Hacker News Reader

Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

That is an extremely dumb idea. And I say that from the POV as someone who used to represent criminal defendants.

A person can be guilty of multiple crimes for the same act. Under the basic principles of criminal constitutional law, all crimes for the same act must be charged at the same time. Your solution would mean that someone guilty of rape, murder, and larceny would go completely free if they were found guilty of the two more serious crimes (rape and murder) but not guilty (or no verdict) for the least serious crime.

View on HN

> Under the basic principles of criminal constitutional law, all crimes for the same act must be charged at the same time

You're just referencing double jeopardy, and mean that you have to simultaneously present all charges that you ever want to charge them with, right?

In your hypothetical, just ignore the larceny. In the event that they're found guilty of rape and murder, you can't really say that justice wasn't done. In the event they can beat the serious charges, you shouldn't think that getting them on the larceny would have been actual justice.

To the extent you may be right that it's a fundamentally bad idea, then the fact that one minor act can be turned into so many "independent" charges demonstrates the problem with a proliferation of laws that cover any possibly wrong action five times over.

One possible fix would be for Prosecutors to have a karma rating and each time someone is found not guilty of any charge it brings them down a notch. At a certain point then they would have their law license suspended for a time.

That's almost how the current system works, and is a source of much of it's woes. There is no actual "karma rating", but prosecutors are very mindful of their success rates as they are generally considered to be a measure of their worth as a prosecutor and the basis on their future career advancement.

Because of that, once they prosecute someone, they must succeed -- and this leads to situations like the prosecution withholding or trying to hide evidence proving innocence.

Is there a way to compare / access the success rates of different prosecutes?

Right, a 100% conviction rate could mean any of 1) they are very good at picking their battles, 2) they are very good at convicting innocent people, 3) they are extremely over-conservative in the cases they pursue. Only 1 is a good thing, although lesser degrees of 3 might be as well, depending. 2 is outright bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com