A brilliant rebuttal of junk science in the courtroom.
A chilling account of forensic science—beloved of prosecutors, judges, and TV writers but often wildly inaccurate.
Fabricant, the Innocence Project's Director of Strategic Litigation, points out that before pharmaceutical companies can market a drug, they must prove that it works. Forensic science, on the other hand, is entirely unregulated. When allowing “experts” to testify, a judge is not required to rule on their expertise, only on legal precedent. Fabricant recounts cases of convictions and the junk science involved. Perhaps the most outrageous is bite mark analysis, but readers—especially those fond of TV detectives and their infallible crime labs—will be flabbergasted by his list of forensic techniques long used by labs, including the FBI’s, and proclaimed by highly paid “expert witnesses” that, when investigated by competent researchers, turn out to be unreliable or worthless. These include arson investigation; hair and fiber microscopy; lie detector tests; voice spectrometry; and analyses of handwriting, bloodstains, shoe and tire prints, and bullet lead. Even fingerprints do not come out unscathed in Fabricant’s rigorous investigation. In 2009, after years of hearings and testimony by genuine experts, the National Academy of Sciences issued a massive 300-page report documenting the worthlessness of junk science that outraged the forensic establishment. Prosecutors and district attorneys downplay the findings because almost all are elected officials, and getting convictions keeps them in office. The report is not law, so they and judges often ignore it, and juries “tend to believe what prosecutors tell them.” The author’s case reports and denunciation of junk science make fascinating reading, but this is not a story with a happy ending. As Fabricant shows, Americans seem obsessed with punishing evildoers regardless of the fallout, and their elected officials loudly proclaim agreement. The rate of incarceration in the U.S. is by far the highest in the world, disproportionately affecting Black Americans, who are “incarcerated at five times the rate of white people.”
A brilliant rebuttal of junk science in the courtroom.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63614-030-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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