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Cool. By this article's own logic, only 33% of innocent people tried were wrongly convicted. What a great system.
by DubiousPusher 9y ago
Cool. By this article's own logic, only 33% of innocent people tried were wrongly convicted. What a great system.
- Retra 9y ago"Hope for a miracle to occur" isn't much of a system when you get right down to it.
- fjsolwmv 9y agoThat how it works today in the public defender system
- squeaky-clean 9y agoI would have assumed around 99%. At least it's much better than that.
- Kiro 9y agoNot sure why you're getting downvoted. I expected the same.
- Bartweiss 9y agoMe too, which is why I'm a bit surprised at all the negativity towards this article. Sure, it's sort of 'defending' trial by ordeal, but it's not new that this practice was real and terrible. What's novel to me is that it wasn't just a way to automatically convict every suspect; a 2/3 acquittal rate is vastly higher than I would have guessed.
- squeaky-clean 9y agoYeah, I really enjoyed this article too! Trial by ordeal has always confused me for that reason, obviously 100% of people holding burning iron will get burnt hands, wouldn't they find it fishy if 100% of the people undergoing trial end up guilty? And this gives a really sensible explanation for that.
- DubiousPusher 9y agoYeah, my problem is that the article is titled "Why the trial by ordeal was actually an effective test of guilt" and not "Why the trial by ordeal was a less horrifying meat grinder of human stupidity than you might otherwise think."
- mdpopescu 9y agoIs today's system better?
- DubiousPusher 9y agoPhilosophically yes. In practice, perhaps not.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoIt relies on testimony under a penalty of perjury that is rarely enforced and little way of proving, with witnesses that do not fear a supernatural extrajudicial force. Testimony is masqueraded as truth, or at least final. You already know the answer.
- DubiousPusher 9y agoAgreed. The extent to which human testiminy is relied upon in court is a scandal. Especially with how much we now know about the ubiquity of human incorrectness, bias and lies.
- CobrastanJorji 9y agoOne assumes that there would be some degree of corruption involved when any person gets to decide whether anyone's guilty or innocent with impunity. Perhaps the rich would sometimes bribe the priest, or the priest would decide that that ugly jerk probably did steal that horse. Plus, getting the water to cool was probably pretty inexact, and as much as you might want to declare a hand unburnt, really bad burns all over your arm are pretty hard to hide.
- sddfd 9y agoI'm not defending the system. However, the priest also took holy confessions from all of his sheep, which is as good as medieval surveillance gets. He could not, however, come out and say that somebody already confessed the crime because holy confession was supposed to br private. So the church as a political institution used a device which allowed to act upon knowledge obtained in holy confessions without admitting that they did so, thereby ensuring that the sheep did not loose faith in the confidentiality of holy confessions.
- agarden 9y agoEven if the suspect had not confessed to this particular crime in the confessional booth, the priest would presumably have a good idea of the character of each of the people in his care, allowing him to make a pretty good guess as to the guilt of the party in question.
- fjsolwmv 9y agoAh yes, an unmarried woman, poor character,must be an adulteress, probably a witch. That's exactly the sort of prejudice that we are still fighting to this today.
- fjsolwmv 9y agoThat's "parallel construction" from mass surveillance. Nothing new under the sun. I doubt a criminal would confess in confessional, though.