3-5 years?! THREE TO FIVE YEARS???!!!
There are no words. Agents of the law need to be held more accountable for their actions than your average citizen, not less. This is disgusting.
There are no words. Agents of the law need to be held more accountable for their actions than your average citizen, not less. This is disgusting.
That's 40,000 counts, 1 day per, continuous -- 109 years and change.
Those entrusted with protecting the law should have far more obligation to uphold its tenets than the hoi polloi, lest we start conceding that there really are two classes of citizenry and start a class war.
EDIT: The scale of her crimes is thousands of person-years of human life in jail. Some of them probably deserved it, others probably didn't. There is a serious asymmetry here, she has only 50-100 years that she can be imprisoned and that's not a strong enough message to people in the government who would think about doing the same to further their own careers as well.
If you have 40,000 cases and only say 1/4 of them get falsified and that results in on average one year of wrongful imprisonment you're at 10,000 years.
The government is the body which has a monopoly on violence. In other words, they're the only people who can legally do things to people that nobody would volunteer to have done to them, like going to prison. It's the government's job to provide courts through which disputes can be resolved, since you aren't supposed to take matters into your own hands. One class of those disputes is the government vs citizens who have violated the government's rules or the laws.
When those kinds of cases are going through the courts the government should be extra careful to be impartial because everyone can tell that it's potentially a situation ripe for corruption. The government is adjudicating a case between the government (the DA or prosecutor) and someone not in the government ("normal people").
Given the choice you wouldn't choose your wife's parents to settle a dispute between you and your wife; but this can be a very real fear when being prosecuted.
The problem here is even though you can name the different parts of the government and call them separate (courts, prosecutor, forensics, etc) ultimately we find out that forensics and the prosecutor are both "on the same team" and that when the courts get involved again to try and fix the mess, that the forensics person is still "on the same team" as the prosecutors and maybe everyone else.
If you're in the class of people called "the government" you have to be extra right, extra careful, and extra following-the-rules so that ordinary people get a fair shake when dealing with an entity that has virtually limitless funds to prosecute versus their usually meager funds to defend (unless you're in the top 1% to 0.1% or so, then it's just "lots more" rather than "infinitely more").
Here's a case where not only was the forensics person not extra careful, right and proper, not even sloppy and foolish but malicious. And not just a little bit either, she didn't tamper with one case that involved a cheating ex or something. She did it systematically over thousands of cases depriving people of their liberty wrongly. You could build a strong case that she perverted justice in a very horrific manner.
If you add up all the person-years of people's lives that she conspired to help imprison and divide by 100 year in a life (round numbers) you'd get to the point where she's effectively "taken" tens if not hundreds of lives. That makes her in a roundabout way something akin to a very impressive mass murderer. In that case I'm not sure that the death penalty is an over-reactionary knee-jerk kind of punishment.
We regularly put a price on human life in civil cases, and that price always seems to be finite and fairly low.
The last thing this planet needs is more death and killing.
By the way, very insightful discussion here!
Is that any less barbaric than denying people their freedom because some people needed their labor in order to enjoy comfortable lives? When that used to happen it was called slavery and from what I can tell it's been abolished worldwide (or nearly so) because we've mostly agreed it's savage and barbaric and the opposite of civilized.
Denying people their freedom through a fair court system is also kind-of barbaric since violence or the threat thereof is what holds the system together. But it's supposed to be "justice" in that there's a fair trial and the hope is that guilty people are properly denied their freedom and innocent ones are not. Obviously there are false positives and false negatives but everyone is supposed to act in good faith to ensure that there aren't systematic biases.
This person introduced a systematic bias which has wrongly denied people their freedom. If she had kidnapped ~600 Americans for 1.5 years she'd be called a terrorist. That's precisely what some Iranian folks who did that to American embassy workers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis
How is this so vastly different?
"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
Does this mean that plainly barbaric things may be justifiably used as punishments? Does this perhaps suggest the possibility that "killing a man", and "killing a man after convicting him of a crime" are morally distinct? Or does this mean that a serious revamp of how we view and run our justice system is long overdue?
I think mostly what I meant is that it's theoretically (I think) illegal worldwide. There are plenty of places where it still happens through corruption or lax law enforcement.
I am a bit disappointed that the website linked to rolls child labor in with slavery and such because it weakens the number. I don't LIKE child labor but there are still places so poor that the only alternative to children working is starvation. And they don't break the 27 million number down. So it's hard to tell if the child labor portion is 1% or 80% of the full 27 million.
Again just to be clear I'm not in favor of child labor across the board. But if the alternative to a child working is starvation then I see no reason to make a law to stop him or her from working. Getting charities together to give the families food so that the kids can stop working? Great! But just passing a law and supposing/hoping that it will solve the problem? I don't know that it's the right thing to do.
I guess part of the problem is that I have no idea how many kids are working to eat and stay alive by their parents conscious choice vs how many are effectively slave laborers being exploited.
I might counter-argue that at some point there's no doubt and being permanently removed from the pool of people who are alive might be OK.
What I mean is that if someone is attempting to murder me and I manage to kill them first that it was a justifiable homicide and that I shouldn't be punished in any way. That's in the law and it even makes sense to a great many people even if they're not lawyers, and even if they don't know the finer points of the law. In that situation there is no doubt, or perhaps no reasonable doubt and the law does effectively judge people to be competent to make precisely that decision.
Part of what makes this so difficult is that she actually wielded vast power due to her position. In many ways she was far, far more powerful than a judge or a prosecutor. A judge can't just unilaterally accuse someone of a worse crime just because, nor can a prosecutor reasonably trump charges up too much without getting called out for bad behavior. But it seems that this lady did precisely that, totally perverting justice.
If an accountant cooks the books it might be professional misconduct (and criminal!) and people might lose their jobs and all of that is terrible. But that accountant can't somehow make all the employees of the company go to jail by doing something wrong.
The power that this lady had and the extent to which she abused it is simply breathtaking.
And that is the argument of why there should not be a death penalty, even for people who you are really sure that they really deserve it. It's a form of humility: To admit that there can be wrongs in the legal system, and so to be very sure not to do anything completely irreversible.
That's why people argue that the death penalty is unacceptable in any case whatsoever: the system has to be able to admit that sometimes it is wrong.
Go after the prosecutors who were involved. Conspiracy is often thrown at "peon" types, from those emails it makes sense that at least some of the prosecutors knew what was going on. You want to hammer these wastes of oxygen and make it clear that corruption will not be tolerated.
Never going to happen, of course. It's easier to just kill someone, and who's going to prosecute the prosecutors?
Someone better versed in Latin may need to double check this:
"Quis prosequiet ipsos prosecutores?"
What's worse is that the system didn't detect the problem for such a long time. Why isn't laboratory analysis blinded? We already spend truckloads of money funding an elaborate appeals process, why isn't there a check on lab analysis? With the drug industry imploding, chemists (real chemists) are struggling to find work, so they could even call it a jobs program if need be.
How can a voter rock the boat over an issue so far down on the political issue list?
there is a big difference between working as a chemist, and working as a forensic chemist. getting drug into trials and treated like shit by both sides in the case isn't any fun, and it's hard to find people who'll actually stick with it.
Exactly my thought. The chemists doing the analysis shouldn't have any way of finding out who the defendant or prosecutor in the case is until they've given their report. Similarly, the parties in the trial shouldn't know what chemist will be doing the analysis in advance.
The part of the story where a prosecutor was practically begging the chemist for a particular result is mindblowing. I hope the feds come in and clean house.
It will be interesting to see how many wrongful imprisonment suits this ends up causing.
I think the time served should be very long, given that most of our violent crimes have very long terms.
That said, I think we need to revisit very long terms. I don't know the answers, but I think that taking decades for seconds of rage, etc, can be extremely harsh.
I hope we can amend this system, or eliminate the need for it, someday. To me, I'm equally or even more scared of prosecutors that have the power to destroy my life as I am of thugs on the street that have that power.
It's far scarier in cases like this, where they only risk a slap on the wrist balanced against absolutely destroying lives.
I literally cannot imagine losing years in prison, when you have so few already.
"... she needs to be held accountable for each and every
instance."
Personally, instead of having her serve a 100 year jail sentence, I would have no problem letting get a jail sentence of 1 year if it meant that everyone else complicit in these crimes also got 1 year of jail. Spreading it among all those responsible is a much bigger deterrent than throwing one person under the bus.
Going to jail for a serious crime you are guilty of is a lottery. It is a much more effective deterrent when being found guilty and spending time in jail is a likely event when a crime actually occurs."
I think they should all be held accountable, no doubt, and I don't think that was lost in the discussion here on HN, thankfully.
I personally find it more contemptible the more power those involved have. This chemist likely felt pressure from her higher-ups. No excuse for her, but disgusting of them to exert their power in that manner.
I hadn't thought much about your last sentence before, but it's very valid. It's a lottery because you're not always caught (and then in some cases, white-collar-crime, you're likely to get a slap on the wrist). I imagine that most criminals are dumb enough to convince themselves they won't be caught, making their odds to "win" seem even higher.
I think crime & punishment is such a complex problem, and our current system is barely passable, and has incredible room for improvement. I just don't want to be the answers guy, because I don't know how to improve it, and the risks are high.
I reckon that all other 49 states should see this as a sign to perform their own audits. I just hope that if such audits are performed, that they don't get swept under the rug. Otherwise the problem will be solved, but many who didn't get due process will continue to rot in jail so that other states can save face.
20+ year jail sentences are already excessive for the overwhelming majority of people in jail with 20+ year sentences.