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Sadly the system never gets punished. I think these judges and prosecutors would do much better if there was ever present risk of either life in prison or even

by Ekaros 3y ago

Sadly the system never gets punished. I think these judges and prosecutors would do much better if there was ever present risk of either life in prison or even death penalty.

BartjeD 3y ago
Do you think you yourself would do better? Are crime rates significantly lower in US States that have the death penalty? Are crime rates lower in States that punish more severely compared to States that punish less severely? The state of art in preventing crime is to focus on rehabilation and education, not punishment. So it would be novel if the statistics prove that punishment works better.
fwipsy 3y ago
Nobody would take that job. If they did they would be hyper-cautious and never prosecute or sentence anyone. Better to just abolish the judicial system. Maybe you disagree, but I think that would be worse than the status quo. There's always room to improve the system, but the way to do that is to make it resilient to individual failures, not by placing more pressure on the individual not to make mistakes.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  So it would be better. No innocent would go to prison. Abolishing system is valid option. If it is clearly failing it is not worth keeping.
  - slt2021 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
      Do you think no one reading this hasn't grown up there? Think before you speak.
      - kortilla 3y ago
        Nobody said that. Any the people who did grow up in unsafe areas generally don’t recommend it. It’s not a hot take.
    - ruined 3y ago
      why do you say it's abolished there? it's my understanding that those areas are acutely suffering under the existing system.
  - lo_zamoyski 3y ago
    The perfect is the enemy of the good. The notion that if something isn't perfect, it must be abolished is, simply put, ridiculous. Trivially, if you have no criminal justice system, no innocent person would go to prison; it's as foolish as claiming there would be no poverty if there were no human beings. But crime would increase. The bulwark against those who do not live according to moral principles, who do not respect the law, would be removed, as such people respond only to the fear of punishment. And the law and the justice system are also instructive. Part of their purpose is to teach. You will not teach justice without being just, and that entails punishment. The severity of the punishment is proportionate to the severity of the crime precisely because it signals and communicates to the perp that severity. It is feedback, hence instructive. A just person already accepts such punishment as just. It is far better to focus on reform, but in order to do that, you first have to have a good understanding of what the law is all about. And I admit: our criminal justice system does need improvement and reform.
  - fwipsy 3y ago
    I believe that the system is currently working, in that it does less harm through wrongful/excessive punishments than would be done by criminals against innocent people in its absence. There's room for improvement, of course.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  People from other jobs are potentially in jeopardy for negligence though. If a truck driver makes a mistake driving a truck they could very well go to prison. Also, judges can be malicious too.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    Right but truck drivers aren't constantly dealing with people who are lying to get themselves out of trouble. And while all jobs include at least some element of dealing with people trying to deceive you, if I'm an embedded engineer dealing with a vendor overstating the low-temperature performance of their embedded compute module, the stakes are a lot lower.
    - interactivecode 3y ago
      The point is that when your job has an "larger than normal" impact on the course of someone's life you should not be able to ignore that responsibility. Responsibility should be matched with equal sized accountability. I'd rather have a system that occasionally let someone go free because of insufficient proof than occasionally have people be imprisoned when they are actually innocent.
    - tacocataco 3y ago
      "Right but truck drivers aren't constantly dealing with people who are lying to get themselves out of trouble." What do you think the dash cams are for?
- eastbound 3y ago
  People always apply for jobs. Even airplane pilot, where the pay isn’t as high as software developers, and where giant door-losing corporations put millions into making every accident pass as a pilot error, incurring a dozen years in jail. Heck, people even apply for the army, where, out of no fault of your own, you can die. They do this for the proper function of the society. And therefore, for proper function of society: - Judges should be exposed to penal jail sentences if an innocent goes to jail, - Judges should also be exposed to penal jail sentences in case they release a criminal sooner than the maximum sentence and they commit a new crime. When a criminal is released 18 times by judges, and they slaughter a dozen people on the 19th time, you know you’re in France. And that’s somewhere you don’t want to be.
  - K0balt 3y ago
    Mmmmmmmmm idk. I’m with you on some liability for the conviction of innocent people, but that liability should also extend to juries. As far as being penalised for not predicting the future actions of an individual person, not so much. That would effectively mean that every person would be sentenced and required to serve the maximum penalty for any violation, even though those maximums were intended to be doled out to only the most egregious offenders. Perhaps much more granular and specific sentencing guidelines with objective qualifiers so that sentencing was more predictable?
    - lo_zamoyski 3y ago
      > I’m with you on some liability for the conviction of innocent people, but that liability should also extend to juries. You have to be careful here. Doing so can create perverse incentives that undermine justice. If a judge or a jury face such penalties, they will be inclined to reduce the penalty or feel compelled to find the defendant not guilty as a fearful precaution, even in cut and dry cases. And would you punish innocent jurors where unanimity is not required?
  - LargeWu 3y ago
    I think a better way to phrase this is that judges should be punished in instances of gross negligence or malfeasance. An innocent person going to prison or early release in which a criminal commits another crime, on its own, does not necessarily imply this.
- omgwtfbyobbq 3y ago
  I agree and disagree. We should improve the system to make it resilient to individual failures, and we should place more pressure on individuals in positions of power to not make mistakes. I think a judge making a mistake this egregious should not be allowed to continue being a judge.
  - lo_zamoyski 3y ago
    > We should improve the system to make it resilient to individual failures This isn't a solution. It is a wish. Obviously, we all would like it to be the case that innocent people are never punished. But first, is the rate of false convictions of the innocent actually egregiously high? This article gives an example of one case, but it does not follow that we are facing high rates of false convictions, especially for serious crimes that carry serious penalties. Second, is there a way to reduce false convictions, especially in a way that doesn't comprise the system in some serious way? > I think a judge making a mistake this egregious should not be allowed to continue being a judge. Perhaps, perhaps not. You risk incentivizing behavior among judges that subverts the justice system.
    - TheCleric 3y ago
      I think the best data we have of this in the US is the exoneration rate of death penalty convictions, which is startlingly high. A study from 2014 found it to be around 4% (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1306417111 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1306417111). 4% may sound low to some, but when people's live are on the line that's terribly high. If a plane had a 4% failure rate it would be considered a colossal failure.
    - wholinator2 3y ago
      I know i have seen more stories lately about innocent people being freed after newly analyzed DNA evidence. I think a good question is, how would we know if someone were wrongly convicted? What tells are there that the person the judge and lawyers said was guilty, that's now in prison, what could tell us they are innocent. Presumably there are tons of guilty people proclaim innocence every day to try to get out of their consequences. What separates them? There could be catastrophically high rates of innocent convictions and I'm not confident we would be aware of that
- HenryBemis 3y ago
  Going through the guy's 'CV' from the article, I guess one of the reasons the authorities never went "all the way to 11" to catch him, is that the harm he did was relatively 'small' - meaning of financial nature - he didn't physically hurt/murdered anyone. (I am not OK-ing what he did, I just think that if you got 100 killers out and about please catch them and the $200k guy will be caught sooner or later by some bureaucratic control).
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    His actions caused the real person to go to jail for 2 years.
- Repulsion9513 3y ago
  > would be hyper-cautious That's a desirable effect. Your argument is the very reason the 5th amendment exists. Making it easier to find someone guilty is a BAD thing, not a good thing.
  - kenjackson 3y ago
    The goal should be truth. Otherwise the easiest way to make it hard to find someone guilty is to make it only confessions under no duress are admissible. And the hyper-cautious effect isn’t because of fear of getting it wrong. It’s fear of retaliation whether right or wrong.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    No one would take the job first. Being a public servant is already pretty thankless and doesn’t pay very well. Second, if they did take the job, they wouldn’t do anything, since the consequences of being wrong are so high, why take the chance? Public opinion would then flip the other way, and they are either a wheat stalk flowing with the wind or they quit.
  - fwipsy 3y ago
    I agree! I don't want it to be easier. But I think parent comment's proposal would result in almost no convictions, even in crystal clear cases. Please read my comment more carefully instead of assuming I'm saying something I'm not.
- vintermann 3y ago
  How about we bring back juries, big and truly random ones (at least 12 people, not haggled over, not filtered). Then give the jury some options to sanction judges and lawyers for blatant bullshit. It doesn't have to be harsher than firing them. All legitimate government power is supposed to come from the people, I feel like that's often forgotten, especially when it comes to the least accountable branch of government.
szundi 3y ago
GPT-6 is up to the task! No bad ruling just before lunch! Also it’ll be just as secure as the Diebold voting machines! /s
capybara_2020 3y ago
I am curious, what could have been done differently? This started more than 30 years ago. The internet as we thinking about it did not exist. Computers were just going around. Most it was physical copies which could not be centralized/shared at scale till the internet came around. I am just trying to think about what kind of system would account for all the changes that have happened and prevented this while also accounting for the reverse where the real person suddenly had someone trying to steal their identity also accounting for the fact this system has to be valid for the future. Maybe it is a failure of my imagination, but I can only think of ways to do it for the current state of the world, assuming the world never changes.
perihelions 3y ago
Take a glance at US news today. US politics would be far more likely to punish judges for a Type II error—for failing to convict or institutionalize a person who goes on to commit a crime—than for the Type I error of violating the rights of an innocent person. The system you've proposed, if you step back from the heated emotions for a moment, would the exact opposite effect of the righteous justice you seek. Any system you'd build in this mold, the criminal justice mold, would be the same or a clone of the current one, inheriting the same flaws. The prosecuting agency would be lenient towards Type I errors, because few people care; and I think in the net it'd increase their occurrence, by severely penalizing Type II errors. edit: (And to the point out the obvious in plain sight—look at the very newspaper story we're discussing. The "criminal that got away with it" is in the headline/title. The "innocent person horribly abused by indifferent criminal justice" is mentioned in passing about 21 paragraphs down).
- Repulsion9513 3y ago
  You do realize that when you're making new laws you can make those laws say anything you want, right?
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    But you can't make them do anything you want.
    - spacecadet 3y ago
      You can, its called a tank.
      - actionfromafar 3y ago
        Even that, can't make them do anything you want. It makes them die.
      - dmoy 3y ago
        Tanks can't go door to door on enough of the populace. If it's a law that's unpopular enough, it's not enforceable pretty much anywhere. Even less so in the US, because of the staggering number of civilian owned guns.
euroderf 3y ago
Prosecutors get away with murder. Literally. Suggesting that reining in prosecutorial immunity would create overly timid prosecutors is a false choice.
Lanolderen 3y ago
If I had life in prison or a death penalty hanging over my head at work after getting all the prerequisites to be a judge I better be getting paid seven figures or I'm either becoming a scrum master or a defence attorney trying to abuse the guillotine to ensure client satisfaction.
RecycledEle 3y ago
> Sadly the system never gets punished. I think these judges and prosecutors would do much better if there was ever present risk of either life in prison or even death penalty. The first step is transparency. Put every bit of evidence for every case on the public record so everyone can see it online. Sadly, The System will not allow that. Truth is the enemy of The System.

by Ekaros 3y ago

Sadly the system never gets punished. I think these judges and prosecutors would do much better if there was ever present risk of either life in prison or even death penalty.

BartjeD 3y ago

Do you think you yourself would do better? Are crime rates significantly lower in US States that have the death penalty? Are crime rates lower in States that punish more severely compared to States that punish less severely? The state of art in preventing crime is to focus on rehabilation and education, not punishment. So it would be novel if the statistics prove that punishment works better.

fwipsy 3y ago

Nobody would take that job. If they did they would be hyper-cautious and never prosecute or sentence anyone. Better to just abolish the judicial system. Maybe you disagree, but I think that would be worse than the status quo. There's always room to improve the system, but the way to do that is to make it resilient to individual failures, not by placing more pressure on the individual not to make mistakes.

Ekaros 3y ago
So it would be better. No innocent would go to prison. Abolishing system is valid option. If it is clearly failing it is not worth keeping.
- slt2021 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
    Do you think no one reading this hasn't grown up there? Think before you speak.
    - kortilla 3y ago
      Nobody said that. Any the people who did grow up in unsafe areas generally don’t recommend it. It’s not a hot take.
  - ruined 3y ago
    why do you say it's abolished there? it's my understanding that those areas are acutely suffering under the existing system.
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  The perfect is the enemy of the good. The notion that if something isn't perfect, it must be abolished is, simply put, ridiculous. Trivially, if you have no criminal justice system, no innocent person would go to prison; it's as foolish as claiming there would be no poverty if there were no human beings. But crime would increase. The bulwark against those who do not live according to moral principles, who do not respect the law, would be removed, as such people respond only to the fear of punishment. And the law and the justice system are also instructive. Part of their purpose is to teach. You will not teach justice without being just, and that entails punishment. The severity of the punishment is proportionate to the severity of the crime precisely because it signals and communicates to the perp that severity. It is feedback, hence instructive. A just person already accepts such punishment as just. It is far better to focus on reform, but in order to do that, you first have to have a good understanding of what the law is all about. And I admit: our criminal justice system does need improvement and reform.
- fwipsy 3y ago
  I believe that the system is currently working, in that it does less harm through wrongful/excessive punishments than would be done by criminals against innocent people in its absence. There's room for improvement, of course.
Aerroon 3y ago
People from other jobs are potentially in jeopardy for negligence though. If a truck driver makes a mistake driving a truck they could very well go to prison. Also, judges can be malicious too.
- michaelt 3y ago
  Right but truck drivers aren't constantly dealing with people who are lying to get themselves out of trouble. And while all jobs include at least some element of dealing with people trying to deceive you, if I'm an embedded engineer dealing with a vendor overstating the low-temperature performance of their embedded compute module, the stakes are a lot lower.
  - interactivecode 3y ago
    The point is that when your job has an "larger than normal" impact on the course of someone's life you should not be able to ignore that responsibility. Responsibility should be matched with equal sized accountability. I'd rather have a system that occasionally let someone go free because of insufficient proof than occasionally have people be imprisoned when they are actually innocent.
  - tacocataco 3y ago
    "Right but truck drivers aren't constantly dealing with people who are lying to get themselves out of trouble." What do you think the dash cams are for?
eastbound 3y ago
People always apply for jobs. Even airplane pilot, where the pay isn’t as high as software developers, and where giant door-losing corporations put millions into making every accident pass as a pilot error, incurring a dozen years in jail. Heck, people even apply for the army, where, out of no fault of your own, you can die. They do this for the proper function of the society. And therefore, for proper function of society: - Judges should be exposed to penal jail sentences if an innocent goes to jail, - Judges should also be exposed to penal jail sentences in case they release a criminal sooner than the maximum sentence and they commit a new crime. When a criminal is released 18 times by judges, and they slaughter a dozen people on the 19th time, you know you’re in France. And that’s somewhere you don’t want to be.
- K0balt 3y ago
  Mmmmmmmmm idk. I’m with you on some liability for the conviction of innocent people, but that liability should also extend to juries. As far as being penalised for not predicting the future actions of an individual person, not so much. That would effectively mean that every person would be sentenced and required to serve the maximum penalty for any violation, even though those maximums were intended to be doled out to only the most egregious offenders. Perhaps much more granular and specific sentencing guidelines with objective qualifiers so that sentencing was more predictable?
  - lo_zamoyski 3y ago
    > I’m with you on some liability for the conviction of innocent people, but that liability should also extend to juries. You have to be careful here. Doing so can create perverse incentives that undermine justice. If a judge or a jury face such penalties, they will be inclined to reduce the penalty or feel compelled to find the defendant not guilty as a fearful precaution, even in cut and dry cases. And would you punish innocent jurors where unanimity is not required?
- LargeWu 3y ago
  I think a better way to phrase this is that judges should be punished in instances of gross negligence or malfeasance. An innocent person going to prison or early release in which a criminal commits another crime, on its own, does not necessarily imply this.
omgwtfbyobbq 3y ago
I agree and disagree. We should improve the system to make it resilient to individual failures, and we should place more pressure on individuals in positions of power to not make mistakes. I think a judge making a mistake this egregious should not be allowed to continue being a judge.
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  > We should improve the system to make it resilient to individual failures This isn't a solution. It is a wish. Obviously, we all would like it to be the case that innocent people are never punished. But first, is the rate of false convictions of the innocent actually egregiously high? This article gives an example of one case, but it does not follow that we are facing high rates of false convictions, especially for serious crimes that carry serious penalties. Second, is there a way to reduce false convictions, especially in a way that doesn't comprise the system in some serious way? > I think a judge making a mistake this egregious should not be allowed to continue being a judge. Perhaps, perhaps not. You risk incentivizing behavior among judges that subverts the justice system.
  - TheCleric 3y ago
    I think the best data we have of this in the US is the exoneration rate of death penalty convictions, which is startlingly high. A study from 2014 found it to be around 4% (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1306417111 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1306417111). 4% may sound low to some, but when people's live are on the line that's terribly high. If a plane had a 4% failure rate it would be considered a colossal failure.
  - wholinator2 3y ago
    I know i have seen more stories lately about innocent people being freed after newly analyzed DNA evidence. I think a good question is, how would we know if someone were wrongly convicted? What tells are there that the person the judge and lawyers said was guilty, that's now in prison, what could tell us they are innocent. Presumably there are tons of guilty people proclaim innocence every day to try to get out of their consequences. What separates them? There could be catastrophically high rates of innocent convictions and I'm not confident we would be aware of that
HenryBemis 3y ago
Going through the guy's 'CV' from the article, I guess one of the reasons the authorities never went "all the way to 11" to catch him, is that the harm he did was relatively 'small' - meaning of financial nature - he didn't physically hurt/murdered anyone. (I am not OK-ing what he did, I just think that if you got 100 killers out and about please catch them and the $200k guy will be caught sooner or later by some bureaucratic control).
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  His actions caused the real person to go to jail for 2 years.
Repulsion9513 3y ago
> would be hyper-cautious That's a desirable effect. Your argument is the very reason the 5th amendment exists. Making it easier to find someone guilty is a BAD thing, not a good thing.
- kenjackson 3y ago
  The goal should be truth. Otherwise the easiest way to make it hard to find someone guilty is to make it only confessions under no duress are admissible. And the hyper-cautious effect isn’t because of fear of getting it wrong. It’s fear of retaliation whether right or wrong.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  No one would take the job first. Being a public servant is already pretty thankless and doesn’t pay very well. Second, if they did take the job, they wouldn’t do anything, since the consequences of being wrong are so high, why take the chance? Public opinion would then flip the other way, and they are either a wheat stalk flowing with the wind or they quit.
- fwipsy 3y ago
  I agree! I don't want it to be easier. But I think parent comment's proposal would result in almost no convictions, even in crystal clear cases. Please read my comment more carefully instead of assuming I'm saying something I'm not.
vintermann 3y ago
How about we bring back juries, big and truly random ones (at least 12 people, not haggled over, not filtered). Then give the jury some options to sanction judges and lawyers for blatant bullshit. It doesn't have to be harsher than firing them. All legitimate government power is supposed to come from the people, I feel like that's often forgotten, especially when it comes to the least accountable branch of government.

szundi 3y ago

GPT-6 is up to the task! No bad ruling just before lunch! Also it’ll be just as secure as the Diebold voting machines! /s

capybara_2020 3y ago

I am curious, what could have been done differently? This started more than 30 years ago. The internet as we thinking about it did not exist. Computers were just going around. Most it was physical copies which could not be centralized/shared at scale till the internet came around. I am just trying to think about what kind of system would account for all the changes that have happened and prevented this while also accounting for the reverse where the real person suddenly had someone trying to steal their identity also accounting for the fact this system has to be valid for the future. Maybe it is a failure of my imagination, but I can only think of ways to do it for the current state of the world, assuming the world never changes.

perihelions 3y ago

Take a glance at US news today. US politics would be far more likely to punish judges for a Type II error—for failing to convict or institutionalize a person who goes on to commit a crime—than for the Type I error of violating the rights of an innocent person. The system you've proposed, if you step back from the heated emotions for a moment, would the exact opposite effect of the righteous justice you seek. Any system you'd build in this mold, the criminal justice mold, would be the same or a clone of the current one, inheriting the same flaws. The prosecuting agency would be lenient towards Type I errors, because few people care; and I think in the net it'd increase their occurrence, by severely penalizing Type II errors. edit: (And to the point out the obvious in plain sight—look at the very newspaper story we're discussing. The "criminal that got away with it" is in the headline/title. The "innocent person horribly abused by indifferent criminal justice" is mentioned in passing about 21 paragraphs down).

Repulsion9513 3y ago
You do realize that when you're making new laws you can make those laws say anything you want, right?
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  But you can't make them do anything you want.
  - spacecadet 3y ago
    You can, its called a tank.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      Even that, can't make them do anything you want. It makes them die.
    - dmoy 3y ago
      Tanks can't go door to door on enough of the populace. If it's a law that's unpopular enough, it's not enforceable pretty much anywhere. Even less so in the US, because of the staggering number of civilian owned guns.

euroderf 3y ago

Prosecutors get away with murder. Literally. Suggesting that reining in prosecutorial immunity would create overly timid prosecutors is a false choice.

Lanolderen 3y ago

If I had life in prison or a death penalty hanging over my head at work after getting all the prerequisites to be a judge I better be getting paid seven figures or I'm either becoming a scrum master or a defence attorney trying to abuse the guillotine to ensure client satisfaction.

RecycledEle 3y ago

> Sadly the system never gets punished. I think these judges and prosecutors would do much better if there was ever present risk of either life in prison or even death penalty. The first step is transparency. Put every bit of evidence for every case on the public record so everyone can see it online. Sadly, The System will not allow that. Truth is the enemy of The System.