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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

Evidence handling and testing should not be under the control of police, or even prosecution. Incentives need to be aligned toward justice, not convictions.

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Full Process Surveilance is needed to make evidence admissable. If it aint filmed the whole way, it aint valid.

I think the searches need to be done with full body camera back up to be sure. This would be an attempt at my partner planting evidence when arriving at the location for me to find. It also should find the situations where the person that planted the evidence from suggesting for someone else to look where he planted it. Of course, this does nothing for planting evidence before the search, but would hopefully stem the opportunity a bit.

No complete record - no case..

I think there's more work we can do to balance the power of individual defendants against the state, but the adversarial justice system is the most accurate and effective system for mediating public safety, punishment, and revenge ever developed in the history of the world.

The main concern here is that the system is being nearly entirely bypassed.

Literally 98% of cases plea out^1, bypassing the entire system of court procedure that is supposed to resolve these issues.

1:https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...

Submitting a plea is part of court procedure, and I'd also point out that the data you shared is for US federal cases, which have a notoriously high rate of conviction which could explain why people are quick to plea out.

> In fiscal year 2022, only 290 of 71,954 defendants in federal criminal cases – about 0.4% – went to trial and were acquitted, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest available statistics from the federal judiciary. Another 1,379 went to trial and were found guilty (1.9%).

So 1669 defendants went to trial, and 1379 were found guilty, roughly 80%.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/14/fewer-tha...

The data isn't much different in my state where 95%+ of criminal convictions end in a deal.

so there are 2 conclusions to draw from this

1. the federal law enforcement, and prosecutors are prefect humans that only ever go after the guilty

2. The system is sooo skewed in favor of the government that fighting them is pointless, likely due to immense corruption in the system it self

Since no humans are perfect, I think the stronger case is for #2 to be reality

3. Federal prosecutors are resource-constrained and don't like to lose, so they only prosecute the surest cases.

Imagine you offer a great soccer player a million dollars if he can shoot 50 goals in a row, and he gets to choose the defenders and goalies. He's probably going to choose children to go against him.

Well in this context it would be the poor, and people that lack education. People that lack the resources to fight back.

still not something we should be proud of

Or, look at the Sam Bankman-Fried prosecution. The DoJ could've gone after a lot more people, but chose to use them as assets to get SBF, the kingpin. The beneficiaries here are the mid-tier criminals.

The Japanese use #1.

99.9% of criminal cases that go to trial in Japan end in a guilty verdict.

So maybe some humans are perfect enough?

Unlikely, it more a deference to authority. you can not honestly believe that 99.9% all cases in Japan are decided justly and fairly and there are statically zero false conviction in the system.

The US is one of the only jurisdictions in the world to use the plea bargain, and it uses it so much more than even the others that do that it’s absurd.

And in most other places where it’s even an option it’s subject to much more rigorous scrutiny and pushback than here.

It will never go away here without a lot of effort, because prosecutors love it because they get to hype their “conviction rates” for re election. There are huge swathes of evidence of people pleading out while factually innocent because they can’t afford the cost (public defenders aren’t incentivized here - you need your own counsel), stress, inconvenience, and beyond.

Plea bargains, as implemented in the US, are a huge system drive by perverse incentives.

We need a rule to prevent plea deals that cross the 3 major punishment classifications (felony, misdemeanor, infraction) .

i.e a prosecutor should not be allowed to plead out a felony to a misdemeanor, that should be by default viewed as unethically coercive

or the opposite where a simple misdemeanor gets trumped up to a felony so that the plea to a misdemeanor sounds like a good deal

You're already quite a bit down the funnel if you're talking about % of cases.

If the feds have a high bar before opening a case, it's not immediately unreasonable that most of the cases are managed with plea bargains.

It might be better to look at the process beginning with arrests or beginning with investigations.

In the Horizon Post Office case in the UK[1], over 700 individuals were convicted based on false accounting data.

I can't find what percentage of that total pleaded guilty, but I did find[2]: "Of the 39 successful appellants in the Post Office Scandal, 35 had pleaded guilty to at least one charge against them."

Personally, I'm not feeling 100% confident in the adversarial system right now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal [2] https://evidencebasedjustice.exeter.ac.uk/false-guilty-pleas...

Dollar for Dollar funding of Public Defenders office would be a huge first step.

For ever Dollar a government gives to the prosecutors office, a dollar should be budgeted for public defense.

currently in most states is like 10%, if that

Well, if you don't think it should be under control of police or prosecution, who do you suggest needs to do it? The defense? A third party private contractor like Theranos? Who's going to be the ones validating whoever is decided can do the testing?

It's a kind of factoring-out from police, who are often systemically racist and corrupt. factoring-out responses to mental health crises, reducing the amount of armed response, etc. reduces the danger from police violence. Factoring out evidence handling to a separate agency that is just as motivated to prove innocence as guilt would improve the use of forensics, and reduce bad plea deals and prosecutions.

what other agency staffed by whom?

everything you listed is still better than giving it to the cops. "these random examples sound bad" isn't really a good argument for doing nothing.

random examples are necessary because we were walked to the edge of the cliff with no actual solution provided, so hyperbole felt like an appropriate response to encourage moving the train further down the tracks.

it's not a bad idea, but it's obviously ripe for just an additional layer of bureaucratic waste. clearly, there is a lack of trust that the police could handle evidence properly. so the natural follow up is who is trust worthy? how would it work? cops are called to the scene, but are then only there to "secure it" until some 3rd party comes along to collect evidence? what's the purpose of a detective at that point? we're not just shifting that role from a police agency to some 3rd party. are we going to re-establish the Pinkertons? if the detectives are no longer a role in the police, then more than likely those that would be attracted to that role would just join the 3rd party instead. so you haven't solved anything other than these people are no longer part of the police but are still involved.

it feels like there are two main categories of reaction to big societal issues: one starts with "this is unacceptable, so we will find an alternative," the other says "everything else sounds iffy so we shouldn't even try"

our current system is so broken and evil that i wonder if just getting rid of it entirely wouldn't actually be better and more ethical. even with the problem of releasing however many violent offenders back in the wild. "it might be even more beaurocratic" isn't really going to convince me of anything.

i dont know what the best alternative solution is, im a software engineer. i just know that the current solution is depraved and should be torn down and replaced.

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