Some netflix non-fiction

[sasha_feather]

Netflix is a blessing for me because it helps me rest and gives me something to do when I'm feeling especially ill. Here are some non-fiction shows I watched recently.

All in My Family

This filmmaker, Hao Wu, is a gay man living in New York with his partner. His parents and extended family live in China. This documentary is about his family and their reactions to him, his partner, and their new kids. I kind of hated this: his mother is a nightmare by my standards. There is not a lot of pushback against the family's homophobia and other biases (the father speaks of pinching the babies' noses to make them less flat, for example). 40 minutes.

Diagnosis

Lisa Sanders runs the diagnosis column for the NY Times, and I enjoyed her book, "Every Patient Tells a Story." She seems like a deeply kind and thoughtful person. However, this show is extremely flawed. The episodes are approximately 45 minutes when the material to fill them is about 20 minutes' worth. The premise itself is troublesome: assuming that there exists a diagnosis for every patient. There are plenty of un-discovered or un-characterized illnesses, and many diagnoses that are syndromes or just a latin description of symptoms. Some of the episodes were deeply frustrating to watch. Not recommended.

Blown Away

Just a fun and beautiful show that is a glass-blowing competition. I liked this a lot. The episodes are short and I would have liked more technical explanations, but OTOH they moved along nicely.

Exhibit A

Four gripping episodes explore junk science that is used in courts to scapegoat and railroad (probably) innocent people. Each episode explores a particular case, a particular defendant, and the type of forensic "science" used to go after the person. This material was so thought-provoking and enraging!

Episode 1 is about video; in this case the video itself was not flawed, but the prosecution brought in an "expert" who had some kind of fake technology that convinced the jury that the video was lying to them, that the perpetrator was not 5'7" but was actually 6'2". The interviews with this so-called expert are WILD; he acts totally convinced of his own bullshit.

The other topics are: cadaver dogs, Touch DNA, and blood spatter.

These episodes are very skillfully made, and I recommend this if you are interested in the material. Some of it is very upsetting (murder, child abduction, etc). There was also a shelved episode about bite mark analysis (https://www.talkhouse.com/the-lost-pilot-episode-of-exhibit-a-in-words-and-photos/). I admire Netflix for having this documentary along with "Making a Murderer" and "The Keepers", which are critical of police and district attorneys. It's clear to me that there are terrible systemic problems and that forensic science (so called) is one of the tools in the toolbox of evil and corruption.

Comments

[lilysea]

and other biases (the father speaks of pinching the babies' noses to make them less flat, for example).

Argh! That seems... racist? colourist?

I feel as though the only justification for doing painful things to babies on a regular basis is if it is genuinely medically necessary eg to treat or prevent actual health problems.

A flat nose is not a health problem!

[sasha_feather]

I think they were talking about very gentle pinching (i hope!), but yes, it was disturbing, and seemed like a kind of internalized racism.

[lilysea]

I've been to several conferences by legitimate professional, practising forensic scientists, and forensic science CAN be a great tool to, for example, put repeat sexual offenders behind bars. [One of the talks was about using pollen in clothing to help prove a case against a serious repeat sexual offender - he claimed he had never visited the public park in question, the highly unusual combination of pollens on his clothing strongly suggested otherwise.]

But
a) the science has to be robust;

b) the forensics laboratory has to be subject to randomised independent/third-party quality-assurance procedures - often when forensics goes wrong its because there is no independent third-party scientific oversight of State Government run forensics laboratories;

c) the prosecution has to present the forensic science accurately.

ETA: Some of the talks were about forensic scientists volunteering their time and expertise for The Innocence Project, which uses DNA testing to exonerate wrongly-convicted people.

[lilysea]

Some of the other talks were about using forensic science on mass graves to prosecute people for war crimes committed in the 1990s and 2000s.

[sasha_feather]

That sounds super interesting! It does seem like forensic science can be a powerful tool for justice, but yes, it depends upon rigorous and ethical use. In this documentary, they talk about juries and judges not understanding DNA, for example; and it seems like the system is just generally weighted towards the prosecution for certain crimes and for certain people.

[lilysea]

There have certainly been some high-profile cases, both in the US and Australia, where the laboratory processes were terrible and there was a lack of independent oversight. Several of the talks I went to stressed the importance of independent quality assurance and of laboratories admitting to their mistakes ASAP rather than trying to sweep them under the rug;

and also the importance of continuing scientific research into new and improved forensic science - a lot of new forensic science has been discovered in the last 10 years, things like being able to lift fingerprints off thermal receipt paper [very difficult to do until very recently]

There are also some gaps in the science: forensics is very good at finding blood stains on floors or clothing, even if they look completely clean to the naked eye, but can't tell if the blood is 1 year old or 5 years old.

[lilysea]

Another case:

a [white] teenage boy, John Button, was wrongly convicted in 1963 of murdering his [white] teenage girlfriend after a minor verbal fight - the girlfriend had gotten out of the car and started walking, the boyfriend had driven in the opposite direction, and then decided to go back and apologise, and he found the girlfriend some distance from the argument badly injured, and got her into his car, and immediately drove her to a doctor's home, woke up the doctor and his wife, and begged for medical attention for her.

Forensics showed the dents on his car were consistent with hitting another car - not a person - and 3 weeks before his girlfriends death he had filed a police report for a minor car vs car accident.

But the judge brushed the evidence off and the man spent decades in jail.

And then a few years later, Eric Edgar Cooke, a serial killer who was about to be executed went, yes, I killed that woman. And the death was consistent with the serial killers mode of operation [running over women who were crossing the street or on footpaths]. Again, this was brushed off.

Finally, an independent journalist started looking into it, and "The world's leading pedestrian accident expert, American William "Rusty" Haight, was flown to Australia and testified that experiments with a biomedical human-form dummy, a similar Simca to Button's and an EJ Holden similar to the one Cooke claimed he was driving when he hit Anderson, matched exactly Cooke's account and excluded the Simca."

The forensic evidence not only got John Button released from jail, it also meant that Eric Edgar Cooke's confession to another murder was finally taken seriously, and a Deaf man, Darryl Beamish, who had been railroaded into a false conviction with no evidence - basically the prosecution's entire case was "He's Deaf and he lived geographically near the murder victim", and he didn't have a sign language interpreter in court, was also released.

Justice finally served is GREAT

[jesse_the_k]

...and thanks for sharing this story.

AND YET, the older I get, the more sensitive I am to the cruelty of false imprisonment. Every year passing is viscerally closer to The End.

Re: Justice finally served is GREAT

[lilysea]

AND YET, the older I get, the more sensitive I am to the cruelty of false imprisonment. Every year passing is viscerally closer to The End.

Absolutely!

It's a story with a [not-the-worst-possible-ending]; that is NOT the same as a [happy-ending]!