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> The problem is a judicial review system that's extremely hesitant to consider exculpatory evidence following a conviction... and here we have an edge case whe
by rocqua 3y ago
> The problem is a judicial review system that's extremely hesitant to consider exculpatory evidence following a conviction... and here we have an edge case where the conviction was gained by discredited scientific means. Science adapts quickly to new evidence and new methods, and quickly discards old ones; the courts don't work that way.
To expand on that, appeals are not intended to re-litigate the facts. They are there to fix procedural mistakes during trial, or wrong argumentation of how the law should be applied.
The question of 'what happened' is generally not up for debate during appeal, and is generally not grounds for lodging an appeal. Instead, appeals are meant for when the law was applied wrong. Or when a trial was unfair due to a judge's mistake. Effectively, it is meant to protect you against judge's mistakes and unscrupulous prosecutors. There is much less protection against experts that happen to be wrong.
It seems to me that a system like that is fundamentally incompatible with a death-penalty, since it leaves a decent amount of space for mistakes that go uncorrected.
- wizerdrobe 3y agoWhat type of appeal would one need to file in order to re-litigate facts? There exists charities involved in, say, DNA-based exoneration. Is there less room for non-DNA based appeals?
- throwaway17_17 3y agoThese types of ‘appeals’ are usually not appeals. They often come in the form of clemency requests and, in some jurisdictions, Post Conviction Relief. Several State’s have legislation in place allowing for a proceeding in the court of conviction to be opened (within some specified period of time) when ‘factual innocence’ is being alleged. The burden for the relief is pretty high to get the proceeding going however.
- tivert 3y ago> Or when a trial was unfair due to a judge's mistake. Effectively, it is meant to protect you against judge's mistakes and unscrupulous prosecutors. There is much less protection against experts that happen to be wrong. IANAL, but I understand certain kind of "evidence" are inadmissible in court due to unreliability/being junk science (e.g. lie detector results). I think it should be possible to classify the admission of unreliable evidence as the judge's mistake, even if that evidence (or type of evidence) was found to be unreliable after conviction. Basically, the standard should be that judges are supposed to be perfectly reliable when evaluating evidence, and should have been expected to catch any issue that was later discovered, so a later standard of inadmissibility is retroactive. If it isn't the, the rules ought to be changed (and this change seems narrow enough to me that it shouldn't cause any problems).
- jfengel 3y agoIt seems to me that a system like that is fundamentally incompatible with justice, regardless of what punishments are applied. There is no way to correct a mistake that deprives a human being of years of liberty, either. If anything I find it more horrifying that we're willing to say, "Eh, at least you're alive", at apparently leave it at that. I'm not calling for infinite appeals and suchlike denial-of-service attacks on the courts. But it seems that we've simply written off the notion of being just entirely, and the highest court in the land seems comfortable with that.