I was falsely arrested
iwasfalselyarrested.com
iwasfalselyarrested.com
I would propose that the state owes you double the highest paid salary that you have earned in your career for the duration of your stay in prison. This is to both make a person whole for their missed earnings, and to repair the damages that having an arrest on your record does to your future earning potential. Further, there should be a minimum cap of $5,000 / month, and a maximum cap of $1M / year. Finally, I would propose that this value goes up by 10% each year to account for potential career growth over that time.
Not only does this attempt to make someone whole for the time that they lost, but it puts a real financial burden on the state for making these kinds of errors. Right now, the state faces almost no downsides other than the cost of housing someone in a prison.
Edit: as noted in a comment below "Wrongfully arrested" may be more appropriate read as "Wrongfully jailed". This program or policy would be targeted at affecting prosecutorial misconduct and not police misconduct. While police misconduct is still a massive issue I think there are different policies that should be used to address police misconduct.
"Not Guilty" — in a society with a presumption of innocence — is the same as innocent. If we find you Not Guilty, and you spent 3 months in jail, the State should repair you for that harm.
"Charges Dropped" after a brief-arrest is not something I would punish. "Charges Dropped" after someone sat in jail for 2 months awaiting a trial? Pay up.
I agree with everything in your post except this; the state does not care whether it is burdened or not, it simply taxes the citizenry to cover these expenses. At least a portion of this compensation should come from the responsible parties if this type of problem is to be discouraged. Imagine that you are a prosecutor or police officer set on obtaining a conviction for moral, corruption, or career reasons; will the possibility of future costs to the state give you any pause, or make you reconsider your actions?
So, when a prosecutor says: "I put away 300 people, with a 97% conviction rate" their supervisor can say: "Yes, but you also cost this office $250,000 with your 2 wrongful convictions. We're passing on you and giving the promotion to Janice who put away 260 people on a 95% conviction rate, but only cost the office $10,000."
Another interesting attack front would be modern riot control techiques like "kettling". Kettling is the practice of herding protesters with chemicals and force into a road blocked at both ends by police walls, ordering everyone to disperse, then arresting everyone and charging them with failure to disperse. Usually, the charges are simply dropped just before habeus corpus issues set in - after people sit for three days in jail without even a hearing. Kettling is an affront to the ideals of the Constitution and it'd be wonderful to see it either legally abolished, or made unaffordable with successful lawsuits.
Prosecutorial misconduct and irresponsibility is a big reason why we have obscene rates of incarceration. I totally agree that we should radically reduce the rates of incarceration, but how do you do that? Do you tell prosecutors to incarcerate fewer people? Do you give each one a maximum quota? Do you apply a penalty for each case that they get wrong?
Anyway, in the UK, YOU are invoiced for board and lodging upon release[1] [2]. The UK Home Office use it as a method of effectively diminishing any compensation payment to negligible sums (but oddly, only for male prisoners - female ones are not invoiced, apparently). 27 years wrongly imprisoned gets you total of around 46 pounds (around $80). [3]
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-458006/Man-wrongly-j... [2] http://www.rense.com/general50/25yt.htm [3] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/mar/22/sean-hodgson-compe...
Several states give you $50k / year, but 24 states give you 0: http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2012/03/us/table.wrongful.con...
Conversely if you set a fixed dollar amount, then you incentivize poorer people to provoke a false arrest in hopes of getting a payday (similar to common insurance scams seen today.)
black people have no alternative to understanding how the world really works
Class isn't immediately visible. Skin is.
You mean just like a racist society does (which makes the statement even more accurate)?
Because even a "rich/european/etc" black person is still a n... when it comes to a racist society, and while his experiences might be better, they'd still be shaped by racism.
The fact there are outliers doesn't mean a blanket statement is "racist" as long as it's accurate for the most. It's doubly not racist if it's positive (and "understanding how the world really works" is a positive thing).
Given that blanket statements such as that, which are meant to imply "in general", are indistinguishable from actually bigoted blanket statements which are meant to be taken literally, it probably is a good discipline to always include "generally" or "typically" as a qualifier, each and every time. It has fallen out of fashion, but let's try to bring it back.
Context matters: in a discussion of percentages of a population holding particular views, where it is offered to explain why a certain percentage of blacks holding a view is improbable, that's not a blanket statement, its a statement about the relative frequency of experiences relevant to the belief in question.
It's actually a very accurate description of how a group that historically is facing systematic injustices and racism get to have fewer illusions than the comfortable majority.
If anything, it's ANTI-racist.
Not being racist is not the same as believing that racial minorities have absolutely the same experiences and outlooks as the majority.
A group of who had the cops enforce Jim Crow and segregation on them, or arrest, harass and shot them far more often than another group, has a different outlook on this "justice" thing.
The problem is that racists don't look into "diverse situations", just racial makeup.
E.g. is there any more diverse situation compared to a poor black guy from the ghetto, than being the President? And yet, even the President is often described, from private discussions down to protest banners in racism terms -- heck, even as a n....
Now it's not "racist". Can we move on?
EDIT: Clarified that it never was racist.
http://www.alternet.org/story/154587/1_in_3_black_men_go_to_...
I'd sooner let ten all-but-certain criminals walk free than convict even a single innocent person. But I am not most people. Furthermore, there is not a good demonstration that decreasing the error rate (which would require imprisoning less actual criminals whom lack certain evidence, etc.) is beneficial for society as a whole. I mean, there's no studies showing it is any worse off either, but I digress.
It's not an argument you can make to most people - they'd rather "keep their family safe from potential murderers" than "not be sentenced to 20 years in prison for a crime they didn't do" because they cannot imagine themselves being sentenced for 20 years for a crime they didn't do but they can imagine a criminal harming their family.
But probably some of those 10 will be repeat offenders. So how many innocent people will you see murdered in order to avoid imprisoning an innocent person? That's a different question, isn't it?
I think this gets to the question of "beneficial for society as a whole". If you stick some plausible values on this (say we're talking about people accused of major crimes, recidivism rate = X%, some weighted values assigned to harm for false imprisonment, being raped, being murdered, etc., and some plausible relationship between false conviction rate and non-conviction of those who are actually guilty), then it should be possible to calculate an optimum rate of convicting people.
(Two notes: First, as the rate of false convictions goes up, the rate of non-conviction of the guilty goes down. Second, calculating the optimum is going to depend on the exact values chosen for all those parameters, but it still could be an interesting exercise.)
All of them. With the difference in terminology: They are not being "set free" after being "knowingly guilty" but "remaining free" after "uncertain evidence".
>But probably some of those 10 will be repeat offenders. So how many innocent people will you see murdered in order to avoid imprisoning an innocent person? That's a different question, isn't it?
I'm well aware of the entire argument you are trying to make. Which is why I said the false conviction rate exists. People are willing to trade security from potential repeat offenders at someone else's expense, while never imagining themselves as that someone else.
Let me ask you this:
Would you serve a lifetime prison sentence for a crime you did not commit?
If you are not willing to serve one yourself - you have absolutely no right to ask someone else to do so for your or societies' security. That is my stance on this. People are only okay with this because they never imagine themselves becoming a part of that statistic. Likewise, nobody ever thinks they'll be the one to die in a car accident and even less that they'd be at fault for the accident. But it happens.
The thing is, if you let a serial killer off the hook because you didn't actually catch him red-handed (though the other evidence is very reliable) then you're killing innocents by inaction.
Therefore, we can reframe your question as: "Would you let you and your family get murdered by a repeat offender to ensure that no innocents are imprisoned?"
As long as there are prisoners, there will be some amount of innocents imprisoned, simply because it's almost impossible (entire impossible?) to prove that someone did something to a 100% certainty. By setting such insane standards you're killing way more innocents than the amount you'd falsely imprison.
No, its subject to less pre-conviction scrutiny than those charged with murders; at least, from the public defenders I've talked to, PDs assigned to homicides tend to be:
(1) the more experienced, skilled attorneys in the PDs office, and
(2) have the lowest caseloads, and thus the most time and resources to devote to each case.
That means that -- at least as regards those defendants relying on public defenders -- those charged with homicides have more effective representation to subject the prosecution to pre-conviction scrutiny. (For those not relying on public defenders, things may be different, but I suspect even there you'd find that the consequences faced means that more resources of those available to the defendant are devoted to the defense when the charge is murder, thus still subjecting the charges to greater pre-conviction scrutiny.)
The general prison population is subject to more pre-conviction scrutiny before it ever gets into court. People aren't charged with crimes by drawing straws from a hat -- but capital crimes are closer to that model than petty crimes are.
Your response doesn't address anything in my comment, unless you think people are assigned public defenders before being charged with a crime.
You've asserted, without evidence, some speculation about a motive that could result in that, but neither established that that motive and no counterbalancing force actual exist, nor established that the effect you attribute to that speculated difference exists. In any case, even if that difference in pre-charge scrutiny existed as you describe it, it wouldn't necessarily tip the overall balance of pre-conviction scrutiny in the same direction, since there are important things that happen in criminal prosecutions between charging and sentencing.
> Your response doesn't address anything in my comment
Except, you know, its argument about the overall balance of pre-conviction scrutiny.
> unless you think people are assigned public defenders before being charged with a crime.
I think that they are assigned public defenders between being charged and being convicted, which makes the quality of representation potentially quite important to the balance of pre-conviction sentencing.
It seems reasonable to expect that plea bargains at least slightly increase the rate of imprisonment of innocent persons.
Whether the guilty deserve the punishment they got (what with BS like "three strikes", "zero tolerance" etc) it's another matter altogether.
Maybe 95% of the middle- to upper-class white population of the US. (But probably not even that, unless by "deserve to be there" you mean "actually broke the law for which they were sentenced" rather than "deserve to be in prison for breaking the law for which they were sentenced"; I mean, its not like drug prohibition is that popular even among that group.)
EDIT: just realized that the parent actually says 95‰ (95 per mille) not 95%. That's equivalent to 9.5%. That may be correct, actually, but is probably not what was intended.
What if we tried funding the public defender's office with the same average amount of money per case handled as the prosecutor's office as? What effect would that have on both justice and people's perception of justice? And is this a simple enough test to be run with either public or private funds in a few sample municipalities as an experiment?
The larger issue is that prosecutors do this kind of thing routinely. Since most of them take jobs as prosecutors with an eye toward obtaining higher-paying jobs at prestigious law firms, perhaps the best way to combat this type of behavior would be a name-and-shame website. Every DA insisting on outlandish sentences for minor crimes, or that refuses to drop charges in the face of clear evidence that the someone is innocent, should be named and their record of inhumanity should haunt them at the top of Google search results for the remainder of their career.
I support any reasonable thing the public can do to help folks like him out. We live in a security state, and video cameras everywhere are beginning to show how rotten it is in places.
Having said all of that, I do not want to see us become self-indulgent with pity. There are 300 million people in the U.S. There are tens of thousands of cops. You could run a video like this everyday and statistically there still wouldn't be much incompetence or corruption going on.
It presents us with an interesting problem, which I'm seeing in not just police incompetence/corruption cases, but all across the political spectrum: when you have large numbers of people, even if an extremely small percentage of them do bad things, it's easy to paint a picture of them all doing bad things. That's true whether it's cops, members of political party X, members of group Y, or so on.
Note that I'm not saying it's an insignificant problem. I'm saying that this type of presentation, while powerful, provides us with zero context to gauge the size of the problem at all. When we consume such content, especially when it's highly emotionally manipulative, we should remember this.
I always get nervous when people say stuff like this because it's like... he says he doesn't think it's a small problem, but then the only thing he's talking about is how we have to be careful making claims about scale... Why would he bring that up except to question the scale of the problem?
But I must be missing something, because you explicitly said you're not doubting the scale of the problem. Maybe you can help me understand what you are trying to say about this story.
There is no context here, just a sad story. You can post a thousand of these stories. It all adds to to a bunch of "There's a bunch of sad stories in the world" without any other data.
It's odd, because I always get nervous about making comments like I did. People are much more interested in "who's side is he on" than critically looking at the information put in front of them.
Look, if consuming endless stories about the pain, sadness, and righteous anger that topic X provokes, all without any kind of context, then have fun with it. I gotta point out the logical problems, though, no matter which side of the discussion I'm on.
I live in Minneapolis, so I'm uncomfortably close to the current protests. There are plenty of nice, well-meaning cops out there spraying mace at people in my city for exercising their right to free speech and assembly. The Minneapolis police, as an institution have down a terrible job of handling the protests. (and please, people, don't turn this into a meta-discussion of the protesters or the original shooting. I'm just observing some facts here.)
The classic example of that is the "All lives matter" response to "black lives matter". Saying black lives matter is a response to the daily bigotry and institutional racism that black people in America suffer, every day. Responding to that with "all lives matter" is a way of disempowering even the acknowledgement of institutional racism, of denying the unique (and uniquely negative) experience of being black. But it sounds like equality. People who say it don't say it to be racist - quite the opposite. Being racist by acting not-racist. It's ironic and strange-loopy, but that's how it works.
Take it back to the post you're responding to. It's a reflexive defense of authority, the "few bad apples" argument. The first response to obvious institutional racism (really, this case boils down to "all blacks look alike") is to shout "Hey, the System isn't broken!" It's not broken if you're white, and you don't recognize how it treats people who aren't like you. It disacknowledges the experience of the individual at the hands of the System, by making sure defending the System comes first.
Thinking about this stuff is hard. Just watch... this comment will get a lot of downvotes, for even saying this stuff out loud.
Look at what you've done here: you've taken away my agency. Instead of letting me engage in a conversation, you've pronounced some over-arching reason for my comment, thereby not only eliminating anything I might have to offer, but wiping aside any category of comment that is similar to mine.
Gotta watch that. It's perfect fine for an internal dialog. After all, we can't take a year to figure out what everybody we run into is thinking, but in an open conversation, well, the important thing is to converse. Who knows, each of us might learn something.
"...Thinking about this stuff is hard...." -- It hurts, but somehow I'll manage.
2. I haven't taken away your agency, or rejected you from conversation. We're conversing right now, aren't we?
And yes, we might learn something. Are you learning, or just reacting to perceived criticism? In the first paragraph of my original comment, I explicitly excluded you from the broad discussion of racism I went into. I shouldn't have to do that, it should be obvious. But one thing I've learned in these discussions is that people take things personally when they shouldn't, then immediately make the rest of the discussion all about themselves. Which is exactly what you did here. We're not talking about either the "few bad apples" you raised, or the problems of social conditioning that I raised. We're talking about how offended you are that I spoke up at all.
If you can learn anything from this, learn to be aware of the risk of doing that. It's an incredibly frustrating thing for those on the other end. It's a major reason why women and minorities are very wary of discussing sexism and racism with white men. (And no, I'm not accusing you of being sexist or racist, so stop right there.)
I'm leaving my comment in place. It shows a nice example of not paying careful attention to the conversation. Too much of that on the net already.
The fact of the matter is there is no real downside for a prosecutor right now to put away the wrong person. Prosecutors have every incentive to put away anyone that they think they can. These payouts would also be a very good metric for judging the relative size of the problems, and which areas have the worst issues.
As things currently are, prosecutors will fight tooth and nail and illegally hide evidence just to avoid admitting the mistake, so it's unclear exactly how much harder it would make things.
"Having said all of that, I do not want to see us become self-indulgent with pity. There are 300 million people in the U.S. There are tens of thousands of cops. You could run a video like this everyday and statistically there still wouldn't be much incompetence or corruption going on."
Because it's mind-boggling to me that you don't think there is incompetence and corruption.
The United States is a very large country, and I've seen a lot of people give it flak for incidents like this that happen here. Each and every state has different laws about incarceration, and the cultures of each of the states varies very widely. Pushing a stereotype on someone from the United States is like doing the same for someone from Europe-- not only are there many different subdivisions of Europe with completely different laws and cultures, but the United States is also a larger landmass than Europe, and lends itself to a lot of diversity.
He didn't say that. He said "much".
There are things that need to be fixed. Is the whole system rotten? No.
With that said, I can't agree with the statement "If the cops had done their job, two people wouldn't be dead." That line of reasoning, when extended, can be applied to pretty much anything.
The only people culpable for the deaths of the two people robbing the gas station are the individuals themsevles - they chose to rob a store, and suffered the consequences.
Not really. The cops have a responsibility to the public. "Pretty much anything" does not have a similar responsibility. I agree that we shouldn't go all Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with regards to culpability, but it's definitely the case here that the cops failed in their duty here, and this failure seems to have had predictable bad consequences.
"If those cops had done their job, two people wouldn't be dead." This is a statement of cause and effect. It is not a statement of culpability.
Imagine that I said, "If you had remembered to lock your car, your backpack wouldn't have been stolen out of the trunk." You can accuse me of "victim-blaming" or you can realize that I'm not stupid and I actually do understand that the thief is to blame for the theft.
1. Isn't there something called prosecutorial misconduct? Surely that would apply now.
2. Isn't it defamation to say someone committed a crime when they clearly didn't?
3. Being incarcerated must be awful, especially if you are falsely imprisoned. There must be legally available remedies for false arrest and miscarriage of justice?
4. His defender was manifestly inadequate. What sort of liability is there for deliberately not defending your client properly?
Public defenders are notoriously shitty. I have an acquaintance who gets into legal trouble every now and then that is quite smart despite being so stupid. He uses a public defender most of the time and has to actively micro-manage them. This includes what motions to file and who to contact. If he is in jail this can also require reaching out to friends to visit the defender in person so they can't just ignore him. If he doesn't do this they just ask him to take a deal.
They are underpaid, overworked and they deal with actual shitty evil people every day and sometimes the only way to tell the difference between them and the innocent is simply their word. Attorneys you hire can overcome the last issue by being paid enough to offset it.
I think the public defender system needs a complete overhaul. I can't think of any solutions that don't have their own downsides but everyone deserves a fair trial and an attorney whose interests are aligned with their own. The best outcome you can hope for right now if you're poor and subject to prosecution is either a rare defender who cares but is also not overworked or a bright eyed and bushy tailed grad who's out to change their world.
I wonder if the problem can't be fixed with a bit of self-help. Black communities could contribute to a fund that would be used to keep a law firm on retainer to deal with criminal accusations on any of their members.
Am I missing something here?
While this could be not the only surveillance video in this case it doesn't really collaborates anything said in the post.
Where did I state something even remotely close to this?
I'm merely pointing out that the original comment is automatically assuming that the author's story is untrue. And that the comment makes a clear call for more proof.
Of course I do, because this is the default attitude one should have when approaching such stories on the internet.
This whole story could be complete fiction that never took place from the beginning to the end, unless you actually make an effort to locate and probably contact (since I don't think they would bother to publish any involved materials) the officials and departments involved. Have you?
This web-page is literally the only source we have. How the hell are we supposed to trust it by default?
You're implying that we shouldn't take the story at face value OR that the author is being dishonest about his experience.
Then you say, "Meanwhile, the only video attached to the post is pixelated to the highest degree, and you certainly can't see facial features on it. Am I missing something here?"
A clear call for proof.
It seems that in your worldview, one either believes the author, or calls him a liar. But in real life, the third option is actually more optimal in majority of cases. This third option is doubt.
Healthy skepticism is good but the only thing worth questioning here is if that shot is in fact real–something that could only be evaluated if they released the tape. But since they're not exactly going out of their way to do that I can only assume that it would be against their interests. Until they produce it I'll have to take his word at face value.
Yes, but as far as we know, it's just a picture on the internet.
To draw the photo taken by his attorney into question relies on assuming his guilt, his attorney's misconduct and the prosecutor taking that misconduct without putting up a fight. Occam's razor and all that.
Yes. The video at the bottom is a video of the second robbery—the robbery that occurred after he was arrested and where the actual robbers got shot. It is not the video that was used to identify him.
This is explained in the second paragraph on the page.
What I also understand is that it is the _only_ video we actually have chance to see.
>...the only thing worth questioning here is if that shot is in fact real–something that could only be evaluated if they released the tape. But since they're not exactly going out of their way to do that I can only assume that it would be against their interests.
The police and prosecution have the latitude to release that video and could certainly do so to exonerate themselves. Releasing it is what the police should have done immediately after his case was dropped if their interest was is in catching a robber on the loose or demonstrating publicly that they did have the right man and the prosecution was dropping the ball.
In other words, you think that they didn't release the video because they have something to prove. I think that they didn't bother because they have couple overworked clerks and hundred cases just like this — regardless of whether the video proves innocence or guilt. I honestly don't see this case as important enough for any officials involved to have any special motives or do anything other than bare minimum required.
Really what I'm saying is that if I'm going to try to extrapolate something more from the information presented that would be the direction, not "Can we be sure he hasn't faked this picture?". My point is that you're speculating that someone is guilty despite a strong piece of neutral information: the DA dropped the case and he was released from jail.
Sure, it's possible the attorney faked the picture and it's all bullshit, but there's nothing to demonstrate that as being likely besides your own biases.