AMA with one of the pro bono defense attorneys for Richard Glossip
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If we can't stop the state from killing a person known to most likely be innocent, it makes me wonder what hope we have with genuinely complex issues such as gun violence.
My first thought in response to that was, "What about a presidential pardon?" Then I realized this was a state case, and so the power of clemency lies with governor Mary Fallin, who has rejected calls for clemency. Shame on her!
That means that 96% are guilty. That's beyond a reasonable doubt and probably not far from the best accuracy you can expect from an inherently fuzzy system. The system is not the problem. The problem is people who are willing to still have the death penalty in a system where beyond a reasonable doubt means 1 in 20 people who are killed are innocent. That's not the system's fault. That's the public's value judgment.
The visceral revulsion evoked by executing someone innocent must be nearly universal, despite disagreement about the death penalty itself.
So I guess I'm suggesting that words "innocent" or "guilty" suggest a clarity of judgement that most people don't actually have in practice. So the condemned didn't actually kill the victim. He must have been involved somehow!
I disagree. A 1 in 25 chance that someone is innocent certainly seems like a reasonable doubt to me. Even 1 in 100 seems like a reasonable doubt. 1 in 1000 is maybe unreasonable, but 1 in 25?
At any rate, the formulation that the legal system prefers to use is the other way round. Rather than how many innocent people we should put in jail, the question is how many guilty people we should allow to go free to prevent a single innocent person from going to jail. The idea that an innocent person could possibly be convicted is totally at odds with the way the legal community sees itself. (Which is why, incidentally, it is so difficult for the law to accept that innocent people have been wrongly convicted.) So I disagree that the system is not at fault. The legal system must recognize that false positives exist and it needs to handle them intelligently.
By the way, there's a wonderful article by Eugene Volokh speculating on what an acceptable number of guilty men to let go free is [1].
4% is not beyond reasonable, it is still in the quite plausible territory. 0.0000000001% is beyond reasonable. (And with 7, 000, 000, 000 on the planet and the birthday paradox, even that)
I do not think they should go for the death penalty on this case because it's too indirect and because parts of Sneed's story are suspect, not to mention because the death penalty can't be undone if there's a mistake. However, I'm also convinced this guy is actually guilty based on the evidence currently known to me (and I will modify it as more evidence becomes available to me, as any rational person should).
Both Glossip and someone sharing the bed with him (the docs aren't clear on there relationship, but I'm going to guess 'girlfriend/wife') lied to investigators to give Glossip an alibi and he appears to have split a large sum of money with the guy who actually held the murder weapon (Sneed). Moreover, the alibi is given as it may be evidence knowing the perpetrator ahead of time. He also told lies to keep people away from the body all day and they only found the body after realizing that he'd been telling lots of lies to people.
I would like them to investigate further and gather physical proof--for example, it sounds like there should be hairs/fingerprints at the murder scene if he helped dispose of the body but it's not clear how hard anyone investigated this, because they didn't review the evidence collection practiced.
So I can agree with the "we shouldn't execute this guy" part of it, but I am not convinced of his innocence and I'm reminded of the Reiser case where there were a lot of techies who were surprised when his guilt was proven when he led investigators to his wife's body. Back then, almost everyone just ignored the fact that they spent all their time lying to investigators even before they should have known they were suspected.
Could learn a thing or two from watching Keyser Soze hustle and learn to spot all the lies that were hiding in plain sight. I mean, I almost never see people reasoning about things like "an innocent person would have no way of knowing that" in particular, how one would know to lie about things before they should have known the hotel manager was dead. We have multiple witnesses saying that Glossip lied about the manager's whereabouts. I don't trust Sneed at all, but Glossip's involvement in the murder seems solid.
It's difficult to believe this is true when he was found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in two different trials.
"Juries are routinely instructed that the defendant is presumed innocent and the prosecution must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but we don’t really know whether either of these instructions has an effect on the average juror. Do jurors understand the concept of a presumption? If so, do they understand how a presumption is supposed to operate? Do they assume that the presumption remains in place until it is overcome by persuasive evidence or do they believe it disappears as soon as any actual evidence is presented? We don’t really know.
Nor do we know whether juries really draw a distinction between proof by a preponderance, proof by clear and convincing evidence and proof beyond a reasonable doubt. These levels of proof, which lawyers and judges assume to be hermetically sealed categories, may mean nothing at all in the jury room. My own experience as a juror certainly did nothing to convince me that my fellow jurors understood and appreciated the difference. The issue, rather, seemed to be quite simply: Am I convinced that the defendant is guilty?"
[1] http://georgetownlawjournal.org/files/2015/06/Kozinski_Prefa...
I think this specific flavor of jury trials, gun ownership and the second amendment, this insanely broad free speech thing, they all are consequences of the same fact:
America optimizes for resilience against a hypothetical future totalitarian regime and happily sacrifices acceptable outcomes in the present.
I'm not convinced it achieves even the former, but that's obviously highly controversial.
Well, it turns out we've screwed up any semblance of a 'presumption of innocence' by intermingling that concept with forced group dynamics.
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From a previous post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8546354 :
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...Because it is not voting in the sense of other voting. A criminal jury verdict has to be unanimous, but we send them to a sealed room and tell them 'Come back when you have a unanimous verdict.', rather than "Oh, you voted and disagreed? Well, Not Guilty then."
There is a strong understanding among the populace that a jury is a majoritarian body, that unanimity is a legal fiction, and that juries which can't effectively suppress dissenting opinions are failures in their social function, and we demand both extended "deliberation", and a completely new trial to correct their issue.
We even reinforce this understanding in caselaw; A last-ditch effort to un-"hang" a jury is termed an Allen Charge, which is apparently when the judge instructs the jury's minority vote that their position isn't reasonable while glaring at them menacingly.
"
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How does a "Presumption of innocence" held by one member, survive that group dynamic? A juror who is unconvinced by the case the prosecution makes doesn't have to say "I'm unconvinced", they have to actively fight for the defendant in deliberation, and convince the other people to change their votes, in order to leave the room. The holders of minority opinions are entrained to see themselves as inconveniencing every other member of the jury, keeping them from work and families. If they do not feel strongly about the verdict one way or another, the ideals of the justice system say that this is an absolute case for dismissal, because 'better ten guilty men go free than for one man to be wrongfully convicted', but faced with these social incentives, what do you expect them to do?
We've created a system where we may as well tell jurors: "If not all of you believe strongly in the verdict, forget the presumption of innocence and go with the decision of whichever among you has the strongest opinions that are the least persuadable".
If you want a system that preserves a presumption of innocence, switch to a unanimity-which-fails-to-acquittal or a supermajority-which-fails-to-acquittal standard rather than a unanimity-which-fails-to-another-vote standard.
"Even more troubling are doubts raised by psychological research showing that“whoever makes the first assertion about something has a large advantage over everyone who denies it later.”43 The tendency is more pronounced for older people than for younger ones, and increases the longer the time-lapse between assertion and denial. So is it better to stand mute rather than deny an accusation? Apparently not, because “when accusations or assertions are met with silence, they are more likely to feel true.”44
To the extent this psychological research is applicable to trials, it tends to refute the notion that the prosecution pulls the heavy oar in criminal cases. We believe that it does because we assume juries go about deciding cases by accurately remembering all the testimony and weighing each piece of evidence in a linear fashion, selecting which to believe based on assessment of its credibility or plausibility. The reality may be quite different. It may be that jurors start forming a mental picture of the events in question as soon as they first hear about them from the prosecution witnesses. Later-introduced evidence, even if pointing in the opposite direction, may not be capable of fundamentally altering that picture and may, in fact, reinforce it.45 And the effect may be worse the longer the prosecution’s case lasts and, thus, the longer it takes to bring the contrary evidence before the jury. Trials in general, and longer trials in particular, may be heavily loaded in favor of whichever party gets to present its case first—the prosecution in a criminal case and the plaintiff in a civil case. If this is so, it substantially undermines the notion that we seldom convict an innocent man because guilt must be proven to a sufficient certainty. It may well be that, contrary to instructions, and contrary to their own best intentions, jurors are persuaded of whatever version of events is first presented to them and change their minds only if they are given very strong reasons to the contrary."
Other than that: since people indicted are more likely to have committed the crimes than the general population (oh, I can already hear them scream...), you'd have to take that into account if you really wanted to calculate probabilities.
Most of the evidence is Glossip telling some very suspicious lies about a dead guy's whereabouts and allegedly splitting $4,000 with Sneed.
I'd still say you're better off not executing people as a matter of policy--you can never undo a mistake in that process--but I'm not very convinced of Glossip's innocence. Given that it mostly relies on testimony, all of which is inherently unreliable, it's a bad use of the death penalty. I'm guessing the prosecutors used it with the intention to force Glossip to cave and plead guilty, but that really doesn't sit well with me.
He could very well be innocent of the "mastermind" or "for hire" charge. There's no evidence other than one person's testimony. This case wouldn't be notable at all if he'd been sentenced to life for assisting the murderer.
Note that despite all this "innocence" talk, Richard admits to lying to police, instructing cleaning crews to avoid the room, robbing his employer's car (after the murder?), and, it seems, pretending to help with the search even though he knew the body would not be found there. From what I've made out of the timeline, he only reversed his statements after it was clear how things were going down. So it would appear that he was trying to cover up the murder.
While one person's testimony shouldn't be enough to add the "for hire" enhancement, why are people saying he's innocent? Certainly his actions that he admits to would be enough to pin an accessory or accomplice charge of murder.