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Comment by DontGiveTwoFlux | Hacker News Reader

The article describes a case where an innocent man had to spend a week in jail. Eventually, he was released and the presumed actual perpetrator was caught. The lead seemed to come from the location data, so it wasn’t useless at least.

But the so called justice system says that it got it right here. The innocent man lost his job when he couldn’t work for a week. Depending on his situation he could miss rent and be evicted too.

Why do we have a system that says justice was served? It’s cruel and unfair.

This dragnet police tactic will scoop up more bystanders and probably convict more than a few innocents as well. I like the timeline feature- it has been genuinely helpful for remembering when I did things months ago. The tie in with photos is also a fun way to remember trips. It’s sad that the cost of these features is to roll the dice on getting arrested because a crime was committed nearby.

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This also showcases how innocent until proven guilty is not honored at all. Don't throw me in jail just because you're investigating me, throw me in jail if I run off out of town or do something sketchy to interfere with the investigation. If I am not guilty I wont be running out of town, but I sure wont be talking to you without a lawyer no matter what[0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

I think this problem is best solved by requiring that the state make amends for arrests which turn out to be incorrect. You lose your job? State funds two months of severance (more if there’s an economic downturn and it’s harder to find a job). Evicted? State provides relocation assistance. Etc. this would also probably be a great disincentive for false arrests. Of course there could be unintended consequences, including the state putting more effort to make square pegs fit in round holes.

I think this problem is best solved by

1. Honoring the plain text, and original intent of the Constitution

2. Holding law enforcement personally liable for their mistakes (i.e ending immunity)

3. Ending the rubber stamp warrant process where law enforcement routinely lies to obtain warrents

4. Ending the moronic 3rd party doctrine exemption to the 4th amendment

What I do not think it s a resolution is putting the tax payers on the hook for monetary compensation for the bad actions of law enforcement, that provides zero incentive for law enforcement to change their aggressive, unconstitutional, and authoritarian methods, policies and procedures

> Why do we have a system that says justice was served?

Suggest specific improvements and call them into your representatives. The closer you can make your proposals to a bill, the more likely it is that the problem becomes an issue.

In this case, I’d argue we need publicly-subsidised attorneys for wrongful arrest. It should also be unlawful to dismiss an employee because they were arrested and never indicted. Giving people the right to notify employers, upon arrest, barring a specific request by the police (approved by a court), would also be prudent.

> It should also be unlawful to dismiss an employee because they were arrested and never indicted.

This would be huge. It's illegal to fire someone because they got called up on jury duty, and if someone is arrested but later found innocent the same rules should apply: in both cases you're involuntarily assisting the criminal justice system :)

> Giving people the right to notify employers

Why not ask your lawyer to do it for you? You already have the right to make a call to a lawyer.

I would be willing to be that 90% of the population getting locked up do not have a lawyer on retainer and use public defenders. Which you must wait for one to be provided to you then wait for said representation to reach out to you. That’s days if not longer in jail just waiting. Unless you have money then you won’t spend a moment in jail. Yet again the wealthy have a different set of rules because they can pay their way out of anything.

That's a good point, thank you. So I guess such a right would indeed be useful.

Beyond this in some areas due to lack of funding & supply there aren't even enough public defenders. It can take people weeks to get one at all and the one they get will barely have enough time to represent them.

> It should also be unlawful to dismiss an employee because they were arrested and never indicted.

I disagree. The cost of bad policing shouldn't be paid for by businesses. The police should bear the consequences, not have yet another victim (some business) to burden with more punishment.

>The police should bear the consequences...

When, in the history of ever (in America), have the police borne the consequences for anything? It's always been either the taxpayer (in pay-outs) or no one (when the officer simply moves to another jurisdiction to keep on keeping on). Although, the premise is idyllic, it would never happen.

> bad policing

But arresting someone reasonably suspected of some crime isn't bad policing, even if they are later found to be innocent. That is why arrest and trial are separate.

I think part of the problem is that there's a lot of actors in law enforcement for which "reasonably suspected" isn't important; "can we make it stick" is. Past that, they don't even bother to consider if it might be the wrong person.

There's a LOT of good cops, lawyers, judges, etc. However, the bad ones can have such devastating effects on their victims, that all of them need to be watched (controlled? not sure what the right word is here) more than would be necessary for other areas.

Let's agree to disagree. I think that detaining an innocent person against their will is bad policing.

But how could it be avoided? The police don't operate on 'guilty' and 'innocent', but on 'suspect' - even if they do everything right, they'll occasionally arrest someone that will later turn out to be innocent. If they're responding to an emergency, they simply don't have time to determine guilt with much accuracy, and are just focusing on protecting possible victims. And if they're arresting someone being prosecuted for some crime, well it's unavoidable that occasionally someone won't be found guilty for what they stood trial for - that's the whole point of a trial.

However, I agree that if that should happen, the detained should be compensated for the harm they suffered, even if the police (and prosecutors!) acted reasonably.

I should clarify that I don't mean to imply the US police and public prosecutors meet these reasonablenes criteria - from what I hear, the deck is stacked heavily against anyone being prosecuted for a felony, guilty or not.

What about if the police had a dedicated fund for arrests. For the employer - they aren't allowed to sack the employee, but administrative costs of finding temp staff can be claimed from the fund. For the arrested, all cost of living expenses are covered until trial, but should they be found guilty, this becomes a CPI indexed, interest free debt. Any pre-conviction incarceration costs where accused is found innocent are also paid by the fund. This seems to grab most of the data in one account. But does also seem to add a big incentive to find people guilty...

That's not always bad policing. The police aren't in the business of determining guild or innocence. The courts are. There will be innocent people who are arrested.

But I don't see how preventing companies from being able to fire people solely because of an arrest actually costs them anything.

An arrest of the sort we are talking about is a form of extra-judicial punishment that should be forbidden by any just system of law. In fact, I am constantly surprised at the things that are allowed, and even encouraged, in our judicial system, and how many individuals apparently believe the system is fine the way it is. Saying that we should continue to allow people to be fired for an arrest is to further support this extra-judicial punishment. It gives individual police officers the power to destroy any individuals life with which they come into contact, without even firing a shot. This power is far too great for anyone to wield, and our system was designed to prevent this kind of power, and yet here we are, with people like you arguing in it's favor.

It is entirely against the premise of "innocent until proven guilty" we treat suspects like criminals, I get it, you want them to "crack" but what in the world! If someone has no criminal record, please treat them as if they may not have one after you question them, don't ruin their lives.

This a misunderstanding of what I am saying. I don't think the existing system is fine.

Fix the judicial system itself, don't offload that responsibility onto businesses. If arresting a person is so easy as to be able to ruin their life (and I agree that it is), there should be a higher bar to arresting people than < says here his phone was near the scene of the crime >.

If a system is conceived in which a business is able to fire and quickly rehire someone who was wronged by the police, I am supportive of that. But some general idea of, "Well let's just make it illegal for businesses to do that!" is beyond absurd. It's papering over a problem caused by another problem. Businesses are not responsible for fixing a problem caused by the police. This would be as absurd as a business suing the government for failing to prevent a valuable employee from being murdered.

Yes, I agree that the justice system itself is the root cause. However, I think it's also okay to "paper over the problem", and to support that I would directly appeal to the jury-trial system. The government is taking people away from work to perform a government service, and they (rightly) forbid business from firing someone during that time. In the same way, arresting someone also conscripts a person, against their will, to do government service. The service, in this case, is very similar to jury service in that the arrestee's role is to help justice be done by the government. The only difference is that a juror is picked by a computer (and then a lawyer) but an arrestee is picked by a cop.

> The cost of bad policing shouldn't be paid for by businesses.

How does that count as "businesses paying for bad policing"?

My representatives do not listen to me.

They probably do, but they also have to listen to hundreds of thousands of others just like you, and pick which opportunities to act on. Can you understand why they may both listen to you and not take action on your concern?

Their responses are often unrelated, or antithetical to my stated position. I think they have an inaccurate classifier.

You should know how these things work. When you contact your representative with an opinion, they just add one to their tally of how many voters expressed the same opinion.

The totals for how many voters expressed which opinions are what carries the most sway with them. Whether or not those tallies are in alignment with the general public is not relevant.

So, when you contact them, you'll get a canned response telling you what their current stance is, regardless of whether that's the same as yours. But make no mistake, your opinion was added to the count.

This sort of thing is why phone banks and contact-your-representative campaigns are so common. In bulk, they're effective and can change policy even in ways that most of their constituents don't agree with. They're only looking at the numbers of contacts they've received.

You have just described my experience to me.

> Whether or not those tallies are in alignment with the general public is not relevant.

Is this not grossly pathological?

I am not claiming this is the way it should work, only that this is the way it does work.

The silver lining in that cloud is that it means that expressing your opinion to your representative is something that really does make a difference. On a practical level, if you don't tell them, they won't know.

OP is probably not a bundler for 6 figures in campaign donations, just saying.

Multiple studies have been done to show they in fact do not listen to the average person

The most famous in recent memory is the 2014 Study "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" (https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595)

Which Concludes

"In the United States, indicate, the majority does not rule at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose ... majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts."

Become a member of a charity fighting for your freedoms such as Electronic Frontier Foundation or Amnesty International.

I don't have disposable income.

You can also volunteer for them.

I don't have disposable time.

Then you do not really want to make a change. Things will not change themselves (except to the worse).

> It should also be unlawful to dismiss an employee because they were arrested and never indicted.

Replace "indicted" with "convicted" and I agree. Further, it should by unlawful to refuse you housing because you were arrested even if you weren't convicted (this is common practice right now).

It's illegal for an employer to fire someone if they're selected for jury duty.

It's insane that it's legal for an employer to fire someone for being arrested, before being convicted.

The same protection should apply in any case where the government is the one forcibly removing you from being present at your workplace through no wrongdoing of your own.

In a case like this where he ended up getting released a week later and experienced extreme hardship, you'd think he could've gotten out on bail (even if there was an ankle tracker or something). Instead in most regions, bail and trackers are both revenue-generators for the people involved, so people rot in jail for no reason.

Imagine if the person wrongly imprisoned in jail has a kid or parent to care for, not only is that dependent abandoned for a week but afterward there's no money to feed them with. It's truly inhumane.

> so people rot in jail for the love of money.

ftfy

> Why do we have a system that says justice was served?

Because it was. There was a criminal investigation, it was processed judiciously, and as a result the man was cleared and released. None of this was based upon a _single_ piece of evidence, but multiple facts that supported each other.

The only "injustice" I can detect is that he wasn't bailed out while waiting for a trial.. but the article suspiciously doesn't touch on that subject, so I have nothing to go on there.

> It’s cruel and unfair.

If he has a civil issue with his employer or with the state or it's officers, then that's a separate question and he absolutely has the right to pursue it for remedy if he chooses.

> This dragnet police tactic will scoop up more bystanders and probably convict more than a few innocents as well.

You make it sound as if the police _only_ used location data to make this case and the arrest. The article shows that they didn't and further shows that the actual murderer had used Mr Molina's car to commit the murder. It's nothing like what you describe.

> he absolutely has the right to pursue it for remedy if he chooses.

How do these cases usually work out? If he was held on a reasonable suspicion, is there any possibility of legal remedy?

The thing I find sad about this is that Blackstone's Formulation[0] has been part of American common law for a long time (innocent until proven guilty). It was influential to founders like Franklin and Adams. It is clearly something we need to defend. Law isn't perfect, and we need to decide when it breaks down which mode of failure it has. Blackstone would say that it should fail that guilty people go free as opposed to failing and having innocent people have that freedom stripped from them (on the principle that freedom is such a valuable thing).

[0] "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer" (Franklin's rephrasing)

Could this have been avoided if the suspect himself had the same access to his own sensor data? Like an alibi? I read this whole thing as the technology is there to prevent innocent people to jail, and the processes haven't caught up.

You do have access to your location history from Google. https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

Thats a cool site I didn't know about, however I assumed the innocent suspect wasn't logged into google maps, and that the reporting was done by the device separately.

Afaik you don’t have to be using Maps for Google to track your location. If you have location tracking turned on in your Google account and are for example logged into android Google will get your GPS even if you’ve never used Maps.

only if you have that feature turned on. Google also records data outside of maps and timeline, IIRC. I imagine you can always access your complete location history by exporting it from Google's take out feature.

From the article, it sounds like the history you have access to is the same that was used for the dragnet searches.

right, I'm saying that turning off Google timeline doesn't stop Google from tracking your location.

correct. turning off “location history” only turns off the visualization, not tracking. your location is still associated with each piece of google activity—searches etc. there is no way to totally turn off location tracking other than tuning off “web and app activity”—which then locks you out of several google services entirely.

wow if it really was only that and a similar car that had him locked up for a week... makes you wonder if he contacted a lawyer immediately or what, that’s crazy

It sounds like the easy solution is to increase surveillance further. I hope that better solutions are sought after than this however

too bad the 4th amendment, which is suppose to bar these very type of generalized warrants and searches, is not respected by the courts at all, and has soo many "exceptions" that it might as well not even be present anymore.

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