I suspect at least half the people exonerated by the Innocence Project are in fact guilty. However, I think that sloppy police work should never be rewarded with a guilty verdict, even if it's likely the defendant is guilty.
Source for most: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/16/686056668/for-seventh-consecu...
More context: https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/24/politics/undocumented-immigra...
Obviously, we’re talking about ICE so my comment was meant towards non official border crossings.
Many of the people that OPs friend is complaining about receiving aid from San Francisco "activist lawyers" are from Asia, who obviously didn't enter the country illegally, hence, non-criminals.
Isn't visa overstay illegal? Is it not part of ICE job?
You’re not a criminal if you leave your car parked in a street cleaning zone, you committed a civil infraction.
"Isn't visa overstay illegal?" is not related to "calling everyone who ICE deports “criminals” is factually wrong."
The statutory language is in 8 USC § 1325[0] and consists in relevant part of:
"Any alien who... obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation... shall... be fined under title 18 or imprisoned... or both"
It's hard to prove and rarely prosecuted of course, but that doesn't change the fact that many of the overstays are guilty.
Feel free to jump to pages 7, 8 and 9 of this report. https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO00/20190712/109772/HHRG...
What they do want is for immigrants to not fear deportation, so they want to make a stand that they'll fight immigration enforcement every step of the way. Hence why they'll get involved with these kinds of lawsuits. Even if ICE purely deported only people who committed crimes other than illegal entry or overstaying a visa; you'd still have plenty of immigrants afraid of all law enforcement. Yes, even the legal ones; nobody wants to have to show their papers on pain of having their life uprooted, even if they have those papers.
I don't know exactly what lawsuits SF is filing, but I'm going to assume the actual legal argumentation is less "let the assassains go free" and more "assassains should serve time in American prisons rather than being deported to Mexico where they'll likely escape and reoffend".
https://jacquelinestevens.org/US-Unlawfully-Detaining.Steven...
1. Due to their being no real central database, it's hard for physical persons in the US to prove their identity and consequently their citizenship status.
2. There are a lot of illegal immigrants in the US.
3. There are a lot of illegal immigrants in the US that have lived here for a long time so the "legality" of their status is muddied. This then makes the whole debate around this more about "what is right" and the emotions involved, instead of what the laws say.
We're literally in a thread about wrongful conviction. Evidence. It matters.
- To fill USCIS Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification.
- To provide a valid nursing license.
USCIS Form I-9 is also required by most jobs. So the remaining jobs that are targeted by undocumented people are informal jobs in agriculture, construction, landscaping, food processing, etc.
From the international news I've seen from El Salvador, it is my impression that Mara Salvatrucha/MS-13 gang members are easy to identify since they use MS-13 tatoos.
This is HN. Please provide evidence of such a claim.
> The activist lawyers and even SF know that these are real criminals but they don’t care.
This is highly speculative. What possible motivation could they have for this?
That's quite debatable. Our founding fathers believed that, but today's justice and penal systems (and political system that buttresses them) do not reflect that belief.
While I agree with you on that core idea being debatable, I also see a lot more support for it than not. Clearly, my experiences are anecdotal, but they do come from a wide swath of the nation.
One of my tasty pleasures on business travel is to strike up some conversations with people. I have done it with all walks of life from homeless to rando joe and jane bag of doughnuts to people of serious means.
For profit prison is growing unpopular. I think it should. And that profit motive does drive a lot of policy aimed at keeping cells full, often justified in dubious ways.
One point in your favor is our trend toward aggressive punishment. People want to see the big, sexy verdicts and game over sentencing and often equate that to a greater measure of their own safety and security.
There is also very low support for better answers to what people do when they have paid, are out again and unable to build a life for ongoing punishment as an ex con. Fewer than I would prefer to see equate that to a lesser measure of security and safety in their lives.
All that said, I am definitely on the err on the side of guilt, meaning some guilty people are not convicted.
I am also on the side of corrections. The goal should be for people to pay their debt to society for wrong doing, AND while paying it, arrive at some plan, skills, resources to try again where it makes sense.
Not doing those things means releasing people who are extremely likely to fail and our results reflect that reality. Sadly, very large numbers of people respond to those facts with even more aggressive sentences, often openly saying we just do not need those people.
Rough topic, IMHO. There is work to do here. Not sure the will exists to do it.
Usually this means that there's good evidence that the person is actually innocent and the trial was completely botched. There are plenty of rural areas where the court decides that someone "seems" guilty and then suppresses any evidence that doesn't support that.
Society benefits when the guilty are in prison and suffers when they go free. If a person is guilty and the police made a mistake, we should correct the mistake the police made, including by firing people responsible or pressing criminal charges if appropriate, but malpractice by the police should not exonerate a guilty person.
The purpose of that is to disincentivize malpractice. That's why we have the "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine for improperly obtained evidence. There's no point in illegally breaking into someone's house to get evidence because that evidence is inadmissable.
The alternative solution is to allow the evidence and prosecute the people who gathered it illegally. The problem there is that there's a clear conflict of interest: they were gathering that evidence for the prosecutor. The same prosecutor who will try to convict them for gathering that evidence. That prosecutor is incentivized to let them walk so they can keep getting illegal evidence. The second issue is that it's not always clear whether it's actually legal to gather some evidence in a particular way. We either have to prosecute negligence the same as malice, which seems unfair, or we leave a gaping loophole where we have to prove malice. All you have to do to get away with is shrug and go "I had no idea that it was illegal for me to just walk into the house if the door was already unlocked, and no, no one can verify the door was unlocked before I got there".
The defendant doesn't have to prove his innocence the DA has to prove his guilt. I hope you never do jury duty.
> New York State chief judge Sol Wachtler was famously quoted by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities that "a grand jury would 'indict a ham sandwich,' if that's what you wanted.