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Does anyone find it deeply disturbing that the justice system will just sit on its own hands when presented with new evidence? It seems like prosecutors are mor

Does anyone find it deeply disturbing that the justice system will just sit on its own hands when presented with new evidence? It seems like prosecutors are more interested in maintaining a hi conviction rate rather than seeking justice. Judges seem totally apathetic.

knodi123 2y ago
> when presented with new evidence? They weren't, for the record.
DoughnutHole 2y ago
In this case the prosecutor actively pushed against the execution, arguing that his guilt was no longer beyond a reasonable doubt. The blame for this lies squarely on the Missouri Supreme Court and Gov. Parson (who has never once granted clemency in a capital case).
- EasyMark 2y ago
  As well as the US Supreme Court
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - giraffe_lady 2y ago
      Democrats had cumulative decades of opportunity to instate abortion access in national law and declined to ever do so. All of the things you're pointing out are true but downstream of that.
      - BadHumans 2y ago
        Democrats would need a super majority to pass abortion and the last time that happened was 09.
        giraffe_lady 2y ago
        Yes they should have done it in 09 then or one of the many other times. It's been half a century since roe they've had opportunity if it had been important to them.
        BadHumans 2y ago
        Formally codifying abortion was not a popular issue among voters in 09. In other words, you're somewhat right, it wasn't important to them because it wasn't important to voters. People seem to think that this issue has always had the support it has now.
        giraffe_lady 2y ago
        [flagged]
        BadHumans 2y ago
        This is not even close to what I'm saying and I'm sure you know that.
        giraffe_lady 2y ago
        Come on it's kind of close.
    - snapcaster 2y ago
      No, we lost Roe v. Wade because the democrat party is so useless at representing our interests they failed to ever pass any law granting the right to abortion. Republicans didn't sit on their hands complacently for 40 years like democrats they followed a systematic approach to overturning it. Meanwhile the democrats did nothing except ask me for more money and continue to take L after L
      - JohnMakin 2y ago
        > Meanwhile the democrats did nothing except ask me for more money and continue to take L after L I agree with you, except to me it's far more insidious - they used the threat of things like roe v wade being overturned and reproductive rights being taken away to drive donations and voter turnout, thus incentivizing themselves to never actually deal with that looming problem.
        snapcaster 2y ago
        Good point! I'm just so frustrated by it because while I don't agree with their positions on basically anything, the republican party appears to do a good job furthering the interests of their voters. I know they're less diverse etc. etc. but it just sucks to see
        mindslight 2y ago
        As a libertarian, analyzing the information flow of the political parties in reverse of how it's normally assumed is illuminating - how good is each party at building support for the policies that their sponsors have bought? In this sense on the national stage, the republican party does a much better job convincing its members that the party's policies are their own interests. Whereas democrats are more likely to begrudgingly but pragmatically vote for their party's candidates while actually disliking their policies. See also the quick about-face dynamic of "I never thought the leopard would eat MY face" when the larger cognitive dissonance ends up collapsing in a very personal way.
      - michaelmrose 2y ago
    - rendang 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - mardifoufs 2y ago
      It's funny that you are making this argument due to this execution (which I'm against) while arguing for voting for a party that currently is in power and actively supports, almost unconditionally so, a state that is committing a genocide that killed tens of thousands in Gaza. The most ironic part is your last argument: "None of this affects me so I don't bother voting", which is funnily enough better than voting for a party that actually enables genocide because said genocide does not affect you. The other funny thing is that I know that the usual counter to that from the Democrats is to claim that "both sides are bad, Trump would've done the same!". Which is again, extremely ironic. (And I'm not here to argue if it's a genocide or not. Let's say it's not. It's still an administration that de facto unconditionally supports and arms a war that has killed 50 000 civilians).
- xyzzyz 2y ago
  “The” prosecutor was not pushing against the execution. “A” prosecutor was, who did not have significantly greater relationship to the case than thousands of other prosecutors in this country. I don’t see how this guy’s opinion is more relevant that anyone else’s.
- concordDance 2y ago
  > the prosecutor actively pushed against the execution Reading this thread, it's obvious there's been a big game of telephone with regards to what happened (half saying "a", half saying "the"). I hope this reminds people that they need to chase down sources as close to the original information source as possible as things can get misunderstood or distorted along the way.
trod123 2y ago
Yes very disturbing, but not unexpected.This is the foundational nature of government, and why citizen's don't generally want big government. Government jobs inherently suffer from a number of structural issues. Both organizationally, as well as psychologically. Without a loss function, such as is required in business (where people get fired for lack of production and revenue dictates hiring), psychology changes in forever jobs. Social coercion and corruption occur commonly, and this grows with time trending towards negative production value and other forms of corruption. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down, best describes the former. Anyone doing too much work is making everyone else look bad and they need to be harassed and punished until they fall into line. The way the interlocking centralized systems operate, anyone working in any position backed by government would be incentivized to meet a classical definition of evil just to do their job, and the psychology tests often done select for complementary characteristics towards that. Sure they manage to catch some real bad guys occasionally, and there are rare people who take their job seriously; don't fall to corruption and stay on the straight and narrow; but these are the exceptions, and the ends don't justify the means when the person is innocent. The mechanics of just doing their job would almost certainly enable many acts of evil to be performed by them without them ever knowing, and information control makes them blind to it. They chose the job and that is part of the job so they willfully blinded themselves. This presents both ethical and moral paradoxes, with little penalty when they get it wrong after a certain point. Mistakes happen as everyone is fundamentally flawed (and not perfect), but when those mistakes aren't fixed because of structural issues; they become as they were incentivized to be; and the dead cannot be brought back to life. By Definition, Evil acts are destructive acts, Evil people are those who have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their evil acts (often through repeated acts of self-violation, such as falsely justifying the unjustifiable, and bearing false witness (storytelling a narrative when the evidence doesn't support it), etc. Regarding judges seeming apathetic, it is almost impossible to remove judges in most cases. Only judges can judge other judges, and there is a inherent old boys club. Only rarely for egregious misconduct do removals happen because if a judge is removed, all cases they presided over need to potentially be reviewed. There is incentive to never remove judges due to cost of mistakes, and for a similar reason judges rarely favor appeals because they would be overturning previous judges rulings. Needless to say, when innocent people are killed because judges didn't do their job, and they remain blind to that consequence with no resistance towards repeating it, they'll be in for one 'hell' of a surprise when they pass and find no pearly white gates waiting for them. Most truly evil people believe they are good. This drives home the importance of choosing your profession carefully and wisely because you spend the most time at it, and it changes you for good or worse.
pie_flavor 2y ago
The justice system wasn't presented with any new evidence. Some DNA from the prosecution's office ended up on the weapon sometime in the preceding 17 years, big whoop. This isn't exculpatory and doesn't contradict a single claim made by the prosecution, and there was plenty of strong evidence that he did it, such as possessing all the victim's stuff and pawning her laptop and bragging about how he did it in words that included nonpublic details about the crime. This is the Innocence Project's standard beat. They attempt to free a lot of convicts with arguments that the media automatically takes as trustworthy because they have the word 'DNA' in them, whose conviction was based on very strong evidence and whose defense offered zero plausible explanations of the evidence, and the DNA-based argument doesn't actually contradict anything at all.
- haswell 2y ago
  > there was plenty of strong evidence that he did it, such as possessing all the victim's stuff and pawning her laptop This should not be sufficient to justify the death penalty. Whether or not this guy did it, using such an incredibly weak standard will and almost certainly has killed innocent people. > This is the Innocence Project's standard beat. They attempt to free a lot of convicts…whose conviction was based on very strong evidence “Very strong” evidence should never be enough to sentence someone to death. The evidence should be irrefutable. Anything less is unacceptable and inexcusable.
  - pie_flavor 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - haswell 2y ago
      > If [the accusations] were refutable, he would have refuted it at trial. This is not what irrefutable means. There are many reasons something might be refuted poorly at trial even if the accused never did anything wrong at all. This is why appeals happen. The standard of evidence I’m talking about is whether or not it is possible in principle to call the evidence into question, not whether or not the defense team did a good job. Put another way, there must be a preponderance of evidence such that it is not possible even in principle to question it, i.e. the crime was committed in a room full of witnesses, or the crime was captured on camera, etc. The evidence must be so air tight that there is no possible way to question it. That standard was not met in this case. > You are welcome to morally oppose the death penalty in principle, but with the set of moral opinions that produced the Missouri legal code, the death penalty was not misapplied in this case The opinions that produced the Missouri legal code that allowed this execution are immoral/unethical independent of one’s position on the death penalty itself. One does not have to oppose the penalty entirely to demand proper standards of evidence. Personally, I don’t think the death penalty should exist. But if it must exist, it must be held to an appropriate standard. That this is even slightly controversial is something I have a difficult time understanding.
qingcharles 2y ago
It is very hard to get cases reopened, it is true. Once DNA testing came about many convicts tried to get the evidence in their cases tested to prove their innocence, but this took many, many years in a lot of cases. In fact, getting anything fixed or changed after conviction is a long process. I know someone who was given 100 years extra on his sentence due to an error by the judge, instead of the ~15 he was due. That was two years ago and a simple error like that still hasn't been rectified.

knodi123 2y ago

> when presented with new evidence? They weren't, for the record.

DoughnutHole 2y ago

In this case the prosecutor actively pushed against the execution, arguing that his guilt was no longer beyond a reasonable doubt. The blame for this lies squarely on the Missouri Supreme Court and Gov. Parson (who has never once granted clemency in a capital case).

EasyMark 2y ago
As well as the US Supreme Court
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    Democrats had cumulative decades of opportunity to instate abortion access in national law and declined to ever do so. All of the things you're pointing out are true but downstream of that.
    - BadHumans 2y ago
      Democrats would need a super majority to pass abortion and the last time that happened was 09.
      - giraffe_lady 2y ago
        Yes they should have done it in 09 then or one of the many other times. It's been half a century since roe they've had opportunity if it had been important to them.
        BadHumans 2y ago
        Formally codifying abortion was not a popular issue among voters in 09. In other words, you're somewhat right, it wasn't important to them because it wasn't important to voters. People seem to think that this issue has always had the support it has now.
        giraffe_lady 2y ago
        [flagged]
        BadHumans 2y ago
        This is not even close to what I'm saying and I'm sure you know that.
        giraffe_lady 2y ago
        Come on it's kind of close.
  - snapcaster 2y ago
    No, we lost Roe v. Wade because the democrat party is so useless at representing our interests they failed to ever pass any law granting the right to abortion. Republicans didn't sit on their hands complacently for 40 years like democrats they followed a systematic approach to overturning it. Meanwhile the democrats did nothing except ask me for more money and continue to take L after L
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      > Meanwhile the democrats did nothing except ask me for more money and continue to take L after L I agree with you, except to me it's far more insidious - they used the threat of things like roe v wade being overturned and reproductive rights being taken away to drive donations and voter turnout, thus incentivizing themselves to never actually deal with that looming problem.
      - snapcaster 2y ago
        Good point! I'm just so frustrated by it because while I don't agree with their positions on basically anything, the republican party appears to do a good job furthering the interests of their voters. I know they're less diverse etc. etc. but it just sucks to see
        mindslight 2y ago
        As a libertarian, analyzing the information flow of the political parties in reverse of how it's normally assumed is illuminating - how good is each party at building support for the policies that their sponsors have bought? In this sense on the national stage, the republican party does a much better job convincing its members that the party's policies are their own interests. Whereas democrats are more likely to begrudgingly but pragmatically vote for their party's candidates while actually disliking their policies. See also the quick about-face dynamic of "I never thought the leopard would eat MY face" when the larger cognitive dissonance ends up collapsing in a very personal way.
    - michaelmrose 2y ago
  - rendang 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - mardifoufs 2y ago
    It's funny that you are making this argument due to this execution (which I'm against) while arguing for voting for a party that currently is in power and actively supports, almost unconditionally so, a state that is committing a genocide that killed tens of thousands in Gaza. The most ironic part is your last argument: "None of this affects me so I don't bother voting", which is funnily enough better than voting for a party that actually enables genocide because said genocide does not affect you. The other funny thing is that I know that the usual counter to that from the Democrats is to claim that "both sides are bad, Trump would've done the same!". Which is again, extremely ironic. (And I'm not here to argue if it's a genocide or not. Let's say it's not. It's still an administration that de facto unconditionally supports and arms a war that has killed 50 000 civilians).
xyzzyz 2y ago
“The” prosecutor was not pushing against the execution. “A” prosecutor was, who did not have significantly greater relationship to the case than thousands of other prosecutors in this country. I don’t see how this guy’s opinion is more relevant that anyone else’s.
concordDance 2y ago
> the prosecutor actively pushed against the execution Reading this thread, it's obvious there's been a big game of telephone with regards to what happened (half saying "a", half saying "the"). I hope this reminds people that they need to chase down sources as close to the original information source as possible as things can get misunderstood or distorted along the way.

trod123 2y ago

Yes very disturbing, but not unexpected.This is the foundational nature of government, and why citizen's don't generally want big government. Government jobs inherently suffer from a number of structural issues. Both organizationally, as well as psychologically. Without a loss function, such as is required in business (where people get fired for lack of production and revenue dictates hiring), psychology changes in forever jobs. Social coercion and corruption occur commonly, and this grows with time trending towards negative production value and other forms of corruption. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down, best describes the former. Anyone doing too much work is making everyone else look bad and they need to be harassed and punished until they fall into line. The way the interlocking centralized systems operate, anyone working in any position backed by government would be incentivized to meet a classical definition of evil just to do their job, and the psychology tests often done select for complementary characteristics towards that. Sure they manage to catch some real bad guys occasionally, and there are rare people who take their job seriously; don't fall to corruption and stay on the straight and narrow; but these are the exceptions, and the ends don't justify the means when the person is innocent. The mechanics of just doing their job would almost certainly enable many acts of evil to be performed by them without them ever knowing, and information control makes them blind to it. They chose the job and that is part of the job so they willfully blinded themselves. This presents both ethical and moral paradoxes, with little penalty when they get it wrong after a certain point. Mistakes happen as everyone is fundamentally flawed (and not perfect), but when those mistakes aren't fixed because of structural issues; they become as they were incentivized to be; and the dead cannot be brought back to life. By Definition, Evil acts are destructive acts, Evil people are those who have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their evil acts (often through repeated acts of self-violation, such as falsely justifying the unjustifiable, and bearing false witness (storytelling a narrative when the evidence doesn't support it), etc. Regarding judges seeming apathetic, it is almost impossible to remove judges in most cases. Only judges can judge other judges, and there is a inherent old boys club. Only rarely for egregious misconduct do removals happen because if a judge is removed, all cases they presided over need to potentially be reviewed. There is incentive to never remove judges due to cost of mistakes, and for a similar reason judges rarely favor appeals because they would be overturning previous judges rulings. Needless to say, when innocent people are killed because judges didn't do their job, and they remain blind to that consequence with no resistance towards repeating it, they'll be in for one 'hell' of a surprise when they pass and find no pearly white gates waiting for them. Most truly evil people believe they are good. This drives home the importance of choosing your profession carefully and wisely because you spend the most time at it, and it changes you for good or worse.

pie_flavor 2y ago

The justice system wasn't presented with any new evidence. Some DNA from the prosecution's office ended up on the weapon sometime in the preceding 17 years, big whoop. This isn't exculpatory and doesn't contradict a single claim made by the prosecution, and there was plenty of strong evidence that he did it, such as possessing all the victim's stuff and pawning her laptop and bragging about how he did it in words that included nonpublic details about the crime. This is the Innocence Project's standard beat. They attempt to free a lot of convicts with arguments that the media automatically takes as trustworthy because they have the word 'DNA' in them, whose conviction was based on very strong evidence and whose defense offered zero plausible explanations of the evidence, and the DNA-based argument doesn't actually contradict anything at all.

haswell 2y ago
> there was plenty of strong evidence that he did it, such as possessing all the victim's stuff and pawning her laptop This should not be sufficient to justify the death penalty. Whether or not this guy did it, using such an incredibly weak standard will and almost certainly has killed innocent people. > This is the Innocence Project's standard beat. They attempt to free a lot of convicts…whose conviction was based on very strong evidence “Very strong” evidence should never be enough to sentence someone to death. The evidence should be irrefutable. Anything less is unacceptable and inexcusable.
- pie_flavor 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - haswell 2y ago
    > If [the accusations] were refutable, he would have refuted it at trial. This is not what irrefutable means. There are many reasons something might be refuted poorly at trial even if the accused never did anything wrong at all. This is why appeals happen. The standard of evidence I’m talking about is whether or not it is possible in principle to call the evidence into question, not whether or not the defense team did a good job. Put another way, there must be a preponderance of evidence such that it is not possible even in principle to question it, i.e. the crime was committed in a room full of witnesses, or the crime was captured on camera, etc. The evidence must be so air tight that there is no possible way to question it. That standard was not met in this case. > You are welcome to morally oppose the death penalty in principle, but with the set of moral opinions that produced the Missouri legal code, the death penalty was not misapplied in this case The opinions that produced the Missouri legal code that allowed this execution are immoral/unethical independent of one’s position on the death penalty itself. One does not have to oppose the penalty entirely to demand proper standards of evidence. Personally, I don’t think the death penalty should exist. But if it must exist, it must be held to an appropriate standard. That this is even slightly controversial is something I have a difficult time understanding.

qingcharles 2y ago

It is very hard to get cases reopened, it is true. Once DNA testing came about many convicts tried to get the evidence in their cases tested to prove their innocence, but this took many, many years in a lot of cases. In fact, getting anything fixed or changed after conviction is a long process. I know someone who was given 100 years extra on his sentence due to an error by the judge, instead of the ~15 he was due. That was two years ago and a simple error like that still hasn't been rectified.