COVID enters the chat…
Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
151–160 of 205 posts
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is wrong with the poisonous tree doctrine in your opinion? I find it isn't used widely enough against police and prosecutor misconduct. There are too many ways out of it for them.
My main problem is that the person that suffers from the poisonous tree is the public at large. The actual criminal in this scenario (the police officer) gets off carte blanche for breaking the law. Additionally, if they managed to find evidence then an additional criminal (the defendants) also gets carte blanche. The only people punished is the public that now have two known criminals that evaded justice!
I absolutely agree. The problem with the doctrine is that it should not exist. The misconduct should be punished. The doctrine only exists because there is no punishment for the police or prosecutors.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being primarily a civil attorney, I'm well aware of the disproportionate number of former prosecutors on the bench. A couple of points: 1. Most prosecutors are liberals. It's not like right wing law students go looking for jobs in prosecutor's offices. I can't think of any from my class way back when. 2. The problem is more that judges and prosecutors are old colleagues. The slant is that they all know the defendants…
I think your point on #2 makes quite a lot of sense, but #1 rings hollow. Plenty of erstwhile liberals hoist the black flag when there's inconvenience in their own neighborhoods; no reason to think it isn't similarly situational with regards to people who are incentivized towards securing conviction.
To pile on, part of the conflict between liberals and those further left is that "law and order liberal" is a thing. That is, while liberals might concede that the justice system is flawed, there's still an underlying faith that the system will get it right the overwhelming majority of the time.
The extreme radical position is that the justice system is fundamentally and irredeemably broken, and that there is no way that a conscientious leftist could work with, let alone within, a system that exists only to oppress the people and reinforce the power of the ruling elite.
There's obviously a lot of gray between those two positions, but the punchline is that its very possible to be a liberal DA. e.g. Chesa Boudin's stated goals exemplify what that's supposed to look like, although without unified support from the police and the judiciary, Chesa Boudin also exemplifies what would actually happen.
Experiences like that drive the broader leftist calls to defund or abolish the police. If you can't get buy in from the entire judicial system to reform itself, then just getting a leftist prosecutor elected/appointed will quickly lead to that prosecutor either being ejected from the position, or co-opted by the system they were trying to fix.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#154Very, very much yes. Criminal courts really, really aren't a good place to address technical matters. For example, ankle electronic monitoring (obviously) doesn't work well in faraday-cage like apartment complexes. And yet time and time again, GPS skew is used to argue that someone left their home -- sometimes even months after the fact. I've read emails from a local sheriff's office that said that they consider a su…
Sounds like grounds for a lawsuit against the company. They are stating false things about their product and causing people harm. An official and highly paid representative sent to testify in court couldn't just be dismissed as "well, one salesman misspoke, not our fault". This would be the just recourse, but I'm aware that probably nobody can afford this justice.
The problem is not the company per se but the fact that the government is allowed to get away with having an "expert witness" testify in court with no supporting evidence about something like this. The government should be required to produce, and keep up to date, positive evidence about the accuracy of such systems, collected independently of the manufacturer.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've gone through the system in a similar fashion, but with no where near the same outcome as you did. If I hadn't gone through a similar situation I would almost believe that you were making it up, that's how ridiculous this is. For context I got stopped in a car with a friend who had weed (unknown to me at the time), had a really old warrant for something like a missed child support payment (also didn't know), and…
Unfortunately, the common refrain in scenarios like this is that it's your fault. Even ignoring the weed, which I think a lot of people would have sympathy for, you owed child support that wasn't paid and had a [bench, presumably] warrant out for your arrest. The simple fact of the matter is that most people don't owe court-mandated child support at any point in their lives, most people that do owe it pay it, and mos…
I think you misread the parent. They didn't have an outstanding warrant, the driver did.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My best answer is for us to provide every court have an on-call statistician, reviewing every case. Is this not the exact reason for expert witnesses?
Expert witnesses are inherently adversarial, like the court system itself. There is no "neutral" evaluation of the reliability of a piece of evidence. If one side hires an expert to evaluate something, they are under no obligation to have the expert testify in court if the evaluation doesn't help their case.
> Expert witnesses are inherently adversarial
In the UK, expert witnesses are "servants of the court". Sure, they're paid by one side or the other; but they're witnesses, and they're required to give true, unbiased testimony, on pain of a perjury charge. Is it not the same inthe USA?
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#157A few years back there were some stories in a Swedish newspaper about a method for medical age estimation of asylum seekers developed by a government agency. I could hardly believe my eyes when the person responsible for the accuracy of the method was quoted as saying that it was very reliable, because it used two unreliable methods to estimate if the person was above 18 years old, and then concluded that they were 1…
Mimics my impression of Sweden in general. It's not a nice place of you are not Swedish.
in this case it's the opposite - the policy allowed asylum seekers to claim and benefit from being considered to be 18 or younger when they were in fact obviously 30+
but yeah your impression is not wrong, Sweden is not a nice place lol
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
He said “at least”. And he specified “guilty of what they were charged with”. You also need to factor in the people who are guilty of crime A (that they did commit but were not convicted of) but are convicted of crime B (that they did not commit) for whatever reason. I’ve seen “street justice” like this. In some cases I think it a net good (right outcome for the wrong reasons, typically involving a serial criminal wh…
What he wrote: at least 95% of the people locked up are guilty of something related to their charges What you wrote: And he specified “guilty of what they were charged with”. These aren't the same. It's depressing to see someone being misquoted on literally the same page as their original statement, in a discussion about lack of accuracy in legal proceedings.
1. I am not a lawyer or an LEO.
2. This is not a court of law or a legal arm of anything. Quite the contrary, it’s a social forum.
3. I don’t think any point you made materially changes the relevance of my point(s).
I appreciate being accurate and precise, but focusing on intent of communication goes a long way.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like grounds for a lawsuit against the company. They are stating false things about their product and causing people harm. An official and highly paid representative sent to testify in court couldn't just be dismissed as "well, one salesman misspoke, not our fault". This would be the just recourse, but I'm aware that probably nobody can afford this justice.
Saying you're "not aware of" something that is real but that you've managed to avoid awareness of, isn't illegal. The individual representative sent to testify probably really was unaware, and the company probably does a good job of making itself as a whole mostly unaware. As long as all knowledge of something routinely goes straight to the shredder before anyone important hears about it, unawareness is achieved.
Yeah but those kinds of games have been standard practice in courts since time immemorial. Should it not be standard practice by now to clearly establish the QA/QC process, bugs opened and closed, roles and key people responsible for product features etc. during court proceedings?
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
That definitely happens but lots of evidence is thrown out and they are looking at throwing the law at him. A famous case is Al Capone. I’m not calling it right or wrong, it’s just what happens with the system in place. It’s also shown to the public to convict them. The jury has the ability to ‘throw’ the case as they did in the case of OJ.
Except Al Capone actually did what he went to prison for. Yeah he did a lot of other stuff nobody could prove to the standard of a courtroom, but what you're talking about is someone "knows" Al Capone is bad, so they fabricate crimes and evidence and frame him for those in order to send him to prison. That would still be wrong. This is a feature, not a bug.
Capone wasn't framed; have I misunderstood you?