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Re: 921, the nature of "Science" and sound hypotheses
Posted by:
SJAvato (IP Logged)
Date: October 20, 2006 12:19PM
The topic of "rogue investigators" has come up before. It seems that the definition of that term is vague; one man's rogue is another man's seeker of truth in a world gone mad. As a public sector investigator, I will admit that there may be investigators who allow personal agendas to cloud their objectivity. Science itself has an error correction mechanism that eventually allows for inaccurate information to be replaced with what appears to be a better explanation of events (of course, that explanation runs the risk of being replaced later by the "new" truth.) In criminal investigations, one hopes that the error corrections occur before lives are severely impacted. There are supervisors and prosecutors who, hopefully, can step up and prevent bad cases from going before juries that are relying on the "experts" for culling fact from fiction. I can't apologize enough to the people and families that have been impacted by investigative errors or misinterpretations of data. I like to believe that the investigator's intentions are good; that they truly believe they are protecting society and seeking justice for victims. I know that there are bad people out there who do kill using fire as their chosen weapon. These people not only destroy their victims and the victims' families, but endanger the lives of firefighters as well. These people need to be brought to justice and held to account for their deeds. It isn't an easy job sometimes.