And the prosecution withholding exonerating evidence to get a conviction should never happen, or if it does they should face some punishment. In many states, that is essentially murder.
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/crimes-punishable-death-penalty
Rather than just if it results in execution, you'd think perjury resulting in jail time should mean the person lying should face the same jail term as the defendant.
That would, in my non-lawyer eyes, make it incredibly hard to convict anyone of perjury as it seems you'd need to prove what was going on in the mind of the accused at the time, and good luck with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_disclosure
https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/the-innocent-man-part-...
The most generous interpretation is that the French penal system is more humane than the US, and sentences shorter, so that wrongful convictions don't necessarily destroy lives, and thus overturning convictions is not a priority either for activist groups, politicians, or law enforcement.
On the other extreme is the idea that challenging verdicts and the appeals process for introducing new exculpatory evidence after convictions is either too difficult or inaccessible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_miscarriage_of_justice...
That is indeed generous. French prisons are notoriously awful. A bit of a catalogue of official condemnations is available at the Wikipedia page[1], but more telling are the many, many anecdotes of people who have done time in them.
Of course nasty prisons doesn't mean that the administration of the courts isn't impeccable, and I am hardly an expert, but I rather doubt it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_conditions_in_France
But there is racism everywhere. I've lived in several countries, including Switzerland. I've never heard anyone except people that have lived in CH talk about how racist it is (very).
The difference, I think, is that the US is the country most likely to admit fault when they are racist. Americans themselves will say "yes, we're racist", while Swiss, Germans, Brits, etc. all seem to still be in that denial stage.
I think things like Brexit are starting to get people to think long and hard about their actual views on race / immigration. America just got to the party first.
Part of what makes US unique is that it’s minority groups are much larger than most other countries. I feel that this means racist attitudes get acted upon more frequently, and that victims have a stronger voice here.
It’s a lot easier to spot a racist when the target of their ire is nearby, as compared to the one that Just mutters obscenities about foreigners while reading the newspaper.
No it isn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...
However, I think you might be conflating two issues. A country can have a very high incarceration rate without imprisoning a single innocent: that country could have a very high crime rate, or the bar for "crime" could be lower and more aggressively pursued. I think the vast majority of the US' "over-incarceration" can be attributed to those two factors, not to the US just throwing randoms in prison.
Do we also sometimes imprison innocent people? Absolutely. But so does every country. As far as I am aware, there is nothing unique to the US justice system that would cause a higher incidence of actually innocent people going to jail. But we do send more people to jail. But the vast majority of them are guilty of their crimes, the question is really "should smoking pot be an imprisonable offense?", or similar.
I think Germany is at the other end of the extreme; if it's your first conviction and it wasn't exactly cold blooded murder you almost always get away with probation, or a couple months tops. There were cases of people abusing children and only getting a year or two, which makes me furious.
And there have been cases in Germany where people were innocent too, of course. This is actually the most important argument for me against the death penalty. Since we know for sure that we make mistakes every now and then we should not carry out a sentence we cannot undo. Sure we cannot give the wrongfully imprisoned back their youth; but we can give them the rest of their life at least.
https://theintercept.com/2018/08/14/police-unions-prison-ref...
https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-price-of-prison-guar...
But those people aren't innocent. If your state/country makes smoking weed an imprisonable offense, and you smoke weed, you're not innocent. Is that a ridiculous thing to imprison someone for? Absolutely. But you're not innocent. So yes, we either need to reduce privatization of prisons, or we need to remove their ability to have a conflict-of-interest in this regard. Either way, it's a problem that needs solving.
But again, I think this flows more into the "mass incarceration" problem/rate than it does into the "imprisoning innocents" problem/rate.
Some of them certainly are; we get “beyond a reasonable doubt” wrong often enough with murder that there are fairly regularly news articles about exonerations after lots of resources from public interest groups dug out the truth.
Just because no one is spending the same resources—and even if they were no one would treat the results as newsworthy—on lesser offeses doesn't mean people aren't imprisoned wrongly for them (perhaps far more often, largely on plea deals, then is the cases for wrongful murder cobvictions.)
> But again, I think this flows more into the "mass incarceration" problem/rate than it does into the "imprisoning innocents" problem/rate.
Mass incarceration is a product of mass criminalization plus high imprisonment penalties on the books. That also produces a volume of criminal cases too high to handle without expedited process, and a heavy pressure tool in terms of high potential penalties that can be traded far down for guilty pleas. With many of the accused unable to afford more than the barest defense, that also creates a huge likelihood of significant imprisonment of the factually innocent on top of that which comes more directly from mass imprisonment plus the failure rate of even ideal criminal process.
That is, mass incarceration causes, rather than being a separate unrelated problem from, imprisonment of innocents.
I hadn't considered the pressure from heavy penalties on the potential for innocents to plead guilty, that's a good point. While I'll admit that's definitely a possibility, I'm not sure you can really claim that is actually happening without some sort of backing evidence? I'd love to see some numbers if you have them, even some good case-studies.
> A country can have a very high incarceration rate without imprisoning a single innocent
No. Unless you are talking imaginary scenarios like Star Trek.
Those are two different problems, with different solutions.
And yes, I was talking about imaginary scenarios. That was a statement about what is logically possible. Another way of saying it would be "you can bring down the rate of incarceration without bringing down the rate of innocent incarcertation, and vice versa".
The problem is the horrifyingly large number of people who are imprisoned for years, some times decades, even though they are innocent.
Do you not find that a problem? Innocent people being imprisoned happen in any country of course, but the problem is much larger in the US than in other first-world countries, both in absolute number and relative to population size.
France does not have similar numbers of innocent people in prison, even when adjusted for the countries size. Unless you will argue that the French police and judicial system is more than six times worse.
This was all in response to the comment questioning why we don't hear as many stories about innocent prisoners in France.
Remember, you can't really "look at the stats" when it comes to how many innocent people you've imprisoned until after the fact. You only know the count once you've actually put in the time to find innocent people in prison. My claim is that France is not doing this, so you can't really say they're 6x better. Unless countries are exerting the same effort to root out innocent prisoners, it's impossible to tell if a lower rate is due to an actually lower occurrence, or if it's due to a lower rate of discovery.
My original point was that I think all countries have an "imprisoning innocents" problem, and all countries have a racism problem. It just looks worse in the US because we're actually bothering to do the due diligence.
Just to be clear, do you understand that not every person incarcerated is innocent, and that is consequently an entirely different statistic/rate?
Yes, this is tremendously accurate. I don't think racism is worse in the US, I think we have more heterogeneity which makes it more visible.
I personally think we just talk more about the USA because: - everything the USA does or says is heavily scrutinized anyway, - many more people can read English than French or Russian so news about cases like this one are more shared on social networks, including among foreign people.
Our problem is how federated the authorities of individual districts are within each state. There can't be a sweeping national reform that fixes everything, because most of this comes down to district-local decisions in each state.
Some people believe the POTUS holds all the power, but your locally elected DA is a lot more likely to have a direct impact on your life than anyone in DC.
- Evicting tenants because their landlord can't follow the law (didn't do required inspections, obtain required licenses, etc)
- Existing arrest warrants for said landlord
- New liens against properties
- Tax increases in the neighborhood of $80-300/yr, which is considerable when the median income is roughly $2250/mo gross.
These are councilors that are elected in unopposed races the vast majority of the time, and when they are opposed the margin may only be a dozen votes. Because they're in off years you're looking at maybe 8-10% total turnout (~45 or so per voting district), and there may only be 25 or 30 total votes in even opposed elections. For folks given the power to evict, halt property sales, etc. I'd argue the power given per vote require is on par with state executives and higher than a freshman member of Congress.
Short of everyone running for office (at least once), I wish there was a way to communicate this truth to the average voters.
In my naivety I didn't think conviction based on that kind of "evidence" was allowed in the US justice system. At one point when the prosecution didn't think the charge of 1st degree murder would stick they added a charge of 2nd degree murder. In the end the jury found him guilty of the latter.
1) Jeffrey had motive. His mother had been abusing him for years.
2) Jeffrey was the last person to see his mother alive. The crime scene evidence also pointed to an “insider” who would’ve felt comfortable sticking around to clean up the crime scene (blood was found in the sink, there was no blood in exit paths).
3) Jeffrey had blisters on his hands consistent with weilding a bludgeoning weapon.
4) Jeffrey’s alibi was that he had been planting flowers at his teacher’s house. But the teacher testified that he had done that four days before.
The second degree murder charge was proper. If the jury believed he killed his mothef because of the abuse, first degree murder might not stick. Second degree, “heat of the moment/emotional disturbance” murder would be the correct charge.
It seems to me that the only reason we do things any other way, is that juries don't have encyclopedic knowledge of the criminal code, and so you have to teach them about what the requirements are for guilt in the particular case.
Given that the court system doesn't like jury nullification, and wants juries to be deciding solely on whether the facts presented to them match the legal requirements for the definition of a particular crime—why would it matter whether they know which crime they'll be asked to evaluate the facts against, before they know the facts? They can learn the facts first, or the law first. Either way, the last step is just matching one to the other. (In the Supreme Court's opinion, at least.)
Your suggestion seems to be to coalesce the grand jury with the petit jury, and have the jury decide first that a criminal court should convene to conduct a trial, and then decide only later if the facts proved in that trial correspond to any particular crime or crimes.
The prosecutors could still press for a specific crime, but the defense would also be able to argue directly to the jury that "even if X and Y were true (which they aren't), that would only be a class N crime, because the prosecution hasn't proved Z, which is necessary for it to be a class M crime."
The reason is more involved, because:
(1) law, like facts, is subject to question and answering those questions is out of scope of the jury, which is the trier of fact alone. Your model would necessarily transfer the judge's responsibility to the jury.
(2) The law creates permission for prosecution (bit civil and criminal , though only the latter is relevant here), but that permission is not a mandate. Judgement of the cake of prosecution is given to the offended party (in criminal law, the executive on behalf of the government). Your model would necessarily transfer the executives authority largely to the jury (though prosecutors could withhold inculpatory evidence to avoid undesired charges being triggered.)
(3) But, most critically, your model would provide the defendant with a vast surface to defend against, and require the defense to provide evidence against any offense the jury might infer from the evidence. The use of specific charges and specifications putd the defense on notice of the specific charges they must defend against.
(4) Related to (3), without specific charges, any trial is essentially a trial for all potential criminal conduct occurring before that point, which creates double jeopardy problems if concealed evidence of an early crime comes to light, as distinguishing between a trial addressing other charges (which would not foreclose a new trial for double jeopardy reasons) and a trial addressing the offense indicated by the new evidence but which merely failed to convict (which would foreclose a new trial) is impossible. Meaningful protection against double jeopardy while permitting trials for newly discovered offenses requires something like the current specific-charge model.
> Given that the court system doesn't like jury nullification,
The court system may not like it, but it has repeatedly been found to be part of the Constitutional order of government. By the court system, I might add, so obviously they like it enough to keep protecting it.
Like I said, I was presuming an ideal jury. (Picture a land where everyone has the legal experience and character of a Supreme Court justice—a land that makes Plato's Republic look populist.)
A real jury is, of course, Not Good at the law.
> Your model would necessarily transfer the executives authority largely to the jury (though prosecutors could withhold inculpatory evidence to avoid undesired charges being triggered.)
Not necessarily. The jury could return a list of crimes that have been proven (in Scottish justice-system terminology), and then the aggrieved could decide which crimes they want the defendant to be sentenced for.
Basically, extend the judge's ability to issue a "judgement notwithstanding" verdict, to be something done in cooperation with the aggrieved party.
Or, to put that another way... take a jury trial, and split it into two pieces:
• a jury-empanelled inquest—a truth-finding procedure—where the jury is there to be a truth-finding oracle, consuming 1. a criminal code and 2. a ream of testimony, and then outputting 3. a set of "proven" / "not proven" decisions for every crime in the criminal code, as they apply to the testimony.
• then, a bench trial, where the judge also has access to the testimony from the inquest, but where the law directs the judge to make their decision the same way they do in a jury trial: by—unless their reading of the transcript reveals that something has gone terribly wrong in the execution of justice—treating "the decision reached by the jury" as the only valid testimony. The judge then assigns a "guilty" / "not guilty" verdict for particular crimes that were being pursued, based on that testimony, and does sentencing.
I think this approach addresses most of your other points. Please poke holes in it :)
> By the court system, I might add, so obviously they like it enough to keep protecting it.
Jury nullification isn't really upheld by the court system (it's been repeatedly found that jurors have no right to it); its existence just comes down to the fact that criminalizing a juror's voting in one direction or the other would kind of break the justice system.
In a justice system that separated the "we declare that you screwed up" and the "so we will punish you" parts, I believe that jurors found to have "voted their conscience" would likely be found to have done something wrong in the eyes of the justice system—just something that cannot, necessarily, be criminalized.
To prove who committed the murder (after proving that the person's death was a homicide at all), all you need is to exculpate two of the three remaining people (by e.g. having them supply air-tight alibis.)
Then, by process of elimination, the last one must be the murderer. Even though that's entirely "circumstantial evidence", it really is a proof, in the deductive sense.
Jeffrey committing the murder doesn't follow from 1) 2) and 3)
Regarding 4) its still hazy as every one's recovery time could be different. Granted it won't be 100 days or something like that, but four days is still touch and go.
Law et al aside. How do Judges rule in this case? There is huge chance of getting this wrong, and how do you live with this thing on our conscious that you would have sent an innocent man to the gallows?
Having motive to kill someone doesn’t prove you did it. But statistically, those with motive are much more likely to be the killer than a random person. That narrows the probability. Likewise, lying about where you were at the time of the murder (which is what #4 is about) doesn’t prove you committed it, but makes it more likely. Those compund—each additional fact narrows the probability that the accused is not guilty.
If you take a random sampling of 100 situations where there exists facts similar to this case, I think you’d find that 95%+ of the time the accused really did commit the murder. That’s all that’s required.
That's 5 innocent people sentenced per hundred people to death/prison for a crime they didn't commit.
That is a lot.
In many cases for the innocent, the trial itself is a big punishment.
You can choose to prosecute a case with basically any evidence (including "no evidence.") In a jury trial, it's up to the jury to decide whether the suspect is guilty—i.e. jury nullification goes both ways, and a jury can return a "guilty" vote despite a complete absence of a case, just because they feel like it. (A judge does have the ability to overrule any guilty verdict they feel was reached unjustly, but in the sorts of situations you'd expect a community biased enough to return a guilty verdict in absence of evidence, you'd also expect the judge—if they're a member of the same community—to be biased as well.)
Usually, though, because juries are almost never that biased (and are not aware of jury nullification), prosecutors just "decline to prosecute" cases that they don't think have enough evidence to sway a jury.
The point of the jury system is to prevent tyranny, especially that experienced in most European countries that had monarchies and oppressive parliaments where angering the government or monarch, being the wrong religion, or having a different ideology would get you convicted very quickly. At least with a jury of your peers you have a chance of getting let off from trumped up charges. Europe _might_ not have the same problems currently, but still nice to have a system that could prevent some egregious things... perhaps including this one.
For example, the definition of a particular offense (Grievous Bodily Harm, say) is a matter of law, and not up for debate by the jury. The jury's role is to decide whether or not the accused committed that particular crime; eg, does the evidence support ("beyond reasonable doubt") the conclusion that they throw the punch that the prosecution allege caused the injury to the accuser?
Seriously, give this as an answer as a first year law student and you fail. No question. Of course, it's how prosecutors present it to the jury (you might ask yourself the question: given that they misrepresent this, how badly did they misrepresent the crime in the first place ?)
And, frankly, if you knew how the police and penal system worked internally, you would in nearly every last case vote not to convict. It does not fix the crime, it just creates one more victim, and the system is totally inhumane. Even if someone is a criminal and have stolen, or even raped they do not deserve to be subjected to that.
Furthermore, prosecutors lie in court to get people convicted, so how trustworthy is their case, really ? Listen to a few of the dirty tricks police pull to convince juries:
https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE?t=26m48s
Still so ready to convict ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
NO ! Is the only correct answer when on a jury. Ever.
So in any case you're ever going to see in your life: no they don't deserve it. Even for most violent crimes, year-long torture (which is what generously describes the penal system) is not a reasonable outcome.
So in a jury you should always always always vote no.
We acquitted one defendant after a day's deliberation.
We sent the other to jail for a LONG time after spending half an hour talking about it, it was really crystal clear from the evidence (which included a videotaped confession . . . yet the goober insisted on a jury trial, go figure).
I sleep well at nights. Also, if cops seat you in front of a video camera and try to ask questions, don't say anything.
Stupid.
Really don't say anything to cops, especially if you've been placed under arrest.
Given the evidence at hand, we probably would have convicted him anyway. The video was the clincher. Early on the judge mentioned that the defendant had insisted on a jury trial, over the advice of his lawyer (and to some extent the judge, who was broadly hinting that sentencing from a guilty verdict by a jury was going to be a lot harsher than one he could reach with a deal of some kind).
I have to say that his lawyer (a public defender appointed to him, since he could not afford his own) was pretty bad, at least by my unpracticed eye.
> Given the evidence at hand, we probably would have convicted him anyway. The video was the clincher.
If the video of his confession, which you know has been edited by the police and prosecutor's office, I would have voted to let him go. You don't know the pressure that was on the guy during that video, you don't know what else the police left out (e.g. one thing is they do is refusing to help someone, or claiming to refuse, until a confession is extracted and signed, then edit out the part where they refused to help, or lied)
What if the person lied and confessed because the police threatened not to call an ambulance for someone ?
Ironically, this may very well be the reason the "goober" wanted a jury trial in the first place, as people do that thinking it will provide more opportunities for the truth to come out.
This isn't strictly true - s.18 (GBH) requires intent, which is a question for the jury. Furthermore, what constitutes "really serious" injury is a question for the jury. You can break in down into questions of fact (e.g. Did the defendant have intent? Did the defendant cause these injuries? Are these injuries "really serious"?), but it's not as clear cut as did the defendant throw the punch (they must judge if they consider the injuries to be "really serious", which isn't quite a question of fact).
In addition, juries are entitled to make a decision based on their conscience, per Bushel's case.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=In_dubio_pro_reo&...
is not obeyed in the trial. This principle says that a defendant can only be convicted if the evidence is clear that the respective person is guilty. If it is not clear, the defendant is to be let free (or rather: can only be punished for the punishable acts for which the evidence is clear).
As you can see in the Wikipedia article, this principle has been very central in German law for centuries.
I think the problem is related to trust of institutions and a learned blindness. Various participants in a trial all assume the others are working to ensure the correct outcome and don't make every personal effort to do the same.
I remember reading that a judge has, on average, spent 16 minutes or less on convictions for less than 1 year sentence.
The state makes it impossible for people to do that, even if they were so inclined in the first place. And, of course, they have to consider that they go against part of their own organization to make this happen (meaning some of your colleagues will want a conviction and you preventing them from getting that will have costs).
The idea is that such decisions are not mere technical matters, and the law is not for some "supposedly" impartial technocrats to impose their opinion on, but to reflect what society thinks.
After all it's not some god given or mathematically derived laws that need to be applied, the law is the will of the sovereign people (with some intermediaries as they can't all just draft them together).
Besides the jury system works just fine in other countries.
It's the:
- systemic racism,
- bad incentives for DAs (and political careers associated with being one),
- strict adherence to the letter of the law when the spirit is clearly elsewhere (e.g. judges not freeing people for some technical BS despite full evidence that clears them)
- privatization of the prison system and large interests
- Old Testament-style vengefulness (e.g. death penalty? In 2018? Third world prison conditions? Long term torture-level isolation?)
that breaks down the US justice system.
In most of Western Europe, juries are only possible for murder (or worse). For everything else, a judge decides without any recourse for the population. There, you do not have the right to a jury trial at all.
Furthermore a jury of your peers is at least as good as the society around it. A jury of self selecting professionals is almost certainly worse. How many people would choose to join the jury profession so they can enact their own personal bullying by voting guilty on everyone? How many people become small town cops because they like having a gun and barking orders?
Furthermore any bias in a juror gets averaged over 12 and affects at most one trial.
Furthermore prosecution and defense get to cross examine and dismiss jurors as part of the selection process. If you want a generally well educated jury you can get one. Ask your trial lawyer which jury is right for you!
Furthermore it only takes one of the 12 to stop a miscarriage of justice.
Furthermore in the US everyone is at least somewhat indoctrinated with an understanding of what a jury is and a respect for executing jury duty faithfully. You have a pretty good shot of getting at least one person on the jury that won't vote guilty instantly so they can still make the baseball game latter that day.
Finally, a jury doesn't need law education. Their job is to judge the facts. They are informed of the definitions of the crime, and the evidence, and must reach a verdict of yes he did this or no he did not. Upon rendering a guilty verdict, the actual law part of the law is executed by the judge.
Why have jurors at all ? Over here in the Netherlands people are judged by ... judges (what's in a name).
Because it limits the power of the state. The state, in the US, does not have absolute power to convict anyone of anything.
In the Netherlands, the state does have that power. That means you have exactly zero chance against a corrupt complaint against you.
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/11/20/onschuldig-en-veroordee...
In practice, the police and prosecutor in the Netherlands are both rewarded financially and have an internal culture that glorifies getting convictions. Needless to say, this means they often successfully prosecute innocents, knowing full well what they're doing.
So I guess you can just decide for yourself. Do you trust the state ? People like to answer in the affirmative, even when boatloads of evidence is available that sometimes significant parts of the state, including the Dutch state, isn't even corrupt, but outright criminal for malevolent reasons (meaning police trying to get innocents convicted out of spite, or revenge, has happened more than a few times).
Jury trials provide some (imperfect) measure of protection against such abuses.
The police and prosecutors in the USA are also rewarded and have a culture that glorifies convictions.
The state has for all intents and purposes unlimited resources to pile on charges, cover up exonerating evidence, they can legally lie to a suspect (“we found a witness you might as well confess”), they can strike jurors who would be more sympathetic to believing that police can be corrupt, etc.
The defense doesn’t have an unlimited budget to hire experts, get evidence independently tested, etc.
If you are poor and/or minority, the state can and will railroad you and the jury that holds your life in thier hands won’t be of your peers. Do you think that a cherry picked jury will really be that concerned if some poor Black kid gets locked up for life?
I did say it's an imperfection measure of protection against that. But frankly, the court is just not going to take you seriously unless it's clear that you will appeal any decision you don't agree with it. Sorry but ... that's how the world works. Still, the alternative in force in Europe does not seem better, in fact it seems significantly worse.
If you watch videos of judges in the Netherlands I assure you, first, the prosecutor is essentially the same, and second the judges ... to say that they are arrogant, unsympathetic and frankly assholes is a serious understatement of reality. Prosecutors are rewarded based on convictions, like in the US.
I think this video, even though the source is a bit ... gmrbl (I DO NOT agree with 99% this website posts) ... But this is the reaction of Jaap Smit, judge and vicepresident of the Amsterdam "fast" court, to a camera:
https://youtu.be/grW-nVrAWvM?t=18s
You can tell what sort of person he is, no ?
They apparently filed a complaint ... and surprise nothing happened.
It's also possible to bribe jurors to get off a conviction. Possibly easier than bribing a judge.
All classes of people are corruptible.
After all, if you don’t know who they are, you can’t bribe them or blackmail them. Same argument applies to the judge.
One-way-glass might be a work of fiction, but video cameras are not.
It's a bit silly to worry about that level of conspiracy.
But even if it weren't silly, there are easy answers. An oversight board, or revealing the jurors after the case is decided, or revealing the entire juror pool of 50 some-odd people, etc.
If I'm going to do something and want to bribe a judge I have years to research all the judges who might be at my trial (there are not very many). Each will have a different bribe that will work. (one doesn't want his wife to know about an affair; the next is in an open marriage and doesn't care but he has big gamboling debts that you can "take care of"...)
On the other hand, it only takes one of the 12 to stop justice from being served if they for whatever reason disagree with the other 11.
> inally, a jury doesn't need law education. Their job is to judge the facts. They are informed of the definitions of the crime, and the evidence, and must reach a verdict of yes he did this or no he did not. Upon rendering a guilty verdict, the actual law part of the law is executed by the judge.
Except they don't just judge facts. They judge based on the stories they're told. Even if the evidence (facts) is lacking, a good story can still sway people. This would be a lot less likely if the panel consisted of people educated on the law (eg. judges). There's a reason the supreme court consists of judges, not 12 (or 9...) random people from your populace.
Combine that with an absurdly low standard of proof and it's no wonder that so many innocent poor people are locked up.
The hardest case was the one that was “not guilty”. The defendant was almost certainly guilty of manslaughter. But for reasons that don’t matter, aspects (time) of key evidence could not be evaluated, which created doubt.
It was a moving experience.
> "The hardest case was the one that was “not guilty”."
Would you clarify? I read the first paragraph as there was one guilty verdict, yet the second paragraph implies there was only one not guilty verdict. Did you perhaps intend two convicted, or alternatively, in the second paragraph, one of the cases that were not guilty?
Blackstone's formulation applies there:
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
In a perfect world, we'd only convict the guilty. The revolutionaries that founded the U.S. decided that justice would be better served by minimizing false positives---the conviction of innocents---instead of minimizing false negatives---the release of criminals. In practice, we've still sent many innocent people to prison (or worse, to death) despite our various protections against false positives, which includes the right to trial by jury.
> This would be a lot less likely if the panel consisted of people educated on the law (eg. judges).
People educated in the law (e.g., judges) would disagree with you:
"Those who wrote our constitutions knew from history and experience that it was necessary to protect against unfounded criminal charges brought to eliminate enemies and against judges too responsive to the voice of higher authority. The framers of the constitutions strove to create an independent judiciary but insisted upon further protection against arbitrary action. Providing an accused with the right trial by a jury of his peers gave him an inestimable safeguard against the corrupt or overzealous prosecutor and against the compliant, biased, or eccentric judge."
(U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White, writing for the majority in Duncan v. Louisiana, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/391/145/)
What if we restricted jury duty to actively practicing lawyers? Who better to judge the work of a lawyer than another lawyer.
They are supposed to be judging the defendant.
There are lots of ways to twist the language around to make it confusing, and that's all that this does. They are not evaluating the performance of one or more lawyers. They are evaluating all of the evidence before them (all of it that is admissible, anyway) to determine whether the defendant is guilty according to law (as opposed to according to their own feelings, etc.).
You can tell they aren't there to judge the prosecuting attorney's performance because not all of the evidence comes from the prosecuting attorney. Thankfully. If it did, you'd have a lot more false convictions. That's why we have defense attorneys even when we can't afford them ourselves. Likewise, you are not judging the defense attorney's performance, because that would require you to start with an assumption of guilt. Nor are you there to judge the combined performance of both of them. That doesn't even make sense. They are not a team working together. They are there to put evidence before the jury (or try to dismiss evidence in various ways) and try to convince them of a particular interpretation of that evidence. So their performance is affecting the outcome, but they are not the ones being judged.
....
Furthermore any bias in a juror gets averaged over 12 and affects at most one trial.
That’s all good in theory until you have the prosecutors put a “B” by jurors who are Black that they want to exclude.
The prosecutors select for bias.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/05/23/opinions/supreme-court-black-...
Furthermore prosecution and defense get to cross examine and dismiss jurors as part of the selection process. If you want a generally well educated jury you can get one. Ask your trial lawyer which jury is right for you!
And if the prosecutor gets to dismiss jurors that are least likely to convict?
Furthermore it only takes one of the 12 to stop a miscarriage of justice.
Furthermore in the US everyone is at least somewhat indoctrinated with an understanding of what a jury is and a respect for executing jury duty faithfully. You have a pretty good shot of getting at least one person on the jury that won't vote guilty instantly so they can still make the baseball game latter that daY
You’re completely ignoring the social pressure of being the one holdout that you would get from the other 11 jurors to go home and the judge to not have a hung juror.
You’re also ignoring the very real psychology of how many people don’t care about the fate of someone who they can’t relate to - someone who is not of thier same race/economic background/upbringing.
They are informed of the definitions of the crime, and the evidence, and must reach a verdict of yes he did this or no he did not. Upon rendering a guilty verdict, the actual law part of the law is executed by the judge.
That’s all well and good unless the “facts” are being withheld by the prosecutor and not being argued effectively by an underpaid, overworked public defender.
So why are allowing prosecutors to exclude jurors? Would it not make more sense to only allow exclusions with cause?
The prosecutor is no more powerful in this respect than the defense. Defense attorneys also try to get jurors that they think are demographically inclined to acquit their client and then find post hoc causes to dismiss.
>You’re completely ignoring the social pressure of being the one holdout that you would get from the other 11 jurors to go home and the judge to not have a hung juror.
>You’re also ignoring the very real psychology of how many people don’t care about the fate of someone who they can’t relate to - someone who is not of thier same race/economic background/upbringing.
No You're ignoring what I wrote.
"Furthermore in the US everyone is at least somewhat indoctrinated with an understanding of what a jury is and a respect for executing jury duty faithfully. You have a pretty good shot of getting at least one person on the jury that won't vote guilty instantly so they can still make the baseball game latter that day"
I specifically wrote this as an allusion to the movie 12 angry men.
Yes a random group of people, with no training and no one to judge them, will sentence a man to death for the trivial convenience of going home early. But we aren't selecting from a group with no training. We are selecting from a population that embeds the sanctity of a trial into its childhood education and into its national identity. You have a fairly reasonable shot of at least someone on the jury willing to be the one angry man.
If you have a pool of 30 jurors and the prosecution has already chosen to dismiss the six that are most likely to not convict, it doesn’t leave the defense much to work with. The scenario is not theoretical, I linked to a case that went to the Supreme Court.
But ignoring that, the system is not suppose to be “equally weighted” for the prosecution and the defense. It should be weighted more heavily toward the defense in a criminal case. It is suppose to be harder to take someone’s freedom or life away than to convict.
Yes a random group of people, with no training and no one to judge them, will sentence a man to death for the trivial convenience of going home early. But we aren't selecting from a group with no training. We are selecting from a population that embeds the sanctity of a trial into its childhood education and into its national identity. You have a fairly reasonable shot of at least someone on the jury willing to be the one angry man.
We can talk theory of “indoctrination” or we can look at the facts both in the posted article and the one I cited about the prosecution explicitly excluding Black jurors. The lack of concern about anyone who doesn’t look like them runs much deeper than some type of theoretical sanctity of due process.
But that story won't ever make the news. Things that make the news are the shocking exception, not the mundane reality.
The very post we are commenting on is an example of where there was prosecutorial misconduct and a lousy defense.
The mundane reality is that court system and the entire justice system is weighted toward the state and thst there are systemic issues when it comes to equal treatment under the law for the poor and minorities.
My entire point is that juries, as they are currently selected, is the least bad system of rendering verdicts. I also stated quite clearly that a jury is at least no worse than the society it exists within. None of the imperfections you point out are absent in wider society.
I do care that the state that has the power to take away my freedom is treating me fairly. I see first hand the difference in the reaction that people have to my step son now - when he is a teenager over 6 feet tall and big and the reaction they had when he was 9 years old and a short cute kid when I met him.
I very much worry about him getting caught up in the justice system and falsely accused and convicted for “fitting the description”.
And my son grew up in the burbs, attended top rated public schools in affluent areas of town, has a friendship circle that looks like the cast of a CW show and it took years before he realized that his mere statue combined with his race intimidated adults - not teenagers. It seems like the next generation is much smarter.
Its not about caring or not caring about wider society. My point is that a society can't produce a system better than itself. Problems that exist outside the justice system are virtually guaranteed to leak into the justice system.
btw you know that you can actually waive you're right to a jury trial and get a bench trial if you really want one. Of course you have no control over which judge is assigned to you. LMK if you seriously want to take that gamble.
- correctly fund the public defenders office.
- get rid of plea bargains for serious offenses. Right now, prosecutors pile on charges that could add years knowing that most people will plea. If every serious case has to go to trial, prosecutors will have to be more careful about when they bring charges.
- admit that the “war on drugs” has been a failure and stop locking people up for years for non violent crimes.
- get rid of prosecutors ability to dismiss jurors. Yes it will make it harder to convict, but it should be harder.
- stiffer penalties for prosecutors withholding exculpatory evidence.
- stiffer penalties for police lieing under oath.
The idea is a "jury of your peers." Part of the point of this set-up is so that The Haves are not the only ones in positions to make life-altering decisions about people's lives.
Jury Nullification is a thing. There is some degree to which jurors, knowledgeable about how the system has consistently and intentionally screwed over "their people," decide to not go along with railroading yet another person of the wrong color or whatever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Any time a government is overthrown, one of the first things that happens is they release all the prisoners on the assumption that, regardless of what their conviction is for, these are actually political prisoners. This is a not unreasonable conclusion in most cases.
The “problem” is that few cases go to trial, and many of those lack competent counsel.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the law itself and rules of procedure creates many of the social issues that come up in these discussions. Jurors have the benefit of handicap of weighing evidence presented to them against statute as interpreted by a judge.
A related issue is jury nullification [1]. Juries cannot be forced to convict, regardless of the weight of evidence against an individual. This gives juries the ability, whether defacto or dejure, to determine whether or not a law is just. So for instance in the early 18th century New York passed a law making it a crime to criticize public officials. But with juries being unwilling to hold up the law, it had no effect. In more recent times nullification has been invoked, even if not by name, countless times in statutory rape, drug charges, etc. As wiki mentions, the recent sharp rise in hung juries (going from ~5% to 20% in recent years) has also been seen as possible evidence of a rise in jurors considering the validity or fairness of the laws they're being asked to convict others under.
Trial by jury enables a nation to express its own value system, regardless of whether or not those who happen be on top agree.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification_in_the_Unit...
Well, the sheer number of prisoners, and whether or not they are guilty are two totally separate issues. After all, someone committed the murder in this case, so you need to put that person in prison.
I predict that I’m in the minority in believing what I’m about to say: In the unlikely event that it turned out the best way of minimising homicide was to promise every single convict £1 million and a 12 hour episode television show in their name, if that actually minimised homicide, I’d be in favour of that response to it. I will of course freely admit that the reason I can say something so shocking is because I don’t know anyone who’s been murdered.
I care about minimising the aggregate rate of all homicide, not punishment for it’s own sake.
It makes sense to me that people are desperate to put away serial killers (because the alternative is more deaths), insisting that the case must be pursued until someone is put away for the crime.
But it doesn't make sense to me that people would rather an innocent person rot in prison with nonzero probability, than a killer who will likely never kill again go free. I feel there should be a very high standard of evidence to convict in cases where there's no likelihood of continued societal harm coming from the guilty party, whoever they are.
(Yes, from an anthropological viewpoint, prison exists not just for rehabilitation, but also partially because people just want revenge... but the whole point of centralizing and structuring this mechanism for societal vengeance, is to prevent that vengeance from being applied to the wrong person!)
It’s all just so stupid.
Just saying, I don't think that was just an excuse. I think they had good reason to believe this guy was a bit of a low level crime boss/gang leader and they decided it'd be better to put him away even if he didn't technically pull the trigger. Yea it's an abuse of the justice system in a lot of ways and I don't condone it, but I don't think it's as easy as saying the DA just wanted to randomly pin the murder on someone else.
The article makes it seem like Dixon was just "at a nearby shop buying beer when the gunshots rang out." The police couldn't find the real shooter, so they just grabbed the nearest black guy and convicted him, right?
If you read the article further though, something seems off.
> Mr Dixon said multiple witnesses could have testified he did not fire the gun.
That's an odd formulation.
> "I grabbed the gun," Scott, now 46, told the courtroom in Erie County, New York.
Grabbed it from who?
The article never really explains it, but what actually happened is that Dixon and the real shooter, Scott, were involved in drug dealing. Dixon gave Scott the murder weapon, a semi-automatic Tec-9, and drove with him to the scene of the altercation: http://www.espn.com/golf/story/_/id/24736866/valentino-dixon...
> Scott said he had gotten the gun, a Tec-9 semi-automatic, from Dixon and the two men had driven together to the crowded corner where the fighting broke out. Scott was given a sentence of 8⅓ to 25 years in prison, concurrent with his current term.
This case is a lot more subtle than it seems: it was about figuring out who was the killer, the guy whose gun it was, or the alleged "bodyguard" (Scott).
Now, this is not to excuse the Brady violation or the other flaws in the prosecution. It's a travesty that Dixon was convicted based on that case. But from my first hand experience with the U.S. justice system, it's not random and capricious. If you see a story that makes it seem random and capricious, digging into it will almost always reveal that there was something more to it than the press releases let on.
For example, a few years ago I got an ACLU or Innocence Project email about a "kid" who was convicted for murder because he just "happened to be at the crime scene." In reality, a bunch of 16-17 year old young men robbed a pizza delivery driver, and shot him dead right in front of his wife and kid who were in the back seat. The convicted man "happened to be at the crime scene" in the sense that he was part of the group, but denied being the one that pulled the trigger. As a matter of legal technicality, that conviction was probably wrongful--you need evidence that the accused pulled the trigger, otherwise you just have accomplice liability. But it's a far cry from the press release implying that some jury just pinned the crime on a random kid who happened to be near by!
Also note two other things: 1) Most prosecutions and guilty please are supported by a mountain of evidence. Sometimes you'll look at the record and think "this shouldn't be a crime" (selling Ambien to yuppies) but at the same time you'll see that the guy tried to sell it directly to a cop or something where guilt was similarly unambiguous. 2) For every exoneration, U.S. civil liberties organizations turn away many cases where the prisoner who professes innocence is actually guilty.
At the end of the day, the US has 30-40,000 murders per year. Even if the rate of error is 1%, that’s hundreds of wrongful convictions each year. There are ways to improve, clearly, such as holding prosecutors accountable for Brady violations, getting rid of elected prosecutors, and combining prosecutors and public defenders’ offices. But if the current system is “not functioning” then I don’t think you can achieve a “functioning” system under that rubric. There isn’t a revolutionary amount improvement to be gained.
So the media first figures out what the story will be (and it better be sensational or why bother), then selectively reports facts to support their story.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
That said, Dixon didn't make for a very sympathetic defendant; he brought the gun used in the murder to the scene, he was a known drug dealer, he was involved in a dispute with the victim, etc. It's not hard to see how he got convicted. He very likely would have been convicted of accessory to murder or other felonies.
Our justice system has major problems, and it's good that this wrong has been partially righted, but this isn't a case that I'd hold up as a prime example of injustice.
edit: To expand, if he were given a proper sentence for the things he actually did, he would have had a chance to reform and go on with his life. Being denied that is injustice.
what it currently is legally in that jurisdiction, what it was in 1991, and if either of those punishments holistically help or harm a productive society
what you write suggests that you view the state as unquestionable - and that its acceptable enough that they did an "almost right" thing given the circumstances - when they do arbitrary things even our constitution tried to deter.
As far as what the appropriate punishment would be, I would think an appropriate punishment for driving your body guard to a crime scene and giving them a murder weapon should be the same as the punishment for murder. I'm no lawyer though, that's just my intuitive assessment.
And I don't think the 'Innocence Project' or any exoneration efforts should be based on how empathetic people are to the convict.
Let's continue highlighting the wide discretion the prosecutors are able to use even when technically prohibited, and the lack of incentives for the state to undermine its monopoly on authority and investigate itself.
Let's make these 'tiny administrative offenses' so intolerable and egregious that there is selective evolution towards better investigations and better evidence collection. Real consequences for operating outside of those bounds. Easier remedies for the people accused and convicted. THE ACTUAL MURDERER BEING OFF THE STREET if anyone's pooled resources are going to be used by this public entity at all, what a concept.
Those are my perspectives.
And that's where I think the perspective is messed up. Sentencing guidelines are codified in law. This man received and served a non-trivial portion of a sentence that he did not deserve. In my opinion, there is no ambiguity here: he is a victim of a failure of the legal system. As a victim his damages amount to at least 12 years of his life.
Note that this makes him less of a criminal for the crimes he did commit.
Not really relevant to our conversation, but where did you get this "body guard" quote?
From the ESPN link.
2. There's more to this case than most of the responders seem to believe.
I don't understand. He served 27 years. You say he should have served up to 15. The difference is 12 years that the justice system has to answer for.
>2. There's more to this case than most of the responders seem to believe.
Unless you have something substantive to reference you're just muddying the waters with this statement.
Substantive points:
* Dixon is innocent of shooting Jackson.
* There was significant prosecutorial malfeasance in his prosecution, along with limited defense competence.
* According to Scott in the ESPN article, Dixon did supply the weapon and drove the two of them to the location.
* According to the prosecutor, Scott worked for Dixon, who was admittedly dealing drugs.
* Dixon was also convicted of supplying the illegal weapon with which Jackson was shot. He was not innocent.
"What kind of person sends an innocent man to prison just to score a win in a case?" -- fjcp
"The prosecutors will not face any real consequences for ruining an innocent man's life." -- gizmo
"They clearly knew that this guy wasn't guilty of murder since somebody else confessed to the murder yet they let the innocent guy behind bars probably thinking "i got no hard feelings, that guy would have ended up killing someone one day"." -- onemoresoop
This is not the case of someone saying "He's a bad guy, so he deserved to be in jail anyway".