Cops Record Themselves Planting Evidence

Police in America are having a tough time: they keep shooting people, many of them totally innocent, then justifying it by claiming that they were afraid of getting shot themselves.

Even when these incidents have been caught on video, juries have let the killers off the hook, letting themselves be suckered by sob stories of scared cops that are actually admissions of incompetence and a lack of professionalism.

But lately there's been another kind of video evidence of police malfeasance: there have been several cases of cops recording themselves planting fake evidence to incriminate suspects:

The Maryland Office of the Public Defender said that charges against at least one suspect were dropped on Monday in light of the new video that they said shows officers "working together to manufacture evidence." The development comes days after the state's top prosecutor announced Friday that 34 prosecuted or pending drug or weapons cases were dropped or dismissed because they were connected to three officers seen in a different body cam video showing one officer planting drugs. 

The brouhaha is part of the aftermath of the Maryland public defender's office releasing a body cam video last week that showed one officer planting drugs in a trash-strewn alley. That officer, Richard Pinheiro, has been suspended while two others depicted in the video have been placed on administrative duty. That first video was turned over to defense attorneys as part of the usual discovery process. Pinheiro apparently did not realize that the agency's body cams retain footage 30 seconds before an officer presses the record button.

This is not an indictment of all cops: clearly there are a few bad eggs.

But what it proves is that cops are just people. They can lie. They can cheat. They can steal. Their testimony should not automatically be given greater weight than civilians.

More importantly, they should never be given the benefit of the doubt in a shooting just because they're wearing a badge. If cops are planting evidence to falsely incriminate people of drug crimes, then they are capable of lying about the circumstances of a shooting.

This is not a one-time problem: crime scene investigators offer courtroom testimony on bite and tool marks, blood spatter, ballistics, hair and fiber analysis, fingerprints, footprints, tire tracks, telling juries that "science" proves such circumstantial evidence is far more conclusive than it really is. Most of this evidence is not actual "scientific proof" -- it's just the personal opinion of the CSI arrived at by eyeballing it under a microscope. Different CSIs can -- and do -- arrive at opposite conclusions for evidence as straightforward as fingerprints.

And then there's the outright fraud by lab techs who analyze DNA and perform chemical analysis:

A mass dismissal of wrongful convictions ─ perhaps the biggest ever ─ unfolded in a Boston courthouse on Tuesday, as prosecutors in seven Massachusetts counties dropped more than 21,000 low-level drug cases tainted by the work of a rogue lab chemist.

The number of corrupted convictions was so unwieldy that the district attorneys used compact discs to deliver lists of cases they were dropping and those they believed they could successfully re-prosecute.

By day's end, just a few hundred cases involving the disgraced chemist, Annie Dookhan, remained. The exact number may not be clear until Wednesday, when the court finishes processing the lists. The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, which fought for the dismissals, did its own tally and came up with 320 cases dropped from a total 21,907.

Prosecutors aren't blameless either: they frequently withhold evidence from the defense, either intentionally or through incompetence, and all too often solicit perjured testimony.

The public -- and juries in particular -- need to be skeptical of all pronouncements made by prosecutors, police and crime scene investigators. They have their own agendas, which have nothing to do with justice, and more to so with self-promotion and -protection.

The more "scientific certainty" an expert witness claims to have in a piece of evidence that they eyeballed themselves, the more skeptical we should be of its validity.

Real science involves conducting experiments and making measurements that can be reproduced over and over again, producing the same results. By its very nature, most of the techniques of crime scene investigation are not science.

If the evidence in a crime consists of one bite mark on a woman's arm, one smudged fingerprint on a gun, or one mashed bullet in a corpse, it's impossible to perform that experiment 20 more times to see if the same result is achieved.

Since they frequently cannot repeat and reproduce their results, CSIs are not scientists, but are professional observers who use scientific tools to assist in their judgments.

And as these recent videos of planted evidence shows, even video evidence cannot always be trusted: selective editing can create misleading conclusions.