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Source?
https://www.texastribune.org/2016/06/17/appeals-court-halts-... Yes, this article is from 2016. Texas also has a strong law that allows throwing out "junk science". This case didn't make it through appeals because the forensic criteria that is suspect was such a small part of the evidence.
The person alleging he hit the daughter is his ex wife and her own sister testified she is a recurrent liar.
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It's called "just"ice, not "systemish". Getting the right outcome is meant to be a core goal of the system. Besides, there are many legal reasonings that would allow the process to give the right answer - that innocent people should not be killed. Thomas chose to find a different reasoning instead.
All nine of them, and practically every lawyer of all persuasions, will tell you that the only justice is the equal application of the written law. And sense of "justice" to mean "fairness" is a job for the legislature. The fact that legislation is always vague and they can interpret it to mean whatever their ideology wants it to mean is just waiting for more legislation to fix it. If there is an obvious miscarriage…
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> He was found guilty because multiple people in his life testified he had a history of violently shaking and screaming at a child for crying. IANAL, but wouldn't that be against the rule that character evidence cannot be used by the prosecution (unless in countering character evidence from the defence)? Specifically, I believe what you describe would be in contravention of the following: https://www.law.cornell.edu/…
Re-read (b)(2). You can't testify that a defendent was "a jealous man" or "of unsavory character". You can testify that you saw him shake an infant angrily until she passed out.
In other words, you can't argue that given there is evidence that the defendant shook babies in anger before, he is the kind of guy who shakes babies in anger, and therefore this is evidence in favour of him having shaken this baby to death.
Regarding (b)(2), I interpret that the testimony that the defendant shook infants in anger in the past would only be admissible under (b)(2) if the previous acts were "proving motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake, or lack of accident". I cannot see how having shaken an infant in the past could provide evidence for any of the above as relates to the separate and specific alleged infant-shaking event for which the defendant was on trial.
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It's retributive justice, it's not a deterrent. To quote a post I recently found resonating with me: "Look, we don’t necessarily hang murderers to deter other people from committing the same offence. We kill them simply because the punishment has to carry the same weight as the offence. The family of the murderer must go through the same anguish and pain that the murder victim’s family went through. The killer has to…
I genuinely find this point of view viscerally repulsive. Maybe it's a common perspective, but I pray not. It really seems to be at the heart of a lot of issues with legal systems.
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I genuinely find this point of view viscerally repulsive. Maybe it's a common perspective, but I pray not. It really seems to be at the heart of a lot of issues with legal systems.
I'm still shocked when people suggest making people get punished for crimes committed by members of their family. It's indefensible and absurd.
That would surprise me!
I’m always confused why conservatives tend to support the death penalty. The conservative ethos is to reduce the power of the state to prevent abuse, but giving the state the right to kill a citizen clearly goes against that. How can you mistrust the state in almost every aspect of society, yet trust it to only kill people that “deserve” it?
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That's because the purpose of the death penalty is to function as a sort of secular human sacrifice, to ward off evil-doers possibly doing bad things, due to a belief that deep down bad guys are rational actors and will choose not to do commit capital murder based on punishment.
It's retributive justice, it's not a deterrent. To quote a post I recently found resonating with me: "Look, we don’t necessarily hang murderers to deter other people from committing the same offence. We kill them simply because the punishment has to carry the same weight as the offence. The family of the murderer must go through the same anguish and pain that the murder victim’s family went through. The killer has to…
I don't understand why this "must" be the way things are done; it seems way more of a stretch to argue this than to say that if the family of the murderer is innocent, choosing a punishment specifically based on wanting to make them suffer seems pretty messed up. I don't think claiming that innocent people who happen to be related to criminals should be forced to suffer is a universal premise; if you're going to claim it, you're going to need to back it up with an argument about why that's somehow more reasonable than "we shouldn't go out of our way specifically to punish innocent people".
> If we are going to shy away from punishing wrong-doers on the basis that the punishment won’t stop other people from committing the same offence then we might as well not send anyone to jail because sending people to jail has never stopped other people from committing the same offences.
If your goal is a 1:1 justice system where the guilty party suffers the exact same punishment that their victim suffered through their crime, doesn't that also imply that imprisonment should basically only ever be used as a punishment for kidnapping/holding people hostage? Do you punish a drug dealer by forcing them to buy drugs from the victim, or a fraud doctor to get care only from people without medical degrees? It's virtually impossible to try to define punishments like this in general, so I don't find it compelling that it's somehow the obvious way to punish murder.
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OK, but that still doesn't explain the connection between SBS and hypnosis (and Texas for that matter). Is there a particular history of using hypnosis to convict innocent people of shaking babies to death in Texas and impose the death penalty on them? Is this common knowledge? The original comment to which I was responding still makes absolutely no sense to me. And getting downvoted because I asked for clarification…
You were downvoted because your comment showed you didn't read the OP article, which answers your question thoroughly
It may well be that the evidence for SBS in this particular case was bogus, but it does not follow that SBS is bogus in general.
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Sorry, I am very confused here. The comment I was responding to said: > to make that bullshit even worse, Texas continued to use hypnosis induced testimony until 2021. That is a sentiment with which I sympathize. But then... > It makes me wonder when the last death penalty sentence for "shaken baby syndrome" was in Texas. This I don't get. Shaken baby syndrome is a real thing, and it seems to me that if someone shake…
I think the point is that you don’t get shaken dead babies without visible external trauma. So saying it’s ‘shaken baby syndrome’ just because there are internal injuries is junk science.
According to the Mayo Clinic you can:
"While sometimes there's bruising on the face, you may not see signs of physical injury to the child's outer body."
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OK, but that still doesn't explain the connection between SBS and hypnosis (and Texas for that matter). Is there a particular history of using hypnosis to convict innocent people of shaking babies to death in Texas and impose the death penalty on them? Is this common knowledge? The original comment to which I was responding still makes absolutely no sense to me. And getting downvoted because I asked for clarification…
I don't know anything about hypnosis, but I think the comment you replied too made an analogy between the contested science of SBS, and the unreliability of hypnosis induced testimonies. There are many other scientific methods in criminal law that have been criticized for their poor reliability, yet many of them are still routinely used in courts. [1] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/09/20/pcast-r... [2…