To start out, I wanted to say that I have not read this book yet, and I am not being paid to advertise this book. I did hear a review and it sounds like one I would like to read. One of the most interesting ideas I heard from the book was the idea of judicial echo chambers. This idea is one that really resonated with me and I wanted to share a few thoughts on it.
For any one that is not familiar with how courts work in the U.S., usually when a judge is set to make a decision they don't use their own judgement. They usually rely on past court cases to make their decision. The reasoning behind this is that everyone is supposed to judged equally before the law and you don't want one judge to rule one way and another judge to rule differently. You add in some technology so that judges clerks can easily look up case law, and it sounds perfect right?
Well, not quite. The biggest problem is what happens if a mistake is made. What happens when you get junk science allowed in that shouldn't be. Then the next time the same issue comes up a judge just looks at the old case law, and the same bad mistake that was made before gets made again and again and again. It's kind of scary when you think about how many cases are tried in the U.S. each day how many times a mistake can get repeated.
Now if there are any of you out there that know a little more about the law you may be thinking "what about appeals?" Well, that is a good question, and to be fair some of the cases where people are convicted on junk science are overturned on appeal. However, this is where things start to get really crazy. If a higher court overturns a conviction based on junk science that case is not removed from the database of case law. So one type of evidence from that should not have been allowed as evidence in one case can be used in another case because it was allowed in the first case even thought the courts have admitted that it should never been admitted in the first case. Got it?
You may think I am over exaggerating, but I would point out an example from the book that was talked about in the review. There is this Dr. that basically purchased a certification, and this certification sounded really similar to what the real certification sounded like. Most judges and lawyers don't know one scientific certification from another and he was accepted as an expert. When one defense lawyer finally did point out it was not the correct certification, the judge was "well he has been a accepted as certified so many times we are just going to accept him as certified now". Right... so we have screwed up so many times in the past, fuck it, why even bother to try and get it right? And then people are shocked that there are people out there like me that don't trust the government.