This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
"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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link