Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System

Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System PDF Author: M. Chris Fabricant
Publisher: Akashic Books
ISBN: 1636140386
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Now in an expanded paperback edition, Innocence Project attorney M. Chris Fabricant presents an insider’s journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role junk science plays in maintaining the status quo. "Fierce and absorbing . . . Fabricant chronicles the battles he and his colleagues have fought to unravel a century of fraudulent experts and the bad court decisions that allowed them to thrive." —Washington Post From CSI to Forensic Files to the celebrated reputation of the FBI crime lab, forensic scientists have long been mythologized in American popular culture as infallible crime solvers. Juries put their faith in "expert witnesses" and innocent people have been executed as a result. Innocent people are still on death row today, condemned by junk science. In 2012, the Innocence Project began searching for prisoners convicted by junk science, and three men, each convicted of capital murder, became M. Chris Fabricant's clients. Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System chronicles the fights to overturn their wrongful convictions and to end the use of the "science" that destroyed their lives. Weaving together courtroom battles from Mississippi to Texas to New York City and beyond, Fabricant takes the reader on a journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role forensic science plays in maintaining the status quo. At turns gripping, enraging, illuminating, and moving, Junk Science is a meticulously researched insider's perspective of the American criminal justice system. Previously untold stories of wrongful executions, corrupt prosecutors, and quackery masquerading as science animate Fabricant’s true crime narrative. The paperback edition features a brand-new index as well as an updated introduction and final chapter chronicling the Innocence Project’s continued fight against junk science in courtrooms across America.

Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System

Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System PDF Author: M. Chris Fabricant
Publisher: Akashic Books
ISBN: 1636140386
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Get Book Here

Book Description
Now in an expanded paperback edition, Innocence Project attorney M. Chris Fabricant presents an insider’s journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role junk science plays in maintaining the status quo. "Fierce and absorbing . . . Fabricant chronicles the battles he and his colleagues have fought to unravel a century of fraudulent experts and the bad court decisions that allowed them to thrive." —Washington Post From CSI to Forensic Files to the celebrated reputation of the FBI crime lab, forensic scientists have long been mythologized in American popular culture as infallible crime solvers. Juries put their faith in "expert witnesses" and innocent people have been executed as a result. Innocent people are still on death row today, condemned by junk science. In 2012, the Innocence Project began searching for prisoners convicted by junk science, and three men, each convicted of capital murder, became M. Chris Fabricant's clients. Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System chronicles the fights to overturn their wrongful convictions and to end the use of the "science" that destroyed their lives. Weaving together courtroom battles from Mississippi to Texas to New York City and beyond, Fabricant takes the reader on a journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role forensic science plays in maintaining the status quo. At turns gripping, enraging, illuminating, and moving, Junk Science is a meticulously researched insider's perspective of the American criminal justice system. Previously untold stories of wrongful executions, corrupt prosecutors, and quackery masquerading as science animate Fabricant’s true crime narrative. The paperback edition features a brand-new index as well as an updated introduction and final chapter chronicling the Innocence Project’s continued fight against junk science in courtrooms across America.

Junk Science Judo

Junk Science Judo PDF Author: Steven J. Milloy
Publisher: Cato Institute
ISBN: 9781930865129
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book is a simple, easy-to-read guide to debunking health scares and scams before you get hurt.

Junk Science

Junk Science PDF Author: Dan Agin
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466838531
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
An overdue indictment of government, industry, and faith groups that twist science for their own gain. During the next thirty years, the American public will suffer from a rampage against reason by special interests in government, commerce, and the faith industry, and the rampage has already begun. In Junk Science, Dan Agin offers a response—a stinging condemnation of the egregious and constant warping of science for ideological gain. In this provocative, wide-ranging, and hard-hitting book, Agin argues from the center that we will pay a heavy price for the follies of people who consciously twist the public's understanding of the real world. In an entertaining but frank tone, Agin separates fact from conveniently "scientific" fiction and exposes the data faking, reality ignoring, fear mongering, and outright lying that contribute to intentionally manufactured public ignorance. Many factions twist scientific data to maintain riches and power, and Agin outs them all in sections like these: --"Buyer Beware" (genetically modified foods, aging, and tobacco companies) --"Medical Follies" (chiropractics, health care, talk therapy) --"Poison and Bombs in the Greenhouse" (pollution, warfare, global warming) --"Religion, Embryos, and Cloning" --"Genes, Behavior, and Race" We already pay a heavy price for many groups' conscious manipulation of the public's understanding of science, and Junk Science arms us with understanding, cutting through the fabric of lies and setting the record straight.

Little Black Book of Junk Science

Little Black Book of Junk Science PDF Author: Alex B. Berezow
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780997253009
Category : Errors, Scientific
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
This handy reference guide will provide media, policy makers and the public with a handy A to Z checklist of realities and myths to distinguish real threats and risks, from perceived/hypothetical ones for everything from Aspartame to Zika.

Galileo's Revenge

Galileo's Revenge PDF Author: Peter W. Huber
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9780465026241
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A scathing indictment of the growing role of junk science in our courtrooms. Peter W. Huber shows how time and again lawyers have used—and the courts have accepted—spurious claims by so-called expert witnesses to win astronomical judgments that have bankrupted companies, driven doctors out of practice, and deprived us all of superior technologies and effective, life-saving therapies.

Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal

Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal PDF Author: Heather E. Douglas
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 082297357X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
The role of science in policymaking has gained unprecedented stature in the United States, raising questions about the place of science and scientific expertise in the democratic process. Some scientists have been given considerable epistemic authority in shaping policy on issues of great moral and cultural significance, and the politicizing of these issues has become highly contentious. Since World War II, most philosophers of science have purported the concept that science should be "value-free." In Science, Policy and the Value-Free Ideal, Heather E. Douglas argues that such an ideal is neither adequate nor desirable for science. She contends that the moral responsibilities of scientists require the consideration of values even at the heart of science. She lobbies for a new ideal in which values serve an essential function throughout scientific inquiry, but where the role values play is constrained at key points, thus protecting the integrity and objectivity of science. In this vein, Douglas outlines a system for the application of values to guide scientists through points of uncertainty fraught with moral valence.Following a philosophical analysis of the historical background of science advising and the value-free ideal, Douglas defines how values should-and should not-function in science. She discusses the distinctive direct and indirect roles for values in reasoning, and outlines seven senses of objectivity, showing how each can be employed to determine the reliability of scientific claims. Douglas then uses these philosophical insights to clarify the distinction between junk science and sound science to be used in policymaking. In conclusion, she calls for greater openness on the values utilized in policymaking, and more public participation in the policymaking process, by suggesting various models for effective use of both the public and experts in key risk assessments.

Junk DNA

Junk DNA PDF Author: Nessa Carey
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
ISBN: 1848318278
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
From the author of the acclaimed The Epigenetics Revolution ('A book that would have had Darwin swooning' – Guardian) comes another thrilling exploration of the cutting edge of human science. For decades after the structure of DNA was identified, scientists focused purely on genes, the regions of the genome that contain codes for the production of proteins. Other regions – 98% of the human genome – were dismissed as 'junk'. But in recent years researchers have discovered that variations in this 'junk' DNA underlie many previously intractable diseases, and they can now generate new approaches to tackling them. Nessa Carey explores, for the first time for a general audience, the incredible story behind a controversy that has generated unusually vituperative public exchanges between scientists. She shows how junk DNA plays an important role in areas as diverse as genetic diseases, viral infections, sex determination in mammals, human biological complexity, disease treatments, even evolution itself – and reveals how we are only now truly unlocking its secrets, more than half a century after Crick and Watson won their Nobel prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1962.

Sanctified Snake Oil

Sanctified Snake Oil PDF Author: Susan K. Sarnoff
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Government supported junk social science-or sanctified snake oil as Sarnoff terms it-exists in all policy arenas along the entire political spectrum, as policy advocates seek to justify the continuation of ineffective programs and to block alternative solutions. This form of junk science is particularly dangerous and wasteful in terms of tax dollars because professional confirmation, media investigation and government support lend it an unwarranted imprimatur of validity. Sarnoff argues that it confuses the public and convinces them to support programs as ends in themselves, rather than determining whether or not such efforts actually achieve purported goals. Ineffectiveness, incompetence, lack of technology, ideology masquerading as policy, and even outright fraud serve to perpetuate the general confusion. This situation is exacerbated by the proliferation of media attention, much of it unmonitored for accuracy or bias. Sanctified snake oil, Sarnoff contends, spawns industries that drain public resources and attention from real, serious cases and distort public perceptions of the magnitude of the issues involved. This study sheds new light on this muddle and offers recommendations which will make it more difficult for junk science to represent itself as legitimate social policy.

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist PDF Author: Radley Balko
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610396928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
A shocking and deeply reported account of the persistent plague of institutional racism and junk forensic science in our criminal justice system, and its devastating effect on innocent lives After two three-year-old girls were raped and murdered in rural Mississippi, law enforcement pursued and convicted two innocent men: Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks. Together they spent a combined thirty years in prison before finally being exonerated in 2008. Meanwhile, the real killer remained free. The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist recounts the story of how the criminal justice system allowed this to happen, and of how two men, Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West, built successful careers on the back of that structure. For nearly two decades, Hayne, a medical examiner, performed the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies, while his friend Dr. West, a local dentist, pitched himself as a forensic jack-of-all-trades. Together they became the go-to experts for prosecutors and helped put countless Mississippians in prison. But then some of those convictions began to fall apart. Here, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington tell the haunting story of how the courts and Mississippi's death investigation system -- a relic of the Jim Crow era -- failed to deliver justice for its citizens. The authors argue that bad forensics, structural racism, and institutional failures are at fault, raising sobering questions about our ability and willingness to address these crucial issues.

Junk Food

Junk Food PDF Author: Vicki Cobb
Publisher: LernerClassroom
ISBN: 0822590425
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
Junk food is so delicious. The tastes of candy bars and smells of movie popcorn are almost irresistible. But junk foods have a secret. It's not an accident that we enjoy them so much. Science plays a major role in making and packaging these foods. "Where's the Science Here?" reveals why junk food is more amazing than you ever imagined! "Cobb's deverly conceived new series, Where's the Science Here?, focuses on food chemistry, not nutrition.... Well-digested explanations and low-tech projects reinforce Cobb's reputation for snappy hands-on science writing for children."---Booklist