[HN Gopher] N guilty men (1997)
___________________________________________________________________
N guilty men (1997)
Author : emmelaich
Score : 103 points
Date : 2023-08-30 11:40 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www2.law.ucla.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www2.law.ucla.edu)
| jasonlotito wrote:
| When considering things that won't likely affect me personally, I
| wonder if I'd be willing to suffer the consequences to pay for
| the reasoning. I imagine myself in the shoes of those that will
| be affected. This tends to be complicated.
|
| Would I be willing to put my sons in that position: being
| innocent? That's easy, no.
|
| Would I be willing to have someone guilty of harming my son go
| free? That's harder.
|
| Would I be willing to go to prison for an innocent man? And I
| don't mean with the hope of going free. The understanding is,
| would I be willing to give up my life so that another would stay
| in prison?
|
| I do this for a lot of stuff that has a moral complexity. Would I
| be willing to suffer for this outcome? Sometimes the answer comes
| easily: yes, I would. It forces me to think through the
| ramifications of what I'm asking others to do. It's not easy,
| because it forces me to come to terms with my moral desires and
| my practical desires. And all of this is really a mind game
| anyways, it's not real. It's speculative. I don't know how I
| would react if I was really put into a position.
|
| Apologies, this wasn't directly related to the topic itself, but
| the post made me think of this.
| rayiner wrote:
| But you could just as easily try to put yourself in the shoes
| of the crime victim that doesn't get justice because the
| perpetrator is one of the 10 guilty men that go free.
| ta757579 wrote:
| [flagged]
| dkarl wrote:
| John Rawls suggests imagining that you don't know which person
| in society you will be. You might be a victim, a defendant, a
| juror, a family member of a victim or defendant, somebody poor
| or rich, somebody who lives in a rural or urban area, somebody
| who lives in a high-crime or low-crime neighborhood. You might
| be any age, any race, with any sexual orientation or gender
| identity. If you were about to be dropped into a society and
| did not know what situation you would find yourself in, what
| rules and norms would you want society to have?
| [deleted]
| r9550684 wrote:
| for the attentive readers, I found an error in the translation of
| the Gogol quote, asked Eugene about it, and he said that he also
| just noticed that the HTML version posted here has "considerable
| differences" from the original PDF[0]
|
| [0]
| https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
| emmelaich wrote:
| That's interesting, I chose the html because I dislike pdf.
|
| Now I'll have to go and diff them!
| r9550684 wrote:
| compare footnote 87 in pdf and 79 in html, the html version
| of the translation is invalid and reverses the meaning, uses
| transliteration instead of Cyrillic, but also where did the
| other 8 footnotes go? I have a feeling the html was
| transcribed by hand after the fact
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Reminds me...
|
| One of my personal top 10 movies: 12 angry men.
|
| 9/10 imdb score.
|
| https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0050083/
| [deleted]
| hirundo wrote:
| > In the fantasies of legal academics, jurors think about
| Blackstone routinely.
|
| I was on a jury that completed service yesterday, a domestic
| violence case, and I brought up the Blackstone ratio early in the
| deliberations. I am not sure that my argument swayed votes, but
| there were several members who were in favor of convicting on the
| more serious charge, and they relented in the face of this
| argument and others that the prosecution had not proved it. We
| found not guilty on this charge and guilty on a lesser charge
| that was clearly proven.
|
| I and I think all of the others would have convicted on a
| preponderance of evidence standard. So it looks to me like the "n
| Guilty Men" logic is still an important part of garden variety
| jury deliberations.
| qingcharles wrote:
| A lot of these cases are overcharged, with a more serious but
| unsustainable charge added on, to try to make sure the
| defendant enters a plea deal rather than attempt trial. This
| defendant got lucky by going to trial and having a jury that
| did the right thing.
|
| Although I assume they were still pissed they got convicted on
| the lesser lol
| darkclouds wrote:
| >The story is told of a Chinese law professor, who was listening
| to a British lawyer explain that Britons were so enlightened,
| they believed it was better that ninety-nine guilty men go free
| than that one innocent man be executed. The Chinese professor
| thought for a second and asked, "Better for whom?"
|
| This article detracts from the questions like are the laws fit
| for purpose, has everyone been notified of said legal changes,
| and if one is not living in a legal dictatorship, has everyone
| been consulted on the law before hand?
|
| Perhaps the reason law is not taught to everyone is because
| everyone would be in fear of falling foul of the law, which then
| begs the question, what is the real intended purpose of law? A
| case of better to have died doing nothing than fall foul of the
| law and be branded a criminal for life, in order to avoid that
| constant up hill battle from those around you?
|
| On the point of criminals serving their sentence and debt to
| society, whilst the authorities may act like this is the case,
| society never acts like this, with nuanced comments or actions,
| again by falling foul of the law, a person is for ever consigned
| to purgatory, even if the comments are innocently made, that
| trigger in psychological terms exists for ever, until dementia or
| death occurs.
|
| So when looking at the wider events, does the law actually do
| more harm than good by simply not informing or educating the
| public in a clear, unambiguous, not open to interpretation
| manner, rendering the n Guilty men philosophy a side show to
| deflect from its own poor implementation?
|
| Times are different today, instant global communication, the days
| of hiding in plain sight by simply moving around the planet are
| long gone, and yet the law doesnt recognise these technological
| changes. With an increasingly educated or more informed public,
| mere suspicions are enough to render an avalanche of inquiry that
| is perhaps best described as a witch hunt of extreme magnitude.
| And here in lies the problem, the witch hunt, a criminal activity
| that even the law fails to address and all because it failed to
| educate the public in the first place, thus creating a situation
| where yin becomes yang, and the law is incapable of punishing
| these situations.
|
| In IT terms, the compiler, the OS, CPU/GPU and peripherals are
| the law, if you make a mistake in your code, you'll get a
| compiler error, a runtime error or a system crash, so you change
| and try again, but in life, law is but a small part of the wider
| part of life, every unsolved murder, every disappearance, shows
| that Law is ineffective, that Darwinism is real and that in real
| life, the more informed you become the more inactive you become,
| rendering the question, what is the point of life?
|
| We are not some infant life form, oblivious to the dangers around
| us, blindly going where no man has gone before, but relying on
| those around us to guide us, but as we become more informed,
| those dangers become more apparent, more nuanced, where it
| becomes obvious to keep our mouth shut and do nothing, hoping for
| a quiet peaceful life, and yet the legal system still does not
| let people euthanise themselves at will in a peaceful non
| traumatic manner to escape the prison of doing nothing for fear
| of falling foul of the law.
|
| Perhaps demonstrating the real intent of the law and its
| nefarious divisive ways, whilst eschewing its own foibles and
| fallacies, with criminal side show deceit like n Guilty Men
| philosophy?
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _N Guilty Men (1997)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10860765 - Jan 2016 (23
| comments)
| renewiltord wrote:
| King Alfred hanging a judge for having had a man hanged about
| whom there were doubts really does take this to quite the limit!
|
| Massive occupational hazard in judgery at the time. One must
| imagine that that society shortly thereafter ended in chaos as
| judges everywhere biased towards innocence.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I've noticed that how people feel about this changes depending on
| how it is asked. If you take, for example, "better to let 5
| guilty men go free than convict 1 innocent man", I think the
| "average" person is somewhat on the fence about that. And while
| this is just 1 example, this isn't total conjecture on my part. I
| was actually asked that exact question, with that exact ratio, by
| a defense attorney during jury selection. The majority of other
| potential jurors (honestly a bit to my horror) disagreed with
| that statement - they didn't think it was OK to let the 5 guilty
| go free even if it meant wrongly convicting an innocent person.
|
| But if you instead ask people, "do you think it would be OK of
| nearly 17% of people in jail were actually innocent", the vast
| majority of people (or, at least all of the few people I asked
| that question to after my jury selection experience) think "no,
| that would mean there is a big problem with the criminal justice
| system".
|
| People are bad at statistics.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Positive feelings about the justice system don't seem to
| survive jury duty. A friend of mine got selected for a jury in
| an armed robbery case when he was 18, the summer street
| graduating. He was one of two votes to acquit, there were six
| votes to convict, and the remaining 4 people were just trying
| to find the quickest way to go back to work.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Positive feelings about the justice system don't seem to
| survive jury duty
|
| That's one anecdote, but I've often heard the opposite: even
| in charged cases where jurors were obviously interpreting the
| evidence differently, people took the job seriously and were
| respectful to one another. Not saying normal cognitive biases
| don't occur, but even though my only experience was with jury
| selection (and I wasn't selected), and even though we didn't
| really want to be there, from the conversations I felt that
| everyone took the duty seriously.
| jkaptur wrote:
| I served on a jury and you described it perfectly:
| imperfect people took the job seriously, interpreted our
| understanding of the law and the facts of the case, and
| listened to each other, both lawyers, and the judge.
| qingcharles wrote:
| You get all sides. For me, with a lot of experience in this
| area, I find juries almost borderline random. Completely
| unpredictable. One jury to the next will have a completely
| different attitude.
|
| I've seen juries several times acquit people who, based on
| the presented evidence, were so totally and completely
| guilty it defies rational sense. I would love to have been
| in the jury room for those ones.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> People are bad at statistics._
|
| While I don't disagree with this as a general statement, it's
| not what your example shows. The two ratios you describe are
| different things. A 5 to 1 ratio of guilty people in jail to
| innocent people in jail (which is what your second question
| asks about) is not the same thing as a 5 to 1 ratio of guilty
| people _going free_ to innocent people in jail (which is what
| your first question asks about).
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| True. I guess I'm the one that's bad at statistics :/
| ddq wrote:
| Our legal structures are due for an update to account for our
| improved understanding of the impact of cognitive biases. They
| are easily, and thus frequently, exploited. Irrationality is in
| our chemistry. I don't want the human element taken out of the
| legal system, but better accounted for.
| bandrami wrote:
| When I'm teaching comp sci to lawyers (long story) I use this as
| an example of Bayesian weighting and Type I/Type II errors
| because I know they'll be familiar with it.
| shanusmagnus wrote:
| Talk about burying the lede! What's the long story?
| bandrami wrote:
| It's actually not that long. I got a job at a law school
| teaching "Concepts of Computer Science" to 2nd-year law
| students.
| throwaway713 wrote:
| Related to this problem is the interesting tradeoff between
| fairness and harm minimization. The idea of fairness is that no
| individual should have a higher probability of a guilty verdict
| or punishment than any other individual due to factors that are
| outside of their control. But there is an inherent conflict
| between fairness and our ability to reduce harm that results from
| crime.
|
| For example, consider two hypothetical but identical individuals:
| one born into a low-income neighborhood and one born into a high-
| income neighborhood. If you develop a model to predict what we
| currently categorize as "crime" (the definition of which is its
| own separate issue), you will find that the income of a
| neighborhood is inversely correlated with the density of crime.
| If this is the only factor in your predictive model, then you
| will more effectively reduce crime by directing attention toward
| the low-income neighborhood. But now there is an inherent
| unfairness, because the additional scrutiny toward the low-income
| neighborhood means that individual 1 is more likely to be
| _caught_ for a crime than individual 2, despite both individuals
| having an equal likelihood of _committing_ a crime. This also
| creates a self-reinforcing situation where having more statistics
| on the low-income subset of the population now allows you to
| improve your predictive model even further by using additional
| variables that are only relevant to that subset of the
| population, meanwhile neglecting other variables that would be
| relevant to predicting crime in high-income neighborhoods. Repeat
| this process a few times and soon you have a massive amount of
| unfairness in society.
|
| It's probably impossible to eliminate all unfairness while still
| maintaining any sort of ability to control crime, but what is the
| appropriate threshold for this tradeoff?
| bArray wrote:
| > The story is told of a Chinese law professor, who was listening
| to a British lawyer explain that Britons were so enlightened,
| they believed it was better that ninety-nine guilty men go free
| than that one innocent man be executed. The Chinese professor
| thought for a second and asked, "Better for whom?"
|
| Specially referring to the British legal system (although others
| will apply), the system itself is part of the punishment, and is
| often used maliciously as so. You can be accused of X, have your
| details leaked to the press (by the police!), have social
| judgement cast upon you, only to be quietly found innocent later.
|
| From personal experience: Better yet, you can have the police
| abuse their power to seize property and raid your home during the
| early hours of the morning, only to have all charges dropped, in
| which case you have to go through a lengthy process to get your
| (now damaged) items back. There is zero recourse, all of the
| oversight bodies are filled with ex-police and look after their
| own.
|
| Meanwhile the real guilty people are 'let off' (non-pursued)
| because they flee the jurisdiction of the local police, or are
| part of a community the police are scared of. They only care for
| easy quick wins.
|
| To address the article directly, the current system is to let 10
| guilty men escape justice, whilst harassing 10 innocent men, and
| occasionally prosecuting them too.
| rayiner wrote:
| Your premise just isn't true. I worked at a court, have friends
| who are public defenders, and know people involved in
| Northwestern Law's "innocence project." Most criminal appeals
| we got were from people who were clearly guilty from the
| mountain of evidence presented at trial. Most public defenders
| will admit that most of their clients are guilty, and their job
| is mainly making sure the clients get a fair process and are
| prosecuted for the correct crimes. And most innocence projects
| acknowledge they have to filter through hundreds of cases to
| identify the relative handful where it's clear that the justice
| system has failed.
|
| In the debate regarding the percentage of imprisoned people who
| are wrongfully convicted, the estimates in the literature are
| 1-4%, with some scholars arguing it's well under 1%:
| https://dc.law.utah.edu/scholarship/138/. The criminal justice
| system is extremely accurate for a human institution.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Generally agree, although I've seen figures more like 2-10%.
| 1% seems low to me - that's the conseravtive estimate just
| based on DNA exhonerations. 10% seems high just based on my
| opinion, but given that 2-4% of death row inmates are
| estimated as being innocent, it might be realistic given how
| much extra attention/appeals death sentences get.
|
| The other part, is how cavalier the system can be about non-
| custodial crimes. If they aren't putting you in jail/prison,
| they really don't care about following thr procedures very
| strictly. All the numbers previously discussed deal with the
| _incarcerated_. Even convictions that don 't result in
| incarceration can ruin people's lives. I assume the false
| positive rates on these approach or exceed 10% (my opinion
| and personal experience) especially given the use of plea
| deals that result in things like community service, or fine
| and parole and wouldn't be captured in the stats/estimates
| above.
|
| Overall, 2-4% wrongful conviction would be fairly low and
| accurate for an adversarial human system (still concerning if
| ruining the lives of 2k-4k people every year in the US). I'm
| more concerned about the issues not caught in those numbers
| that still ruins peoples lives - like a lack of attention or
| due diligence for non-serious or "unimportant" crimes but the
| conviction of which still ruins chances at employment etc. Or
| the expanse of civil laws that also remove freedoms and
| possibly hurt job prospects without the protections found in
| the criminal side (no right to be present, no right to an
| attorney, lower standards of conviction/judgement, etc).
| woooooo wrote:
| Your experience doesn't contradict theirs at all -- they're
| not talking about being imprisoned, found guilty, or even
| brought to trial.
|
| They exit the pipeline, with hardship, before your statistics
| pick up.
| bArray wrote:
| ^ Exactly this.
|
| It reminds me of the 99.8% Japanese conviction rate [1].
| It's not because the police are the best in the world or
| that their legal system is superior, it's because only 8%
| make it to court.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_o
| f_Jap...
| giantg2 wrote:
| Or, they take a plea deal that doesn't result in
| incarceration (or the crime/sentencing didnt assign
| imprisonment), but all the other negatives. Still in the
| pipeline, but they just aren't in those stats since they
| aren't incarcerated.
| rayiner wrote:
| Plea deals must be accepted by judges based on the
| record. See the failed Hunter Biden plea.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The majority of cases end in a plea deal. Yes, the judge
| has to sign off, but usually they just accept whatever
| deal was made (of course the lawyers present it
| "graciously" and answer any questions so the judges feel
| involved, but in my limited experience they accept any
| reasonable ones).
|
| The Biden deal is unusual. It's highly political. The
| other interesting part is that they still have an active
| investigation, so it's not like the deal was conclusive
| (prosecution and defense were arguing on protection from
| future prosecution in the deal).
| qingcharles wrote:
| Having spent a decade locked up, you're not wrong. Most
| criminals are guilty of something.
|
| The biggest problem is that most arrestees never get a fair
| process, which is the primary duty of the justice system.
|
| Firstly they never get to use their right to trial because
| typically there is overcharging in the case and so the
| potential sentence is astronomical and no-one with any sense
| would gamble going to trial even if innocent because a guilty
| verdict would end their life -- so they plead out.
|
| Secondly, the police and prosecutors that I know are all
| dirty as fuck and will do anything and everything to get a
| guilty verdict. Once you are arrested you are assumed guilty
| and the judges will do almost nothing to reign in misconduct
| by sanctioning these parties or dismissing cases.
|
| Most of the time the appeals courts are the only way to get
| some vague sense of justice. They usually have less skin in
| the game and will give a case a bit of a longer look than a
| trial court judge.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| TimPC wrote:
| This reflects the disparity in the east vs west and the focus
| on society vs the individual. It's better from an individual
| rights perspective that an innocent man isn't imprisoned but in
| societies that put far less weight on individual rights, you
| wouldn't be willing to have ten guilty men reoffending to
| prevent that one innocent man being jailed.
| goodbyesf wrote:
| > This reflects the disparity in the east vs west and the
| focus on society vs the individual.
|
| More of this 'east vs west' nonsense. The court system exists
| not for the individual but for the society. This is true in
| the US, in china, in russia, in europe, everywhere.
|
| > It's better from an individual rights perspective
|
| What individual rights? All rights are given to collectives.
| Ask the african slaves who got 'special rights' because they
| belonged to different collectives. Civil rights, women's
| rights, etc are collective rights.
|
| > but in societies that put far less weight on individual
| rights,
|
| You mean societies that believe in collateral damage? Where
| if you think some bad guy is attending a wedding, you kill
| everyone at the wedding?
|
| If there is a society that values individuals or individual
| rights, the society wouldn't exist.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Why is it better one way or the other depending on the focus
| of society? I don't see the connection. I'd equally lose
| faith in the system either way. Maybe moreso if I see my
| neighbor going to jail unjustly rather than some random
| individual.
|
| As for the other way around, seeing a guilty man go free, the
| standard for imprisoning someone being evidence beyond
| reasonable doubt seems reasonable.
|
| Granted, there is a two tier justice system and if you are
| unreasonably wealthy, you have more leeway, but I think
| that's a different discussion.
| dooglius wrote:
| Not necessarily, if comparing against e.g. an approach of
| jailing the first suspect against whom one finds evidence,
| the net number of free guilty men may still go up,
| particularly in crimes where innocent men can be framed.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "you wouldn't be willing to have ten guilty men reoffending
| to prevent that one innocent man being jailed."
|
| You want accuracy. We can just ignore this false dichotomy
| about letting guilty people go to protect the innocent. If
| you are jailing the innocent, then you still have guilty
| parties going free anyways since the wrong person is
| convicted.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| It's not about individual cases, it's about the aggregate
| effect of the rules governing the process. Making it easier
| to convict people (by lowering or shifting the burden of
| proof, weakening procedural protections for the accused
| etc) will result in more guilty people being convicted, but
| it will also result in more innocent people being
| convicted. And making it more difficult to convict has the
| opposite effect.
|
| It's not like the only two possible outcomes of a criminal
| investigation are that a guilty person gets convicted or an
| innocent person gets convicted. You can also convict both
| (eg, if there is evidence that multiple people were
| involved), or neither.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm mot sure why you're replying this to me. Did you mean
| to respond to someone else? It seems to be formed
| argumentatively but follows what I was already saying.
| Kwantuum wrote:
| Pretty sure they're just replying specifically to
|
| > you still have guilty parties going free anyways since
| the wrong person is convicted
|
| which is a non sequitur.
| giantg2 wrote:
| How exactly is that a non sequitur? It should be evident
| that if you jail the innocent party, the guilty party
| would still be at large, case closed, authorities would
| no longer be looking for them.
|
| The whole premise of this one or the other thing is
| flawed. You can increase conviction of the guilty while
| also protecting the innocent depending on the procedures
| taken. The "how" matters at lot. So when you ask people
| stuff like how many guilty men should go free, it's a
| complete farce that is easily manipulated based on how
| you pose the question, methods, and outcomes in the
| fictional scenario. It takes away focus from the actual
| policies/solutions.
|
| Edit: why disagree?
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| What's the aggregate, social effect of living in a state
| where 9% of prisoners are innocent?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I'm not sure it's just "weight on individual rights". Those
| ten guilty men reoffending are going to cause damage to other
| people (assuming it's not something like jaywalking). So for
| me as a person who just wants to live my life, not subject to
| being a victim of false arrest, and also not being a crime
| victim, there's a trade-off. The higher the rate of false
| positives, the more likely I am to be arrested, tried,
| jailed, and perhaps even executed for something that I didn't
| do. But the higher the rate of false negatives, the more
| likely I am to be robbed, beaten, or killed by someone who
| was let go rather than jailed.
|
| The "send one innocent to jail" can and will be abused by
| people in power. The "free 10 guilty" can and will be abused
| by professional criminals.
|
| You can't make it perfect with imperfect people to implement
| the system. The best you can do is set the trade-off to
| minimize the damage to society. Unfortunately, this means
| _some_ people being damaged each direction - some innocent
| people jailed, and some people being harmed by guilty people
| who were let off.
| bee_rider wrote:
| There are also plenty of non-trade-offs, for example.
|
| 1) Generally wasting resources locking up innocent people
| means you have fewer resources to spend locking up the
| guilty ones.
|
| 2) If you have poor investigation that nabs an innocent
| person as the culprit, you might stop investigating
| prematurely and not catch the real perpetrator.
|
| 3) A culture that locks up innocent people makes every
| interaction with the cops potentially life-ruining, which
| will make people less likely to come forward as witnesses,
| etc.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| On the other hand, a culture that doesn't lock up repeat
| offender guilty people makes every interaction with
| _everyone_ potentially life-ruining. So even in that area
| there is a trade-off.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| I don't know how true this is. My friend moved from the West
| to Japan and was explaining how policing works there. He said
| there is more crime in Japan than the statistics show. One
| part of favoring society over the individual is downplaying
| crime. He described it like how there is a perception that if
| no one sees the crime, then the crime did not happen so there
| is pressure from police not to report crimes and they prefer
| not to deal it. He said he once dealt with them where they
| increasingly became hostile towards him and bureaucratic
| demanding more documentation on his immigration status and
| banking records to the point where he dropped it. Don't get
| me wrong, I think Japan is still a low crime country.
|
| I've seen it also, being thrown out of a club by police over
| a false report by someone else as the police ignored things
| going on around them. My point is that it's not extremely
| helpful to society to behave like that.
| gsatic wrote:
| Its pretty much how any org/institution that deals with a
| little too much day to day unpredictability and randomness
| functions.
|
| They learn quickly that lot of the problems they have to solve
| dont have solutions and are above their resource/skill level.
| So the goals turn defensive. Dont get blamed. Avoid the
| hard/unpredictable and complex. Survive long enough to collect
| pension and become a netflix advisor.
|
| No one with a choice wants these jobs.
| makk wrote:
| > No one with a choice wants these jobs.
|
| Disagree, because many people want to:
|
| > collect pension and become a Netflix advisor.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Or the power/prestige that goes with them.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| > or are part of a community the police are scared of.
|
| That was my suspicion about things. I wondered why the police
| bothered to pursue someone like Mark Meechan, the one arrested
| for teaching a pug to do a nazi salute as a joke, when there
| must be more serious crimes they could devote resources to.
|
| I think there obviously are more serious crimes but would
| require a lot more effort and trouble to make any arrests.
| Going after people for frivolous things is much easier for them
| achieve. They can kind of give off the appearance of doing
| something useful this way.
| pc86 wrote:
| I have some experience with LE from various angles, and while
| there may be exceptions, from what I've seen an arrest is an
| arrest is an arrest. With the exception of major kingpin-type
| criminals, which your average detective is never going to get
| anywhere near investigating, you don't get any more juice in
| the department because you arrest some big drug dealer
| compared to arresting the comedian with the well-trained dog
| - you _certainly_ don 't get promoted any faster or get any
| raises or bonuses. And what's more, the big drug dealer is
| likely to have an attorney and dangerous friends while the
| comedian likely won't. Every aspect of harassing the person
| who may have subjectively broken some ridiculous law to
| nobody's harm is going to be 10x easier than going after the
| person objectively ruining lives and acquiring boat loads of
| treasure in the process.
| bArray wrote:
| > I wondered why the police bothered to pursue someone like
| Mark Meechan, the one arrested for teaching a pug to do a
| nazi salute as a joke, when there must be more serious crimes
| they could devote resources to.
|
| About that case particularly:
|
| 1. The media somehow turned up on the doorstep of the arrest
| of a previously private person. They directly doxxed him and
| prevented a fair trial.
|
| 2. The police were not allowed to complain about the incident
| directly, so they pulled in a person to complain on their
| behalf that they have worked with on many cases.
|
| 3. The judge assumed his malicious intent for the joke made,
| despite the evidence suggesting otherwise.
|
| The irony is, he made a joke a the _expense_ of Nazis, and
| now the UK government actively funds groups within the
| Ukrainian army who are self-confessed Nazis. (That 's not an
| argument for or against Ukraine, simply to add perspective.)
|
| > I think there obviously are more serious crimes but would
| require a lot more effort and trouble to make any arrests.
| Going after people for frivolous things is much easier for
| them achieve. They can kind of give off the appearance of
| doing something useful this way.
|
| The police will sometimes pursue cases that excite them -
| ones that are active or high profile. Small or unexciting
| cases are dropped. A local cash machine got stolen, cut open,
| robbed and dumped in our garden - and they didn't even want
| to swab it for prints or collect it.
|
| And it's far worse. The police get pressure from above to
| make X group less represented in their criminal statistics
| irrespective of any reality-based bias, so the only option
| left is simply not to pursue them.
|
| This will just continue to get worse. They are fuelled by
| ideology and hindered by ongoing cuts (relative to
| inflation). They will soon stop responding to all mental
| health incidents (i.e. suicide attempts), and there is no
| other funding or service to pick up the slack.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| > The police get pressure from above to make X group less
| represented in their criminal statistics irrespective of
| any reality-based bias
|
| Yes that's what's unspoken but you've said it out loud.
| Although I think there is a lot of denial around it.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Meanwhile the real guilty people are 'let off' (non-
| pursued)_ [...]
|
| On how modern autocracies work:
|
| > _Day in and day out, the [Orban] regime works more through
| inducements than through intimidation. The courts are packed,
| and forgiving of the regime's allies. Friends of the government
| win state contracts at high prices and borrow on easy terms
| from the central bank. Those on the inside grow rich by
| favoritism; those on the outside suffer from the general
| deterioration of the economy. As one shrewd observer told me on
| a recent visit, "The benefit of controlling a modern state is
| less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to
| protect the guilty."_
|
| * https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-
| to-...
|
| * https://archive.li/ZIzCm
| didntcheck wrote:
| Sorry to hear that happened to you (if I'm understanding
| correctly). There really is so little concern or compensation
| given to innocent people who get hit by the system. How long
| did it take you to get your items back? What sort of damage did
| they do?
|
| > or are part of a community the police are scared of
|
| Also curious about this if you have any more info to share.
| What sorts of communities did you see that with?
| bArray wrote:
| > There really is so little concern or compensation given to
| innocent people who get hit by the system.
|
| No, there is none. You can report directly to the police
| force which will throw your complaint out. The next step is
| the IOPC [1] which is made of ex-police, and it's not
| independent. They just clear themselves of wrong-doing, when
| they are evidently in the wrong.
|
| > How long did it take you to get your items back? What sort
| of damage did they do?
|
| Over a year in one case, several months in another case (car
| keys, phone, wallet, work clothes). If it wasn't for having
| another bank account, a spare car and phone (all of which
| they didn't know about), I would have been without an income.
|
| To add insult, they lost the car keys and damaged the phone.
| When I complained, they told me to claim on the house
| insurance - which would have sent the premiums through the
| roof.
|
| > Also curious about this if you have any more info to share.
| What sorts of communities did you see that with?
|
| Tight-knit groups, such as travellers or gangs. They have no
| way to enter the group and they all share the same name when
| asked.
|
| [1] https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/
| CalRobert wrote:
| My neighbours in Ireland had two mobile homes, 17 kids,
| several dogs (Akitas and German Shepherds mostly) hundreds of
| cousins, and they would all come out to scream at anyone who
| gave them trouble or asked them to perhaps keep their dogs on
| their land. They had an ongoing feud with the neighbour who
| had shot one of their dogs for killing too many sheep. They
| shot fireworks over my (thatched) roof and would make rude
| remarks any time they saw me outside.
|
| The planning department hassled me for the heritage
| characteristics of my windows. They were happy to ignore the
| completely illegal mobile homes next door. The police do
| nothing but occasionally talk to them very sheepishly.
|
| This is in a country where the police usually do not carry
| firearms, which I don't think makes a lot of sense,
| personally.
|
| Of course, if you do something truly horrible, like smoke
| cannabis or not pay taxes on onion imports, you'll go to
| jail.
| bArray wrote:
| I've seen extremely similar throughout the UK. Possibly the
| worse thing about the UK (or Ireland) is that it punishes
| those who abide by the rules the most.
|
| Unfortunately you will not got any support from the
| government or police. The only way out of your situation is
| to gather multiple allies and make the area unviable. In
| one local place the farmers shot bird scarers over the tops
| of their caravans for several nights and they left.
| qingcharles wrote:
| > From personal experience: Better yet, you can have the police
| abuse their power to seize property and raid your home during
| the early hours of the morning, only to have all charges
| dropped, in which case you have to go through a lengthy process
| to get your (now damaged) items back. There is zero recourse,
| all of the oversight bodies are filled with ex-police and look
| after their own.
|
| Amen. I've had this happen multiple times. I antagonize the
| police though by doing work in the justice field and trying to
| publicize police misconduct. I was arrested last year simply
| for Retweeting a newspaper article that I'd interviewed for.
| The irony is that it was the government themselves that had
| Tweeted the article to bring light to the police misconduct.
| When I was in jail I was laughing with my lawyer as it was so
| ridiculous and of course the judge would throw it out. Ah, I'm
| so naive sometimes. And I'd only just got out after doing 10
| years in detention waiting for trial before the prosecutor came
| to me and said they wanted to throw all the charges out.
| bArray wrote:
| Massive respect to you. I would suggest that in the future
| you somewhat hide your identity so that you can have a larger
| impact.
|
| > And I'd only just got out after doing 10 years in detention
| waiting for trial before the prosecutor came to me and said
| they wanted to throw all the charges out.
|
| Surely that can't be legal? They've taken 10 years away from
| you, that must be the system being used maliciously?
| qingcharles wrote:
| Sadly it is. I spent that time locked up simply because I
| didn't have the tiny bit of money needed to bail out. If I
| had been wealthy I would not have spent a day locked up.
| That's why some jurisdictions are now trying to do away
| with what is called "cash bonds" to prevent this difference
| between rich and poor people's justice.
| playday wrote:
| Most criminals offend multiple times. So if it's better to let n
| guilty people go free than punish 1 innocent, how many times (x)
| would criminals need to reoffend for half of them to end up in
| prison? Been too long since I studied stats so I'm not sure what
| type of distribution to use, Poisson?
| qingcharles wrote:
| That is absolutely true, but there is a reason for it. When
| society releases someone from prison they generally have so
| little support to get them back to being a productive member of
| society that they end up in situations where they reoffend.
|
| Source: working with dozens of parolees.
| petsfed wrote:
| Did anyone else notice this weird typographical sequence?
|
| >and innocent "perfons," warning that "prefumptive evidences
| fhould be warily preffed." 77 What exactly a perfon is may be a
| fruitful fubject for further refearch.
|
| I expect its because of a steady evolution of the way English is
| written, but it is so jarring I had to go back and reread the
| rest of the article to confirm that it was just very specific
| uses of the letter 's' that justified being turned into 'f'
| svat wrote:
| The author is making fun of the long s in the quote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s (rules:
| https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2006/06/rules-for-long-s.h...
| ), by reading it as "f". (As in Flanders and Swann
| "Greenfleeves")
| rossdavidh wrote:
| To find the proper N, we should also know the ratio x of serious
| crimes which result in the criminal being caught. In other words,
| if we let this guilty man go free, how many other innocents will
| he kill/rob/rape/whatever before he is caught again? If x = 0.01,
| then 100 innocents will suffer (on average) for each guilty man
| you fail to convict, which is problematic. On the other hand, if
| x = 1, then the situation is much different.
|
| Also, each innocent who is wrongly convicted, will erode public
| support for the criminal justice system, and now we have a non-
| linear system and it gets very complex. But probably we could
| break out some calculus and find the optimal N given x and y
| (erosion of criminal justice system power due to loss of public
| support, for each innocent convicted, that results in fewer tips
| to law enforcement), and maybe z (erosion of criminal justice
| system power due to loss of public support for each criminal set
| free, that results in greater likelihood people take the law into
| their own hands).
|
| I suppose, working backwards, you could for each N work out what
| that person thinks the values of x, y, and/or z are. If you think
| we rarely catch criminals, then letting one go is a bigger
| problem than if you think we normally catch the perpetrator of
| any given crime.
| [deleted]
| watwut wrote:
| Innocent person in jail means that guilty person walked free.
| If it is easy to lock Innocent people, justice system has no
| incentive to try to figure out who really did it.
|
| Result is easily that then you have both more innocent people
| in prison and more guilty people being free.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| The expression sets up a relationship: more strict and more
| effective vs less strict and less effective, and asks us how
| much effectiveness we're willing to give up in exchange for
| safety. This just misses the point, a legal system that locks
| up innocent people instead of guilty ones is just not doing a
| good job.
|
| I think it is well intended (at least for values of n much
| greater than 1) but harmful.
| cornholio wrote:
| The problem of "n" does not completely go away even in a
| much improved legal system. Assuming you can identify the
| killer 99.99% correctly with absolute certainty, you will
| still have that one in ten thousand case where the killer
| is not precisely known, but there is 50%, 90%, 99%
| probability it's them, that is, you risk to convict one
| innocent man for every n = 1, 10, 100 guilty persons in
| those rare cases.
|
| So the efficiency of the criminal system and the problem of
| "n" are somewhat orthogonal: the first is an issue of
| effective governance, the second is a political choice
| faced by any practical (thus, imperfect) system of
| governance.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I'm realizing there should also be something in there about the
| number of crimes which an unconvicted criminal is likely to
| commit. Maybe their close call (being put on trial but not
| convicted) causes them to walk the straight and narrow, at
| least for a while. I am starting to think that a Bayesian model
| of this is what is called for. We do have some data (from DNA
| exoneration of the convicted, and also from clearly guilty who
| are not convicted because evidence was obtained improperly) as
| to how often we fail to convict the guilty, or convict the
| innocent, which we could plug into this.
|
| Which brings up a larger point: what is N, really? Like, now,
| in the real world in my country or state or city, what is N? It
| would be interesting to try to estimate it.
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