12 ms·

I have mixed feelings about jail terms in general, but I agree– this is precisely the sort of crime I would imagine carrying a life sentence. The number of case

by ics 13y ago

I have mixed feelings about jail terms in general, but I agree– this is precisely the sort of crime I would imagine carrying a life sentence. The number of cases affected & lives disrupted here is hardly fathomable.

sentenza 13y ago
What is the punishment for helping somebody to hold a person captive in their basement? The sentence should be that times sixhundred (how many wrongful convictions she caused, number might rise yet).
- gaius 13y ago
  The sum of those 40000 sentences.
- msandford 13y ago
  Honestly I think this is a situation where the death penalty is entirely appropriate. I don't like the idea of more suffering when there is already plenty to go around here, but I can't see how you can call it "justice" if she is allowed to live. An example must be set that this kind of thing is so repugnant to civilized societies that it WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. EDIT: The scale of her crimes is thousands of person-years of human life in jail. Some of them probably deserved it, others probably didn't. There is a serious asymmetry here, she has only 50-100 years that she can be imprisoned and that's not a strong enough message to people in the government who would think about doing the same to further their own careers as well.
  - thenmar 13y ago
    For someone supposedly concerned about human life, you seem awfully eager to end one.
    - msandford 13y ago
      Superficially I have to agree with you that I look like a hypocrite. The government is the body which has a monopoly on violence. In other words, they're the only people who can legally do things to people that nobody would volunteer to have done to them, like going to prison. It's the government's job to provide courts through which disputes can be resolved, since you aren't supposed to take matters into your own hands. One class of those disputes is the government vs citizens who have violated the government's rules or the laws. When those kinds of cases are going through the courts the government should be extra careful to be impartial because everyone can tell that it's potentially a situation ripe for corruption. The government is adjudicating a case between the government (the DA or prosecutor) and someone not in the government ("normal people"). Given the choice you wouldn't choose your wife's parents to settle a dispute between you and your wife; but this can be a very real fear when being prosecuted. The problem here is even though you can name the different parts of the government and call them separate (courts, prosecutor, forensics, etc) ultimately we find out that forensics and the prosecutor are both "on the same team" and that when the courts get involved again to try and fix the mess, that the forensics person is still "on the same team" as the prosecutors and maybe everyone else. If you're in the class of people called "the government" you have to be extra right, extra careful, and extra following-the-rules so that ordinary people get a fair shake when dealing with an entity that has virtually limitless funds to prosecute versus their usually meager funds to defend (unless you're in the top 1% to 0.1% or so, then it's just "lots more" rather than "infinitely more"). Here's a case where not only was the forensics person not extra careful, right and proper, not even sloppy and foolish but malicious. And not just a little bit either, she didn't tamper with one case that involved a cheating ex or something. She did it systematically over thousands of cases depriving people of their liberty wrongly. You could build a strong case that she perverted justice in a very horrific manner. If you add up all the person-years of people's lives that she conspired to help imprison and divide by 100 year in a life (round numbers) you'd get to the point where she's effectively "taken" tens if not hundreds of lives. That makes her in a roundabout way something akin to a very impressive mass murderer. In that case I'm not sure that the death penalty is an over-reactionary knee-jerk kind of punishment.
      - trekky1700 13y ago
        By god, is the human race so savage that we resort to killing so quickly. This is a life, something some people would consider priceless. Not something you can view arithmetically, calculating the hours in damage caused versus somebody's time left.
    - lolnope 13y ago
      There's a distinction made between individuals that follow society's rules and those that break them on a massive scale for financial gain (or other reasons).
    - conjecTech 13y ago
      Your argument is one of semantics. He is a defender of those who have not deprived others of their right to life. This is the reason why both the word murder and the word kill exist. There is a fundamental difference that you don't appreciate.
      - trekky1700 13y ago
        Unless there was a death penalty administered due to this, she has not deprived anyone of "life" in the sense suggested. She denied their freedom, and this is a grave injustice, but not one fit for a death penalty. How savage and petty that would be.
        msandford 13y ago
        What is worth more, 50 years of a single person's life or 10,000 years of many people's lives? If it's really hard to comprehend 50 years of a single person's life how impossible is it to truly understand what 10,000 years of human life is? If you have 40,000 cases and only say 1/4 of them get falsified and that results in on average one year of wrongful imprisonment you're at 10,000 years.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - kabdib 13y ago
    Revenge is useless. Deterrence is not. Go after the prosecutors who were involved. Conspiracy is often thrown at "peon" types, from those emails it makes sense that at least some of the prosecutors knew what was going on. You want to hammer these wastes of oxygen and make it clear that corruption will not be tolerated. Never going to happen, of course. It's easier to just kill someone, and who's going to prosecute the prosecutors?
    - malandrew 13y ago
      I feel like that should be made into a latin phrase like "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Someone better versed in Latin may need to double check this: "Quis prosequiet ipsos prosecutores?"
  - e12e 13y ago
    And if it turns out someone tampered with the forensic evidence or manipulated testemonies in this case? How would you undo the wrongful execution? Witnesses, lab records and cctv can all be manipulated after all...
jjoonathan 13y ago
Me too re: jail times, but since being "hard on crime" is the politically convenient position for politicians, why not be hard on the right kinds of crime? What's worse is that the system didn't detect the problem for such a long time. Why isn't laboratory analysis blinded? We already spend truckloads of money funding an elaborate appeals process, why isn't there a check on lab analysis? With the drug industry imploding, chemists (real chemists) are struggling to find work, so they could even call it a jobs program if need be. How can a voter rock the boat over an issue so far down on the political issue list?
- sigstoat 13y ago
  > With the drug industry imploding, chemists (real chemists) are struggling to find work, so they could even call it a jobs program if need be. there is a big difference between working as a chemist, and working as a forensic chemist. getting drug into trials and treated like shit by both sides in the case isn't any fun, and it's hard to find people who'll actually stick with it.
- bodyfour 13y ago
  > Why isn't laboratory analysis blinded? Exactly my thought. The chemists doing the analysis shouldn't have any way of finding out who the defendant or prosecutor in the case is until they've given their report. Similarly, the parties in the trial shouldn't know what chemist will be doing the analysis in advance. The part of the story where a prosecutor was practically begging the chemist for a particular result is mindblowing. I hope the feds come in and clean house. It will be interesting to see how many wrongful imprisonment suits this ends up causing.
cstross 13y ago
I don't know how Massachusetts law -- or US Federal law -- swings, but here in the UK there's a specific crime, magnificently called Conspiracy to Pervert the Course of Justice, which covers everything from perjury to faking evidence. And while the average sentence is on the order of 2 years, there's no upper limit: a life sentence is possible in sufficiently extreme cases.
- judk 13y ago
  With 40k counts here, it can be a matter of deciding whether the sentences --no matter how light--should be served concurrently or sequentially.
  - FBT 13y ago
    How does one serve multiple jail terms concurrently? The whole idea makes no sense.
    - hmottestad 13y ago
      If you define a jail cell to be in two different jails at the same time then you can serve two sentences in two jails at the same time :)

by ics 13y ago

sentenza 13y ago

What is the punishment for helping somebody to hold a person captive in their basement? The sentence should be that times sixhundred (how many wrongful convictions she caused, number might rise yet).

gaius 13y ago
The sum of those 40000 sentences.
msandford 13y ago
Honestly I think this is a situation where the death penalty is entirely appropriate. I don't like the idea of more suffering when there is already plenty to go around here, but I can't see how you can call it "justice" if she is allowed to live. An example must be set that this kind of thing is so repugnant to civilized societies that it WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. EDIT: The scale of her crimes is thousands of person-years of human life in jail. Some of them probably deserved it, others probably didn't. There is a serious asymmetry here, she has only 50-100 years that she can be imprisoned and that's not a strong enough message to people in the government who would think about doing the same to further their own careers as well.
- thenmar 13y ago
  For someone supposedly concerned about human life, you seem awfully eager to end one.
  - msandford 13y ago
    Superficially I have to agree with you that I look like a hypocrite. The government is the body which has a monopoly on violence. In other words, they're the only people who can legally do things to people that nobody would volunteer to have done to them, like going to prison. It's the government's job to provide courts through which disputes can be resolved, since you aren't supposed to take matters into your own hands. One class of those disputes is the government vs citizens who have violated the government's rules or the laws. When those kinds of cases are going through the courts the government should be extra careful to be impartial because everyone can tell that it's potentially a situation ripe for corruption. The government is adjudicating a case between the government (the DA or prosecutor) and someone not in the government ("normal people"). Given the choice you wouldn't choose your wife's parents to settle a dispute between you and your wife; but this can be a very real fear when being prosecuted. The problem here is even though you can name the different parts of the government and call them separate (courts, prosecutor, forensics, etc) ultimately we find out that forensics and the prosecutor are both "on the same team" and that when the courts get involved again to try and fix the mess, that the forensics person is still "on the same team" as the prosecutors and maybe everyone else. If you're in the class of people called "the government" you have to be extra right, extra careful, and extra following-the-rules so that ordinary people get a fair shake when dealing with an entity that has virtually limitless funds to prosecute versus their usually meager funds to defend (unless you're in the top 1% to 0.1% or so, then it's just "lots more" rather than "infinitely more"). Here's a case where not only was the forensics person not extra careful, right and proper, not even sloppy and foolish but malicious. And not just a little bit either, she didn't tamper with one case that involved a cheating ex or something. She did it systematically over thousands of cases depriving people of their liberty wrongly. You could build a strong case that she perverted justice in a very horrific manner. If you add up all the person-years of people's lives that she conspired to help imprison and divide by 100 year in a life (round numbers) you'd get to the point where she's effectively "taken" tens if not hundreds of lives. That makes her in a roundabout way something akin to a very impressive mass murderer. In that case I'm not sure that the death penalty is an over-reactionary knee-jerk kind of punishment.
    - trekky1700 13y ago
      By god, is the human race so savage that we resort to killing so quickly. This is a life, something some people would consider priceless. Not something you can view arithmetically, calculating the hours in damage caused versus somebody's time left.
  - lolnope 13y ago
    There's a distinction made between individuals that follow society's rules and those that break them on a massive scale for financial gain (or other reasons).
  - conjecTech 13y ago
    Your argument is one of semantics. He is a defender of those who have not deprived others of their right to life. This is the reason why both the word murder and the word kill exist. There is a fundamental difference that you don't appreciate.
    - trekky1700 13y ago
      Unless there was a death penalty administered due to this, she has not deprived anyone of "life" in the sense suggested. She denied their freedom, and this is a grave injustice, but not one fit for a death penalty. How savage and petty that would be.
      - msandford 13y ago
        What is worth more, 50 years of a single person's life or 10,000 years of many people's lives? If it's really hard to comprehend 50 years of a single person's life how impossible is it to truly understand what 10,000 years of human life is? If you have 40,000 cases and only say 1/4 of them get falsified and that results in on average one year of wrongful imprisonment you're at 10,000 years.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- kabdib 13y ago
  Revenge is useless. Deterrence is not. Go after the prosecutors who were involved. Conspiracy is often thrown at "peon" types, from those emails it makes sense that at least some of the prosecutors knew what was going on. You want to hammer these wastes of oxygen and make it clear that corruption will not be tolerated. Never going to happen, of course. It's easier to just kill someone, and who's going to prosecute the prosecutors?
  - malandrew 13y ago
    I feel like that should be made into a latin phrase like "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Someone better versed in Latin may need to double check this: "Quis prosequiet ipsos prosecutores?"
- e12e 13y ago
  And if it turns out someone tampered with the forensic evidence or manipulated testemonies in this case? How would you undo the wrongful execution? Witnesses, lab records and cctv can all be manipulated after all...

jjoonathan 13y ago

Me too re: jail times, but since being "hard on crime" is the politically convenient position for politicians, why not be hard on the right kinds of crime? What's worse is that the system didn't detect the problem for such a long time. Why isn't laboratory analysis blinded? We already spend truckloads of money funding an elaborate appeals process, why isn't there a check on lab analysis? With the drug industry imploding, chemists (real chemists) are struggling to find work, so they could even call it a jobs program if need be. How can a voter rock the boat over an issue so far down on the political issue list?

sigstoat 13y ago
> With the drug industry imploding, chemists (real chemists) are struggling to find work, so they could even call it a jobs program if need be. there is a big difference between working as a chemist, and working as a forensic chemist. getting drug into trials and treated like shit by both sides in the case isn't any fun, and it's hard to find people who'll actually stick with it.
bodyfour 13y ago
> Why isn't laboratory analysis blinded? Exactly my thought. The chemists doing the analysis shouldn't have any way of finding out who the defendant or prosecutor in the case is until they've given their report. Similarly, the parties in the trial shouldn't know what chemist will be doing the analysis in advance. The part of the story where a prosecutor was practically begging the chemist for a particular result is mindblowing. I hope the feds come in and clean house. It will be interesting to see how many wrongful imprisonment suits this ends up causing.

cstross 13y ago

I don't know how Massachusetts law -- or US Federal law -- swings, but here in the UK there's a specific crime, magnificently called Conspiracy to Pervert the Course of Justice, which covers everything from perjury to faking evidence. And while the average sentence is on the order of 2 years, there's no upper limit: a life sentence is possible in sufficiently extreme cases.

judk 13y ago
With 40k counts here, it can be a matter of deciding whether the sentences --no matter how light--should be served concurrently or sequentially.
- FBT 13y ago
  How does one serve multiple jail terms concurrently? The whole idea makes no sense.
  - hmottestad 13y ago
    If you define a jail cell to be in two different jails at the same time then you can serve two sentences in two jails at the same time :)