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Four years after a man was executed, someone else’s DNA found on murder weapon

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Re: Four years after a man was executed, someone else’s DNA found on murder weapon

#161

Post by gbrown »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #50
gbrown wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is an absurd statement on its face

Which part do you think is absurd? That eye witness data can be considered or that the DNA evidence is irrelevant? I don't support the death penalty but I see the judge's point. Most DNA evidence isn't very useful and rarely as damning or exculpatory as people think.

The idea that eyewitness testimony obviates the need to examine hard evidence is absurd, given how poor people are at providing accurate eyewitness testimony. It’s not that DNA evidence is perfect, it’s that eyewitness testimony is hot garbage.

Re: Four years after a man was executed, someone else’s DNA found on murder weapon

#162

Post by gbrown »

beerandt wrote: post #138
mikeryan wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the witnesses were other neighbors. So there's not much reason to doubt their identification, at least. Sure there is, if you seem someone leaving a house that resembles another neighbor you’re going to assume its the neighbor and not a stranger. Context is huge.

The neighbor witness followed the suspect to a place where he was known/recognized.

I didn’t see that in the article, but it’s still trivial to come up with reasonable doubts:

1. What does known/recognized mean? It’s perfectly possible for additional people to make a mistake in identification, especially if prompted by others. 2. Even if it was him, the crime wasn’t witnessed; he’d be agitated just by having seen the scene, I imagine

The big thing that adds to number 2 is that people often forget that reality is messier than neat stories. The defendant could very well have been doing something else illegal or furtive, and been agitated for that reason. They might have been involved in related criminal activity but not responsible for the actual attack. They might have had an innocent reason to be there and not expected to be believed. It may really not have been the suspect there to begin with.

That’s why the death penalty is bad, and it’s why eyewitness testimony is crap by itself, especially when it’s circumstantial.

Re: Four years after a man was executed, someone else’s DNA found on murder weapon

#163

Post by qalmakka »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #60
qalmakka wrote: post #54

The death penalty is plain hypocrisy, because it strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment. It is not also about preventing dangerous individuals from causing harm on other people because again, that is already plainly achieved by incarceration. The death penalty is 100% state-mandated revenge against the perpetrators of heinous crimes. It is been known for…

"strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment." Well... duh. The death penalty being a punishment is a feature, not a bug. Nobody says the death penalty is about re-education. It's because the person has done something society has judged to be worthy of death as punishment for that crime. If somebody molested my prepubescent daughter, I would say that person s…

> The US executed 22 people, Egypt 32, Iran 251, Saudi Arabia 184, China over 1000, and Iraq over 100 in 2019

None of those countries are neither Western nor democracies. All western democracies have been pushed by the influence of the others to abolish death penalty (for instance, it's a mandatory requirement in order to join the EU), the US being the only outlier. What if the situation was different, i.e. the US was an abolitionist country and only a small country like Luxembourg was the only remaining Western democracy to execute its citizens? It would quickly become a pariah among its peers.

> it's because the person has done something society has judged to be worthy of death as punishment for that crime

The basic problem with this is that it _does not work_, and it does not accomplish anything than pleasing the victims of a crime. Killing convicts has been the default punishment for millenia and still it hasn't deterred anyone from doing crimes. It simply creates a state where people are harshly punished for what they've done, and that often is used as a way to avoid doing absolutely nothing to fix the issues that caused the offense to occur in the first place. Europe has abolished executions decades ago, with some places like Italy doing that in the '800s. Still, Europe has a much lower crime rate than the US, where prisons are much harsher and the worst convicts may face an execution for their crimes.

Re: Four years after a man was executed, someone else’s DNA found on murder weapon

#164

Post by beerandt »

chmod600 wrote: post #82

I skeptical of news stories that ask the readers to play juror based on a reporter's one-sided take, often a lazy one designed for clicks. Sometimes it's necessary, but most of the time it's just generating a lot of low-information outrage. (This is apart from the larger question of whether we should abolish the death penalty. But that's not really news.)

The Louisiana non-unanimous jury verdict saga just got similar, scary, one-sided newspaper treatment.

Not necessary because it should or shouldn't have been changed, but because the obvious propaganda was so damn effective. And it wasn't blanket coverage by every local news outlet, but constant, serialized coverage from one, arguably dying, newspaper.

Reminds you of just how powerful even a single media outlet can be when it wants to.

Also, that any future that newspapers might have will require selling influence, instead of advertising and subscriptions.

Re: Four years after a man was executed, someone else’s DNA found on murder weapon

#165

Post by qalmakka »

GavinMcG wrote: post #103
qalmakka wrote: post #54

The death penalty is plain hypocrisy, because it strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment. It is not also about preventing dangerous individuals from causing harm on other people because again, that is already plainly achieved by incarceration. The death penalty is 100% state-mandated revenge against the perpetrators of heinous crimes. It is been known for…

> it strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment It's only hypocritical if the justice system claims to be solely about re-education. But you point out two other goals—deterrence and isolation—and there really are people out there who believe punishment is a moral good and a necessary component of justice.

As I've said in my other post, a penal system that focuses on punishment and not on rehabilitation is not positive for a society, because it doesn't actually help reducing the causes behing crime (and thus stop it from happening), and often degenerates towards being unfair to certain groups and minorities.

Re: Four years after a man was executed, someone else’s DNA found on murder weapon

#166

Post by tomatocracy »

LocalH wrote: post #12

The death penalty should be abolished, end of discussion. If even a single innocent person is murdered , then an obscene and heinous crime has been committed by the state.

There's also the fact that a wrong person convicted usually means the guilty party going free and the investigation closed.

This is bad enough normally but the death penalty creates even bigger incentives for people to claim the right person was convicted after the fact and not to look too closely at any new evidence which comes to light which could lead to the actually guilty party being found.

Re: Four years after a man was executed, someone else’s DNA found on murder weapon

#167

Post by Koshkin »

chmod600 wrote: post #112
endymi0n wrote: post #3

> In an effort to prevent his execution, Lee's attorney sought in the post-conviction appeals process to finally have the DNA evidence in the case tested for the first time. [...] Their request was denied. "The reasoning given by the judge was it wouldn't matter, that there were three people who saw him at or near that neighborhood on that day and time and honestly the DNA just wouldn't matter," Short said. Wow. Like…

It's interesting that a "fail to comprehend" post is voted more highly than an informative post that at least partially answers the question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27246831

But note that your remark falls into the same category.

Re: Four years after a man was executed, someone else’s DNA found on murder weapon

#168

Post by rhino369 »

hwillis wrote: post #127
rhino369 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know anything about the specific case, but often DNA from someone else would be totally irrelevant. If I murder someone with my kitchen knife, my wife and her fathers DNA will be on the murder weapon. If you buy a gun from someone and then go shoot someone with it, it might have the sellers DNA on it. So it’s sometimes the case that DNA can’t really create reasonable doubt.

The presumption was that the items would have Lee's DNA on them and they did not.

1) That really isn't true. Studies indicated anywhere from 40-75% of the time you can't find "touch" DNA on objects that were handled by someone. That's not even considering whether he could have been wearing gloves or wiped the object after.

2) Since the testing was conducted by defense counsel, we don't really know what an objective test would even show. His lawyers statements are a bit weasel worded--"did not show an 'absolute or conclusive' connection to Lee." Okay, but does that mean it showed a probable match? Is the DNA just too degraded to test?

Re: Four years after a man was executed, someone else’s DNA found on murder weapon

#169

Post by sershe »

qalmakka wrote: post #54

The death penalty is plain hypocrisy, because it strips away any supposed appearance of justice being about re-education and not about plain punishment. It is not also about preventing dangerous individuals from causing harm on other people because again, that is already plainly achieved by incarceration. The death penalty is 100% state-mandated revenge against the perpetrators of heinous crimes. It is been known for…

Why would there need to be appearance of re-education? The society doesn't owe anyone a re-education. It's not really about punishment either... If someone doesn't respect others' life and property, why would theirs be respected at all? There's no more revenge here than in drowning a tick that bit you instead of releasing it back into the wild. In abstract, I'd apply it to many more crimes with an unambiguous victim and selfish intent, even minor ones.

The only problems I have with death penalty is potential for abuse (to be clear, I don't believe it's the present danger, more of a future danger if the death penalty was normalized), and wrong convictions (and that I think would mostly be solved by requiring multiple separate convictions before it's applied).

Re: Four years after a man was executed, someone else’s DNA found on murder weapon

#170

Post by rhino369 »

aqsalose wrote: post #35

Concerning DNA testing in general. Recently there was a case where the Finnish police arrested a person as a suspect for a robbery of a convenience store on basis of DNA evidence: the robber had dropped a plastic glove, presumably to hide fingerprints, on the floor of the store. Officers isolated DNA from the glove, searched archives, found a match with a person who had had some minor offense years prior, and brought…

You need to apply Bayes Theorem to DNA evidence, but courts typically don't.
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