This is disgusting! 13 people got convicted of criminal charges because of this guys incompetence.

Falsely implied deep knowledge
In the case of Sharon Reynolds, a seven-year-old Kingston, Ont., girl who died of wounds in 1997, Smith testified at her mother’s murder trial the child had been stabbed, and not bitten by a pit bull. He left the impression he had extensive experience examining penetrating wounds, even citing a trip to the North Pole to study polar bear bites.

But, in fact, “he had seen only one or two cases involving penetrating wounds or stab wounds.”

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/10/01/goudge-report.html

This would seem to be a case where lifetime imprisonment of Smith would be justified, to match the years of life Smith stole from innocent people who were convicted on his false testimony.  Since he’s trying to get work doing the same thing he’s been shown to be thoroughly incompetent at, both technically and morally, this sentence would protect future innocent people from him.

Occam

I don’t see how this is a major scientific error. Its not a scientific error at all. This is simply a case of someone pretending to be an expert and using fake science to back up his claims.

Damn.  You’re quite right, Macgyver.  I wanted to point that out, but I got too interested in the specifics and forgot about the thread title.  Absolutely, this had nothing to do with real science.

Occam

For sure, the title I just randomly copy and pasted from the article.

I agree that those things are not science errors.

Here something scary happens on courtrooms: sometimes psycologists determine if a defendant or a witness is trustworthy, based on the kind of psycology common here: the psychoanalysis. So the Rorschach test can send you to jail.  Pseudoscience threatening people’s life.

Recently, a psycologist using a combination of test (I remember they said the Rorschach test was used, I don’t remember the other but it can give an idea of how scientific it was) determined that a defendant had the profile of a sexual criminal.