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"Paradoxically, Justice Antonin Scalia has emerged as a vocal early skeptic about the risk of taint in the work of crime labs" -- there is nothing paradoxical a

by JackFr 11y ago

"Paradoxically, Justice Antonin Scalia has emerged as a vocal early skeptic about the risk of taint in the work of crime labs" -- there is nothing paradoxical about it all. The paradox exists only in the mind and shallow analysis of an intellectually lazy author who has been conditioned to believe that he should categorically disagree with Scalia.

hackuser 11y ago
Scalia was indeed very conservative, and I'm pretty sure he would tell you that. Often was not a friend of the accused or convicted, though there were some exceptions.
- wyldfire 11y ago
  But how should "conservatism" play into faith-in-forensic-evidence? Seems like it's mostly orthogonal. I suspect that trends of finding against the accused would track the issues well: Scalia was focused on a strict interpretation of the Constitution.
  - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    Because death penalty supporters, like Scalia, ultimately have to accept the court's ruling as perfect or the government is just murdering random people. You can't have it both ways. You can't support the DP and also accept that our investigation tools, be them technical or social, are highly flawed and that our court is often wrong. That's the contradiction here.
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      > Because death penalty supporters, like Scalia, ultimately have to accept the court's ruling as perfect or the government is just murdering random people. False dichotomy. The court's ruling can be less than perfect and still be very far from random. (Perfection is clearly something they should strive for, of course.) But in fact, we are not (and should not be) willing to accept a 100% false negative rate in order to achieve a 0% false positive rate.
    - reality_czech 11y ago
      Everyone understands that the government and the criminal justice system is imperfect. We have them anyway, because the alternatives are worse. Sending an innocent man to jail for life is not fundamentally different from executing him. You can't give people back years of their life, and many people die in prison for various reasons.
      - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
        There is a fundamental difference: the living person could continue to lobby his case via extraordinary means (pardon, etc) or wait until there's some meta-analysis of evidence or other event that frees him. Being killed means this never happens. Once the execution takes place, there's no going back. We've seen several of these cases of people in prison for years getting their lives back recently. We don't hear about this happening to the executed, because we can't give life back.
        reality_czech 11y ago
        I agree that the death penalty is not to be taken lightly, but that is different from arguing that it should not be used at all. There are lots of examples of crime bosses, murderers, and drug kingpins escaping from prison, but no instances of them returning from the dead. Lives may be lost from inaction as well as action, and the philosophy that "we must be 100% certain to do anything in life" is a self-serving and disingenuous argument, which could be applied equally well against any punishment the state might choose to apply.
        hackuser 11y ago
        > the living person could continue to lobby his case via extraordinary means (pardon, etc) or wait until there's some meta-analysis of evidence or other event that frees him. That's theoretically true, but how often does it happen? My impression is that more people are exonerated on death row than when serving life sentences.
  - hackuser 11y ago
    > how should "conservatism" play into faith-in-forensic-evidence? Seems like it's mostly orthogonal. That would be ideal, but the reality is that many judges make decisions, to significant degree, based on ideology. Of course there is no way to prove what someone's motive or state of mind is, but a few observations: 1) Many people think this is plainly true, 2) many votes by Supreme Court Justices can be predicted based solely on the politics of the issue, and with no knowledge of the facts or law, and 3) the Republicans in the Senate currently openly claim that Justice is an ideological job and therefore they won't vote for a Democrat's nominee. Judges are human beings; we shouldn't hold them to unrealistic standards or we will be shutting our eyes to the realities of how and when justice succeeds and fails. Some are more ideological, some less; some inject ideology more intentionally, some more unconciously based on biases and assumptions. I once attended a speech by a legal scholar who advocated doing away with juries, and all their human unreliability and flaws, and relying instead on the impartial wisdom of judges. An experienced litigator leaned over to me and whispered, 'judges put on their pants one leg at a time, just like everybody else.' > Scalia was focused on a strict interpretation of the Constitution. He said he was, but I've yet to see evidence that it was true. IMHO, he was strict about things he didn't like and flexible about those he did (e.g., Citizens United).
CWuestefeld 11y ago
I re-read this sentence several times, and I'm still not sure how I should interpret it. What is Scalia skeptical of? Is he skeptical that there is any risk, or is he skeptical of the crime labs? Maybe my reading comprehension isn't up to snuff, but I think when you're trying to point out a (putative) paradox, you should avoid stacking too many clauses so that it becomes fuzzy which of those is where you see the conflict.
- lawpoop 11y ago
  I think the general take-away is that Scalia is skeptical of "Big Goverment" and state power. Scale ruled that police needed warrants to put tracking devices on vehicles: http://jalopnik.com/antonin-scalia-the-tiny-constable-and-why-cops-need-w-1759071376 http://jalopnik.com/antonin-scalia-the-tiny-constable-and-wh... "Lawyers for the government argued that Jones had no reasonable expectation of privacy out on public roads, and therefore affixing a GPS tracking device to someone’s car is not a “search” at all—a search would trigger protections under the Fourth Amendment..." Scalia, who authored the court’s majority opinion, acted in a way that reflected his own strict interpretation of the constitution: in seeking to preserve the Framers’ supposed intent of the Fourth Amendment when it was created, Scalia wondered if the 18th century colonial equivalent of this case would be a “constable” hiding in a suspect’s vehicle." Anywho, it is a pretty dumb move to gloss the opinions/interpretations of Supreme Court Justices by a simple "which side of the spectrum are they on?" analysis. They are usually pretty sophisticated in those respects. You can't just say "Oh they are going to side with Law Enforcement/The States/The Federal Government/The NRA" etc.
ohyes 11y ago
The paradox is that he's skeptical of the crime labs, which have been used in convicting/sentencing people to death, yet in the quote he appears to state that there have never been wrongful death sentence convictions because of tainted/false evidence. The paradox is between Scalia's statements and is actually pretty clear. But you do have to put the entire paragraph and read the link to understand the context. “It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby.” “Two years ago, Scalia spoke for a 5-4 majority reversing the conviction of an alleged cocaine dealer from Massachusetts because prosecutors did not bring to court a lab analyst whose test confirmed the bags of white powder were indeed cocaine. The dissenters, including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr., said a lab technician who conducts a test is not a "witness" in the ordinary sense of the term.“ Based on Scalia's constitutional views (a very literal interpretation), I'd say it probably isn't really a paradox to him, but an outside observer might see the results as conflicting. (I mean, obviously it wasn't going to be a literal paradox, that's not what paradoxically is taken to mean colloquially).
- kobayashi 11y ago
  I'd imagine that Scalia would have argued in response that the legal system provides for enough failsafes, since that individual wasn't actually executed.
adultSwim 11y ago
I believe Dahlia Lithwick is a she.
coldtea 11y ago
I think "intellectually lazy author", "in the mind and shallow analysis", "conditioned to believe" etc tells more about your stance towards Scalia than the author's.

by JackFr 11y ago

hackuser 11y ago

Scalia was indeed very conservative, and I'm pretty sure he would tell you that. Often was not a friend of the accused or convicted, though there were some exceptions.

wyldfire 11y ago
But how should "conservatism" play into faith-in-forensic-evidence? Seems like it's mostly orthogonal. I suspect that trends of finding against the accused would track the issues well: Scalia was focused on a strict interpretation of the Constitution.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  Because death penalty supporters, like Scalia, ultimately have to accept the court's ruling as perfect or the government is just murdering random people. You can't have it both ways. You can't support the DP and also accept that our investigation tools, be them technical or social, are highly flawed and that our court is often wrong. That's the contradiction here.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    > Because death penalty supporters, like Scalia, ultimately have to accept the court's ruling as perfect or the government is just murdering random people. False dichotomy. The court's ruling can be less than perfect and still be very far from random. (Perfection is clearly something they should strive for, of course.) But in fact, we are not (and should not be) willing to accept a 100% false negative rate in order to achieve a 0% false positive rate.
  - reality_czech 11y ago
    Everyone understands that the government and the criminal justice system is imperfect. We have them anyway, because the alternatives are worse. Sending an innocent man to jail for life is not fundamentally different from executing him. You can't give people back years of their life, and many people die in prison for various reasons.
    - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
      There is a fundamental difference: the living person could continue to lobby his case via extraordinary means (pardon, etc) or wait until there's some meta-analysis of evidence or other event that frees him. Being killed means this never happens. Once the execution takes place, there's no going back. We've seen several of these cases of people in prison for years getting their lives back recently. We don't hear about this happening to the executed, because we can't give life back.
      - reality_czech 11y ago
        I agree that the death penalty is not to be taken lightly, but that is different from arguing that it should not be used at all. There are lots of examples of crime bosses, murderers, and drug kingpins escaping from prison, but no instances of them returning from the dead. Lives may be lost from inaction as well as action, and the philosophy that "we must be 100% certain to do anything in life" is a self-serving and disingenuous argument, which could be applied equally well against any punishment the state might choose to apply.
      - hackuser 11y ago
        > the living person could continue to lobby his case via extraordinary means (pardon, etc) or wait until there's some meta-analysis of evidence or other event that frees him. That's theoretically true, but how often does it happen? My impression is that more people are exonerated on death row than when serving life sentences.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > how should "conservatism" play into faith-in-forensic-evidence? Seems like it's mostly orthogonal. That would be ideal, but the reality is that many judges make decisions, to significant degree, based on ideology. Of course there is no way to prove what someone's motive or state of mind is, but a few observations: 1) Many people think this is plainly true, 2) many votes by Supreme Court Justices can be predicted based solely on the politics of the issue, and with no knowledge of the facts or law, and 3) the Republicans in the Senate currently openly claim that Justice is an ideological job and therefore they won't vote for a Democrat's nominee. Judges are human beings; we shouldn't hold them to unrealistic standards or we will be shutting our eyes to the realities of how and when justice succeeds and fails. Some are more ideological, some less; some inject ideology more intentionally, some more unconciously based on biases and assumptions. I once attended a speech by a legal scholar who advocated doing away with juries, and all their human unreliability and flaws, and relying instead on the impartial wisdom of judges. An experienced litigator leaned over to me and whispered, 'judges put on their pants one leg at a time, just like everybody else.' > Scalia was focused on a strict interpretation of the Constitution. He said he was, but I've yet to see evidence that it was true. IMHO, he was strict about things he didn't like and flexible about those he did (e.g., Citizens United).

CWuestefeld 11y ago

I re-read this sentence several times, and I'm still not sure how I should interpret it. What is Scalia skeptical of? Is he skeptical that there is any risk, or is he skeptical of the crime labs? Maybe my reading comprehension isn't up to snuff, but I think when you're trying to point out a (putative) paradox, you should avoid stacking too many clauses so that it becomes fuzzy which of those is where you see the conflict.

lawpoop 11y ago
I think the general take-away is that Scalia is skeptical of "Big Goverment" and state power. Scale ruled that police needed warrants to put tracking devices on vehicles: http://jalopnik.com/antonin-scalia-the-tiny-constable-and-why-cops-need-w-1759071376 http://jalopnik.com/antonin-scalia-the-tiny-constable-and-wh... "Lawyers for the government argued that Jones had no reasonable expectation of privacy out on public roads, and therefore affixing a GPS tracking device to someone’s car is not a “search” at all—a search would trigger protections under the Fourth Amendment..." Scalia, who authored the court’s majority opinion, acted in a way that reflected his own strict interpretation of the constitution: in seeking to preserve the Framers’ supposed intent of the Fourth Amendment when it was created, Scalia wondered if the 18th century colonial equivalent of this case would be a “constable” hiding in a suspect’s vehicle." Anywho, it is a pretty dumb move to gloss the opinions/interpretations of Supreme Court Justices by a simple "which side of the spectrum are they on?" analysis. They are usually pretty sophisticated in those respects. You can't just say "Oh they are going to side with Law Enforcement/The States/The Federal Government/The NRA" etc.

ohyes 11y ago

The paradox is that he's skeptical of the crime labs, which have been used in convicting/sentencing people to death, yet in the quote he appears to state that there have never been wrongful death sentence convictions because of tainted/false evidence. The paradox is between Scalia's statements and is actually pretty clear. But you do have to put the entire paragraph and read the link to understand the context. “It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby.” “Two years ago, Scalia spoke for a 5-4 majority reversing the conviction of an alleged cocaine dealer from Massachusetts because prosecutors did not bring to court a lab analyst whose test confirmed the bags of white powder were indeed cocaine. The dissenters, including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr., said a lab technician who conducts a test is not a "witness" in the ordinary sense of the term.“ Based on Scalia's constitutional views (a very literal interpretation), I'd say it probably isn't really a paradox to him, but an outside observer might see the results as conflicting. (I mean, obviously it wasn't going to be a literal paradox, that's not what paradoxically is taken to mean colloquially).

kobayashi 11y ago
I'd imagine that Scalia would have argued in response that the legal system provides for enough failsafes, since that individual wasn't actually executed.

adultSwim 11y ago

I believe Dahlia Lithwick is a she.

coldtea 11y ago

I think "intellectually lazy author", "in the mind and shallow analysis", "conditioned to believe" etc tells more about your stance towards Scalia than the author's.