The Junk Science That's Admissible Evidence

The J.Rogan Experience. So Josh is now hosting a podcast called Junk Science. This is what we started talking about at the beginning and then I made you stop and redirect it. So let's come back to it. So explain, like what is the junk science? What are the issues with wrongful convictions and junk science? So the various disciplines of forensic science are used to convict people. And in fact, wrongfully convict people. Does a polygraph work? A polygraph is not admissible. So no, it doesn't work. It's not reliable. Is it because you could beat it if you're a psychopath? Yeah, you can beat it. There's all different factors that cause your blood pressure to rise. You may just have high blood pressure. Your heart may beat faster and you get anxious in different situations. So it just doesn't work. And it's not admissible in any courts. I'm talking about things that you would probably think just based on pop media, even if you're very well read, which you are, you would say, oh, well, that's reliable. Like bite mark evidence. It's complete junk science. And the National Academy of Sciences is the gold standard. It's got the finest scientists in the country that did a review of all of the forensic disciplines that are used in courts and found that with the exception of DNA, all of these are fraught with problems, bite mark evidence, blood spatter, arson, coercion, and coerced confessions. So what the podcast does is it examines all of these front episode by episode. It examines all of these forensic disciplines and it goes through to explain how and why A, they're total bullshit and B, they are in the face of it being total bullshit, still accepted. Now, like the fact that you got emotional made me want to hug you because it was like, you know, it's like it takes a special person to be able to get there on that level. But now I want to try to make you angry because I think it's the anger that should drive people. Oh, I'm already. I'm already. I take about this and other things. Yeah, but about all this. So bite mark evidence, for instance. Okay, bite mark. Let me give you an example. I have crooked teeth. Like my bottom teeth are crooked. If I bite into a mouthpiece, like if I get a mouthpiece formed, you can clearly see, I can see that it's my teeth. You want to know the difference between a mouthpiece and human skin? Everything. Humans, your skin is different than my skin in thickness and consistency. If you're flexing when I bite you, if it's during a struggle or not, and you have to follow the science. What the science tells us is that bite marks on human skin are not only unreliable, but there has been study after study that the so-called experts that they call odontologists can't tell the difference between a bite mark and an insect bite. They can't even agree. They were all shown. The self professed finest odontologists in the country are all shown pictures of marks on human skin. They can't even agree as a threshold matter what's a bite mark and what isn't. That's a medical term, odontologist? So odontologist is a forensic dentist that fancies themselves an expert in bite marks. But it's bullshit. Not only is it bullshit, but the origin story of all these forensic scientists, you end up down a rabbit hole to some fucked up story that sounds like a wacky religion. Take bite marks, for instance. There's a guy named George Burroughs who's a reverend in the late 1690s. He's accused of torturing young girls, and one of the forms of torture is biting them. He's tried and convicted, and they take him around the courtroom and pull his mouth open, and they point to the crookedness of his teeth, the ridges, and his molars, and they compare it to the bite mark. He's hanged publicly. He cites the Lord's Prayer at his hanging. Everybody in the crowd is like, that's kind of fucked up because witches aren't supposed to be able to cite the Lord's Prayer because this was a trial during the Salem witch trials. He's the first posthumous exoneration I'm aware of. Twenty years after this, they end up finding out that George Burroughs was in a different town altogether. Not only did him bite these people, but that the marks weren't even bites. This is a part of the Salem witch trials. The Salem witch trials. Is that old? They posthumously exonerate him. The colony of Massachusetts pays his family compensation. Watch this. In the 1970s, there's a guy named Walter Marks that is accused of biting a victim in a murder. The court in that case says, you know what? There is no established science here. It can't be replicated, but bite marks are associated with identifying accident victims, burn victims, and admits it. It gets admitted into evidence. The appellate court says, well, if the judge found it credible, who are we to overturn it? Joe, watch this. It now infects, and it's probably an unpopular analogy to use now, but it spreads across the criminal justice system like a virus. Every court just starts citing this Marks case, and judges just start admitting it. The National Academy of Forensic Sciences found that there's no way to replicate it, that it's unreliable. There's this fucking crackpot named West, who is an odontologist that claimed to use 3D pictures and ultraviolet. They set him up. They sent him bite marks and the mold of the teeth from someone other than the defendant and said, we think this is the defendant. Can you match it to this bite mark? He said yes. They had sent him the bite mark of someone other than the defendant. It is that bad of a junk science. What we're hoping to do is through the podcast to educate people, because you're right. How do you overhaul a system? It's a monster. One of the ways that you can overhaul the system is everybody says, they ask me a lot, how do I get out of jury service? I say, you know what? You should want to be there, because God forbid you were accused of something you didn't do. Wouldn't you want you on your jury? One of the ways we want to do it is to get people thinking, you know what? I can make a difference here, because there's no presumption of innocence. We throw that around like it exists. It doesn't exist. There have been studies done. My firm has done one where well over 90% of people feel like if you've been accused of a crime, you probably did it. Look, I represented how I met Lennox. I represented Lennox in a case. Lennox Lewis, we should tell people. Oh, okay. I managed Lennox Lewis. How I met him was I represented him in a case. It's interesting. Most people say to me when I say that, what did he do? Right, of course. Instead of what was he accused of? He actually wasn't accused of anything. Lennox was suing a boxing manager and a promoter from ripping him off and for stealing from him. If you ask people during jury selection, how many of you in a criminal case, and when I was ... A lot of jurors were asking, well, what did he do? He didn't do anything, but if you ask jurors in a criminal case, if a judge will let you ask it, but you should be able to ask, how many of you think my client, he was arrested and indicted, must have done something wrong? Well, hands go flying up. It should be a basis to get rid of people. That's not the presumption, but that's the assumption of guilt. It doesn't exist in this country, and it takes more people to be conscientious. One of the things that we're trying to do on the podcast is educate them about these junk sciences so that if you're ever on a jury and you hear, well, the trajectory of the blood mark on the wall shows you that the person must have grabbed the knife from this angle. It's total bullshit. One more time. What's the name of the podcast? The name of the podcast is Wrongful Conviction Junk Science. Okay. That blood splatter shit. I'd watched a whole thing online about how these people figure out how someone must have hit them this way, and I've seen it in movies. That's all bullshit? Total bullshit. The second episode of the podcast, I have a guest by the name of Pamela Koloff, who's an award-winning writer. She just won every award you could win for writing an article about an informant in a case of mine. I got to know her, and she wrote an amazing investigative piece about blood splatter evidence for ProPublica or Texas Monthly or the New York Times, one of those three I should know. She went undercover deep, and she became a certified blood splatter analyst as part of her research. This is a discipline that was born in the basement of some whack job up in New York. He called it the National Forensic Laboratory or some shit like that, and it was his basement in his house. He would do things like recreate crimes by hitting cadavers and watching the blood splatter. Just think about it. There's so many things wrong with that. The way the blood travels out of the body from a static body versus one where blood is circulating already changes it. The temperature of the blood is different. If you're struggling and I hit you with a blunt force object, a hammer, a bat, and your arm is coming up this way, depends on the speed your arm is traveling. It is total and utter bullshit. But it's admissible? It's admissible. This is bite mark evidence in all 50 states. Even though the highest court in Texas, based in the work of the Innocence Project, the highest authority in Texas strongly admonished the courts not to consider bite mark evidence, but they still do in spite of the fact that there's case after case that proves that these guys who make themselves out to be these experts don't know anything about what they're talking about. We should all be embarrassed and ashamed that this is allowed to go on in our courts. You think about it, Joe. Forensic oatontology was created as a practice so that if there's a disaster, if there's a plane crash, and bodies are obliterated, they can take a full set of teeth and they can compare it to your dental records. Now you take the idea that someone's going to bite an imperfect surface, like a finger or your neck or whatever it is. And now you're going to go with a couple of teeth on an imperfect surface days or weeks later and you're going to go, this must be Joe's teeth because sometimes they don't even know if you have teeth or not. Joe, check this out. In the National Academy of Sciences report, they did a study and they cite to it in the report and you can get it online. They did a study where they would have people with no teeth bite human skin and the people missing their two front teeth, the bite mark appears as if they have two front teeth. People that have two front teeth can bite down and if their incisors are too long, it can make it appear that they're missing two front teeth. So it's just, and as far as blood spatter is concerned, there is a case, I think it's the Peterson case that my friend David Rudolph did, the staircase that show on Netflix where the guy was accused of pushing down the stairs. I think it was in this case where they were trying to recreate, the blood spatter analysts were trying to recreate the spatter in the staircase and there's video of them doing it and they keep on hitting this receptacle full of blood and they can't recreate it and they keep on doing it and doing it and finally on the whatever, 15th try, they get it and they all start celebrating and high fiving. You're supposed to be able to replicate this shit and the reason why DNA is so reliable is that it's going to be the same every time. It is the gold standard. Now there are ways to manipulate it. There are certain people out there that are trying to fuck with it right now. How so? For instance, there's this guy who runs this computer algorithm and he claims to be able to take a mixture of a bunch of different people's DNA and untangle it and basically be able to say whose DNA is what. He won't give the source code for his data and this shouldn't be a black box. There's some things going on like that, but for the most part when it's done correctly and the right standards are applied, you can bet on DNA. But a lot of these pattern matching disciplines, blood spatter, fingerprints in some instances, bite mark evidence. What are the other ones? Tread tracking on shoes. Arson. Arson is a big one. Arson science. So when they can figure out where a fire was started. I always wondered about that. No, please. Sorry to interrupt you. No, please. So Arson, I thought you were done. Arson science is not science whatsoever. You can become a licensed arson investigator with a 40 hour correspondence course. I know it sounds like a joke, but it's true. Same thing with blood spatter. It's a 40 hour course. At the end of the week, you can go into any court in the country and say I'm a blood spatter. I always wondered because I would see a house burnt to the ground and they would say, oh, they determined it was started by a fire and this is how they determined it. Like, then everything's burnt out. Like how do you know? There are countless people serving hard time in prisons in America. Joanne Parks. I'm Christine Bunch who I just interviewed on my podcast. She brought me to tears who was convicted of setting a fire. I mean, her case in Indiana, how insane is this, Joe? We're about to release this episode. But she was a 21 year old mother of a three year old boy and her trailer caught fire. She was asleep. She woke up. She couldn't get into the son's room. It was too, the fire was too out of control already and the little boy died. And the fact is that she, they arrested her six days later in charge of arson and murder. And the prosecutor said to the jury, look, we admit we don't have a motive. We don't have a motive. She was a loving mother with no mental issues, with no, I asked her, do you have any other history of the law enforcement? She goes, yeah, once I got a warning for going five miles an hour over the speed limit. And she, everybody said she was a doting, loving mother. She was working and going to school and she lost everything she owned. She didn't have insurance. She didn't have a shirt to wear at the end of this, right? Because she was in her pajamas. It's like, I mean, and it was an electrical fire. It was proved 17 years later by actual experts. What did they use as the arson evidence against her in the case? They claimed that there was a certain type of accelerant, which there wasn't. They withheld evidence that there was a kerosene that had been present in the house from previous owners who had come forward and said that there was, you know, and that there was, you know, there was a lot. So they had just decided that she was guilty and they were going to try to win. And that's the sick thing about it is that these arson cases, there is no, there was no crime. There was a tragedy, but no crime. Nobody. And how long did she go away from? She was in for 17 years and she's such a beautiful human. I mean, you would meet her even and you just want to hug her. She's just a magnificent human who in prison did the most phenomenal things. And now she's helping others. She has an organization. Maybe you could look it up, Jamie. She has a wonderful organization I'd like to shout out and she's making a real difference. And she, I think helped pass a compensation statute. You know, Jim, sorry, I'm going to step on your words. I was just going to say that what happens with a lot of these forensic sciences is they they reverse engineer and outcome. So they decide that the person did it. And there's all this, this confirmation bias. I know that I've heard you talk about it. You're familiar with it. You know, you know, the desired outcome. So you confirm that bias. So you know, they then start looking at a streak from a smoke stain on the wall and knowing that the theory is that there was a match struck and placed against the wall. Right. They will say, well, that's why you see it, the pattern that you do of that stain on the wall of smoke where the reality is, is that there are a lot of different explanations for how something can look. The scientific analysis of charred remains, not remains of people, but remains of different things, chemical compounds and things. And if you're working to reverse engineer and outcome, you know, it's, and it's easy to make this stuff sound reliable because if you don't have experience with it, I mean, look, this is a big, I hadn't done any bite mark cases in all of my cases. So I actually tried to approach it with an open mind. I'm literally stunned at what I'm finding out doing research for the episodes because it sounds like some wacky religion, you know, that somebody invented in their house and people buy it. So is all this stuff still in use because no one has exposed the fact that it's all junk science or is it because it's established as a part of what they accept in trials and they haven't made the corrections yet? Because if they did, then they would have to accept the fact that all these other convictions that were based on this junk science would be open to reinterpretation. In the trailer for junk science, Josh addresses exactly that. And he does it very eloquently, which is that along with Chris Fabrikant, who is a strategic litigation director at the Innocence Project. It was actually a post I created in honor of my dad who's not with us anymore. Well, I helped to create, I should say, and he does an incredible job, but basically they keep using it because the precedent is there, right? Once it's, and Josh talks about this and maybe we could even play the trailer, but. Sure. He talked play the trailer. Yeah, can we? Sure. Can we play on the podcast app? Yeah, Jamie'll find it. As soon as he finds it, it's a little stuff. Yeah, and then that'll say it more eloquently than I possibly can. This is so fucking hard to listen to. And then there's shaken baby syndrome, which we'll be covering on junk science, which is like everyone's heard those words. It's a ridiculous idea that you can shake a baby hard enough to rattle its brain without injuring it in any other way, right? So we're supposed to believe that a woman who's a mother, right? First of all, it's hard to believe that they would kill their kid, but okay, let's suspend that disbelief. How are you going to shake a baby? You're a strong guy, okay? But let's say you don't have a big muscle mass and you have a baby, sometimes they're toddlers. It could be a 15, 20 pound kid. You're going to hold it out at arm's length and shake it? No, your arms aren't going to do, and by the way, unless I'm mistaken, most people, they get mad at something. They don't shake it. They hit it. They kick it or they throw it, right? You get mad at your golf club, you don't shake it. You hit a bad shot, whatever. I mean, it's madness, and yet it's accepted in courts, and there are countless people serving time. Melissa Kalyusinski is one. I can't leave her out. John Jones in Ohio, innocent as could be, just misdiagnosed.