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I agree. In the spirit of that other article posted a few days ago ("It's better to let n guilty people go free than to imprison one innocent person"), I'm of

I agree. In the spirit of that other article posted a few days ago ("It's better to let n guilty people go free than to imprison one innocent person"), I'm of the opinion that the field of criminal justice needs a huge overhaul in terms of rigor. We need professional statisticians working on cases that involve guilt and innocence. We need to provide accurate probabilities to jurors. We need replication and peer review of lab results. As a society, we owe a fair and accurate trial to everyone, and if we have the technical resources to improve upon the existing process, then I think we have a moral obligation to do so.

thaumasiotes 11y ago
> the field of criminal justice needs a huge overhaul in terms of rigor. We need professional statisticians working on cases that involve guilt and innocence. We need to provide accurate probabilities to jurors. We need replication and peer review of lab results. This misjudges the fundamental operation of the justice system. Talk about probabilities is there to sound good, not because the justice system wants to use statistical calculations. http://volokh.com/2014/01/02/wrongful-convictions-proof-beyond-reasonable-doubt/ http://volokh.com/2014/01/02/wrongful-convictions-proof-beyo... > So here we had a case where there were no other witnesses, no “corroborating physical evidence,” a “word against word situation,” yet the judge concluded that Montgomery was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt because the judge saw “no motive whatsoever” for Coast to lie (though it turns out that Coast indeed had such a motive). > My sense is that in such cases convictions are fairly common (though not universal), especially when there’s no obvious motive for the witness to lie, but sometimes even when there is. This wasn't just any word-against-word situation. This was a girl retroactively accusing the neighbor of raping her seven years in the past, when she was 10. No evidence was ever offered (nor could it have been, really); no support of any kind was ever required for her to have a young man thrown in jail for several years. And my observation in passing earlier, that her accusation couldn't have been supported by any evidence even if it had been true, is significant: > What’s doing the work in many of the convictions, I suspect, is that the very ubiquity of the risk makes factfinders realize that — if we were to constantly consider this generalized risk, in the absence of more specific information — a wide range of crimes couldn’t be effectively prosecuted. That’s especially true of child molestation and rape, but it’s also true of many sorts of felons’ possession of guns, robberies, and the like. We've created a justice system that requires large numbers of punishments for crimes which could never be demonstrated under ideal conditions. It shouldn't surprise us that we then don't prosecute those crimes with statistical, or any other kind of, rigor. Consider a very typical word-against-word: a traffic cop writes you a ticket for running a red light. You show up in court and say "it was yellow". The cop says "it was red". He doesn't have to give evidence; his word is worth more than yours. Why?
- imh 11y ago
  More than that, if you use statistical evidence you open the door to things like "poor people are more likely to commit X crime, and you are poor, so you are more likely to have committed the crime." While it's valid inference, it's a terrible setup for a justice system. I'm sure there are plenty of causal correlations between being some particular protected class (gay/black/muslim) and committing different crimes, but we exclude discrimination on those for a reason. Statistical inference and justice should not go hand in hand.
- tptacek 11y ago
  Off the top of my head, and not that I don't have sympathy for the point you're making, but: * Because their individualized incentive to lie --- or, more likely, to retcon a false belief that the light was yellow when it wasn't --- is far less than yours. In fact, it probably does not matter to them one way or the other if you win your case; they won't lose a penny. * Because they're a third-party observer tasked with monitoring your compliance with the traffic light, whereas you drive through hundreds of lights without burning a milliseconds thought on any of them. * Because they're trained to monitor compliance with lights, and you're not. * Because they've testified repeatedly before the court and have a track record, and you don't. * Because given the cohort of people contesting tickets, you're statistically likely to be wrong, because so many people contest tickets for bogus reasons. I'm not trying to argue that the police are always right about traffic tickets (although it is the case that I have less sympathy for people cited for traffic violations than for almost any other offense [and I get cited too!], given the risks that noncompliant driving imposes on everyone else).
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    As I understand things, traffic tickets are generally revenue to the police, so they do care if you win your case. They'll only really notice if large numbers of people start doing this, but a principle that their unsupported word is no better than yours will certainly rise to that level. There are a lot of process reasons to give the police the legal right to overswear civilians. They basically boil down to the same problem discussed in the Volokh piece, which is that without that right they lose the ability to prosecute (I'm not claiming they are prosecutors; I want to use that word in a more general sense) most of the cases that are meant to be their job. But this isn't compatible with the much-vaunted notion of "innocent until proven guilty"; it's actually a judgment that most innocent people should discover that it's impossible to be found innocent once they're charged.

thaumasiotes 11y ago

> the field of criminal justice needs a huge overhaul in terms of rigor. We need professional statisticians working on cases that involve guilt and innocence. We need to provide accurate probabilities to jurors. We need replication and peer review of lab results. This misjudges the fundamental operation of the justice system. Talk about probabilities is there to sound good, not because the justice system wants to use statistical calculations. http://volokh.com/2014/01/02/wrongful-convictions-proof-beyond-reasonable-doubt/ http://volokh.com/2014/01/02/wrongful-convictions-proof-beyo... > So here we had a case where there were no other witnesses, no “corroborating physical evidence,” a “word against word situation,” yet the judge concluded that Montgomery was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt because the judge saw “no motive whatsoever” for Coast to lie (though it turns out that Coast indeed had such a motive). > My sense is that in such cases convictions are fairly common (though not universal), especially when there’s no obvious motive for the witness to lie, but sometimes even when there is. This wasn't just any word-against-word situation. This was a girl retroactively accusing the neighbor of raping her seven years in the past, when she was 10. No evidence was ever offered (nor could it have been, really); no support of any kind was ever required for her to have a young man thrown in jail for several years. And my observation in passing earlier, that her accusation couldn't have been supported by any evidence even if it had been true, is significant: > What’s doing the work in many of the convictions, I suspect, is that the very ubiquity of the risk makes factfinders realize that — if we were to constantly consider this generalized risk, in the absence of more specific information — a wide range of crimes couldn’t be effectively prosecuted. That’s especially true of child molestation and rape, but it’s also true of many sorts of felons’ possession of guns, robberies, and the like. We've created a justice system that requires large numbers of punishments for crimes which could never be demonstrated under ideal conditions. It shouldn't surprise us that we then don't prosecute those crimes with statistical, or any other kind of, rigor. Consider a very typical word-against-word: a traffic cop writes you a ticket for running a red light. You show up in court and say "it was yellow". The cop says "it was red". He doesn't have to give evidence; his word is worth more than yours. Why?

imh 11y ago
More than that, if you use statistical evidence you open the door to things like "poor people are more likely to commit X crime, and you are poor, so you are more likely to have committed the crime." While it's valid inference, it's a terrible setup for a justice system. I'm sure there are plenty of causal correlations between being some particular protected class (gay/black/muslim) and committing different crimes, but we exclude discrimination on those for a reason. Statistical inference and justice should not go hand in hand.
tptacek 11y ago
Off the top of my head, and not that I don't have sympathy for the point you're making, but: * Because their individualized incentive to lie --- or, more likely, to retcon a false belief that the light was yellow when it wasn't --- is far less than yours. In fact, it probably does not matter to them one way or the other if you win your case; they won't lose a penny. * Because they're a third-party observer tasked with monitoring your compliance with the traffic light, whereas you drive through hundreds of lights without burning a milliseconds thought on any of them. * Because they're trained to monitor compliance with lights, and you're not. * Because they've testified repeatedly before the court and have a track record, and you don't. * Because given the cohort of people contesting tickets, you're statistically likely to be wrong, because so many people contest tickets for bogus reasons. I'm not trying to argue that the police are always right about traffic tickets (although it is the case that I have less sympathy for people cited for traffic violations than for almost any other offense [and I get cited too!], given the risks that noncompliant driving imposes on everyone else).
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  As I understand things, traffic tickets are generally revenue to the police, so they do care if you win your case. They'll only really notice if large numbers of people start doing this, but a principle that their unsupported word is no better than yours will certainly rise to that level. There are a lot of process reasons to give the police the legal right to overswear civilians. They basically boil down to the same problem discussed in the Volokh piece, which is that without that right they lose the ability to prosecute (I'm not claiming they are prosecutors; I want to use that word in a more general sense) most of the cases that are meant to be their job. But this isn't compatible with the much-vaunted notion of "innocent until proven guilty"; it's actually a judgment that most innocent people should discover that it's impossible to be found innocent once they're charged.