FRAUDULENT ARTICLE IN NATURE MAGAZINE

I have to talk about a fraudulent article in Nature magazine, which promotes religious propaganda.

The article talks about how innocent people often go to prison based on police having eyewitnesses point the finger at the wrong person. And not telling jurors that the statements of the eyewitness are unreliable and why. Nature promotes the copaganda, that this results from a lack of science, despite virtuous police wanting to do good. Nature implies that well-meaning cops lying and producing lies, is a result of scientists not doing their job.

This Nature article promotes false propaganda about the nature of police work and wrongful convictions. Two of the basic falsehoods are 1) eyewitness lineups and testimony are used by police to figure out what they want to do, rather than to legalize the outcome they have already chosen, and 2) the problem of not telling jurors the true scientific reliability, is a problem of scientific knowledge.

The article implies that police want to catch the right person, but need help from scientists. If that were the case, it would not take so many years to figure out what is wrong with police lineups, tell jurors the problems, and fix them. The reality is that police and voters want to pick whom to send to prison, and don’t want scientists and jurors taking that choice away from them.

There’s always a group of people, whether it’s local voters, the sheriff, or some corrupt lawyers or politicians, which local group is able to figure out what the moral thing to do is. If that moral thing is to send a particular person to prison, they don’t want a lineup or juror telling them that they can’t do it, that they can’t do what they know is right.

The purpose of criminal process in court is to take the choice of who goes to prison away from local participants and social currents, and give that choice to the law. Meaning to the outcome of a mechanical process rather than a social process. Telling the truth in court takes power away from the social group, takes power away from the participants in the trial. Telling the truth in court creates power for no man, and only for the law.

It’s not just that police have an incentive to lie, to create theater like witch trials and get elected. It’s not just that police and prosecutors are rewarded and never penalized for wrongful convictions. Both of these things are true. Having an independent institution with structural incentives to compel reporting, investigate and prosecute perjury, and report empirical data on it to jurors through expert witnesses, would fix this problem. Letting wrongfully convicted people sue police and prosecutors who cultivate lies — as the law already calls for — would fix this problem.

These institutional incentives — penalties for lying and producing lies — would encourage police to improve lineups. And to improve and mitigate all the infinite other devices they use to lie. These institutional incentives would have caused cops to fix their lineups long ago. Without cops needing to mislead scientists, with self-promotion that they are do-gooders captive to bad science, but who are always improving and willing to become more enlightened. Where scientists then patronize cops as well-meaning dumb people who need help.

The larger problem is that police are rewarded for subverting criminal process to social processes. Social groups don’t want the decision taken away from them. They don’t want what they can do — whom they can send to prison — dictated to them by science and law, in processes they are made slaves to.

The larger problem — the reason no institution prosecutes state-agenda perjury, the reason judges ignore law and prevent lawsuits, the reason prosecutors are given absolute immunity to produce lies — is that criminal process takes power away from the virtuous decisions of police or voters or whoever the dominant social group is. Mechanical processes ignore political expedience. Real humans need to act on political expedience.

Everything scientists are calling errors, are intentional designs. Every apparently flawed part of the process, every error and lie, is actually designed flawlessly and ingeniously. It’s ingenious right down to the propaganda they tell about it, and the act they put on in front of scientists. It’s designed ingeniously and insidiously, to take away power from courts and law, and give it to social influence.

This is encouraged by a perception that social consensus produces more virtuous outcomes than mechanical process, or often does. And so participants must have freedom to second-guess and subvert the process, and choose the right outcome when they need to. Devices must be readily available — safety valves — that enable virtuous people to do what is right, and not be captive to rigid processes which are often wrong. That safety valve is there being a reward and no penalty for lying to subvert courts.

The assumption is that people are good and wise. Once you make that assumption, the process needs to be subvertible, so that good people can do good. If you assume cops do good, then cops need freedom to use lineups in whatever way they think gets the best result.