Comment by oskarth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oskarth | Hacker News Reader

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If you write, read, bookmark, share or search for something like this [0], does your conditional probability of killing someone go up? Probably not - chances are you just happen to be morbidly curious. The real killer, being smart enough, would never let his or her identity be coupled with such an obvious clue.

That's the rational answer. What's the more probably answer?

A lawyer with an excerpt of your most mischievous writes, reads, shares and bookmarks could paint quite a despicable portrait of you, the villain. Remember that time when a friend showed you a link which you stupidly clicked on? Yeah, that too.

And that "no real criminal would leave a trail like that" line won't work either - because we all know how criminals are stupid.

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My point is that I agree with you. Psychological profiles will probably become more commonplace as data mining et al. goes mainstream. These can be manipulated. Badly.

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. (Cardinal Richelieu)

How about six million lines? All written with the naive understanding that they would stay private.

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For us, all of this privacy issue thing is far from news. We know about it. But as a society, we are still very far from developing the new values that are necessary given this overflow of intimate knowledge.

0: http://ask.metafilter.com/7921/If-you-killed-somebody-how-wo...

EDIT: Maybe I am being overly cynical about how the justice system can be manipulated. As the above two comments suggests, it is indeed designed to be a robust system. However, looking at cases in the US of people wrongfully executed, it doesn't seem like an unreasonable stance to be a bit distrusting of the manipulation possibilities.

Nitpick:

> If you write, read, bookmark, share or search for something like this [0], does your conditional probability of killing someone go up?

I would guess yes - it seems likely that the fraction of killers who look up things like that is greater than the fraction of not-killers. Even taking into account that some killers will look up stuff like that and hide their tracks.

(Remember that killers, too, may be morbidly curious. Assume they're just as likely as anyone else to be. Then we're really comparing "how many killers looked stuff up specifically to learn to hide their crimes?" versus "how many people who subsequently became killers refrained from looking stuff up out of morbid curiousity, because they didn't want it used as evidence against them in future?")

But not so much higher that it's strong evidence, so your point stands.

In fact, it is still so low that it is likely not useful evidence at all.

Let's say there are 50 serial killers in operation in the US. And the MeFi thread cited had 100,000 uniques. Even if all 50 killers read the thread you would still get a huge false positive rate if you are counting on that thread in the browser history alone telling you anything.

You are possibly not being cynical enough. Learn how to wave at judges.

Sorry, are you aware of someone who can be proved to have been executed in the US within the past few decades for a crime they did not commit?

I'm aware of instances where "key witnesses" recant decades later (under what kind of pressure from defense attorneys or their own conscience I have no idea...) But I'm unaware of any instances where innocence was clearly established after an execution was carried out.

Only around a hundred: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exonerated_death_row_in...

Why post a question like that if you're going to be so intellectually lazy?

Wholeheartedly agree; the people that make the most noise are generally those who have done the least research.

None of those people were actually executed, which was my question and oskarth's claim: That people in the US had been wrongfully executed. Not wrongfully sentenced to die.

Are you too lazy to read before posting a knee jerk Wikipedia page?

How about just posting one name of an executed prisoner?

Cameron Todd Willingham

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_...

The Innocence Project reports that they've exonerated (via DNA evidence) 17 people who had already been sentenced to death and were awaiting execution:

http://www.innocenceproject.org/know

This strongly suggests that many other innocent people are still on death row or have already been executed, since the Innocence Project doesn't have the resources to investigate all cases of claimed innocence, and has to limit its efforts to saving people who are still alive.

The Wikipedia article on wrongful execution claims that "at least 39 executions are claimed to have been carried out in the U.S. in the face of evidence of innocence or serious doubt about guilt."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution

So pick the most convincing one that was actually executed. For such a charged issue, it's hard to take passive voice claims on Wikipedia too seriously.

Felker and Garrett are the only "specific examples" in that article from the US in the past few decades. Garrett sounds plausibly innocent, but there's certainly no posthumous proof. Similarly, Felker's alibi depends on autopsy results from a body found in a creek. Not really a slam dunk either.

Many anti-death penalty advocates believe (wrongly, I think) that it would be a huge boon to their cause if they could identify someone who was clearly innocent of the crime for which they were executed. oskarth apparently believes instances have already been found. I'm just looking for the current exemplar.

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