We asked the judge to make the source code public after scientists and defense attorneys raised concerns that flaws in its design may have resulted in innocent people going to prison.
A federal judge this week unsealed the source code for a software
program developed by New York City’s crime lab, exposing to public
scrutiny a disputed technique for analyzing complex DNA evidence.
Judge Valerie Caproni of the Southern District of New York lifted a protective order in response to a motion by ProPublica,
which argued that there was a public interest in disclosing the code.
ProPublica has obtained the source code, known as the Forensic
Statistical Tool, or FST, and published it on GitHub; two newly unredacted defense expert affidavits are also available.
“Everybody who has been the subject of an FST report now gets to find
out to what extent that was inaccurate,” said Christopher Flood, a
defense lawyer who has sought access to the code for several years. “And
I mean everybody — whether they pleaded guilty before trial, or whether
it was presented to a jury, or whether their case was dismissed.
Everybody has a right to know, and the public has a right to know.”
Caproni’s ruling comes amid increased complaints by scientists and
lawyers that flaws in the now-discontinued software program may have
sent innocent people to prison. Similar legal fights for access to
proprietary DNA analysis software are ongoing elsewhere in the U.S. At
the same time, New York City policymakers are pushing for transparency
for all of the city’s decision-making algorithms, from pre-trial risk
assessments, to predictive policing systems, to methods of assigning
students to high schools.
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Source: ProPublica
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