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> judges act as rubber stamps now Exactly. Our government is as overbearing and oppressive as it's been in a very long time. I read somewhere that judges appro

> judges act as rubber stamps now Exactly. Our government is as overbearing and oppressive as it's been in a very long time. I read somewhere that judges approve something like 99% of the search warrants presented to them. They no longer serve as a check on law enforcement. I'd love to hear otherwise, to hear how judges are doing a good job balancing the interests of people against the interests of law enforcement.

vinceguidry 12y ago
I did not downvote you, but there's a perfectly good explanation for why 99% of warrants would be approved. Consider that the police know what warrants a judge is likely to approve and which he's likely to turn down. Over time, police departments will learn to submit the warrants they can get approved and not bother wasting a judge's time with warrants that won't be approved. So very high approval rates do not necessarily signal the loss of the judge's ability or willingness to check police power. Just that everybody involved is doing their jobs as professionals in their domain.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  > there's a perfectly good explanation for why 99% of warrants would be approved. Your argument is that the approval rate could be 99% legitimately. Even if true it doesn't actually provide any evidence that judges are not acting as a rubber stamp, it only attempts to discount some evidence in favor of it. Moreover, the fact that the approval rate is 99% is still evidence that judges are not being very critical in approving warrants. The high rate makes it statistically more likely that judges are approving warrants uncritically than would be the case if the rate was lower.
  - vinceguidry 12y ago
    > Moreover, the fact that the approval rate is 99% is still evidence that judges are not being very critical in approving warrants. No it is not. > The high rate makes it statistically more likely that judges are approving warrants uncritically than would be the case if the rate was lower. As I said in another sub-thread, you are going to have to explain the statistics involved if you want to make an argument from them. Otherwise you are just being circular. You cannot expect a statement to be its own proof.
    - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
      > No it is not. Yes it is. There is no question that it is evidence, so you can only be questioning whether the evidence supports the proposition. You want a mathematical proof? OK. Without knowing the percentage of approved warrants we can't exclude the possibility that exactly zero warrants were approved, which would be a hard disproof of the proposition that judges are uncritically approving warrants. Discovering that the percentage is nonzero eliminates the possibility that it is 0%, which increases the probability that the proposition is correct. Continuing by induction, with each warrant not approved the possibility that it was approved uncritically is eliminated, whereas with each warrant approved the possibility that it was approved uncritically is retained. So the higher the percentage of approved warrants the more it supports the proposition that they are being approved uncritically. QED. What you're arguing is that it's weak evidence. It could be that there were many legitimate warrants requested and few illegitimate ones. But that's a weak argument unless you can present some contrary evidence for the opposite position. All you're doing is claiming that the proposition hasn't been strongly proved, not proving it incorrect.
      - vinceguidry 12y ago
        Your position is circular. You are defining 'critical-ness' with the sole criteria being the approval rate. If we accept that as the only criteria, then sure the proposition stands, but then it loses meaning and becomes nothing more than a rhetorical device. Generally speaking, we mean 'critical' to involve the weighing of a decision against an ethical standard. Assuming the standard isn't changing, we would expect an equilibrium to emerge where the parties involved would come to understand the standard, especially given that the warrant process is not adversarial. So there's no reason not to expect the approval rate to settle at close to 100%, with the few denials being law enforcement attempts to skirt the boundaries. Anything less than a very high rate would indicate that the standards are inconsistent or are being inconsistently applied. The only reason I can see to be inconsistent is to game statistics like this one that seem to mean more to certain people than they actually do.
        AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > the fact that the approval rate is 99% How'd this get from "I read somewhere" to "fact"?
- foobarqux 12y ago
  You could say the same thing about many aspects of the law (e.g. pursuing prosecution) but none have a 99% success rate.
  - vinceguidry 12y ago
    You can not say that about pursuing prosecution, as that is at least intended to be an adversarial process, anomalously high conviction rates do indicate to me a corruption of justice proceedings. Acquittals in China are quite rare, for instance. The reason is that the CPC considers itself the source of justice and sees no issue with doing away with impartiality in matters of political importance.
    - Tomte 12y ago
      99% seems too high. On the other hand, outright acquittals are very low in Germany, as well (as they should be). Outright convictions for everything the prosecution charged are also not too common, but that the prosecutor deems something illegal and grave enough to charge, the court concurs by opening proceedings, and then in the trial everything falls completely apart basically only happens when the trial brings a complete surprise with it. And most of those times the "complete surprise" is just a key witness refusing to testify or not remembering anymore (as it happens too often in domestic abuse cases).
- kenrikm 12y ago
  99% is not "just" "optimized" police departments. Something else is up, statistically it does not make sense.
  - vinceguidry 12y ago
    You're going to have to explain the statistics involved if you want to make an argument from them.
  - Rapzid 12y ago
    Agree with vinceguidry. Is 99% above the "judge is no longer being critical" statistical threshold? How was that determined and where is it published?
dragonwriter 12y ago
> I read somewhere that judges approve something like 99% of the search warrants presented to them. They no longer serve as a check on law enforcement. Where? Most sources I can find (usually focussing on individual departments) indicate rejected warrants applications aren't tracked, so there would likely be no basis for this conclusion. Even if it was true, it would likely be misleading -- the fact that a warrant is approved doesn't mean its approved with the scope originally sought. Most sources I've seen also suggest that while rejections are uncommon, limiting the scope of the warrant is not.
- PhantomGremlin 12y ago
  I don't have a good source for my 99% comment for the general case, that's just something I ran across a while ago. However, Wikipedia makes the same claim for FISA warrants.[1] Of course, there is also some discussion that these are only "final" requests to that court. Just using the FISA numbers as a starting point for discussion, I'm not ready to believe that 11 requests denied and 33,942 warrants issued is something that makes sense. I'd bet that the Russian Parliament is less of a rubber stamp on Putin. :) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellige...

vinceguidry 12y ago

I did not downvote you, but there's a perfectly good explanation for why 99% of warrants would be approved. Consider that the police know what warrants a judge is likely to approve and which he's likely to turn down. Over time, police departments will learn to submit the warrants they can get approved and not bother wasting a judge's time with warrants that won't be approved. So very high approval rates do not necessarily signal the loss of the judge's ability or willingness to check police power. Just that everybody involved is doing their jobs as professionals in their domain.

AnthonyMouse 12y ago
> there's a perfectly good explanation for why 99% of warrants would be approved. Your argument is that the approval rate could be 99% legitimately. Even if true it doesn't actually provide any evidence that judges are not acting as a rubber stamp, it only attempts to discount some evidence in favor of it. Moreover, the fact that the approval rate is 99% is still evidence that judges are not being very critical in approving warrants. The high rate makes it statistically more likely that judges are approving warrants uncritically than would be the case if the rate was lower.
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  > Moreover, the fact that the approval rate is 99% is still evidence that judges are not being very critical in approving warrants. No it is not. > The high rate makes it statistically more likely that judges are approving warrants uncritically than would be the case if the rate was lower. As I said in another sub-thread, you are going to have to explain the statistics involved if you want to make an argument from them. Otherwise you are just being circular. You cannot expect a statement to be its own proof.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    > No it is not. Yes it is. There is no question that it is evidence, so you can only be questioning whether the evidence supports the proposition. You want a mathematical proof? OK. Without knowing the percentage of approved warrants we can't exclude the possibility that exactly zero warrants were approved, which would be a hard disproof of the proposition that judges are uncritically approving warrants. Discovering that the percentage is nonzero eliminates the possibility that it is 0%, which increases the probability that the proposition is correct. Continuing by induction, with each warrant not approved the possibility that it was approved uncritically is eliminated, whereas with each warrant approved the possibility that it was approved uncritically is retained. So the higher the percentage of approved warrants the more it supports the proposition that they are being approved uncritically. QED. What you're arguing is that it's weak evidence. It could be that there were many legitimate warrants requested and few illegitimate ones. But that's a weak argument unless you can present some contrary evidence for the opposite position. All you're doing is claiming that the proposition hasn't been strongly proved, not proving it incorrect.
    - vinceguidry 12y ago
      Your position is circular. You are defining 'critical-ness' with the sole criteria being the approval rate. If we accept that as the only criteria, then sure the proposition stands, but then it loses meaning and becomes nothing more than a rhetorical device. Generally speaking, we mean 'critical' to involve the weighing of a decision against an ethical standard. Assuming the standard isn't changing, we would expect an equilibrium to emerge where the parties involved would come to understand the standard, especially given that the warrant process is not adversarial. So there's no reason not to expect the approval rate to settle at close to 100%, with the few denials being law enforcement attempts to skirt the boundaries. Anything less than a very high rate would indicate that the standards are inconsistent or are being inconsistently applied. The only reason I can see to be inconsistent is to game statistics like this one that seem to mean more to certain people than they actually do.
      - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > the fact that the approval rate is 99% How'd this get from "I read somewhere" to "fact"?
foobarqux 12y ago
You could say the same thing about many aspects of the law (e.g. pursuing prosecution) but none have a 99% success rate.
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  You can not say that about pursuing prosecution, as that is at least intended to be an adversarial process, anomalously high conviction rates do indicate to me a corruption of justice proceedings. Acquittals in China are quite rare, for instance. The reason is that the CPC considers itself the source of justice and sees no issue with doing away with impartiality in matters of political importance.
  - Tomte 12y ago
    99% seems too high. On the other hand, outright acquittals are very low in Germany, as well (as they should be). Outright convictions for everything the prosecution charged are also not too common, but that the prosecutor deems something illegal and grave enough to charge, the court concurs by opening proceedings, and then in the trial everything falls completely apart basically only happens when the trial brings a complete surprise with it. And most of those times the "complete surprise" is just a key witness refusing to testify or not remembering anymore (as it happens too often in domestic abuse cases).
kenrikm 12y ago
99% is not "just" "optimized" police departments. Something else is up, statistically it does not make sense.
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  You're going to have to explain the statistics involved if you want to make an argument from them.
- Rapzid 12y ago
  Agree with vinceguidry. Is 99% above the "judge is no longer being critical" statistical threshold? How was that determined and where is it published?

dragonwriter 12y ago

> I read somewhere that judges approve something like 99% of the search warrants presented to them. They no longer serve as a check on law enforcement. Where? Most sources I can find (usually focussing on individual departments) indicate rejected warrants applications aren't tracked, so there would likely be no basis for this conclusion. Even if it was true, it would likely be misleading -- the fact that a warrant is approved doesn't mean its approved with the scope originally sought. Most sources I've seen also suggest that while rejections are uncommon, limiting the scope of the warrant is not.

PhantomGremlin 12y ago
I don't have a good source for my 99% comment for the general case, that's just something I ran across a while ago. However, Wikipedia makes the same claim for FISA warrants.[1] Of course, there is also some discussion that these are only "final" requests to that court. Just using the FISA numbers as a starting point for discussion, I'm not ready to believe that 11 requests denied and 33,942 warrants issued is something that makes sense. I'd bet that the Russian Parliament is less of a rubber stamp on Putin. :) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellige...