Forensics: One Of America’s Big White Lies

Recent cases in the American criminal justice, legal, and policing systems have all converged upon the same troubling fact: white people lie.

Their motives are not always abundantly clear. Whether white people lie because they are xenophobes who hate others, because they are pathological liars, or because they will do anything for fame or money, is up for debate.

Nonetheless, the lies that white people tell have affected millions of everyday citizens.

The most prevalent instances of white lies in the news have consisted of recurring incidents where white police brandished their weapons to murder Black victims and subsequently lie on police report. White police officers insist the murdered Black person was armed (not true), the Black person was attacking them (not true), the Black person was reaching for their weapon (not true).

These lies have come to light based on incontrovertible video evidence that astonishingly confirms the opposite of the white police tales.

Now forensics science is coming under the knife to be examined as a new foray in which white people have told and are still telling lies–some of which led to the execution of people on death row.

Though testimony by forensic sciences is regularly used to lock millions in prison, investigations have proven time and again that claims to link defendants to hair samples, fibers, bite marks, or shoe prints are 100 percent erroneous.

Only DNA testing is a reliable method for connecting a person to evidence, but whites stubbornly want to continue to practice forensic pseudoscience despite overwhelming evidence confirming it is only a web of lies.

The title of a recent New York Times article written by Eric S. Lander challenges Americans to “Fix the Flaws in Forensic Science.” Lander urges the white community to “bring rigor to forensic science” and have “insistence on high quality forensics.”

But how can one fix something that is innately flawed, something that from its meager beginnings was designed to do exactly what it accomplished, which is to incarcerate millions of Black people for absolutely no reason? Forensic pseudoscience serves the interests of the white community in America. It furthers the advancements of whites who do not want to equally compete for resources in this world of growing residents, but want to disqualify others from social life, and therefore competition, by any means necessary.

When Black people are in prison or shot dead, it gives more opportunities for whites in America to occupy positions in government, politics, and classrooms. It leaves more seats open for whites to participate in society. What interest do whites have in ensuring that more Black children are alive and healthy to compete with white children for a decreasing number of spots at socioeconomic mobility?

If law enforcers’ promotions, bonuses, career advancement are linked to how many people they kill or lock up and if these incentives are higher in poor and Black communities, there is no surprise why the killing of Blacks is a celebratory event and a badge of honor for police officers in some white communities.

If prosecutors want to win cases and the FBI is dually responsible for prosecuting crime, their goal will never be to seek justice. They have no interest in justice, but only an interest in winning cases. Until then Americans desire and implement a justice-oriented system that values humanity, white lies will go unchallenged and even rewarded.

Whites, perhaps acknowledging their propensity to lie, have come up with a phrase that puts telling falsehoods in a positive light. They have coined the phrase “little white lie” to denote fibs that produce no harm and even do some good, like telling a sick friend she looks well so that she feels better.

Unfortunately, this lying culture in the white community has become pervasive and is quite harmful. Big white lies are not only told everyday, they are the grounds upon which whole institutions, governments, and legal systems are built and operated.

Big white lies have deep roots in American history. In the late 1800s, they formed branches of statistics and were used to make superiority and inferiority claims. Earlier, big white lies invented crainology to measure skulls and concoct fictions about intelligence. Eugenics was a similar culprit, all the while attempting to brand science as the beacon of a higher power.

These big white lies degrade even the remotest of possibilities of an American moral fabric, the threads of which have been permanently loosed so much that the seamstress questions whether they could have ever formed a finely woven piece. Certainly it can never be, that is, without some invasive reconstruction and not just simple patchwork.

Instead of ridding a sham discipline that makes more egregious false claims that true ones, whites claim to amend something that is beyond repair, to salvage a totaled car, not for its few usable parts, but to put the entire automobile on the road. Hello????? The car is totaled.

America’s mafia of liars–the police, politicians, forensic scientists including the FBI examiners, and other groups–and the institutions they established are likewise totaled.

White media, however, incessantly defends this broken system and its perpetrators.

In Eric Lander’s article on flawed forensic pseudoscience, one sentence sticks out sorely: “Although the errors don’t necessarily mean the defendants are innocent–other evidence might have supported conviction–the F.B.I. plans to notify prosecutors and prisoners of the findings.”

Since when does no evidence mean that defendants are not necessarily innocent? If there is no evidence to support a conviction, there is no conviction. If the prosecution had any other evidence to support a conviction, they certainly would not have forged testimony to bring a jury to false conclusions.

Unfortunately, Lander does not want to call out big white lies and leave it there. He still wants to place a shadow of doubt on the victims of big white lies–defendants in trials where big white lies were the basis for wrongful convictions.

Lander calls the big white lies “errors.” Yet, one point is unmistakably clear: they are not errors. Either forensics can or cannot prove to be a match. In the case of shoe prints, bite marks, fibers, ballistics, and hair samples, there is no DNA evidence to validate claims–it is all lies. They did not miscalculate something. They flat out lied.

In the same way Chris Hayes, a white correspondent for the MSNBC network, regularly discusses white lies as if they are something besides lies.

In one case, what ensued was an unnecessary and unfounded police shooting of a white cop mercilessly firing bullets at a Black man after he stopped the Black man for absolutely no law enforcement reason at a gas station. The white police officer asked the Black man for his driver’s license. The Black man told him the license was in his car. He would reach in and get it if that was alright with him. The white police officer agreed, but when the Black man came out of his car, wallet in hand, the white police officer pounded him with bullets. Luckily the barrage of bullets only wounded the Black man, but did not kill him, unlike in many other cases where death is the result.

Still, in the police report, the white officer outpoured a diet of word vomit in his barrage of lies about the incident.

When white media correspondent Chris Hayes viewed the video of the police shooting on-air, instead of calling the policeman what he was, a liar, Hayes underwent he exercise of validating the policeman’s false claims, asking his viewers: what could have made the officer fear for his life in a situation where there is obviously no fear evident?

Chris Hayes understood that there was no fear factor in this scene. But he, perhaps through his mentality of white tribalism, could not bring himself to call the policeman a liar; instead, he validated his false claims. He entertained the notion that the police officer felt a threat. Hayes attempted to give credence to boldfaced lies.

White journalists, news correspondents, and other whites in media who validate big white lies are also a huge part of the problem. Whites consistently validating the motives and claims of killers are equally as harmful as the lies and killers themselves. In defending liars, the white community in American encourages lying.

Through their control of media, they are able to disseminate propaganda like that on MSNBC and The New York Times that substantiates falsehoods. Though increasingly, these media outlets prove they are not publications of record, only the modes of transport for lies.

The Innocence Project reviewed FBI testimony about hair analysis and found that testimony was patently false in 96 percent of cases.

If a student got 96 percent out of 100 on a test, we would call that student incredibly bright. On the other hand, if the student got 4 percent out of 100 on a test, we would question the student’s ability to process information. We would strongly discourage the student from proceeding down his path. A mere 4 percent out of 100 is not close to perfection or even to competency. It is outright embarrassing.

Forensic pseudoscience falls into this categorization of a shameful existence.

As a result of the over 200 false cases thus far overturned in this particular Innocence Project investigation, 9 people lost their lives and were executed on death row, while 33 were waiting to be executed on death row. Many more people have already been killed at the hands of white lies or are languishing in jail because big white lies were favored by white judges and juries over Black truths.

The big white lies of white America are being revealed each day through social and digital media, and the results are damning. But in light of evidence that white people lie, there appears to be no cessation of deviant behavior and poor judgment; white people just keep on lying.

If a New York Times author cannot accept a system of innocent until proven guilty and insists that defendants might still be guilty even though there is no evidence that leads to a conviction, we must accept that this author prefers to advance the lies concocted in his head and by members of his klan more than he values truth and justice.

A nation that values lies over truth and injustice over justice is in need of a moralistic rescue. But to do so, America must engage with its peril of big white lies.