These people want to pretend that they are all compassionate and save lives, but none of them really understand what it means to live a life that isn’t worth saving – to lay on the floor in your living room, unable to pray to God to kill you, please, just let me die! because it hurts too bad to actually put those thoughts together. None of them understand that lot of these painkiller overdoses are actually acetominophen overdoses because they put liver poison into the pain killers to keep people from abusing them. They would rather have you dead than high, you see.

I wouldn’t wish it upon any of them, but i do wish that they could understand so that they stop what they are doing and back off a little.

Is this the sign of a psychopath or a sociopath? I don’t really know what the distinction is between the two.

That doctors evil pills turned me into a newt! [I got better]

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/53366697-78/search-police-warrants-court.html.csp

But my opinion is colored by a cynical feeling that the vetting of science by ‘experts’ will be run by the State, and in consequence all kinds of prosecution- friendly frauds will get a pass.

It already happens. There is essentially a process for becoming “licensed” to appear as an expert witness (as determined by The State, with requisite fees). These witnesses are known to lawyers, and there is a “expert witness circuit” (for lack of better sarcastic words) that they all travel. One could even half-jokingly state that there is an “expert witness” ranking system, full of scouts, draft ratings, 40 yd dash scores, etc.

Frauds like Michael West…

Preach it, brother!

“we still see appeals courts shoot down post-conviction petitions on the grounds that the defense already challenged the state’s expert at trial, and the jury found the prosecution’s witness more convincing. It doesn’t seem to matter that we now know the prosecution’s witness was spewing pseudo-science hokum”

Procedure was followed — that is all that matters. NEXT!

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-208.pdf

I tell this story bcs, at the time I was researching to try to keep the expert’s statement in, it was hilarious to read the Daubert progeny cases that involved law enforcement experts. The precedents (primarily Daubert) were the same, but the law enforecement expert’s testimony always, always got in. “Scientific method” means a completely different when the science is law enforcement related. I always think of the Mr. Show sketch with the hunchback and Bob Odenkirk as the wizard.

I actually don’t even think getting a bunch of scientists together to set a broad policy or set of standards for what constitutes “good” and “bad” science would solve any problems. The very nature of (real) science is that the facts themselves are fluid: or more precisely, the “facts” are really “our best possible interpretation of data collected to date”. Setting a broad policy based on science is very difficult, because science is itself undergoing continuous revision. Policy would have to be continually revised as well to keep up. Our political and justice systems are poorly suited to this.

As a scientist, I sometimes find myself arguing against points I made myself just a few years ago. That’s how fast it can move.

An alternative might be to set up a mechanism of scientific review of scientific evidence on a case-by-case basis, probably something that would be a sort of hybrid between a grand jury and an NIH study section. This would have to be completely independent of the legal review for admissibility to be truly scientific.

I don’t know the law well enough to say how feasible that sort of thing really would be, but I imagine that there would be significant constitutional issues with that, both in terms of the independence of the judiciary and the integrity of the jury system.