Comment by parl_match
2 years ago
The justice system does the best it can with the information it has. It is far from perfect. It makes horrible mistakes all the time. The problem, of course, is improving it without knock-on effects making it worse.
There are huge swaths of people doing the work required to make it better, every day. It's not as easy as turning a dial from "bad" to "good"
No. When it comes to evaluating forensic evidence lawyers are, by training, too process oriented to solve the problems. Ask a prosecutor what the error rate is for fingerprints or DNA evidence and you’ll get a blank stare. They don’t even try to measure it.
A lot of doctors are process oriented as well. Which is fine most of the time. But I was similarly disturbed when a specialist had zero clue what the approx half life of one of the primary drugs they use was. There was a situation that didn’t fit the book and i just looked it up for them on the spot. They didn’t like me.
You're telling me no defense lawyer thinks about arguing the evidence is unreliable or are you just saying the prosecution throws everything they can find at their side of the case? The former seems extremely hard to believe (lest you're about to become the greatest defense lawmaker of all time due to wisdom shared in a short HN comment) and the latter seems to be evidence of the system working both well and as designed, not evidence it's badly faulty.
> latter seems to be evidence of the system working both well and as designed
Prosecutors in America have one goal: close the case. At any cost, close the case. They are not interested in justice. They are not interested in finding the one who actually committed the crime. They are interested in closing the case. If that is “working as designed”, then we need to change the design.
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There are also huge swaths of people actively trying to make it worse, that's what the FBI did (does?) for years when it knowingly pushed junk forensics.
Or what basically every prosecution does, when it knows that the science behind some things isn't airtight but still presents it in the best possible light to get a conviction.
> junk forensics
Fiber analysis (e.g. carpets)
It's not a justice system, it's a Law and Order system: It's not designed to deliver justice, it's designed to resolve disputes relatively cheaply, while allowing for spending more money to get better results.
If the current functioning is it doing "the best it can", the whole thing should be burnt to the ground.
> A system that does not incarcerate anyone for any reason would be much preferable
surely you don't actually believe that? I don't think the result of this is just 0 false positives. The result of that is a lot more crime, and a lot more injustice.
I think you (as is very common) vastly overestimate the effect of the threat of incarceration on crime.
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to be replaced with what? i'm all for making changes that are an improvement, but just burning it to the ground for the sake of it with no end game is not an improvement
At this point, I would not be surprised if having two judges per case, randomly selected from the community, from parents who have successfully had at least three children leave the nest while still remaining on speaking terms, was a more reliable method of justice.
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A system that does not incarcerate anyone for any reason would be much preferable to the atrocities that are the current criminal justice systems in most of the global west (and especially of course the United States).
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If you burnt to the ground everything doing the best it can probably 75% of the public and every instution would spontaneously combust.
and none as effective as this one person
too many cooks in the kitchen