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Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

theguardian.com

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Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#221

Post by pyuser583 »

vorpalhex wrote: post #139
Arainach wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He was found guilty because multiple people in his life testified Source?

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/06/17/appeals-court-halts-... Yes, this article is from 2016 and yes it's in Texas which has a strong law which allows throwing out bad science. The suspect forensic claim was such a small part of the evidence against the defendent that it didn't survive appeals.

Texas has a really good reputation when it comes to throwing out junk science.

But it also means prosecutors often avoid scientific evidence in favor of witness testimony.

It also creates situations where no DNA test is done on evidence. On appeal the defense says “the prosecution didn’t even do dna testing!” But during the trial the defense wasn’t asking for it (and neither was prosecution) so of course it didn’t happen.

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#222

Post by adfgiionio »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #217
adfgiionio wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no, no, and no. In all of those cases the killing is justified by more than just bloodlust. I am not a pacifist and never have been. Executions are different. People are not afraid to admit that they support executions because they like knowing that hated people will suffer. That is not something I will consider acceptable under any circumstances. If there were any evidence that capital punishment served a purpos…

Recidivism rate is high so People who commit murded will likely commit other crimes if released so removing them from society is a good thing. Keeping them in jail forever is a waste of resources so execution is right approach. The one thing is that process should not take 20 years and all appeals should run out in a year or two at most so justice is reasonably swift. We should not torture them on purpose but besides…

Execution is vastly more expensive than keeping people locked up. This is well documented. Shortening the appeals process enough to make it cheaper than prison would be radically authoritarian and would result in even more innocent people being executed.

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#223

Post by [deleted] »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #219
adfgiionio wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people, moral or not, would never kill. Most people rarely feel a desire to kill, and most people know they would feel guilty for killing someone. A person's feelings will keep them in line even if their character won't. The police add an extra incentive. But executions change all that. Whether or not a person supports capital punishment reveals if their morality is a flimsy thing of feelings and self-interest o…

The confounding variable in your test is this: people may simply be detached from the argument. As bad as that may be, it isn't a sign of violent intentions .

[deleted]

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#224

Post by kmeisthax »

adfgiionio wrote: post #179
kmeisthax wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wanting to weaken or abolish any kind of property right - even the non-naturally-derived government-granted monopoly bargains that form copyright, patent, and trade secrecy - makes you extremely fringe in the legal profession. If you want to be a competent and successful lawyer while holding those opinions you have to firewall half your brain off from the other half. Partially because fringe people who want to change…

Who said anything about the state claiming ownership of this software? That's a huge leap of logic. We are talking about removing the state's power to use secret software at trial. This is a restriction on the government, not on the software authors. The authors have the right to write whatever software they want. They have no right to have the government use their software at trial. We have pretty good proposals to…

"Fringe" in this case means "outside the Overton window", not "only implemented for a short fraction of the history of the human species". Otherwise we'd have to call suburban living and freedom of speech fringe ideas, because the 1st Amendment is only slightly younger than copyright itself and the formation of suburbs is still in living memory for a handful of 100-year-olds.

>>Partially because fringe people who want to change the law make terrible legal arguments

>No one has ever changed the law to benefit the rich, no sirree.

You followed this up with a link to America's mind-numbingly long copyright terms, so I would instead point out that none of those were extended by judicial fiat. Generally a "legal argument" means something argued in front of a judge about how the law is, rather than something argued to Congress about how the law ought to be. The reason why reformers make bad legal arguments is because they're trying to use the legal system to do an end-run around Congress, because the rich people already own Congress.

That being said, they also own the legal system indirectly. It's staffed by professionals who have a vested interest in a set of rich people paying them money. If SCOTUS said tomorrow that, say, 1A overturns the Copyright Clause, half the legal profession would be homeless by the day after.

Also, trademark as copyright is already precluded by the federal preemption clause of US copyright law; you specifically cannot cobble together other rights into something that looks and quacks like a copyright.

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#225

Post by adfgiionio »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #219
adfgiionio wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people, moral or not, would never kill. Most people rarely feel a desire to kill, and most people know they would feel guilty for killing someone. A person's feelings will keep them in line even if their character won't. The police add an extra incentive. But executions change all that. Whether or not a person supports capital punishment reveals if their morality is a flimsy thing of feelings and self-interest o…

The confounding variable in your test is this: people may simply be detached from the argument. As bad as that may be, it isn't a sign of violent intentions .

I don't quite understand what you're saying.

There are a lot of people who aren't shy about supporting the death penalty simply because they want suffering and death. There are others who don't care what's happening in the world, give in to peer pressure, or honestly believe executions have practical value. Those aren't the same problem as simply cruelty.

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#226

Post by skotobaza »

dsego wrote: post #192
skotobaza wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sending people to jail has never stopped other people from committing the same offences That's a bold claim. I know people who didn't do illegal stuff because they didn't want repercussion that comes with it. So it is a deterrent.

Why is it bold? Prisons are full yet we haven't eradicated crime, lots of people doing illegal stuff.

Because it's not about stopping all people from committing crimes. It's about stopping enough of them so society doesn't collapse. And it works.

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#227

Post by dsego »

adfgiionio wrote: post #225
thomastjeffery wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The confounding variable in your test is this: people may simply be detached from the argument. As bad as that may be, it isn't a sign of violent intentions .

I don't quite understand what you're saying. There are a lot of people who aren't shy about supporting the death penalty simply because they want suffering and death. There are others who don't care what's happening in the world, give in to peer pressure, or honestly believe executions have practical value. Those aren't the same problem as simply cruelty.

It's not cruelty, it's a service to society and the victims.

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#228

Post by yieldcrv »

edrxty wrote: post #109
yieldcrv wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Are you victim blaming...slaves?

that sentence is pretty clear about other tribes choosing to do something to the victim of their actions, so, no.

nice try though

if it’s really so unclear, to you, each sentence is about a different group comprising large swaths of Americas population.

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#229

Post by dsego »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #220
mcpackieh wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Response to the deleted comment: "I genuinely don’t understand this point of view. I get why the victims would want this but why is that a reason for our legal system to adopt it as a guiding principle?" The pact the government has with people is that the government metes out justice so that people don't try to get it themselves. Some measure of retribution, it doesn't need to be the death penalty, works towards this…

A responsible government would punish the vigilantes instead of the innocent or rehabilitated.

I always wonder how moral and fair it is to provide an opportunity for rehabilitation to someone guilty of a heinous crime, since they didn't provide a second chance to their victims. It seem like a great cosmic injustice. As for punishing vigilantes, should settling the score be more severely punished than the original crime? Let's say a person kills someone I love, and I take my revenge by killing them, am I now not worthy of rehabilitation?

Re: Texas death row inmate at mercy of supreme court, and junk science

#230

Post by chipsa »

kmeisthax wrote: post #142
Grimburger wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closed source DNA testing code used daily just raises so many red flags. It's honestly concerning how basically no one in the legal community understands why this is an issue. This stuff is way too important to be proprietary.

Wanting to weaken or abolish any kind of property right - even the non-naturally-derived government-granted monopoly bargains that form copyright, patent, and trade secrecy - makes you extremely fringe in the legal profession. If you want to be a competent and successful lawyer while holding those opinions you have to firewall half your brain off from the other half. Partially because fringe people who want to change…

Weird copyright idea of mine: copyright registrations lapse, and must be paid for regularly, but the copyright itself continues. You have to have a registration to be able to demand statutory damages and can only demand for the period of the registration. So, if it lapses, you can't demand anything. No copyright zombies, because if you cared enough, you'd have made sure the registration was up to date. But it still falls close enough to treaty requirements to not get thrown out.
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