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Comment by locallost | Hacker News Reader

So basically it confirms again that the role of the police and the justice system is not to find the guilty, but to find someone to make everyone feel comfortable with the system working. A type of a sacrificial lamb for the civilized world. Of course we know who the predominantly white police force will consider for the role. Puts into perspective why there are over 2 million black Americans in prison.

Quote:

I asked Carlos who he thought bore the brunt of the blame for DNA evidence not showing up in his trial: the police, the DA, or his own attorney, Gibson. “Straight-up crooked cops,” he said. “That’s all it was. Plain and simple.”

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> there are over 2 million black Americans in prison.

Where did you get this statistic? There are only 1.2 million people total in prison (still too many but...)

https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/prisoners-2021-stat...

I found one site that claimed the total population of people incarcerated is 1.7 million but still, for either number, black Americans, while possibly over represented, could never = 2 million given those numbers

The jury system was never about truth and fact finding, it was always about community justice. If the community feels safer with the accused behind bars the accused is sent to jail, evidence is only there to inform the jury in their decision. It's a terrible system that should've been relegated to the past.

I eagerly await your proposed improvements to the criminal justice process that you didn’t post in your criticism of the current process.

In Norway we long had two systems to determine guilt. One was a jury system. A careful examination of the performance of both systems over many years concluded that the jury system was the worst. All serious miscarriages of justice we have had happened in a jury system.

A key reason identified was that juries don’t have written statements giving the reasoning for their judgment.

The jury system ended several years ago and nobody miss it. A panel of judges professional and selected among citizens akin to jury duty determines guilt.

That matches the common wisdom I've heard multiple times from those in the know here in the US that, if you have the option of a jury trial or a judge (bench) trial, which is often the case in criminal proceedings, you probably want the bench trial if you're actually innocent and the jury trial if you're actually guilty.

Has anyone ever ran a study on the effectiveness of different court styles?

Mock a murder or other crime and let the law and justice handle it as normal. At the end, reveal the true mock and see how close the law got and how close the court got.

I'm not saying it would be practical and maybe impossible but I would find the results interesting.

That’s really interesting. I do wonder if requiring jurors to write an opinion would have a similar effect, or would it just be like every group assignment in school where most jurors decide to coast off the work of the most diligent member.

It would have to be secret to avoid issues like the bullying described in the article.

There are plenty of countries without a jury system putting significantly less innocent people in jail.

Sure, but what are those systems? Are they like Japan where they don’t charge as many cases, or are they like North Korea where you are executed with a missile (and therefore aren’t innocent in jail). Is it judges or sortition? All of the other cultural context matters.

Germany doesn't have a jury system either and I'm fairly sure there's no death sentence by missile in Germany

It’s just a reflection of how society works. Are you suggesting an even more concentrated arbiter of truth?

Quality over quantity, for trails of this severity you have multiple judges decide the case. I am not convinced that having a random selection of people with no experience in law results in more accurate verdicts, in fact there is plenty of evidence of the opposite.

I'm supposing then as part of this restructuring of society that will never happen there will also be a restructuring of how judges get to be judges in America which will also not be happening so that this "quality" will be achieved.

You don't have to set the quality bar very high to get someone who is better at deciding a verdict than the average juror.

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