It's pretty ironic reading through your link that's trying to make a case for "junk science" in forensics, when the biases and fallacies in the article itself just scream out at you.
You can note all the weasel words they use, as well as weaseling and interpreting other's words to mean what they want them to mean.
How they say junk science has "limited evidence" to justify it, but then later on link to studies with limited evidence that are supposed to justify their claims.
How they explicitly link to some evidence that supposedly justifies their claims but for other claims they just say "studies exist" but don't bother to provide names, dates, or any details about the studies.
Going to just stop reading there and mark that notch down as propublica being a source of "junk journalism".
>Lee’s goal was to eliminate human bias from death investigations. “[F]ar too often the investigator ‘has a hunch,’ and looks for and finds only the evidence to support it, disregarding any other evidence that may be present,” she wrote in an article for a criminology journal. “This attitude would be calamitous in investigating an actual case.”
But that's how Columbo[0] solves almost every case, using the perpetrator's over-reliance on "other evidence that may be present" against them.
As much as I love Peter Falk, we should remember that Columbo was a fictional character whose presentation had little to do with the actual work of solving crimes.
>we should remember that Columbo was a fictional character
Sure, which is why I included a link for those not familiar.
>whose presentation had little to do with the actual work of solving crimes.
It seems very plausible to me that for a pre-meditated murder, the perpetrator might very well try to create fake but valid-seeming evidence pointing away from them, as much as creating an alibi. So I think the need to distinguish real evidence from fake (as Columbo is wont to do) is very much involved in the actual work of solving crimes.
Well, then, to answer your original question: “the point is” that one might assume that if you cared that much, you’d read TFA. Which apparently is sometimes a baseless assumption.
I'm not asking what her parents did (which is indeed explained in the article), I'm asking "why did the author bother to put word 'heiress' in the headline when it doesn't tell the reader any additional information when used by itself".
If the headline read " The daughter at Harvard ..." surely you'd wonder why they used the word "daughter" there, right? "Heiress" without any qualifiers means more or less the same thing, so it's natural to be surprised by the word choice.
Because the job of a headline is to pique readers’ interest. Ana analogous headline would be, “Golden Age film star invented spread-spectrum communications”.
"Golden Age film star" descriptor has fairly high information content because there are not that many film stars in the world. Just saying "heiress" without any additional qualifiers (unlike say "heiress to a large fortune" or "heiress to a throne") can literally mean any woman with known parents, so the information content is quite low, which is why it's weird to put it in the headline as if it's supposed to mean anything.
She was a woman at Harvard in the middle of 20th century, it's already obvious that she was rich, which once again supports my point that the word "heiress" provides virtually no new information here.
https://www.propublica.org/article/understanding-junk-scienc...
The innocence project is rather pointed example of how many times forensic science has been used improperly to sentence people to death.