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Comment by seebetter | Hacker News Reader

Based on this story with Aaron and experiences in the 1990s with hacker friends, my opinion of federal prosecutors is very low. I see them as highly educated people who excel in relativism and twist ethics and law to achieve narrow goals without regard to principles.

Compounding this, I also got into a dispute with two former federal prosecutors, both of whom did wildly unethical things. One represents the Police Chief and the Sheriff of a major city. I can't even believe that former US Attorneys would act this way, but then I'm reminded by Alexander Acosta who protected Epstein.

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> I see them as highly educated people who excel in relativism and twist ethics and law to achieve narrow goals without regard to principles.

That's how I see most lawyers.

That's great for lawyers, it's part of their job description. Lawyers are not about morals and truth, they're about defending their client, guilty or not.

It's bad for prosecutors, though...

They should be defending their client?

Exactly. How can you have a fair trial if the defence lawyer won't give his best? Just look at the sham justice served if a person can't afford counsel and has to use a public defender. In the US being rich or poor can make the difference in whether or not a person goes to jail for a crime.

I understand people get upset when they help a very likely guilty person get off (OJ Simpson anyone? see the point about being rich above.)

But defence lawyers have an important job, irrespective of who they're representing or what they're alleged to have done.

The justice is sham there because the other side mostly brought forth lawyers. If both sides were being defended by vaguely similar public defenders, the result might be different.

This only shows that using lawyers is a classic game theory problem. Both people using lawyers prolly makes the system worse off overall, but neither side can defect in isolation.

Think of divorce lawyers for example so that you don't feel this is about criminals on one side and innocent people on the other. In a divorce settlement, neither side is usually the criminal, and yet they spent thousands of dollars lawyering up in a bizarre game of mutually assured destruction. cf. The Marriage Story.

The main issue with going without trial lawyers is that even if they were somehow banned for both sides in all cases it would bias it just towards those who would be good pro se (relatively speaking as it is always a disadvantage) .

Really defense attorneys are a prerequisite to actually convict the guilty and have it mean anything. An unopposed trial could convict a ham sandwich and thus can and should be thrown out on appeal.

I don't think this happens in a bubble. You have to look at the incentives. What's their reward? Political capital? Quotas?

Right. Criminal prosecutors, like many other criminals, are the product of their environment.

Conviction rates for one.

Does the prosecutor get to choose which cases to prosecute? If so if you're optimizing for a high conviction rate you should drop all cases except your absolutely most solid case. Then just ride that 100% conviction rate for the rest of your career while dropping all future cases.

Conviction rates don't exist in a vacuum though. If you have a 100% conviction rating but have only prosecuted one case, no one is going to care. The real key is to bring extreme charges against large numbers of people and then offer them palatable plea deals. You get a large number of convictions with little effort and the few people who risk going to court aren't going to hurt your conviction rate much even if they win.

Yea, it always tickles me when people discover that every group with adverse incentives ends up corrupt. Almost _everyone_ is corrupt. It's rare to find a person holding a single damn principle, which is why incentive design is so important.

These type of people require networks of equally misguided people to survive. And those networks and their methods grow over time. So you are never fighting a person.

Its a network that is surrounding the fool teaching, reinforcing and promoting the behavior. You will notice they have a high level of confidence no matter what outcomes are produced. That's because the network behind is patting them on the back and saying you got what it takes.

The only counter balance is developing your own network. When I was younger it was just about people I got along with. People who had the same personality, interests, needs etc. But thats a network with only certain strengths. It took a while and lot of blundering about to realize there are lot of people very different from me, who share the same values. And putting in the effort of connecting/nurturing connections over those values, pays off big time in dealing with douchebags esp above you in the food chain.

Reminds me of what happens with the DoJ and their war on encryptiom - the top people often change their views and condemn it only after they left it. This isn't a case of falling in line like the lower totem pole members, it hints of a cultural bubble.

>The only counter balance is developing your own network.

Interesting, I have reached essentially the same conclusion. Read the link on my profile and contact me if needed.

There's obviously cases where prosecutors or bureaucrats in general go way beyond what they need to do in which case individual responsiblity or morality matters, but in general lawyers and federal employees apply the law, they don't make it. What you identified as relativism I think is actually impartiality, which is a good thing. The problem with principles, like empathy is that they tend to be unevenly applied, often in activist manner. Which is why we demand of officials that they follow procedures, rather than inherently subjective judgement.

I think at the end of the day when it comes to stories such as Aaron's the buck stops with everyone of us, because we're responsible for keeping these people employed and the rules in place.

Not from the US and I lack personal experiences, but reading anecdotes like this[1] it seems to me that the problems extend beyond just federal prosecutors.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/ha9mjv/off_...

>Based on this story with Aaron and experiences in the 1990s with hacker friends, my opinion of federal prosecutors is very low.

And that's a high profile white hacker. Wait till you hear the experiences with them of poor/black/latino folk...

Or the President of the United States, people who work on his campaign and high profile supporters.

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