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MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

innocenceproject.org

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Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#61

Post by lozenge »

mlindner wrote: post #10
walrus01 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many spaceflight movies and TV shows for example show very bad things in the future giving people a false impression that the future will be worse than the past I think The Expanse got it right, in that we're more likely in the near to medium term to get a bunch of oligarch type Jules-Pierre Maos (Hi Bezos!) running things behind the scenes. Not a utopia type technology + spaceflight + social inequity problems solv…

The Expanse is one of the TV series that I was thinking of actually when I wrote that comment. It'd be too long to write down here but I feel like while The Expanse got many things right it also portrayed all sorts of fundamental things that were completely off. For example even in the first season things that are fundamentally off that result in very different futures: * The idea that we would actively intentionally…

"The idea that there would be a complete backtrack in labor rights and labor safety"

Our economy has always relied on people lacking labor rights or safety. From serfdom, to colonialism, to slavery, to police fighting strikes, to banana republics (governments overthrown for not trading on the US terms), and today hundreds of millions work in unsafe conditions or as child labor for coffee, chocolate, diamonds, precious metals, clothing, in recycling, etc. But that doesn't make good TV, so it's asteroid mining and there's no kids on screen.

As for the idea the human race has transcended past MAD... that's just wishful thinking on your part! I could equally say capitalism was due to historical happenstance and wouldn't be invented today. It would have about as much evidence.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#62

Post by tremon »

caminante wrote: post #39
pkrotich wrote: post #35

What scares me about US legal system is; Elected prosectutors are motivated by high conviction rate for obvious reasons (re-election and politics of it all). Add the fact that their line of work requires competitive personalities and you become just but a number, especially if you don't have competent cousel. I'm not saying ALL public defendors are incompetent, but we see to many cases of ineffective representation w…

False positives are rare in the US [0]: estimated at only 1% of incarcerations according to the Innocence Project (mentioned in HN article) and go even lower depending on who does the analysis. Are you aware of legal systems in other countries with lower false positives? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_...

Does that 1% include the number of people who accepted a plea deal, or only the number of wrongful convictions after a case has gone to trial?

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#63

Post by caminante »

tialaramex wrote: post #57
caminante wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that is a broken and dangerous system regardless of how other countries fare at that metric. No. It's on topic because the parent singled out the US, and I'm curious if other countries are taking procedures that could be adopted in the US to reduce false positives and ALSO false negatives.

Wait, why do you think it's necessary to also reduce false negatives? Suppose there are five people who stole some candy, out of 100 people in the village. I claim that a system A in which three of the actual thieves are successfully convicted, but the others escape is better than a system B in which four people are successfully convicted, three of them are thieves but one is innocent. You seem to disagree, insisting…

> a system B in which four people are successfully convicted, three of them are thieves but one is innocent.

You might need to re-phrase your hypothetical: "five people [...] stole some candy candy", now you have three getting convicted, a new person is innocent, but charged, and what happened to the 5th person?

Regardless, you're skipping a step to argue values about how many people should be incarcerated, etc. False negatives matter because just like you don't want innocent people being locked up for stealing candy (or serious crimes), you ALSO don't want a high number of murderers freed into the streets!

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#64

Post by nostromo »

el_nahual wrote: post #58
caminante wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False positives are rare in the US [0]: estimated at only 1% of incarcerations according to the Innocence Project (mentioned in HN article) and go even lower depending on who does the analysis. Are you aware of legal systems in other countries with lower false positives? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_...

That number doesn't seem right to me so I followed the wikipedia citation. It cites "The Innocence Project", which actually says: > the few studies that have been done estimate that between 2.3% and 5% of all prisoners in the U.S. are innocent (for context, if just 1% of all prisoners are innocent, that would mean that more than 20,000 innocent people are in prison). https://innocenceproject.org/contact/#:~:text=How%…

The 1% actually cites the estimation method (extrapolation from DNA exonerations). The higher 2.3-5% doesn’t. What studies are those?

https://innocenceproject.org/how-many-innocent-people-are-in...

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#65

Post by lucb1e »

caminante wrote: post #45
woojoo666 wrote: post #12

What kind of compensation do these people typically get? I can't imagine what compensation would be enough for losing 35 years of your life, especially the years 18-53. There goes almost all dreams of becoming famous, meeting your soulmate, starting a family, etc.

Here's info for wrongful incarceration compensation at the federal and state level [0]. [0] https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Key-...

Takeaway from that link: around 50k/year in the USA, more or less depending on the region, and you have to go to another court (or similar) to get it, depending on the region. Additionally, in some regions you might get "tuition assistance", "medical expenses" (national healthcare for the rest of your life I think this might mean?), "job search assistance", and other things that you expect to get in a prosperous country without having to have been wrongfully convicted, and these benefits aren't even universal across the USA after a wrongful conviction. But the 50k×35=1.75 million USD should make for a nice retirement fund regardless of anything else.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#66

Post by TheCoelacanth »

tialaramex wrote: post #57
caminante wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that is a broken and dangerous system regardless of how other countries fare at that metric. No. It's on topic because the parent singled out the US, and I'm curious if other countries are taking procedures that could be adopted in the US to reduce false positives and ALSO false negatives.

Wait, why do you think it's necessary to also reduce false negatives? Suppose there are five people who stole some candy, out of 100 people in the village. I claim that a system A in which three of the actual thieves are successfully convicted, but the others escape is better than a system B in which four people are successfully convicted, three of them are thieves but one is innocent. You seem to disagree, insisting…

If you don't care about reducing false negatives, then the ideal policy is simply to abolish prisons because that results in zero falsely imprisoned people.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#67

Post by tremon »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #25
mlindner wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Expanse is one of the TV series that I was thinking of actually when I wrote that comment. It'd be too long to write down here but I feel like while The Expanse got many things right it also portrayed all sorts of fundamental things that were completely off. For example even in the first season things that are fundamentally off that result in very different futures: * The idea that we would actively intentionally…

It is possible that I am biased, because I watched Expanse and ( apart from being annoyed by how it quickly it became a relationship show ) I absolutely bought into the premise including the points you listed: * The idea that we would actively intentionally re-create the situation of MAD in another context. MAD was an accident of historical happenstance and now that we know about it, we wouldn't try to re-create it.…

we wouldn't try to re-create it

Some people argue that we've already recreated it: https://consilienceproject.org/its-a-mad-information-war/

> While the 2016 U.S. election was a watershed in computational propaganda, the same phenomenon has basically swept the planet, beginning as early as 2010.[..] We posit that this frontier leads toward mutually assured destruction, like all frontiers of arms races in weapons technologies.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#68

Post by giantg2 »

DannyBee wrote: post #60
giantg2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like 2-10%. And that's only for the incarcerated . There are many more that take deals to avoid prison time and rotting in jail for 2 years just to get a trial, etc. https://thehighcourt.co/wrongful-convictions-statistics/ Edit: can't find the actual article. Child commenter goes into great detail about this being a rather solid range though.

Both overall cite NRE data. So may be better to go to the source (and the latest version). https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/NRE%... is the 2021 National registry of exonerations annual report. What you'll see, interestingly, is neither the 2021, nor 2019 report, estimate the prevalence of wrongful conviction directly. In particular, the claim "According to the 2019 annual report by the National…

Good catch

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#69

Post by lalopalota »

pkrotich wrote: post #35

What scares me about US legal system is; Elected prosectutors are motivated by high conviction rate for obvious reasons (re-election and politics of it all). Add the fact that their line of work requires competitive personalities and you become just but a number, especially if you don't have competent cousel. I'm not saying ALL public defendors are incompetent, but we see to many cases of ineffective representation w…

Most public defenders are competent at their job.

Unfortunately, their job is to minimize the court's time spent spent dealing with their clients.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#70

Post by giantg2 »

caminante wrote: post #54
giantg2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like 2-10%. And that's only for the incarcerated . There are many more that take deals to avoid prison time and rotting in jail for 2 years just to get a trial, etc. https://thehighcourt.co/wrongful-convictions-statistics/ Edit: can't find the actual article. Child commenter goes into great detail about this being a rather solid range though.

Where is the 2-10% in the source document [0]? I couldn't find it in a brief glance. [0] https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Exon...

Looks like they're referencing the LA Times but I can't find the actual article.
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