3 ms·
I wonder how many people have been unjustly imprisoned between planted evidence, made up evidence, and illegal parallel construction…
by radicaldreamer 4mo ago
I wonder how many people have been unjustly imprisoned between planted evidence, made up evidence, and illegal parallel construction…
- madaxe_again 4mo agoOver all time? Probably tens of millions.
- gcr 4mo agoHere in the US? Probably a large double-digit percentage of cases imo…
- Terr_ 4mo agoEspecially if law enforcement uses Parallel Construction [0], lying to the court about the process taken. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
- MagicMoonlight 4mo ago[dead]
- cadamsdotcom 4mo ago> large double-digit percentage This is a very very intense claim, and if true, would represent a monumental institutional failure across hundreds or even thousands of disparate organizations. Do you have any data to support your hunch? Strong claims require strong evidence.
- lokar 4mo agoI don’t know the numbers, but DNA exonerations give a bit of a natural experiment (where testable evidence was preserved).
- jasonfarnon 4mo agoThey give a floor, and that floor is too small to be useful.
- lokar 4mo agoThe main obstacle is the denominator. How many conversations were there (before dna testing) where testable tissue was preserved? You would want to test some random sample of them against the person convicted.
- Arodex 4mo agoPolice in the United States is already in a state of "institutional failure"...
- cadamsdotcom 4mo ago“Police in the United States” is not a monolith. It’s easy to say things that sound true on the surface, but even if true, it’s still irresponsible to say them on the back of a hunch.
- nixon_why69 4mo agoIt's more monolithic than you would think due to shared culture over the internet. There's a whole narrative about sheepdogs (them), sheep (us) and wolves (the bad guys).
- jyounker 4mo agoWhen DNA matching was introduced, we discovered that at minimum 10% of people on death row were innocent. Death row cases are among the most litigated and examined cases. So, 10% is a reasonable floor, and we're already in double digits.
- junofan 4mo ago> This reasonably sets a floor I disagree wrt reasonableness. It’s just too big a leap. There are a lot of crimes, and not many land you on death row.
- halestock 4mo agoHoo boy, welcome to the history of the United states.
- brookst 4mo agoThe observation was that death row represents the highest level of scrutiny, and still had 10% false positives for guilt. Is there any argument that less-scrutinized cases would have a lower level of false convictions?
- jyounker 4mo ago
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- dpkirchner 4mo agoIf you believe parallel construction should be illegal (it sure seems like it is unconstitutional to me), then 100% of prosecutions that rely on it are unjust. I don't think anyone truly knows how common it is, though, and that's by design. Double-digits wouldn't shock me at all.
- rvnx 4mo agoShouldn't it be the exact opposite here ? The burden of proof is the other way around. The big claim is here: the state has grandiose claims that the overwhelming majority is fair, but there is no proof of it. Therefore the state should prove that more than 90% of the cases are legitimate, fair, not coerced, and not motivated by the pressure to interrupt the proceedings. 97% of people choose plea deals or out-of-court settlement, it is a huge amount. It means that in real practice, not imaginary internet, people who face court consider that justice is a big machine that can crush you no matter if you are innocent or not. In the best case you are acquitted at the end, but you are guaranteed to bear the financial burden, fear and stress as a punishment. Being held in jail before trial is a very convincing reason to plea deal too. It's a system engineered to make pleading the only reasonable option, no matter if you did anything or not.
- CoastalCoder 4mo ago> Shouldn't it be the exact opposite here ? The burden of proof is the other way around That's the rule for criminal court in the US, but each of us is free to pick his own standard for his own purposes.
- jasonfarnon 4mo agoThat is true--the checks and balances the founding fathers fought so hard for were thrown out the window with overlegislation and expansion of prosecutorial discretion in 20th century. To make a convincing argument that "double digits" of cases involve fabricated evidence, you still need to explain why prosecutors would engage in fraud at this massive scale. Just laziness? Collecting scalps? The incentives run that way in some limited cases, e.g., prosecutor up for election, post-reconstruction south. But you need some explanation there.
- inigyou 4mo agoThey get rewarded based on winning cases?
- jasonfarnon 4mo ago
- smallmancontrov 4mo agoA few years ago, one of my coworkers was arrested for a domestic violence complaint. Looking into his case, I found an extremely specific lurid description of the allegations -- and then I found the same lurid description copy/pasted to every other person recently arrested for the same crime. I'm probably getting the specific terms wrong, but I did click through to see it on a government website, because my first suspicion was the aggregator, but no, the police just had a boilerplate story full of specifics which could not possibly apply to each and every person they carelessly slapped it onto. This absolutely blew my mind at the time, but it fits with smaller subsequent observations. In any case: a double digit percentage of institutional failure does not upset my priors about how carefully the police operate.
- gerdesj 4mo agoWhy did you "look into the case of your coworker"?
- ceejayoz 4mo agoYou wouldn't be curious?
- xstas1 4mo agoCan you put some of the text in a comment here?
- assimpleaspossi 4mo agoThe complaint would be by the courts, not the police.
- smallmancontrov 4mo agoMy mistake, and that's too bad - my priors about courts were higher than the police, and this decreases them. Thanks for the correction.
- chaps 4mo agoAn important thing you should recognize: the judicial system is painfully nontransparent in such a way that even figuring this sort of thing takes an extensive amount of time and is often even impossible. I've personally gone down a similar route (did some journalism for a bit) by trying to understand how shotspotter is used in prosecution, many of which resulted in false arrests and many, many years of life lost across all the people arrested falsely from it. If you would like to begin trying to answer these, I recommend starting with submitting some FOIAs. Considering your stance seems to be that you won't believe what others are telling you -- I promise you that you'll be surprised.
- vitally3643 4mo agoWe have the highest proportion of imprisoned citizens in the world. This is done because there's an exception in our constitution for slavery "as punishment for a crime" and well all know that capitalism loves slave labor.
- adastra22 4mo agoDo you have any exposure to the criminal "justice" system in the USA?
- themafia 4mo agoIt's actually an institutional success since prison labor is so often utilized in the United States. The truth is they're just lying to you.
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago[dead]
- tyingq 4mo agoConsider all of that can be used for forced confessions and forced plea bargains also. In those cases, the "evidence" doesn't even need to exist at all, or be on the record in any way.
- reactordev 4mo agoLet alone all it takes is a photo and a voice clip of 10sec to create an imitation of that person confessing to whatever your heart desires.
- rvnx 4mo agoAn old phone book is enough.
- simcop2387 4mo agoHows wolfie doing?
- rvnx 4mo agoit's max aren't you an imposter ?
- gdulli 4mo agoSadly, there's more evil and more laziness/incompetence in the world that's being accelerated by AI than there is good.
- duped 4mo agoForensics is the art of manufacturing evidence to convict people. Ok that's a bit aggressive, but it's important to understand the limits of forensic science, the broken incentives, and systemic lack of rigor in the application of various analyses and products to inculpate/exculpate suspects after the fact.