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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Mostly because these stories are incredibly rare. The Innocence Project does excellent work to try and prevent people like this from falling through the cracks.

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The stories are rare. We don't know how rare the events are. What percentage of people do the Innocence Project manage to review? It's certainly not everyone.

Absolutely not. The high imprisonment rate and the number of people imprisoned without a process is a clear symptom.

And if everyone who dropped the ball on this got a year in prison for it, they'd be even more rare.

thats a good way to gum up the system so nothing ever gets done.

Then people will be empowered to enforce community standards instead of being held back by a State force that doesn't do its job but prevents them from doing theirs.

Once you start punishing players for dropping the ball, the game becomes to not receive the pass.

We never seem to have this problem for any field other than law enforcement or military. In other professions, if you mess up aggressively, there are repercussions professionally.

There are? Like when Goldman Sachs needed a bailout ... and then used half of it to pay bonuses to their execs that had gotten them into the mess in the first place? Or politicians mismanaging things, only to be re-elected or, worst case, switch to a cushy job on the board of some corporation?

I'm not sure there are that many professions where you get exiled or go to jail for failure.

If doctors or lawyers fuck up bad enough, losing their license is one possible, if rare, outcome. Those professions are still very popular.

I hear you but I also feel like this is already happening. Not only did everyone in this chain, for 2 years, say "its not my problem, I'll push it forward", when it had to be reviewed they did it secretly without recompense for the harm caused.

They received the pass and then pretended it never happened

There are organizations dedicated to handling the repeated abuse of mental health facilities in similar ways here -- not the legal aspect, but the mental health. "Incredibly rare" feels like it's playing into the narrative of "oops, this is rare".

So, I would argue, "one of many": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment

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