Man Convicted Based on Erroneous Evidence Exonerated After 25 Years
innocenceproject.org
innocenceproject.org
That seems impossibly, mind-bogglingly incompetent.
one off-the-cuff sample: http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132262
Considering that such evidence is used to convict people and imprison them for possibly decades, shouldn't we call it "criminally incompetent"?
People convicted in part based on flawed science are not obviously innocent. At minimum, you'd need to assess how important that particular evidence was to determining guilt. It's possible they'd have been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt even if that evidence was never found. I assume this is the prosecutors' position, unless you have evidence otherwise.
Period, end of discussion
That is if you want a justice system, not a legal system
I have a feeling you want a legal system and do not give a shit about justice.
So you admit they are not "obviously innocent," but deserving of a retrial. I agree.
>I have a feeling you want a legal system and do not give a shit about justice.
That's a hell of a lot to infer from my comment which, as far as I can tell, doesn't even disagree with you.
I made the statement about you wanting a Legal System because based on the comments you seem to be more focused on the procedure and technical aspects of the law than on the miscarriage of justice that the FBI and their Fake Hair Science has caused. You want to leave it to Judges and Prosecutors to guess at the state of mind of the Jurors to figure out how much the jury may have considered the Hair Analysis, Only a person looking for a Legal system would make that comment.
If you want justice you understand that there is no way to figure out how much that testimony factored into the jury, thus EVERY case it was offered in should be vacated.. TODAY. and everyone person convicted should be released. TODAY. then they can figure out who can be retried using actual evidence and attempt to get convictions with new juries
Further any Plea Bargains that were reached by threatening to use FBI Hair Analysis should also be Vacated, how many people where extorted into pleading guilty by prosecutors because they threaten this "scientific evidence"?
People convicted in part based on flawed science are also not obviously guilty. It is difficult to impossible to weigh how the jury weighed the evidence. So at the least they should be afforded another trial excluding the flawed evidence.
The conspiracy theory goes that the concept of criminal intent makes it easy for reckless prosecutors and (especially) bankers to escape justly deserved punishment. After all, who can read a prosecutor's thoughts and prove that they were not incompetent when they relied on a phrenologist to give evidence but actively malicious?
Same with banksters.
The police officer said to me, 'I have no idea how this happened, I would have been fooled too, he even had the title!?' (paraphrasing)
I gather you're arguing that convicting people like me is a worthwhile price to pay for convicting truly guilty people, but I disagree.
Consider the case of something like a child porn thumbnail on your pc. Where did it come from? Might have come from a Google image search, and you are totally unaware of it. However because child pornography possession is a strict liability crime you could be looking at years of jail time.
A law without exceptions is tyrannical no matter what its form.
The answer to perceived "bad guys getting away with it" isn't always to force harsher penalties regardless of circumstance.
The law is not, and never could be a fixed computer program you run that evaluates the fact, and spits out a just resolution.
Your proposal is a pragmatic way of making it easier to convict people you're unwilling to presume innocent - which is why you identify "banksters" as your preferred bad guys, where you can presume guilt.
"Criminal negligence" is a kind of mens rea.
I was on a jury and I could not argue to the rest of the jury using knowledge I was literally trained as a Psych major about... because it was not presented as evidence in the trial. It literally brought me to tears
The belief that the current justice system is even close to being fair is a fallacy. Standards for evidence in law and science are almost completely different. Eyewitness testimony, for example, should basically be thrown out: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-i...
Science needs to take law out back and give it a good whuppin'
As my small contribution to the truth, I donate to innocenceproject.org every month.
"At trial, the prosecution relied on the testimony of the three informants as well as the testimony of Elinos Whitlock III, an employee of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department Crime Lab who had been trained by the FBI in how to conduct microscopic hair analysis. He claimed that he could make a “strong identification” that a hair recovered the crime scene was Bridges’s hair. He further stated that there was only a 1 in 1000 chance that two Caucasian people (Bridges is white) would have indistinguishable head hair."
Obviously those participating in hiding evidence should be prosecuted, but it's hard to blame everyone else who is going along with what forensic "scientists" tell them. The legitimate scientific establishment has done little to nothing to expose this field as the domain of charlatans. How are lay people supposed to understand the difference?
Well first off lay people not to stop placing government agents on a God like pedestal where by everything a "forensic scientist" from the state utters in court is assumed to be truthful and beyond questioning.
This is how we get terrible science and convictions, the public watches a episode of CSI or NCIS where you have infinite zoom and enhance, where you can do facial recognition on a person in a ATM video from 25 miles away, where 2 people can hack all encryption by typing on the same keyboard really fast....
They see this shit, so then when a person from the FBI gets on the stands, says a bunch of big words, and points to the scary man or women at the table saying they did it... the case is over....
I question even the validity of fingerprint matching one of the oldest "Forensic science" fields.
Almost nothing in "Forensic science" follows the actual scientific method. There is far far far far far too many assumptions, "intuitive leaps", and formation of a preconceived narrative round "science"
They make the evidence fit their story, vs allowing the evidence to tell a story.
And don't get me started on countries like Japan with 99.7% conviction rate and antiquated laws regarding police arrest.
I think that until you have a significant sum of money that can be used to pay for a legal defense team, you are at risk of prison even if you're innocent (of course in most cases the risk is negligible but if you're part of a minority it might not be)...
Most cases end in a Plea, which innocent people with out proper legal representation, and many with proper legal representation take for a whole host of reason.
It helps that in probably 80% of the cases there is no real doubt on the identity of the killer (not all cases are a suspense movie scenario). But I wonder if the reliability of courts is even higher that whatever that percentage is.
"In practice, it's more expensive than life-in-prison" doesn't do it for ya?
If the death penalty were reserved for use in cases that meet a higher standard -- say "guilty beyond any conceivable possibility of doubt" -- I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with it. To me, that's the difference between a Timothy McVeigh and a West Memphis Three. But I don't have any insight into how many cases would meet that criterion. It may be that the death penalty is simply not worth reserving as an option in those cases.
Regarding just the second number - deterrence - here's a claim that the death penalty deters, saving between 3 and 18 lives per execution depending on the study you choose (quite the spread, BTW...):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06...
...But here's a claim that the death penalty doesn't deter (though they cite, not direct statistical evidence, but the opinion of criminologists and the fact that some places without a death penalty have lower murder rates than places with it; but maybe if I dug deeper I'd find something more direct):
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-about-deterrence-and-d...
Perhaps someone who've looked into it more deeply can weigh in; all I'm saying is that it matters what the answer is.
(My own intuition would be that people aren't deterred by the death penalty very much, because they count on not getting caught, instead of multiplying the penalty by the probability or some such. But I could be wrong. Also I'm open to the opinion that you shouldn't do some things to people regardless of potential benefits to society, for instance I'm pretty sure torture would deter more than the death penalty because it's a very vivid picture a potential criminal would have in their mind, but it's great that nobody thinks we should go there. I just don't think that the capital punishment is "cruel and unusual" that way.)
I could not disagree with you more! It should not matter how much total good it does if even one person is wrongly killed via the death penalty. It sounds like a logically sound thing until you find yourself being the one person society has decided to kill for the better good of the society.
That said, I understand the deterrent effect to be often assumed to be far greater than reality bears out, and I think the death penalty is quite a poor practice on balance for a host of reasons.
A rough translation (my French is rusty - been a decade or two): "The law is clear: Anyone who intentionally kills another will lose their head. Let the executioner do his duty." "This way, my friend" "And so, a good deed done" "I'm sorry, but anyone who intentionally kills another..."
(Idées Noires is fantastic and macabre. Franquin kept "letting" people who causes suffering for other people - or animals - die horrible deaths in his panels, often with a solid dose of poetic justice in between other things, and coupled with rather caustic political commentary. Unfortunately, AFAIK I don't think there is an English translation (one was in the works), but even with quite modest French they're relatively easy to understand (many of them don't have much or any text))
[1] http://www.franquin.com/in/album3_in.php - rightmost panel on the top.
It's certainly true that threatening prosecutors with execution in the event of a wrongful execution would stop them from pursuing the death penalty in almost any case. The same is true of a threat of life in prison, and probably also true of substantially lesser sentences.
The death penalty isn't about deterrence. It's about vengeance. At least to the family and friends of the victim.
Many in the US, for religious reasons, consider death to be the ultimate punishment. You know - "hell is that way".
But what if you don't believe in hell, or a judgement? Then death is an easy way out. Personally, I'd rather die than be thrown into a hole for 40 years.
So allow me to rephase: //I'd think that it matters how many innocent people are executed vs how many people believe the criminal will suffer in hell.
Either way, i agree.
Because they believe hell is more of a punishment. They'd rather see the criminal dead in hell, then sitting in a jail cell alive.
I just googled this and discovered there's a Christianity Stack Exchange site. Seems to be no strong consensus on exactly when you get to heaven.
The Emory study cited by that first article (http://cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DezRubShepDeterFinal.pdf) doesn't inspire me much. Show me an observational study which the researchers claim "eliminates the bias arising from unobserved heterogeneity", and I'll show you a study that was conducted by overconfident researchers who're overselling the strength of their evidence.
And no, after reading the paper I'm not personally convinced that they did deal with unobserved heterogeneity. I'm not even convinced that the authors fully understand what the unobserved heterogeneity problem's really about. They seem to think that it's something you can whisk away by just throwing a bunch of covariates at your data, which is not how it works. If they mentioned their conditional independence assumption, let alone attempted to defend it, I missed it.
I'll be sure to write, "if only the person that stabbed me in this dark alley had the deterrent of possibly being convicted and executed maybe I would still be alive" in blood before I lose consciousness or run out of blood.
I am not sure if this applied in this case, but it may well have done.
No on the second, for good reason. There wasn't anything in the article that indicated that the prosecutors did anything wrong. They took the evidence they were given by the police, by informants, and by the crime lab employee and presented it at trial. That the police did not give the prosecutors all the evidence the police had, and that a forensic technique that was widely accepted at the time by the FBI and the state turned out to not be accurate is beyond the scope of the prosecutor's role.
For this prosecutor's office to have put this fellow away for so many years on not even circumstantial evidence but merely the good faith acceptance of three unreliable sources with criminal records, and the hair which turned out to be erroneously identified, despite the bloody handprint that was not a match, and despite the victim's failure to identify the defendant, is almost obscene. Sadly, however, it's not unheard of at all; our criminal justice system is far from perfect, though it probably still ranks near the top in a world where justice is difficult to obtain in most countries outside of western Europe and North America.
You'll be more likely to duck things like this if no one knows your name.