Comment by gbrown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gbrown | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I didn’t see that in the article, but it’s still trivial to come up with reasonable doubts:

1. What does known/recognized mean? It’s perfectly possible for additional people to make a mistake in identification, especially if prompted by others. 2. Even if it was him, the crime wasn’t witnessed; he’d be agitated just by having seen the scene, I imagine

The big thing that adds to number 2 is that people often forget that reality is messier than neat stories. The defendant could very well have been doing something else illegal or furtive, and been agitated for that reason. They might have been involved in related criminal activity but not responsible for the actual attack. They might have had an innocent reason to be there and not expected to be believed. It may really not have been the suspect there to begin with.

That’s why the death penalty is bad, and it’s why eyewitness testimony is crap by itself, especially when it’s circumstantial.

As for your what-if's: that's what a jury is for. Determining matters-of-fact from presented evidence. They convicted.

If they could (and did!) do that without needing DNA evidence, the presence of someone else's trace DNA, or absence of the suspect's on one specific piece of evidence isn't likely to change that, even if it's the murder weapon.

All evidence is imperfect, and I personally think we'll start to publicly realize that DNA evidence is just as malleable as eye-witness testimony. Just run more PCR iterations until some other DNA is amplified above the signal/noise floor! (If people knew the amount of analytical probability that goes into PCR/ matching DNA samples, they'd have a lot less faith in the technology, but that's another topic.) Same thing for manipulated/edited video and even deep-fakes.

Which, isn't too say all evidence is crap and therefore no convictions are valid.

It's why we put faith in the system and in our peers serving on petit-juries...

and why it's up to a them and the judge to evaluate the evidence, and decide whether or not to convict...

And why we don't have a computer run a PCR and automatically say: "Positive dna-sample: go directly to jail".

> that's what a jury is for. Determining matters-of-fact from presented evidence.

That’s a pretty shockingly huge amount of faith you’re putting in a system with well documented shortcomings and biases, especially in a capital case with a black defendant.

Also, it seems frankly absurd to claim that the absence of the subject’s DNA on the murder weapon isn’t material to the decision to convict . It’s surprisingly hard not to get DNA on things, and the prosecution’s case appears not to have painted the defendant as some sort of methodical dexter-type.

Nobody has claimed that we should rely solely on DNA tests - that’s an absurd straw man. I think it’s even more absurd to defend this sequence of events in a capital case.

The point is that the article is completely one sided propaganda.

It didn't mention anything about any contradictory evidence, except to say the judge felt enough existed.

Debating the death penalty is one thing, but advocates for abolishing it aren't helping themselves by relying on this type of propaganda. This was and is a solid conviction of a guilty man.

There are enough legitimate concerns to debate without taking the word of the click bait.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com