Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
That alone is terrible. But to make that bullshit even worse, Texas continued to use hypnosis induced testimony until 2021.
It makes me wonder when the last death penalty sentence for "shaken baby syndrome" was in Texas.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/shaken-baby-s...
[UPDATE] To those of you downvoting me, would you kindly explain why? It seems like a reasonable question to me.
"We can't explain this trio of internal head/brain/eye trauma with lack of corresponding external trauma, but don't you dare make the reasonable claim that shaking a baby can/does nominally cause the symptoms we see when a baby is, in fact, shaken."
> to make that bullshit even worse, Texas continued to use hypnosis induced testimony until 2021.
That is a sentiment with which I sympathize. But then...
> It makes me wonder when the last death penalty sentence for "shaken baby syndrome" was in Texas.
This I don't get. Shaken baby syndrome is a real thing, and it seems to me that if someone shakes a baby to death they are guilty of murder (or at least negligent homicide) and should be treated no differently than if their victim had been older. What does it have to do with hypnosis?
Because 4th/5th amendment issues aside, if an interrogation or testimony via hypnosis is verifiable, who cares if hypnosis is 'real' or 'junk science'?
If a man shakes a baby and that baby dies, who cares if 'SBS' is 'junk science'? It's still murder.
The label shouldn't automatically validate (or invalidate/discredit) the underlying information/ action/ admission.
So saying it’s ‘shaken baby syndrome’ just because there are internal injuries is junk science.
According to the Mayo Clinic you can:
"While sometimes there's bruising on the face, you may not see signs of physical injury to the child's outer body."
It doesn't get into the nuance, nor is intended as a validation for facile forensic based witch-hunting.
Many forms of trauma can cause these injuries (especially 'trio'), but alone and without matching external trauma, shaking becomes the most likely cause.
Which isn't to say that shaking couldn't also cause some external trauma.
Just the fact it’s on mayoclinic doesn’t mean all that much.
As far as I understand, the claim is that internal head/brain/eye trauma can have many causes, so these symptoms do not automatically mean that the baby was necessarily shaken. Sadly, this combination of symptoms have been named "Shaken Baby Syndrome", which means that people naturally assume that the baby has been shaken, which is apparently a crime in Texas.
Had this same syndrome been named "Guthkelch Syndrome", or anything else, the man currently on death row might have been deemed innocent.
I, for one, find this scary. Just as (in a very different domain) the "movie piracy == slavery" equation I've seen float in Blockbusters many years ago. When people who don't know better start believing in names/PR/..., this can have very real (in this case, deadly) consequences.
But almost all have corresponding external trauma.
The cases that don't have matching external trauma narrow it down considerably.
Restrained in a car seat in a rollover wreck? Maybe.
Rolled out of her bed? Not really plausible. But might seem like a good excuse for someone looking to cover up abuse.
Sort of agree with it being scary that a diagnosis implies a crime, but this is a case where the girl died from bad parenting, whether you call it SBS or not.
Hell, even his excuses are giving a 2-year old too many opiates and letting her sleep somewhere she could fall from while sick. Plus lying about the pneumonia, which wasn't present on autopsy.
Thanks for the details!
You have absolutely no way to place any certainty on this "might" at all.
Moreover, the Syndrome was used to justify suspicion of deliberate harm in cases where the triad was not observed at all, as I think in Roberson's case, if you read between the lines - no article about the case mentions the triad, only generic injuries that could, allegedly, only be caused by shaking.
[1] https://shakenbaby.science
[2] https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-sha...
[3] https://cyrille.rossant.net/introduction-shaken-baby-syndrom...
The original comment to which I was responding still makes absolutely no sense to me. And getting downvoted because I asked for clarification is making even less sense to me. I must be missing something fundamental here. (Either that or HN has jumped the shark, which I fervently hope is not the case.)
[1] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/09/20/pcast-r...
[2] https://innocenceproject.org/misapplication-of-forensic-scie...
[3] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-problem-wi...
Although SBS is a highly disputed and contested diagnosis, most medical authorities (Mayo Clinic, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC...) do not recognize any legitimate controversy associated with it. The most notable exception is the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services which published a systematic review in 2016 criticizing the scientific reliability of SBS diagnoses made on the so-called "triad" of subdural hematoma, retinal hemorrhage, and encephalopathy [1]. This report itself generated intense debates.
The difficulty here is that definitions are generally vague and change over time. What does "shaken baby syndrome" mean? An abusive gesture, a medical theory, something else? That alone is unclear.
What is being really contested is the idea that you can reliably infer shaking whenever you observe this "triad" of findings in an infant with no history of major trauma, and no other evidence of trauma (no bruises, no fractures, no neck injury...). This idea was universally accepted between the 1980s and the 2000s. But the science has shifted, to such a point that medical authorities no longer officially support this theory — however, diagnoses are still being made by inertia of clinical practice and criminal justice. Yet, authorities still claim there is no controversy on the existence and severity of abusive head injuries, which isn't really the point. More on this issue here [2] and in this paper [3].
[1] https://www.sbu.se/en/publications/sbu-assesses/traumatic-sh...
[2] https://cyrille.rossant.net/introduction-shaken-baby-syndrom...
[3] https://wlr.law.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1263/2020/...
It may well be that the evidence for SBS in this particular case was bogus, but it does not follow that SBS is bogus in general.
The reference to Texas is because the subject of the article is a particular case in Texas (with references to other laws/cases in Texas like the "junk science writ" and Kosoul Chanthakoummane whose case had nothing to do with SBS). The reference to hypnosis is sort of orthogonal to SBS, it's used as another example of junk science in the article.
This section of the article is probably the most relevant:
Paradoxically, Texas is a leader in countering junk science. In 2013, the state introduced a first-in-the-nation “junk science writ” that allowed prisoners – especially those on death row – to challenge sentences on grounds of misused forensic science. It was under this law that in 2016 Sween saved Roberson from imminent death by securing a stay of execution four days before his scheduled lethal injection.
But the hope generated by the new junk science law in Texas has proven a chimera. There have been about 70 attempts by death row inmates to utilize the law and of those the number that have obtained relief is zero.
Kosoul Chanthakoummane was one of those who appealed through the junk science law. He had been put on death row on the back of three different types of junk science: hypnosis of a witness to obtain identification, bitemark analysis and a discredited form of DNA testimony.
In August 2022, Texas executed him anyway.
The problem is: 1. The science seems to point towards ‘Shaken Baby Syndrome’ being able to be caused by several different things, including ones that don’t even involve physical trauma, so physical shaking is only one cause amongst many whereas most doctors and the justice system still mostly confidentially assert it’s always from shaking. Saying SBS is always a result of shaking is junk science.
2. Hypnosis is a way to extract confessions, but it’s probably extremely likely to extract false confessions. Hence why it’s generally disallowed, because it’s pseudoscience.
3. The particular case involving (1) assuming SBS is always from shaking and (2) a false confession from hypnosis happened in Texas.
So that’s the link.
As you say in your article, there must be hundreds, if not thousands of people in jail for having shaken their babies to death. I can't imagine any harm more horrible that our society can perpetrate than punishing someone for the death of their loved ones when they had nothing to do with it. To think that this is done systematically is inconsolable, insufferable to contemplate.
I totally agree. This is insufferable.
This is not just a virtual, academic subject to me. I've cofounded an association of French families [1] that has been contacted by 1300+ people in the past 8 years or so. I see parents losing their baby to foster care for 6, 12, 24 months or more. To say they are broken for life is an understatement. I see fathers, mothers, nannies maintain their innocence for years until they are convicted to 5 to 15 years of jail, because medical experts have certified that no other explanation than shaking could have ever caused the child's findings. Three more people I know have been convicted in the past couple of weeks. I feel so absolutely desperate and hopeless seeing people going to jail one after the other, week after week, while I can't do anything about it. All cases are not illegitimate, of course, but there are serious reasons to be doubtful when there is no external evidence of trauma, strong and sustained denials, and no antecedent of abuse.
For sure, we have tried to alert medical authorities, doctors, politicians, institutions, judges, celebrities, scientists, journalists for years, and almost no one actually cares, while those who do will do everything in their power to cancel and suppress us (Waney Squier is one among many other examples, Chapter 1 of our Cambridge book provides more examples). I see no other example in our modern history of an active, systematic endeavor that has been so destructive to so many people for so long.
Thanks! Although I just saw it and didn't have the chance to upvote it when it was posted. Let's hope it gets on the second chance queue. It's a good article, well written and level-headed.
>> This is not just a virtual, academic subject to me.
I can tell. Thank you for your indefatigable advocacy.
I read about Shaken Baby Syndrome some time ago and since then I've kept bookmarks of cases I see in the news that seem to be false convictions. I remember one in particular of a British man who was accused of having murdered his baby daughter by shaking. The case has stuck in my mind because the press reported how a Playstation was found on the living room table and the prosecution alleged that the daughter's crying had disturbed the father's playing, and so he had shaken her so he could continue playing. I could not believe that such a far-fetched conjecture, virtually impossible to falsify, would be accepted by judges and juries and thought that for the prosecution to be grasping for straws like that they must really have nothing concrete to go on, but the father was put in jail nonetheless. I don't have my bookmarks at hand now so I can't look up his name.
I suspect that when legal and medical experts claim that SBS cases don't only take the evidence of the triad into account, that's the kind of "evidence" that they mean they also consider: just-so stories that stop only short of calling the family pet as a witness.
Edit: I just realised - your association is called "adikia". "Injustice" in my native language, Greek.
I would recommend contacting ProPublica and TheGuardian to raise awareness.
Edit: My cousin is similar to a nurse at an adolescent lockdown facility in N. Texas for serious mental healthcare and physical safety needs that no parent could reasonably hope to provide. The standard is so high and the beds so few, the kids in the facility are the most desperate cases and pretrial diversions that would otherwise go unaddressed in carceral situations. It takes a special, brave, and trained caregiver to meet the needs that medication, godly patience and tolerance, and love alone cannot provide.
For example, the Wikipedia article on SBS has a section on "Legal Issues" that gives some details. Or you may find informative Wikipedia's article about Waney Squier, a doctor who was involved in SBS cases as an expert witness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waney_Squier
The "Legal Issues" section on the SBS also mentions Waney Squire's case.
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[1] Btw, this is a "controversy" in the sense of often acrimonious debate between experts and not in the sense of the "controversy" that Young Earth Creationists demand be taught in schools. It's a controversy about methodology and medical and science ethics; the kind of thing that gets up some scientists' noses.
And the thing is in a different context we celebrate this logic. When we do elections we don't really care about choosing the best candidate. We just go through the process, fight to protect the sanctity of the process because what's actually important is that people accept the outcome even if it makes so sense. Peaceful transfer of power and finality.
The fact that legislation is always vague and they can interpret it to mean whatever their ideology wants it to mean is just waiting for more legislation to fix it. If there is an obvious miscarriage of justice, all you need to do is get a majority of the House, 60% of the Senate, and the President to all agree within a two year window. There, justice done.
In this case the guy got to go all the way to the top court. That's great. That sounds like a good system so far. So at very least it's not rotten to the core. Thomas is unfit and disappointingly partisan, but this appointment came from the executive branch, not the justice system itself. The justice system was set up so the executive branch can check the judiciary. In this case the executive Branch's actions really messed up, but I don't think it's fair to criticize the justice system.
I'm not saying it was okay to kill the person. I'm saying we can't throw away laws but your comment continues to advocate for a less "algorithmic" (unambiguous) law. These types of comments are part of why people get radicalized on the internet.
Your sentence about people getting radicalized on the internet is non sequitur and bizarre.
No. This isn't a case of OJ finding the Real Killers(tm). It wasn't even "new" evidence.
>Ramirez appealed to federal court where his federal public defenders uncovered evidence of intellectual disability and extensive childhood abuse that hadn't been presented at his initial trial.
The ruling only overturned (the 9th circuit precedent) whether the 'default' position of the appeals court should be to accept/consider new arguments not made at trial.
It was not suddenly discovered that the convicted might be intellectually disabled.
Which is itself is still quite the leap from suddenly discovering 'exonerating evidence'.
>"Jones also appealed to federal court, where federal investigators found evidence suggesting he was innocent. In both cases, ..."
Just about every single person on death row will suddenly claim to have found yet another round of evidence proving innocence when their previous appeal doesn’t work out. It’s a classic delaying tactic, and in this case I agree with the Supreme Court.
They apparently didn't like their chances at retrial, even with "effective counsel".
"We couldn't simultaneously argue two conflicting theories of defense"...
Isn't quite the same argument when your revealed preference shows you not to believe either theory to stand on its own (or together).
"Your honor, we'd like this conviction thrown out because we couldve/shouldve claimed 'defense option B'." Retrial granted. "No! We don't actually want to retry with 'defense option B'! We just needed a reason to throw out conviction based on 'defense option A'!"
An appeals judge should be able to make that call the same way a trial judge can dismiss charges before trial. That appeals judge can easily say, it’s relevant but not clear enough for me to dismiss the case.
PS: Thus various standards of evidence “beyond reasonable doubt” vs “clear and convincing” vs “preponderance” etc.
No, deciding to (not) call an expert witness to present a different theory (that conflicts with the rest of your defense claims) isn't "found evidence". It's strategy.
It's the same buyers remorse, no-true-scotsman argument. Case lost, therefore ineffective assistance.
The lawyer could have presented a different argument, but didn't. Convicted now wants to make a different argument on appeal.
'That injury shouldn't have killed her that quickly.' isn't new medical evidence. Just an argument not made.
'Also I forgot I saw a boy hit her with a pipe. It must have been that injury. Even though I just claimed the same time frame was impossible if I had hit her.' Isn't new evidence, just a new argument.
This is on top of him not allowing the mom to bring her to the hospital until the next day, after she was already dead. Eta: Oh yea, also on top of the admitted statutory rape stuff.
>where federal investigators found evidence suggesting he was innocent
No, they just decided (with the benefit of hindsight) that they would have used a different defense strategy.
That's not "found evidence suggesting he was innocent."
the death sentence is still a barbaric practice.
In Illinois you can attempt to present your evidence only after you have exhausted all of your regular appeal routes (appellate court, state supreme court, SCOTUS, state habeas corpus, fed habeas -- there are 11 levels here first) which can take a decade. Then you have to petition the court. But you have to do it yourself, you don't get a lawyer to help you at the first stage. So if you have no idea what you're doing (and certainly a prison is going to do whatever they can to impede you in this by restricting your access to any instructions or legal materials), then you just have to suck it up and take the needle.
In fact, I don't think enough emphasis is put on the fact that these people are generally fighting their cases from prison and it is 1000X harder to do from inside than outside. They have no access to a phone directory to try to call anyone. They might not have any money to make calls. The prison might only give them one free letter a week. And then you need an address to write to - where do you get that? A phone call is probably limited to 20 mins, and if you call and the other person misses it, you can't call back to a prison.
And don't get me started on legal materials in prison. If you are lucky enough where you can actually get to a library (all prison law libraries shut during COVID and many have never reopened) you'll rarely see a computer. Often it is just piles of moldy books. And of course the previous person didn't want to risk the chance they would ever get back to the library, so at the very least they have torn out all the pages they need from the book you wanted to read, or worse, have straight up stolen the book.
And we're not taking into account how much energy is required to fight the system and how exhausting it is for an inmate. It is mentally unbelievable to do all this work locked up. You have to do everything on paper with a pencil too at most places. Copying out huge citations and writing huge motions. Then you have to perhaps write them out another 19 times because that's how many copies the court requires by law and you don't have access to a photocopier. Plus everyone around you at the prison is just running buck wild, screaming, shouting, fighting, gambling. It's no fun.
And these lawyers fighting for death row inmates are awesome, amazing, unbelievable people, but there are very, very few of them. And only death row cases get any real traction. The innocent people who are convicted and get life without parole don't get noticed. The innocent people who get 80 years without parole are way down the list, even though it is a de facto life sentence.
I'm helping a guy now who is inside on a life-without-parole case. No lawyer has stepped up to help him out. I'm trying to help him find a lawyer. I've just been helping a guy reconnect to modern life after getting out from a 40 year sentence for a crime he didn't do.
Whereas issues like you mention above, and trial reform in general, and prison system reform in general, would have wide bipartisan support.
It really makes me suspicious why activists and the media are not advocating for the things 90% of people would agree with. Is the other stuff just an intentional distraction so nothing gets fixed?
There are many prison reform movements, but none of them get any traction without such visceral, concrete, and shocking symbols. You hear about defunding the police because it's the only one with even a shred of a chance to accomplish anything at all.
People might agree with other improvements if a pollster asked them, but only because it's abstract. If they got any serious traction there would be an equivalent objection using the same tactics to defame and harass the people who were trying. And since it doesn't involve a death it will get chalked up to "both sides are bad" and dropped.
I'd love to see politics work on something more coherent and beneficial but we're way, way past that.
Firstly, 90% dont agree with trial reform. Most conservatives and wealthy "liberals" do not care, but they are not the ones who suffer.
Secondly, "defund the police" helps solves trial reform by reducing the number of people pushed into trial on questionable grounds. Take this for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37431962 -- this type of AI-driven precog system would not be funded if we defunded police departments. That means less people arrested/tried on pseudo-science grounds.
Similarly, less police means the police have to focus on the highest impact issues, rather than trying to go on dragnets and putting angent provaceteurs into the community to literally manufacture criminals.
They absolutely do not. You can see the split clearly in court decisions regarding the criminal justice system.
It’s to achieve vengeance. This doesn’t seem that complicated.
So they frame it as "deterring others in the future" which sounds sort of noble.
It's like they know the vengeance thing is f--ed up. Why else would they lie?
Perhaps even worse is that the politicians themselves might not even crave vengeance. A lot of the time, they're just pandering to voters who want it.
To quote a post I recently found resonating with me:
"Look, we don’t necessarily hang murderers to deter other people from committing the same offence. We kill them simply because the punishment has to carry the same weight as the offence. The family of the murderer must go through the same anguish and pain that the murder victim’s family went through. The killer has to be stopped from enjoying all the things that come with being alive. When you kill another person, you deprive them of worldly enjoyments like food, sex, conversations, bathing, laughing, crying and therefore it is only befitting that you too get deprived of same and the only way to do so is through the death sentence. If we are going to shy away from punishing wrong-doers on the basis that the punishment won’t stop other people from committing the same offence then we might as well not send anyone to jail because sending people to jail has never stopped other people from committing the same offences."
https://www.sundaystandard.info/iocom-a-retributionist-i-sup...
Some cultures actually did do retribution based executions, they where horrific and very different from lethal injection etc.
No, it would not. That's not the definition of retribution.
The argument was one for the proportionality of death for death, but death wasn’t the only harm. That’s an inherent contradiction in the argument being made. You can’t argue an unequal punishment balances the scales here.
That would surprise me!
But executions change all that. Whether or not a person supports capital punishment reveals if their morality is a flimsy thing of feelings and self-interest or a thing of principle. It is safe for someone to hate a heinous criminal and wish them ill. There's little fear of guilty feelings or reprisal. The average person will give in, baying for blood purely because they want to see the hated person suffer. A good person will refuse to hurt others no matter how badly they want to.
Capital punishment is a good litmus test. It reveals those who are murderers deep down inside.
Does this include or exclude killing in self defense? Would a good person allow themselves to be killed rather than harming the attacker? Imagine that the assailant would be rehabilitated after serving 10-15 years for your murder and live a productive life with family and kids, does that change the equation? Is absolutist pacifism the end goal or is there an arbitrary line you are willing to draw?
Executions are different. People are not afraid to admit that they support executions because they like knowing that hated people will suffer. That is not something I will consider acceptable under any circumstances. If there were any evidence that capital punishment served a purpose beyond feeling good I might change my tune. But there isn't, so I won't.
You yourself admitted executions serve no practical purpose, so your self-defense hypotheticals are irrelevant.
We should not torture them on purpose but besides that I do not particularly care if they suffer or not during execution.
As bad as that may be, it isn't a sign of violent intentions.
There are a lot of people who aren't shy about supporting the death penalty simply because they want suffering and death. There are others who don't care what's happening in the world, give in to peer pressure, or honestly believe executions have practical value. Those aren't the same problem as simply cruelty.
We consider murderers the lowest of the low, therefore we stoop to the same level. That's the thinking?
In the US, the same people who think government should not have much power, are against taxes, think that abortion is a kind of murder and should be illegal, these people are nevertheless fine with government murdering citizens. I don't get it.
It makes perfect sense if you realize that none of those things are rational positions; they're all opinions people arrived at for emotional reasons, while lacking information or the ability to process it.
What hurt them is the behavior. You really going to feel good about your brother senselessly murdering three people, because "at least he's alive".
The notion of standing behind loved ones, no matter what, is not universal.
So that's the explicit goal.
I wonder if they were really focusing on the family needing to be punished, vs. the murderer knowing what they've done to their family. In such a case, you could argue that it does not and should not hurt the family any more (or not much).
You don't have to stand by family, and can feel very little different about their receiving justice; perhaps a bit worse, since you don't know what else they could do before being laid to rest.
I thought this was getting dismissed too quickly, but I forgot how directly this was said. Yes, if you literally want to hurt their families, that's just insanity; lashing out at people who had nothing to do with it...
... although there's a really interesting argument that you're always doing this when you punish someone.
It's the intention that matters.
Punishments have several functions -- to work as deterrent, to keep society safe from the perpetrator, to change them so that they won't repeat their crime in the future, to compensate the victims if possible, and also pure retribution, to let people feel "they got what they deserved."
To me, that last one is the least important, and "tooth for a tooth" makes the punisher guilty of the same crime as the perpetrator.
When I said "punishment" I meant the purely revenge version. I was basically working from that assumption, and this is what we'd been previously discussing.
So, I was purely speaking from a harm perspective. The argument is that it makes no sense to try to harm anyone, for any action, no matter how evil.
Without "free will" this is a violent act of senseless aggression against the innocent. Interestingly, if it's an animal we think it probably doesn't have "free will", however we accept this as a reason IN FAVOR of disregarding their rights (eg. the killer bear doesn't think and feel like us, just shoot it).
With modern sensibilities, you shouldn't hurt people unless they do something under their own "free will"; but this is never true, if we don't have "free will" to begin with.
So if an animal kills we use their lack of free will as a reason to kill them, but if a person doesn't have free will, then that's a reason they should be spared; doesn't this just seem like we've created another spiritual concept, to shape based on our cultural values.
P.S. Even arguing the inverse case, it's tempting to use lack of free will as a justification for leniency; at the same time you'll be very quick to use some form of it as a reason in favor of the sanctity of life.
How are family members guilty by association? Did they even chose to be somebody's brother, daughter, etc?
The pact the government has with people is that the government metes out justice so that people don't try to get it themselves. Some measure of retribution, it doesn't need to be the death penalty, works towards this goal. If people believe the courts will punish a criminal they are less likely to do it themselves, it reduces the risk of vigilante justice. That's a good thing because vigilantes are less discerning about getting the right person and considering extenuating evidence. It's a compromise.
Imagine the government found a way to cure psychopathy with a pill. They catch a serial killer who brutally murdered dozens of people, utterly rehabilitate him with their pill and release him the same day. This might satisfy you and some of the other wise and enlightened commenters in this thread, but many people would not be satisfied with it and people would be more inclined to kill murderers in retribution, since the government no longer punishes them.
That's a bold claim. I know people who didn't do illegal stuff because they didn't want repercussion that comes with it. So it is a deterrent.
Or it's a form of societal self-defence: there are some folks that will continue to be a menace to society, whether they'll do murder or other bad things, and society wants to eliminate the risk/threat.
If someone comes at you with a knife or gun, you have a right to protect yourself, potentially up to the point of killing the attacker. If someone comes at a group of people (e.g., at a temple, mosque, church), they have a right to protect yourself, potentially up to the point of killing the attacker.
If someone keeps coming at member of society, society has a right to protect itself.
In modern times, with modern prisons, it is much easier to keep these people isolated from society at large, and so the need for the mechanism has been diminished, but the principle is still there.
Sure, the author wrote why they believe what they do. That's not itself evidence that they are right in their beliefs.
I don't understand why this "must" be the way things are done; it seems way more of a stretch to argue this than to say that if the family of the murderer is innocent, choosing a punishment specifically based on wanting to make them suffer seems pretty messed up. I don't think claiming that innocent people who happen to be related to criminals should be forced to suffer is a universal premise; if you're going to claim it, you're going to need to back it up with an argument about why that's somehow more reasonable than "we shouldn't go out of our way specifically to punish innocent people".
> If we are going to shy away from punishing wrong-doers on the basis that the punishment won’t stop other people from committing the same offence then we might as well not send anyone to jail because sending people to jail has never stopped other people from committing the same offences.
If your goal is a 1:1 justice system where the guilty party suffers the exact same punishment that their victim suffered through their crime, doesn't that also imply that imprisonment should basically only ever be used as a punishment for kidnapping/holding people hostage? Do you punish a drug dealer by forcing them to buy drugs from the victim, or a fraud doctor to get care only from people without medical degrees? It's virtually impossible to try to define punishments like this in general, so I don't find it compelling that it's somehow the obvious way to punish murder.
Is the only way to get the "correct outcome" a BLM george floyd type protest? It seems like the court system is becoming like getting support from tech companies these days where the only way to get a "normal" level of service/outcome is to start a shitstorm on twitter as the normal support systems doesn't have the approval to make a profit affecting decision.
That’s really a sad state of affairs.
So long as you follow arcane procedure and precedent, the deeper facts don’t matter and don’t get much respect from the system.
Outside of the Anglosphere judges are free to ignore precedent, which they call "jurisprudence". This is a tradeoff: you get justice "in the moment" in exchange for less future surety about how the legal system will react. The legal system might just decide that you doing the exact same thing someone else did and got away with is now illegal.
My personal opinion is that any basis of law can be used for tyranny, and that common law and inviolable rights are less protective than we have been propagandized to think. Even common law legal systems occasionally overturn precedent if they feel like it - remember when anti-abortion laws were a violation of the 4th Amendment until they weren't?
[0] This even extends to the word "franchise", which means "French-ize", as in to be given freedoms by being turned into a Frenchman
[1] What if your enemy seeks to take away your rights?
This was the second try at this case after a prior jury hung, but the two years between the charge and the second trial were not enough to get _any_ results back on the substance. Apparently the lead time required is such that they didn't bother to try. Here's how they explained that: "This isn't CSI."
The spin-offs are bad. The suspects are interrogated until they confess, and nobody cares if they have no lawyer or they use dubios evidence.
For the cops, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, the show doesn't give the proper sense of immense caseload. Each episode feels like they're focused 100% on a single thing, when in reality they're probably juggling dozens, and stretched thin.
The cop side of things in L&O is fairly unrealistic, but imo in more minor ways for pacing than anything egregious.
The prosecutors of course don't get called on 4th/5th amendment violations as they normally would, and my memory is the defendant testifies way too frequently (for homicide cases, in that time priod). And it doesn't do a realistic depiction of the rate at which people get completely screwed over by corruption. And it doesn't do a great job pointing out how often prosecutors will take cases prioritized for their own political careers.
I am not a lawyer, and the lawyers I watched L&O with were civil litigators not criminal litigators, so some of my perspective is probably off (though I suspect in ways that are more favorable to the show). Also it was like 25 years ago? Lol
This case is harder. Medical questions about what happened to a victim are often highly relevant, and doctors are legitimate, credentialed experts qualified to speak on that topic. If they believe based on their training and experience that suchandsuch symptoms mean blunt force trauma, how could a random judge evaluate whether they have enough scientific backing to say that?
It sounds like the appeal is NOT like that, the judge having seemingly ignored the very reasonable challenge to the original witness testimony.
There ceased to be a distinction between the two groups in your original comment when the weight of evidence started to clearly tip away from prosecutions like these.
> In Tribble’s case, the FBI agent testified at trial that the hair from the stocking matched Tribble’s “in all microscopic characteristics.”
> In closing arguments, federal prosecutor David Stanley went further: “There is one chance, perhaps for all we know, in 10 million that it could [be] someone else’s hair.”
It was dog hair.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/dc-judge-exonerat...
This has to be wildly illegal. "perhaps for all we know", followed by a concrete number.
In "Factfulness" the late Hans Rosling mentions how he spent years telling people to not keep babies sleeping on their back, based on science were people believed babies might suffocate more easily.
This turned out to be the opposite of truth, babies are more likely to die when sleeping on their belly. For years, doctors , him included, may have indirectly killed babies trying to save them.
OTOH, the unreliability of our tools makes a strong case against the death penalty, IMO.
[0] Like me, right now, who thinks we should demand copyright term maximums
We have pretty good proposals to deal with this problem. I think the following seems sensible:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/4368
>Partially because fringe people who want to change the law make terrible legal arguments
No one has ever changed the law to benefit the rich, no sirree.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/To...
It is our current system that is fringe. Copyright is practically permanent when compared to a fleeting human lifespan. Even when copyrights eventually expire, trademarks function as "a species of mutant copyright" to keep works protected forever. Companies like Disney profit off our shared heritage and then lock it in their "Vault" forever. The way human culture has worked for hundreds of thousands of years has been derailed within just the last few generations.
Radical changes to line the pockets of the owning class are sensible and legal and moderate, but wanting even the smallest change to prevent the slaughter of innocents by the Abbott regime is fringe.
Note that I don't necessarily disagree with you that reformers often make bad legal arguments. Making good legal arguments requires good lawyers, and only the rich can afford good lawyers.
>>Partially because fringe people who want to change the law make terrible legal arguments
>No one has ever changed the law to benefit the rich, no sirree.
You followed this up with a link to America's mind-numbingly long copyright terms, so I would instead point out that none of those were extended by judicial fiat. Generally a "legal argument" means something argued in front of a judge about how the law is, rather than something argued to Congress about how the law ought to be. The reason why reformers make bad legal arguments is because they're trying to use the legal system to do an end-run around Congress, because the rich people already own Congress.
That being said, they also own the legal system indirectly. It's staffed by professionals who have a vested interest in a set of rich people paying them money. If SCOTUS said tomorrow that, say, 1A overturns the Copyright Clause, half the legal profession would be homeless by the day after.
Also, trademark as copyright is already precluded by the federal preemption clause of US copyright law; you specifically cannot cobble together other rights into something that looks and quacks like a copyright.
The OP did not say anything about taking ownership of already-existing software without its owner’s consent.
This man was not committed to death row because of one doctor. He was found guilty because multiple people in his life testified he had a history of violently shaking and screaming at a child for crying.
The doctors failed to diagnose the infant with severe pneumonia and prescribed it medications that are no longer considered safe for children. This seems like plenty of doubt to not convict him.
You know the issue with that claim? It would have shown up in autopsy. There would still be inflammation in the lungs.
The child had breathing problems because of SBS. SBS can pinch off the airway.
This is a kid that was repeatedly in a hospital. Not for a diagnosed issue such as Asthma but because SBS damage kept occuring because Roberson kept shaking the child hard enough for her to pass out on multiple occasions.
IANAL, but wouldn't that be against the rule that character evidence cannot be used by the prosecution (unless in countering character evidence from the defence)?
Specifically, I believe what you describe would be in contravention of the following: https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_404
> (a) Character Evidence.
> (1) Prohibited Uses. Evidence of a person’s character or character trait is not admissible to prove that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character or trait.
> [...]
> b) Other Crimes, Wrongs, or Acts.
> (1) Prohibited Uses. Evidence of any other crime, wrong, or act is not admissible to prove a person’s character in order to show that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character.
> (2) Permitted Uses. This evidence may be admissible for another purpose, such as proving motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake, or lack of accident.
You can't testify that a defendent was "a jealous man" or "of unsavory character". You can testify that you saw him shake an infant angrily until she passed out.
In other words, you can't argue that given there is evidence that the defendant shook babies in anger before, he is the kind of guy who shakes babies in anger, and therefore this is evidence in favour of him having shaken this baby to death.
Regarding (b)(2), I interpret that the testimony that the defendant shook infants in anger in the past would only be admissible under (b)(2) if the previous acts were "proving motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake, or lack of accident". I cannot see how having shaken an infant in the past could provide evidence for any of the above as relates to the separate and specific alleged infant-shaking event for which the defendant was on trial.
Source?
Yes, this article is from 2016 and yes it's in Texas which has a strong law which allows throwing out bad science.
The suspect forensic claim was such a small part of the evidence against the defendent that it didn't survive appeals.
But it also means prosecutors often avoid scientific evidence in favor of witness testimony.
It also creates situations where no DNA test is done on evidence. On appeal the defense says “the prosecution didn’t even do dna testing!” But during the trial the defense wasn’t asking for it (and neither was prosecution) so of course it didn’t happen.
Unfortunately, for the state, taking innocent lives is just an Oopsie.
I’m not saying this from a cynical political perspective. IMHO, the problem is more about the psychology of people in power. They usually believe that the thing they do is the most important thing in the world and sometimes they may screw up(huge material losses or tragic life losses) but that’s not a big deal. Even there endless desire for destroying privacy in the name of security is rooted in this. You can’t let a murderer go free and if you have to you can kill a few innocent people in the process and that’s not a big deal == you can’t let criminals commit crimes and if the privacy is the casualty that’s not a big deal.
On the series Succession, there was a scene where one of the billionaires skit kills a waiter and the father covers up evidence, and says “no real people involved” to justify his actions. I think this very accurately is straight, the thinking of people in power.
You can be against junk science, but entertain the likely possibility he also did it.
* Had severe undiagnosed pneumonia.
* Was prescribed an opioid medication that is no longer deemed safe for children.
* Had diarrhea and a fever of 104F for 5 days prior to her death.
How can you not entertain the possibility that her death had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that someone claims a dude shook a child one time?
In any case the conviction doesn't remotely approach the bar of "beyond a reasonable doubt"
The path is this: he is known to have shook at least one kid before, so maybe that's that happened again with the kid who died in his care. Doesn't mean there was an intent. Just that he shook too hard or the wrong way. So you ask a doctor you check for signs. Doctor says yup, totally SBS. The end.
At no point did he need to "escalate to murder", so there is no leap needed. It's all very straightforward.
What people deify is certain conclusions, for myriad reasons.
"Scientific consensus" is taken as gospel by many people. Most on this very board. They don't care to learn how the consensus was reached (usually happens by just ignoring detractors). They just care to feel superior to people outside the consensus because "duh, science".
Given how complicated nature or whatever around and within us is, there will be many shades of gray. What is looked down upon is (usually) conclusions reached from methods outside of the scientific method, such as predictions of one’s personal life based on a deck of cards or medical interventions with no explanation of cause of action or experimental numbers to rule out random-ness.
Though I'll agree there is a phenomenon that occurs when a vocal group starts criticizing a scientific consensus, usually for obvious political reasons, that causes many people to double-down and express too much rigid faith in that consensus. I don't like that either.
Determining the correctness of somebody’s experiment is pointless if the underlying observations are intentionally incorrect.
Just as you should be cautious trusting Josephus to be critical of the Romans, you should be cautious trusting a researcher report observations contrary to the interests of their social institutions.
Stuff is just complicated.
With conventional religion somewhat on the wane, science has become the new religion: a unquestioning belief in the experts, just like the way people rarely question the word of the priest/preacher in a traditional religion. There's something innately human which predisposes people to beliefs. One of them being just low IQ, An IQ of hundred does not go very far, for the complex lives that we need lead.
What do you call a med school graduate who had a straight-A average? "Doctor".
What do you call a med school graduate who had a C-minus average? "Doctor".
I've had to weed through a couple dunce doctors in my time.
Kids got a broken arm or a broken nose from being slapped around, abuser can't hide it forever. Eventually kids gotta go to school or cops are going to do a welfare check. Same thing if kid disappears off the radar.
SBS is not just a parent trying to shush a baby - it requires a very significant amount of force in a healthy infant. This is not a "oh shush let me hug you" thing, this requires repeatedly seriously jostling the baby hard enough to pinch it's airway off or bounce it's brain off the inside of it's skull. Usually repeatedly.
And as a general rule, KILLING people because they made a mistake is really fucking dumb.
Death sentence strikes me as an idiotic punishment.
That sounds like malicious abuse to me.
> and does not understand that this could kill them, or at least thinks they will not.
It would still be manslaughter at least, if not murder. And if shaking the baby was itself felonious abuse, then an accidental death resulting from that is probably felony murder in states with such statutes.
It suppresses the rate of vigilante justice. If the courts can generally do a better job than the vigilantes themselves, then society comes out ahead.
If we were to live in a society where parents can abuse their children to death and receive nothing more than a scolding from the state to be more careful in the future, then we'd have a lot more people killing each other in retribution. And once that starts in earnest, it often forms unending blood feuds. At the very least, imprisonment for manslaughter is warranted. For the state to mete out no punishment at all would be an abdication of their duty to deliver justice so that others don't have to seek it themselves.
That's obviously a galaxy brain argument, but what's to stop someone from going Tim McVeigh over a routine miscarriage of justice?
If this was manslaughter/murder of an unrelated adult, then I could see that there could conceivably be some friends or relations inspired to vigilantism, but this thread has mainly been about manslaughter of children by parents due to incompetence.
SBS deaths are largely vastly different from intentionally abusive parents. These are accidental harms.
Also sorry but… what? You seem to be proposing that if the law doesn’t support a very specific standard of Justice that vigilantes are the logical consequence. This argument is not supported by anything and could be applied to any level of Justice.
I can relate to wanting to silence something very distressing/aggravating by any means necessary but as a Society we've decided that adults should know better and should be held responsible for such mistake/accident. And I tend to agree. So manslaughter it is.
There may be no clear, bright line making it super obvious who is merely a dumb schmuck without parenting skills and who is a murderer.
We should do a better job of putting out quality parenting info for free and also provide appropriate legal consequences.
WTF do people imagine when they say “murderer”?
The news side also had a piece on this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-debate-over-shaken-baby-syn...
Texas has a history of executing the disabled and presenting "expert" junk science as evidence. https://www.propublica.org/article/is-texas-still-executing-...
https://www.texastribune.org/2011/04/15/texas-psychologist-p...
Illinois had similar problems with the death penalty, including likely executing innocent people.
Arkansas executed an innocent but convicted person in 2017 who was subsequently cleared by DNA evidence. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/making-sense-chaos/2...
So it seems the death penalty cannot be enforced if it cannot be investigated or adjudicated with a necessary and sufficient degree of rigor. It also doesn't serve a purpose as a deterrent (criminals aren't smart enough to anticipate outcomes). Furthermore, it makes the society that dispenses it appear governed by a 3rd-world authoritarian regime. Finally, it's an expensive process and a bloodlust spectacle. Better off keeping cretins alive behind bars for the remote possibility of rehabilitation and let them live with themselves rather than giving them an easy out.
From a purely economic POV, it makes no sense. Compare the average annual cost per state prison inmate [1] ($22,000 for Texas) to the annual cost of a death row inmate. For example, $90,000 per inmate per year for Nevada [2].
In addition capital cases are significantly more expensive to try. Each Federal execution cost an estimated $1 million [3].
Since 1973, at least 190 people sentenced to death have been exonerated [4]. People exonerated of crimes tend to skew heavily towards minorities, particularly African-American [5][6], which shows it's not really about the severity and certainty of a conviction but instead emotional retribution disproportionately targeted at black people.
The American carceral state is an abject failure and a blight on humanity. We have 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's priosners. If locking people up worked, this would be the safest country on Earth.
[1]: https://www.vera.org/publications/price-of-prisons-2015-stat...
[2]: https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/76th2011/ExhibitDo...
[3]:https://interrogatingjustice.org/death-sentences/the-cost-of...
[4]: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence
[5]: https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-...
Credit to the guardian article for linking this. What a weird world.
It's one of the grimmest open data sets around. And the source of this dataviz from Reddit: https://imgur.com/t61UIgH https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/26rui7/oc_...
Also this brings to my mind a recent conversation I had with friends who live in the US (I'm Braziian) on how horrible the health system (even private) is. Hospital refusing emergencies to avoid litigation risk, no service given but bill sent anyway, totally superficial diagnosis no even touching the patient...
I'm not surprised that DRs and Nurses would simply make absurd statements like the ones in the article.
The words "conservative", "liberal", "right", "left", etc., are practically meaningless, and I'm old enough to have seen them change over the decades, sometimes radically. They're nothing but trendy labels.
Liberal vs conservative
Secular vs religious
Governance vs identity politics
The list goes on and on. In an odd historical analogy, the electric charges were originally assigned "negative" and "positive" according to what happened when they were combined, with no hypothesis as to the underlying cause.
This is a gross misunderstanding. Socrates was sentenced to death for "corrupting the youth" in a sham trial. Some friends of Socrates offered to smuggle him out of Athens and escape his death sentence, but Socrates argued against that, for various reasons.
There's no evidence that Socrates supported and promoted the death penalty in the abstract.
It's not. Maybe you're thinking of libertarianism? The conservative ethos is to preserve and promote a social hierarchy. This requires both winners and losers.
Limiting the power of government is a central idea in conservative thought, especially in America[0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_in_the_United_Sta...
I think the fairest thing to say, from that Wikipedia article, is this: "Conservatism in the United States is not a single school of thought." "The history of American conservatism has been marked by tensions and competing ideologies".
Limit government interference in the market? Yes.
Defund the police: Hell no.
Defund the military: Mostly no.
Defund the IRS? Hell yes.
Let anyone who wants to marry get married? Let anyone who wants to have an abortion get an abortion? Go burn in hell.
It really varies depending on the issue.
I would claim that these apparent contradictions all make sense if the goal is to preserve and promote a social hierarchy.
One might wonder how Christianity and capitalism are even compatible. Read what Jesus said about money! Sometimes it appears that most contemporary conservative Christians in the US have not read The New Testament at all, and in some other countries, such as in South America, Christian social movements tend to be (more naturally IMO) explicitly anti-capitalist. I have this strong impression that US conservative Christians have come to believe that the so-called Invisible Hand of the market is actually God sending reward and punishment, which is why it's now ok and even praiseworthy to seek after and accumulate wealth.
- police oversight
- abortion
- welfare
And even on dumber issues like public transit. Say what you will about authoritarianism being the real problem but most people vote and ally themselves based on the progressive-conservative axis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
"Prosperity theology is a religious belief among some Charismatic Christians that financial blessing and physical well-being are always the will of God for them, and that faith, positive speech, and donations to religious causes will increase one's material wealth. Material and especially financial success is seen as a sign of divine favor."
Conservatives have no problem stripping authority from cities and towns so that they maintain absolute power at the state government level. That's what Florida, Texas etc have all done, accelerating especially recently. It's always couched in specific terms and frameworks designed to make sure they're the haves and everyone else is the have not.
> Well, no.
Just because Florida, Texas, etc have lurched towards authoritarianism at the state government level in recent years doesn't negate the fact that a belief in limited government is a central idea in conservative thought in the USA, and has been for over a hundred years.
It's like how everyone says liberals are socialist progressives. They're usually not, but the two groups form a coalition that constitutes the base of the Democrat party.
Libertarians being called conservatives is a strange Cold War aberration emerging from their mutual opposition to authoritarian Marxism. Now that the USSR is gone and that type of Marxism is mostly very fringe, conservatives are reverting to their historical mean and kicking out libertarians. This is what national conservatism and to some extent MAGA is about.
This is why body language “experts” are grifters and charlatans.
This is why you shouldn’t convict people on a hunch, and why as a professional you don’t say shit you are unqualified to say.
Ableism kills.
Yes, this article is from 2016. Texas also has a strong law that allows throwing out "junk science". This case didn't make it through appeals because the forensic criteria that is suspect was such a small part of the evidence.
The person alleging he hit the daughter is his ex wife and her own sister testified she is a recurrent liar.
For example, new highway spending, municipal bond issuance and other stuff gets put on the ballot. Consent to take the life of a person who has committed capital crimes should be directly granted by the people. Advocates for the inmate can campaign for leniency but voters must vote assuming guilt since the inmate is already convicted. Lack of turnout or refusal to grant consent means the inmate gets life without parole.
There aren't enough executions for this to be an issue and a person's life shouldn't depend on legalist bureaucrats.
Also, a guilty verdict alone shouldn't be enough to put their name on that ballot. Overwhelming evidence needs to be present.