It'd get thrown out as an alibi. But it'd be used as evidence for a crime.
That's how it works with data: Against you.
That's how it works with data: Against you.
Any evidence that you have that can corroborate your story will be useful to you, hence digital trails are defensive tools to innocent people, even though appearing on CCTV or near a crime could be sufficient for further investigation including questioning, detainment, or other forms of inquiry.
Direct evidence is evidence that directly links a person to a crime, which for the most part means testimony of a person who claims to have personal knowledge of the crime. Evidence that requires making inferences to get from the evidence to the crime is circumstantial.
A good non-criminal example of direct vs. circumstantial evidence would be if you were trying to prove that it snowed last night and you found someone who said that they woke up at 3 AM and looked out a window and saw it snowing. That would direct evidence because you have someone who claims to have personal knowledge that what you are trying to prove happened actually happened.
If instead of a witness who actually saw the snowfall you had a person who testified that there was no snow on the ground when they went to bed but when they woke up in the morning there was snow that would be circumstantial evidence.
From that testimony you do have direct evidence that there was snow on the ground in the morning, but you have to make inferences if you are trying to prove that snow fell during the night and so that evidence is circumstantial for proving that.
And, if there was corroboration with the digital trail of the mobile device, and you appearing on a CCTV at a location matching the GPS at some point or chatting to somebody on the phone, it'd possibly further break the insinuation that you didn't have the device during this time period.
Risking a bench trial is poor odds as they are significantly more likely to convict when things aren’t clear. Roughly 3/4 the time they agree, but when they disagree judges are ~5x more likely to convict. The difference seems to largely be bias on the side of Judges.
There’s a common option that someone only gets to trial when there’s significant evidence they are guilty. Which on the surface is a reasonable assumption, but that bias has real impact on people’s behavior.
Taking a plea deal as an innocent person is often a very wise decision.
You haven't substantiated your claim.
Here’s a quote for my 3/4 agree, 5x more likely to convict when they disagree: “ The judge and jury in the Kalven-Zeisel survey of 3,500 criminal cases agreed in 78% of the cases on whether or not to convict. When they disagreed, the judge would have convicted when the jury acquitted in 19% of the cases, and the jury convicted when the judge would have acquitted in 3% of the cases” https://criminal-justice.iresearchnet.com/forensic-psycholog...
Feel free to look up some more, there’s some variation here.
This study you cite is not relevant to that claim.
How about just a baseline do juries even understand what it means? “Numerous appellate courts have cautioned trial judges not to explain the reasonable doubt standard to juries.” https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/taking-beyond-a-reasona...
The term is quite literally meaningless to some people yet: “In one case, a jury asked for a “layman’s” explanation of “reasonable doubt,” and an appellate court said the trial judge acted properly by simply rereading the original charge.”
I could go on, but instead I am going to simply ask you for some demonstration as to why you think it is commonly applied.
> Yet you made no reference to it in your poorly executed attack.
You wrote:
> In practice reasonable doubt is generally ignored by juries.
> Interviews of post conviction juries show they often convict
> people who they have serious doubts actually committed the crime.
> They say stuff like, “If he’s innocent it will be reversed on appeal.”
> While the system is not perfect and errors do occur, the claim
> that juries "generally" ignore the standard of reasonable doubt
> is a sweeping statement.
> It’s a sweeping statement backed up by actual evidence.
> Actually your post containing the sweeping statement doesn't
> contain any evidence.
Your own evidence didn't substantiate your claim, it directly refuted it.
You posted a Kalven-Zeisel study comparing the decision-making processes and outcomes of judges and juries in trials which concluded that judges and juries generally agree on verdicts in a high percentage of cases (78%). In fact, it is stated that "when they disagreed, the judge would have convicted when the jury acquitted in 19% of the cases, and the jury convicted when the judge would have acquitted in 3% of the cases—a net leniency rate of 16%". The study that you've given me shows that when the jury and judge disagree, the jury is more lenient than the judge. This directly refutes your subsequent claim that "Interviews of post conviction juries show they often convict people who they have serious doubts actually committed the crime. They say stuff like, “If he’s innocent it will be reversed on appeal”" and indicates that the jury err on the side of reasonable doubt rather than ignore it.
The article you have subsequently posted is about the interpretations and articulation of what "reasonable doubt" means to juries. It does not substantiate any claims about "reasonable doubt" being generally ignored by juries or make any claims about them being more likely to convict. It's conclusions are about how "reasonable doubt" might be better communicated or understood.
> It does not substantiate any claims about “reason doubt”
There’s zero possibility for someone to use a standard they don’t understand. Every single case where a Jury is confused as to the standard is a case where they aren’t using it.
Any suggestion that they follow a standard requires them to both understand the standard and for them to apply it. If 60% understand and 60% of those that understand follow it then 36% are following the standard. (No those numbers shouldn’t be taken as an argument.)
3% of the time a judge disagrees with all 12 members of the jury that someone is innocent. Considering what percentage of defendants are likely guilty that’s a surprisingly high probability.
The 3% disagreement where judges would have convicted doesn't prove juries 'ignore' reasonable doubt; it reflects normal variance in human judgment.
Legal decisions aren't coin tosses—such a high agreement is unlikely if both parties weren't generally applying the same legal standard.
I am not suggesting legal results are actually a coin toss, just that this level of agreement doesn’t require shared logic let alone using the same standard. If you have two people roll a dice with 90% yes and 10% no then they will agree 0.9 * 0.9 + 0.1 * 0.1 = 82% of the time with absolutely zero logic involved. A much lower standard say ‘the preponderance of the evidence’ is easily enough to hit 78% agreement which is really quite low.
The study showed that juries had a higher threshold for conviction than judges, which is a direct repudiation of your point that "reasonable doubt is generally ignored by juries. Interviews of post conviction juries show they often convict people who they have serious doubts actually committed the crime." It also explained that similar results to this had been reproduced many times over.
It's not even conclusive that it is purely due to juries having a different interpretation of reasonable doubt as it is explained that "Much more research is needed to map experimentally the differences and similarities between the judgments of judges and juries before concluding that judges are better than juries at specific tasks (e.g., assessing risk) or that deliberations enable juries to outperform judges on other tasks (e.g., assessing conflicting testimony)."
To be clear, your claim that juries are more likely to convict was disproven by your own data and your claim that they ignore "reasonable doubt" is unlikely given that they err on the side of reasonable doubt. The later article you posted doesn't really have anything to say about either of these things, but instead presents better ways to articulate the idea of reasonable doubt to a jury.
I don't find your latest argument about dice rolling persuasive either as (1) it's not an empirical argument, and (2) this oversimplifies the complex dynamics of legal decision-making and doesn't effectively challenge the implications drawn from the Kalven-Zeisel study -- unlike the randomness of dice, legal decisions are derived from a deliberative process grounded in law, evidence, and rational argumentation.
(1) A statistical smell test: A random dice roll (under reasonable[?] assumptions) achieves an agreement rate of 82%.
(2) unlike the randomness of dice, legal decisions are derived from a deliberative process grounded in law, evidence, and rational argumentation.
Retrics argument appears to be: For (2) to empirically pass (1), the agreement rate between judges and juries must thus be >>82%. The Kalvin-Zeisel study found a rate of 78%.
Kalven-Zeisel specifically argues "Disagreement rates were no higher when the judge characterized the evidence as difficult than when the judge characterized it as easy, suggesting that the disagreements were not produced by the jury’s inability to understand the evidence." It seems impossible to mathematically tease out how much of the agreement comes from a shared understanding of the reasonable doubt standard vs other facts from the case -- either way, the idea that juries generally ignore reasonable doubt and err towards convicting people is not evidenced.
I see no advantage to sharing the data in the cloud, vs just storing it locally in your phone.
You can still use it for your own benefit, while preventing it from being used against you.
It is just not easy to do. There's many stoppers to doing so like the one you've described.
No doubt Google makes it really easy to give up all your data. Very hard to keep it private and local.
And this is a horrible trend.
> I see no advantage to sharing the data in the cloud, vs just storing
> it locally in your phone.
If the data is stored locally it could be argued that it's possible that you have tampered with it, particularly since you possess the skill set necessary to do so. On the other hand, if it is stored on the cloud, it's likely that you won't have the level of access required to tamper with the data, and that there will be an auditable transaction history with information about the identity of anybody that made changes. Google will be able to provide information to the court on the level of security that applies to the data -- in fact, data from Google services is already known to be legally admissable assuming it passes relevance, reliability and integrity tests.
Of course, you might be able to create something similar locally, but it's more complicated and untested: you'd need to be able to prove that you don't have the ability to retroactively amend the data (write access, encryption keys, etc).
I agree that it would be nicer if: the digital evidence wasn't accessible by others and was also reliable and with integrity protection. Maybe an option would be to encrypt it with your public key and write it into a public blockchain?
Location data can easily be fabricated. This has been discussed extensively in other subthreads. Thus insufficient by itself.
However, it can be corroborated with e.g. cameras along the path if need be, providing an alibi. By having control of the data, rather than giving it up to the cloud, it can be used in this way, without allowing it to be used against you in the "location data says you were near the scene of the crime" scenario.
> Location data can easily be fabricated.
But, in general, if you have a digital trail which corroborates with other digital or real-life trails, you have something which does have weight as evidence.