouri, for a drive-by shooting of a drug dealer. The case rested largely on the eyewitness testimony of a career criminal named Robert Fitzgerald, who had been an informant for prosecutors before and was in the witness-protection program. Fitzgerald maintained that he happened to be at the scene because his car had broken down. After Griffin’s execution, a probe sponsored by the N.A.A.C.P.’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund revealed that a man who had been wounded during the incident insisted that Griffin was not the shooter. Moreover, the first police officer at the scene disputed that Fitzgerald had witnessed the crime.

These cases, however, stopped short of offering irrefutable proof that a “legally and factually innocent person” was executed. In 2005, a St. Louis prosecutor, Jennifer Joyce, launched an investigation of the Griffin case, upon being presented with what she called “compelling” evidence of Griffin’s potential innocence. After two years of reviewing the evidence, and interviewing a new eyewitness, Joyce said that she and her team were convinced that the “right person was convicted.”

Enter the retard-in-chief, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:

[17] Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in 2006, voted with a majority to uphold the death penalty in a Kansas case. In his opinion, Scalia declared that, in the modern judicial system, there has not been “a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.”

A new lawyer didn’t help much:

[18] In 1996, he obtained a new court-appointed lawyer, Walter Reaves, who told me that he was appalled by the quality of Willingham’s defense at trial and on appeal. Reaves prepared for him a state writ of habeas corpus, known as a Great Writ. In the byzantine appeals process of death-penalty cases, which frequently takes more than ten years, the writ is the most critical stage: a prisoner can introduce new evidence detailing such things as perjured testimony, unreliable medical experts, and bogus scientific findings. Yet most indigent inmates, like Willingham, who constitute the bulk of those on death row, lack the resources to track down new witnesses or dig up fresh evidence. They must depend on court-appointed lawyers, many of whom are “unqualified, irresponsible, or overburdened,” as a study by the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit organization, put it. In 2000, a Dallas Morning News investigation revealed that roughly a quarter of the inmates condemned to death in Texas were represented by court-appointed attorneys who had, at some point in their careers, been “reprimanded, placed on probation, suspended or banned from practicing law by the State Bar.” Although Reaves was more competent, he had few resources to reinvestigate the case, and his writ introduced no new exculpatory evidence: nothing further about Webb, or the reliability of the eyewitness testimony, or the credibility of the medical experts. It focussed primarily on procedural questions, such as whether the trial court erred in its instructions to the jury.

What a surprise! The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals doesn’t care about exculpatory DNA evidence!

[19] The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was known for upholding convictions even when overwhelming exculpatory evidence came to light. In 1997, DNA testing proved that sperm collected from a rape victim did not match Roy Criner, who had been sentenced to ninety-nine years for the crime. Two lower courts recommended that the verdict be overturned, but the Court of Criminal Appeals upheld it, arguing that Criner might have worn a condom or might not have ejaculated. Sharon Keller, who is now the presiding judge on the court, stated in a majority opinion, “The new evidence does not establish innocence.” In 2000, George W. Bush pardoned Criner. (Keller was recently charged with judicial misconduct, for refusing to keep open past five o’clock a clerk’s office in order to allow a last-minute petition from a man who was executed later that night.)

Sure enough…

[20] On October 31, 1997, the Court of Criminal Appeals denied Willingham’s writ. After Willingham filed another writ of habeas corpus, this time in federal court, he was granted a temporary stay.

Since 1925, the SCOTUS can choose to deny hearing a case without providing any reason:

[21] He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in December, 2003, he was notified that it had declined to hear his case. He soon received a court order announcing that “the Director of the Department of Criminal Justice at Huntsville, Texas, acting by and through the executioner designated by said Director . . . is hereby DIRECTED and COMMANDED, at some hour after 6:00 p.m. on the 17th day of February, 2004, at the Department of Criminal Justice in Huntsville, Texas, to carry out this sentence of death by intravenous injection of a substance or substances in a lethal quantity sufficient to cause the death of said Cameron Todd Willingham.”

…

His only remaining recourse was to appeal to the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, a Republican, for clemency. The process, considered the last gatekeeper to the executioner, has been called by the U.S. Supreme Court “the ‘fail safe’ in our criminal justice system.”

It takes a real expert to expose the frauds that the so-called “arson investigators” most usually are:

[22] One day in January, 2004, Dr. Gerald Hurst, an acclaimed scientist and fire investigator, received a file describing all the evidence of arson gathered in Willingham’s case.

…

He left the defense industry, and went on to invent the Mylar balloon, an improved version of Liquid Paper, and Kinepak, a kind of explosive that reduces the risk of accidental detonation. Because of his extraordinary knowledge of fire and explosives, companies in civil litigation frequently sought his help in determining the cause of a blaze. By the nineties, Hurst had begun devoting significant time to criminal-arson cases, and, as he was exposed to the methods of local and state fire investigators, he was shocked by what he saw.

Many arson investigators, it turned out, had only a high-school education. In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a forty-hour course on fire investigation, and pass a written exam. Often, the bulk of an investigator’s training came on the job, learning from “old-timers” in the field, who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of arson, even though a study in 1977 warned that there was nothing in “the scientific literature to substantiate their validity.”

In 1992, the National Fire Protection Association, which promotes fire prevention and safety, published its first scientifically based guidelines to arson investigation. Still, many arson investigators believed that what they did was more an art than a science—a blend of experience and intuition. In 1997, the International Association of Arson Investigators filed a legal brief arguing that arson sleuths should not be bound by a 1993 Supreme Court decision requiring experts who testified at trials to adhere to the scientific method. What arson sleuths did, the brief claimed, was “less scientific.” By 2000, after the courts had rejected such claims, arson investigators increasingly recognized the scientific method, but there remained great variance in the field, with many practitioners still relying on the unverified techniques that had been used for generations. “People investigated fire largely with a flat-earth approach,” Hurst told me. “It looks like arson—therefore, it’s arson.” He went on, “My view is you have to have a scientific basis. Otherwise, it’s no different than witch-hunting.”

This true expert wasn’t at his first case. In fact, he demolished all the pseudoscientific evidence!

[23] In 1998, Hurst investigated the case of a woman from North Carolina named Terri Hinson, who was charged with setting a fire that killed her seventeen-month-old son, and faced the death penalty. Hurst ran a series of experiments re-creating the conditions of the fire, which suggested that it had not been arson, as the investigators had claimed; rather, it had started accidentally, from a faulty electrical wire in the attic. Because of this research, Hinson was freed.

…

Hurst’s patents yielded considerable royalties, and he could afford to work pro bono on an arson case for months, even years. But he received the files on Willingham’s case only a few weeks before Willingham was scheduled to be executed. As Hurst looked through the case records, a statement by Manuel Vasquez, the state deputy fire marshal, jumped out at him. Vasquez had testified that, of the roughly twelve hundred to fifteen hundred fires he had investigated, “most all of them” were arson. This was an oddly high estimate; the Texas State Fire Marshals Office typically found arson in only fifty per cent of its cases.

Hurst was also struck by Vasquez’s claim that the Willingham blaze had “burned fast and hot” because of a liquid accelerant. The notion that a flammable or combustible liquid caused flames to reach higher temperatures had been repeated in court by arson sleuths for decades. Yet the theory was nonsense: experiments have proved that wood and gasoline-fuelled fires burn at essentially the same temperature.

…

Hurst had conducted myriad experiments showing that such charring was caused simply by the aluminum conducting so much heat. In fact, when liquid accelerant is poured under a threshold a fire will extinguish, because of a lack of oxygen. (Other scientists had reached the same conclusion.)

…

Hurst then examined Fogg and Vasquez’s claim that the “brown stains” on Willingham’s front porch were evidence of “liquid accelerant,” which had not had time to soak into the concrete. Hurst had previously performed a test in his garage, in which he poured charcoal-lighter fluid on the concrete floor, and lit it. When the fire went out, there were no brown stains, only smudges of soot. Hurst had run the same experiment many times, with different kinds of liquid accelerants, and the result was always the same. Brown stains were common in fires; they were usually composed of rust or gunk from charred debris that had mixed with water from fire hoses.

Another crucial piece of evidence implicating Willingham was the “crazed glass” that Vasquez had attributed to the rapid heating from a fire fuelled with liquid accelerant. Yet, in November of 1991, a team of fire investigators had inspected fifty houses in the hills of Oakland, California, which had been ravaged by brush fires. In a dozen houses, the investigators discovered crazed glass, even though a liquid accelerant had not been used. Most of these houses were on the outskirts of the blaze, where firefighters had shot streams of water; as the investigators later wrote in a published study, they theorized that the fracturing had been induced by rapid cooling, rather than by sudden heating—thermal shock had caused the glass to contract so quickly that it settled disjointedly. The investigators then tested this hypothesis in a laboratory. When they heated glass, nothing happened. But each time they applied water to the heated glass the intricate patterns appeared. Hurst had seen the same phenomenon when he had blowtorched and cooled glass during his research at Cambridge. In his report, Hurst wrote that Vasquez and Fogg’s notion of crazed glass was no more than an “old wives’ tale.”

Hurst then confronted some of the most devastating arson evidence against Willingham: the burn trailer, the pour patterns and puddle configurations, the V-shape and other burn marks indicating that the fire had multiple points of origin, the burning underneath the children’s beds. There was also the positive test for mineral spirits by the front door, and Willingham’s seemingly implausible story that he had run out of the house without burning his bare feet.

As Hurst read through more of the files, he noticed that Willingham and his neighbors had described the windows in the front of the house suddenly exploding and flames roaring forth. It was then that Hurst thought of the legendary Lime Street Fire, one of the most pivotal in the history of arson investigation.

[skipped 9 paragraphs describing the Lime Street case investigation]

During the Lime Street experiment, other things happened that were supposed to occur only in a fire fuelled by liquid accelerant: charring along the base of the walls and doorways, and burning under furniture. There was also a V-shaped pattern by the living-room doorway, far from where the fire had started on the couch. In a small fire, a V-shaped burn mark may pinpoint where a fire began, but during post-flashover these patterns can occur repeatedly, when various objects ignite.

One of the investigators muttered that they had just helped prove the defense’s case. Given the reasonable doubt raised by the experiment, the charges against Lewis were soon dropped. The Lime Street experiment had demolished prevailing notions about fire behavior. Subsequent tests by scientists showed that, during post-flashover, burning under beds and furniture was common, entire doors were consumed, and aluminum thresholds melted.

John Lentini says of the Lime Street Fire, “This was my epiphany. I almost sent a man to die based on theories that were a load of crap.”

[skipped 5 paragraphs describing how this case wase just like the Lime Street one]

Hurst found it hard to imagine Willingham pouring accelerant on the front porch, where neighbors could have seen him. Scanning the files for clues, Hurst noticed a photograph of the porch taken before the fire, which had been entered into evidence. Sitting on the tiny porch was a charcoal grill. The porch was where the family barbecued. Court testimony from witnesses confirmed that there had been a grill, along with a container of lighter fluid, and that both had burned when the fire roared onto the porch during post-flashover. By the time Vasquez inspected the house, the grill had been removed from the porch, during cleanup. Though he cited the container of lighter fluid in his report, he made no mention of the grill. At the trial, he insisted that he had never been told of the grill’s earlier placement. Other authorities were aware of the grill but did not see its relevance. Hurst, however, was convinced that he had solved the mystery: when firefighters had blasted the porch with water, they had likely spread charcoal-lighter fluid from the melted container.

You would think they’d free Willingham once they’d be presented with irrefutable evidence that his case was identical to Willis’ one, right? NO WAY!

[24] “I am a realist and I will not live a fantasy,” Willingham once told Gilbert about the prospect of proving his innocence. But in February, 2004, he began to have hope. Hurst’s findings had helped to exonerate more than ten people. Hurst even reviewed the scientific evidence against Willingham’s friend Ernest Willis, who had been on death row for the strikingly similar arson charge. Hurst says, “It was like I was looking at the same case. Just change the names.” In his report on the Willis case, Hurst concluded that not “a single item of physical evidence . . . supports a finding of arson.” A second fire expert hired by Ori White, the new district attorney in Willis’s district, concurred. After seventeen years on death row, Willis was set free. “I don’t turn killers loose,” White said at the time. “If Willis was guilty, I’d be retrying him right now. And I’d use Hurst as my witness. He’s a brilliant scientist.” White noted how close the system had come to murdering an innocent man. “He did not get executed, and I thank God for that,” he said.

On February 13th, four days before Willingham was scheduled to be executed, he got a call from Reaves, his attorney. Reaves told him that the fifteen members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which reviews an application for clemency and had been sent Hurst’s report, had made their decision.

“What is it?” Willingham asked.

“I’m sorry,” Reaves said. “They denied your petition.”

And why and how did they denied the petition, you’d ask? THEY DIDN’T EVEN EXAMINE IT!

[25] The vote was unanimous. Reaves could not offer an explanation: the board deliberates in secret, and its members are not bound by any specific criteria. The board members did not even have to review Willingham’s materials, and usually don’t debate a case in person; rather, they cast their votes by fax—a process that has become known as “death by fax.” Between 1976 and 2004, when Willingham filed his petition, the State of Texas had approved only one application for clemency from a prisoner on death row. A Texas appellate judge has called the clemency system “a legal fiction.” Reaves said of the board members, “They never asked me to attend a hearing or answer any questions.”

The Innocence Project obtained, through the Freedom of Information Act, all the records from the governor’s office and the board pertaining to Hurst’s report. “The documents show that they received the report, but neither office has any record of anyone acknowledging it, taking note of its significance, responding to it, or calling any attention to it within the government,” Barry Scheck said. “The only reasonable conclusion is that the governor’s office and the Board of Pardons and Paroles ignored scientific evidence.”

LaFayette Collins, who was a member of the board at the time, told me of the process, “You don’t vote guilt or innocence. You don’t retry the trial. You just make sure everything is in order and there are no glaring errors.” He noted that although the rules allowed for a hearing to consider important new evidence, “in my time there had never been one called.” When I asked him why Hurst’s report didn’t constitute evidence of “glaring errors,” he said, “We get all kinds of reports, but we don’t have the mechanisms to vet them.” Alvin Shaw, another board member at the time, said that the case didn’t “ring a bell,” adding, angrily, “Why would I want to talk about it?” Hurst calls the board’s actions “unconscionable.”

So they killed him. The glorious State of Fucking Texas. Whatever happened later is of little relevance.

[26] In December, 2004, questions about the scientific evidence in the Willingham case began to surface. Maurice Possley and Steve Mills, of the Chicago Tribune, had published an investigative series on flaws in forensic science; upon learning of Hurst’s report, Possley and Mills asked three fire experts, including John Lentini, to examine the original investigation. The experts concurred with Hurst’s report. Nearly two years later, the Innocence Project commissioned Lentini and three other top fire investigators to conduct an independent review of the arson evidence in the Willingham case. The panel concluded that “each and every one” of the indicators of arson had been “scientifically proven to be invalid.”

In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.” The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”

The story doesn’t say whether Texas eventually acknowledges officially that it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person,” but I very much doubt it did. You see, in the United States, just like in the former Soviet Union, THE SYSTEM IS NEVER WRONG, because IT CAN’T POSSIBLY BE!

Summarizing the way Texas, and most of America, works

I managed to copy 71 paragraphs of the original 179, which is definitely copyright infringement, but there is no other way to show you the entire view. (This is not quite 40%, as some of “my” paragraphs are 1-liners.)

It’s not unusual for the police to put pressure on witnesses [1], and it’s also a known fact that the testimonials are increasingly unreliable as the time passes. But the US judiciary never cared about such objective facts.

It’s also quite common for the investigators to jump to conclusions without proper evidence [2][3], often using [5] completely unreliable [12] inmates as informants. While so many cases don’t get to court if the DA believes they don’t have a strong case, so they’d rather not waste public money, in this case they were only too happy to get someone sentenced to death. The trial can sometimes be speedier [8] than in the former Soviet Union! It obviously doesn’t help that your assigned lawyer doesn’t believe in your innocence [6], and if a court appoints another lawyer, this doesn’t mean he or she would have more resources [18]; not everyone is a millionaire. Also, it doesn’t help that alternative “experts” are as incompetent [8] as the original ones. Courts aren’t bothered that the testimonies are contradictory [9] as long as they can be used to sentence a person rather than to release them. Texas also seems to be stuck in a medieval age, when snake tattoos and posters with skulls made you a sociopath and a Satanist [10].

Jackson’s opinion [4] that capital punishment isn’t effective in deterring criminals, and it’s also wasteful, deserves a quick comment.

Indeed, if capital punishment is used too easily, anyone who’s likely to be sentenced to death would keep going with their killings, robberies, and whatnot, because what could they lose more than one life? I’m, however, of the opinion that capital punishment should only be used in the most atrocious cases, like that of Anders Behring Breivik.

On the other hand, from all possible purposes of judiciary punishment—deterrence (questionable in such cases), rehabilitation through reeducation (which never works), temporary protection of society (during prison time)—the last is the only valid one. Not the case of a random arsonist, but Breivik’s case: he killed 77 people, 8 by bomb, and 69 in a mass shooting! Such people don’t deserve to die, full stop. No matter the prison, and even if they worked to cover their detention costs. When the possibilities that the crime did not occur and that the sentenced person is not the actual perpetrator are rigorously zero, a sanitization of this planet is necessary, and that person needs to be killed.

As for the cost, “because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas—about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years.” That’s one of the most cretinoid things specific to the United States. Instead of repeatedly denying all kinds of motions and denying the reexamination of the case when new evidence is produced, which would have been cheaper, America prefers to keep people on death row for 10–20 years, thus spending much more without creating justice and usually without avoiding judicial errors!

And it’s not just Texas: Since 1978, California had spent approximately $4 billion on its death penalty system, which had resulted in 13 executions by 2011.

Furthermore, since this lengthy process is incredibly slow and dumb, States might kill innocent people while Federal relief were possible, but not arriving in time. From the study on California: “Considering that habeas corpus relief has been granted by federal courts in 70% of California’s death row inmates’ cases, a significant number of inmates who died while their petitions were pending may have had their convictions or death sentences set aside…but for the unconscionable delay in judicial review.” They spend incredible amounts of money, and they still kill innocent people! How hard can it be to revise, in full honesty and good faith, the limited number of cases on the death row?!

The offer to plead guilty to have the sentence commuted to life [7] is another perversity of the judicial system, unfortunately existing even in Europe. Once you plead guilty, you cannot make any attempt at an appeal or a revision of any kind because you just admitted your guilt! And this is an infamous blackmailing of a candidate to death! How could any wrongfully sentenced person fight for truth if they admit their guilt?! Plea deals are extremely common before a trial, when the prosecution would charge you with a lesser crime if you admitted to it and waived your right to a jury trial. But admission of guilt is also mandatory to be able to face parole boards, and this applies to most jurisdictions on Planet Earth. But once you need to admit your guilt to be released earlier (say, after 25 years instead of rotting in jail until death), how could you later fight for your rehabilitation when you know you’re innocent? Abject judicial blackmailing.

Most disturbing is the fact that courts use fake experts to decide on people’s guilt. The so-called forensic psychologists and psychiatrists in this case (and in many other cases!) had no actual competences beyond family counseling [10], they have later been expelled from the American Psychiatric Association [11], and they have passed their judgment without any of them having met the defendant!

But the arson investigators are one of the worst charlatans in the United States. Countless cases have been reported for decades by the press, for very little change to happen. 

In theory, the “scientific evidence of arson” was the soundest, if not the only, “real evidence” to incriminate Willingham [13]. But many arson investigators [22] only have high-school education, and they can be certified after a meager forty-hour course on fire investigation. Then, they base their decisions on “telltale signs of arson” learned from “old timers”! In this case, Vasquez’s approach “seemed to deny “rational reasoning and was more characteristic of mystics or psychics” [26].

Dr. Gerald Hurst, a true scientist and fire investigator, had demolished all the pseudoscientific evidence in a previous case in California, “the Lime Street case” [23]. That case was “like I was looking at the same case. Just change the names” [24]. All the fake theories and the “telltale signs of arson” used to sentence Willingham as a triple murderer were nonsense, and there were sound explanations for every single element of the case. Nonetheless, as the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was known for upholding convictions even when overwhelming exculpatory evidence came to light [19], it just denied Willingham’s appeal [20], then the Board of Pardons and Paroles denied him the petition [24]!

How could this have happened? The Court of Criminal Appeals is, well, criminal itself, but as a last resort, you’d expect the 15 members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles of the state of Texas to take their jobs seriously, right?

The fuck they did. In 28 years (1976-2004), the Board of Pardons and Paroles of the state of Texas approved only one application for clemency from a prisoner on death row! And its members never debate a case in person; they send the decision by fax! In truth, THEY ALMOST NEVER EVEN READ THE FILE! “The documents show that they received the report, but neither office has any record of anyone acknowledging it, taking note of its significance, responding to it, or calling any attention to it within the government.” [25] A member of the board said that “the case didn’t ring a bell,” and another one insisted that “You don’t vote guilt or innocence. You don’t retry the trial.” What kind of justice is this?

The [14] “super due process to make sure that no innocent defendants are executed” is but a lie!

The Supreme Court of the United States—whose decisions I used to read at some point in time as an exercise in interpreting the legal quagmire with supposedly a logical approach—is another murderous entity and a shame for the United States. (And I’ll skip discussing both the reversing of Roe v. Wade, and the recent refusal to hear other pivotal cases.)

As previously mentioned, since 1925, the SCOTUS can choose to deny hearing a case without providing any reason; sure enough, it declined to hear Willingham’s case, because who the fuck cares about an innocent human’s life? A bunch of lazy fuckups, this is what they are! In the 1980s, SCOTUS typically heard about 150 cases per term; by the late 1990s, this number had dropped to about 80 cases per term. In recent years, the SCOTUS was hearing around 60-70 cases per term. (A term is about 9 months in a year, because there’s a summer recess.) While the Court is hearing fewer cases, they are still receiving roughly the same number of petitions. This means that, proportionally, they are denying to hear a larger percentage of cases than in previous decades!

Other countries usually don’t have a unique “top court” à la SCOTUS. Typically, in Civil Law legal systems, you’d have a (High) Court of Cassation for revisions beyond the normal appeal path and a Constitutional Court for cases when the constitutionality of a law or of a judgment is challenged. In both cases, a properly filled motion leads to a mandatory hearing, even if it’s then cursory dismissed as “frivolous”! (Meaning it obviously lacks any basis in law or fact, or it’s filed with the purpose of harassing or delaying the due course.) For constitutional challenges, they are usually raised in an inferior court, which escalates them to the Constitutional Court, and there is no way to ignore and to refuse to hear such a case!

But the United States is the country of the most expensive, the most complex, and yet the most bogus judiciary in all civilized countries! Such justices could as well have worked in the health care system…

Ever since I completely lost confidence in the SCOTUS, I stopped reading their decisions. They’re sham judiciary.

I also mentioned the infamous retard-in-chief Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. To him, “there has not been a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.” [17] I’m not sure whether there are dozens or hundreds of such cases in the US, but this shithead clearly shouldn’t watch the rooftops for evidence!

A last observation. Nobody in the United States’ judicial system cares about establishing of truth, which should be the crucial point of such a system. You establish the facts, then you apply the law; you don’t “do justice,” because a judge’s job is not to use their moral judgment but to apply the law. If the law is unjust, the only way to void its effects in a specific case is jury nullification. (This happens when a jury, despite obvious evidence of guilt, declares the defendant “not guilty” because they believe that the law itself is unjust or shouldn’t be applied in this case. However, potential jurors who openly acknowledge an understanding of jury nullification would be disqualified during the jury selection process because courts don’t want the fairness or morality of the law to be challenged. “Follow the law, not your moral conscience!” Fucktards.)

Back to our sheep. You have to establish the facts. Did that thing actually happen? Does it meet the legal requirements to be considered a crime under the law? Is the defendant the one who “did it”? Is the defendant legally liable under the law, or are there extenuating circumstances, such as self-defense, or acting under Good Samaritan laws, etc.? Finally, is the defendant “guilty as charged”?

Nobody cares about that. “We won the case!” cries the prosecutor. “We won the case!” cries the defendant’s attorney. As if it were a sports competition!

The judge also couldn’t care less where the truth stands, especially as, in Common Law, the judge is only an arbiter, unlike the inquisitorial, active role of a judge in Civil Law systems. In Continental Europe, the judge is actively seeking the truth, possibly acting at times as both prosecutor and defender, asking for supplementary expert opinions, and so on. In the US, UK, and so on, the judge is only supervising the adversarial process between prosecution and defense.

So how could a Common Law judge care about truth? They only care that the game’s rules are observed! The outcome is more like a popularity contest, and a measure of which part was more effective in manipulating the jury! (Unless, as it happens in 98% of cases, the defendant accepts a deal and no jury trial ever takes place.)

Cases as the ones presented here show that, beyond the often unrealistic cases you see in detective movies, real life can be even worse in the US, and justice is, in my opinion, rarely made. Police want to close a case and find someone guilty. The DA wants to be reelected and to save some money whenever possible. The court-appointed lawyers are pathetic, and good lawyers are expensive like hell. So, guess who “wins” the case?

Do you know what makes a dictatorship unbearable, be it a left-wing or a right-wing one? Not the fact that you cannot join the political party of your choice, that economic freedom is questionable, and that information is censored. Nope.

It’s the randomness by which someone could be considered guilty and face severe punishment, even if they scrupulously observe all the laws and regulations, unjust as they are!

Most people could live a happy life even under an authoritarian regime. There were periods of non-famine and relative prosperity in the former USSR and the satellite Central and East European countries, roughly after the mid-1960s and before 1980. This also happened in “Franco’s miracle years”; and there was a “Milagre Econômico” during the military dictatorship in Brazil prior to the 1973 oil crisis. Pinochet’s “Milagro de Chile” is another infamous example, but the best examples are those of Taiwan and South Korea.  Taiwan was under martial law from 1949 to 1987. South Korea’s first civilian president was elected in 1992. 

In any such country, during a government dubbed “dictatorial” or “authoritarian” (think of today’s People Republic of China!), most people tried to observe most of the laws that would put them in jail, and I’m not talking of petty theft. They would not express “unorthodox” political views, they would not challenge the legitimacy of the government, and they would obey the restrictive and often dumb laws and regulation.

And yet, all of a sudden, some of them were considered “enemies of the State” or “enemies of the people” for absolutely no good reason! 

That’s the randomness I was talking about. One extreme example is Stalin’s 1936–38 Great Terror, or Great Purge. But after the Soviet post-war occupation of Central and Eastern Europe, anyone could become an unpardonable criminal to the State. There was a joke in those times: “I was scrupulously following the Party’s policy, but I didn’t notice when it changed, so I was charged with deviationism!”

So what made it possible for you to go to jail, to Siberia, or get shot for an imaginary fault? There was still a judiciary, and there were laws you were certain you did not break!

Among the main factors: (1) proper checks and balances were missing, and the political dictated to the judiciary; (2) there was a lack of transparency, and the media was censored, so without public scrutiny, abuses couldn’t be corrected; (3) there was this mantra that “the State can never be wrong,” especially “the Security Services cannot be wrong.”

I’m not sure how STASI behaved in the GDR, but the NKVD, the MGB and later the KGB in the USSR, as well as the Romanian Securitate, had the tendency of arresting people based on slanderous denunciations. Once you were arrested as a potential enemy of the State, even if you were innocent and no proof existed against you, proofs were fabricated, and false confessions were coerced. The State is never wrong!

This was the real terror of living in a dictatorial regime. Not the fact that a passport was refused to you. The randomness of your destiny.

And, believe me or not, this is what I believe to be the most important issue in the United States, too.

Not that you could get killed in a random attack in a country where there are more civilian-owned guns than people.

Not that health care is not only absurdly expensive and also unfair on so many counts. In a hospital, you could be charged $10 for a Tylenol pill, and the fact that before the surgery someone used a BIC ballpoint pen to trace two lines on your belly will get that pen on your bill for the price of $5. If Medicare or Medicaid are billed $900 for a medical investigation, you are billed $6,000 if uninsured or $3,000 if insured, of which your insurance might cover $1,000 or $1,500. It’s not even “that’s expensive, but business is business.” It’s a complete rip-off. And it’s also rather random: not all clinics would extort you that much. But vital medicine (diabetes, anyone?) will be sold 20 times more expensively than in Canada or Europe, and vaccines are sold to the State also at fabulous margins. 

And it’s not even that the paid vacation is ridiculously short, that paid sick leave is not regulated, that workers’ rights are properly protected in a few states only or for federal employees.

It’s the fact that you could go to jail or on death row while being completely innocent!

Let’s recap. Police only want to close a case and declare someone guilty. The prosecution wants this to be cheap. The investigators are biased, most experts are frauds, and nobody is doing their jobs right. The labs often mix up or contaminate the DNA evidence. Legal defense is absurdly expensive, and the State-provided one sucks. 

Nobody really cares about anything, they’re just doing their jobs without any dedication, small cogs in a huge law enforcement and judicial system. They’re working, not thinking, and not feeling anything either.

They observe the rules when the rules are broken, and they ignore the rules when the rules are meant to protect you. THIS IS AMERICA.

Just like in the Soviet Union or in the Socialist Romania, the System can’t possibly make mistakes. So you have experts saying that the prosecution was wrong, that the evidence doesn’t prove anything, and that you’re undoubtedly innocent? You can have 300 such reports. APPEAL DENIED. PETITION DENIED. MOTION DENIED. REVISION DENIED. PARDON DENIED. The System is never wrong.

The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, the highest among “democratic” nations. With over 2 million people currently in prisons or jails, the US houses about 25% of the world’s prisoners, even though it only makes up about 4% of the global population.

While the US always had the tendency to impose heavier penalties than most European countries, things went out of control since Reagan significantly escalated the War on Drugs (in 1971, Nixon merely declared drug abuse to be “the public enemy number one”). The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act established mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes. Later, Three-Strikes Laws, mandating life sentences for individuals convicted of a third felony, made America the concentrationary system that it is today.

And it’s not even working. States with the highest incarceration rates don’t have lower crime rates. You can give people hundreds of years or life without parole, this won’t lead to a notably less violent society.

The society is violent. The Establishment is violent and insensitive. How is this a democracy?

More pseudoscience

Although this has nothing to do with the above cases, and despite polygraph tests not being admitted anymore in a court of law, I still want to talk a bit about them. Because they’re also debunked fake science.

I noticed that, even in recent years, the “lie detectors” tend to be popular again in some contexts. Agencies such as the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other federal agencies often use polygraphs as part of their recruitment process or for security clearances. Some police forces in the UK (the NCA) also use “lie detectors” to vet individuals with access to sensitive information. Heck, the UK Probation Service uses polygraphs on convicted sex offenders! On the continent, polygraphs are often used “unofficially” by criminologists (they would make great arson investigators!) to direct the investigations “on the proper way.”

I can understand that people can be stupid on so many levels, but that stupid?

Let’s talk about sensitivity and specificity in the case of “lie detectors.” Sensitivity (true positive rate) measures how effectively the polygraph detects lies among people who are actually lying. Specificity (true negative rate) measures how effectively it correctly identifies truthful individuals.

Many people assume that, with all its unreliable results, it would still be OK if a lie detector could positively identify, say, 80% of those who really are guilty (sensitivity) and falsely identify only 10% of the innocent (specificity). Unfortunately, lie detectors are much less reliable.

Some realistic figures for polygraph tests:

  • Sensitivity around 60-70%, meaning that 30-40% of guilty individuals may not be detected.
  • Specificity around 50-65%, meaning that 35-50% of innocent people may be incorrectly flagged as lying.

But most people would still be clueless on what this actually means. They need to be taught about Bayes’ law and this fancy formula:

P(A|B) means the probability of A under the condition B.

To cut a long story short, in order to estimate the reliability of the polygraph method, we need to start from a hypothesis: the prevalence, i.e. the proportion of liars in the population. Generally, we can assume this value to be 10%. For criminal investigation, where the tested population is the set of suspects, we could assume 20%: we have five suspects, of which one is our criminal. For simplicity, let’s have sensitivity and specificity at 65%. At face value, they’re decent numbers, right?

For a prevalence of 10%:

  • The probability that someone flagged as a liar is really a liar is about 17.1%.
  • The probability that an innocent person is flagged as a liar is 35%.

For a prevalence of 20%:

  • The probability that someone flagged as a liar is really a liar is about 31.7%.
  • The probability that an innocent person is flagged as a liar remains 35%.

This is flabbergasting! While most people would assume something like, “OK, so 1 in 3 liars wouldn’t be detected, and 1 in 3 innocent people would be considered liars, it’s still helpful, and I can live with that,” the reality is really dire:

  • Someone detected as a liar is only a liar in 1 in 6 to 1 in 3 cases.
  • An innocent person has at least 1 in 3 “chances” of being detected as a liar!

Simply put: The “lie detector” true detection rate is barely better than randomly selecting a “guilty” person from 3 to 6 suspects. And it falsely incriminates more than 1 in 3 innocent people!

If this sounds counterintuitive and unrealistic to you, let’s go back to that Wikipedia page:

Suppose, a particular test for whether someone has been using cannabis is 90% sensitive, meaning the true positive rate (TPR) = 0.90. Therefore, it leads to 90% true positive results (correct identification of drug use) for cannabis users.

The test is also 80% specific, meaning true negative rate (TNR) = 0.80. Therefore, the test correctly identifies 80% of non-use for non-users, but also generates 20% false positives, or false positive rate (FPR) = 0.20, for non-users.

Assuming 0.05 prevalence, meaning 5% of people use cannabis, what is the probability that a random person who tests positive is really a cannabis user?

… (skipping the computations) …

In other words, even if someone tests positive, the probability that they are a cannabis user is only 19%—this is because in this group, only 5% of people are users, and most positives are false positives coming from the remaining 95%.

If 1,000 people were tested: … 235 positive tests, of which only 45 are genuine drug users, about 19%.

From an older version of the same Wikipedia page, I wrote down a different version of the above example:

Suppose that a test for using a particular drug is 99% sensitive and 99% specific. That is, the test will produce 99% true positive results for drug users and 99% true negative results for non-drug users. Suppose that 0.5% of people are users of the drug. What is the probability that a randomly selected individual with a positive test is a drug user?

The answer was: about 33.2% (and indeed, it does compute).

This example should make you more conscientious of the importance of extremely high values for both sensitivity and specificity. Remember the rapid antigen tests, aka quick COVID-19 tests?

The next time you encounter someone who says, “the polygraph is a valuable tool to us,” I advise you to push them out of a window, if there aren’t any witnesses around. You’ll have done a service to humankind!

The American Dream is for retards

Yes, it is. With all of the above considered, and disregarding the fact that 99.8% of the world’s population is stupid, why would anyone dream of America? The “US of A,” obviously.

I could marginally accept that America could have looked attractive in the late 60s and early 70s. Possible even more so in the 50s, granted that you were in no way colored, and you were not leaning to the left, you dirty Commie! Land of Opportunity, eh?

Meanwhile, socioeconomic mobility in the United States went south. Housing prices, higher education costs, and health care bills have rose much more than the wages. When 41% of adults or more than 100 million people are saddled with some kind of health care debt, 43 million have unpaid college debt, 8.4 million people have 2 or 3 jobs, 37% lack enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense, and 2 million people are in jail, does it look to you like the land of Cockaigne? The likelihood of moving into the upper class has decreased toward a solid zero.

The best country in the world, as people learn in school, but people in the Soviet Union were taught the exact same thing. The country with a Pledge of Allegiance that sounds either Nazi or Communist but whose former Bellamy salute looked definitely Nazi, or at least fascist. The country with “the best Constitution under the sun”—but “all men are created equal” only if they were white males. A strange document in which any single right can only be specified as an amendment, and it took them only too long to realize that Negroes are humans, that “separate but equal” was a segregationist and white supremacy doctrine, and that even constitutional amendments aren’t really enforceable, so separate laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were required. A country where the KKK was primarily composed by local law enforcement, duh. This is how much people respect and observe the law. If it’s not the Second Amendment, the fuck with the law! (“I’m sorry. They denied your petition. They did not read it, but they denied it. The Supreme Court also refused to hear your case.”)

A country with Jim Crow Laws identical in spirit to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 in Nazi Germany. The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 in Virginia, which was not fully repealed until 1967, prohibited interracial marriage. The “one-drop rule” principle used in many Southern states classified you as Black if you had ⅛ or ¹⁄₁₆ of African ancestry. The Nuremberg Laws required at most ⅛ Jewishness to be considered Deutschblütiger, and practicing certain professions was subsequently forbidden to “impure” people. The Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924, similar to the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Defective Progeny of 1933 in Nazi Germany, was amended in 1988, but never declared unconstitutional, despite the 2001 apology and the 2015 provision for compensation. The best under the sun!

Prior to “Not for colored,” there were “Not for Mexicans,” “Not for Irish,” and even “Not for Italians.” A model of tolerance, I’m telling you.

The only time I visited the States was in 2015, for 42 days. Sandy, Draper, and Salt Lake City, UT. The people I met were all nice people, or at least this is how they looked like. Unsophisticated, mostly honest, open. 

The Salt Lake City Public Library was fabulous! Walmart Supercenters were useful, and they even included some edible food, but Target was nicer. Back then, Barnes & Noble was rock-solid and a pleasant place to be. But they still had Circuit City, RadioShack, Best Buy, Sears and Kmart, JCPenney, and I mean the real ones!

I found a list, an inventory of gifts and self-gifts I brought on my way back. 15 books, 6 DVDs, 6 CDs, some electronic gizmos, a film Minolta camera with accessories, supplements (excellent prices compared to Europe), teas (Celestial Seasonings and Bigellow), perfumery, a pair of khakis, all kinds of crap (some even ordered from eBay!), for a total of $1,122.21 (with tax). But now I realize that the 750-pill bottle of generic ibuprofen (something like $9.49 + tax) that I purchased from Target isn’t on the list. Did I make a second visit to the States in 2009? I thought I didn’t, despite the 10-year visa that I got and which, as far as I recall, I didn’t use in the end.

I had no bad experiences in Utah, but I was only a visitor. And there wasn’t any crisis back then. 

But even back then, I knew I couldn’t live in the States. Many non-Americans believe they have a grasp of the States from the countless movies they watched, not counting the music, the documentaries, and whatever you can find on the social networks these days. Well, I suppose most of them are wrong. We all believe we know and understand more than we do.

Otherwise, I enjoy this healthy Dissociative Identity Disorder, especially as it’s not just dual. After decades of ingesting the cultural products of several countries, I am more than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

When I watch a British TV series or film, or when I’m reading a British novel, contemporary or from the 19th century, I’m a Briton. But I couldn’t live in the UK.

When I watch an American thing or read American fiction… you guessed it. Besides, American English is today’s lingua franca, so I try to observe its stupid punctuation rules that dictate that the dot at the end of this sentence stays “inside the quotation marks.” It makes no sense, and it’s the only language on Earth to mandate that.

When I read French-Belgian comics, read French literature, watch French movies, listen to French music, watch French TV, or listen to French radio stations, I’m living in a French civilization that doesn’t exist anymore or that never existed, mixed with the contemporary abject social situation. Vive la racaille. Not.

I’m still in the process of assimilating parts of the Italian culture, primarily because my understanding of Italian is modest. 25 years ago, I wanted to learn Spanish. It’s still on my bucket list.

Otherwise, I live in Germany, but I don’t feel German for not being born here and not having a natural sense of the language and of everything else that comes with it. 

I’m infinitely much more comfortable in American English, yet I couldn’t live in the States! It would be like living in a movie, but sometimes you have to get out of that movie, and you can’t.

From my 2005 visit, I have a memory of the typical American stupidity. It was here, but things have changed since then.

There was a Mexican restaurant, and somebody had choked on something, or maybe they had a heart attack, I couldn’t tell. Soon after, a small convoy of two vehicles from the local Fire Department shows up. Sirens, horns, the whole shebang, but if they ran at more than 30 mph, then I’m the Pope. And there was a reason for that: they sent a modest ambulance, labeled “Paramedic transport,” and a 10-ton truck also labeled “Paramedic transport,” which, despite not carrying any water (or maybe it did carry!), had the agility of an elephant in a china store. And they really wanted to arrive together, so there.

Why on the fucking Earth couldn’t they have sent two ambulances, if that one was too small to carry all the medical equipment that might have been needed? And who in their right minds would dedicate such a hugely expensive and physically huge, heavy and apparently slow truck to “paramedic transport”?!

A fire truck, and I mean a “Class 1” truck like this one, if it doesn’t carry water, then it carries all kinds of technical equipment needed to put off a fire or to perform a complex technical operation at the scene of a serious incident. I said technical, not medical!

As far as I could see, there were extra paramedics in the cabin, but nothing was extracted from the “technical” part of the fire truck.

Morons. One ambulance would have been enough. A second light vehicle could have carried extra paramedics. By sending an unnecessary monster, they added to the cost of the intervention, they increased the time of arriving to the scene, and they wasted an expensive vehicle that should have been dedicated to carrying of other equipment, or even medical equipment, but to major incidents!

There are several possible explanations I can think of. One: they’re completely retarded. Two: this is the standard procedure in Sandy, UT, because they’re retarded. Three: their union mandates a maximum utilization of everyone and everything. Four: the fire department wants to issue huge bills for no matter what incident. Typical American greed, and dishonest at that (like in health care).

Either way, then and there I decided I stopped trying to understand the American mindset, because it’s anything but logical. Or anything but honest, whichever happens to be true.

What kind of bill would I face if I choked with a fish bone and someone called 911?

Knowing how things work in the States, I wouldn’t like to test the likelihood of being arrested or having any interaction with the justice system. I hope to never set foot again in the most democratic, most advanced and most civilized country on Earth.

BONUS READING: Inside the Secretive Facility Housing Migrants at Guantánamo Bay (barrier-free if needed). A place in a legal limbo, outside standard American legal framework. What was Dubya’s concoction to deny the Geneva status to captured alleged terrorists and keep them at Guantánamo? Oh, right, “enemy combatant.” Detention without trial and without being even charged. Habeas corpus and due process, my ass. On a piece of land stolen from Cuba. Marvellous.