It's beyond me how anyone has one iota of faith in the US judicial system anymore.
The justice system mostly works (relative to what its designed to do and the system it evolved out of, which you might both disagree with, but let's not complicate this). By the nature of what it handles (humans) and what you are (human) it will look abhorrently cruel when it fails. And, as with any system, it will definitely continue to fail as long as it is in place.
Assessing an acceptable failure rate is kinda hard – but realistically there has to be one or you will just have to do without any system at all.
So, more interestingly, the thing to look out for is whether a) there are institutions that report on system failures and b) we learn from those failures and correct them at all. As far as I can tell that generally happens in democratic countries.
The next thing to look at is the speed in which we do those corrections. Could they be quicker? Sure. However, it seems like democracies are a tad slow about everything to people everywhere. Or, put differently, we are all wired a little bit too impatiently for how our democracies are currently designed.
I feel that's good thing, constantly scrutinising our systems, keeping them on their toes and improving as we go.
And when they realized they had wronged this man, they did whatever they could to sweep it under the rug and avoid consequences, or reparations for their actions.
The system doesn't just "look abhorrently cruel", it IS abhorrently cruel, and this incident is a clear example of that.
The key question is "what sort of system makes it harder to cover things up?" because the people element of people not wanting to get in trouble or have their mistakes visible isn't going to go anywhere.
You also need to have the non-mistake, non-cruel cases visible, to see if things are changing for the better or worse, rate-wise.
A "less cruel" system isn't a particularly specific or well-defined thing to strive for if it's not specifically trying to address those human failings, since people can still be cruel.
How hard it is for the coverup to work is largely irrelevant IMO.
Though I am interested if you have some other examples.
Though of course it's strange that these half admissions of coverups are not treated sufficiently seriously by the courts.
We have a US legal system.
The US legal system is a commercial system. By that, I don't mean to say it is corrupt. Rather, the participants in the system require representation i.e. lawyers, and lawyers charge for their time, by design. Consequently, access to outcomes of the legal system is a function of the financial and social resources of the participants.
The only loss for the officials here is embarassment
The incentive also seems backward here: if there's a shield protecting you even in case of screwup, you are incentivized to cover things up less than otherwise.
Protection from initial mistakes, like "blame free retros," is generally heralded as a way to promote fixing root causes and reduce political coverups.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his cheap internet virtue points depend on his not understanding it.
I think this is my largest hatred. People's first action after something bad happens is not to discover why it happened, but rather to express outrage that it happened. In my ideal society they would be excluded.
What's not okay is skipping the investigation step, to jump straight from outrage to action.
So, I would argue, "one of many": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
I'm not sure there are that many professions where you get exiled or go to jail for failure.
They received the pass and then pretended it never happened
There isn't a large Innocence Project (though a small one has popped up and should be supported) in Australia and there are overzealous prosecutors in Australia, just as in a lot of places (though the competition in America seems to be exceptionally strong). Faith is nice and all, but it doesn't free the innocent. There's a link to support Australia's innocence project, maybe tithe.
For that matter, things won't improve in any anglophone country until they ditch the adversarial system for the inquisitorial one that has a better chance of getting to the truth of a case. But don't hold your breath, that won't happen anytime soon.
https://obriensolicitors.com.au/case-studies-unlawful-impris...
Every day on HN we have debates about the trading of privacy for data for a more secure world. This is an indication that our efforts are broken, because people. But also that those people held a lot of different roles, in a diversity of offices across our judicial system.
EDIT: Confused "anywhere" with "everywhere". I'll take my F in logic today and show myself out.
* a human that has never once made any mistake whatsoever
* a system composed of humans who are mistake capable but the system itself actually makes no mistakes.
Such a thing seems impossible - if you can point to the existence of such a thing, your doubt is worth entertaining, otherwise it's just contrarianism.
Multiple people convicted by evidence provided by a quack of a doctor used as an Expert Witness by the crown.
For one thing, if another country handles things better, that shows humans are capable of improving their system.
I wonder what the other countries are that do better, and what they do differently. Maybe there should be a mandated evidence review every x years, irrespective of sentence.
Sure, we will have failures—but we need to push the envelope and do “good” not “better than worse”.
If it was unique you can point to what makes it unique - but if it happens everywhere, then it's because humans are humans.
If you don't understand the source of the problem you have no change of fixing it.
The system is designed to target and exploit vulnerable, poor people and turn them into productive assets. Once it has them, getting them out can be incredibly difficult because they become so profitable. Our penal system is not designed for rehabilitation but for profit generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
Hundreds jailed or fined due to a faulty computer system blaming them - no other evidence - Post Office covered it up repeatedly - victims still not fully compensated.
I think justice should be considered the entire purpose of a legal system. And if it isn't working, it should be fixed.
Accountability sounds like a good place to start. If an official causes harm to another person through negligence or otherwise they should be held accountable to the same standards as anyone else.
... but it doesn't always succeed for multiple reasons. One of the most common being that it's not always possible to grant all parties justice. Sometimes, courts have to evaluate a zero-sum situation and decide how cost will be shared, so there's no way to move forward without constraining someone's rights. And people's definitions of "justice" vary, and are far more often grounded in emotion than coherent philosophy... It's not always even logically possible to grant all parties justice.
The useful distinction to keep in mind is that the legal system will follow the law, but whether the outcome of that is "justice" is a subjective evaluation more than a measurable concept.
This is probably argument from definition (unclear) but in any case, it's a statement which needs backing up.
To cite a usual boogeyman for such discussions, the Soviet court system under Stalin wasn't at all interested in justice.
It's not clear to me that the incentives in the US court system align with justice more than accidentally. As in, sometimes the guilty go to prison, as a side effect of the prosecutor's office needing to clear their docket and present good numbers to keep their budget up. Very occasionally, the innocent are cleared of crimes, and even more occasionally than that their lives aren't ruined in the process; defense attorneys want to look good as well.
And, to play Devil's advocate, most of those in power under Stalin would likely have claimed and honestly believed that it was a justice system and that it was using its might for the greater good.
Outright sociopaths who simply don't care about harm are rare. When systems cause more harm than good, it's usually because well-intentioned participants fall prey to other human flaws:
* Dehumanizing and believing that some groups are simply less worthy of care than others.
* Biased data or beliefs about who is harmed and who is helped.
* Principle-agent problems where the ones making the decisions don't see or own the consequences of them.
* Emergent properties where no individual member of the system wants a result, but the system as a whole ends up producing it because of its structure. Sort of the beauracratic equivalent of crowd crush.
The reason I'm pointing this out is because I think when non-totalitarian systems fail to help, it's usually for the same reasons. It's not because of psychopathic monsters. It's mostly that primate brains were never designed to operate at the organizational and power scale we have created. The fact that it works at all is a miracle.
One way of at least improving the situation would be for laws that would allow for the victim to sue both the State and public officials separately. If police and other public servants could not hide behind the protection of State and could easily be sued for negligence then they'd be much more diligent. It wouldn't make things perfect but it'd only take a few instances of public servants finding themselves out of pocket to the tune of their life savings for things to improve significantly for the better.
There's no doubt that democracy is badly impacted by such events, and it's little wonder that people continue to lose faith in their governance whenever this happens. Anyway, I hope some smart lawyer will make the State pay very early for its irresponsible and horrendous error and that Spriestersbach is awarded the large compensation that he deserves.
The innocence project is just trying to clear his name, after he went to live with his sister in Vermont.
I can't read the article because it's behind a paywall. I said he needed outside lawyers to rectify the situation. Just because he was freed doesn't mean his life is back in order. I suspect he has an arrest record, criminal conviction and a record of time served to contend with. Not to mention he hasn't worked in 2+ years. I'm sure his credit is toast. What happened to the place he used to live? I don't know if his voting rights have been restored. I would imagine a google search for his name would bring up at least one article on his conviction for employers to be deterred. Imagine what your life would look like if you just vanished from civilization for 2 years. The punishment is a lot more than just the incarceration.
This does not change the crux of your post, just some of the points.