One of the things that scares me about the US criminal justice system is that it relies almost entirely on magical thinking and torture to secure convictions. I don’t believe anyone is guilty unless they were literally photographed holding the bloody knife while standing over the body and even then I’ll need some convincing to rule out potential mitigating circumstances.
This is just speculation, but reading this makes me imagine that forensics professors, and probably anyone who probably spoke to one ever, are never on juries lol. Can you imagine the jury room “So the entire case of the prosecution is basically palm reading, I know because I’m a palm reading professor”
Making sure no one in the jury stand is capable of understanding what’s going on or evaluating any of the evidence critically is the primary role of the prosecuting attorney during Jury selection. Well, I guess they also try to remove black people, anyone who has ever interacted with the cops in an adversarial setting, and in cases involving sexual violence they try to remove all women.