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Comment by laurent92 | Hacker News Reader

In France we have presumption-of-innocence laws, but presuming innocence participates to justice not working: Look at the last people who have been killed during the summer and you’ll notice a worrying trend — they have 10, 20, 47 repeat offenses.

At one point you have to think of the victims too. For 20 repeat offenses recorded, there has been hundreds of beat-ups. I met a guy who said he’s been 200 times (his estimate) in custody between 13 and 18. He had only been condemned once, at 19. He bragged to me about how many French people he bullied, including locking up a fat kid in a basement for 3 weeks. You have to think of the victims.

Again, look at repeat offenses of usual criminals in newspapers, and remind yourself that they have been presumed innocent to the extreme and only condemned for cases which have been extensively proven, where victims dared to talk, knowing he has a condemnation rate of less that 0,5% per arrest.

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This has nothing to do with presumption of innocence. Presumption of innocence means that you are considered innocent until legally proven guilty in court. It is a very fundamental value of a democratic justice system that guarantees that you can defend yourself of accusations and you are free of the arbitrariness of prosecutors and public opinion. If you undermine that out of an emotional reaction to some event you risk creating much more harm, by sending many innocents in jail and generally instilling distrust in the society, than you will prevent.

Also, what do you propose? If it is not necessary to be declared legally guilty anymore, then what? The color of your skin? The mood of the prosecutor and judge? The number of times you are presented before the court? What if the cops don't like you? What if you are accused without proof and without mean to exonerate yourself?

The cases you describe of people committing 47 offenses (with no conviction you say, so the justice system decided that they were not actually offenses, Yet you are here claiming that they are without any knowledge of the facts) and then going to kill someone are very very rare. You can't have a 100% failure-proof system without complete totalitarian control over everyone in the population. Many of these people are just insane, they're not the organized terrorist group types, and the justice system is not equipped to deal with mental health issues. When it tries you end up with people in psychiatric internment for years and years without trial and with little recourse, which is another tragedy.

Imagine being released from prison and told, "Whether or not you return to crime, if anyone ever accuses you again, we're going to assume you're guilty and send you back." I think you get a lot more victims that way, even before you count the reformed criminals who are now victims of the state.

Criminal history should absolutely factor in to a case, and I believe it does in the US. But it is imperative for society at large that innocent people can expect to go unpunished.

I agree, but after 20, 47, 200 assaults or robberies, at some point, someone needs to start noticing a pattern and doing something about it!

Tomorrow is a new day! and Start with a clean slate! are laudable goals and ideals for us to have and we would all want that for ourselves ... but maybe not to the point of delusion and detriment to society?

If someone has been found guilty of 200 actual assualts, by all means, exponentially increasing punishment is fine with me.

However 200 (potentially false) accusations of assualt shouldn't matter. Otherwise a bad actor could just repeatedly accuse someone until the accusee hits the 200 (or whatever) limit.

In NL, doing fake accusations is a crime in itself ( and it is prosecuted too ). In Dutch I believe it is called a 'valse aangifte'.

Probably does not apply in all cases? Imagine someone beats me up or something but is found not guilty for some reason. Would I be charged with lying under oath or false accusations? It just increases the stakes for any lawsuit.

If I remember correctly, the previous district attorney in Manhattan was very friendly with the wealthy people. Imagine how much they could legally wreck your life if this was left up to the prosecution.

Applies in all cases, but it has to be deliberate. You can accuse as many people as you want if you actually (reasonably) believe they’ve done you wrong.

Insufficient evidence to convict someone else is not sufficient evidence to convict you. They’d still have to convict a jury of your peers that you did so.

Agree. Law mechanisms can be abused. In Poland we had a case where a shoplifter (Stanisław Belski) was caught stealing coffee and sentenced. Security and the owner tossed a couple extra items into his bag to get him over a threshold so he qualified for a harsher verdict. The thief protested, but was found insane and delusional. In classic Soviet style, he was detained for 8 years and drugged in a psychiatric hospital. It wasn't until a new young inspector showed up that his protest was finally heard. Even when the thief was released, the staff of the hospital tried to crush the man by publishing his sensitive information. The thief received high monetary compensation, but no one was actually sentenced for the abuse of the law system.

I would expect these to show up as massive amount of unsolved crimes is stats.

And the places where people get away with a lot of crimes are places with corrupt underpaid police force rather then the ones with stopping civil protections.

On discussion forums people talk about it as if the issue was impossibility to find evidence against single dumb impulsive individual. When you look at places with a lot of unsolved cases, you see cops who don't care or who protect their friends or are corrupt or who prefer to prosecute random people. And you see good apples cops getting demotivated and loosing political confkicts against bad apples cops.

What you don't see is well discipline well intentioned police force that is just unable to get doctor report of injuries or use testimony as evidence.

Assuming they're accusations (not convictions), the question is what's the pattern? Is it a pattern of criminal behaviour, or is it police bias/somebody systematically accusing this person for whatever reason? Aggregating multiple not guilty verdicts and/or cases that weren't perused into something that results in criminal sanctions is dubious, and in some sense may invert the burden of proof (you now have to show the allegations against you are _false_ to challenge them, rather than just showing guilt hasn't been proven).

Presumption of innocence is none of the concern in #MeToo situations. In fact our Ministry of Equality affirms that presenting a defense in justice is a problem of further bullying the victim, who shouldn’t be challenged in the process.

In the same year, we’ve had several bethroatings over the summer (last one yesterday) from people who were presumed innocent several times. The victims are the bottom of the joke here.

> Presumption of innocence is none of the concern in #MeToo situations.

You're conflating public opinion and the justice system.

> In fact our Ministry of Equality affirms that presenting a defense in justice is a problem of further bullying the victim, who shouldn’t be challenged in the process.

It doesn't seem to go against the presumption of innocence. You may not know but in rape cases, the victim and the alleged rapist are sometimes questioned at the same time, side by side, which can be quite traumatic.

> from people who were presumed innocent several times.

Being presumed innocent and being found not guilty are not the same thing. Everyone, even the worst of the worst, is assumed innocent.

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