SCRAM scam

Another pseudo science for the courtroom.

Where was I? Ah yes, the gentleman wearing a Scram. I'll call him Mr. Smith. So his bond was revoked and he was put back in jail when his Scram showed he'd been drinking just before Christmas. He told his lawyer (a young man I checked with today, and who was too modest to allow me to use his name, so I'll call him Mr. Jones*) that he'd not been drinking. Insisted, in fact, that he'd not been drinking. So, doing his duty, Mr. Jones went before the judge and tried to explain that there'd been a mistake. So the judge, wanting to be fair, had the people responsible for the Scram come into court.

They showed him their proof, a print out of a black-and-white graph.

On that graph were two lines, one showing whether the Scram had been tampered with, one showing whether Mr. Smith had been drinking. Both lines spiked. Thank you Scram people, Mr. Smith stays in jail.

But Mr. Jones wasn't satisfied. Presumably because his client was less than satisfied and, oddly in the face of technical and scientific evidence, still claimed to have been at work and not drinking.

So Mr. Jones went back to the Scram office and obtained another copy of the graph. But he made to sure to get a print out in color, not just a photocopy. Lo and behold, the color graph contained three lines (as opposed to two), each a different color:

* one showing whether Mr. Smith used alcohol
* one showing whether Mr. Smith tampered with the Scram
* one showing Mr. Smith's body temperature

The spikes were in the bottom two lines, the ones showing body temp and tampering. The line showing his alcohol use was a flat-line at the bottom of the graph, and had been mistaken by everyone as the baseline, the line you'd draw at the bottom of every graph.

Ooops. Mr. Smith had not, it was now clear, used alcohol.