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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

> “Um, I’m at a house,” [NAME] said, with hesitation, giving a [STREET NAME] address in [CITY].

This should NOT have been publicized. There is enough information in the above sentence that I was able to Google for her exact address. This is a gross danger to violence victims.

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Transcripts are already public information. The accused obviously already knows where she lives. How does this affect her security?

Even if we could keep the identity of witnesses secret, we don’t want to. We have the right to confront our accusers, and we don’t want secret trials.

The other solution seems to be endangering the general public by opening the courts in a pandemic or to start having secret courts. Neither are particularly compelling. Far less people were assaulted in the US than died of coronavirus, and even fewer were assaulted for witness intimidation. And a secret court is obviously bad for a rules based democracy.

It needn't be one or the other.

You can have remote trials but just don't put personal information in records, and prohibit unauthorized recording. Have one official recording that redacts personal addresses and contact information.

No parr of the justice system should be hidden from view. If its too dangerous to be made public, its not important enough to be used.

I disagree. I strongly think the justice system should be first and foremost protecting victims and not exposing them to more harm.

That would encourage victims to not bring wrongdoings to trial in fear of their personal info being exposed.

If someone is convicted, then yeah, go ahead and put them on a sex offender registry with their address. Loss of privacy is a consequence of their actions. That's justice.

But goddamn no don't put the victim's address in public view.

Everyone should be treated equally in the court. A court that prioritizes the victim is barely batter than having a system based on vigilante justice.

Well yes, so you start out by not publishing either party's address. If and when someone is convicted as a sex offender, it's reasonable to publish their address at that point, and continue to protect the victim's identity.

You can censor live events for nuisances like strong language or nudity, but you can't protect the privacy of victims? You would be absolutely astonished, how many women are intimidated/assaulted each year. The infection rates of covid pale against that.

Roughly 300,000 people were assaulted in 2019 (last year of uniform crime stats from the FBI). The annualized amount of COVID-19 death is about 400,000.

Correction: 300,000 reported assaulted, not 300,000 assaulted.

Specifying that for only one side isn't exactly balanced. There were only 400,000 reported covid deaths as well.

I'm not sure why is it that you only mention "women" here, are you implying men are never assaulted?

This was an ok amount of anonymity under Old School journalism with paper phonebooks but not after the internet. Seems they need to update their standards.

There's always a price when you censor something. There's also always a price when you regulate something, too. In this particular case, the likely attacker was literally in the same house, so there's not a lot of argument to be made that the extra burden of censoring would add a similar or greater gain.

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