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Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

bbc.com

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Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#51

Post by mcguire »

benevol wrote: post #22

A slow-motion replay is just 1 way of "looking closer". The thing is, in order to not be hypocritical, we'd need to look as closely as possible. Once we do that, we'll be looking at the molecular structure of not only the brain of the perpetrator but also the whole body (as there is of course infinite interaction). We'll be asking for the causes that led to the body being as it was at the moment of the thing will cur…

Rethink punishment in what way?

On the one hand, if the perpetrator is not "responsible", then it seems inhumane to punish them.

On the other, if the perpetrator has demonstrated that they cannot or will not abide by society's rules and we have no way of reprogramming them to do so, then the only rational response is to remove them from society. Permanently. And as early as possible in their career.

And fortunately, questions of "inhumanity" do not arise---we don't have any free will to worry about, either.

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#52

Post by Confusion »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #26

I think what slow motion does is reveal the full violence of an action. Some commenters have mentioned that slow-motion tackles and punches look much worse than they do in real life. However, in real life, I think we underestimate the violence. Medical research into things like CTE has revealed that there is actually brain damage occurring during those plays. Notice the research used a gunshot video. I think the aver…

  the slow motion would actually help the jury come
  to the correct conclusion.
For the wrong reason.

The whole point of the article is that it helps them come to the wrong conclusion in a number of cases and your argument is that they must be wrong, because they came to the 'correct', in your opinion, solution in this specific case. That kind of reasoning is awful and immoral.

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#53

Post by kevin_b_er »

entropy_ wrote: post #32
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #26

I think what slow motion does is reveal the full violence of an action. Some commenters have mentioned that slow-motion tackles and punches look much worse than they do in real life. However, in real life, I think we underestimate the violence. Medical research into things like CTE has revealed that there is actually brain damage occurring during those plays. Notice the research used a gunshot video. I think the aver…

How violent an action truly is is irrelevant when deciding whether a murder was premeditated(first degree) or not(second degree). If I swing a hammer at a wall and someone happens to be passing by, I hit them in the face and kill them, it's going to look very gruesome in slow motion. That doesn't mean I intended to kill the person. If a jury is more likely to think I had time to notice the person passing by because o…

It doesn't even have to be a killing.

The slow motion makes it look like actions were deliberate instead of spontaneous. So it makes it look like a planned action. If the defendant deliberately did it, they must be pretty terrible, right? Guilty of a worse crime.

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#54

Post by mcguire »

vidarh wrote: post #39
rubidium wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any way for your statement (which has many bold assertions) to lead anywhere but "We're all just victims of our genes"? Your materialistic assumptions are a wonderful way to do science, but a terrible way to be human or govern.

It goes further. His statement (which I agree with) implies that we have no individual responsibility because our actions are entirely beyond our control. In that case the perpetrator is just as much victim, which alters the entire balance of justice, and creates all kinds of ugly rabbit holes to deal with with respect to societal effects and morality.

1. The perpetrator of at least some crimes lays costs on society far outweighing the costs to the perpetrator of the actions.

2. Morality is irrelevant. We don't have free will either.

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#55

Post by BurningFrog »

afandian wrote: post #10
djaychela wrote: post #5

Having recently sat on a Jury in the UK, deliberating on a triple assault case, the CCTV was the most crucial piece of evidence - eye witness reports were patchy and in some cases contradictory, and watching the events on CCTV was important in deciding what actually happened. If we had not had access to the CCTV - both in real time and slowed down (which was actually produced by the defence, not the prosecution), the…

My view is that the aim of a using juries is to bring the things humans are good at* to the judgment process, i.e. deciding who's lying under cross-examination. Humans might be good at detecting 'intent' in the real world and calibrated for reality. Their calibration might be completely wrong for slow-motion. So maybe slow-mo does give a better view of what happened to establish the facts of the matter but may drasti…

> the aim of a using juries is to bring the things humans are good at

As opposed to what non human alternatives?

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#56

Post by mikeash »

Retric wrote: post #50
alanwatts wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intentions aside, the 67% recidivism rate in the US shows that it is more focused on recurring punishment than rehabilitation.

The rate of people who go back to prison is far less than 67%. The odds that someone goes back is 67% when looking at people who have already gone back and counting them once for each trip. AKA (A, B, C, A, D, A, E) = 1 person out of 4 went back (25%). But, A went back 3 times so out of 7 stays 3 of them repeated (43%). Yet another way of counting is to look at people at one point in time (C, A, D, A,). But, someone…

Incidentally, the same problematic interpretation of numbers shows up when looking at divorce rates. If you just look at the number of marriages which end in divorce (which is the commonly quoted statistic) then you'll assign too much weight to people who get married and divorced many times.

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#57

Post by mcguire »

BurningFrog wrote: post #55
afandian wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view is that the aim of a using juries is to bring the things humans are good at* to the judgment process, i.e. deciding who's lying under cross-examination. Humans might be good at detecting 'intent' in the real world and calibrated for reality. Their calibration might be completely wrong for slow-motion. So maybe slow-mo does give a better view of what happened to establish the facts of the matter but may drasti…

> the aim of a using juries is to bring the things humans are good at As opposed to what non human alternatives?

Dice? A coin flip?

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#58

Post by mcguire »

coredog64 wrote: post #43
chrisweekly wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confounding the issue: evidence that some reactions happen before the actor is consciously aware that there is a decision to be made (let alone actually making a choice and deliberately initiating a response). It goes beyond recoiling your hand from a hot stove before you're aware of the pain. Tests w/ next-gen helicopter gunship HUD trigger controls showed pilots opening fire microseconds _before_ their neural pathw…

Isn't this all based on those fMRI scans that were discredited? http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/algorithms-used-to-st...

Have you heard more about this? The article you link to does not specifically mention the studies in question:

""This calls into question the validity of countless published fMRI studies based on parametric clusterwise inference." It's not clear how many of those there are, but they're likely to be a notable fraction of the total number of studies that use fMRI, which the authors estimate at 40,000."

Re: Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility

#59

Post by chrisseaton »

Confusion wrote: post #52
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #26

I think what slow motion does is reveal the full violence of an action. Some commenters have mentioned that slow-motion tackles and punches look much worse than they do in real life. However, in real life, I think we underestimate the violence. Medical research into things like CTE has revealed that there is actually brain damage occurring during those plays. Notice the research used a gunshot video. I think the aver…

the slow motion would actually help the jury come to the correct conclusion. For the wrong reason. The whole point of the article is that it helps them come to the wrong conclusion in a number of cases and your argument is that they must be wrong, because they came to the 'correct', in your opinion, solution in this specific case. That kind of reasoning is awful and immoral.

> come to the wrong conclusion

How do you know which verdict is wrong or right in order to say that though? You can say that slow motion makes people convict more, or convict less, or whatever, but unless you have an oracle to tell you which was the correct verdict in each case, and we don't, this data tells us nothing.

Maybe people are systematically underestimating violence when they don't get to see it in slow motion, and the acquittals when they don't have slow motion are the wrong conclusion.

Or maybe people are systematically overestimating violence when they do have the slow motion and the convictions are the wrong conclusion.

Who knows? But it doesn't really give us anything to go on does it?

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