I recently had an experience with the system. Literally every person we encountered as a part of that system make mistakes, were incompetent, or committed misconduct. I'm talking about 3 magistrates (who aren't even required to be lawyers!), court clerks, a trooper, the SGT that approved the citation, the ADA, the second ADA, the DA clerk, a judge, court reporter, president judge, and I'm sure I'm forgetting others.
It's an absolute shit show that only cares about money. I was even told by a civil rights lawyer that we had a case, but that the judges don't care unless we sustained substantial monetary loss (more than the $2k plus of handling the case pro se).
Search dogs simply do not meet even a minimum requirement for probable cause because their accuracy is poor at best, yet they are widely used and accepted by law enforcement and the courts.
Law enforcement agencies across the US still use lie detector tests, despite their efficacy having been determined many decades ago to be exactly nil.
DNA evidence is infallible they say, yet an entire state( NY) screwed up their test procedures to such a degree that they are essentially trash. The system knew this, yet proceeded to use those tests because telling the truth was deemed too costly. They deemed it better to send possibly innocent people to jail than admit their mistake.
Fingerprints are another area where law enforcement regularly screws up. They try to glean useful information from a partial print, in many cases so partial as to be laughable. I know of two cases where someone was arrested for a crime, even after having soundly proven they were not in the same state and even in the country at the time of the crime.
Further, most of the tools in an arson investigator's toolkit are no better than using a divining rod to find water, yet they are accepted by the courts as valid.
There are tens of thousands of cases where prosecutors proceeded with pressing charges in the face of overwhelming evidence to a suspect's innocence.
The police are given tools that they do not understand, nor care to understand, and cannot employ with any reasonable amount accuracy.
The courts nearly universally side with the police on these matters.
These are simply facts, and should make everyone's hair stand on end, because the police are using what amounts to voodoo to determine the guilt of a suspect, and the courts go along with it.
It's an absolute shit show that only cares about money. I was even told by a civil rights lawyer that we had a case, but that the judges don't care unless we sustained substantial monetary loss (more than the $2k plus of handling the case pro se).