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A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

arstechnica.com

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Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#231

Post by voakbasda »

jojobas wrote: post #112
anigbrowl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an adversarial system (which the US and Canada and UK are), the judge is not supposed to challenge evidence unless it's glaringly, obviously adrift from reality. That's the job of the defense lawyer. In civil law systems the roles of the judge and prosecutor are combined and responsility for bad decisions is distributed differently.

The prosecution must still present evidence that proves guilt beyond reasonable doubt. "Something something IP address" sort of evidence that the article describes doesn't seem to cut it.

Is that the standard for evidence in Canada?

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#232

Post by yieldcrv »

ktallett wrote: post #174
yieldcrv wrote: post #28

Remember when Saudi Arabia indicted Canada on its human rights and everyone laughed? Got to separate the message from the messenger

Huh? I am not sure Saudi Arabia can hold the moral high ground and this is definitely not the way to do it.

It was their turn on the UN seat and they were correct

Was it an incorrect message if a different country’s delegate said it?

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#234

Post by Hackbraten »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #144
codetiger wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This case can be the best example of human hallucinations. They made a mistake in username, and assumed everything after that was facts. All that had to be proved was the person is the owner of the mistaken username.

There should be/does anyone know if there is a name for this? When you truth-check exactly once and then just blindly runaway after that? Edit: Apparently in medicine there exists the concept of "premature closure", where the carer settles on a diagnosis early and stops considering other possibilities. Seems like a decent match?

Sounds like confirmation bias to me.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#235

Post by qingcharles »

voakbasda wrote: post #229
mothballed wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a gazillion federal prosecutions in the US that go something like 1) Pile of evidence that someone is guilty. 2) Federal "expert witness" allowed and funded to testify it points to X person 3) Defense is broke 4) If defense not broke, judge finds reason why defense expert witness can't present their full argument 5) Prosecution offers plea deal or a gazillion years in jail 6) Person folds when they realize…

I have heard prosecutors say that innocent or guilty doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether they can convict.

I've known and hung out with a lot of prosecutors. I've never heard one say anything like that outright, but, one of the main issues is that in 99.9% of cases the evidence will not be looked at. They are just not given the time and resources to even take a single glance at the police reports, never mind any forensic evidence. They literally have no idea whether the person is guilty or innocent when they offer a plea deal.

Even your paid defense attorney might never look at the case files at all. Jared from Subway's lawyer got into hot water because he got Jared to take a plea and it turned out he was factually innocent of one of the many offenses he was charged with, and that fact would have been uncovered quickly had the defense attorney ever looked at the evidence, which he said he had not.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#236

Post by Silamoth »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #170
denkmoon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just today I had an incident review meeting resulting from a prod incident where the root cause was an LLM refactor stripping ! from the front of a boolean statement "for no reason". Not to mention how often I've seen garbled output from the LLM. Lots of things failed for that to reach prod, but the assertion that LLMs do not make subtle typos... is not congruent with my experience.

Which LLM? When was this code written? When was the last time you saw "garbled output" and what was the context? I'm really trying to get to the bottom of these claims, because I see them a lot and it's so wildly different from most people's experiences.

If a lot of people make the same claim, then from their perspective, you’re the one with a “wildly different” experience. What makes you so certain your experience generalizes to “most people’s experiences”?

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#238

Post by mvkel »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #167
mvkel wrote: post #92

Now imagine dumping the corpus of this case into an LLM and asking it to find discrepancies. I'll bet your bollocks to a barn dance that it'd point out the extra underscore. This is yet another example of human confirmation bias leading to terrible outcomes for other humans. Our judgment is not so virtuous. Now the question is whether being fallible is a feature. It seems like society is interested in keeping humans…

There's probably a lot of alpha in getting (legal) access to a bunch of court records and finding discrepancies, and then using that to convince municipalities into buying a subscription to your discrepancy-finding AI SaaS. Give it a cool YC name like "Convictly.ai"

I don't get it. We're snobs about facts being more accurate?

In a system that is innocent before guilty, more accuracy favors the person.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#239

Post by fortran77 »

throw101010 wrote: post #102
shusaku wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all comes down to the jury, none of those things matter. The bigger issue here: he knew those messages weren’t him, so the lawyer should’ve gone full force to figure out how this happened. I would guess his lawyer didn’t really believe him

> I would guess his lawyer didn’t really believe him Then you'd ask to change lawyer. If they can apply a standard practice of care and do basic checks like matching a username and time of use because they don't "believe" you when you say these are not you messages, they are not doing their job as a lawyer. I'd go as far as saying such basic checks not being done amount to negligence/malpractice, they might have a ci…

This is Canada. That may not be possible.

Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

#240

Post by anigbrowl »

jojobas wrote: post #133
anigbrowl wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, but it's up to the defense to articulate what the basis of that doubt is. If you read jury instructions, they typically tell the jurors to only base their decision on the information presented in the courtroom and to set aside their own intuitions, prior life experience etc. Now this isn't universal; I've seen judges that encourage the jury to ask questions in open court (by submitting as notes to the judge w…

It's not even about asking questions, the judge is allowed just listen to the prosecution case and acquit without requesting any elaboration, or even challenge by the defense, isn't he? The prosecution didn't meet "no reasonable doubt" even before the defense started.

It's not my fault that the legal system does not work the way you wish it did. Maybe stop arguing with me and write earnest letters to the Supreme Court instead.
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