Sadly the system never gets punished. I think these judges and prosecutors would do much better if there was ever present risk of either life in prison or even death penalty.
Any system you'd build in this mold, the criminal justice mold, would be the same or a clone of the current one, inheriting the same flaws. The prosecuting agency would be lenient towards Type I errors, because few people care; and I think in the net it'd increase their occurrence, by severely penalizing Type II errors.
edit: (And to the point out the obvious in plain sight—look at the very newspaper story we're discussing. The "criminal that got away with it" is in the headline/title. The "innocent person horribly abused by indifferent criminal justice" is mentioned in passing about 21 paragraphs down).
If it's a law that's unpopular enough, it's not enforceable pretty much anywhere. Even less so in the US, because of the staggering number of civilian owned guns.
Tanks can go through some of the doors, especially as long as you know there isn't a basement. So if you have a small segment of a population you need to go through doors on, sure.
But if it's enough of the population, then tanks don't work to enforce the laws.
It doesn't scale.
The military as a whole doesn't work well as a police trying to enforce laws, but even if it did, it wouldn't be the tanks. It would be door to door with infantry.
And 7000 IFVs, and 15,000 APCs, and 25,000 Mine Protected Vehicles, and also a bunch of fixed and rotary winged piloted and unpiloted aircraft carrying PGMs, all of which can go through specifically chosen doors, and, as with the tanks, all of which can send something through many specifically chosen doors (or windows, walls, whatever) in a fairly short period of time.
Not good for arresting people, bringing them to trial, and providing due process, but that's not the only means of raising the expected cost of non-compliance with the law so as to coerce compliance.
It's a volunteer force. Might simply refuse the orders as unlawful, might repeat 1861, depending on the law.
I'm told "fragging" comes from the weapon of choice used by conscripts in Vietnam against unpopular commanding officers.
Furthermore, determining the law is not the same as determining the outcome of having that law on the books. The law is permissive about many immoral behaviors, at least in part because the enforcement of laws regulating such behaviors would cause greater harm than the behavior in question. Prudential judgement among lawmakers is necessary to determine what should and should not be regulated.
Personally, I see no issue with increased accountability on both of these fronts. If you sign up to be the person who gets to decide whether other humans are put in a concrete box for years at a time, you should be willing to face the highest levels of scrutiny for your decision making. And if you are wrong there should be harsh punishments for your failures.
I don't know how better to phrase this. I fully agree with your values—but look at the state of things, it's right now even a contentious issue whether innocent people should be jailed or not. (That is, whether criminal defendants should enjoy their constitutional right to pre-trial bail, or if they should be put in a cage without trial, without conviction—the majority seems to lean in that direction, in the name of safetyism. The topic of "bail reform"). It's a complicated game where everything is genuinely awful and there's no clear path towards making things less awful, and a lot of the naive ideas counterintuitively make things worse. Political pressure on courts definitely would make things a lot worse, at this point; dead certain. What can one do, in such a world?
There's always room to improve the system, but the way to do that is to make it resilient to individual failures, not by placing more pressure on the individual not to make mistakes.
Trivially, if you have no criminal justice system, no innocent person would go to prison; it's as foolish as claiming there would be no poverty if there were no human beings. But crime would increase. The bulwark against those who do not live according to moral principles, who do not respect the law, would be removed, as such people respond only to the fear of punishment.
And the law and the justice system are also instructive. Part of their purpose is to teach. You will not teach justice without being just, and that entails punishment. The severity of the punishment is proportionate to the severity of the crime precisely because it signals and communicates to the perp that severity. It is feedback, hence instructive. A just person already accepts such punishment as just.
It is far better to focus on reform, but in order to do that, you first have to have a good understanding of what the law is all about. And I admit: our criminal justice system does need improvement and reform.
Also, judges can be malicious too.
And while all jobs include at least some element of dealing with people trying to deceive you, if I'm an embedded engineer dealing with a vendor overstating the low-temperature performance of their embedded compute module, the stakes are a lot lower.
I'd rather have a system that occasionally let someone go free because of insufficient proof than occasionally have people be imprisoned when they are actually innocent.
What do you think the dash cams are for?
And therefore, for proper function of society:
- Judges should be exposed to penal jail sentences if an innocent goes to jail,
- Judges should also be exposed to penal jail sentences in case they release a criminal sooner than the maximum sentence and they commit a new crime.
When a criminal is released 18 times by judges, and they slaughter a dozen people on the 19th time, you know you’re in France. And that’s somewhere you don’t want to be.
As far as being penalised for not predicting the future actions of an individual person, not so much. That would effectively mean that every person would be sentenced and required to serve the maximum penalty for any violation, even though those maximums were intended to be doled out to only the most egregious offenders.
Perhaps much more granular and specific sentencing guidelines with objective qualifiers so that sentencing was more predictable?
You have to be careful here. Doing so can create perverse incentives that undermine justice. If a judge or a jury face such penalties, they will be inclined to reduce the penalty or feel compelled to find the defendant not guilty as a fearful precaution, even in cut and dry cases. And would you punish innocent jurors where unanimity is not required?
I think a judge making a mistake this egregious should not be allowed to continue being a judge.
This isn't a solution. It is a wish. Obviously, we all would like it to be the case that innocent people are never punished. But first, is the rate of false convictions of the innocent actually egregiously high? This article gives an example of one case, but it does not follow that we are facing high rates of false convictions, especially for serious crimes that carry serious penalties. Second, is there a way to reduce false convictions, especially in a way that doesn't comprise the system in some serious way?
> I think a judge making a mistake this egregious should not be allowed to continue being a judge.
Perhaps, perhaps not. You risk incentivizing behavior among judges that subverts the justice system.
4% may sound low to some, but when people's live are on the line that's terribly high. If a plane had a 4% failure rate it would be considered a colossal failure.
That's a desirable effect. Your argument is the very reason the 5th amendment exists. Making it easier to find someone guilty is a BAD thing, not a good thing.
And the hyper-cautious effect isn’t because of fear of getting it wrong. It’s fear of retaliation whether right or wrong.
All legitimate government power is supposed to come from the people, I feel like that's often forgotten, especially when it comes to the least accountable branch of government.
Are crime rates significantly lower in US States that have the death penalty? Are crime rates lower in States that punish more severely compared to States that punish less severely?
The state of art in preventing crime is to focus on rehabilation and education, not punishment. So it would be novel if the statistics prove that punishment works better.
This started more than 30 years ago. The internet as we thinking about it did not exist. Computers were just going around. Most it was physical copies which could not be centralized/shared at scale till the internet came around.
I am just trying to think about what kind of system would account for all the changes that have happened and prevented this while also accounting for the reverse where the real person suddenly had someone trying to steal their identity also accounting for the fact this system has to be valid for the future. Maybe it is a failure of my imagination, but I can only think of ways to do it for the current state of the world, assuming the world never changes.
The first step is transparency. Put every bit of evidence for every case on the public record so everyone can see it online.
Sadly, The System will not allow that. Truth is the enemy of The System.