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Comment by ryanklee | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't a person's admittance of guilt and the sincerity of that admittance be a factor in determining their sentence?

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Humans are not well equipped to accurately judge sincerity.

That has no relevance to my question. What I want to know is if admittance of guilt and sincerity is at all relevant to sentencing, not about whether a particular mechanism is fit to determine either point.

If we can't accurately assess it, it should absolutely not be considered in sentencing.

It's like giving someone a longer jail sentence for having a blue aura instead of a pink one.

I think it's rather unfair to say that we can't accurately judge sincerity unless you talk about levels of precision.

Because, for instance, accuracy in judgment of sincerity is a basic requirement of getting through any day for any human. In other words, we can certainly judge it accurately enough for many purposes.

Gullible people and great liars abound. People fall for "we're the IRS and we need you to buy some iTunes gift cards" all the time, the entire country is deeply split on what's "fake news" and what isn't; we're clearly not cut out for these assessments. Normal life works reasonably OK, but sentencing isn't a "normal life" scenario; it's the sort of thing that sends people to jail wrongly for decades fairly frequently.

Yes, all of which sentencing is also based on human judgement of persons character, witness statements, expert statements, presentation of evidence, etc etc

Judgement of sincerity is woven into the entirety of court procedures. Why would you exclude this additional relevant data point regarding sincerity of allocution?

A witness who's promised something like immunity should absolutely be treated with skepticism. An expert who's paid $5k/hour to testify should, as well. They're also subject to cross-examination during those processes.

"Gee, I'm so sorry I drove drunk, please give me a lower sentence" is so transparently self-interested it should be discarded as evidence.

Treating someone with skepticism is a function of judgement of sincerity. Not sure how that is in any way in disagreement with my point. Which is that we should and must exercise judgement of persons' interior properties in court.

'Accurately' by what standard?

By the "people get tricked by liars all the time" standard.

"all the time" is not correct. Because just as well, people "all the time" correctly judge people to be credible.

These are not measures of sincerity. They are pop science at best, gut feelings based on nothing at worst.

No.

You should not incentivise people to lie, or give a specific answer.

Nor should you incentivise innocent people to proclaim their guilt

I didn't say we should, I asked if someone's admittance of guilt and their sincerity is relevant to sentencing measures.

If it's relevant then people will be incentivise to lie to get better outcomes for themselves

No, I don't think acting ability should factor into sentencing decisions.

That wasn't my question.

Someone with low affect likely just gets seen as insincere, and a professional actor gets impunity?

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