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Yesterday a man named Marcellus Williams was executed via lethal injection in Missouri. He was convicted of the murder of a local journalist. The main points of the case are that
a) no forensic evidence at the scene (the victim's house) connected him to the crime; DNA fragments on the murder weapon (a butcher's knife from the kitchen) were not his; a bloody footprint was not the same shoe size he wore.
b) He sold a laptop taken from the house to someone else;
c) Two people, a former jailmate and ex girlfriend, both told police that he had confessed to the murder. However, they had a financial incentive for doing so.
On balance it seems fairly likely that he did it; being a career criminal, having two unrelated people tell the cops you did it, and having possession of an item from the crime scene is pretty damning. It also can't be that hard to avoid leaving behind forensic evidence - use gloves, shave your head or wear a balaclava, even deliberately wear differently sized shoes. But when talking about the death penalty, we must take the 'reasonable doubt' thing extra seriously. So what do you think mottizens?
Look at any given person who has strong opinions about this case, the rights of the accused, and how the criminal justice system railroads the innocent. Then check their assessment of the Rittenhouse case, or whether Kavanaugh is a rapist.
People argue about the light or the dark, but it's the contrast that kills.
I would say so, yes.
I do care deeply about the rights of the accused.
It's great that he was acquitted.
Plainly he is not.
What percentage of politically-aware people share your views on these questions?
Who knows? Life’s full of surprises.
True enough, and doubly so for those who choose to navigate life with their eyes closed...
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If this is the best that the Innocence Project has got, it updates me towards the belief that no innocent people are ever executed in the US.
I'll also say this: getting a clearly guilty murderer out of prison on a legal technicality is evil. If that person then goes on to murder someone else, their blood is on your hands.
"A technicality" is a fuck-up big enough by police or prosecution that a judge believes or the law says that guilt can not be established with legally obtained evidence or that some behavior was so beyond the pale that the best response is to let the guilty walk free to disincentivise similar misconduct in the future.
We are generally not talking about 'prosecution made a few spelling mistakes' here. A defense attorney who gets their client of the hook, even with some far-fetched technicality, is doing their job. If you don't like the common law trial system imported by the founding fathers, there are plenty of jurisdictions where a defense attorney is always just a figurehead, consider moving there perhaps?
Yes, a good lawyer might get their criminal client to walk away freely by playing the role society has assigned for them to play, and that criminal might commit further crimes. But I don't see a big difference from a doctor saving a criminals life.
Of course, a line would be crossed if the lawyer themself break the law to ensure their client is aquitted, like bribing witnesses or tampering with evidence, and anyone who engages in this is a scumbag. But just pointing out why your client should not be convicted due to a matter of law is their fucking job.
The exclusionary rule is a mistake, IMO, and not actually mandated by the Constitution. If you want to deter misconduct by police, then punish them personally for it. Letting a person who was clearly guilty go free because the evidence was obtained illegally hurts the Innocent people the 4th Amendment was intended to protect.
Short answer: I believe that the constitutional rights of a subject should be upheld. If that is generally the case, then any suspect who could only be convicted through evidence obtained illegally will go free. Like the framers, I think this is acceptable. If suspects rights are respected 99% of the time due to any effective enforcement (e.g. incentives due to exclusionary rule, punishment of police), then we are just quibbling over the 1% odd cases where deterrence of police misconduct failed and we have to decide what to do with illegal evidence. The exclusionary rule will not lead to worse conviction rates than respecting suspect rights in the first place.
If you are unable to say 'the world would be better if the cops had not illegally searched the suspect and found the murder weapon, which lead to his conviction' then you are not anti-exclusionary, you are anti-4th.
Wait what? The way I read the 4th:
This seem pretty narrowly tailored to express that the government (whose action the Bill of Rights limits) can not conduct unreasonable searches. Your interpretation seems to be along the lines of 'people have a right to security of their person, so the government has to make homicide illegal'.
Famously, the constitution says what the SCOTUS says it says, so if you have a SC ruling that the 4th mandates government action to protect people (e.g. by driving away natives, or defending you against a mob, or forcing states to build hurricane shelters), I will concede this to you.
It seems obvious that the constitution tries to strike a balance between civil rights and police efficiency. The 4th seems a good example here:
You might have noticed that police rarely face criminal charges about their conduct. For example, if they get the address wrong while executing a warrant, i.e. they perform an action which has no legal basis, they are still treated very different from private citizens. A motorbike gang who decides to storm some home to look for their dope will generally be tried for robbery, while due to the qualified immunity doctrine police storming the wrong home will face no criminal charges unless you can prove that they acted in bad faith.
On top of that, the DA generally has a symbiotic relationship with the police: they need the cops to investigate and testify. While public pressure will these days make certain that they bring murder charges if there is video evidence, having a policy to aggressively investigate any allegations of police misconduct will lead to the police becoming very uncooperative, which will jeopardize your reelection chances. And the blue code of silence means that you would likely not get very far in any case.
This applies to even routine police misconduct like giving a suspect a black eye without reason. I may judge 'blatantly violating suspects rights to gather evidence to secure a conviction' as 'evil', but I am confident that a significant fraction of cops would judge it as 'heroic'. The chances that the criminal justice system would be able to punish cops enough to deter them from doing so all the time are basically nil.
--
How about a compromise: the exclusionary rule can be voided if a cop takes responsibility for the violation of the suspects rights. This involves giving testimony in open court about the gathering of the evidence, asking for forgiveness for violating the constitution and committing suicide through sepukku on the spot. Any inheritance or widow's or widower's pensions will go to the suspect whose rights were violated instead of the family of the cop.
This would both of us get what we want: you would have a way to get around the exclusionary rule, and I would have effective incentives set against violating suspect rights which will keep convictions on illegally obtained evidence rare.
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When you are the Innocence Project, you aren't the judge, you aren't the jury. You are a paid activist group who is trying to get innocent people out of jail.
When you instead use your powers to get 99.9% guilty people out of prison, it's a bad thing. When they kill more people, you are to blame.
You're the Innocence Project. You should get innocent people out of jail. If you really want to fight prosecutorial misconduct, then fight that directly. Change your name and try to get the worst prosecutors fired. But don't get murderers out of jail to make a greater point.
The fact that they are fighting to release clearly guilty people instead of innocent people tells me they have grown too large. They should dissolve.
Suppose you are an anti-death penalty extremist*, and you view the death penalty as state sponsored murder. Perhaps you would accept ten free-range murders to prevent one state-sponsored one, perhaps you try to keep the sum as low as possible and think that the expected number of murders a acquitted murderer will commit post-release is smaller than one.
The honest thing to do would be to campaign against the death penalty. The clever thing to do would be to find what people hate most about the death penalty, and emphasize that.
One thing people generally seem to hate are torturous executions, and there are certainly activists making hay with that: whatever method one might care to propose, someone will certainly describe it as cruel or brutal.
Another thing the population does not like is if innocent people are executed. Thus anything which increases the public's estimate of the fraction of innocents on death row will also decrease support for the death penalty.
The low hanging fruits are people on death row who are actually innocent, and getting them freed through DNA evidence is good work. But you don't have an infinite supply of these. So you expand your scope to people who might be innocent. In a strict anti-death-penalty world view, getting a guilty man out is still net positive: not only do you prevent once action you consider murder, but you also increase the perceived base rate of innocents ('not proven' might be more accurate) on death row, thereby eroding support for the death penalty.
Then there is signaling value to be considered. There is little signaling value in believing a woman's rape accusation if it is backed by video evidence: anyone with any politics would agree with you. By contrast the signaling value of publicly stating that you believe accusations not backed by evidence made by a woman who has lied under oath before is much higher, because it is a costly signal for outgroup members to send. Likewise, it could be that anti-death-penalty activists might get into a #BelieveDeathRowInmates competition where getting acquitted clients who seem more obviously guilty has stronger signaling value.
Even if the activists fail to get an acquittal or a stay of execution, they still win, because it was not never about that one convict in the first place. If you get the media to report the execution as controversial, that will cause the general population to update towards p(innocent|death row)=0.5, which is good enough. By contrast, defending someone in a jury trial successfully is much less effective, because it reinforces the message 'the system works: innocents get acquitted', which is not the message you want to send.
One can debate if the Innocence Project contains anti death penalty activists, and especially such activists who would prefer a murderer to walk free (after a few decades) to them being executed. The Wikipedia page is rather positive. Of course, it also says:
I have not studied the OJ Simpson case in enough details to have my own opinion on it, but from what I have read, the accuracy of the verdict is at least contested, and the defense certainly went above and beyond to get an acquittal. So a cynic might suggest renaming it to 'The Innocent like OJ Project'. On the other hand, they also have spent a lot of effort on clearing the name of people not on death row through DNA evidence, so painting them as 'always chaotic evil' seems wrong as well.
[*] As an European, I am generally anti-death-penalty. I find it barbaric, ridiculously expensive when implemented with proper safeguards (think US, not Iran), distasteful. But I don't oppose it to the point where I would prefer murderers to walk free to getting killed, so I find myself on the same side of the fence as death penalty enthusiasts opposed by my hypothetical radical activists.
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I believe this is pretty much never the best response.
I want that to stop being their job.
OR I can attempt to change the system in the jurisdiction where I already live. Do you believe this is illegitimate?
This would not make him or her a good lawyer. It would demonstrate competence, but not virtue. It would produce an intolerably bad outcome for society. I no longer want society to assign this role for them to play.
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When the based regime takes over, mass disbarment of probably 75% of defense attorneys needs to be a priority. They know they’re getting guilty people released and they think that’s just great. Anyone affiliated with the Innocence Project deserves prison time.
Bizarre comment. Is the suggestion that defense attorneys should make their own ad-hoc judgements about who they think is or isn't innocent and put more or less effort into their defense accordingly?
Yes, actually that’s pretty much what I’m suggesting. Putting up a spirited defense to help a guilty person escape justice is a bad thing. I am not accusing all public defenders of intentionally committing acts which they believe to be immoral; I’m saying that the moral hazard created by forcing them to do this is a terrible thing. I cannot understand what value is created for society when a defense attorney concocts elaborate arguments and exploits loopholes in order to stop somebody from being punished for something that person did.
I actually agree with this, though not with most of your crimestop opinions, but I have a gentler solution to the moral damage done by the public defender system:
Replace DA offices and PD offices with "Public Criminal Law" offices. Lawyers are assigned essentially at random as prosecutors or defenders for any given case.
Right now, becoming a PD is joining the Washington Generals, you're going to lose, all the time, you're at best there to keep the government honest, while the rest of the courthouse has a slight tendency to view you as a speedbump and an obstacle. It attracts only certain temperaments. Becoming a DA conditions you to view the criminals as slime, grist to the mill, just a case number to get through.
Make them switch sides, constantly, and you'll get higher quality defense with a better relationship to the cops and judges. You'll get DAs who are less high handed, because they might find themselves on the other side next week.
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Because there's no way to let a defense attorney do it only for innocent people and not for guilty people, and there's substantial value in providing protections to the innocent.
There's also another problem: If the attorney is not supposed to put up a defense for a guilty person, that means that the defense attorney needs to decide guilt, making him essentially a judge. There are good reasons why judges and defense attorneys aren't the same thing.
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I'm sorry, but you sound like a young man who has just discovered that the justice system is not perfect, but you have simple and obvious solutions that no one in the history of American jurisprudence has thought of before. If only they would listen to your common sense solutions!
There are several reasons defense attorneys put up a spirited defense:
Contrary to your belief, no, they don't always "know" their clients are guilty. They might believe it, they might strongly suspect it, but sometimes innocence is actually a possibility, even if an unlikely one. And our legal system is built on the premise that "reasonable doubt" is enough to acquit, and it's better to let ten guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent man. You might disagree with these premises, but then you have to convince everyone else; it's not something no one has actually put thought into.
If they do know for a fact that their client is guilty, they are actually not allowed to make arguments contrary to fact. (They can't claim the defendant wasn't there if they know he was.) In that case, they still can require the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That is because the state has enormous power, and requiring the state to prove you are guilty, not just "know" it because "it's obvious," is one of the few things preventing people from being casually railroaded by malicious cops and prosecutors (which still happens even with all these safeguards).
I strongly suspect the probability of that happening not bothering you is because you know who would be railroaded more often than not, and you think that would be a good thing because you have openly stated you don't really care about the procedural ethics or truth valence of any particular charge against
blackcriminals as long as they get got for something. But most people don't share your values or your eagerness to unleash the full power of a police state, with your confidence that that power will mostly fall on your despised outgroup.Convincing people is precisely what I am attempting to do! I’m well aware that you don’t think I’m doing a very good job of that. I’m well aware that my position is very much a minority one, both on the Motte and in American society at large.
And it’s not as though I haven’t acknowledged counterarguments throughout this discussion and others. I just ultimately believe, after thinking it through and examining the arguments, that my position is correct. It was not always my position! Again, as you know, I used to be extremely pro-civil-rights! Justice William Brennan was a major hero of mine. When I took a constitutional law class in college, I was consistently the one arguing for the most expansive protections for defendants possible! I’ve been persuaded away from that position over time, but it’s not like I don’t understand the arguments for it.
My outgroup here is “individuals with long criminal rap-sheets, including multiple felonies.” These are not normal upstanding middle-class people who get roped up unjustly and at random. Do you genuinely think, based on anything I’ve said, that I’d be happy to see some respectable black guy with a wife and a mortgage and a full-time job get snatched up by police and railroaded for a crime some white junkie committed? No, I wouldn’t, and that doesn’t happen. The people who would get expedited through the justice system under my proposed regime would be people who have conclusively demonstrated their inability to participate in a non-criminal manner in society.
Fair enough. I will tell you one of the reasons you fail to convince me: because even though I am not a member of the black criminal underclass that you want to put a boot on, I have seen what people like you and your compatriots have said they would do to me and mine just for being your political opponents. In your hypothetical police state that doesn't have to care about civil rights or reasonable doubt, I have no illusions that it would only be junkies getting the boot. No, don't tell me that as a respectable law-abiding white guy I would be safe; I don't believe you.
Happy? No, but I think if that were the price for putting more junkies away, you would be okay with it.
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Because, obviously, the very act of the attorney defending them in front of the judge and/or jury is the process by which we arrive at a conclusion of whether that person did in fact do it in the first place. We can be more confident in knowing that someone did do something precisely because someone has done their very best to defend them, and if the defense attorney can't furnish any convincing arguments there probably aren't any. How are we supposed to determine what arguments will be 'elaborate' or 'loopholes' and which will not be in advance of the arguments actually being made to someone?
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This absolutely misses the point of what attorney is supposed to do. The criminal system is based on the fact, that everybody has right to their own attorney. In a sense attorney is there not to only represent the defendant, but also to defend the whole system of justice. Let's say we have "obvious" murderer, but the prosecution used the most heinous tactics such as beating confession out of him, planting evidence or manipulating and threatening witnesses. In such a case it is the prosecution fault that they mishandled the case and the defendant was let go. Similar with any other issues, such as claiming insanity etc. In such a case it is a problem of stupid experts or laws that let these people out, it is not a problem of attorney that he used such loopholes.
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This started as a reply to @monoamine's comment here but I'm posting here for greater visibility.
I do not think that this is "Based". To be "Based" is to have a base, be grounded, firmly planted, to reject the world of wishy-washy postmodernist bullshit (deconstructionism, moral relativism, etc...) in favor of the hard and the fast. That is unless you're going for the alternate etymology where "based" is a reference to freebasing and you really meant to say "When the crackhead regime takes over..." which tbh also fits.
Its a common error amongst wishy-washy postmodernist to conflate "rejects postmodernism" with "retarded and anti-social" and thus there is an inclination to label any anti-social idea as "based". Our justice system was designed as an adversarial system for a reason. Don't go looking to tear that fence down before you demonstrate that you understand why it was built.
I'm reminded, once more, of De Maistre- to be counter-revolutionary is not to be in support of an opposing revolution, but to be opposed to the revolution.
I mean, yes, progressive attitudes towards the rights of the accused are retarded and antisocial. But the reaction to them has a very real question of 'based in what?', which is a real way of asking 'are we sure this isn't even more retarded and antisocial?'
The right should seek to build off of what has worked before. We should put a son upon his father's land, not burn the shire in the hopes of building something new.
Agreed on all points.
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But I’m appealing to a model of justice that has recurred over and over throughout history. I’ve referenced England’s Bloody Code before. Whatever else you want to say about it, it did a phenomenal job of reducing crime. The inquisitorial system is very lindy, even if not in a specifically American context. And someone like Nayib Bukele (see my flair) is demonstrating that the type of justice I’m advocating can work in a 21st-century context.
We're talking about the system famous for pickpockets working the crowd of the hanging of a pickpocket, right?
Lindy, yes, but lindy doesn't mean "good".
This sounds bad until you compare it with how much worse levels of criminality were in England before this. Banditry basically disappeared in the country by the end of this period.
No doubt! I’m anything but a doctrinaire conservative. There’s plenty of lindy practices and beliefs I’d be happy to consign to the dustbin of history. I was responding, though, to a post which accused me of conjuring fanciful hypotheticals rather than building on existing time-tested practices that worked. I submit that my ideal model of justice is very much built on proven practices from the past.
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I think this is the first time I’ve seen someone accuse Hoff of postmodernism. Or of being wishy-washy, for that matter.
FWIW the comment started as a reply to someone else but still...
There seems to be this perception amonst rationalists that the "based" option is by definition the most aggressively retarded and anti-social one and that is what I am trying to push back against as futile as it may be.
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I mean this is the same guy who believes that John Wilkes Booth was a progressive, so I think he might be suffering from a serious case of whatever Hlynka suffered from, which renders the sufferer unable to recognize distinctions between the various alternatives to American-style Christian conservatism.
No, I called him a "democrat" though to be fair those terms are becoming increasingly interchangeable.
And then in this comment you explicitly said that you were suggesting that he was also a left-winger. I don’t know how much more clear you could have been in this conversation.
Again, i called him a leftist and a democrat. You're drawing your own associations
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I already explained in another comment that I believe the adversarial design of the American justice system made sense in an era where it was far more difficult to ascertain guilt. No video, no photography, no DNA, not even things like fingerprinting. Unless the police literally caught somebody in the act, they had to rely almost entirely on witness testimony and extremely rudimentary investigative techniques. Under such constraints, it’s very understandable to impose an adversarial model, to balance against the natural unreliability and possible ulterior motives of witnesses.
In the 21st century, it is incomparably easier to ascertain guilt based on far more solid evidence. My contention is that this obviates the need for adversarial justice in the case of most crimes.
Now, there are of course types of crime where the inquisitorial model is still inappropriate. The kangaroo courts that sprung up on college campuses to adjudicate rape accusations are a great example. Rape, at least of the “date rape” variety rather than the “prowler pouncing out of the bushes” variety, is inherently far harder to assess because the physical evidence nearly always accommodates multiple competing explanations. The physical evidence establishes that two people had sex, but rarely indicates whether that sex was consensual in the moment or not. In that scenario, adversarial justice is preferable. For a robbery caught on camera, or a murder where the killer’s fingerprints are on the knife and his DNA is on the scene? What is there to argue about? Why is a defense attorney necessary? What do we gain by pretending that going through the (expensive, time-consuming) motions is valuable?
How do we determine which among every criminal charge meets the bar for sufficient evidence not to have to undertake a formal adversarial trial? Should every charge have a pre-trial in which it is decided which kind of trial is required? Who would have the final say in such a pre-trial? Would it itself be adversarial?
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The purpose of a defense attorney is not to get the accused acquitted at all costs. Their purpose is to help the accused navigate an extremely stressful environment. That can include, for example, encouraging the accused to take a plea deal in the case of overwhelming evidence. There's a reason the vast majority of cases do not end up in trial.
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We live in a world where allegedly hard evidence like audio and video is becoming increasingly trivial to fake and DNA evidence remains only as trustworthy as the Lab.
I dont think the ulterior motivations nor the inherent unreliability of the human animal has changed at all.
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We have an adversarial system of justice; that's part of the system by design. If your based regime has an inquisitorial system instead, you might as well make a thumbscrew and rack your banner.
An adversarial system is manifestly retarded when guilt or innocence can be easily adjudicated by viewing photo/video evidence, and/or by assessing DNA/forensic evidence. Leave the adversarial justice system for the much smaller percentage of crimes wherein guilt is genuinely in dispute, or where evidence is genuinely incomplete, as judged by a professional panel of disinterested parties.
You are not the first person to suggest that it is "easy" to decide guilt or innocence in almost all cases and it's just those pesky tricksy civil rights technicalities getting in the way of justice.
Leaving aside the fact that knowing your priors, no black person in his right mind would trust any system you find satisfactory, your system will straightforwardly give absolute power to the state, carte blanche to cops to do whatever it takes to get a conviction, a justice system on a rail, and you would endorse this because it will mean no guilty people go free.
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Japan has an inquisitorial justice system. From my understanding: a member of Japanese law enforcement decides someone is guilty and then that person is railroaded. No need for juries or any chance the judge will side with a defendant.
You’ve pointed to one of the lowest-crime societies in the world, and attempted to present it as a cautionary tale. Seems like they’re doing a ton of things right over there that we may want to consider emulating.
Japanese people are thin and healthy, in comparison to Americans. But no amount of importing Japanese doctors or hospital systems would improve Americans.
My understanding of the Japanese justice system is that it is indistinguishable from railroading and I have no reason to think it accurately discriminates between guilty and innocent. Their conviction rate exceeds 99% and most prosecutors never lose a case.
I consider that failure to run a valid criminal justice system and certainly don't want it in America. Yeah let's lock up more people and longer. But give them the option of trial by jury with an adequate defense in order to minimize the most egregious false conviction of innocent people.
The American criminal conviction rate is also extremely high, north of 90%.
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I very much doubt Japan's justice system is even one of many causal factors contributing to their low crime rate.
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Japan's a nice place, I hear.
I don't think there's any way to get there from here, though. That is to say, if you implemented their methods here, you would not get even the remotest approximation of their results.
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OK, one vote for the Inquisition.
I will note that this murder is NOT such a case. There was no photo/video evidence, nor DNA evidence. There was pretty clear evidence that he stole from the victim, but the murder conviction, while likely justified, was not so obvious.
I don’t disagree; I think a case with this level of ambiguity merited an adversarial jury trial. However, it also happened more than 25 years ago, when video surveillance was far less ubiquitous than it was now, and forensic technology was less advanced. Cases which would have merited a jury trial in 1998 no longer do, because our methods of reliably adjudicating guilt are so much more powerful. The Founding Fathers could not have foreseen the absolutely paradigm-shifting advances in criminology and technology that would exist in the future, and if they had I don’t believe they would have shackled us with this onerously pro-defendant criminal justice system.
If obvious, why would the adversarial system get to a different result?
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Video evidence is indeed quite something.
On the other hand, large branches of forensic science have operated for decades and then been revealed to be fraudulent. Bite mark analysis, burn pattern analysis, psychological profiling; @gattsuru has linked to an article about how the justice system's conception of shaken baby syndrome is based largely on fictions. This, combined with the degree to which jurors and the public generally overestimate the reliability of even valid and well-grounded forensic methods does not inspire confidence.
Justice is not, in fact, a solved problem. I'll certainly concede that it's a whole lot more solved than our decaying system can implement, though.
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Reminder that most criminal defense attorneys have nothing to do with this, their job is pressuring clients into accepting plea bargains so the court system doesn’t collapse under the sheer number of cases. Those that do private defense also mostly have nothing to do with this, their job is getting driving offenses off the client’s record when he pays the fine anyways.
This is a vanishingly small number of defense attorneys.
Right, I’m not even saying most of them have done anything morally wrong or worthy of prosecution or anything like that. I’m saying that in my ideal justice system most of their jobs would simply be obviated. They wouldn’t be needed anymore, because there would no longer be a need for trials for most criminal proceedings, and therefore no need for this whole process of haggling over plea deals. Many criminals would also not be entitled to legal representation, so there wouldn’t need to be this mass of public defenders.
Ah, you want to bring back the hanging judge. I understand. I just have qualms.
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America abolished trials as a routine part of their criminal justice system decades ago. The purpose of the trial in 21st century America is to be a Kafkaesque nightmare set up so that the incentive to avoid it correctly motivates the participants in the real criminal justice system (i.e. plea-bargaining). The fact that most states have an explicitly defined legal process for an innocent defendant to plead guilty (nolo and Alford pleas) is the smoking gun here.
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Those aren’t the main points.
The murder weapon was improperly handled by the police, and they did not use “touch DNA” at that time. This means that DNA could not be factored into the murder, not that DNA either exonerated the suspect or acts as evidence against his involvement through omission. The DNA on the murder weapon was from the police, and it’s greatly misleading to just write “the DNA wasn’t his”.
From my reading, the shoeprint sole pattern wasn’t his. That’s not a big deal because the perpetrator would have disposed of his bloody shoes if they were sufficiently bloody as to leave marks (they were). The Appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court makes no mention of shoe size.
You are wrong that there was a financial motive. The girlfriend never requested reward for information about Ms. Gayle’s murder. (Don’t make top level posts explaining the “main points” if your main points are wrong, this isn’t Reddit).
You ignored significant other main points:
The jailhouse informant provided information about the crime that was not publicly available, yet consistent with crime scene evidence and Williams’ involvement. Other individuals were present when Williams bragged about this murder, and they were disclosed to Williams’ team before trial and have been discussed in subsequent proceedings. “On August 31, 1998, Williams was arrested on unrelated charges and incarcerated at the St. Louis City workhouse. From April until June 1999, Williams shared a room with Henry Cole. One evening in May, Cole and Williams were watching television and saw a news report about Gayle's murder. Shortly after the news report, Williams told Cole that he had committed the crime. Over the next few weeks, Cole and Williams had several conversations about the murder. As he had done with Laura Asaro, Williams went into considerable detail about how he broke into the house and killed Gayle. After Cole was released from jail in June 1999, he went to the University City police and told them about Williams' involvement in Gayle's murder. He reported details of the crime that had never been publicly reported.”
Gayle’s personal items were found in the trunk of Williams’ car. “Asaro told the police that Williams admitted to her that he had killed Gayle. The next day, the police searched the Buick LeSabre and found the Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator belonging to Gayle”.
This was his face around the time of the murders. The media likes to show him as a weak old religious man today.
—
This is sufficient to use the death penalty. There is zero chance (zero.) that he otherwise came into possession of these personal items, and he happened to have these worthless items in his possession (of no monetary value), and his cellmate just happened to accuse the wrong person who happened to have these possessions, and that he happened to guess the right details, and that the made up confession happened to also be reinforced by two separate made up testimonies that the confession occurred, and that the black hood girlfriend with a strict no snitching policy happened to rat our her boyfriend immediately. No. Come on. He did it. It’s not a question.
"The Innocence Project" makes this claim.
https://innocenceproject.org/innocence-project-statement-on-the-execution-of-marcellus-williams/
They don't appear to be arguing in good faith and they are paltering but I don't think anyone expects them to outright lie.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-5612/326599/20240923222511639_Petitioners%20Appendix.pdf
On page number 37, the court informs us that the girlfriend mentioned to the police she had information about the murder under no provocation. It was during a prostitution sting, but it defies any motive, because she later declined to cooperate despite the offers of 5k reward and charges being dropped:
This isn’t surprising. Ghetto people don’t rat. Although she originally mentioned the murder to the officers, she refused to cooperate despite enormous reward offers. It was only after officers told her she could be charged for withholding information that she decided to cooperate. According to the lead prosecutor, she was a perfect witness:
The prosecutor also tells us about the jailhouse informer:
The lead prosecutor also informs us that the officers on the scene believed with certainty that the perpetrator wore gloves, due to spots left on the broken window. Which, of course, renders the entire dna subplot void, even if the lead prosecutor didn’t additionally inform us that he only learned about “touch DNA” in 2015!
On balance, I think he likely did it. But Cole's specificity raises some skepticism of his testimony for me. Would a murderer actually mention those details?
Not impossible, and I don't have a strong mental model of jailhouse confessions and what motivates them. But I can equally see the police thinking "this guy obviously did it, so we should intentionally leak these details to Cole to make sure we get him."
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It's a decades old case, there are a lot of contradictory things floating around on the internet. The governor's statement may be correct, but according to this article the ex girlfriend's testimony is a bit muddier:
Maybe she forgot about getting the reward because she was a crackhead sex worker, but she didn't exactly come forward voluntarily either.
While we're on the topic, what's the counter-claim exactly? That this crackhead just randomly decided to frame her ex-boyfriend for a murder that some other guy who was cellmates with him had also decided to frame by complete coincidence for a financial reward?
I suppose if we are maximally conspiratorial, the explanation is the (obviously racist) police were embarrassed with an unsolved murder of a white woman, marked some black dirtbag in prison for it, and fed testimony to two people and then planted the evidence. But if we're that conspiratorial about the police why do we believe any evidence one way or another about DNA? Everything is manufactured. Conflict theorists unite!
You don’t have to go that far.
The witnesses could, in theory, have coordinated. Especially if one of them did it.
But if there was a credible alternate theory, maybe one of the many trials would have found this guy innocent.
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My takeaway is that he would have gotten away with it if he had the restraint to not go around confessing to murder. Probably would have helped to not steal from the house after it's a murder scene rather than a robbery, but it sounds like no one would have bothered to look in his trunk if he just shut up about it. The implications are discomfiting.
I wouldn't worry about it, I'm guessing you don't interact with many criminals or murderers on a regular basis, I've had that delight before.
They are all fucking idiots who can't help themselves, brag, and do other stuff that makes sure they get caught. Yes you have sampling bias issues (how do you meet the ones who aren't idiots?).
However almost by definition most murderers in particular have some sort of acute or chronic issue with impulse control. Why? Because the upside of murder is typically so minimal. For most people it's to sate some appetite (even if it is just anger at your partner for cheating on you). That's not a good reason to expose yourself to so much risk.
People who have any semblance of control make sure to use it, and those that don't are more likely to out themselves in some way, fuck up the cover up, etc.
Most killers by the numbers are gang types or addicted to drugs. How organized do you think those people are these days?
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Discomfiting because... ?
The face value implication that he was too stupid / psycho to resist blabbing to people about this brutal murder he did against a totally innocent woman after breaking into her home? Or something else?
Because it implies that the police are incapable of anything beyond security theater. A lot of other evidence is accumulating behind that hypothesis, and it bodes ill if you value a government monopoly on violence.
Don't be in the bottom half of murderers or bottom quarter of rapists and you'll probably get away with it.
Alternate take: it's the bottom half of murderers killing the bottom half of victims who are most likely to get away with it. In 2022 cook county (Chicago) had a 20% clearance rate (154/756). Maine had a 90% rate (54/60)
The bottom half of victims get the "he already had crack sprinkled on him, let's get out of here" investigation technique.
A gang member shooting a guy who looked at him wrong just has to be clever enough to use his girlfriend's car for the drive-by. A white collar guy who wants to murder his boss or an annoying neighbor needs to be Moriarty with a forensics post-grad.
(And cynically/realistically, only one of those two will get a billion dollar foundation helping him avoid justice, unless the professional's name is Leo Frank)
In addition to what hydroacetylene says, the majority of gangland shootings involve huge numbers of suspects at scenes with very large numbers of people were any one of them might well have a gun and fire it. White collar murders typically take place at locations where DNA evidence is much more compelling because, for example, a killer actually tries to dispose of the victim (almost guaranteeing a DNA trail) rather than using the spray and pray method and running away, which leaves no DNA.
In addition, the police are a taxpayer funded service and therefore try harder in cases where actual taxpayers get killed.
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White collar people who commit murder almost always murder eg a cheating spouse where the prime suspect is immediately obvious. You don't have to be Sherlock to figure this stuff out(and you wouldn't be able to get away with it by being Moriarty either). On the other hand the bottom half of murders are much more random.
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Are you saying if the police were competent they could have caught this guy without needing him to confess unprompted to randos? Or just that it's awfully unnerving how easily it would be for non idiots to get away with random acts of murder?
An NYPD friend told me once that if you just drive to some neighborhood you never go to and shoot somebody on that street the odds that they'll ever catch you are slim to none. But that was in the early 2000s...
Fortunately, non-idiots rarely commit murder, and when they do it’s usually a crime of passion where they would be the prime suspect regardless of evidence.
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That's the one.
The current era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
Here, we are seeing that there is a significant gap between the perception and the reality of "getting in too much trouble." Awareness of the gap invites arbitrage.
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From the AJ article:
I am, of course, skeptical of that claim. But whatever, let's accept it as dicta for the moment. If this were true, how is it even slightly exonerating of Williams? In both of these scenarios, we're talking about murderers. If white murderers have gotten away with it, I think that's a very bad thing and we should stop letting white murderers get away with it. I want white murderers caught, tried, and executed. If it's true that they're getting away with murder because of their race, I don't find some solace in the idea that my race is getting away with crimes. My enemies are the murderers, not people of any particular race. With comments like this from Clive and the famous reactions to the OJ trial, the black and progressive belief seems to be that if whites get away with murder, blacks should too.
This is literally enemy propaganda, the point is to sow chaos in your society. Why are you even reading this? What’s the point of contaminating your mind with an obvious psy-op?
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If I were a white racist, I'd actually prefer if white murderers got punished more severely and with less stringent proof than black ones. In very broad strokes, whites are more likely to murder whites, and blacks are more likely to murder blacks. Killing off murderers of a particular race is of disproportionate benefit to that race.
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The Reddit-progressive beliefs about such a thing seems, to my mind, to be the belief that the death penalty shouldn’t exist- and possibly neither should extremely long prison sentences- and that these things serve no criminal justice purpose because they don’t reduce crime, the reason they exist is to keep black people down.
This belief is wrong. But they’re wrong, not evil.
I firmly believe that the anti-death penalty stance is evil inasmuch as any relatively normal political stance can be. I think I understand the philosophical underpinnings for it fairly well and can countenance certain object-level objections (e.g. requiring very high certainty), but at some point, we slam into a values difference that I really do think is flatly evil. When considering a case like Payton Gendron (the Buffalo Tops shooter), a man that filmed his actions on live stream, there are no outstanding questions about the certainty of his guilt or the pointless evil that he committed. The purpose, arguably a core raison d'être for a state is to dispense justice, and I simply cannot accept that less than public execution of such an individual is anything but evil. I suppose we could get into what exactly "evil" means or should mean, but this sort of sniveling weakness, extending completely unwarranted sympathies to the worst criminals seems like a vacuum where someone's sense of justice should be.
To me, it is the finality and chance of a mistake. I’d concede the point where someone livestreams it. But I worry in other cases.
Right, understood, that's the type of argument that I agree includes tradeoffs and has differing levels of willingness to tolerate error. If someone insists on a very high evidential bar for execution, I have no qualms with them. It's the refusal to accept finality even in cases where there is absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that I refer to as evil. The fact that a guy like Ed Kemper still walks the Earth is, put simply, evil.
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Is Clive here American (and directing a UK charity), or is he speaking in outrage-inducing hypotheticals? Because if I were British, I'd be ashamed at the Crown's tyrannical encroachment on the free speech rights of Man.
But I'm not British.
I was going to say something snarky about how little stake the chap has in the United States, but on looking him up, he appears to have gotten his education in the States and spent a significant chunk of his legal career here. My own attitude about a Brit inserting himself into American racial politics with attacks on the integrity of white Americans would be unsurprisingly negative, but I am forced to admit that he's not a complete outsider.
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This drives me nuts. We aren't playing "Reasonable Doubt" anymore. Reasonable Doubt ran out when he got convicted. The disrespect for the ordinary juryman, the sneering contempt which the intelligentsia holds for the idea of normal citizens being allowed to sentence them or their pet prisoners. The arrogance of the kind of person who thinks that they skim a Slate article or listen to a podcast and their judgment is suddenly superior to that of twelve people, sworn to a sacred and serious duty, who listened to evidence presented by professionals for days on end and considered it carefully in conference with each other. The hatred for the Public Defender, surely a useless waste. The assumption that the Prosecutor is surely biased, but the journalist surely isn't.
Legally we can talk about the standards behind various technicalities and whatnot on appeal and the systemic importance of those technicalities (one man's loophole is another man's subsidy), but if we're talking about actual innocence the standard has to be a lot higher than Reasonable Doubt before I'm gonna give a damn. One has to be presenting evidence that no reasonable jury could have convicted, or evidence that someone else did it beyond a reasonable doubt. In this case, no evidence has been offered that any other suspect is even reasonable, let alone likely, to have committed the crime. Nor has any alibi been offered. Nor is there even significant evidence offered of prosecutorial malfeasance, just that the evidence seems weak to somebody with an axe to grind.
I can respect the true anti-death penalty activists. One has to laugh at the continued ideological degradation of the Mises caucus into some kind of weird turbo-Reaganite party. There's nothing wrong with taking the position that the government shouldn't be in the execution business, and I tend to agree that our current system is a farce: either we should brutally and efficiently execute people within a year or two of the crime, or we shouldn't execute them at all. But don't pretend to me that you actually find it more likely than not that this guy is innocent, or turn him into some kind of moral paragon.
Your essential point is well received: the jury had an opportunity to consider the evidence pointing towards innocence, and we should take the jury verdict and do Bayes updates on evidence which they already considered, and we should also remember that post trial, the probability of any evidence surfacing is strongly dependent on the direction is pointing, 'not only is he guilty, but we have found evidence for another 100:1 update towards that conclusion' does not make for a terribly exciting podcast.
However, I would set my threshold a bit lower than you. You basically say to update away from the 'guilty beyond reasonable doubt' verdict, you would require evidence for 'innocent beyond reasonable doubt'. I think this is a bit of a high bar. If new evidence pointing to innocence 10:1 is surfacing after the trial, then that might already call the verdict into question, because juries tend not to give out numerical probabilities (not that they would be qualified to do so), and reasonable doubt is not a fixed probability value either.
Personally, I have stronger faith in jury verdicts reached using forensic evidence. I think juries have a tendency to over-update on eyewitness accounts. Here, two key pieces of evidence are not only eyewitness accounts, but hearsay. (Permissible hearsay, but hearsay still.) I don't like that at all. Not only have you all the usual unreliability of eyewitnesses, but one of the key checks on outright fabrications by witnesses, the fact that such fabrications will land you in prison for a lengthy stay, is completely missing. If you claim that Alice shot when you in fact saw Eve shooting, you have to consider the possibility that other evidence will surface which will prove you wrong. "He confessed to me" is the ultimate he-said-she-said situation. Even if evidence later surfaces which clears the accused beyond any reasonable doubt, he might still have confessed to you, people lie all the time. Nailing you for that will basically be impossible.
The second account, plus the knowledge of the damning details of the crime make a malicious witness unlikely. If any shenanigans were going on, it would have to be on the investigative or prosecutorial side. That is unlikely, but not impossible. Plenty of people here seem to believe that defense attorneys who try to get guilty clients acquitted are immoral. From that, it is not a huge distance to 'prosecutors who know the defendant is guilty should subvert due process to get a guilty verdict'. I hope that these attitudes are less common among lawyers, though.
Without diving deeply into the case, I will however not say that the verdict was incorrect.
IIRC, the Guardian mentioned that a prosecutor wanted the case reopened, which would be unusual because prosecutors are rarely anti-death-penalty activists. However, given their usual spins, it likely just means that the prosecutor wanted to identify the DNA on the weapon before the execution, and the outcome 'it got there due to bad evidence handling' was embarrassing but acceptable and they were fine with the execution proceeding.
We're pretty far outside of ordinary "Defense Attorneys" and a decent distance from ordinary Prosecutors as well. Once you get deep into appeals, you're dealing with ideologues on the defense side who dedicate their lives to this kind of activist anti-death penalty work. These kinds of people are basically anti-death penalty, and often anti LWOP, extremists who take "an unjust law is no law" to heart. They will actively try to overturn what they view as an inherently unjust sentence by any means necessary.
This particular prosecutor is running for congress. Not that this means he's wrong, or cynical, but it does mean he has different motivations for public advocacy than most DAs.
Now, to engage with the meat of the post:
Not exactly, because you're confusing the logic by trying to smuggle in Bayesian probabilism to a binary based in religious morality. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" began as essentially a theological formula: it was the point of certainty at which even a mistake by the jury that lead to the death of an innocent man would not harm their souls' salvation. Beyond a reasonable doubt is a defense you offer to the Lord on judgment day "Hey look I had doubts but they weren't reasonable;" which hypothetical then becomes a standard for taking action "I'm comfortable with this verdict because I would be comfortable defending this action on judgment day."
I can update toward innocence or a jury mistake in my heart of hearts all I want, the question is at what point we make a binary switch from his legal guilt to his legal innocence (or a legal mistrial, but we'll ignore that for the moment). Moving back from the death penalty for reasons of doubt about his guilt isn't really an option within the legal system, nor should it be, the penalty and guilt phases are separate, either you free him or you kill him. We're not talking about updating Bayesian probabilities, we're talking about taking action. Either killing a murderer or freeing him.
So you agree with me that the standard for reversing a verdict should be reversed in strength from the standard for reaching it. The burden has shifted.
Now as I keep emphasizing these are not probabilities, but using probabilities to make the point: if you set your decision points at >95% to reach a guilty verdict, and at <50% certainty you overturn the verdict on appeal, any update after the verdict that doesn't get you to 49% is irrelevant. I can update all I want between 95 and 51, the verdict stands, he fries.
Where I object is when people try to smuggle in reasonable doubt after the verdict, so that the standard is >95% to convict, and if at any time afterward any other person involved (judge, prosecutor, etc) gets to <95% the conviction should be overturned.
Thanks for the background on reasonable doubt.
You are correct, in the absence of numerical odds given by the jury and given that updates after the verdict are very costly, we should have some hysteresis built in for the verdict. Say we don't want to execute some man who is innocent with a probability p_k (perhaps 10%, or 5%, or 1%). What we should do is require a higher standard for conviction verdicts, perhaps p<p_k/x (Where x might be 5, perhaps). Then after the verdict, we have some slack to not revert the verdict even in the case of evidence with an odds ratio 1:x in favor of innocence.
Of course, an extremist view would be that we should never overturn verdicts and just accept the deaths of innocents as already priced in, statistically, in our p_k threshold (as long as the juries are well calibrated). However, not using all the available info (with exception of the exclusionary rule in court) seems indefensible (and I see neither you nor anyone here arguing for it). The reasonable doubt standard on judgement day likely applies on a case-by-case base, the governor who signed an execution order for a man who is likely innocent and just tells God 'well, I found that jury verdicts generally achieve your ordained threshold, and found it to bothersome to update, but look, the other 19 men I hanged were all murderers, so statistically speaking, we are good' would likely be hellbound in most theologies.
Of course, Scott Alexander advocates explicit probabilities:
I'm confused as to what you're saying here, so I don't want to argue about it too hard until you explain it.
I think you're ignoring the systemic value of finality in verdicts. If we constantly allow convictions and sentences to be paused and altered while we sit and consider whether some new piece of evidence alters the probability of guilt to a degree too great to countenance, we'll never get anything done.
Made up probabilities are all well and good for those of us in the peanut gallery, but for decision makers final decisions must be made, and they must be respected with some degree of certainty.
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I think the case is even stronger for juries here: failure to convict requires just one out of twelve to hold out on voting guilty.
Jury dynamics of the "I just want to go home" variety make this weaker, but I think it's still quite strong. One in twelve gives you a good chance of drawing a concientious and disagreeable person that would always refuse to vote guilty if the evidence was unconvincing for them.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Non-unanimous juries are pretty rare for most things, so what do you mean by here?
I actually think that death penalty cases in most states (I'm not super familiar with Missouri) are weaker because of jury selection dynamics that allow prosecutors to strike jurors who aren't "death penalty qualified" from the jury. Meaning that if the prosecutor intends to seek the death penalty, he can ask the prospective jurors if they believe in the death penalty, and remove any jurors who wouldn't impose it. Naturally, just look at the thread, people who are pro-death penalty are also more likely to be anti-criminal and pro-police in general. So just by asking for the death penalty, the prosecutors are assuring themselves of a friendly audience for their whole case.
Conviction requires consensus. The system is biased strongly against conviction. The defense only needs one juror to take their side. The prosecution needs all of them.
Not really. A hung jury doesn't return ANY verdict, the prosecution can just try again, which in a murder they would tend to do.
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American should put as much effort into getting capital cases right first time as you do into the interminable post-conviction litigation.
This is the part I genuinely like best about the US justice system. It is a brilliant work alignment which penalizes a partisan investigative and prosecutorial system for misconduct in a way which really hurts their utility function.
If you imposed some penalty on misconduct, the result will be that people who cut corners to secure the conviction will be regarded as heroes who sacrificed their career, money, or liberty to put a murderer behind bars. With 'evidence becomes inadmissible' etc, these people are more likely to be considered assholes who ruined a lengthy team effort and enabled the murderer to get off 'on a technicality'.
But what’s annoying is that these rules shield the guilty; not the innocent who have their rights trampled.
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Why do these reasons justify punishing the public for the mistakes of the prosecutor? If a guilty man gets released and then immediately victimizes another person (as so frequently happens) am I supposed to believe this is a good outcome because the prosecutor was (hopefully) chastened by this outcome? What if I or a loved one was the person who was victimized? Should I see this as worth it in order to incentivize diligence by prosecutors? Why should I have to suffer for their mistakes?
If you live in a society of laws, you are already not optimizing for preventing victimization. Our loss function is not the sum of innocent police victims and crime victims. If we gave police the powers to kill on sight anyone who they were reasonably sure was a reasonably bad person, it could well be that the number of crime victims saved would be higher than the number of innocents summarily executed by police. But such police states tend to devolve into dictatorships in pretty short order, because there is little in the way of safeguards. This frequently leads to a much higher loss of life down the road.
While it is not commonly admitted, I will grant you that the price we pay for living in a non-totalitarian society where laws impose restrictions on the state is paid (among other things) in victims to crimes which would technically be preventable if we tapped every device and abolished due process.
If we accept that this is the way society sets its priorities, then sacrificing a few more future crime victims to safeguard due process against prosecutorial misconduct just seems more of the same.
Of course, we can debate the exact boundaries for throwing a court case out. Fucking your co-council is generally not the sort of misconduct which sees the defendant walk free, but tampering with witnesses or evidence would be different.
Generally, there are some professions in society where unprofessional conduct can result in innocents losing their lives. We rely on physicians, truck drivers, electricians and so on to do their job reasonably well. The only difference with police and prosecutors is that society would technically be in a position to prevent loss of life due to their fuck-ups after it becomes apparent. But again, this is a price consistent with the priorities of a society of laws.
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It creates incentives for the prosecutor not to do this. You or a loved one could also be the person who the prosecutor was discouraged from framing. Of course this is a seen versus unseen fallacy; it's impossible to see that you escaped being railroaded by a prosecutor because he was discouraged from doing so by the rules, while it's easy to see if you are victimized by a criminal who gets let go.
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In part because (in the US, anyway) we prioritize innocent men going free over guilty men going to jail. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice; sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence; if a prosecutor does something sufficiently malicious or incompetent like "refusing to disclose exculpatory evidence" it creates a credible concern the accused is innocent and the prosecutor is framing him. The "what if I" question can be flipped on its head: what if you or a loved one was railroaded by the state? Obviously a single murderer going free on a technicality is bad, but a bad prosecutor prosecuting the wrong person is worse, since it casts the entire legal system into question (bad for society) and lets a single murderer go free (bad for justice and society) and potentially puts the wrong person in prison (bad for that person, at a minimum).
Now, I'm not a pro-releasing-murderers-to-kill-again guy. Obviously the goal here should be competent prosecution that
But I think there's a good reason for tossing (or, perhaps less problematically, retrying) cases if the prosecution is bad enough. ETA: I also sometimes suspect that bad prosecutors get off too easily by just having their cases tossed, so perhaps there's room to improve the status quo by creating additional negative incentives for prosecutorial misconduct.
The odds of this are astronomically low, even in a hypothetical state that is significantly more authoritarian than the one in which we currently live. I, like every member of my family, is a productive and law-abiding citizen. Nobody in my living extended family, so far as I’m aware, has ever been arrested, ever charged with even a minor crime, etc. There just isn’t anything about their or my behavior that would incentivize the government to go through the trouble of railroading them, not anything that could be credibly pinned on them that a government could use to railroad them or me.
Ultimately that’s the calculation that underpins my rejection of slippery slope arguments about harsh justice. It’s the same reason I reject John Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance. I know who I am, I know what my family is like, I am very confident that the risk to me and mine presented by a loosening of prosecutorial standards is extremely low, so it doesn’t worry me. Any knock-on effects created as a result of reducing the number of hoops prosecutors need to jump through are unlikely to redound onto normal citizens, but are likely to redound onto the sort of people who deserve it anyway. In other words, I do trust the justice system to keep the welfare of normal law-abiding people in mind, and to appreciate the natural disincentives against corruption and malice built into the psyche of conscientious and intelligent individuals.
Many commentators of a more libertarian bent are, I’m sure, going to implore me to consider the possibility that the current “woke” regime will use the powers I’m recommending to persecute random white men and bend the rules for guilty blacks. They’ll point to the treatment of J6 defendants, or to the prosecution of right-wing demonstrators and Twitter users in the UK and Europe.
Well, while those things are bad, I still believe the tradeoff is still worth it. I believe that it’s more important to preserve state and law enforcement capability so that people with my politics can seize it and use it for our purposes, than it is to dismantle or hobble state and law enforcement capability to ensure it doesn’t fall into the hands of my enemies.
They might be, for you, depending on where you live, but I suspect they aren't as low as you think. I come from a background much the same as you, but I had a family member get cited for hunting with an illegal shotgun. Game warden jumped the fence onto private property to inspect the firearm (a search with no warrant or probable cause, which ordinarily would be extremely unlawful but game wardens get special dispensation to violate normal Constitutional precepts.) Did my family member have a blocker installed in the tube (the typical way of ensuring compliance)? Yes. Was he hunting with more shells than legally allowed? No. Was the warden able to force an extra shell in because the blocker was slightly too short? Yes.
The amount of "trouble" the warden had to go through to issue a ticket for ~no reason was considerable (and frankly I think he put himself in actual physical danger by jumping people's fences like that, you don't know what's on the other side) but cops and prosecutors are incentivized to "catch" people. Expanding the circle a bit wider to issues I have much less knowledge about, I had a classmate at college whose friend went to prison for rape. Girl later copped to lying about it. Did my classmate's friend get out of prison? Nope (and as far as I know there were no legal consequences for the accuser, either, but I didn't keep up with the story).
Is this all anecdata? Sure. I could pull up real data, but I think you'd claim that it was poisoned by specious anti-cop organizations. And I might not even disagree with you on that. I've even had fairly good experiences with law enforcement types, and I'm not about to go on an unhinged anti-cop rant. I just don't think police and prosecutors are really different from anyone else.
Well, I'm not arguing against harsh justice. I'm fine with executing murderers. I'd be okay if we executed more people (a lot more people). If we can be confident that the right people have been caught for the right crimes, I have no problem with harsh justice. If you want to argue that a single bad prosecutor shouldn't automatically result in release of a prisoner, that's fine – and my understanding is that it doesn't; retrials exist for a reason – but I suspect pragmatically the reason accused criminals so often walk due to prosecutorial misconduct is that past prosecutorial misconduct is an excellent way to introduce doubt in the mind of the jury on retrial. (Perhaps some actual lawyers here can weigh in.)
I don't think that police officers – whose reporting is what prosecutors and judges rely on – are particularly conscientious or intelligent – probably on average less intelligent than college graduates. In my personal experiences speaking to people in the military and law enforcement (and related careers, such as firefighting) I get the impression or "vibe" that what you might call petty corruption is fairly commonplace. Prosecutors I would guess are probably more intelligent than police officers (law school filter) but that does not make them any less corrupt than other intelligent individuals (see the long catalogue of PhDs who keep getting busted for outright fraud despite every reason not to commit outright fraud.)
My point here isn't that cops and prosecutors are bad people. They're probably slightly better than average levels of badness. But they're people people and you can't just trust to their natural disincentives against corruption and malice.
I don't think that's how these sorts of things work. Whose politics is in control of the FBI? No, the answer isn't "woke," the answer is "the FBI." Whose politics is in control of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department? The answer isn't "woke," the answer (apparently) is "literal organized criminal gangs."
What I think people often fail to consider is that all power structures develop their own interests and they pursue them independent of what the people nominally in charge of them believe. And it is in the best interest of society to properly align prosecutors (and cops) to exercise basic competence, to actually catch the right people, and to avoid imprisoning innocent ones.
Cops have to be squeaky clean, so they’re probably much more virtuous than the general population of ‘males with an associates degree’(and most police have some college and all of them have police academy, so it’s probably the rough equivalent) because less virtuous people do things like experiment with drugs that preclude entering the police force.
Broadly agree, but it is worth noting that as far as I can tell past drug experimentation is not a hard bar to entering the police force, and being convicted of crimes is not a guaranteed bar to continuing to serve on a police force.
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You don't maximize public benefit by hill-climbing the local righteousness gradient. You have to look at the second and third order implications of policy. A culture of prosecutorial fair play benefits the public in global ways that the earlier incarceration of some lowlife at the margin does not.
First off, I’m not actually certain this is true. I think that a lot of this country’s jurisprudential traditions - particularly the ones introduced from the time of the Warren Court up until the present - create unnecessary and harmful obstacles for prosecutors. In other words, they make it far too easy for guilty men to walk free. I’m far more concerned about this than I am about prosecutors maliciously persecuting innocent normal Americans. You can make slippery slope arguments all you want, but frankly I think we’re so far up the “make things easier for criminals and give prosecutors more hoops to jump through and more chances to accidentally screw up” hill, and therefore so far from the hypothetical “tyrannical and capricious authoritarian hellscape” bottom - that I’m perfectly willing to overlook and forgive prosecutorial errors if it means keeping another worthless scumbag felon behind bars or on the gallows.
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Some misconduct is theoretically punished this way. Mere doofusery typically is not. In this case, the doofusrey was inconsequential; no DNA from the defendant was found on the knife. If the knife was found to have been mishandled and both defendant and contaminant DNA was found, there might be a case for excluding that evidence, but that's not what happened here.
Since many of the rights of the defendant are based on "don't do what England did", that's not very convincing. Especially considering the UK's current despotism (COVID, ASBOs, saying bad things about immigrants, banning dogs doing the Hitler salute..)
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The whole case seems like a Toxoplasma of Rage classic. A scumbag whose guilt for the murder is near certain, but at the same time procedural errors in convictions get guilty people off all the time, or at least delayed. It's a surprise that the anti-death penalty people lost on this one as they rarely seem to take such high profile defeats. But for me the big question is why this awful, guilty murderer has been made a cause celebre. Sure, I just referenced toxoplasma of rage, but that only explains public attention. Why did the innocence project and other anti-death penalty campaigners choose this case to focus on? It's clearly going to be a disaster if anyone pays the slightest bit of attention!
Some of this is just a tendency to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. There just aren't that many death penalty cases to start with, and something like a third of them are in states that basically never will actually execute them (California and Pennsylvania haven't executed any inmates in over a decade, and Pennsylvania in this millennium), and some of the absolute worst ones get cleared up relatively 'quickly'.
If you go to the Innocence Project's death penalty page right now, the first three examples I get are :
And the top-line changed while I read these cases, moving from Williams to a Robert Roberson shaken baby case that's... uh, at best a 'raises some doubts'.
Which makes it really weird mix ... if you thought people were reading the Innocence Project page to find examples of clearly innocent people on death row.
But the Innocence Project's point is a broader-spectrum criticism of punishment and criminal justice in general. Something merely being controversial or having even the slightest doubts do that, and that's a much wider field.
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There is no one on death row in America today who was wrongly accused because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time due to stopping to change an old lady’s tire on his way home from volunteering at the orphanage. Anti-death penalty campaigners simply don’t have cases of innocent upstanding citizens to take on as a cause célèbre, and, well, the death penalty has literally never been abolished by popular vote, anywhere in the world, countries which abolished it would bring it back in a heartbeat if there were a referendum. The innocence project and CURE and for whom the bell tolls know full well they’ll lose a principled argument. So they’re going to blatantly lie about this guy being a scumbag.
Ahem.
That wasn't a death penalty abolition, technically. It was codifying existing law fifty years after the last hanging.
What a cheat. It was a constitutional referendum to formally ban capital punishment. If that doesn't meet your criteria, what would?
A vote to get rid of the death penalty currently in use or having been used in the recent past. Ireland was just enshrining existing law in the constitution.
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also Switzerland - unsurprisingly given the ubiquity of referenda in that country.
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Because they sympathize with murderers far more than the murdered.
Remember, these are the same people who thought rittenhouse should have let himself be beaten and shot rather than have the gall to defend himself, all because he decided that rioting and looting were wrong
Are they, though?
Rittenhouse haters insisted he was a murderer, and that didn’t earn him any sympathy.
The "crime is good" crowd makes an exception for self-defense, which is only valid when used against cops.
There is no “crime is good” crowd. There’s a “crime is better than this” crowd, which is disgusted with the state of policing.
Said group assumed Rittenhouse was a provocateur looking to play cop. They probably also assume the state cuts corners and commits injustices in cases like this one. Neither of these is an endorsement of crime.
I remain unconvinced that morally or practically the distinction matters, though in tone-policing forums such as this it may be worth distinguishing.
Criminals are a "crime is good" crowd, including Seth Rogan and Chesea Boudin's entire extended family.
I do have a hard time accepting the positions of people who are thoroughly insulated from the consequences of their beliefs or immune to the logical conclusions of their beliefs.
I believe it's Chesa Boudin.
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Friend/enemy distinction
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and my guess is that Rittenhouse hatred would correlate strongly with belief that this guy was innocent.
The comment would make more sense if you interpret it as "they sympathize with actual murderers" rather than "they sympathize with people they believe to be murderers". That is to say, there appears to be a significant population whose assessment of murder and indeed of justice generally is nearly perfectly inverted from what one might, optimistically, describe as "actual reality".
I think you’re applying too much charity to a sneer at the outgroup.
It's possible, and the naked phrase alone is certainly low-effort. On the other hand, I think there's a point there that deserves more than you're given it. If the problem is how that point is expressed, fair enough, it should be expressed better. But if "better" is undefined, then it becomes a fully general counter-argument. Hence why I'm replying, trying to tack away from arguments over the phrasing, and toward what appears to be the underlying issue.
I think that if we go to reddit, we can find an arbitrarily-large number of people who believe that Rittenhouse is clearly a murderer, and that this guy is clearly innocent. These people will be disproportionately likely to care about Rittenhouse's "victims", and they will be disproportionately likely to know little, and to have little interest in learning, about this man's victim, or indeed his previous, non-murder victims. Further, I think these same peoples' views on a lot of other questions of justice will strongly correlate: they will reliably treat people provably guilty of multiple violent felonies as though they are entirely innocent, and they will treat people provably innocent of any crime at all as though they are crazed murderers. Likewise, they will consider moderately questionable uses of lethal force by the authorities as clear murder, and entirely unjustifiable uses of lethal force by the authorities as obviously good and correct, based entirely on tribal logic.
If I'm correct about the existence and general views of the above cohort, "they sympathize with murderers far more than the murdered" seems like a reasonable encapsulation of the problem. Further, if I'm correct, it seems to me that this is a pretty important problem that certainly bears discussion, because it would seem to imply that our justice system isn't going to get better, and in fact is going to get worse, with consequences that flow through to a whole lot of other flashpoints in the culture war.
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I think this is mostly a result of sanitized coverage of the murders themselves. They simply don’t deal with the particular crime as brutal, in fact it’s usually pretty common to downplay those details in public. If the public saw the crime scene full of blood, gore, splatters of brain etc. they’d be in favor. Instead the victim was shot (passive voice), and didn’t suffer, and the scene was not that bad.
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There was a period of about a month where it looked like there was exonerating DNA evidence, until the DNA on the murder weapon turned out to be the prosecutor. By that point the left-wing noise machine was in full swing and couldn't be stopped.
Yeah this. Confirmation bias. Everyone "learned" this guy they had never heard of before was wrongfully convicted and then nobody could update with contradicting information afterwards.
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I'm generally pretty skeptical of jailhouse commentary. On the other hand, the case doesn't really rest on it: the possession of stolen goods and knowledge of undisclosed facts is pretty clear and, in this case, difficult to come up with an alternative explanation. You end up needing Asaro, Wiliams ex-girlfriend, or some unknown third party working with both Asaro and Williams, to have been the real murderer, or you need a pretty wide breadth of police conspiracy, or both. There's ways to stitch these possibilities together, but they depend on incredibly complex chains of counterfactuals.
((And the media coverage is absolutely awful; it's not surprising that the Innocence Project is just outright wishcasting, but a lot of other shops are repeating that version without any mention of the official trial records contradicting them over and over.))
On the gripping hand, the standard isn't Ace Attorney Find The Real Murder, or even innocence, just to find reasonable doubt. But... this is still pretty weak sauce to find doubt in, and low enough a bar to sound like 'any imaginable alternative'. Especially when fresh appeals are being furnished decades later, there's always going to be some new technology not used, or tangentially-related person having second thoughts, or new angle to approach, or snafu to be highlighted.
((And way too many of these cases are like this. Every death penalty case not involving a spree shooter gets a fandom -- I've seen people defend killers who literally asked for the death penalty -- and even the most highly promoted ones Don't Look Great Bob. Actual plausible cases of actually sketchy convictions exist, and boy does Scalia's corpse spin like a motor when you point it out, but the degree of difference is vast.))
Maybe there's an argument for such higher standards that are not just a generic argument against the death penalty, but in many ways that's scarier: the increasing political battle against life without parole, sentencing with parole, mandatory minima, and of crushing sentences for particularly egregious crimes have a pretty obvious end result if the argument generalizes.
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The thing that pisses me off the most about this case are that so many people are like, "I think we should kill murderers, but executions of innocent people like this is why I oppose the death penalty".
They're the same, terrible, revenge-driven idiots as the pro-death-penalty people, they're just less slavishly subservient to the state apparatus. Whether this guy was innocent or not is totally immaterial-- what matters is the incredible investment of resources we spent as a society raising children to adulthood and how best we might make that investment back. "Hard Labor" is an infinitely better punishment, both for its renumerative and deterrent properties. A life in a reasonably comfortable prison followed by lots of media attention and then a relatively peaceful death is, at best, not very scary. And it wastes an entire human being. People clearly have no conception over how expensive people are. It's. Pure idiocy.
... And also killing a helpless person is morally wrong, but I suspect anyone willing to be convinced by morall arguments against the death penalty already has been.
I guess I’ll bite on the last point.
I think killing a person is relatively but not absolutely wrong. We deprived this man of his liberty and eventually life because it was the only way to protect the rights of (would-be) victims. Since we can’t predict recidivism, we’re stuck with this approximation.
I am giving equal weight to life and liberty, here, but I’m not feeling confident in that. Outside of pragmatic concerns like cost and false positives, do you think life imprisonment is categorically more moral than killing?
I think there are cases where it's justified to kill someone. I'd refer to aquinas' just war theory as being illustrative. Every death is a tragedy, but there are times where causing a lesser tragedy serves to prevent a greater. But note that I specified "helpless" person. Which-- relative to the carceral system-- inmates are. In older, meaner times, when society had fewer surplus resources, the relatively higher difficulty for the state to efficiently contain criminals made the death penalty more justifiable. But in the modern context, that's simply not the case.
So yes, I believe life imprisonment (where technically feasible) is more moral than killing. I wouldn't try to life-imprison an enemy soldier in the middle of a firefight, but I would absolutely prefer to imprison rather than execute them after their capture.
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It's not as if we are running out of them. They are renewable resourse.
Revenge is a nice meal, when restoration is impossible.
The resources spending raising a child are not that much. And are sunk anyway. The whole theater of appeals and waiting is expensive. It should be more expeditive. And cut the exotic execution methods. Bullet to the back of the head is fast, efficient, and cheap.
Of course it's expensive-- society is will to accept a very low P[innocent of murder|executed for murder] rate. What false positive rate are you willing to accept?
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The cost of prison v the pecuniary benefits from hard labor is probably a net negative. Maybe though if prisoners had to do really truly hard labor (at pains of extreme punishment) prisons would be easier to manage (since no one would have the energy) AND there would be a larger disincentive to commit crime.
This is why for lower level crimes I support public flogging. I think you get probably more disincentive without the deleterious impact of jail.
Weirdly enough, I agree with you about the public flogging. It's also the reason I think arguments in favor of the death penalty fall apart on practical grounds. Carceral systems that include flogging as an alternative or supplement to fines and lengthy prison sentences demonstrate that it's possible to make fundamentally different tradeoffs about how we administer justice.
If you assume we're keeping everything the same about the current system, then the death penalty is verifiably a net economic negative. There's little evidence it is, in its current form, much of a deterrent, and it costs a lot of money to establish someone's guilt to the required standard. If you assume we're going to change the system somehow, to require a higher threshold of surety for guilt but also a lower threshold of double-checking to reduce costs... then why not assume we can change the system in other ways? I refuse to believe we can't engineer a way to make an entire adult human productive enough to be worth maintaining.
The death penalty isn't about material economy. It's about political economy. The people are naturally bloodthirsty. They used to walk long distances to see hangings and breakings on the wheel. They feel a visceral satisfaction in the pain of wrongdoers. It's primal.
Now, we are rational creatures. We can override our base impulses or have them overridden for us for our own good. We don't have to indulge our bloodlust. But denying it carries a cost. Sparing the worst of the worst from the ultimate reprisal has a big psychic cost, since it's a powerful emotion you're overriding.
A state can only spend so much entry in a continuous fight against human nature. Why should we spend our resources on kindness on jurisprudence instead of in inducing some other non-default beneficial behavior?
If we're talking about political economy, The People also hate hate hate to hear about innocent (or at least, insufficiently proven-to-be guilty) people being executed. They're also mad about people being falsely imprisoned, but to a far lesser degree.) There's no objective reason we should be spending our resources to satisfy the vengeance-lovers over the mercy-lovers, and plenty of practical reasons why we wouldn't want to encourage "vengeance" as a core value of our society.
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We as society will eventually admit that Heinlein was right for everything in Starship troopers. Unfortunately misunderstanding the book and decrying it as fascism is prerequisite of one's ascension to the IYI class.
I don't think Heinlein believed that the Terran Federation was right about everything, or even most things. His actual politics were a lot more libertarian than the politics expressed in Starship Troopers. The book doesn't even answer (and the fandom is deeply divided on) the fundamental question about how the Federation actually works because we only see it during an existential war - is the normal form of Federal Service participation in a large peacetime standing army, or is it more like the WPA but with military discipline?
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I find that position even worse for a different reason. The “if there’s any doubt at all, we can’t execute” standard also guarantees that by the time we actually execute someone, it’s extremely expensive and decades after the fact. The delay removes any deterrent from the act of execution as by the time you actually execute him, most people have no idea what crime he committed or the details of the crime. At least in the bad old days of either the Old West, or Dark Age Europe you didn’t generally have to remind the public of the crime that happened twenty years ago. You knew he’d murdered someone because you had just recently heard about the crime. Public executions would seem a reasonable thing if the goal is to deter crime.
This what I'm always saying. The death penalty is expensive because we let it be so. It would be really cheap if we just hanged them 20 minutes after conviction right outside the courthouse.
Justice only has deterrent value when it creates credible fear in potential criminal's minds. The most important way is certainty -- most criminals think they won't be caught. But inflicting the image of hanging corpses on public streets on the public would certainly keep the thought in their minds.
I mean yes certainty, but also temporal nearness. Having a situation where a guy sentenced in 2000 doesn’t have the sentence executed until 20 years later absolutely kills the deterrent effect of the execution because the time frame is longer than humans are biologically able to process. Even 5 years for most people is a vague “long time from now’ thing. And most criminals have shorter timeframes than the average person. And again, if you’re talking about a crime that happened two decades ago, most people have long since forgotten the crime.
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See the Jaremy Smith case in SC. 5 years in prison, 7 more for hostage taking during a breakout attempt.
Released on Dec 1st 2003 for "good behavior".
Murdered a woman and a police officer in March 2004.
No amount of labor you get out of that thing will make up for the risk some "progessive justice" ghoul will release it on the public to kill again. A rapid death penalty is the only way to remove the threat they present to their victims.
It would be nice if we had the power to peacefully incapacitate them so they could make up for the harm they've caused, but it's simply not possible when large parts of the justice system are dedicated to freeing violent criminals.
You could have made this point without calling people “it” or insisting that your outgroup are ghouls. But no, you’re doing the always-popular thing, deciding that this time, the behavior is so egregious that normal rules don’t apply.
We’ve warned and banned you repeatedly for this. We’ve permabanned better users for the same thing. Consider this one month ban your final warning.
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No amount of labor? Consider that statement very seriously. Would you seriously have executed that man if he were otherwise guaranteed to cure every form of cancer?
Everything about the justice system is an expected value calculation. If you let at most ten guilty men go free to save a innocent, you're implicitly saying that the risk of them committing crimes is outweighed by the good the innocent person could do. And you're also saying that an innocent person is worth less that the expected value of letting eleven criminals go free.
There are other problems with imprisonment for innocent people. A big one is that the state needs to have credibility on both ends. On the one hand (where the modern states fail IMO) is that it has the capacity and will to deal with actual crimes in a way that protects public order. When people have no reason to suspect that the government can and will deal with crime, you end up with various ad hoc solutions to crime that can escalate to the point of vigilante justice. On the other hand, a state that cannot reliably prosecute only the guilty or at least mostly the guilty (with the errors being mostly good faith mistakes) is one that loses public trust rather quickly. If I think that I’m going to be persecuted for thought crimes with a random prosecution, I’m not going to trust the police. You might not call on them and you might resist them. And the loss of trust is a detriment to stopping crime. This is why the defund movement is making crime worse. When you tell an entire population that the police exist to persecute them, they don’t cooperate and crime increases in that area. Then those people end up victimized by the criminals riding free because the cops are not trusted.
In case it's non-obvious, I'm making an argument about optimizing for expected efficiency, rather than saying there's any agreement about how many innocent people we would knowingly condemn to prison in order to keep guilty people imprisoned too. My claim is that we already make implicit cost-benefit calculations about what sort of false negative/false positive rates we're willing to accept from the justice system. Which, in turn, implies that we must also be placing an implicit, finite cost on how much damage we think particular crimes actually cost.
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No; there's also the harm of the imprisonment/execution of the innocent itself, and the second-order effects (you do not want the civilian population en masse to start treating the justice system as an occupying army).
I'm abbreviating for conciseness. Of course there's a lot of other factors that go into what false positive/negative rates we optimize our justice system to accept, like the risk of a justice system being seen as "soft" encouraging vigilantism and the degradation of state power.
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It seems like you started with the moral presupposition from your last paragraph, and then reverse-engineered a convenient argument that you can attempt to use on people who don’t share that moral presupposition. In other words, you would still oppose the death penalty even if it was cheap and we could demonstrate to you that it is a net economic benefit. Your stated concern is not your actual concern; therefore, you are concern trolling.
If your concern is that we spend too much money raising children to adulthood, how would you feel about a regime in which we attempt to identify, as early as possible, juveniles who will turn out not to be worth the investment, and begin a quickly-escalating regime of corrective punishment on them once they first start misbehaving, such that if they fail to shape up we stop devoting said resources to them? Most of the guys on death row started their life of crime in their early teens. It was pretty clear from an early age what sort of adults they would amount to. Why let them stick around long enough to escalate their level of criminality into full-blown murder? Start flogging them in the public square, denying them access to the internet and other services, cut off pinky fingers and move up from there - see if that’s enough to get them back on course to a productive life. If it’s not, end it before it gets too bad for the rest of us.
Yes. And? I want something from you. Does it make more sense for me to offer something I want, or something you want in return for it?
Are you seriously pissed off that I'm not assuming you should share my values and arguing from them?
If so, here's your argument: "Pope said so, Q.E.D."
He’s upset because he thinks you’re wearing his values like a skin suit. You were honest about it, but he still finds the practice disturbing.
That said, y’all are starting to get heated. I’m going to recommend dropping the subject for now.
I don’t think I am “upset”, nor do I think things are getting “heated”. I would hope I haven’t said anything yet that will get me a mod warning. I think I’ve been very civil, or at least as civil as one can be while accusing an interlocutor of being dishonest.
Sorry. By “upset” I meant “objecting.” You are not being warned, and I appreciate that you’ve remained civil.
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Who said I’m “pissed off”? What I’m saying is that you’ve outed yourself as a liar. You’re willing to cynically lie to your interlocutors about this issue because you have an axe to grind. Therefore, we can apply considerable skepticism to any “evidence” you bring to bear to try and trick us into supporting your position. You bring some statistics purported to demonstrate that executing prisoners instead of enslaving them is a net economic negative? Okay, why should we trust that your statistics aren’t doctored or misrepresented?
Again, you’ve already demonstrated that you don’t actually care if that reason is true, because it’s not your actual reason for opposing the death penalty. It’s just something you latched onto because you thought we would care about it. So if it’s not true, it doesn’t move the needle for you at all. It’s not like you’re going to switch to supporting the death penalty if you discover that whatever study you’re citing isn’t accurate or replicable.
I can't wholly discount the possibility that my more fundamental beliefs about the sanctity of life have biased me towards believing evidence and arguments that present my anti-execution position as fulfilling both my values about utilitarian economic efficiency and my values about deontological behavior. And yes, since my deontological values are more fundamental than my utilitarian values, I would still be anti-death-penalty even if I thought it wasn't a utilitarian evil. But I was in no way being dishonest-- I genuinely believe everything I said about alternatives to the death penalty. I would prefer lifetime imprisonment over hard labor for everyone on track to receive the death penalty because of my utilitarian and deontological beliefs about slavery, but I would be happy to accept hard labor as an improvement to killing people.
As for your last accusation-- that I don’t actually care if that reason is true-- you are also completely wrong. It's true that I would ultimately be happy if you stopped supporting the death penalty regardless of why. (Though I'd privately think you were an idiot if you said something ridiculous, "lifetime imprisonment causes more net suffering" or alternatively the exact position I complained about in my original comment about people who are pro-execution but anti-government.) But I have practical objections against lying in arguments, and specifically in this case if you somehow managed to convince me that the death penalty was a utilitarian good versus alternative punishments I would reprioritize my time and emotional response. There's plenty of stuff that's a utilitarian evil but moral good, and plenty of stuff that's a utilitarian good but moral evil. Given that it's much harder to change peoples' minds on either of those categories, I prefer to focus my time on the slam-dunks that are both utilitarian and moral evils.
/u/Netstack if I haven't sufficiently toned down the heat of my rhetoric, please tell me and I'll stop responding to this subthread in general.
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Same reason you trust people who do share your values? Reputation, mostly.
Most sources aren’t load-bearing. Most beliefs don’t even have a load-bearing source to present! Discrediting the false ones is still appropriate.
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I reject your hypothesis. Many human beings are net negatives to society regardless of how much compelled labour you can get out of them for the rest of their lives. You think that sentencing this guy to hard labour would be more efficient - I highly doubt it. The infrastructure (both physical, in terms of jails, and human, in terms of chain-gang guards salaries) required to confine such a person to hard labour is going to be more costly than the value of hard labour they produce.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Whatever you think of the Katyn Massacre: frogmarching people into the woods, having them dig their own graves, and then one-taping them in the back of the head - you cannot complain that it wasn’t a CHEAP way of dealing with undesirables.
Soldiers routinely commit atrocities worse than your average executed murderer, and yet people have been enslaving prisoners of war for literal milllenia. Forced labour literally pays for itself.
Prisoners don't have to be doing low-efficiency labor like breaking rock or pumping water out of lead mines... It's 2024. We can rent them out to mechanical turk for twelve hour a day and give them fentanyl doses to make sure they stay on task.
The kind of labor that can be efficiently done by slaves is mostly done even more efficiently by machines these days, and prison guards cost a lot more than just hiring society's existing pool of the poorest(voluntarily out of the probation office if need be). Forced labor outside of the third world is mostly sex work these days and that's for a reason which doesn't have much to do with human kindness.
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The behavior appropriate in group-conflict is radically different from that which is appropriate within the in-group, and as such the comparison is inapt.
Also, the standard practice for millennia was to execute the soldiers, and to enslave the women and children. We don't do that anymore.
The enslaved soldiers definitely would have still been out-group after being enslaved, and if anything more prone to massive violence. You're correct that executions were also common, but I don't think either of us have the data to talk about "standard practice" in this case. And yet, an argument that says, "hard labor cannot be more efficient than execution" required a preponderance of the evidence, while my position (that hard labor can be made to be more efficient) requires only a collection of positive examples, regardless of how representative they are of average behavior.
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Forced labour probably doesn't pay for itself if you have to pay the man with the whip a first-world middle-class salary. The gap in productivity between a slave and a free worker has grown a lot larger a society has got more productive.
The cost to feed/house/guard a prisoner in the US is significantly higher than the annual earnings of a full-time minimum-wage worker, which is roughly the value you can extract from a forced worker (and more than you can get competing with the 3rd worlders on MTurk). The Nazi forced labour systems (the concentration camps that were not extermination camps, the Jewish ghettos, the forced labour of kidnapped French boys in Germany) were profitable, but the workers were not getting enough food for long-term survival, and the guards were cheap conscripts.
I'm almost absolutely positive it could. The carceral system-- and in particular the prison labor system-- is inefficient because it has misaligned incentives at every level due to a complete lack of consensus about its actual goals plus institutional inertia from times with totally different values. If we're talking about making dramatic reforms anyways (which would be required to significantly streamline the process of executing criminals) then we could orient things towards actually making the existence of prisoners net remunerative for society.
Uh, imprisonment in the US is ridiculously expensive, and that's mostly security costs which don't exactly get easier if the prisoners are doing hard labor.
Our justice system is expensive because it's poorly designed. Or rather, because it wasn't designed-- because it's just a long pile-up of compromises with no guiding ethos. And yet, despite that, if we assume we're not going to redesign it, then imprisonment is still cheaper than the death penalty. If we assume we are going to redesign it, then why no redesign it so that criminals directly repay their contributions to society?
People demand that prisons be punitive while at the same time squeamish about the exact nature of punishment. Of course that leads to poor optimization for economic efficiency. We could get a lot more efficient use out of prisoners if we were a lot more judicious about exactly which rights we chose to violate, while at the same time not losing our heads if the same measures end up making prisoners happy. For example, encouraging moderate cocaine use but then predicating their supply on being productive and compliant.
(I'm not saying that specific intervention would solve our problem, just using it as an example of the sort of measure no one is even willing to consider.)
I'm also addressing your comment here:
... with the above. Historically, slaves did plenty of complicated, specialized work that required a surprisingly high level of education. In rome,
That in the modern day compelled labour is typically done by people with only the desire for and ability to compel uncomplicated work doesn't mean we'd have to stick to that paradigm. We imprison plenty of lawyers, hedge fund managers, accountants, scientists, etcetera. It shouldn't be impossible to convince them to do work that's on net beneficial to society even if we have to pay them with cash or reductions to their sentences.
No we don’t. Rome captured some scribes as slaves, it’s pretty rare that a person commits a worthy-of-imprisonment crime while even able to work a factory job, let alone something high paying.
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Indeed.
So these prisoners toiling under the lash had better all be full time employed professional workers for the labor camp to break even.
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I guess the question is do you need the work to be economically viable? Maybe if prisoners were forced to do non pecuniary very hard work for 12 hours a day prison would be a much worse place to be and prison might be easier to manage (since the inmates would be exhausted).
This was tried in various forms in England in the 19th century after the Victorian Gold Rush attracted enough free settlers to Australia that convicts were no longer welcome there. (The legal term was "imprisonment with hard labour"). It failed because in order to be effectively punitive for people from the kind of rough background that produces criminals, hard labour needed to be hard enough to kill a significant fraction of the people assigned it.
The Victorians were perfectly comfortable hanging criminals who committed capital offences, and there was a lot of capital offences. So working criminals to death for less-than-capital offences was ultimately rejected as cruel.
Ok, but the American underclass isn't used to doing backbreaking labor. Bosses prefer Guatemalans for a reason.
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The gulags had lots of disciplinary problems despite prisoners being literally worked to death on a regular basis.
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The number of lies spread about this case and how uncritically large parts of the population accept them have made me even more cynical. I didn't think that was possible.
It's been like watching people blasted by a firehose of bullshit and respond by puking what they swallowed into each other's mouths.
The messaging apparatus is shockingly effective, and I'm not sure if it's possible to do anything about it under our existing legal system.
And even if you do fix the problem at the source by abolishing "the innocent project" and their media accomplices, how do you even arrange your society recognizing that so many people are just blank canvases for propaganda?
His girlfriend never claimed the reward. She came forward after he was arrested because he had promised to kill her and her family if she told anyone.
No, a leftist 5th columnist elected in 2018 with no connection to the original case tried to ruin the already won case. You'll be shocked at who funded his campaign (no you won't)
Lies and liars make me angry. Any I notice go on a permanent list of irredeemable monsters. Every lie told about this case is so blatant and malicious I can't see any explanation except that they don't care about truth or even acknowledge the concept of it, and their only goal is to unleash murderers on the innocent.
We're now in a situation where both the public defenders and prosecutors are bought by the same leftist billionaire, and the entire justice system is a circus of sociopathic procedural manipulation to achieve political outcomes. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
First you actually teach them to evaluate evidence. This was one of the great shocks of Covid for me. Nobody could actually think with any coherence. Either the person seems to reflexively agree with the leadership or reflexively disagree with the leadership. Very few people were looking for alternatives, examining evidence, or even asking questions. It was just “the health department says X, so they must be right/wring,” and that was the end of it.
Some I think are incapable of such thoughts, and thus I think they probably should just obey/believe their betters. I’m not really sure exactly how many people are just too stupid to think for themselves, but it’s certainly a good number of people who no matter what you do will fall for propaganda.
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...the actual achieved outcome was that they executed the guy, no?
Did you research how they did it? The state AG's intervention was the only thing that stopped them from overturning the process from 1998.
The criminals, the media, the defense, and the prosecutors are all on the same side and all literally employed by the same leftist prison abolition groups, and the only people still opposing them are a handful of right wing politicians.
They're mostly succeeding in their goal of releasing violent criminals to kill again (see my link to the SC case), and the occasional failure just gives them more propaganda material.
It was a fair assumption that you were referring to the case in question where, again, the actual achieved outcome was that they executed the guy.
I am referring to the case here, where they would have gotten away with it if not for those meddling
kidsattorney general.One lucky wrench foiling an otherwise perfect plot just highlights how easily they usually get away with it without us ever hearing about it. Just check out the "success stories" on the innocence project site and read between the lines that all those guys were as guilty as this one.
They released 14% of the entire prison population in 2020 using covid as an excuse, and if you read that paper and don't acknowledge that their goal is total prison abolition I don't know what else to tell you.
And if you think they care about the concept of truth when it comes to lawfare, just check out the "disparities" section that starts
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The actual outcome was achieved years ago, and they were not capable of overturning it. Their efforts to overturn it bode ill for more recent cases, and especially for the cases they'll be initiating going forward. "Justice was served in this case because the people now in power did not have a time machine" is not a terribly reassuring summary.
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I don't think this is true. Justice should be justice. A bunch of convicted murderers in states without the death penalty don't get even a quarter of the extra attention lavished on this guy.
Moreover, I think the DNA evidence is plain inconclusive. A bunch of hucksters are spinning this as DNA EXONERATES which is just totally nonsense -- DNA cannot exonerate someone except by implicating someone else more strongly.
That's not quite true; the absence of DNA that would certainly be expected if the crime was committed by the defendant is evidence that he didn't commit it. But in this case it probably just means he wore gloves, so it doesn't hold.
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I’m very glad he’s dead, and that would be the case even if it somehow turned out he was innocent of the particular crime he was executed for. His long rapsheet is full of crimes which, if we lived in a sane country, would be punishable by death - particularly when committed in succession by the same individual. Marcellus Williams deserved to die a long time before he did, and if it wasn’t for this robbery it would have been for a different one; consider this one a make-up call for all the times he unjustly evaded execution before now.
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Some base rates for callibration: In the United States, about 20 people are executed a year. Every few years, a story like this about a supposedly innocent man who is (about to be) executed gains traction in the media and online. Is it plausible that one out of every 50 or so executions is of someone falsely accused? I think so. I would expect the false positive rate to be about that order of magnitude.
On the other hand, there is an entire legal-industrial complex that exists for the sole purpose of fighing tooth and nail for every single person on death row to be granted clemency. The tiniest procedural hiccups or missing puzzle pieces can be blown up into claims of actual innocence. The only proper description of the evidence is the evidence itself. There is a reason that findings of the trial court are given deference. The judge and jury who tried the case were much more familiar with the evidence than you or me.
Why? There are 21k murders a year in America. The clearance rate may plausibly drop that down to 16k resulting in a trial. Perhaps 14k convicted. Out of 14k, those with the most evidence and evilness become candidates for execution. The amount of inspection that these cases get would not lead to a 2% false positive rate. It is the legal equivalent of building a bridge, the failure rate is more like 1/10,000
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Indeed, I doubt it's quite that high. For regular convictions, I'd probably say 1/200. For capital cases probably 1/1000.
There are 1-2 exonerations each year where DNA evidence that was not presented at trial unambiguously exonerates the defendant. The US takes so long to litigate death penalty cases that this number should drop slightly further as we start executing the people whose first trials happened after DNA evidence became ubiquitous.
So the rate of actual innocence among people convicted at the first capital trial is closer to 1 in 20, unfortunately.
Why does this happen? Some of it is actual dishonest and corrupt prosecutors. A lot of it is that the typical tough-on-crime conservative voter (thanks for being the existence proof, @Hoffmeister25) and the politicians they elect doesn't care if a career violent criminal like Marcellus Williams is actually guilty of the specific crime they are condemned for - he was already in jail for a crime he was uncontroversially guilty of that would be capital in a "tough" system at the time.
The more interesting reason is that public prosecutors don't have clients. For every other lawyer with a duty of zealous advocacy, there is a client who has the ability to call the lawyer off, and is morally (and occasionally legally) responsible for not sending their lawyer out to zealously advocate for an injustice. (In the UK the split legal profession creates an element of this, with a Crown Prosecution Service solicitor making the decision to prosecute and preparing the case, but a hired barrister handling the courtroom advocacy). It is hard to switch between the mindsets of "My job in Court is to make the best possible case regardless of what actually happened - in this courtroom it is the defence attorney's job to get innocent defendants acquitted and mine to get guilty defendants convicted." to the mindset of "Am I actually advancing the interests of the People by continuing to prosecute this innocent defendant?"
since we supposedly wish to let ten guilty men go free rather than let one innocent man go to the gallows, 1 in 20 is pretty good! is my math wrong?
as stated here https://www.themotte.org/post/1181/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/253893?context=8#context by https://www.themotte.org/@hydroacetylene
Indeed, "1 in 20 people on death row are innocent of the capital crime" is mildly unsettling.
"1 in 20 scumbags who end up on death row are innocent of the capital crime" is significantly less unsettling and feels like an acceptable error rate.
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There's a lot of talk about this. Apparently he had a history of home burglaries and armed robberies, he had both the laptop and the purse from the victim (with her ID!). The DNA found on the knife was not from a potential alternate suspect but some police officer who mishandled it in the station after testing and finding no DNA could be recovered.
Seems pretty open and shut to me.
Do you have a cite for this? It would be super helpful because of all the "BUT THE DNA EXONERATED HIM" discourse.
I haven't tracked down the underlying filing yet, but the Washington Post reports:
Thank you sir.
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