One of the things that scares me about the US criminal justice system is that it relies almost entirely on magical thinking and torture to secure convictions. I don’t believe anyone is guilty unless they were literally photographed holding the bloody knife while standing over the body and even then I’ll need some convincing to rule out potential mitigating circumstances.
Reminds me of a time someone posted a clip at me of John Douglas, the guy who invented profiling or whatever, talking about the Zodiac killer.
He literally is just rambling nonsense, just saying bullshit off the top of his head like “At home he has a diary that he uses to talk to himself and carry on conversations” or “He threatens kids because he feels they are experiencing the childhood he never had”, purely armchair psychology, and since he invented this shit he gets to coast by on the assumption that he has some reasoning that would make this reasonable, but with profiling you never have to show your work lmao.
Profiling is especially harmful. It’s like the FBI knew that vast majority of serial killers where born in disfunctional families and neighbourhoods, but instead improving the material conditions of these families, especially with healthcare, they invented this bullshit pop culture version of serial killers, where the perpetrator is the master of deceit, literally the devil, and the profiler is the tortured soul that is trying to understnd the dark side of human psyche.
Bit cheeky to ask but does anyone have any info on how unreliable forensics is? Like an article or something? Its something on my radar I have not really had a chance to properly look at.
