Comment by frognumber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frognumber | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The truth is somewhere in the middle.

There was a similar case in Massachusetts many years back. It never went to trial, and legal analysis could go both ways. The bargain struct was it would go into secretive judicial oversight channels.

There is a strong case to be made for obstruction of justice, and an equally strong case to be made about her making an error in her professional capacity as a judge and a government employee (which grants a level of immunity). Police officers, judges, soldiers, etc. make mistakes, but they generally don't go to jail for them because (even corruption aside) everyone makes mistakes. In some jobs, mistakes can and do have severe consequences up to and including people dying. If that led to prison, no one sane would take those jobs.

In any sane universe, it'd be fair to say she screwed up, and then the FBI also screwed up arresting her. I think the FBI screwed up more, since their mistake was premeditated, whereas she was put on the spot.

I do agree with your fundamental point of fatigue. This is not something anyone has a moral high ground to hang their flag on without looking bad.

What was the honest mistake the judge made?

I usually read coverage from different sides. If you don't realize where she screwed up, look at Fox News. If you don't realize where the FBI screwed up, look at NY Times.

Fox News perspective is that she broke court procedures in order to obstruct federal agents.

Prior cases seem to support that:

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/massachusetts-judge-court-...

Case concluded with some kind of judicial reprimand (not criminal, but administrative). This one is further over the line.

Neutral description to LLM also supports that the judge acted improperly (but LLM didn't think this would lead to a conviction). LLMs aren't great at legal analysis, but are actually pretty good at pattern-matching cases.

One thing helpful to have is a lawful plan. The courthouse might have handled ICE without breaking protocols by having protocols. Protocols should be prima facie neutral, but it's reasonable to expect people in courts, schools, and other places we actually want them to show up to feel safe there. That shouldn't involve sneaking people through back doors or hiding them in jury areas.

Why would I trust that an "entertainment" network like fox news would provide a good legal analysis of how a judge messed up the law? LLMs are worse than this.

ICE has been regularly overstepping its bounds and going after people in ways that impact our legal system's ability to function. This is a terrible precedent to set for no other reason than it impacts the rule of law. If people who are accused of crimes can be disappeared without a trial, just for showing up to court, what incentive is there for anyone to go to court? They are literally ignoring the "innocent until proven guilty" that is critical to the rule of law.

If you take away people's ability to get justice within the system, you are making it inevitable that they will go outside the system to get justice.

Ergo, I posted a link to an analogous legal situation in Massachusetts.

We can agree with what the judge did, but it doesn't make it legal.

We can also agree that ICE is breaking laws, but it also doesn't make what the judge did legal. It does help a bit -- in another comment I explained why -- but not enough to change the legal analysis.

As a footnote, modern LLMs aren't worse than Fox News. They have a lot of case law in their training set. They make mistakes so shouldn't yet be used for anything critical, but the legal analysis from Claude or GPT4.1 is a lot better than e.g. 95% of forum posts here.

I don't know that I have the brainpower to analyze 95% of the forum posts on here. And less to determine what I think is "better", so I guess I'll drop the point.

Does screw up as you use it mean knowingly and intentionally breaking the law, or mean it was accidental and unintentional?

It might be a mistake to beat someone bloody, but it isn't an accident.

I'm not sure what you're asking.

Let's say I beat someone bloody. We can play through several scenarios:

- Someone broke into my house, and I was fearful for my life

- Plain clothes police broke into my house, and I was fearful for my life

Let's say a police officer did so:

- Someone was a gang member, and the police officer did so in self-defense

- Ditto, based on mistaken beliefs

A lot of the protections in place for police and judges are based on the fact that mistakes like these happen. In general, people aren't individually liable for mistakes make in their official capacity as a government employee, unless they cross very extreme lines. They might get fired, but not prosecuted.

There are exceptions (such as handling of classified materials), but as a guideline, if a police officer beats someone bloody, but has good reason to believe they were a criminal and that this was the least force they could use to keep themselves safe, they're protected even if they're wrong.

Im talking about intent: knowingly and intentionally breaking the law.

I understand that honest mistakes happen due to inaccurate information, understand, ect.

- e.g. you thought a cop was a burglar.

These are different from poor and regrettable choices, also sometimes referred to as "mistakes".

  - I beat my wife because I caught them cheating.

There may be an interpretation of this situation where judge did not understand their situation and actions, but I don't find it very probable. It seems clear that they were trying to help the target of a legal warrant evade law enforcement apprehension, and knew exactly what they were doing.

People do dumb things in stressful situations. To your "I beat my wife because I caught them cheating" example, there's a world of difference between:

1) I walked in. An argument and a fight ensued.

2) I found out about it, went of and thought, and made the choice.

There's a hierarchy, including:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provocation_(law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insanity_defense

I find it entirely probable that the judge didn't know or understand, in the moment, their situation and the implications of their actions. Indeed, I will go one step further. If ICE does illegal things 100 times, then it's reasonable to expect an unreasonable reaction maybe 10% of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause

If I were a judge, and someone came into court with an "administrative warrant," I might not want them disturbing my courthouse either. I might want parties to feel safe there, and be concerned about miscarriages of justice if parties are scared to show up.

People do dumb things in stressful situations. To your "I beat my wife because I caught them cheating" example, there's a world of difference between:

1) I walked in. An argument and a fight ensued.

2) I found out about it, went of and thought, and made the choice.

There's a hierarchy, including:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provocation_(law)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insanity_defense

I find it entirely probable that the judge didn't know or understand, in the moment, their situation and the implications of their actions. Indeed, I will go one step further. If ICE does illegal things 100 times, then it's reasonable to expect an unreasonable reaction maybe 10% of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_cause

If I were a judge, and someone came into court with an "administrative warrant," I might not want them disturbing my courthouse either. I might want parties to feel safe there, and be concerned about miscarriages of justice if parties are scared to show up.

The trick here is to have policies ahead-of-time, and especially, to let judges know about this sort of thing ahead-of-time. If police show up at my door, I might make a mistake. If they let me know ahead of time, and I have time to think, I hopefully won't.

Judge thinks ICE is illegally abducting people. The ideas are laid out pretty clearly in the grandparent comment. It’s not clear what is right and wrong because ICE is skipping due process and rendering people to foreign prisons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com