Category Archives: Crime

Cameron Todd Willingham & The Witchdoctors Who Killed Him

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Law, Pseudoscience

As it has been practiced for decades, arson investigations were more voodoo than science, and “arson sleuths” were often dabblers; “old-timers” who lay claim to a “a body of wisdom,” passed down from one old timer to the next arson investigator. The problem? An innocent individual, Cameron Todd Willingham, was “executed for the arson murder of his three young daughters,” in Texas, in 2004, based on this hocus-pocus.

Many arson investigators, it turned out, had only a high-school education. In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a forty-hour course on fire investigation, and pass a written exam. Often, the bulk of an investigator’s training came on the job, learning from “old-timers” in the field, who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of arson, even though a study in 1977 warned that there was nothing in “the scientific literature to substantiate their validity.”

In 1992, the National Fire Protection Association, which promotes fire prevention and safety, published its first scientifically based guidelines to arson investigation. Still, many arson investigators believed that what they did was more an art than a science—a blend of experience and intuition. In 1997, the International Association of Arson Investigators filed a legal brief arguing that arson sleuths should not be bound by a 1993 Supreme Court decision requiring experts who testified at trials to adhere to the scientific method. What arson sleuths did, the brief claimed, was “less scientific.” By 2000, after the courts had rejected such claims, arson investigators increasingly recognized the scientific method, but there remained great variance in the field, with many practitioners still relying on the unverified techniques that had been used for generations. “People investigated fire largely with a flat-earth approach,” Hurst told me. “It looks like arson—therefore, it’s arson.” He went on, “My view is you have to have a scientific basis. Otherwise, it’s no different than witch-hunting.”

On September 7, 2009, the New Yorker’s David Grann wrote a lengthy expose, “Trial by Fire,” in which he asked, “Did Texas execute an innocent man?”

On March 9, this year, Maurice Possley, of The Marshall Project, all but confirmed that yes, Texas executed an innocent man.

Read the horror story of Cameron Todd Willingham, who “insisted upon his innocence in the deaths of his children and refused an offer to plead guilty in return for a life sentence.”

And the update.

UPDATED: The Farce Of ‘Black Arrests’ In Ferguson

Crime, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Race

Ann Coulter channels Steve Sailer, who compared the arrest rates of blacks in various left wing precincts like the “People’s Republic of Santa Monica, CA”: “the black arrest rate in Santa Monica is three times as high as the black arrest rate in Ferguson, Mo.”

More than three times higher:

:

Related: “The Ferguson Report: The Best Of Pseudoscience (‘Disparate Impact Gambit’)”

More Steve Sailer.

UPDATE (3/16): Facebook Thread:

Myron Robert Pauli: 631/1000 – that’s 63% of the entire black population although probably many are the “usual suspects” getting arrested multiple times per year! Still an enormous number. Pretty high even for whities. The arrest rate in North Dakota (evil Republican state with lots of gun owners) is 24/1000 – although apparently the oil boom is bringing in more crime. Utah also has low crime but the crime rate does not correlate that much with RED (Idaho and Utah) vs BLUE (Vermont, Maine, and Minnesota have low crime) as much as the absence of a certain population which perhaps Steven Sailer can point out – see enclosed picture.

Myron Robert Pauli: … and the District of Columbia is # 1 … with Ward 8 being the most criminal in DC (interesting fact is that a certain research lab in Ward 8 has more patents than the rest of the Department of Defense put together – but that Lab has a barbed wire fence and guards – presumably to keep the “Russians” out!!) … – just don’t get lost can have your car break down if you are coming to visit Naval Research Lab! Still, it seems rather odd that gun-friendly Idaho has lower crime than such as a paradise as the District of Columbia with its anti-gun laws… after all, don’t we get taught that guns cause crime????!!!

Repeal Unnecessary Laws, But Quit The Ferguson Racism Libel

Crime, Law, Media, Politics, Race, Racism

The moron media, reporters like CNN’s Sara Sidner front-and-center, have framed the Ferguson Report released by the Department of Justice as offering conclusive proof of institutionalized racism. With pride can Sidner The Inciter tweet out praise for her impartial reporting, but that doesn’t make it so.

The Ferguson Report is the best of pseudoscience. Most in the media, Sidner for one, do not appear to have the wherewithal to understand that confounding variables are at play here: The reason blacks are more likely than whites to be stopped by law enforcement is that there are differences in rates of offense between blacks and whites (and Asian, by the way, who’re conveniently omitted from the “disparate impact” formula used by our racism-spotters, because they’re likely to commit fewer offenses than whites).

Not even Radley Balko’s plaintive account, illustrating the correlation between poverty and lack of compliance with the law, manages to make the case for institutionalized racism, as Megyn Kelly mindlessly called it.

Radley writes:

“These are people who make the same mistakes you or I do — speeding, not wearing a seatbelt, forgetting to get your car inspected on time. The difference is that they don’t have the money to pay the fines. Or they have kids, or jobs that don’t allow them to take time off for two or three court appearances. When you can’t pay the fines, you get fined for that, too. And when you can’t get to court, you get an arrest warrant.”

All Americans groan under too many laws and regulations. The police and government see us all “as little more than sources of revenue.” Some of us find it harder to comply with these many, mostly-unjust laws.

Repeal unnecessary laws—and certainly laws criminalizing the use of drugs and their sale—but stop the racism libel.

With respect to the open season on cops in Ferguson, Missouri, it’s hard to fault Andrew C. McCarthy when he suggests the following about politicians:

When public officials signal to the mob that its anger is so justified that its criminal behavior, even if not exactly condoned, will be rationalized, minimized, or ignored, they are facilitating criminality. So of course they should be deemed contributorily culpable when the criminality happens.

What about members of a media-congressional complex who pose as impartial agents when they are in fact agents provocateurs?

UPDATED: The Ferguson Report: The Best Of Pseudoscience (‘Disparate Impact Gambit’)

Affirmative Action, Crime, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Race, Racism

If, as TAWE (The Ass With Ears) would have it, and the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report “evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement”—then, by logical extension, the Civil Rights Movement was spawned by not much at all. Since we know this to be untrue, what do you suppose is missing from the Ferguson report, according to which there exists “‘a pattern or practice of’ racial bias in both policing and the court system, searches and seizures in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and interference with the free expression rights of all peaceful protesters”?

“African Americans experience disparate impact in nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law enforcement system,” the report asserts.

Here’s what’s going on: To advance propaganda, pseudoscience must be deployed. After all, the Idiocracy will be none the wiser. Yes, black are more likely to be stopped by law enforcement than whites. But the Ferguson report fails to control for the fact that there are differences in rates of offense between blacks and whites (and Asian, by the way, who’re conveniently omitted from the “disparate impact” formula used by our racism-spotters).

Via InvestorsBusinessDaily:

“The Justice Department’s research arm, the National Institute of Justice, explains that differences in traffic stops can simply be attributed to ‘differences in offending.'”

But federal data compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that blacks violate traffic laws at higher rates than whites in every offense, including driving with an invalid license.
Yet Holder makes it sound as if Ferguson police target blacks at random for stops for no other reason than “driving while black,” and then pile on the tickets. …

It is one thing to demand that traffic and other laws be repealed because blacks are more likely to fall foul of them. (I certainly think drug laws should be repealed together with all unjust laws, irrespective.) But it is quite another thing to shout racism when blacks are stopped more frequently, because cops are obliged to enforce laws against offenders. People are sick of it.

UPDATE: The brilliant Heather Mac Donald on “The Disparate Impact Gambit”:

… Disparate-impact analysis obviates the need to find intentional discrimination in a civil-rights case; a policy or practice can be wholly color-blind, but if, in its application, it falls more heavily on a particular racial group, it is illegal under certain federal regulations. A job requirement that employees have a high-school degree is a classic example of a policy that has a disparate impact, if the high-school-degree requirement disqualifies more blacks than whites for the job. Never mind that the employer applies his job threshold without racial bias, he can be held liable for racial discrimination anyway if he is unable to justify the high-school requirement as a business necessity.

The Obama administration’s aggressive use of disparate-impact theory against schools for their disciplinary practices has been a disaster for classroom safety and order. That school-discipline crusade has meant that schools cannot remove unruly black students from the classroom under neutral behavioral codes without triggering potential legal liability, simply because more black students violate those codes. But as destructive as the application of disparate-impact theory to school authority has been, applying it broadly to law enforcement is a recipe for anarchy. There are few criminal laws that do not have a disparate impact on blacks, because the black crime rate is more elevated than the white crime rate.

MORE Mac Donald.

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