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Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

>causing the other man to be falsely imprisoned for identity theft and sent to a mental hospital.

To me that is the bigger crime. How comes the government can't recognize who is the real Woods and imprisons the wrong person?

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The real Woods was a homeless, while the fake woods had a job and family. The police and justice system are very biased, it is a well known fact.

> University of Iowa Police Detective Ian Mallory opened an investigation into the case. Mallory found the biological father listed on Woods’ birth certificate — which both Woods and Keirans had sent him an official copy of — and tested the father’s DNA against Woods’ DNA. The test proved Woods was the man’s son.

Detective Mallory is the hero of this story. He believed a man who few people would at that point.

He didn't even necessarily act on belief, he was just diligent.

This. There's no substitute for competence.

As bad as it is that he was unjustly sent to a mental hospital, I wonder if getting on medication helped him get into a better place and advocate for himself more credibly.

I'd watch the movie about detective Mallory.

Alice and Bob are on a crime spree and planning their next hit, but Detective Mallory inserts himself into their communications and sets up a sting using a replay attack against Bob.

I'd watch it twice if Tom Hanks played detective Mallory.

Only if Leonardo DiCaprio plays the guy faking his identity for 35 years.

What's horrifying to me is that the real Woods should have been appointed a defense attorney, and it seems that that attorney didn't believe him either or even make an effort to act as though they did. It should have been his defense attorney back during the trial who thought to hunt down the father and do a DNA test.

If he was homeless it's almost assured that he had a public defender. An LA public defender is so overloaded that[1]:

    L.A. public defenders are carrying workloads that require 4,160 hours of work or more to effectively represent their clients. That is more than double the amount of work hours available in a year, assuming no vacation or sick time is taken.

If I had to work 80 hours per week I'd make a lot of mistakes too. Some attorneys I've talked don't even meet their clients until the day of court. Our public defense system is horribly broken.

1: https://www.aclusocal.org/en/press-releases/los-angeles-lags...

He very probably did have a public defender, who seems to have done a very good job by the metric of what most public defenders understand their job to be: negociating with the DA.

Woods managed to not serve any additonal time after sentencing and didn't even have to admit guilt for that.

Because birth certificates don't have DNA. Social security numbers were never meant to be used for identification. Etc.

But before you send someone to prison you should be sure you investigated properly.

Did they question any relatives of him?

In our system, one of the most serious crimes is inconveniencing a cop while poor.

If this were true, we wouldn't have homeless encampments, open drug use and street crime in major American cities.

Those don't inconvenience cops. They drive right on by until someone else throws enough of a fit for them to do an anti-homeless sweep.

They are not allowed to do homeless sweeps which they would prefer vs letting their cities degrade as they have.

They also get restricted by DAs and politicians when they arrest criminals, who then have same criminals released back on the street. The problem is one of political constraints on police's ability to enforce law and order.

It is why organized retail theft is just allowed to occur over and over again unimpeded.

Exactly. If anything, I think homeless encampments are proof of this. It's not like homeless people are generally eager to cluster together; as both cause and effect, the level of mental illness and general dysfunction among the homeless is off the charts. In my neighborhood, the homeless are pretty well distributed, one or two people here and there. But I'd expect that in cities with more of an anti-homeless bias, there's a strong incentive to collect in places that are out of the way for cops.

I don't understand how any of you can see this as a lack of will from police rather than political policy coming from above them.

Here is thorough documentary outlining over and over again police prevented from enforcing law by politicians, who also don't charge or incarcerate criminals who cops arrest repeatedly.

https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?si=yovLyNLoQzjHmomo

Similar policies exist in other cities like San Francisco.

I never said it was a lack of will from police. And I also don't think a 5-year-old pants-wetting video from a company well known for pushing right-wing views will convince me of much of anything. Especially that Seattle was dying 5 years ago, given that it doesn't seem to be dead. [1]

Homelessness is not a problem that will get solved with violence, which is what police have the monopoly on. It won't get solve with criminalizing homelessness, either, because it's mostly not a choice people make, but a situation they end up in. So I think it's generally good that cops generally ignore the homeless, because as this article shows, bad things can happen when they don't.

[1] except for comedic value: https://theneedling.com/2023/09/20/after-courageous-3-year-b...

How often does it actually happen that rich people give money to cops who conduct a proper investigation (before or after)? Looks rather unbelievable to me.

I was nearly killed last year by a negligent driver and sustained significant injuries. If the driver hadn't had a suspension, the cop would have let him go without any tickets whatsoever. He got one ticket for the suspension and was given a wrist slap punishment.

The cop ignored the testimony of an eyewitness who saw everything, turned off his bodycam for 18 minutes to ensure the witness statement wasn't recorded, and was conciliatory toward the driver, literally saying it wasn't his fault. The prosecutor issued me a notice to testify in court only three days in advance and was uninterested in knowing what happened to me or doing anything once the defendant and cop didn't bother to show up. The "trial" was held four months after the collision. The police department took five months to release the bodycam video.

Business as usual for the American injustice system. You don't have to bribe the police if they're already biased in your favor.

You don't need to give money to a cop to make that happen. People that have no money are an easy target for any kind of abuse, including from cops. They have no lobby. No media outrage if a poor person is falsely imprisoned. No lawyers coming to hound you. The person may even not be in a state alert enough to understand what's going on.

A wealthy person has favors to call in, lawyers on call, all the things that entirely legally make a cops live hard.

So now, you're a cop and under pressure to arrest someone in a case. Homeless or mansion owner, who do you pick?

There is no direct bribery outside elected officials. But there is lot of nepotism have the right connections and those in power will sort things out by ordering lower levels to make it go away.

That's not at all what I said. I'm just saying that cops are on average more responsive to the needs of the "right" people than the "wrong" ones. And in the US, having money (e.g., nice house, nice car, or here, a literal nice bank balance) does a lot to make you right.

Part of that is, I'm sure, their own interests. If they throw a rich person in jail for no good reason, it's much more likely to come back on them than if it's some homeless dude. But part of it's just that it's the implicit job of cops to enforce not just legal order, but the social order.

The cops dealing with poor people are often different from the ones dealing with rich people. But let’s say you are in a city with lots of poor (unhoused) and rich people: the cops are pretty mean to everyone in those, since they get beat down pretty quickly. Move over next door tot eh suburb that ships unhoused people next door, the cops are much nicer.

That’s not really how it goes. There are layers to it. Above all though, poor people are gross and a nuisance, whereas employed family men are humans just like you and me.

…obviously not my own opinion.

School mates…

This is one of those edge cases where DNA databases are invaluable, as they do not lie (retests can be done if an error is suspected) and the data (genetic provenance) cannot be destroyed (such that a vital record or entire archive could be). You can “walk” the vital record web/matrix from known good identity to unknown identity.

Vital records should probably have DNA attached. Maybe eventually they will.

What happens when that data inevitable gets stolen? The fact that biometrics cannot be changed or removed is also a huge drawback.

Would proper IDs helped avoid the issue? Not necesarily state-of-the-art biometric ones that we have already (on this side of the pond) but even rudimentary with owner photo, personal ID and document ID?

I was in jail and regularly saw where people were caught in traffic stops and gave their siblings name. They were allowed to leave, but later an arrest warrant was put out and the sibling was arrested. I was actually in court three times when I saw this come up, so it must happen much more frequently than that.

> gave their siblings name.

so the name doesn't match their driver license? Or they're driving without one? I would imagine a cop just taking the name on face value seems negligent.

I have to assume they told the cop that pulled them over that they didn't have their license on them (even if they did). And when the cop ran their name their picture looked similar enough (and maybe the name even matched the owner of the vehicle).

Each time I saw this come up the defendants had spent 2-3 days in the jail before they got a hearing. I can't imagine how pissed I would be. The first few days in jail are the absolute worst. Imagine trying to tell all the jail staff that they've got the wrong person? Oh, how they'd laugh...

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