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Comment by dfxm12 | Hacker News Reader

Time and time again, we've seen how the justice system doesn't benefit society at large. At this point, I think it's naïve to think that's its goal. Instead, we see how it's about controlling people like Terrill Swift & feeding the prison industrial complex. In a lot of states (including Il), you can't vote while in prison. Having a conviction greatly lowers your ability to find a job, get a mortgage, or access to some government benefits.

Also Promissory Estoppel is a concept in contract law. Do you think a reasonable person would think that a police interrogation is a contract? Does it meet the elements of a contract? I don't think so.

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> In a lot of states (including Il), you can't vote while in prison.

Not just while in prison, but afterwards in many states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...

I think the only layer that we can fix these kinds of issues is in court.

Juries should only be allowed to hear objective facts. No character testimonies, no eye witnesses, no confessions after a 12 hour interrogation. Objective facts only.

This would likely mean guilty people don't get convicted, but I think that is a worthy tradeoff for a more fair justice system. An innocent person going to jail is much more egregious than a guilty person going free.

This wouldn’t work, because a person’s intent matters for many crimes.

Good luck telling an eye witness that what they saw isn't an objective fact, or the DA that the handwritten, signed confession in his hand isn't an objective fact.

>>Good luck telling an eye witness that what they saw isn't an objective fact,

The thing is, we have studies upon studies upon studies that show repeatedly and undoubtedly that witness testimony is shit. If you show 10 people an event and ask them to describe what they saw an hour later, they will describe it in 10 different ways, frequently changing facts, adding things that never happened, or omitting important details. In trials, you get witness testimony from years before, and it's treated as if every single word said is absolute objective truth - like, we have the science to prove that no, actually, most likely it isn't, and it should be treated as "maybe true" at best.

But disregarding witness testimonies puts us on even more dangerous path: in order to know "objective facts" you need to put surveilance cameras and microphones everywhere so there is a video footage of every crime.

> The thing is, we have studies upon studies upon studies that show repeatedly and undoubtedly that witness testimony is shit.

Like so many things, I think the mistake here is to assume you can educate your way out of this. You could send every citizen through a six-week course on the problems with eye-witness testimony and some percentage of them will come out on the other side of that training insisting that, nah, if somebody says they saw the crime, then they saw it. We're talking about deep psychological biases carefully shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

It's worse than that actually.

An eyewitness will tell the DA that they don't remember shit about what happened years ago, and the DA will reassure them that they police have ways of making them remember.

Source: A close friend of mine is getting pulled in to testify in a criminal case about some junkie that they may have called the police on three years ago. He has called the police so many times, and has dealt with so many sketchy, drug-influenced people, he can't even remember what the person in question did.

The whole point of a jury trial is for the jury to decide what they believe are the facts from the evidence, testimony, and arguments provided by the lawyers on both sides. You are essentially proposing that we kneecap juries by taking the power of fact-finding away from them and handing it to another authority. That would undermine the check on government overreach juries are meant to provide.

You woefully undershoot the position of power that juries hold, and this is no surprise The judicial system frowns on those who understand the concept of jury nullification.

The jury is the People's seat and primary check on the exercise of Governmental power. It's one more layer to the overall setup of checks and balances.

> Time and time again, we've seen how the justice system doesn't benefit society at large.

Do you mean to imply that we've seen examples of how the justice system, on balance, does not benefit society at large? As in, adding up all the positives and negatives of the justice system, we'd be better off without it? If so, I'd want to see what those examples you mention are.

I completely agree about Promissory Estoppel and contract law. I was (perhaps unclearly) trying to demonstrate that other areas of the law do address the principle of relying on a promise when making a decision.

I think the principle could and should apply to some extent in this situation here too.

Something like: if you were misled into making a confession - perhaps relying on a promise or lie told to you by the interviewer - then at the very least that confession should be considered deeply suspect.

He said, "It kinda feels a little like the common law doctrine of Promissary Estoppel".

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