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More people are getting away with murder

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Re: More people are getting away with murder

#101

Post by midoridensha »

version_five wrote: post #65
dist-epoch wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will that continue to work in the future as society becomes more polarized and culture wars grow in importance? Every trial will be a hung one, you will have one blue/red juror which will refuse to find guilty a blue/red defendant.

That's still a better outcome than people getting convicted just for being on the wrong side of the culture wars. Failing in the right direction (not locking someone up) is one of the most important characteristics of a justice system.

If the justice system becomes too ineffective, then people will create their own justice "system" (i.e., vigilantism) to replace it. The entire reason for the justice system to exist is to prevent this.

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#102

Post by unaindz »

Bran_son wrote: post #75
Loquebantur wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> for some reason the FBI groups whites with Hispanics Because race != ethnicity, they even do the split on the right, on the ethnicity column.

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#103

Post by fakedang »

tzs wrote: post #88
fakedang wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The point is that, regardless of how logical you want the jury to act, they will still act inherently with some bias because they are not trained in the law. While lawyers and members of the bar are also inherently prone to bias, they at least have some degree of knowledge on what evidence is admissible and what evidence should not be taken under consideration.

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#104

Post by [deleted] »

George83728 wrote: post #44
kasey_junk wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#106

Post by prepend »

aristus wrote: post #87
prepend wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Certainly they have. Also, it’s kind of a catch22 because if a police department is bad wouldn’t you systematically cut their budget?

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#107

Post by stevekemp »

arp242 wrote: post #54
version_five wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

In principle I agree, but it also works the other way round: people get convicted for crimes they did not commit due to unreasonable and unsound reasoning. The fact that things like the Innocence Project exist is by itself already a huge red flag. On balance, I'm not sure if it's biased towards letting people go free. It might be interesting to compare e.g. the UK with some European countries (in the US the justice s…

Scotland has three verdicts for trails:

* Guilty

* Not Guilty

* Not Proven - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_proven

The latter lets you off, but has the connotation the defendant probably did it, but it couldn't be quite proven.

I like that system, but it seems there is a legal review going on at the moment which might abolish it.

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#108

Post by red-iron-pine »

George83728 wrote: post #68
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…

If the accused wants to plead innocent even after confessing, isn't that their right? They're entitled to a trial.

Potentially. Confessing to a 5-0 during an interrogation is different from entering a plea of guilty or not guilty.

But given that you just confessed guilt, a not guilty plea is going to raise eyebrows and potentially end badly.

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#109

Post by red-iron-pine »

umvi wrote: post #55
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…

> 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. Isn't this a consequence of jury vetting on the part of the attorneys? i.e. the defense does not want logical/rational thinkers on the jury if they have a bad case (know the defendant committed the crime, lots of evidence against defendant, etc). In those cases they want people wh…

Love that bias lol. "We do science therefore we are incapable of logical fallacies".

There are plenty of people they screen for and/or boot off of juries. When I went to jury duty the questionnaire asked about if you are / were / related to a cop or lawyer, if you had ever worked for a police dept or court system as a civilian, if you had experience with regulatory or GRC roles, or if you were a PI. They also asked about level of education and if you had experience in management or HR.

Keep in mind that this is not the court asking these questions, it's the lawyers.

Re: More people are getting away with murder

#110

Post by kasey_junk »

gamblor956 wrote: post #83
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…

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 jo…

Your last paragraph was my point. The incompetence of the investigation left a chance at trial even though there was a taped confession.

If the investigation had been just workmanlike or followed basic protocols I cant imagine any defense attorney would have wanted to take it to trial. Though perhaps they still didn’t want that but their client demanded it. I of course couldn’t know that.

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