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Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
191–200 of 205 posts
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The gulf between truish, biased testimony and perjury is immense. The entire reason to have an expert witness giving testimony is that no one else in the courtroom is fully qualified to determine the truthfulness of the testimony.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just for this one project. I'm not saying everyone is innocent, but the number of people who were wrongly convicted by a lazy system that let shoddy police work and lax standards become the norm is shocking. There's the old thought process that even if the guy wasn't guilty of this crime he's certainly guilty of others so they would be doing the world a favor by putting him away. In the end this is just self-j…
>There's the old thought process that even if the guy wasn't guilty of this crime he's certainly guilty of others so they would be doing the world a favor by putting him away. In the end this is just self-justified racism. I’m sorry, where is race the factor in this? You could make a weak claim for sexism from your post but there is no racism.
I'll give you one guess as to the skin color of the people who "seem dangerous" to these all white judges, prosecutors, and juries.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non-violent dealing (meaning possession for the purpose of sale instead of use) would still be non-violent possession. It is a valid question what fraction of dealing (as opposed to possession for personal use) is actually non-violent. But even the violence is largely a product of the war on drugs, just as the corresponding violence surrounding illegal alcohol dealing during Prohibition was a product of the war on al…
How many of those are without a weapon? Is intent to distribute fentanyl a non violent possession? If so could you ever make a case it’s non violent dealing? If you don’t see it as non violent dealing, a store advertising date rape drugs should be allowed to sell all their legal products.
> How many of those are without a weapon?
Whatever the current fraction is, it's in a world with a war on drugs, so it can't tell you anything useful about what a world without a war on drugs would be like.
> Is intent to distribute fentanyl a non violent possession?
As long as the distribution is done by voluntary transactions, sure.
> a store advertising date rape drugs should be allowed to sell all their legal products.
Date rape is not the only use for fentanyl. One might as well say that liquor stores should be closed down because liquor can be used for date rape.
The premise of the war on drugs is that if we make drugs illegal, people will stop using them, or at least use will be drastically curtailed. We already knew that was false because Prohibition did not stop people from using alcoholic beverages, or drastically curtail their use; it just created a lucrative black market in alcohol, plus an incentive to violence for the people who ran that market--since they were criminals already, adding violence to the mix wasn't a big step. The war on drugs has worked out the same way.
The only way to drastically reduce drug use is for people to stop wanting to use drugs. Unfortunately nobody has a really good way to do that. But we know that criminalizing their use and creating a lucrative and violent black market for them does not work.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obligatory IANAL. >Prosecutors are incentivized to get convictions, Their entire job is to get convictions. It literally doesn't matter if the prosecutor thinks someone should be convicted or not, that's for the judge to decide. The job of a prosecutor is to make as strong a case for conviction as he possibly can. Likewise, the job of a lawyer representing a defendant is to make as strong a case for acquittal as he p…
> It literally doesn't matter if the prosecutor thinks someone should be convicted or not, that's for the judge to decide. The job of a prosecutor is to make as strong a case for conviction as he possibly can. It's unfortunate that you're probably right in the de facto sense. This is how many prosecutors view their role. But it's wrong. This is not the prosecutor's objective. Their obligation is to strive toward just…
>> The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all, and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.
Ah yes, and it is politicians (you know, the people who oversee all of this) obligation to govern according to "the will of the people"...just like we see in movies, on TV, in the trustworthy and totally independent news, in various simulcast professionally written PR pieces after an incident occurs, etc. (Consensus across the board is how you know it's true. That, and: this is a democracy.)
Protect "democracy" with all you have, free and rational citizens, it is our most sacred institution.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding that this is largely a thing of the past. Simple possession doesn't result in time, although dealing can
Non-violent dealing (meaning possession for the purpose of sale instead of use) would still be non-violent possession. It is a valid question what fraction of dealing (as opposed to possession for personal use) is actually non-violent. But even the violence is largely a product of the war on drugs, just as the corresponding violence surrounding illegal alcohol dealing during Prohibition was a product of the war on al…
The Counterpoint is you have countries with lower incarceration rates like Singapore with the death penalty and other harsh penalties for drug dealing.
I personally think the use of drugs is something better regulated by social norms then the law. However, this changes if the law socializes the cost of drug addiction. That is to say, if I'm forced to pay for food, shelter, and Healthcare for addicts, then they also lose the freedom of choice.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you're not taking anything away. Your situation is (sadly) very common indeed. And as you say, if you start missing child support payments the judge will hit you with contempt charges and put you straight back in jail for several months to teach you a lesson. If you had ended up in jail the case might have run on for months or years. Once you are inside a jail you lose most contact with your attorney and your sup…
>And as you say, if you start missing child support payments the judge will hit you with contempt charges and put you straight back in jail for several months to teach you a lesson. All of this should be illegal, debtors prisons by another name is all this is.
It's particularly irrational because they're the ones that put you in the situation of missing child support in the first place. Seems more like extortion and racketeering to me.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many of those are without a weapon? Is intent to distribute fentanyl a non violent possession? If so could you ever make a case it’s non violent dealing? If you don’t see it as non violent dealing, a store advertising date rape drugs should be allowed to sell all their legal products.
> How many of those are without a weapon? Whatever the current fraction is, it's in a world with a war on drugs, so it can't tell you anything useful about what a world without a war on drugs would be like. > Is intent to distribute fentanyl a non violent possession? As long as the distribution is done by voluntary transactions, sure. > a store advertising date rape drugs should be allowed to sell all their legal pro…
Singapore indicates strict prohibition and punishing laws can and do work. The problem wasn’t that prohibition didn’t work, it was the lack of enforcement.
I don’t have any philosophy towards the idea of drugs. I don’t think the world would be worst off all fentanyl sellers were all dead. I don’t see a point to say we should treat heroin like weed and cocaine like Xanax.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How many of those are without a weapon? Whatever the current fraction is, it's in a world with a war on drugs, so it can't tell you anything useful about what a world without a war on drugs would be like. > Is intent to distribute fentanyl a non violent possession? As long as the distribution is done by voluntary transactions, sure. > a store advertising date rape drugs should be allowed to sell all their legal pro…
Singapore indicates strict prohibition and punishing laws can and do work. The problem wasn’t that prohibition didn’t work, it was the lack of enforcement. I don’t have any philosophy towards the idea of drugs. I don’t think the world would be worst off all fentanyl sellers were all dead. I don’t see a point to say we should treat heroin like weed and cocaine like Xanax.
> Singapore indicates strict prohibition and punishing laws can and do work.
For a city-state with a reasonably homogeneous population, perhaps. But that's very different from a large country.
> The problem wasn’t that prohibition didn’t work, it was the lack of enforcement.
That's because the amount of enforcement it would have taken to actually prohibit all use of liquor would have been (a) way, way too costly, and (b) inconsistent with having a free country. At least our country realized that for liquor and repeated Prohibition.
> I don’t have any philosophy towards the idea of drugs.
It sure seems like you do from your statements that immediately follow this one.
Re: Bad science and bad statistics in the courtroom convict innocent people
#200I was thinking about this just today randomly. Every bit in computer memory or data store is just a bit flip away from being completely wrong. In other words all data corruption -- unintentional or deliberate-- can be statistically shown as a bunch of off-by-one errors. Of course the chance of multiple random off-by-one errors lining up exactly to help one party is astronomically low. But would a typical court of law…
I don't think this categorization is technically correct, and even in the places where it is partially correct I don't see that the "off-by-one" phrasing adds any value. Off-by-one errors are a very specific type of error in algorithm implementation, where a closed boundary and an open boundary are confused. A general bit flip is not really an example of this unless it is connected to this specific kind of mistake. A…
thank you
I was talking very loosely --surely it doesn't stand up to any level of scrutiny