Police, Prosecutors Used Junk Science To Decide 911 Callers Were Liars

An anonymous reader shares a report: Tracy Harpster, a deputy police chief from suburban Dayton, Ohio, was hunting for praise. He had a business to promote: a miracle method to determine when 911 callers are actually guilty of the crimes they are reporting. "I know what a guilty father, mother or boyfriend sounds like," he once said. Harpster tells police and prosecutors around the country that they can do the same. Such linguistic detection is possible, he claims, if you know how to analyze callers' speech patterns -- their tone of voice, their pauses, their word choice, even their grammar. Stripped of its context, a misplaced word as innocuous as "hi" or "please" or "somebody" can reveal a murderer on the phone. So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpster's claims have failed. The experts most familiar with his work warn that it shouldn't be used to lock people up. Prosecutors know it's junk science too. But that hasn't stopped some from promoting his methods and even deploying 911 call analysis in court to win convictions. [...] Junk science in the justice system is nothing new. But unvarnished correspondence about how prosecutors wield it is hard to come by. It can be next to impossible to see how law enforcement -- in league with paid, self-styled "experts" -- spreads new, often unproven methods. The system is at its most opaque when prosecutors know evidence is unfit for court but choose to game the rules, hoping judges and juries will believe it and vote to convict. People like Faria, defense lawyers and sometimes even the judges are blindsided. "I don't want what happened to me to happen to anyone else," Faria told me. Askey, who now goes by Leah Chaney and is no longer a prosecutor, did not answer questions about the case other than to say she didn't know about Harpster's work until after Faria's first trial. She has denied allegations of misconduct in other media interviews.

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