How many people are in jail based on faked data? | Hacker News Reader

How many people are in jail based on faked data?

slate.com

132 pointsAmorymeltzer33 comments

The main problem I see is that we don't look at the legal system like any other system or process; despite it's very high stakes we hold it to a very low, non-scientific standard of poor engineering. There are obvious solutions, or at least necessary steps to solutions, that would be implemented in any professional context (think of your own job):

* Quality control: Determine and track the accuracy of your system's output. This is done for systems with much less impact than human lives and freedom; why isn't it done for our legal system?

* More QC: Someone independent should be verifying the output in each case.

* The results from the first two steps should be incorporated into the design of the legal system. Build quality into the system.

* Accountability: If serious errors are committed (and someone being imprisoned in error is a serious error) people should be fired. Why does the DA still have a job? For reckless and negligent acts, civil and criminal lawsuits should follow.

As far as I can tell, the people who operate the legal system try to do their jobs with no feedback. They go through their process and have no idea how well it has worked. Imgaine if you were told to write software like that. How can they do their jobs well even if they want to?

The feedback system in place in most countries seems to have been the press, but unfortunately that's mostly historical. In the past the press did a much better job of performing their role of the 'fourth estate' than what is on display in the present. Maybe the tide will turn and the press will find a new backbone but more often than not they are in an incestuous relationship with the elements they should be critical of and this strongly diminishes their ability to provide some much needed counterweight.

> The feedback system in place in most countries seems to have been the press, but unfortunately that's mostly historical. In the past the press did a much better job of performing their role of the 'fourth estate'

I'm not sure I agree that it's worse now, but I don't have any data or research. Would you happen to know of any?

I think even at its best, the press doesn't have the resources to follow up on more than a tiny minority of cases.

> Would you happen to know of any?

Reading the newspapers for the last 38 years or so is my source, I don't know what it is like where you live but the trend is very disturbing. It's all about 'access' and advertising money today and I'm fairly sure that it wasn't like that in the past (though for sure these are not absolutes, it is merely a trend that the reporting skews far more towards entertainment and embedded opinions than it does towards reporting the facts and letting people draw their own conclusions).

Compare that to medical or aviation regulations. The legal system has the potential to hurt people as much as these industries so it should have the level of regulation.

>despite it's very high stakes we hold it to a very low, non-scientific standard of poor engineering.

The problem is that nobody cares about the standard, because our society overwhelmingly feels that criminal defendants are just criminals. There is no political will to improve this situation either, as any attempt to improve the standards will be seen by voters as a "soft-on-scrime" measure designed to let more guilty people go free.

Unfortunately the rights of criminal defendants are something that few people care about until they or a loved one are charged with a crime. I don't see this changing anytime soon.

There are large communities where many people are or know criminal defendants, such as poor communities in large cities. I don't understand why they don't make their voices heard.

The only way poor US communities seem to be able to get their voices heard is by rioting.

There's been an entire summer of riots about injustice in the justice system. Did it change anything?

Much of the bad stuff in law comes from the reasonableness standard, which is inherently subjective. Each of these are apprised by specific sets of facts unique to each case.

This means no QC is possible.

Most of the issues that you describe are supposed to be addressed via the democratic process. Unfortunately, local races like county district attorney are increasingly one sided affairs resolved in the primary election with no real contested multi party vote.

Between the democrats big tent and the erosion of the republicans in most places, democracy is in rough shape.

> Despite the ongoing scandal, the district attorneys take the position that it is not their responsibility to help identify Dookhan or Farak defendants. They lack the budgets or resources to do so, and—as they have argued in oral argument in the Bridgeman case—prosecutors have no special duty to notify defendants that their convictions might have been obtained with evidence that was falsified by government employees.

Mildly nauseating.

This isn't just a matter of a few rogue employees. Seen in light of http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc... it looks like deep, systemic corruption. Notice how there's no mention of any of these labs processing blinded control samples? That's the root cause of the problem. What they're doing isn't science at all.

I'd like to see someone try the legal argument that evidence from a crime lab can't be presented to a jury unless it has reasonable quality control procedures.

You can think of crime lab employees as content creators.

The article linked near the top is worth checking out too: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...

> The problem is that, as a purely practical matter, there is simply no easy way to correct it.

There isn't a way I can think of to correct it ex post facto, but we can definitely prevent these kinds of problems better. One big area where we can improve things is on data collected.

Currently, the only data I can usually find on prosecutors is usually their conviction rates. But the job of a prosecutor isn't just to convict people, it's to convict people who are guilty. Highly visible conviction rates mean that a prosecutor is incentivized to try only easy-to-win cases, even if the defendant in an easy-to-win case is innocent or the defendant in a hard-to-win case is guilty. We need more effort put into overturning convictions generally, and careful collection data on overturned convictions and that data needs to be publicized equally to conviction rates. If 5% of a prosecutor's convictions are overturned either through appeal or reversal, that should be a huge red flag.

The other thing is, the vast majority of convictions are of poor people who are defended by a public defender. Public defenders are underfunded, understaffed, and as a result, often underqualified (if you're a great lawyer, there's no reason to become a public defender when you can get paid far more for easier work doing prosecution or private practice). Who knows how much of this false evidence would have been discovered earlier if a competent, well-funded, and well-staffed defense lawyer had investigated the evidence? At the very least, I think prosecution budgets should be tied to defense budgets: there's no reason prosecution should ever be funded more than defense. And it might be worth investigating putting public defenders through the same election process as district attorneys (I'm not sure this would work, but I'm not sure it has been tried).

Another way would be to move data acquisition about a case, such as DNA, etc. into the judicial branch, or at least out of law enforcement and prosecution. Tests should be blind, and equally accessible to the defense, and QA'ed by sending test data through the system. Prosecutors also effectively set the schedule for labs, which means difficult cases like rapes pile up.

Or hey, a new "information" branch.

I would argue that a prosecutor's job is not about guilt or innocence, and that it is to just convict people. Just like it's the defending attorney's job to get people acquitted, regardless of guilt or innocence. It is the court's role to convict guilty people and acquit innocent people, which in theory happens when you allow a prosecutor who wants to convict and a defending attorney who wants to acquit to argue in front of an impartial judge and jury.

In theory. It's a wacky system when you think about it and there's plenty of places it can fall down. But as built, I don't think it's the prosecutor's job to decide innocence or guilt.

They do need to follow the rules, though. If they're obtaining convictions by violating the rules, they need to be punished strongly. If they're obtaining false convictions within the rules then the rules need to be reexamined.

I don't see any reason why there should be symmetry between the defense's aim to get the best outcome for their client and the prosecutor's office's role to get the worst outcome.

Instead, I'm fine if every stage and every actor in the system was biased towards a finding of not guilty.

To that end, I do think it's incumbent on the prosecutors to only seek to convict those it believes are guilty rather than those it believes it can convict.

I disagree.

A prosecutor has the full weight of a government and the associated resources behind him. To bring those resources to bear on someone they know is innocent should be a crime all in its own right.

The prosecutors job is to pursue a case they know is unjust against a defendant they know is innocent?

Because this helps society?

It shouldn't be possible for a prosecutor to know that a defendant is innocent and simultaneously be confident that they have a solid case that can result in a guilty verdict.

A prosecutor trying to optimize for conviction rates will still refrain from prosecuting people when he doesn't have a good case. It's just based on the quality of the case, not the presumed guilt or innocence of the accused.

That's an easy scenario. The prosecutor sees you (elsewhere) while the crime is being committed. Later, they charge you anyways because the evidence seems strong enough to convince others.

Prosecutors are typically required to give the defense all evidence they possess that could possibly aid their defense. They may not actually do this, but that doesn't make it actually a prosecutor's job to prosecute in this hypothetical.

Yeah, and yet the prosecutors in this story are saying they don't even have an obligation to let you know when their case has been shown to be fraudulent.

My point of eyewitness testimony is that it would truly convince the DA but wouldn't be valuable evidence in the trial. They could say "I think I saw him elsewhere" to be truthful but say it in a way that didn't give it enough weight to counteract the other, conflicting (because you weren't really there) evidence.

If this came out, the DA would not even face censure or reprimand, let alone firing or criminal charges.

If a reliable witness with no reason to lie came out and testified that they saw the suspect far away from the crime scene when the alleged crime was committed, that wouldn't be seen as compelling evidence for the innocence of the accused?

I meant to specifically under-tell the story. Make sure that your testimony was questioned, don't argue strongly, etc.

I don't know the hand-ranking of various legal maneuvers but I am curious where a DA's eye-witness testimony would rank compared to a cell-phone location trace, or hair samples, etc.

The "war on drugs" has easily been one of the largest institutional failures of the late 20th century and is on track to be one of the major failures of the early 21st. It has single handedly shown to snyone who will look that the entire system is tainted past the point of self-repair. The loss of liberty, the mass invasion privacy and the subversion of the the post-justice system are just the most obvious side effects of a government determined to judge-dread first and seek approval later.

The war on drugs is just a manifeststion of what is possible if the system is willing to turn in ward for its own benifit. How long will the lower class continue to be segregated and disrespected in the name of a lost and poisonous cause no major politician has the self respect to stand up against? How many more people will we label sub-human and dispose of in all but name for the supposed benefit of society?

I don't understand how you guys don't have a revolution over the manifest injustice of your "justice" system. And I don't mean riots, I mean actual change of government.

How about creating serious penalties for prosecutors who use falsified evidence, regardless of how it was obtained or their knowledge thereof. Our society, for whatever unfathomable reasons, places special trust in prosecutors (and police), trust that is placed without cause, reason, or consequence for it to be broken. Thus, we can expect much steeper penalties when things go wrong. If prosecutors faced the threat of jail for messing up cases, they'd be more careful. How about a day in jail for every day that is mistakenly assigned to an innocent person?

The argument that they need immunity is total bullshit and in no way reflects their actual job. In fact, removing immunity is the only way to make prosecutors accountable. If they are not 100% sure of their conviction, then they shouldn't be convicting. Really simple logic. If you can't do your job within the law, you're not doing your job, you're just a criminal (as most prosecutors are morally). Same for police. These two groups of public servants should be held to higher standards than the rest. For even minor offenses, there should be long jail times. It goes without saying that when offenses by prosecutors or law enforcement are investigated, special outside prosecutors and investigators are necessary.

Truth is, the solution is simple but it will never be implemented because no one in the US law enforcement/justice system cares about justice. The buck no longer stops anywhere. We have given these people such power that they are essentially all-powerful. It is beyond comprehension why our society would trust the scumbags who get jobs as prosecutors and police officers, usually the stupidest, meanest, most horrible people you can imagine that just can't find work anywhere else and tend to have superiority complexes. These are the people we trust with life and death and then we wonder why thousands of innocent people are locked up or why our system is so fucking racist?

In America, solutions are simple, well defined, and actionable. Too bad no one who can act on them does. I think that is likely a huge reason for the decline of our society. The solutions exists and are obvious to anyone with a middle school education, yet we can't seem to enact any of them. Is it any wonder that the people in charge of justice don't care (and admit to not caring) about justice itself and who gets wrongfully convicted? Actually no. The nature of the power given to them almost dictates that they will abuse it. The sad part is that the people accept such an unjust situation and are satisfied with reciting cliched mantras like "the land of the free" all the while being enslaved by an incredibly unjust system.

Then again, most people affected by injustice in the US are either not white or poor. For all intents and purposes, from the point of the US justice system, they might as well not be American citizens. That's how they're treated anyway.

> How about a day in jail for every day that is mistakenly assigned to an innocent person?

You'd never find anyone to be a prosecutor ever again.

I'm willing to compromise a bit on the time, but the point is they need to face real consequences for their actions or they will continue to be irresponsible with the lives of others.

Falsifying evidence is a crime already. Negligence is professional misconduct and a firing offence. Mistakes in good faith will happen from time to time. There certainly should be oversight to catch them ASAP, and incompetents should be fired.

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