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To amplify Paul's point: The legal standard in all criminal trials is "Beyond a reasonable doubt": > The standard that must be met by the prosecution's evidenc

To amplify Paul's point: The legal standard in all criminal trials is "Beyond a reasonable doubt": > The standard that must be met by the prosecution's evidence in a criminal prosecution: that no other logical explanation can be derived from the facts except that the defendant committed the crime, thereby overcoming the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty. And yet, DNA testing has exonerated many convicted in death-penalty cases where that standard should be applied with the most thought and care. I don't think there any conclusion other than: The system of trial-by-peers is flawed with a measurable error rate. The judges failed, the juries failed and the prosecution failed; Innocent people have been put to death, while the real culprits have walked free. Putting people to death based on such a flawed system is unconscionable.

rayiner 6y ago
What does “beyond a reasonable doubt” mean in probability terms? Most people say 90-95%, which suggests even Graham’s 4% number (which is on the high end of such estimates, see: https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1130&context=scholarship https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1130&con...) is actually consistent with the system working as designed. Also, while you’re thinking about that, what’s your estimate of the probability that Derek Chauvin’s negligence was the but for cause of George Floyd’s death (and not some other factor mentioned by the defense expert in the case such as his health or drugs). Note that’s a scientific question—but for causation is an element of the crime. It’s not enough that what Chauvin did was reckless as to human life. His recklessness had to be the cause. Are you 99% certain of that?
- sneak 6y ago
  There is significant tradition in the criminal justice system for the error bias to be in the other direction (in theory, if not in practice): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio I believe that to be "working as designed" we would see a lot more guilty people going free than innocent people being convicted.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > I believe that to be "working as designed" we would see a lot more guilty people going free than innocent people being convicted How do you know that’s not the case?
    - sneak 6y ago
      Conviction and plea bargain rates. Most (>90%) people who are charged (in the US) end up with either a guilty verdict or a guilty plea. IIRC even the ones that don't plead out are ~90% conviction rate, at least at the federal level. Doesn't jive at all with what we know of competence and bias levels observed in police and prosecutors in the US.
      - rayiner 6y ago
        Most people plead out because they’re ridiculously guilty. I’m a crunchy hippie on criminal justice, but I’ve also seen these cases first hand working for an appellate judge. Prosecutors go after cases that are open and shut. You wouldn’t believe how much evidence there is in a typical case that doesn’t go to trial. They have the guy on CCTV with stolen goods in his car and cell phone records of fencing. Innocence Projects weed out hundreds of meritless requests for help for the relatively few meritorious cases they take.
        sneak 6y ago
        > Most people plead out because they’re ridiculously guilty. I know many innocent people who plead out to avoid jail because they're looking at $250k in legal bills and a ~90% trial conviction rate. Juries, being amateurs, are not very good at avoiding bias, as they are completely untrained. I'm not so sure that plea bargain rates are indicative of guilt either way.
        rayiner 6y ago
        How many people who plead do you think have enough money not to be eligible for a PD? And how do you know “many innocent people who plead out?”
- thinkindie 6y ago
  try to tell the family of people in the 4% that the system is working as designed.
  - benjohnson 6y ago
    It’s not ideal. But if we don’t have a working criminal justice system, victims will take the law into their own hands and their error rate will most likely be much worse.
    - siva7 6y ago
      Will they? Doesn’t seem to be the case in Europe. At least people there don’t equal death penalty with a working justice system
    - SomeCallMeTim 6y ago
      There is zero evidence that the death penalty is useful for deterrence. Zero points for using a distraction from the argument at hand which is whether the death penalty is justified.
      - wahern 6y ago
        > For example, MHA found that there was a 66 per cent reduction in the average net weight trafficked for opium in the four-year window after the mandatory death penalty was introduced in 1990 for trafficking more than 1,200g of opium. > In the four years after the death penalty for trafficking more than 500g of cannabis was introduced in 1990, there was "a 15 to 19 percentage point reduction in the probability that traffickers would choose to traffic above the capital sentence threshold", said Mr Shanmugam. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/death-penalty-life-imprisonment-crime-deterrent-shanmugam-13204312 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/death-penalty... Granted, the deterrence value of capital punishment as applied in most nations, such as the U.S., has been shown to be negligible. Most countries, especially in the 21st century, just don't have the stomach to apply capital punishment strictly enough to make it worthwhile. And for good reasons, I might add. But if I were creating a country from scratch, before certain patterns of crime and social dynamics became endemic (that is, firmly rooted in the economic life of certain classes such that they would, as a group, be systematically grossly disproportionately punished), I would absolutely employ capital punishment. I think in the U.S. we tend to assume that poverty and violence go hand-in-hand. And so to punish violence is to in some sense punish the poor. But if you look at poverty around the world, violence is not a necessary consequence of poverty. There are many places where even desperately poor communities experience much less violence than some of the richest towns in the U.S. Ultimately it's a function of the wider culture and its predisposition to violence. If you can use capital punishment to forestall societal changes (e.g. drugs trafficking, use of guns in crimes) that invite pervasive violence, you can achieve a more just outcome for everybody. But in practice you probably can't use capital punishment to put the genie back in the bottle; certainly not alone.
- Aunche 6y ago
  > Are you 99% certain of that? Chauvin's case was unique because the narrative of him being a murderer had already been broadcast across the entire country. While I'm not personally 99% sure of his guilt to second-degree murder, the jurors most likely were.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    He was convicted of 2nd degree unintentional murder. Which, in Minnesota, one of the definitions is that you killed someone while committing a felony. So even if fully an accident, if you kill someone while robbing a store, that's going to be 2nd degree murder. And in the case of this trial, I assume the jury was simply convinced that kneeling on someone's neck for nearly 10 minutes while they beg for mercy and then continuing to apply pressure for minutes after they pass out is a crime in and of itself, even if he had not died.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  Reasonable doubt means doubts that a person is guilty. In probability terms it can be interpreted as a state of belief in the guilt (or innocence) of the accused. PG's 4% number is offered as the frequency of wrongful convictions. The two concepts are not related. For example, if a body of jurors say that they are 95% certain that John Smith murdered Jane Brown, that does not mean that there is a 5% probability that John Smith did not commit the murder, or a 5% probability that he will be wrongfully convicted. The 95% number quantifies the belief of the jurors that John Smith is the murderer. 5% quantifies their belief that John Smith is not the murderer. Nothing in those numbers tells us anything about how often jurors are wrong- it only tells us how strongly they believe they are right. To know the frequency of wrongful convictions we must look at the frequency of exonerations. Whatever is the state of belief of jurors or judges etc during the trial where someone was convicted of a crime can't really inform us about the probability of their future exoneration.
  - nojs 6y ago
    I think most people interpret the task of assigning a percentage to their belief of something like this as equivalent to estimating the percentage of the time they are likely to be wrong. So to say the two are not related is not true.
    - solveit 6y ago
      I think this attributes overly precise motives to people who have none. It may be accurate for the HN crowd (although I doubt it), but in general, people assigning percentages to their beliefs are performing cargo-cult numeracy rather than actually calibrating beliefs. To illustrate: I am pretty sure that people saying they're 99% sure are saying "I am pretty sure" and not "I estimate I will be wrong once out of a hundred times in situations of comparable certainty".
      - MaulingMonkey 6y ago
        99% is a common number for cargo-cult numeracy, much like "give me a minute" probably doesn't mean a literal minute. On the other hand, 95%, 90%, "give me three minutes", etc. are much less cargo-cult, and much less likely to be cargo-cult numeracy. On the third tentacle, people are bad at a lot of estimates, HN crowd included.
- impendia 6y ago
  > What does “beyond a reasonable doubt” mean in probability terms? When serving as a juror in a criminal trial, I asked precisely this question of the judge. Her response was that the law does not prescribe a percentage.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    This is actually a really tough problem, because it's even unclear which rate to talk about. If you look at "trial by peers" as a test, what error rates are we worried about/trying to make unreasonably rare? Sensitivity? Specificity? FDR? Posterior probability under what prior? One of the many many others used in stats? I might argue that FDR [0] is the right number, given that you want to look at the set of convicted people and say it's unreasonable to doubt that a randomly picked one of them is guilty. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_discovery_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_discovery_rate
- jjeaff 6y ago
  Actually, Chauvin's actions did not have to be the only cause of death. Reckless actions only had to contribute in order for him to be guilty. The fact that there were drugs involved or other medical conditions merely establish that he may have been easier to kill than a healthier individual. You only need to be very sure that what Chauvin did was reckless and unreasonable and also very sure that had Chauvin not knelt on his neck for nearly 10 minutes, that Floyd wouldn't have died at that same moment anyway.
  - hnick 6y ago
    Often cited as the 'Eggshell skull' doctrine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull
- sjg007 6y ago
  Maybe you should read the actual charges and Minnesota law; it covers all of your hypotheticals.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  "Beyond reasonable doubt" means it's unreasonable to doubt it. If you bet your friend (who is incentivized to say that they rolled above a 1) rolls a ten sided die and says they rolled above a 1, is it unreasonable to doubt them? No way, 10% chance of an event happening means it's very reasonable that it'll happen. Same for a d20. At what point is it unreasonable to be concerned about rolling a 1? > Most people say 90-95% Most people believe that the 538's 2016 presidential forecast was incompetent because it said trump only had a 1/3 chance of winning and he won. Other papers put it at 10%. People said this was a huge failure because people generally are terrible at intuitively reasoning about probabilities, which is well established. I'd put reasonable doubt at closer to 1 in a few hundred, maybe even rarer. Is the link you included talking about the probability of convicting a person, given that they're innocent, or the probability that a convicted person is innocent? It brings too mind the classic stats issues of testing positive for a disease via a highly accurate test, with it still being probable that you don't have the disease. Even a highly accurate test can be entirely unreasonable as evidence of the rare case. We should probably care about making the false discovery rate the unreasonable one. Of the convicted people, is it unreasonable to doubt that a random one is guilty.
exclusiv 6y ago
I don't know how you could replace the jurors but I think they're only as good as the rest of the system. I mean, if they don't get to hear or see certain evidence because it was deemed non-permissible or it was hidden or destroyed, they can't make a good decision. Not to mention at one point we had no DNA evidence. We relied on junk science with bite marks and shoe prints and other things. Although there are indeed issues with peers (and witnesses). I was in a large lecture hall some time ago and someone came in to do an staged purse snatch. You couldn't see the person's face and they were moving fast. When the class was shown a lineup to say who it was, most all agreed it was one of the suspects. When asked why, they said he was tall (he was much taller than the others in the lineup). And that was the whole point. People will try and identify based on little info and they make the incorrect assumption that the lineup they were presented with actually has the real perpetrator! So if you presented a lineup (maybe an impartial organization other than the police) and made it really clear to the witnesses that the perp may very well NOT be in the lineup, you would probably fix a lot of bad identifications. And you wouldn't have detectives trying to influence a decision. That would be a good start.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  I think the suggestion is that not having a death penalty reduces the harm of incorrect decisions
  - spfzero 6y ago
    I agree. Mistakes are going to happen at some rate, 4% seems realistic. At least if the wrongfully-convicted person is still alive in prison, they can be released and compensated. They may be able to bring a civil suit if there was sufficient malfeasance or incompetence. Some redress can happen. As well, once someone has been executed, interest in finding the truth goes away, and any chance to correct and improve the system based on that case's specifics is gone.
  - tertius 6y ago
    Live in prison and living with knowing that society seems you a deviant vs death. We shouldn't tolerate either if innocent.
newacct583 6y ago
To be clear: I don't think that anyone is surprised to see a 4% error rate here. No one ever really thought this system was perfect, and in point of fact perfect determination of innocence wasn't even a design goal of the jury system. The point to selecting juries from the public is to make it harder for a corrupt government to employ its own law enforcement apparatus corruptly. (Whether that works is also an argument of some topicality right now...) But yeah: given that the error rate is in the 1-2 9's range, it seems like applying it to capital cases is a horrifying mistake. Imagine a medical device with only a 99% chance of not killing you.
2bitencryption 6y ago
> The system of trial-by-peers is flawed with a measurable error rate. I've been listening to the podcast Court Junkie (not to be confused with "Crime Junkie"; long story...), and this was my main takeaway as well. The podcast is great because it is almost entirely audio excerpts from actual murder trials, with some extra narration to tie it together. It made me realize my understanding of trial-by-jury was formulated almost entirely by television and other storytelling, and not be reality. What amazed me the most is how the winner seems to be biased toward whichever side can present the most compelling story. Not the most realistic story or most likely story, just the most interesting one.
- rland 6y ago
  I worked as a trial consultant for a while and got to sit in trial. This is what struck me the most. The best trial lawyers I know are like actors, entertainers, celebrities -- they have the ability to publicly act towards witnesses and juries to evoke friendly, sad, likeable, dis-likeable, happy, angry emotions in a jury. The money doesn't come from legal analysis at all; frankly many were not very bright on legal issues -- that's what second-chairs and legal experts are for. They all, without exception, were fantastically entertaining, funny, weird, charismatic people. It's an important takeaway for life in general. The money follows people who are good at emotions.
adriang133 6y ago
And putting them in prison for multiple years, or even decades, is better ? Hardly. I think the point should be more: the justice system sucks and we should work very hard to make it better, instead of complaining about a particular consequence of it, that is ultimately irrelevant.
- ohazi 6y ago
  That's a great whataboutism. None of your points are wrong, none of your conclusions are wrong, yet your comment still derails and detracts from GP's well stated point. Don't do this.
- solipsism 6y ago
  If there was ever a comment more deserving of a "why not both?" response, I'd be surprised.
- chalst 6y ago
  If you read the linked story about Kevin Cooper, it sounds like he is a better human being today than when he was almost certainly wrongfully convicted. Just one data point, but at least regular prison has redemptive potential, while the lethal syringe, I think, has none. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/17/opinion/sunday/kevin-cooper-california-death-row.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/17/opinion/sunda...
todd8 6y ago
According to the Innocence Project[1], 21 people on death row have been exonerated by DNA evidence. In the last 31 years a total of 375 people have been exonerated by DNA evidence (not just the people on death row). [1] https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-states/ https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-...
agumonkey 6y ago
Yes, justice should never ever enact something irremediable. History showed how not matter the means, technology, experience, diligence.. errors still occur.
austincheney 6y ago
No system is perfect, but perfection isn’t the point. The point is the error rate that you alluded to. At any rate judges sometimes make really bad decisions. The most remembered from where I live is Affluenza: * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluenza https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluenza * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Couch https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Couch
Hitton 6y ago
Trial-by-peers is not the problem, problem is prosecutorial, police and expert misconduct. Vast majority of wrongful convictions are caused by withholding(or even falsifying) evidence, police forcing out confession from innocent or experts who are either ignorant or deliberately lying. And those who are later caught doing these things are nearly never held accountable and in rare case when they are, it's just a slap on the wrist.

rayiner 6y ago

What does “beyond a reasonable doubt” mean in probability terms? Most people say 90-95%, which suggests even Graham’s 4% number (which is on the high end of such estimates, see: https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1130&context=scholarship https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1130&con...) is actually consistent with the system working as designed. Also, while you’re thinking about that, what’s your estimate of the probability that Derek Chauvin’s negligence was the but for cause of George Floyd’s death (and not some other factor mentioned by the defense expert in the case such as his health or drugs). Note that’s a scientific question—but for causation is an element of the crime. It’s not enough that what Chauvin did was reckless as to human life. His recklessness had to be the cause. Are you 99% certain of that?

sneak 6y ago
There is significant tradition in the criminal justice system for the error bias to be in the other direction (in theory, if not in practice): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio I believe that to be "working as designed" we would see a lot more guilty people going free than innocent people being convicted.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > I believe that to be "working as designed" we would see a lot more guilty people going free than innocent people being convicted How do you know that’s not the case?
  - sneak 6y ago
    Conviction and plea bargain rates. Most (>90%) people who are charged (in the US) end up with either a guilty verdict or a guilty plea. IIRC even the ones that don't plead out are ~90% conviction rate, at least at the federal level. Doesn't jive at all with what we know of competence and bias levels observed in police and prosecutors in the US.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      Most people plead out because they’re ridiculously guilty. I’m a crunchy hippie on criminal justice, but I’ve also seen these cases first hand working for an appellate judge. Prosecutors go after cases that are open and shut. You wouldn’t believe how much evidence there is in a typical case that doesn’t go to trial. They have the guy on CCTV with stolen goods in his car and cell phone records of fencing. Innocence Projects weed out hundreds of meritless requests for help for the relatively few meritorious cases they take.
      - sneak 6y ago
        > Most people plead out because they’re ridiculously guilty. I know many innocent people who plead out to avoid jail because they're looking at $250k in legal bills and a ~90% trial conviction rate. Juries, being amateurs, are not very good at avoiding bias, as they are completely untrained. I'm not so sure that plea bargain rates are indicative of guilt either way.
        rayiner 6y ago
        How many people who plead do you think have enough money not to be eligible for a PD? And how do you know “many innocent people who plead out?”
thinkindie 6y ago
try to tell the family of people in the 4% that the system is working as designed.
- benjohnson 6y ago
  It’s not ideal. But if we don’t have a working criminal justice system, victims will take the law into their own hands and their error rate will most likely be much worse.
  - siva7 6y ago
    Will they? Doesn’t seem to be the case in Europe. At least people there don’t equal death penalty with a working justice system
  - SomeCallMeTim 6y ago
    There is zero evidence that the death penalty is useful for deterrence. Zero points for using a distraction from the argument at hand which is whether the death penalty is justified.
    - wahern 6y ago
      > For example, MHA found that there was a 66 per cent reduction in the average net weight trafficked for opium in the four-year window after the mandatory death penalty was introduced in 1990 for trafficking more than 1,200g of opium. > In the four years after the death penalty for trafficking more than 500g of cannabis was introduced in 1990, there was "a 15 to 19 percentage point reduction in the probability that traffickers would choose to traffic above the capital sentence threshold", said Mr Shanmugam. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/death-penalty-life-imprisonment-crime-deterrent-shanmugam-13204312 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/death-penalty... Granted, the deterrence value of capital punishment as applied in most nations, such as the U.S., has been shown to be negligible. Most countries, especially in the 21st century, just don't have the stomach to apply capital punishment strictly enough to make it worthwhile. And for good reasons, I might add. But if I were creating a country from scratch, before certain patterns of crime and social dynamics became endemic (that is, firmly rooted in the economic life of certain classes such that they would, as a group, be systematically grossly disproportionately punished), I would absolutely employ capital punishment. I think in the U.S. we tend to assume that poverty and violence go hand-in-hand. And so to punish violence is to in some sense punish the poor. But if you look at poverty around the world, violence is not a necessary consequence of poverty. There are many places where even desperately poor communities experience much less violence than some of the richest towns in the U.S. Ultimately it's a function of the wider culture and its predisposition to violence. If you can use capital punishment to forestall societal changes (e.g. drugs trafficking, use of guns in crimes) that invite pervasive violence, you can achieve a more just outcome for everybody. But in practice you probably can't use capital punishment to put the genie back in the bottle; certainly not alone.
Aunche 6y ago
> Are you 99% certain of that? Chauvin's case was unique because the narrative of him being a murderer had already been broadcast across the entire country. While I'm not personally 99% sure of his guilt to second-degree murder, the jurors most likely were.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  He was convicted of 2nd degree unintentional murder. Which, in Minnesota, one of the definitions is that you killed someone while committing a felony. So even if fully an accident, if you kill someone while robbing a store, that's going to be 2nd degree murder. And in the case of this trial, I assume the jury was simply convinced that kneeling on someone's neck for nearly 10 minutes while they beg for mercy and then continuing to apply pressure for minutes after they pass out is a crime in and of itself, even if he had not died.
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
Reasonable doubt means doubts that a person is guilty. In probability terms it can be interpreted as a state of belief in the guilt (or innocence) of the accused. PG's 4% number is offered as the frequency of wrongful convictions. The two concepts are not related. For example, if a body of jurors say that they are 95% certain that John Smith murdered Jane Brown, that does not mean that there is a 5% probability that John Smith did not commit the murder, or a 5% probability that he will be wrongfully convicted. The 95% number quantifies the belief of the jurors that John Smith is the murderer. 5% quantifies their belief that John Smith is not the murderer. Nothing in those numbers tells us anything about how often jurors are wrong- it only tells us how strongly they believe they are right. To know the frequency of wrongful convictions we must look at the frequency of exonerations. Whatever is the state of belief of jurors or judges etc during the trial where someone was convicted of a crime can't really inform us about the probability of their future exoneration.
- nojs 6y ago
  I think most people interpret the task of assigning a percentage to their belief of something like this as equivalent to estimating the percentage of the time they are likely to be wrong. So to say the two are not related is not true.
  - solveit 6y ago
    I think this attributes overly precise motives to people who have none. It may be accurate for the HN crowd (although I doubt it), but in general, people assigning percentages to their beliefs are performing cargo-cult numeracy rather than actually calibrating beliefs. To illustrate: I am pretty sure that people saying they're 99% sure are saying "I am pretty sure" and not "I estimate I will be wrong once out of a hundred times in situations of comparable certainty".
    - MaulingMonkey 6y ago
      99% is a common number for cargo-cult numeracy, much like "give me a minute" probably doesn't mean a literal minute. On the other hand, 95%, 90%, "give me three minutes", etc. are much less cargo-cult, and much less likely to be cargo-cult numeracy. On the third tentacle, people are bad at a lot of estimates, HN crowd included.
impendia 6y ago
> What does “beyond a reasonable doubt” mean in probability terms? When serving as a juror in a criminal trial, I asked precisely this question of the judge. Her response was that the law does not prescribe a percentage.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  This is actually a really tough problem, because it's even unclear which rate to talk about. If you look at "trial by peers" as a test, what error rates are we worried about/trying to make unreasonably rare? Sensitivity? Specificity? FDR? Posterior probability under what prior? One of the many many others used in stats? I might argue that FDR [0] is the right number, given that you want to look at the set of convicted people and say it's unreasonable to doubt that a randomly picked one of them is guilty. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_discovery_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_discovery_rate
jjeaff 6y ago
Actually, Chauvin's actions did not have to be the only cause of death. Reckless actions only had to contribute in order for him to be guilty. The fact that there were drugs involved or other medical conditions merely establish that he may have been easier to kill than a healthier individual. You only need to be very sure that what Chauvin did was reckless and unreasonable and also very sure that had Chauvin not knelt on his neck for nearly 10 minutes, that Floyd wouldn't have died at that same moment anyway.
- hnick 6y ago
  Often cited as the 'Eggshell skull' doctrine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull
sjg007 6y ago
Maybe you should read the actual charges and Minnesota law; it covers all of your hypotheticals.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
"Beyond reasonable doubt" means it's unreasonable to doubt it. If you bet your friend (who is incentivized to say that they rolled above a 1) rolls a ten sided die and says they rolled above a 1, is it unreasonable to doubt them? No way, 10% chance of an event happening means it's very reasonable that it'll happen. Same for a d20. At what point is it unreasonable to be concerned about rolling a 1? > Most people say 90-95% Most people believe that the 538's 2016 presidential forecast was incompetent because it said trump only had a 1/3 chance of winning and he won. Other papers put it at 10%. People said this was a huge failure because people generally are terrible at intuitively reasoning about probabilities, which is well established. I'd put reasonable doubt at closer to 1 in a few hundred, maybe even rarer. Is the link you included talking about the probability of convicting a person, given that they're innocent, or the probability that a convicted person is innocent? It brings too mind the classic stats issues of testing positive for a disease via a highly accurate test, with it still being probable that you don't have the disease. Even a highly accurate test can be entirely unreasonable as evidence of the rare case. We should probably care about making the false discovery rate the unreasonable one. Of the convicted people, is it unreasonable to doubt that a random one is guilty.

exclusiv 6y ago

I don't know how you could replace the jurors but I think they're only as good as the rest of the system. I mean, if they don't get to hear or see certain evidence because it was deemed non-permissible or it was hidden or destroyed, they can't make a good decision. Not to mention at one point we had no DNA evidence. We relied on junk science with bite marks and shoe prints and other things. Although there are indeed issues with peers (and witnesses). I was in a large lecture hall some time ago and someone came in to do an staged purse snatch. You couldn't see the person's face and they were moving fast. When the class was shown a lineup to say who it was, most all agreed it was one of the suspects. When asked why, they said he was tall (he was much taller than the others in the lineup). And that was the whole point. People will try and identify based on little info and they make the incorrect assumption that the lineup they were presented with actually has the real perpetrator! So if you presented a lineup (maybe an impartial organization other than the police) and made it really clear to the witnesses that the perp may very well NOT be in the lineup, you would probably fix a lot of bad identifications. And you wouldn't have detectives trying to influence a decision. That would be a good start.

dan-robertson 6y ago
I think the suggestion is that not having a death penalty reduces the harm of incorrect decisions
- spfzero 6y ago
  I agree. Mistakes are going to happen at some rate, 4% seems realistic. At least if the wrongfully-convicted person is still alive in prison, they can be released and compensated. They may be able to bring a civil suit if there was sufficient malfeasance or incompetence. Some redress can happen. As well, once someone has been executed, interest in finding the truth goes away, and any chance to correct and improve the system based on that case's specifics is gone.
- tertius 6y ago
  Live in prison and living with knowing that society seems you a deviant vs death. We shouldn't tolerate either if innocent.

newacct583 6y ago

To be clear: I don't think that anyone is surprised to see a 4% error rate here. No one ever really thought this system was perfect, and in point of fact perfect determination of innocence wasn't even a design goal of the jury system. The point to selecting juries from the public is to make it harder for a corrupt government to employ its own law enforcement apparatus corruptly. (Whether that works is also an argument of some topicality right now...) But yeah: given that the error rate is in the 1-2 9's range, it seems like applying it to capital cases is a horrifying mistake. Imagine a medical device with only a 99% chance of not killing you.

2bitencryption 6y ago

> The system of trial-by-peers is flawed with a measurable error rate. I've been listening to the podcast Court Junkie (not to be confused with "Crime Junkie"; long story...), and this was my main takeaway as well. The podcast is great because it is almost entirely audio excerpts from actual murder trials, with some extra narration to tie it together. It made me realize my understanding of trial-by-jury was formulated almost entirely by television and other storytelling, and not be reality. What amazed me the most is how the winner seems to be biased toward whichever side can present the most compelling story. Not the most realistic story or most likely story, just the most interesting one.

rland 6y ago
I worked as a trial consultant for a while and got to sit in trial. This is what struck me the most. The best trial lawyers I know are like actors, entertainers, celebrities -- they have the ability to publicly act towards witnesses and juries to evoke friendly, sad, likeable, dis-likeable, happy, angry emotions in a jury. The money doesn't come from legal analysis at all; frankly many were not very bright on legal issues -- that's what second-chairs and legal experts are for. They all, without exception, were fantastically entertaining, funny, weird, charismatic people. It's an important takeaway for life in general. The money follows people who are good at emotions.

adriang133 6y ago

And putting them in prison for multiple years, or even decades, is better ? Hardly. I think the point should be more: the justice system sucks and we should work very hard to make it better, instead of complaining about a particular consequence of it, that is ultimately irrelevant.

ohazi 6y ago
That's a great whataboutism. None of your points are wrong, none of your conclusions are wrong, yet your comment still derails and detracts from GP's well stated point. Don't do this.
solipsism 6y ago
If there was ever a comment more deserving of a "why not both?" response, I'd be surprised.
chalst 6y ago
If you read the linked story about Kevin Cooper, it sounds like he is a better human being today than when he was almost certainly wrongfully convicted. Just one data point, but at least regular prison has redemptive potential, while the lethal syringe, I think, has none. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/17/opinion/sunday/kevin-cooper-california-death-row.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/17/opinion/sunda...

todd8 6y ago

According to the Innocence Project[1], 21 people on death row have been exonerated by DNA evidence. In the last 31 years a total of 375 people have been exonerated by DNA evidence (not just the people on death row). [1] https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-states/ https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-...

agumonkey 6y ago

Yes, justice should never ever enact something irremediable. History showed how not matter the means, technology, experience, diligence.. errors still occur.

austincheney 6y ago

No system is perfect, but perfection isn’t the point. The point is the error rate that you alluded to. At any rate judges sometimes make really bad decisions. The most remembered from where I live is Affluenza: * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluenza https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluenza * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Couch https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Couch

Hitton 6y ago

Trial-by-peers is not the problem, problem is prosecutorial, police and expert misconduct. Vast majority of wrongful convictions are caused by withholding(or even falsifying) evidence, police forcing out confession from innocent or experts who are either ignorant or deliberately lying. And those who are later caught doing these things are nearly never held accountable and in rare case when they are, it's just a slap on the wrist.