Comment by akudha
6 days ago
Maybe everyone does it at some level, but not everyone works in a job that has the potential to wreck other people's lives and freedoms. There should be a higher standard for doctors, prosecutors, cops, judges etc than someone writing a todo CRUD app or a cashier at a bodega.
It is not too much to ask for prosecutors to be a bit more careful, bit more factual, understand the powers that come with their position and use it wisely. If they are not able to do that, they should pick some other profession which has lesser potential to cause damage than law enforcement.
Also - now that the software has proven defective, are they doing to go after Fujitsu or those who tested/signed off on the software? Probably not, maybe they will find a scapegoat at best.
Law enforcement could definitely do better here. The nature of the job tends to attract people who like exerting power over others, and I imagine that correlates with deciding people are guilty first, and finding evidence later.
But everybody is like this to an extent, so you need to fix this in other ways too. This is why reasonable countries have a whole bunch of process around legal punishment, and don't just throw someone in prison after a police officer says so. All the restrictions on how evidence is gathered and what kind of proof needs to be provided are ways to work around this problem. The police and prosecutor might decide someone is guilty, but they still have to convince twelve ordinary people. (Or whatever the process is in your country of choice.)
It sounds like this is where things really fell apart with the postal scandal, and the courts were willing to convict with insufficient evidence.