101–110 of 184 posts
I bet it would be a huge hit, add an extra often graphic layer to the hugely popular true crime with the added bonus of potentially creating another Serial like situation where your fan base are positive of someone's innocence.
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Aren't those false confessions usually the result of the other tactics (long interrogations, intimidation, etc)? I'm wondering if there's some data on deception without these other factors. Even plea bargains aren't a bad thing except if they're abused.
> usually the result of the other tactics (long interrogations, intimidation, etc)? That is definitely not required for a false confession. I don't have stats handy, but for another comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146157 ) I was reading up on the Dutch Wikipedia article on false confessions. Reasons for false confessions given there ( https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valse_bekentenis ) are: - Feeling gu…
The example you gave clearly had numerous other issues in it.
I guess I'm still not seeing how deception would be a problem if we fixed the other issues - including not corroborating the confession (there are methods for this, even with limited evidence).
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I can't tell if you're being willfully dense or serious. If you're deceiving people and pressuring them to lie in order to close a case, they will say anything to be released, potentially not knowing the implications.
I'm only talking about deception. The other pressures I can understand. Why is deception without the other pressures bad?
Maybe this has always been obvious to everybody but the American justice system is not about truth or fairness. The goal is to convict no matter what. That is how the incentives are lined up. Case in point: the (famous) Serial podcast started about the (now evidently) wrongful conviction of a teenager. He was recently released after 20+ years because of a note found written by a prosecutor that pointed to other plaus…
No, the goal of the prosecution is to convict no matter what. The goal of the defense is to prevent the prosecution from winning. In order to win, one side must convince a jury. This is an intentionally designed adversarial system.
The European system, where a judge is essentially an inquisitor trying to discover the truth rather than a referee, is not better, it's just different. It is not more immune to abuse or bad results than the Anglo-American system.
Except, a lit cigarette can ignite a pool of gasoline. All those videos with stupid people holding cigarettes and igniting vapours at the gas station are proof that gasoline can be ignited with a cigarette. What you need is for the cigarette to have enough time in contact with right concentration of vapours (2% to 8% by volume). Too little but also too much and you will not get it ignited. Here is a handy table listi…
The ones I've seen are all consistent with static electricity sparks being the source of ignition, or else someone is screwing around with a cigarette lighter.
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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. Fals…
They weren't convicted. I feel like the fact you weren't able to figure that out suggests I need to work through this example a little more slowly in the hope you can follow:
In the village of Example there are one hundred people, that's too many for me to name so I'm just going to number them E00 through to E99.
It so happens five of these people have stolen some candy, with our god view of the world we happen to know that it's E09, E14, E43, E44 and E90, but this information is not available to the other Example villagers or to a prosecutor, judge etc regardless of whether they live in Example. We have this god view, they do not. No real world prosecutors know for sure who committed which crimes and in many cases it's even unclear whether a crime was committed.
In system A, three people are convicted, and they are, let's say E14, E44 and E90, they are actually all thieves.
But in system B, four people are convicted, they're E09, E20, E43 and E90. Unfortunately E20 wasn't a candy thief, we know that with our god view.
I claim that system A is better than system B. Your claim was that system A isn't better because, apparently you feel that a better system must catch more of the thieves, and you've offered no argument for that beyond that you don't seem to see a difference between "more" and "not less".
> In 2021, Illinois and Oregon became the first states to ban the use of deception during interrogations of minors ... Is there any other modern democracy that allows deception as a method of interrogation to the same extent as the US? In my country, Germany, deception during interrogations is forbitten even for adults. There exist only some minor exceptions, for example, that prior wrong ideas of the suspects may be…
Not that it makes it okay, but Japan also extensively uses deception in interrogations. Japan and America seem to be similar as highly-advanced, rule-of-law democracies with abhorrent criminal justice culture.
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> 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…
> That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.
This builds upon an idea espoused by Voltaire, I believe.
Western philosophical/political systems have long held the idea that false negatives are a worthwhile cost to avoid any false positives.
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If every time you enter the legal system and you have a 1% chance of being falsely convicted, that is a broken and dangerous system regardless of how other countries fare at that metric. Especially if you consider that certain underprivileged demographics are already at a higher risk of having more run-ins with the police regardless of their criminal state.
> If every time you enter the legal system and you have a 1% chance of being falsely convicted I agree with you that 1% is a high number in this context, but I don't think the math works for what you're saying here. If 1 out of 100 convictions are of innocent people, that doesn't mean that 1 out of 100 innocent people put on trial are going to get convicted. That rate could be higher or lower than 1% because it depen…
The innocent person has a 75% change of being convicted. A plea deal of the innocent isn't counted if it avoids jail time.
Better to deal with the cost and hassle of parole than being prisoner where you are legally on the same level as a slave.
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2% of people on death row get exonerated and that’s an underestimate due to the difficulty in proving innocence. Most crimes don’t see anything close to that level of review before or after conviction with death row reserved for the most clear cut cases. So, most estimates suggest in the range of 2-10% of convictions are probably wrongful.
> due to the difficulty in proving innocence. Remember: the person started out in a position of presumed innocence, and were found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I would expect it to be hard to prove innocence after enough evidence was provided to prove guilt. Note: I am not saying the system always operates according to principles - that's why those 2% get exonerated. I just wouldn't expect the real number of fal…