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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28318 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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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.

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.

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.

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%.

In 2018, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that among defendants charged with a felony, 68% were convicted (59% of a felony and the remainder of a misdemeanor) with felony conviction rates highest for defendants originally charged with motor vehicle theft (74%), driving-related offenses (73%), murder (70%), burglary (69%), and drug trafficking (67%); and lowest for defendants originally charged with assault (45%).

Federal prosecutors only go to trial when they are really confident, so their conviction rate is higher.

Japanese prosecutors ask the judges to declare guilt and they almost always declare guilt.

I very much doubt Japan's justice system is even one of many causal factors contributing to their low crime rate.

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.

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?

  1. Because our jurisprudence has established a million little procedural tripwires for a prosecutor to accidentally stumble over, which can lead to a retrial or vacation of judgment.
  2. Because it allows for jury nullification.
  3. Even if it doesn’t reach a different result, it is far more expensive and time-consuming affair, and turns things into a public spectacle/media event.

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.

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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