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Comment by zehaeva | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine that this is unexpected, nor that surprising.

I served on a jury nearly 20 years ago for a criminal case. And the biggest thing at the time, if you recall that long ago, was the biggest shows in TV were CSI and Law & Order. I certainly watched them a fair amount.

Both, and the myriad of spin off and other shows in the same vein, presented a flashy and scientifically certain view of law enforcement.

I bring up my time on that jury because the lawyers both spent a _huge_ amount of time preempting everyone's questions about why there wasn't any conclusive "scientific" evidence. No finger prints, no weapons marks, no expert testimony, etc.

It turns out real life is far more messy than a 30-60 minute tv drama.

So as CSI, et. al. gave us these unrealistic fever dreams about how crime is solved in the real world, so too do "True Crime" stories give us an unrealistic view of what happens out there in the real world.

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Exactly. They're just whining that the "police can do no wrong" sentiment born out of CSI/NCIS/Law and Order and post-9/11 first responder worship is coming to a close.

And of course the public deference to them over that period enabled a bunch of shoddy work and that shoddy work is what underpins the current generation of "ignored X" and "framed Y" type true crime and so the pendulum of public perception swings back toward where it was in the 1990s when the public was becoming aware that police had, roughly speaking, spent the prior decades framing a bunch of black guys because that was easier than solving crimes.

Edit: Now that I think about it it's kind of a condemnation of the industry how quickly the pendulum swung.

I have been watching a little of daytime TV cop stuff while spending time with my older family. In one particular 44 minute episode the 4 plot lines are: solving a hate-crime by deceiving a suspect during interrogation into confessing; an object lesson that you shouldn't film cops lest you make them too nervous to arrest people, with tragic consequences; a 3 layered defense against the idea of an old boys club, in which even the would-be racist cop is bait-N-switched into being color-blind; and a Medicare fraud investigation. I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience it was so surreal in its overtness.

We probably need better k-12 epistemology lessons, so every adult could reasonably be expected to understand different levels of doubt and scrutiny, evidentiary requirements.

That said, juries should be skeptical of the story they are being sold, right? Maybe we should not lock up very many people for whom there isn’t any hard evidence of their guilt.

> Maybe we should not lock up very many people for whom there isn’t any hard evidence of their guilt.

Would you consider eyewitness testimony to be 'hard evidence'?

I don't have any CCTV in my house, so if a guest visiting my house beats me up, although my face is indisputable evidence that someone attacked me, the only evidence they did it is my eyewitness testimony.

Would our society be a better place if my attacker was convicted, or if he wasn't?

What if you had two guests but you lied about which one beat you up while the other one was out?

What if they were twins?

What if the person was wearing a mask that you knew your guest owned, but it wasn't actually him?

You're entering into this with the assumption that you know who beat you up. The police don't have anything other than your assertion. That's why corroborating evidence is needed.

Don’t forget the chance that they beat themselves up to get the other person in trouble and/or try to extort them. (I wish this was that fantastical a scenario)

I mean, these are sort of fanciful soap opera scenarios, haha.

More likely, if a guest beats you up, there will be some other witnesses and some motives. Anyway, police can get search warrants and work it out, or like… maybe the guest will feel guilty and admit what they did, perhaps after a stern talking-to along with the implication that they’ll probably be found out after some investigation anyway.

It's not that fanciful.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/2102/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/28/kevin-karl-d...

> police can get search warrants and work it out

ROFLMAO!

It is a problem if police don’t do their job well, but we shouldn’t paper over that problem by locking people up without evidence.

Eyewitness testimony has been shown to be far less reliable than most people believe it to be. Human memory is frail and subject to modification if not outright fabrication.

Not to say that it should be completely discounted, only that it should be treated as evidence with a less than perfectly reliable. Not quite "hard" evidence, but definitely something that should be considered.

A case I was a juror on, all of the witnesses were suspect. One was straight up lying I found out from the defense attorney a year later at a bar (he and the prosecutor didn't want to deal with a purjury charge for the so the defense attourney gave the prosecutor an obvious hole in the testimony to go after immediately). They were all drunk and high as hell.

At the end of the day the one dude still hit his friend with his truck and threw him at least 10 feet across a wide sidewalk and into a wrought iron fence hard enough to partially impale him. Everyone agreed that the one guy was driving, and that the other guy was hit. The only real evidence was how injured the victim was. It was completely open and shut. There was plenty of supposed nuance. None of it mattered. Still drunken assault with a deadly weapon.

Eyewitness testimony has been proven to be unreliable; even in cases where there is no evidence the witness attempted to be deceptive. So yes, if literally the only evidence that they were the person to assume you is your memory, then the standard of reasonable doubt means they get away with it.

> Would our society be a better place if my attacker was convicted, or if he wasn't?

I’d honestly need more than that if impaneled on a jury to conclude beyond reasonable doubt that you’d correctly identified your assailant. Hell, if the only evidence is eyewitness testimony from the victim, an obviously-interested party, I’m not even sure I’d be comfortable awarding civil damages. Especially in a modern context, where every sneeze throws off a digital and/or forensic trail.

I think it should be rare that a guest of yours spontaneously decides to beat you up without generating any other evidence. So I think we can wiggle out of having to totally solve this problem by emphasizing:

> Maybe we should not lock up *very many people* for whom there isn’t any hard evidence of their guilt.

This should be very rare, so even if we caught everybody who spontaneously beat up their hosts, there still wouldn’t be very many people in this category.

This doesn’t mean we don’t have to investigate any crimes of course. It is important for the legal system to work for victims too. But if you get beat up and point to some guest of yours, an investigation can start, a search warrant can be generated, we can see if they’ve discussed it with anybody, etc etc.

>I think it should be rare that a guest of yours spontaneously decides to beat you up without generating any other evidence.

Are you assuming most assaults are premeditated? I'd say most aren't. Even something like burglaries/robberies are often opportunistic, without anything incriminating like a heist planning board.

I responded to the scenario that they brought up, a guest (not a burglar) attacking their host.

It isn’t most assaults, it is a sort of weird artificial situation constructed to have a crime committed without any physical evidence, but which could be solved just assuming the victim’s testimony was 100% true and accurate.

What about something as simple as two acquaintances getting in a heated argument?

I think in that case, the two witnesses would have contradictory stories as to what the exact sequence of the escalation was, so it would be hard to tell which one to believe.

Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Of course if you knew your attacker that is different

I love this idea, but it feels very anathema to the current K-10 education system at minimum, if not all the way to 12. The entire system is highly authoritative, e.g. "read this textbook and regurgitate the 'right' answer back to us." I'm not even saying that critically, I'm just pointing out what a radically different model it would be to start from an epistemological viewpoint.

The US crime system, including all its rights, hardly seems to be the best in the world.

"Maybe we should not lock up very many people for whom there isn’t any hard evidence of their guilt."

If this is the case, we need body cams on us 24/7 and many more cameras on other areas. The me-too movement was based on hearsay from sometimes two decades ago. Should everyone in these cases walk free?

I suspect there would be more vigilante justice in these cases.

> It turns out real life is far more messy than a 30-60 minute tv drama.

But at the end of the day, they jury is asked to decide if an accusation is true "beyond a reasonable doubt".

And I say it should be. If the entire argument is “these cops say so and also this one guy who may hate the defendant”, that should probably get dismissed. Make them submit body cam footage showing evidence and amazingly a lot of bad stuff gets less bad.

Most criminal convictions are based on circumstantial evidence. True crime podcasts and shows have made the general population expect a higher level of evidence. I can't say I disagree.

And how many people are wrongfully convicted?

Hard to know an exact number, since we only know of ones who crossed the huge hurdles to reverse a conviction. And those require a very high bar of exacting evidence like DNA. But, the system should bend towards letting guilty people go free rather putting innocent people in jail.

What evidence did they have?

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