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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

#111

Post by sokoloff »

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_...

1% false positive for criminal conviction is horrifically bad and does not meet with the plain English “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, IMO.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#112

Post by [deleted] »

tialaramex wrote: post #106
caminante wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> what happened to the 5th person? 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 go…

[deleted]

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#113

Post by sokoloff »

nostromo wrote: post #89
lupire wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US used to solve the majority of murder cases, but now it’s solving less than half Closs the cases, not solve. It's good that police can't convict innocent people as easily anymore.

Even at the highest estimates of false imprisonments, it still means several thousands of murderers are walking free each year that wouldn’t have just 10 years ago.

I’m OK with that if it avoids innocent people rotting away their one life in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#114

Post by spoils19 »

Archelaos wrote: post #84

> 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…

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Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#115

Post by Retric »

david38 wrote: post #107
aikinai wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you anything about Japan you wouldn’t say this. Japan’s criminal justice system is so bad as to rival Central America, not the US.

I think you misunderstood, abhorrent means disgusting, loathsome, terrible etc. So he’s saying Japan’s criminal justice system is unconscionable just like the US, not that they are equally bad.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#116

Post by systoll »

nostromo wrote: post #64
el_nahual wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=996629 , is the 2.3%

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228207991_Innocents... is the 5%.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#117

Post by caminante »

tialaramex wrote: post #106
caminante wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> what happened to the 5th person? 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 go…

Hold up...

> 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"

Where did I say or imply that.

I asked if other countries were doing things that could [X=reduce false positives] and [Y=reduce false negatives]. That's not presenting an argument. If there are ways to reduce false positives without necessarily reducing false negatives, I didn't ask for those, though, it'd be interesting for discussion.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#118

Post by mlindner »

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.…

> I can't even.. We can just barely force corporations to maintain labor rights now with some semblance of control since we have them physically operating and we can summon the representative in court and enforce compliance. And even then, those controls are eroded via various means. Is it really that difficult to imagine 'when cats away' scenario?

We've had massive improvements in workplace safety in 100 years. Just look at some old footage/pictures of an industrial linen sewing plant from the turn of the 20th century. Limb amputation happened on the regular. Or look at the job descriptions of "chimney sweeper". Any person from our era would be horrified at what they saw. We've come so far that almost the entire reason for labor unions even needing to exist has almost been eliminated.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#119

Post by Volundr »

giantg2 wrote: post #86
lupire wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is deception right? Even the 10 commandments oppose it. Deception leads to false convictions.

"Deception leads to false convictions." How?

"We have video putting you at the scene and two eyewitness who picked your mugshot out of a line up. Now if you let this go to trial your looking at at least 15 years, but you seem like a good kid. If you work with me on this I'm sure I can talk to DA into reducing the charges. Probably have you out on parole in 5."

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#120

Post by mijoharas »

spoils19 wrote: post #114
Archelaos wrote: post #84

> 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…

Quoted post unavailable.

Is this Poe's law[0] in action here? I'm struggling to believe that you're being serious.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

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