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More people are getting away with murder
71–80 of 114 posts
Re: More people are getting away with murder
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "police who were near incompetent in their investigation, the forensics people who could barely maintain chain of evidence" Are you sure they were all bad at their jobs? It's certainly possible. But it's also possible that you simply had unrealistic expectations for what the process looks like, exemplifying the "CSI Effect". This is why I find these sort of pseudo-anonymous anecdotes very difficult to judge; I know…
Let’s put it this way, even though they had a full video confession it made it to trial…
Police often manipulate or coerce people into making false confessions. 29% of DNA exonerations in the US involved a false confession.
https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-...
Re: More people are getting away with murder
#73The comment section here is in poor shape. Violent crime is up all over the united states, and at least from what I've seen, there is not a single easy explanation for why. ie, I'm very sympathetic to the argument that "de-fund the police" has had very negative effects, however we're seeing violent crime rise in districts which were not de-funded. The whole red vs. blue states / cities thing doesn't seem to stack up…
My guess is that it’s a secondary consequence of the initial 2020-2021 wave of media theft-apologia, increasing liability for police, and defunding/prosecution-abstention: now it’s the copycat problem writ large due to social media. People seeing visceral videos and group chats of crowds, gangs, and individuals doing blatant petty and violent crimes in a few places (and oftentimes getting away with it) is probably em…
I think there's a much simpler and more historically universal reason: murders go up in bad economic times. Inflation is high, inequality is increasing, people are losing or have lost their jobs, and who has suffered this seems pretty random, particularly since other groups (like software engineers in 2020/2021, solar installers in 2022, tradespeople in 2023) are doing just great. All this makes people on the losing side very angry. Some angry people kill people.
There was a similar spike in murders during the 1970s and early 80s, and during the 1920s and Great Depression.
Re: More people are getting away with murder
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your anecdote sounds like an example of the system working to me. I'm absolutely sure your assessment is correct: I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide People as a rule are horrible at logical thinking. But that's absolutely the right side to err on. Much better for twelve people to have to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. Put another way, it's…
People "not being logical" renders their decisions random. Or biased in case, some common cause for such biased thinking is present. Like prejudice towards skin colors, poverty or whatever. The former case results in GP's tie, the latter in the absurdly skewed prison population the US is known for. People are horrible at logical thinking.
> the latter [results] in the absurdly skewed prison population the US is known for.
This is not supported at all. I assume you're talking about racial demographics of prison population. It's a complex historical and socioeconomic problem, biased juries may have some role but it wouldn't be on the top 10 factors.
Re: More people are getting away with murder
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your anecdote sounds like an example of the system working to me. I'm absolutely sure your assessment is correct: I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide People as a rule are horrible at logical thinking. But that's absolutely the right side to err on. Much better for twelve people to have to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. Put another way, it's…
People "not being logical" renders their decisions random. Or biased in case, some common cause for such biased thinking is present. Like prejudice towards skin colors, poverty or whatever. The former case results in GP's tie, the latter in the absurdly skewed prison population the US is known for. People are horrible at logical thinking.
> the latter in the absurdly skewed prison population the US is known for.
Are you sure? Since most homicides are intra-racial [1] (despite the impression one gets from those the media choose to focus on), we can use victim race as proxy for offender race (I'd use offender race directly, but then you'd just blame it on police racism). Since it's hard to manufacture a corpse, or fake its race, we can further assume that data is largely free of police bias.
So white+Hispanic are 50% of homicide victims [2] (which we use as proxy for perpetrators), and 58% of the prison population [3]. For blacks, its 44% and 37%, respectively. Doesn't look particularly skewed to me. There is some anti-white+Hispanic bias, but since we're looking only at homicide to avoid police bias, we're not seeing the whole picture, which may explain the disparity.
[1] In approximately ninety percent of all murders committed in the U.S. over the years, the victim and perpetrator are of the same race - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wicked-deeds/201602/...
[2] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-... (for some reason the FBI groups whites with Hispanics)
[3] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/incarceration-rates-by-r... (white and Hispanic are again grouped)
Re: More people are getting away with murder
#76Was on a jury for a murder trial dec 2021. The trial gave me a new found respect for how trials are conducted, what evidence is allowed in, how defendants are protected, and the general thought and reasoning behind it all. Then, the jury deliberated and I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide. It was an absolute shit show in false pretenses, irrational…
Different trial (attempted murder), but I too was on a Jury. At the start of deliberation, it was an even split. Towards the end of deliberation it was 11/12 in favor of returning a verdict of guilty. However... One juror opened up some bizarre Pandora's box arguing against the fundamental knowability of the universe. How could any fact truly be "known"? At times, I love conversations like that. But not when a man ha…
11/12 should be enough to convict for this very reason: there’s quite possibly one holdout who is totally inane. States have tried allowing non-unanimous juries but the Supreme Court has said it is unconstitutional. The process should be revisited. I actually think it might make more sense to have pods of 3 jurors discuss independently (to avoid groupthink) then require like 11/12 or something along those lines.
Re: More people are getting away with murder
#77That article doesn’t mention any number, and I was curious how that compared to suicides and road deaths. There are 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people, so about 26k per year. That’s staggering. There were 46,412 suicides among adults in 2021. 37,461 people were killed on the roads. Given how frequent are hit-and-runs with accidents, I expected it to be more common in deadly situations, but it seems to be the opposite:…
> 37,461 people were killed on the roads. Given how frequent are hit-and-runs with accidents, I expected it to be more common in deadly situations, but it seems to be the opposite: 2,049 fatalities that resulted from hit-and-run crashes in 2016.
Fatal collisions are more likely to disable the perpetrator and/or their vehicle, rendering them unable to hit-and-run even if they were so inclined.
If this is true then I expect hit-and-run to be more common in fatal car-vs-pedestrian crashes than for fatal car-vs-car crashes.
Re: More people are getting away with murder
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let’s put it this way, even though they had a full video confession it made it to trial…
Police often manipulate or coerce people into making false confessions. 29% of DNA exonerations in the US involved a false confession. https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-...
Hence being bad at their jobs
Re: More people are getting away with murder
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counterpoint, I was on a murder jury several years ago where every part of the justice system was pretty abysmal. Whether the police who were near incompetent in their investigation, the forensics people who could barely maintain chain of evidence or both sets of attorneys who couldn’t make logical arguments on either side. The only people who came out looking good was the judge who was able to keep this circus from…
> "police who were near incompetent in their investigation, the forensics people who could barely maintain chain of evidence" Are you sure they were all bad at their jobs? It's certainly possible. But it's also possible that you simply had unrealistic expectations for what the process looks like, exemplifying the "CSI Effect". This is why I find these sort of pseudo-anonymous anecdotes very difficult to judge; I know…
Or is it coming from someone who thinks the original airpods are cream of the crop?
Re: More people are getting away with murder
#80Was on a jury for a murder trial dec 2021. The trial gave me a new found respect for how trials are conducted, what evidence is allowed in, how defendants are protected, and the general thought and reasoning behind it all. Then, the jury deliberated and I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide. It was an absolute shit show in false pretenses, irrational…
I was on the jury for a simple drunk driving case where the cop, the only witness testifying, with no other evidence presented, was caught lying about being "run off the road." Lost a lot of faith in mankind that day.
It's so common that police have a special term for it: testilying
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/nyregion/testilying-polic...