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More people are getting away with murder

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Re: More people are getting away with murder

#81

Post by fakedang »

privatedan wrote: post #22

Was 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…

Honestly never understood the rationale behind jury-based trials. You're having a group of people who aren't trained in law, forcing them to rely only on the bits of evidence presented in the court, and asking them to make an unbiased decision, when they clearly have not been given any training of the sort?

I mean, vesting all the power in the jury is just as bad as vesting all power in a single person/group of persons (judges). Perhaps a rational middle ground would be to give jury duty to only members of the bar?

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#82

Post by Yoric »

fakedang wrote: post #81
privatedan wrote: post #22

Was 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…

Honestly never understood the rationale behind jury-based trials. You're having a group of people who aren't trained in law, forcing them to rely only on the bits of evidence presented in the court, and asking them to make an unbiased decision, when they clearly have not been given any training of the sort? I mean, vesting all the power in the jury is just as bad as vesting all power in a single person/group of perso…

FWIW, in France, a few years ago, there was an academic study on the impact of TV on jury decisions [1]. This study concluded that the content of yesterday's TV news had a measurable impact on the duration of sentences inflicted by a jury.

I seem to remember that this led to a reform which removed the popular jury (and replaced it with a jury of law professionals) for some cases. I don't know if the effect of that reform has been studied.

[1] https://www.ipp.eu/actualites/impact-medias-sur-decisions-de...

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#83

Post by gamblor956 »

kasey_junk wrote: post #67
George83728 wrote: post #44

Earlier 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…

It seems like you might have very unrealistic expectations for the criminal justice system.

Defendants are constitutionally entitled to a jury trial. Even if they were caught on 4k video, with their face fully identifiable, their fingerprints all over the blood scene, and they walk straight into a police station afterwards to confess.

A defense lawyer with a client who confessed on video has an extremely difficult job; they must try to present a credible case while also not suborning perjury or violating ethical rules. Very frequently, they're not going to have a "logical" case; they're simply trying to poke whatever holes they can in the prosecution's case...because the Defense is not constitutionally required to prove anything (unless they're attempting to prove an affirmative defense, and if they were you'd know because the judge would explicitly tell you).

On the other hand, if the prosecutor and the police and the forensics guys were all as incompetent as you claim, the defense might have gone to trial despite the taped confession because there was a chance they could prevail with a jury if the prosecution messed up presenting the case. I won most of my jury trials because the prosecution messed up.

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#84

Post by hedora »

kevviiinn wrote: post #80
Zigurd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Closely related: “alternative reconstruction”

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#85

Post by Georgelemental »

version_five wrote: post #25
privatedan wrote: post #22

Was 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…

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…

> it's way more important for the justice system to minimize false positives (wrongful convictions) than false negatives

True, but only up to a limit. The only way to avoid all false positives is to have no justice system at all, but in that case the criminal gangs essentially become the government and justice system.

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#86

Post by prepend »

aristus wrote: post #35
prepend wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think pretty much all essential/monopoly/government industries get more money when kpis go south- health, education, sanitation, etc. Pretty much all essential services get more funding when kpis go south. And I think that’s usually because lack of resources make kpis go south. Take a great teacher with 20 kids in their class. Make the class size 40 and KPIs will go down. Does that teacher become bad?

Usually because of lack of resources, perhaps. But that's not what's happening here with cops. It's deliberate.

How can you tell the cops are deliberate and the teachers aren’t?

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#87

Post by aristus »

prepend wrote: post #86
aristus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually because of lack of resources, perhaps. But that's not what's happening here with cops. It's deliberate.

How can you tell the cops are deliberate and the teachers aren’t?

Cops don't have their budgets systematically cut. Quite the opposite.

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#88

Post by tzs »

fakedang wrote: post #81
privatedan wrote: post #22

Was 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…

Honestly never understood the rationale behind jury-based trials. You're having a group of people who aren't trained in law, forcing them to rely only on the bits of evidence presented in the court, and asking them to make an unbiased decision, when they clearly have not been given any training of the sort? I mean, vesting all the power in the jury is just as bad as vesting all power in a single person/group of perso…

The point of juries is to decide whether or not disputed facts are true. They don't need to know anything about the law because the jury instructions given to them by the court will deal with that.

The jury instructions essentially break the law down to essentially a flowchart, with the decision points being questions of whether or not some specific fact is true or not.

Both the prosecution and the defense will have geared the arguments and evidence they offered toward convincing the jury as to whether or not those specific facts or true.

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#89

Post by etempleton »

There are a number of factors at play here, one is certainly, as others have pointed out, that police are taking less initiative on the job due to low morale and their own form of quiet quitting.

However another major issue is that people are not talking to police like the used to. People do not trust police with information and more so they do not trust police to protect them. Volunteering information on a murderer is dangerous you have to trust the system can protect you.

And finally, murder clearance rates were focused on in the 90s and sometimes that led to closing cases early or other bad practices to increase superficial metrics.

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#90

Post by giardini »

overthrow wrote: post #72
kasey_junk wrote: post #67

Earlier 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-...

This!

A friend, A former police officer, said the most astonishing thing he learned as a rookie was how easily some people would confess to crimes they could not possibly have committed. Such persons were usually not very bright and, after hours of interrogation, could be convinced that they had indeed done a bad deed.

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