The problem is a judicial review system that's extremely hesitant to consider exculpatory evidence following a conviction... and here we have an edge case where the conviction was gained by discredited scientific means. Science adapts quickly to new evidence and new methods, and quickly discards old ones; the courts don't work that way.
To expand on that, appeals are not intended to re-litigate the facts. They are there to fix procedural mistakes during trial, or wrong argumentation of how the law should be applied.
The question of 'what happened' is generally not up for debate during appeal, and is generally not grounds for lodging an appeal. Instead, appeals are meant for when the law was applied wrong. Or when a trial was unfair due to a judge's mistake. Effectively, it is meant to protect you against judge's mistakes and unscrupulous prosecutors. There is much less protection against experts that happen to be wrong.
It seems to me that a system like that is fundamentally incompatible with a death-penalty, since it leaves a decent amount of space for mistakes that go uncorrected.
There is no way to correct a mistake that deprives a human being of years of liberty, either. If anything I find it more horrifying that we're willing to say, "Eh, at least you're alive", at apparently leave it at that.
I'm not calling for infinite appeals and suchlike denial-of-service attacks on the courts. But it seems that we've simply written off the notion of being just entirely, and the highest court in the land seems comfortable with that.
IANAL, but I understand certain kind of "evidence" are inadmissible in court due to unreliability/being junk science (e.g. lie detector results). I think it should be possible to classify the admission of unreliable evidence as the judge's mistake, even if that evidence (or type of evidence) was found to be unreliable after conviction.
Basically, the standard should be that judges are supposed to be perfectly reliable when evaluating evidence, and should have been expected to catch any issue that was later discovered, so a later standard of inadmissibility is retroactive.
If it isn't the, the rules ought to be changed (and this change seems narrow enough to me that it shouldn't cause any problems).
That's a feature of the system. If we had perfect information and judgement we wouldn't even need courts in the first place. It's also the case that the law itself can be unjust, should it be blindly applied, or is it good that the jury can declare someone not guilty anyways?
> At the end it's a matter of which side can build a more passionate argument to sway the juries
Right. So it's interesting that the prosecution gets a regular plus a "rebuttal" closing argument that the defense never gets. It's interesting the way courtrooms are laid out. It's interesting that the state in many circumstances cannot supply exculpatory testimony on your behalf, even if they have it.
My point being, there are so many more worthy things to consider before presuming juries themselves are the problem. Those who have made these arrangements are happy that you see it this way, though.
> rather than what evidence is actually presented and its rational meaning.
Do you have some evidence that this occurred in this case? We are examining it more than 20 years after the fact. At the time the jury thought it had the best explanation, and it might have even been "common knowledge." I certainly remember the "shaken baby" period in the zeitgeist of the time.
> So yeah of course the American judicial system is not willing to review past convictions based on scientific discoveries
Quite the contrary. His first execution was halted and he was granted review under a Texas law commonly called the "junk science law." He quite literally got this exact review.
All that being said capital punishment is amoral and especially irreconcilable with all the above facts. In no sense am I defending it, just our system of jury trials.
Ok, I didn't know that - should have read up more on this case before I commented.
>>or is it good that the jury can declare someone not guilty anyways?
Maybe. I find it much more troublesome that the jury can be presented with literally undeniable evidence that someone is innocent and still vote guilty anyway. Not that a judge couldn't do that of course - but like I said in my other comment, such a conviction would be a lot easier to appeal against, compared to a conviction made by a jury.
Usually that's not really what happens. It's often woefully inadequate defence (either due to incompetence or because the public defender is juggling 19 other cases), misconstrued evidence, bad evidence (which is more or less what happened here), and things like that.
- Law enforcement needs to raise the issue to a prosecutor
- A prosecutor needs to pick up the case
- A grand jury needs to indite you
- A petite jury needs to find you guilty
- A judge needs to sentence you with a penalty (as opposed to stern talking to)
Each of those is intended as a check-and-balance in the system. All of those have been steamrolled with misaligned incentives, mandatory minimum sentencing, etc., but that's how it's supposed to work.
Tangent: it’s spelled indict, not indite (but it is pronounced as if it were indite)
Really? How do you mean?
See the Post Office scandal in the UK for a terrible example of justice gone badly wrong, due entirely to juries allowing technical "evidence" (which turned out to be fraudulent) to overrule common sense everyday right-feelings.
https://becarefulwhatyouwishfornickwallis.blogspot.com/2013/...
legally this has come to mean that "machines do not make mistakes" ie if a mechanical device has done the same thing hundreds or thousands of times in exactly the same way, it is not a defence to say it must have started doing something differently. This idea was conceived well before anyone started programming computer software, and was meant to represent basic mechanical devices (say, a cash register), rather than the interlinked electronic eco-systems we depend on nowadays.
Thirdly, there is a widespread public perception that electronic evidence is infallible, hence the readiness of juries to convict on computer records alone.
And it seemed pretty clear that juries aren't really operating at 12 independent people with critical reasoning skills. Overwhelmingly there are always a few people with real reservations who vote to convict anyway. Those people always justify it to themselves with various reasons. And the reasoning they uncovered were things like "if he is innocent this will get overturned on appeal" or "everyone else on this jury is convinced of the evidence they cant all be wrong" or lots of other internal justifications people use to live with themselves.
I was on a jury once for a murder case and we had the opposite problem. One juror kept repeatedly arguing that she thought the guy was guilty of one of the charges, but she couldn't explain why. Everyone else voted not guilty, because the evidence just wasn't there. We had to repeatedly explain to her that she was the textbook example of reasonable doubt. Eventually she decided to vote not guilty but it cost us several hours because it had to be unanimous in either direction.
Every time this common opinion gets posted, it seems as though the people making this point are largely unaware the defendant always has the choice of a bench trial, which is decided only by a judge. In fact, the judicial system would much rather defendants choose a bench trial rather than a jury trial, because it's quicker and much cheaper, and the system is overloaded.
Defendants and their defense lawyers are choosing jury trials because they think they have better odds than with a bench trial. That is, you're proposing taking away what defendants like this choosing jury trials perceive to be the better route.
Judges are no better than juries of one. Worse, for consider what type of person becomes a judge.
...You must become a lawyer. But note the fact that judges earn 10-20x less than top-decile lawyers at an equal stage in their careers. The best lawyers can actually make 100x. (About $20M/year.)
...So you're either a failed lawyer who absolutely can't cut it in private practice, or the type of twisted personality who values status and power over your fellow man FAR more than you value money. Most of the time, the latter; in some cases you are a "covert politician" who wants to legislate from the bench.
Given the financial and status incentives, it's an extremely strange person who becomes a judge. I'd trust a jury, whatever its composition, before I trust an American judge to fairly determine my fate.
Let me ask it this way - why are nurses doing what they do, even though it's a grueling job that pays very little? Is it fair to conclude that they must all be psychopaths because only a psychopath would agree to these conditions?
Trust me on this, "justice" is somewhere down its list of priorities; it cares more for tradition, ritual, and form. In civil court, just causes very frequently (indeed, almost as a rule,) lose -- and often because one side doesn't have deep enough pockets to engage proper representation and survive the expensive process of discovery in Federal court.
A noble-minded judge, as you describe, wouldn't last a year. He'd quickly end up looking like the stereotype of the beleaguered public defender: Harried, exhausted, and unable to do a good job as he sees it.
The people who do survive as judges are a very, very strange breed.
> Trust me on this, "justice" is somewhere down its list of priorities; it cares more for tradition, ritual, and form.
I think is somewhat true, and is a generally applicable criticism of law and lawyers. I don't think values like justice are far down their list of priorities, but I think tradition etc. are just given too much weight. Lawyers constitute a tribe and collective which takes itself too seriously, at the end of the day, and don't value self-correction and improvement enough.
There are plenty of noble-minded judges. The reason why litigation becomes expensive, and thus poses fairness issues, is a multi-faceted problem that boils down to a lot of boring things. Most people in law haven't had what I would consider a real job, and the culture of law is too obsequious and deferential for people to understand that the way lawyers have been doing things is usually stupid. They don't have a culture of thinking about how they work, and their personality types are very geared towards external validation, which means they will do things very stupidly if they get accolades and very meager financial bonuses for it, and they mistake such things as markers of actual progress and productivity.
I could go on, and I reckon you have more experience in law than I do (I have been a software engineer for longer than I worked at law firm), but I think at the end of the day, I would remind you and others reading of the adage that one should not jump too quickly to ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I know a few judges, albeit not federal ones. They’re generally the philosophical type. The ambitious ones are keenly aware that their decisions will be re-hashed for the rest of their career. Also, judges being bound by “tradition, ritual and form” is an important part of the rule of law. Respecting that is a major component of justice.
> a failed lawyer
Isn't there anything in between? And, the lawyers who make $20 million a year might only be able to do so by serving a lot of slimy clients, so not necessary a category to admire.
We don't drag someone off the street at random for most jobs now do we?
This isn't a normal job. We don't hire 6 to 23 people for a single job, and jurors aren't random. Yes, jury summons are sent randomly, but they'll have hundreds summoned and then jury selection starts. It's not unlike a job interview. If someone is on the jury who's going to be biased or unreasonable, that's a failure of their legal counsel.
But such a trial has nothing to do with justice. It relies on the dark arts of psychiatry.
Here in Germany we have a system were "volunteer" judges are elected from the general public. On lower levels there then are two volunteer and one regular judge*, where the regular judge is leading the trial, but volunteers got same right to ask question and votes are equal, thus the two volunteers could overrule the regular judge, (both for deciding whether guilty or not and the punishment) while in most cases they probably follow the suggestion of the regular judge.
If the verdict is challenged upper courts only have regular judges.
Goal is to have, both the legal expertise, but also the "common sense" in the ruling.
* in some cases the numbers may be different, there are sometimes 3 regular and two volunteer or something in between
You can have multiple judges decide over a case, which will work even better if you don't allow fake science into the courts.
And we also need to get rid of elected judges.
The developed world do just fine wuthout a jury system.
I'm unfamiliar with the laws and jurisprudence on bench trials in the US, but the impression I have is that judges are either required to simply follow the law, or are at least bound by custom to do so.
However, the French government is now increasingly pushing for the replacement of juries by judges ("cours criminelles"), in some criminal cases, particularly child abuse ones. Acquittals are becoming harder to obtain in these cases.
A jury of twelve is democratic and those people can put themselves in your shoes.
Is it? One obstinate person can upend the whole process.
> and those people can put themselves in your shoes
Unless you happen to not be of the same demographic as the majority of pool the jury is drawing from.
I know, I know, "Well, what do you suggest?". I'm not sure, but I don't think that the jury system is democratic, nor do I think it guarantees that you're going to have people who are empathetic.
Sure. We’re dealing with life and fundamental freedoms. This fundamentally comes down to the value of innocence.
Juries are democratic in that they devolve power to a body of citizens, not the government. The unanimity requirement is a check on the mob, alongside various court procedures and the appeals process.
The jury is the democratic organ. The value of innocence is what motivates the undemocratic check of a unanimity requirement. You complained about one person upending the system. That’s the cost of valuing innocence.
> the tyranny of the minority is largely considered undemocratic
Yes, supermajority requirements are not perfectly democratic. Nobody argued juries are perfect democracies. Just that they’re more democratic than systems in which a judge decides everything.
The value of innocence is technically orthogonal; you could instruct a judge to bias one way or another. But that’s structurally guaranteed by a jury in a way it cannot with bureaucrats, even a panel of them.
Actually this is great news, those juries can stand against big companies.
As far as I know, they get a lot of money, funny hair and get to do whatever they want with no checks.
It's a mystery why it would work even part of the time.
With juries they are completely free to ignore any and all evidence but because it's a jury, you get 12 people agreeing on something together, it's so much harder to get an appeal because "you were judged fairly by your peers" and all of that nonsense.
And of course, lastly - there are many countries with no jury systems or where juries are only used in the worst of crimes, and I have never seen any stat suggesting that these countries are less just than US is.
Juries can declare you guilty, but it's the judge that sentences someone to death
The problem with the death penalty is masked slightly because of the US’s lengthy appeals process and the Innocence project which delays a lot of these death penalties from being carried out which has meant that in many instances they have succeeded in delaying the death penalty long enough for the science that could acquit the innocent to be established.
And in states which care about justice, as opposed to bloodlust, it’s saved innocent lives (and equally importantly, in some cases, helped nab the actual guilty party).
But these stories are becoming increasingly rare because the states that care about justice as opposed to bloodlust have increasingly joined the first world by abandoning the death penalty altogether. Imprisonment for life still allows for innocence to be proven. The death penalty eliminates that option and it’s impossible to know at the time of sentencing whether new evidence would turn up.
There are a number of recourses to rectify wrongful imprisonment - none for death.
For example, there's elections every two(?) years - a new president or governor could commute the remaining sentence?
Given the choice between death and two years in prison - I know what I would prefer...
Any money that either side spends on legal resources, 50% goes to your lawyer and 50% to opposing counsel. You can spend $1,000,000, or go pro se, but the other side gets the same resources.
Another way to make this work is to cap expenses for both sides (I believe Germany does this for many types of cases).
The deeper issue is that there have been no serious efforts at reform. The system basically needs to be re-invented from the ground up. A lot of disputes which should not be adversarial (such as family law) are made into such, and there are misaligned incentives all over the place.
That must vary a lot by jurisdiction. In San Francisco and neighboring Alameda County (Oakland, Berkeley), prosecutors are facing criticism for their insistence that they will not bring charges unless they believe beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty, even when there appears to be a lot of evidence in that direction. Essentially, they are pre-empting the jury's job. It's so bad that Alameda D.A. is facing a possible recall just a year after being elected, for not bringing charges that in the past would have been routine.
Once a case is under trial, that’s their job, isn’t it, just as it’s the job of the defense to get an acquittal, even if they think or even know you did it?
I think the problem is pre trial, with trials getting started even though there’s no good evidence.
We are confusing diligence and factual reporting with incentivized persuasion.
Only? That’s 140 cases a year, or one every two working days. Sounds like an extremely high number to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_U.S._Supreme_Court_c... says it’s ≈70 per year. That’s less, but IMO still very high.
I'd have all the time in the world to accept bribes from billionaires and take fancy trips on their private jets and yachts too!
Innocent people can be freed once errors are discovered. Dead people can't.
Statistically, minorities are much more likely to be sent to death once convicted. The state has unlimited resources to convict someone and the defendant usually only has an overworked underpaid public defender.