The women who came forward against Harvey Weinstein reacted with fury after the disgraced media mogul’s rape and sexual assault convictions were overturned by a New York appeals court on Thursday.

Weinstein, 72, was found guilty in 2020 of raping and assaulting two women, and is serving his 23-year sentence at a prison in upstate New York.

In a 4-3 decision on Thursday, New York’s highest court ruled the original judge made “egregious errors” in the trial by allowing prosecutors to call witnesses whose allegations were not related to the charges at hand.

Weinstein was once one of Hollywood’s most well-connected and powerful producers who made a series of Oscar-winning films. But behind the glamourous facade, it was a different story. More than 80 women have accused him of abuse ranging from groping to rape. Even with his conviction overturned in New York, he remains convicted of rape in California.

The Weinstein revelations launched the #MeToo movement in 2017, which saw women from all corners of society come forward to talk about their experiences of sexual harassment and assault.

  • Grimy@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    As far as I know, there has never been two people with the same fingerprints, it isn’t a myth.

    Not that we shouldn’t be critical of our standards when it comes to evidence and what not.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      We have no idea if there have never been two people with the same fingerprints. It’s never been tested and there’s no way to test it since the majority of people who have existed are now dead. I would say that puts that claim squarely in myth territory until there can be some way to show that it’s true beyond “we haven’t found two matching sets out of the small subset of people we’ve fingerprinted.”

      Anyway…

      The real problem, Cole notes, is that fingerprinting experts have never agreed on “a way of measuring the rarity of an arrangement of friction ridge features in the human population.” How many points of similarity should two prints have before the expert analyst declares they’re the same? Eight? Ten? Twenty? Depending on what city you were tried in, the standards could vary dramatically. And to make matters more complex, when police lift prints from a crime scene, they are often incomplete and unclear, giving authorities scant material to make a match.

      So even as fingerprints were viewed as unmistakable, plenty of people were mistakenly sent to jail. Simon Cole notes that at least 23 people in the United States have been wrongly connected to crime-scene prints.* In North Carolina in 1985, Bruce Basden was arrested for murder and spent 13 months in jail before the print analyst realized he’d made a blunder.

      https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/myth-fingerprints-180971640/

      • Jojo, Lady of the West@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        6 months ago

        We have no idea if there have never been two people with the same fingerprints. It’s never been tested and there’s no way to test it since the majority of people who have existed are now dead.

        This is true. Similarly, we haven’t tested and have no means to test if two well-shuffled decks have ever matched. But we do understand the mechanisms that underlie these phenomena, and (specific or ballpark) likelihood of an exact match occurring, and from those odds can make a reasonable assertion that a match has (in all likelihood) never occurred.

        That being said, the approximate impossibility of an exact match does not make up for the other issues of fingerprinting as you quoted. The chances of finding someone’s fingerprint whole and readable to compare to a control may be far more likely than two distinct people matching exactly, but far more often the prints being used are nowhere near “whole and readable”

          • Jojo, Lady of the West@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            6 months ago

            From a quora post because IDGAF and I’m not doing any more deliberate research on this than that:

            Galton Calculated that the chance of 2 people having the exact same fingerprint is one in 64 billion.

            Dunno who Galton is, but there ya go

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              So some random person made a calculation according to another random person on fucking Quora and you think those are actual odds?

              That’s so amazingly dishonest that I don’t know what else to say.

              But let’s say he’s right. Let’s say it’s 1 in 64 billion. There have been over 100 billion people. That means at least 2 people have the same fingerprints based on the odds you have given me without checking their accuracy.

              So thanks for proving my point.

              • Jojo, Lady of the West@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                6 months ago

                So some random person made a calculation according to another random person on fucking Quora and you think those are actual odds?

                Another two second Google search, it was Francis Galton who calculated those odds.

                That means at least 2 people have the same fingerprints based on the odds you have given me without checking their accuracy.

                I don’t think 1 or 2 pairs of people having had fingerprints that matched from the dawn of humanity to today is sufficient to say it’s a myth that “no two people have the same fingerprint”. The likelihood that two living people, or even two people who lived at the same time ever, shared fingerprints, is still effectively 0. I’m not trying to say fingerprints are magic, just that they are relatively unique. That’s not a myth.

                It’s clear you have strong feelings on this, and I really don’t, so I don’t expect I’ll be engaging further. I’m sorry for any distress.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  it was Francis Galton

                  Oh, Fancis Galton. Then it must be true. Could a 19th century racist who didn’t even understand the concept of genetics possibly be wrong?

                  I don’t think 1 or 2 pairs of people having had fingerprints that matched from the dawn of humanity to today is sufficient to say it’s a myth that “no two people have the same fingerprint”.

                  That literally makes that statement false. i.e. a myth.

                  Seriously, dude… you used the work of a 19th century racist, the literal founder of the racist “science” of eugenics, who couldn’t possibly calculate odds accurately, to show, based on that work, the statement about fingerprints was false and you’re now saying, “well just because that statement is false, you can’t really say that it isn’t true.”

                  But please, do show me what Dr. Mengele thought on the subject next.

      • Grimy@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Imo, something isn’t a myth just because it’s hard to prove definitely due to a near infinite amount of samples. By the same argument you could pretty much discredit most knowledge. Dna being unique or the speed of light because we haven’t tested all individual photons.

        Its healthy to always acknowledge the possibility but if there’s a mountain of evidence pointing one way, you kind of go with what you have.

        Obviously though, it’s insane we don’t have better standards. It sounds like most times, it boils down to a judgment call from an expert and that is clearly not okay.

        • baru@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Its healthy to always acknowledge the possibility but if there’s a mountain of evidence pointing one way

          You’re assuming the fingerprint is perfect. It might not be. In enough cases they do not have the full fingerprint. Then if there’s a match, was it actually a match or not?

          For above, this caused problems though times. Especially with huge fingerprint databases.

          Disagree with your statement that there’s loads of evidence pointing that fingerprint are unique. That’s not how they’re used. And there’s enough cases where it went wrong.

          • Grimy@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            That’s not how they’re used. And there’s enough cases where it went wrong.

            Yes and it has nothing to do with two people having the same fingerprint. We need to be much more precise on how we measure differences and what samples we allow (like no partials) but there isn’t an inherent fault in fingerprint evidence because there are multiples of the same one floating around.

            I’m arguing against the notion that it’s individuals can have the same exact fingerprint and not talking about how we process them.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          That’s not how science works at all. You don’t need to test individual photons to know the speed of light. That involves mass and energy. There’s a famous equation that allows you to calculate it if you re-order the variables, E=mc².

          You do not present a hypothesis that has no evidence to back it up and pretend it’s true. That is not fact, that is folklore. Mythology.

          • Grimy@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            You don’t ignore all the evidence just because every single bit of possible data hasn’t been parsed.

            There has never been two individuals with the same fingerprint, out of all the fingerprints we have collected, they are all unique. This kind of points to all of them being unique and this will be true until we find one that isn’t.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              There has never been two individuals with the same fingerprint, out of all the fingerprints we have collected, they are all unique

              How many fingerprints have been collected versus how many humans have ever lived?

              This kind of points to all of them being unique and this will be true until we find one that isn’t.

              Again, that’s not how science works.

              • Grimy@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                So dna isn’t unique as well? And I mean, we haven’t boiled every drop of water on the planet, how can we know all water boils at 100c at sea level.

                There isn’t much things we know that was tested to such an extent.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  You really do not understand how science works. You are arguing that the test for uniqueness is the same as the test for uniformity.

                  If someone were to claim that every drop of water is unique, you would have a point. No one is claiming that. That is the claim about fingerprints and it is a claim which has never been tested to the satisfaction of anyone working in that field of science.

                  • Grimy@lemmy.world
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                    6 months ago

                    I’m not saying it’s proven beyond a doubt, my point is that something that has turned out true the millions of times we have checked can’t possibly be a myth.

                    You can say there’s a possibility of it being wrong but shouldn’t lump it in with antiquity gods just for the sake of your argument.

                    There’s a whole range between fantasy and certain beyond a doubt, you should stop assuming I’m an idiot and ask yourself why you are so adamant about defending the extreme in such an abrasive manner.

    • supamanc@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Thing is, as with DNA, the whole fingerprint is not examined, just certain reference points. The chances of 10 points in a particular print matching another random person’s are much much greater than the whole fingerprint.

      • harmsy@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        10 points in a particular print matching

        You can run a better match test than that on GIMP just by using the difference blend mode and some rotation. It’s absurd that this is what they rely on instead.

      • Grimy@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        I and the other user are talking about the actual fingerprint on the finger which looking at it now might not be the right term.

        I’m mainly saying I don’t believe something is automatically false just because we haven’t verified all 8 billion datapoints, even more so when we’ve already sampled quite a bit. I don’t get why it’s fantasy or a myth like the other user is saying.