Hacker News Reader

Comment by mavdi | Hacker News Reader

Thankfully not as severe as this, but a few years police came to my door and arrested me on suspicion of robbery. I was told they had a forensic evidence that I was involved in it.

As part of UK Visa procedures, I had to provide my biometric details. They had found my finger prints on a phone book and concluded that I must have done the robbery. They had no other evidence, they hadn't done any background checks or found a motive. The phone book was one of the ones my mom was distributing in her small van. I had helped her loading them up the van. I explained this, they checked with the distribution company and I was freed. But the thought that I had been incredibly lucky to have an explanation never left me. Just imagine a situation like this, maybe you go into a shop, pick up an item and put it back. Someone somewhere gets killed and your forensic information is left on an item in the murder scene.

What happened to this guy is terrifying. And I'm sure there are thousands of innocent people in jails because since the introduction of forensics, law enforcements and the courts have become too lazy to analyse the situation. "Evidence is there, must be guilty" mentality.

View on HN

It sounds like you would have been saved a lot of stress, indignation and hassle if they had simply asked you, and spent five minutes checking up on your answer, before arresting you.

Considering the number of fingers that may have touched a telephone book during its manufacture and distribution (surely the cops have phone books and knew they weren't sent in the post, or if they had found a post worker's fingerprints on a piece of mail they wouldn't have arrested the postal worker) it seems to me that they may have been reckless in their conclusion.

I was surprised by their conclusion. The only item with finger prints on it was the phone book. So I asked them, would a burglar go about stealing things, then just as he's about to leave the home, he takes off his gloves and checks out a phonebook? And then puts the gloves back on to open the door to leave?

Isn't that sort of like poking a finger in the lion's eye without being able to run away? You're absolutely right, but while that's logical, it's also the sort of thing that a detective already fixated on you might think of as gloating. Insert new theory of the crime: you weren't helping your mother out of the goodness of your heart, but so you could scope out potential victims. And maybe you did touch the phone book during the crime for the adrenaline rush, content in the belief that it's the last place the police would think to dust for prints. All theories made less crazy because the detective thinks you were a smug SOB.

You mentioned that you felt lucky; sad to say, I think you're probably right. What a nightmare of an experience.

Indeed. "Ah ha! How could you know the burglar was wearing gloves if you weren't at the scene of the crime?" No winning there.

Never talk to police without a lawyer is good advice, but that advice literally translates to "Never talk to police without paying someone $300 per hour to do it." Meanwhile, police, at no additional cost to themselves, can essentially compel you to talk to them any time they want. So it's pretty easy to push people around with that dynamic, yet most people I talk to seem to bury their head in the sand on the issue.

I'm reminded of:

George Aaronow: When I talk to the police I get nervous.

Ricky Roma: Yes. You know who doesn't?

George Aaronow: Who?

Ricky Roma: Thieves.

It's not that much. That lawyer then would spend those money staying at one of your hotels or such. What goes around comes around.

After I had my home broken into the guy taking fingerprints explained to me that fingerprints don't really work like that. You're lucky to pull one single print out of an entire house, regardless of how careful a burglar was.

So I suspect that finding one good print and extrapolating a suspect from it is probably pretty common. Flawed obviously, but common.

This happens because the police aren't intelligent people.

In a Sherlock Holmes story, the protagonist uses forensic evidence but he thinks about what the evidence means.

The police, on the other hand, want a magic oracle device that spits out names and current addresses, and they treat forensics like it was such.

In the United States, having a valid explanation for why your fingerprints were on some object wouldn't necessarily get you freed, it wouldn't necessarily prevent prosecution. Some asshole DAs here would take that to trial (or extort you into a plea bargain, at least).

>The police, on the other hand, want...

someone to get arrested so it looks like they are doing a good job so the chief gets off their back, the chief wants this because re-election is coming soon and doesn't want to look weak on crime. Neither one of them can go pick up some random black guy for the crime any longer without too much media attention so 'forensic' evidence is what they try to use today.

I'm sure many police are not like this, but they also want the power trip. I was once pulled over by a cop who was driving incredibly recklessly on icy roads to get behind me fast (when I saw him swerving in my mirror I actually thought he must be on his way to an active shooter situation or something). He yelled at me to give him my license, and then ordered me to get out of the car and sit on the curb because he thought it was a fake. When it turned out to be authentic, he politely informed me that one of the lights illuminating my license plate were out and that my registration was expired. He wrote me a ticket. My registration was not expired, and I fixed the light the next day. The judge was laughing his head off at the ticket and called people in from the hallway to see how silly it was. But my complaint about the officer was just "noted".

I was pulled over by a cop because I essentially "cut him off" at an intersection, pulling from my complete stop at a stop sign across the intersection while he, further behind but with no stop sign, was turning into the same road: he therefore couldn't keep so much of his momentum but once he got into the road he needed to slow way down to match my speed.

Fortunately, I had a tail light out -- not a brake light, just the ones that idle on when the car is running. When he asked "do you know why I pulled you over?" I said "Because I have this tail light out: but the brake lights are fine, I have this appointment to fix them tomorrow, and here is this warning that this other officer gave me about the problem, which clearly says that it has to be fixed by the end of the week."

He said out-right "no, that's not why I pulled you over, you ran that stop sign," and I said, "no, I came to a complete stop, I always do, it's one of those disciplines I have that really annoys my girlfriend..." and such. Probably I shouldn't have even tried to argue it? But I did.

In the end, he came back with a ticket for "driving a defective vehicle" -- because the tail light was out, and despite the fact that he should have ideally deferred to the earlier warning. I asked him about it and he said, "you didn't fix it fast enough!" brusquely. Probably he wanted to lean on my immediate statement of "this is broken but I am fixing it tomorrow" in any trial, like, "he immediately confessed to the crime."

This turn of events was quite fortunate as when the county prosecutor saw both pieces of paper side-by-side (the warning, "fix by the 9th", and the ticket issued on the 7th, or whatever), she agreed to drop the case before it went to trial. (I had also been told by a police clerk that the judge was pretty lenient about traffic violations, so that may have also been in her mind.)

Probably he wanted to lean on my immediate statement of "this is broken but I am fixing it tomorrow" in any trial, like, "he immediately confessed to the crime."

That's precisely why he asked the question in the first place. Never admit to anything.

A few years ago, I got a ticket for driving with an expired inspection sticker. I knew it was expired and it was my fault so I wasn't going to try to argue my way out of it but when the officer asked if I knew why he pulled me over, I said "I have a pretty good idea, officer but I'm not going to say it out loud."

Hmm, I wouldn't try that again.

  Prosecutor: In Officer Wiggum's evidence he stated that you said you had a
  "pretty good idea" why he pulled you over.  Is that correct?
  You: I guess.
  Prosecutor: And what was that idea?

I could respond to that with "I'm going to assert my 5th amendment right and not answer that question" or "That was several months ago, I don't recall exactly what I thought" or "Because it was near the end of the month and I believe that officers have quotas to meet" or "Because I'm black".

All of that is moot. Where I live, there's no prosecutor involved for traffic tickets.

That idea, was that I am a wax tadpole. Was that also your idea?

"I was pulled over by a cop because I essentially "cut him off" at an intersection, pulling from my complete stop at a stop sign across the intersection while he, further behind but with no stop sign, was turning into the same road: he therefore couldn't keep so much of his momentum but once he got into the road he needed to slow way down to match my speed."

Apropos of anything else - you DID cut him off, and you did fail to yield (Stop signs are also Yields). His argument about you running the stop sign is invalid, sure, if you were at a complete stop, but if you're forcing someone who did not have to yield to, by your own words, 'slow way down' to match you pulling out in front of them, then you were in the wrong.

I did cut him off. That's not a crime, but it was definitely a dick move. It was 2 AM and had it not been so late I'd probably have been nicer and just waited. (He might have been hoping that he'd caught a drunk driver?)

I don't think I 'failed to yield' to him because I exited the intersection before he entered it: he only really had to slow down once he got into the road I was in. But had he given me a ticket for that, I might have just taken responsibility and paid the fine. I mean, I think I could plausibly argue the case in court because I "made it" well ahead of him. But then again, he may have started slowing down much sooner, and it could be a thorny argument.

What interested me most about it at the time was: it was a 3-way T-shaped intersection formed by taking a 4-way intersection and blocking off the North end with construction work. So the North-South road had no signs, but the general rule for such intersections (and I think it's explicitly written down in most states, but I'm not sure) would be that the South traffic has to yield to East/West traffic: in other words, in combination with the East/West stop signs, I think the law-books would imply that the road should have implicitly become an all-way stop.

Every law enforcement officer I've talked with at length has been an intelligent person.

I think we all want tools that help us do our jobs quickly and more reliably. Forensic science is, in aggregate, a tool for discovering what's true. Improvements in forensic science are, on balance, a net positive.

In the United States, nothing prevents prosecution. The state can bring whatever charges it wants. The bulwarks of our freedom are in the courts, the ballot box, and in the enumerated Bill of Rights.

It's the jury of our peers and a speedy trial that check the ability of prosecutors to do us individual harm. As a society, it's our power at the ballot box that determines who we admit into the job of prosecution.

The intelligence of individual officers is not the issue even though smart candidates are actively discriminated against in some locations (see: http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/sto...). Prosecutors control the entire process and have largely negated trial by jury through the use of multiple charges and plea bargains (see: http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-procedure/plea-bargain-...). Many prosecutors are not directly elected, so the ballot box does not provide a direct path to a solution. Furthermore, I doubt many voters vote for candidates based on who they will appoint as a prosecutor.

"Every law enforcement officer I've talked with at length has been an intelligent person."

This could be selection bias at work. Perhaps you terminate conversations with less intelligent officers earlier, without realising the reason you do so. So, these less intelligent ones are forgotten, or removed from your sample because the conversation was not long enough to find strong evidence about intelligence.

> Every law enforcement officer I've talked with at length has been an intelligent person.

No. He's just poor at judging intelligence, like everyone else.

If they are polite and don't raise their voice and there are no obvious deficiencies in their vocabulary or pronunciation, and they seem to be minimally informed on current events and trends, you couldn't tell an idiot from a genius. You have no ability to see their thought processes, and you've never really bothered to try to infer them.

Studies even suggest you don't know what's going on in your own brain either. This despite the fact that you are actually privy to at least some of your own thought process.

> Studies even suggest

[citation needed]

Eric Schwitzgebel specializes in papers about studies about this: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/

The citations will probably be helpful for you to find the studies and similar ones.

My favorites:

Why did we think we dreamed in black and white?

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/DreamB&W.htm

How well do we know our own conscious experience? The case of human echolocation.

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm

edit: here's an interview - http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-splintered-skeptic/

Tor Nørretranders (1998). The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. Viking. ISBN 0-670-87579-1.

> I think we all want tools that help us do our jobs quickly and more reliably.

I can't help but feel there's something vital missing from police, DA, etc training. I'm reminded very distinctly of my ethics class (which was required for graduation), where we were told the horror story of the THERAC-25. Even now, when I work on software for the military, I am very conscious of what my decisions may cost. Why aren't police, judges, district attorneys and forensic scientists required to take classes that tell them of stories like this one? I feel that juries aren't enough, especially when they are surrounded by those with much more experience and comfort in the courtroom.

Would a DA take you to trial based on a single fingerprint on a phonebook? Even in the article at issue, an example of justice system at its worst, the prosecution was based on an eye-witness identification in addition to the tenuous forensic evidence.

I read an article a year or so ago about a prosecutor who, once DNA evidence revealed that the defendant (convicted prior) was innocent started theorizing that he was one of two rapist, but wore a condom.

So yeh. There are no limits and no meaningful rules as to what they can and will do. Certainly many feel no moral or ethical constraints on their actions.

And what actually ended up happening in that situation? Did the DA take the defendant to trial under that theory?

I think he's referring to the case of Roy Criner. What was ridiculous is that I remember watching a documentary that focused in part about this case and they interviewed the district attorney who was denying an appeal of the case after the DNA analysis of the semen confirmed that it didn't belong to Roy Criner. The DA was adamant that he was obviously guilty because he was given a fair trial and that the DNA evidence just meant that the victim also had sex with someone else recently before she was raped and murdered by Criner.

http://www.law.northwestern.edu/legalclinic/wrongfulconvicti... http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/case/etc/updat...

>> Considering the number of fingers that may have touched a telephone book during its manufacture and distribution (surely the cops have phone books and knew they weren't sent in the post, or if they had found a post worker's fingerprints on a piece of mail they wouldn't have arrested the postal worker) it seems to me that they may have been reckless in their conclusion.

That's why such evidence is supposed to be supportive of a larger case. Of course there will be a fingerprint on almost any given item. If you have a complete biometric database of every person in the country you will be able to match it, but that doesn't mean anything at all. If the person matched happens to be local it still doesn't mean anything by itself. In this case there was a plausible innocent explanation of how it got there, but in most cases people won't know how they spread their prints or DNA.

At which point he could have disposed of evidence, refused to be interviewed, etc etc.

This is exactly how the legal system in the UK works - you arrest people at a relatively low burden of proof, and that gives you the power to detain them for a few hours while you question them, search for evidence, etc. You can't do any of that if you go over and "ask"

I'm glad things ended well for you, but please realize that you were freed thanks to luck and not because you were actually innocent.

Don't ever talk to police. DON'T EVER TALK TO POLICE.

Call a lawyer and allow him to explain the mistake. There's just as much chance that the police could have used your explanation against you if they thought you were lying and you would be in jail right now, wrongfully convicted because you misremembered a small detail in your story.

DON'T EVER TALK TO POLICE, ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVE BEEN EXPLICITLY CHARGED WITH A CRIME.

I think you may be thinking of the US? In the UK it's pretty rare to prosecute the innocent. If anything things are a bit lenient with a quite a few criminals getting off free.

I don't think human nature changes drastically between politically defined boundaries. Besides, a simple google search shows roughly the same proportion of innocents convicted per trial.

Bear in mind that those statistics are enormously skewed by plea bargaining, for both good and bad reasons. Good plea bargaining is where the evidence is extremely strong and the defendant has little criminal history, so admitting guilt and serving a minimal sentence is in everyone's interest. The bad kind is where prosecutors have a weak case but bring so many charges that defendant is facing a horrendously long time in prison, and pleads guilty to a crime that wasn't committed rather than take the risk of extended incarceration.

Human nature's probably much the same but the systems and their incentives seem pretty different.

As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "Better a hundred guilty men go free, than one innocent man is prosecuted without due process of law." Oh, wait....

> In the UK it's pretty rare to prosecute the innocent.

Really?

When i did jury duty, probably about a third of the charges i heard were pretty obviously groundless.

"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks! I'm guilty as charged. Will reform.

I think that was a justified breaking of the rules.

Commenting with emphasis in all caps is the textual equivalent of grabbing someone by the collar and screaming in their face.

Everyone who does so feels it's justified, but the effect is always obnoxious and it never conveys more information or meaning, only an insistence that the commenter is especially important and needs to be paid attention to.

Very common way people try and "win" on the Internet is by arguing a point not made by the parent. It wasn't all in upper case; your comment is invalid.

It's been considered rude since the days of Usenet and probably before, and whether or not the comment was entirely in all caps is irrelevant.

Hi dang, this is unrelated (feel free to remove this reply) but it seems that my post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9774037 has disapeared? Could you look into it?

Comments by new accounts are autokilled if they trip certain filters that we have in place because of past abuse by spammers and trolls. I've unkilled your comment and marked your account legit so it won't happen again.

Soon, everyone will be able to contribute to unkilling good comments, so fixing these will no longer block on moderator attention. In the future, though, everyone: please send issues like this to hn@ycombinator.com. It's too random whether we'll see it on HN itself! Not to mention off topic.

Honest question: is everyone supposed to have a lawyer on standby? Who exactly am I supposed to call if I need one in this kind of emergency situation? Do I just look in a phone book for "lawyers"?

That, or calling your local bar association's referral line. Some cities and courts have low cost legal assistance either through government agencies or via nonprofits.

Better yet, spend 30 minutes on that exercise now, rather than when you're stuck in the situation for real.

How can you say this, and not include a link to the video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

This video explains perfectly why even if you are innocent, you should not talk to the police.

Might want to edit your post.

But that is how arresting in England and Wales is supposed to work. The standard of suspicion to arrest someone is pretty low because it affords the police time to question a suspect, obtain DNA and fingerprint samples, search your house etc.

The problem we have is when the investigating officer gets focused on a suspect thanks to forensic evidence to the exclusion of other suspects. The CSI effect is real and strong, in reality in many cases there is little to no useful forensic evidence at all.

How long can they hold you while fishing for evidence?

24 hours. Can apply for up to 96 hours for a serious crime. Or 14 days under the Terrorism Act

Years, according to the New York City Department of Corrections.

In England the justification has to be approved by a Custody Sgt initially that gives up to 24 hours. A more senior officer has to review the continued detention from the 6 hour mark up to 24. A Superintendent or above can authorise up to 36 hours. Beyond that a Magistrate can authorise up to 96 hours in 36 hour blocks. During this time the individual has access to legal advice, where the reasons for continued detention have to be provided and the evidence thus far collected explained (again unless a very senior signs off on why not).

Unless you're been arrested for a very serious crime, in which case you're going to be defended for free by a very experienced QC who will tear apart dodgy process, you are likely to be arrested for a handful of hours. The exceptions would be being held overnight, if you're drunk/high and thus incapable of being interviewed etc.

Things are slightly different in Scotland where you get detained not arrested, but the principles are broadly the same. UK policing as a whole has been through periods of dodgy processes and huge reforms in the wake of them. There are likely to be very few criminal justice systems in the world I'd rather interact with than the UK one, especially if I were accused of a serious crime.

Edit to add - plus the premise of "fishing" implies there is no existing evidence. The initial justifications for the arrest have to be supplied at the start, and "it might have been him" won't pass muster.

> plus the premise of "fishing" implies there is no existing evidence.

I'm not sure where you get that from. I would assume you fish where you expect to find something, and my interpretation of the many places "fishing" is used (or even "phishing" to a lesser degree), is that it's done where you expect some payoff. Maybe you're thinking of the phrase "he's just fishing", which while often used by people to describe someone searching for something, often fruitlessly, generally the person searching is doing it with the expectation they will find something.

In a legal context there is the concept of a "fishing expedition" which is more of a looking for evidence when there isn't sufficient underlying evidence to justify the intrusive methods being asked for.

Ah, you meant "existing evidence" as in "currently existing evidence", while I interpreted it as "there exists evidence".

They kept me for about 6 hours. Mainly because I phoned up a lawyer and told them I wouldn't be speaking to them unless he arrived. Took the lawyer a few hours to get there.

It's not really fishing. They had forensic evidence for a specific crime, used it to find him (the suspect), conducted their investigation, cleared him of that crime, and let him go.

Fishing is where you pick someone first, then go looking for evidence of any crime.

It's still fishing if the forensic evidence does not justify the investigation. For example, a thumb print on a telephone book, but not on a doorknob or anywhere else that might suggest there's a reason to think the thumb print was any less than casual/innocent.

See: http://lesswrong.com/lw/19m/privileging_the_hypothesis/

Did they actually tell you they had concluded you conducted the robbery? Or did they simply treat you as a suspect or person of interest and wanted to discuss it with you?

That's two different things.

Seems the system worked in your case. You had a plausible reason for the existence of your fingerprint at the scene of the crime. I would imagine they also ran your background information without bothering to inform you and regular police officers don't care about motive. Detectives do when investigating a case but street cops showing up at your door (assuming that's what happened) probably don't. You apparently didn't even have to go to court to explain all this and be set free.

Curious, do you know if they caught who actually committed the robbery?

They were suited up detectives. They arrested me on suspicion of robbery. One of them was about to handcuff me but I kindly asked that he shouldn't and he accepted. They then transported me to the police station while my neighbours watched. Standard police stuff then on...

I don't know your local police procedures, but did they "book" you or just take you in for questioning? I apologize for the questioning but I'm interested in your treatment in all this. I find it really interesting that they were willing to not cuff you as they took you away.

They booked me and detained me in a cell for a few hours. They gave a cup of tea though.

I'm assuming you now have an arrest record because of this? If you do, then that's really screwed up.

Yes indeed, an enhanced CRB check will reveal arrests...

Is there no procedure to get it expunged?

How did they have your fingerprints to cross reference in the first place?

"As part of UK Visa procedures, I had to provide my biometric details."

Lsmod answers your question, but on top of that the English police force has an extensive fingerprint and DNA database. People who are arressted will have their fingerprints and DNA taken and that's held on file even if the case does not go to court (or goes to court and the defendant is found not guilty).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com