9 ms·

N guilty men (1997)

121 points by emmelaich 3y ago

bandrami 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Talk about burying the lede! What's the long story?
  - bandrami 3y ago
    It's actually not that long. I got a job at a law school teaching "Concepts of Computer Science" to 2nd-year law students.
jasonlotito 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    They did, re-read paragraph 3.
- dkarl 3y ago
  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?
darkclouds 3y ago
>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?
renewiltord 3y ago
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.
bArray 3y ago
> 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.
- TimPC 3y ago
  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.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    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.
throwaway713 3y ago
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?
rossdavidh 3y ago
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.
- watwut 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
hirundo 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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
  - giantg2 3y ago
    Here's an example from today that says there was never any evidence to support the more serious charge they charged this guy with. He did take a plea as well (looking at the story and the reckless conduct statute, I'm not sure why he would even plead to that) https://www.yahoo.com/news/prosecutors-drop-felony-charges-against-195126116.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/prosecutors-drop-felony-charges-a...
    - qingcharles 3y ago
      LOL. Of course Reckless Conduct. I was offered Reckless Conduct. It's a catch-all crime you can use to charge anyone with anything. It's a very low-level misdemeanor. Prosecutors use it as a plea negotiation when they need a conviction at all costs to save face. Especially Cook County prosecutors.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
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.
- ddq 3y ago
  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.
- kevinmchugh 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > 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.
r9550684 3y ago
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?article=3427&context=penn_law_review https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
- emmelaich 3y ago
  That's interesting, I chose the html because I dislike pdf. Now I'll have to go and diff them!
  - r9550684 3y ago
    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 3y ago
Reminds me... One of my personal top 10 movies: 12 angry men. 9/10 imdb score. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0050083/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0050083/
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
playday 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
dang 3y ago
Related: N Guilty Men (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10860765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10860765 - Jan 2016 (23 comments)
petsfed 3y ago
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 3y ago
  The author is making fun of the long s in the quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s (rules: https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2006/06/rules-for-long-s.html https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2006/06/rules-for-long-s.h... ), by reading it as "f". (As in Flanders and Swann "Greenfleeves")
1letterunixname 3y ago
In 2011, Illinois abolished the death penalty because of its track record of executing innocent people (somewhere between 20 and 75 over its history, posthumously exonerated obviously). In 2018, the then governor called for its reintroduction but it foundered. Oddly enough, the first execution (before it was a state) was a man burned at the stake for witchcraft in 1779 when it was under the jurisdiction of Virginia (during the Revolutionary War).

N guilty men (1997)

121 points by emmelaich 3y ago

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 3y ago
Talk about burying the lede! What's the long story?
- bandrami 3y ago
  It's actually not that long. I got a job at a law school teaching "Concepts of Computer Science" to 2nd-year law students.

jasonlotito 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  They did, re-read paragraph 3.
dkarl 3y ago
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?

darkclouds 3y ago

>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?

renewiltord 3y ago

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.

bArray 3y ago

TimPC 3y ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  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.

throwaway713 3y ago

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?

rossdavidh 3y ago

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.

watwut 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago

hirundo 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
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
- giantg2 3y ago
  Here's an example from today that says there was never any evidence to support the more serious charge they charged this guy with. He did take a plea as well (looking at the story and the reckless conduct statute, I'm not sure why he would even plead to that) https://www.yahoo.com/news/prosecutors-drop-felony-charges-against-195126116.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/prosecutors-drop-felony-charges-a...
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    LOL. Of course Reckless Conduct. I was offered Reckless Conduct. It's a catch-all crime you can use to charge anyone with anything. It's a very low-level misdemeanor. Prosecutors use it as a plea negotiation when they need a conviction at all costs to save face. Especially Cook County prosecutors.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

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.

ddq 3y ago
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.
kevinmchugh 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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.

r9550684 3y ago

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?article=3427&context=penn_law_review https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

emmelaich 3y ago
That's interesting, I chose the html because I dislike pdf. Now I'll have to go and diff them!
- r9550684 3y ago
  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 3y ago

Reminds me... One of my personal top 10 movies: 12 angry men. 9/10 imdb score. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0050083/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0050083/

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

playday 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.

dang 3y ago

Related: N Guilty Men (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10860765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10860765 - Jan 2016 (23 comments)

petsfed 3y ago

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 3y ago
The author is making fun of the long s in the quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s (rules: https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2006/06/rules-for-long-s.html https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2006/06/rules-for-long-s.h... ), by reading it as "f". (As in Flanders and Swann "Greenfleeves")

1letterunixname 3y ago

In 2011, Illinois abolished the death penalty because of its track record of executing innocent people (somewhere between 20 and 75 over its history, posthumously exonerated obviously). In 2018, the then governor called for its reintroduction but it foundered. Oddly enough, the first execution (before it was a state) was a man burned at the stake for witchcraft in 1779 when it was under the jurisdiction of Virginia (during the Revolutionary War).