Crime Lab Scandals Just Keep Getting Worse (slate.com) 245
Many people are convicted in American courts on the basis of drug lab analysis. Just how accurate or accountable are the people and labs? schwit1 writes with an excerpt that gives a good reminder of how people can land in jail based on fake data, with the example (an outlier, surely) of Annie Dookhan, a chemist who worked at a Massachusetts state lab drug.
Dookhan was sentenced in 2013 to at least three years in prison, after pleading guilty in 2012 to having falsified thousands of drug tests. Among her extracurricular crime lab activities, Dookhan failed to properly test drug samples before declaring them positive, mixed up samples to create positive tests, forged signatures, and lied about her own credentials. Over her nine-year career, Dookhan tested about 60,000 samples involved in roughly 34,000 criminal cases. Three years later, the state of Massachusetts still can't figure out how to repair the damage she wrought almost single-handedly.
three years? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about adding up all the time served by the people who got false convictions, then doubling it.
Re:three years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:three years? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a huge part of the problem and is very revealing. Prosecutors and judges decide there is no particular hurry to get the many innocent people convicted by the worst kind of false evidence out of jail, then go home to their nicer than average homes and have a better than average dinner with their families while the innocent eat the cheapest crap that can legally be called food while locked away from their friends and family.
Once the wheels of justice grind away, more slowly than usual, they will act as if they are doing the falsely convicted the worlds biggest favor simply by not further wrongly punishing them.
As for compensation, start by looking at how much you have to pay someone to willingly live under poor conditions away from their family for an extended period of time. So you're looking at paying them what you would pay a North Atlantic oil platform worker at a minimum. Then double it because there was no furlough on offer and double it again because they didn't willingly accept the arrangement.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not seeing the problem with this. How many lives did she ruin? It's not just the time people spent in jail. They then have a lot more trouble finding work because of a criminal conviction. There's their family who has to suffer. Plus there are probably some guilty people who weren't convicted.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Systematic Failure (Score:5, Interesting)
People will look at this person as a bd person, and I do not question that; but the system that allowed this to happen is the real culprit. A system that rewards people, formally or subtly, for producing the desired results, is not a system that is engineered for finding truth.
The reality is that Lae Enforcement and investigation procedures need independent oversight built directly into the system. Otherwise these issues can never be resolved.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, she was a bad person. Just because a system allows you to cheat does not mean you should cheat and if you do cheat you are the bad person, not the system. She should have had to serve the time of all of her victims x 3. She got off way too easily.
meme.jpg (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not both?
Yeah, she should be nailed to a raft by her ears and set adrift on the ocean.
But we should have a system of justice that isn't so prone to corruption by way of weak oversight.
Re:Systematic Failure (Score:4, Interesting)
She should have had to serve the time of all of her victims x 3. She got off way too easily.
And what "punishment" for a system that has allowed a single person to screw up 50,000 or so cases? The system is fine. It fucks the poor. It fucks the minorities. It fucks the people we don't like. So keep the system the way it is, and replace the broken cog in the broken machine, and let the broken machine still pump out bad results.
And 3x the time of the victims is a silly sentence. Let's say every conviction (some wrongly, some rightly) were 1 year (some shorter, some longer), that's 34,000 (current estimate, could be more) years in prison. That's purely symbolic and does nothing to prevent this from happening again, nor make any of the tainted convictions right.
What would you do with the victims of her crimes?
Re: (Score:2)
Sing it, Bob (Score:2)
The trial was a pig circus. He never stood a chance.
Re: (Score:2)
You're right. My annoyance at getting it wrong is softened by someone actually knowing what I was talking about.
Re: (Score:2)
And it needs somebody that is responsible if this oversight fails and that goes to jail. In the US system that would be the task and responsibility of the prosecutor as it is his/her evidence.
It's not just the criminal justice system. (Score:5, Interesting)
The civil justice system is just as big a mess, and for the same reason as TFA implies. Strangely absent from both systems are the victims and the accused, the petitioners and the respondents, the actual citizens that the system purportedly serves.
Instead, both parties touch the system only at its very edge. Their actual cases happen more or less without them, winding their way through an impossibly large-scale system full of paid actors whose jobs, practically speaking, at the level of everyday experience, are not to think about the parties in the case, but to perform the same particularistic tasks day after day in massive volumes before handing things off to other paid actors in a massive division of labor.
It's a kind of assembly line or factory for legal activity and paperwork production. The complete details of any single case, civil or criminal, are not known by anyone within the system—even the judges, commissioners, and magistrates that hear them—even though the actual parties to the case know their own stories inside and out. There is no facility or room within the system for its paid actors to actually get to know a case, through either party's eyes. Instead, each professional focuses only on the tiny fragment of each case that they are responsible for before handing it off to the next professional.
There is essentially no oversight for any part of the system, and even if there was, plausible deniability is huge, since each professional knows and interacts with only the tiniest part of each case, yet most legal statues offer recourse only if poor or unprofessional practice are more likely than not to have actually altered the final outcomes of this division of labor involving many months, dozens or hundreds of specialists, and a significant degree of uncertainty due to the vagaries of interaction and logistics.
It is a forest-for-trees problem to the Nth power, but it's difficult to see any way to address it; to be just, the law needs to be well-documented, clear and explicit, and to have nuance and detail. This necessarily makes it large and complex. That implies the need for professionals that have been trained in it. But a professional that dedicates their life to law must be able to make a living. Most individuals cannot afford to pay an entire salary to a legal professional, much less the many that must work on a given case due to the complexity of the law, and thus, they cannot expect these professionals to dedicate themselves to a single case. Instead, the costs of the professionals' salaries must be shared amongst literally many thousands of victims, accused, petitioners, and respondents, meaning that the professionals must limit their consumption of case details to just those in which they specialize, or face mountains of information with which they can't possibly cope and the consumption of which would impact their ability to do the job in which they specialize.
As a result, for the average citizen, bringing a case or participating in a case is like playing a giant, almost comically huge game of Plinko. The case enters at one end of the machine and knocks about between pegs endlessly and seemingly at random, well out of their reach, for what seems like ages, while they stand by, breathless and helpless. At the end, the case exits somewhere, with some sort of decision, but the relationship between its final disposition and its initial circumstances are completely unpredictable and due to the nature of the machine, and it's difficult to argue that any part of the game machine is "broken" most of the time—a peg in the machine has to be severely affected (i.e. missing, malformed, completely bent) for such a claim to be viable. Minor variances throughout may influence outcomes for a very long time without being detectable, even under scrutiny. And for the most part, there is no budget, much less any avenue even for the funding and organization of a program of scrutiny.
Re: (Score:3)
The first time I got drug tested by a job I was trying to get it was in a small doctors office, years later when I had to do the same thing again for another job it was in a drug testing facility that tests hundreds of people all the time like herding cattle.
Testing companies have convinced employers that you can not afford to NOT test your employees, it could make you look bad in the press and cause bigger issues later.
It is all a bunch a bullshit and they need to leave people allot, stop wasting money on
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure why you would want to punish the people allowing the prosecutors to resign. They should resign. That won't release them from being punished if they should be found to have tampered with or asked the lab to tamper with evidence.
I think the objection to "resignation" is that is appears voluntary. They should not be allowed to resign, they should be fired. Yes prosecution should follow also.
Simple way to 'repair' 'damage' (Score:5, Insightful)
Just pass some retroactive laws legalizing drug use. Problem solved. No need for new trials. No new costs, and dramatically reduced law enforcement budget going forward. Plus revenue from tax stamps on recreational substances.
Re: (Score:2)
I like your idea. If there were no penalties for using drugs then there would be no reason for drug users to hide the fact that they use drugs. By their use being illegal, the whole dataset that could provide important information as to both the positive and detrimental effects of drug use is totally skewed. The way it is now, only those stupid enough to be caught using drugs contribute to the data which causes the results to suggest that using drugs makes you stupid. The only way to ensure there is no bias
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The way it is now, only those stupid enough to be caught using drugs contribute to the data which causes the results to suggest that using drugs makes you stupid.
I totally agree. This whole notion that people who use meth or heroine all day are in any way impacted by those drugs is just The Man trying to keep us down. Substantial studies showing that young people who smoke dope end up dumber, more paranoid, and otherwise developmentally down the scale - that's all just BS (never mind that such studies line up perfectly with the observations any honest person will tell you they've made through their own experience). Yes, it's just like alcohol, I know. Which is a go
Re:Simple way to 'repair' 'damage' (Score:5, Insightful)
While drugs are bad there is also evidence that shitty environmental situations, not just addiction, drive people to drugs in the first place.
Your "honest person observation" smells an awful lot like what prejudice people say when they want to persecute minorities.
"Any honest person will tell you that, in their experience, [group] are [lazy/dumb/useless/not REAL people so it's ok that we treat them like shit]"
Giving drug abusers an even shittier environment to live in by demonizing them isn't going to lead to better outcomes for society.
Watch this but with a grain of salt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The point is not that the public should embrace the use of drugs but that the war on drugs is a complete failure and actually doing harm.
It only makes sense that you should try something else when what you're doing isn't working.
For example, we could legalize marijuana and decriminalize other drugs and use the income from taxes on marijuana to fund education to prevent abuse and social programs to help abusers get back on their feet and be proud of themselves and break their addiction (and, possibly more importantly, their need for their addiction.)
Ideally we'd try lots of different methods of helping people and use studies to see which methods are actually effective and worth continued funding.
So, we wouldn't be wasting taxes on law enforcement and prison sentences for abusers, we'd hopefully undercut the black market and cut down on drug related crime, it would potential be self-funding (the best kind of taxation), and people might actually get help instead of being treated like scum.
I don't have any ideas for what to do about drug dealers who can no longer make a profit selling drugs, though. It'd suck to collapse that economy and drive them to a worse crime.
And honestly, we already tax alcohol and tobacco and I have to wonder where all of that money is going. It seems to me if 100% of that were going to education and social programs for drug abusers (including alcohol and tobacco) then we'd probably be in a lot better place.
Re: (Score:2)
The point is not that the public should embrace the use of drugs but that the war on drugs is a complete failure and actually doing harm.
It only makes sense that you should try something else when what you're doing isn't working.
Yep. Unfortunately, there's a lot more to it.
First off, there are of course the people who benefit from the current system. The criminal justice system is huge, and there are a lot of people and companies that suck on that teat.
Second, decriminalization is "soft on crime." That's political suicide in many parts of the country.
Third, a lot of conservative types support the war on drugs and long prison sentences. Those play well with the Republican base.
Also:
For example, we could legalize marijuana and decriminalize other drugs and use the income from taxes on marijuana to fund education to prevent abuse and social programs to help abusers get back on their feet and be proud of themselves and break their addiction (and, possibly more importantly, their need for their addiction.)
Ideally we'd try lots of different methods of helping people and use studies to see which methods are actually effective and worth continued funding.
You used the words "social programs." It doesn
Re: (Score:2)
It really is bizarre that our society is completely fine with criminalizing minor activities and then taking away someone's rights and freedoms while paying to house and feed them.
But any government program that tries to help house or feed or improve the life of a non-criminal is considered a waste of money and some sort of "Nanny State" attack on society and will lead to a totalitarian communist government and the complete erosion of our rights and freedoms.
Or how people can be against gun licenses when mo
Sure it does (Score:2)
Let me explain. Almost every poor person at least knows someone who takes drugs. In the absence of access to medical care you're going to self medicate. Now, remember that all our drug laws make you guilty by association. If they find your buddy's pot in your car you still lose your car. That means if you're poor you learn to avoid the poli
Re: (Score:3)
Are you nuts? We have a whole private industry hanging on this!
Re: (Score:2)
Bad forensics effects cases other than drug cases. So no, that does not solve the problem.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem isn't solved.
There are still thousands of people that have criminal records associated with them as a direct result of bullshit this person lied about.
Even if you get that 'removed' from their record, its still there, it doesn't actually go away and it will follow them for the rest of their lives. Legalizing drugs doesn't help them in any way shape or form.
Re: (Score:2)
Using this as a push for general legalization is a disservice to those what were falsely convicted.
In what way? Since most of these people weren't harming anyone anyway, it was wrong to convict them on any basis.
Re: (Score:2)
In the United States, the Congress is prohibited from passing ex post facto laws by clause 3 of Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution. The states are prohibited from passing ex post facto laws by clause 1 of Article I, Section 10.
Correct. However, I think the OP misspoke. S/he was really proposing that we repeal laws, not pass them. IANAL, but I think that can be done ex post facto.
Up The Ladder (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
He got fired... for letting her carry on, "testing" thousands more samples than her colleagues each year, for nine years.
So, on the one hand, at least he (and several other people above her) got the axe.
On the other hand, NINE YEARS?!? What the HELL, people?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
And the entire legal system of Massachusetts should be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up, firing EVERYONE who was anything higher than a mid-level manager.
Although honestly, this travesty of justice makes me think that even more drastic action is needed. I'm thinking we release all non-violent prisoners and hold a constitutional convention. The system is fucked up in a fundamental way, and we need to rebuild it so that it isn't.
Re: (Score:2)
> Anyone convicted on the basis of a test she could have conducted should be pardoned.
I agree with your sentiment. I see enormous practical difficulties. Sorting out which convictions were "on the basis of a test" is a nightmare, especially when the victims of poor testing plea bargained to a lower sentence. And what of people convicted of violence while in prison, violence that might not have occurred if they'd been free?
Re: (Score:3)
And that is why I and a growing number of Americans have become increasingly skeptical of the criminal "justice" system in the U.S.
Like financial systems, audit labs (Score:2, Insightful)
Take random samples from one lab and have them retested at another lab. Mistakes will be borne out.
Re: (Score:2)
There should be redundancy in these tests (Score:5, Interesting)
"costs are significant but..." (Score:2)
This is not an easy "but." Most cases generate aggregate billing across all facets of the case at a rate of five or six figures monthly, and it is already easy to make the claim that the finance limits in every case are the most direct limits on just outcomes.
Who is going to pay the significant costs? And at the expense of what other part of the case that might have had them instead? There are many victims and defendants that would argue that the first thing that ought to be paid for is increased time for t
Re: (Score:2)
Re:"costs are significant but..." (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Who is going to pay for that? The police, who will stop sending samples and money to the lab that tells them "You're wrong" too often?
Re: (Score:2)
Who is going to pay for that? The police, who will stop sending samples and money to the lab that tells them "You're wrong" too often?
Who is paying to lock people up for years? Compared to that cost lab tests are trivial.
The police should have no say about the labs. These should be certified and run by professionals, with quality control procedures in place (blind test samples in the test stream, etc.), with regular reviews. You know, like real labs. "Police labs" are not real labs.
Re: (Score:3)
Have the crime lab test a series of random samples periodically. Get random objects from the police department or the prosecutor's office. If any come back positive, something is going on. Better quality control techniques would vary the amount of drugs (or DNA) on the object and this would show how accurate and reproducible the lab's technique is at detecting it.
A big problem in these cases is that no quality control is being done whatsoever!
Re:There should be redundancy in these tests (Score:5, Insightful)
...And even if there isn't any cheating, there is the possibility that the two labs would come to different conclusions honestly, due to the inherent messiness of most criminal matters.
You cite that like it is a problem with double checking results. No, that is the very feature we wish to implement. It two labs come to different conclusions, that throws them both into doubt - and then additional checking must be initiated to resolve the discrepancies. If a repeatable result is not possible, then it is not evidence. Period.
What does Mass. Mean... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
System has no interest in error correction (Score:2)
I know that lab very well (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been the Hinton Lab in Jamaica Plain dozens of times. The people I worked with there from the lowest lab tech to the middle managers were outstanding, but they were in the epidemiology end of things. The drug testing lab was segregated on its own floor, and it was walled off like a fortress. But despite that superficial formidability of the drug testing lab, there was clearly a problem: back in 2007 the director of the crime lab resigned because mishandling DNA tests, and before that the lab had been in trouble for processing DNA too slowly. There were rape kits that had been waiting to be processed for eighteen years.
Yet despite the review of the crime lab's procedures that followed this scandal, Annie Dookhan was able to continue with her antics for an other four years before she was caught. It's odd that she was even hired with her phony degrees because that was the year it came out that Ralph Timperi, the Hinton Lab's overall director, got his PhD from a diploma mill. You'd think that'd trigger a little more scrutiny.
It all makes the entire Hinton Lab sound like a hot mess, but with the exception of Timperi's phony degree all the problems were in the crime lab, which while located inside the Hinton Lab building was (IIRC) actually overseen by the Massachusetts State Police. Possibly some kind of responsibility thing was going on there. On the public health side of things the people at the state labs were among of the best public employees I've ever dealt with, and I've worked with state and county agencies across the country. It's a shame they've been tainted.
Re: (Score:2)
There were rape kits that had been waiting to be processed for eighteen years.
And what do you suppose would hapen if priorities were reversed? If evidence for rape/murder convictions was processed in a timely manner, but drug evidence was shelved for years? The DEA would shit themselves and come after state officials. Because the DEA has nothing better to do than protect its business model and law enforcement market share.
Close the DEA. Delegate it's duties to the FDA and FBI.
blame the man (Score:5, Insightful)
I blame management, the prosecutors, and the judges. There was a serious lack of oversight, obviously.
Let's say she worked 250 days/year, a conservative assumption. That means she was averaging ~ 6E4/(9*250) ~ 27 analyses/day. Assuming 8 hours actual work/day, that means she was completing an analysis roughly every 18 minutes. I'm a physicist. I've worked in a manufacturing facility with a chem lab that analyzed production samples. Hell, sample prep can take 20 minutes! There is no way she was completing these analyses accurately. Her boss must have known something was amiss. A reasonable assumption is that he or she knew so and had wink/nod arrangement with the prosecutors and the courts.
Our "justice" system is deeply flawed, and this is more evidence of the systemic flaws in it. Kudos to Ms. Lithwick for covering this beat.
She's just a small part of the problem. (Score:3)
After sitting through a jury selection process, I have figured out that even this, supposedly fair process, is deeply broken in favor of the prosecution. If you are honest and don't agree with an overly harsh mandatory sentencing law, or don't trust cops implicitly, or are willing to accept that you may have one of many biases, which research shows we ALL have; then you will be disqualified.
Sitting there, observing the people who quickly figured out the exact right things to say to NOT be disqualified, especially after hearing how those same people talked while we were waiting outside of the courtroom, I can't help but believe those are the people who are eager to vote "guilty." I met several others who came to this same conclusion.
So, once a cop has decided to arrest you, large parts of the system seem to have been "gerrymandered" in a way to drastically increase the probability of conviction. I call it, "The law of secretly intended consequences."
Slow news day? (Score:2)
We need to rehash all the posts from almost 3 years ago?
Justice Is A Crime (Score:2)
Repair the Damage? (Score:3)
I would suggest that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts pay more attention on how to repair the damage their drug laws have wrought (alas, not single handledly); by comparison, Ms Dookhan's damages are a drop in the ocean. I have no doubt that three decades from now the Commonwealth will be arguing over this. As a starter, how about freeing everyone convicted of a marijuana offense, overturning their convictions, and returning (or recompensing) any seized property?
What is the state of the samples? (Score:3)
What is the state of the samples?
If the sample integrity has been maintained retesting is possible.
My bias is that the war on drugs has become vastly worse than the drugs themselves.
Given my bias and opinion based cost analysis all drug offenders should be released
with time served rubber stamps. The war on drugs has caused astounding social
damage in the US and much of the world. Can we say "war zone" children.
The WOD money would better be spent on the social and medical needs and consequences.
Addiction is very serious but once money is removed all of the associated crimes involved in
the financing of addiction are vastly reduced both domestic and international. Addiction does
cause harm to individuals. The WOD causes harm to communities and even nations.
The bigger fish involving truck loads of stuff and money are unlikely to be impacted.
Crack and meth are so evil that each citizen should be required to cultivate a marijuana
plant of old green simply to make a less harmful choice available.
Drug addiction is real and a problem --- the WOD is worse.
CSI? (Score:2)
I beg to differ (Score:3)
Single handedly? sorry, she was considered the Go-To Person to test your samples by many DA's in Mass.
It's ludicrous to think that any person can be the go-to person unless they deliver the results you want - which is a conviction - even if it's forged. DA's are elected, and have you ever seen one that wasn't "Tough on Crime". or bragged about their conviction rate in their election campaigns?
They knew - they just didn't care.
Three years? (Score:3)
She destroyed the lives of almost certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent people and all she gets is three years? Our "justice" system is insane, hold up a 7-11 with a toy gun and get thrown jail for longer than that, steal billions from millions of people and you see no time at all. Shoot someone kicking through your front door at 3am (without a badge) and get convicted of murder, shoot an 84 year old grandma in bed (with a badge) and its called an "accident" and left unpunished.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Eye-witness testimony is nigh useless even when people aren't deliberately fabricating. The human brain is just too "flexible" for that kind of thing.
End the drug war (Score:5, Insightful)
End the drug war. Free its non-violent victims. That'd be a great start.
As for anyone convicted due to the person's work, or convicted where this person could have been involved, they should be set free immediately and their records cleared of said convictions.
The fact that they didn't go right after this simply tells us just how corrupt the system is. "Justice", my aching ass.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:End the drug war (Score:4, Informative)
Re: End the drug war (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't have any bias against testimony by police officers. I patiently and comfortably sit through any testimony offered, listening carefully. I just don't necessarily believe the police officer. Or anyone else, for that matter. Which is exactly my duty as a juror.
Many times, the problem isn't police officers (sometimes, of course, it is); sometimes it is the systemic violation of personal freedoms strictly according to law. Sometimes it is the violation of fundamental constitutional rights. Sometimes it i
Re: (Score:2)
No. I apply the same filter of credibility and context to determine the reliability of police testimony that I would apply to anybody.
In context I may or may not be able to believe the police.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
When they ask you about jury nullification, I suggest this response:
"Jury nullification? Would you please define what that is?"
Either they define it -- and so inform the entire panel of what it is -- or they will move along, in which case all is good -- or they will ask you, one way or another, if you know / don't know what it is, to which an honest answer something along the lines of:
"I am not certain what you're asking me here."
That should take care of it, without you getting tossed for cause.
As for the e
Re:End the drug war (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to be hit with the asshole stick to not serve. The jury is the very last line of defense from bad law, bad cops, bad lawyers, and bad judges. Not to mention a corrupt and evil prison system, relegation to permanent bottom economic and social classes, loss of family, friends, possessions, job, credit rating, employability...
The jury is all that's left to us now. The last remaining semblance of justice within the actions of the system has been ashes for years.
When you refuse to serve, you are abandoning your fellow citizens. Both the ones that are victims of criminals, and the ones that are victims of the governement machine.
Or just poor (Score:4, Interesting)
The trouble with juries is they are inherently conservative and right wing because only successful people who've never experienced any hardship can really afford to be on them. Everyone else just googles for how to get out of 'em (or asks around pre-google). That's not by accident. Every major facet of our legal system was built to protect property owners from the unwashed masses...
Re:Or just poor (Score:4, Informative)
The trouble with juries is they are inherently conservative and right wing because only successful people who've never experienced any hardship can really afford to be on them.
I'm not sure where you came up with this line of reasoning. Many (most?) people who have lots of jury time available are government employees. Teachers and the like are not generally known as "inherently conservative and right wing". Certainly as a group less so than the private sector people around them.
Re: (Score:3)
You have to be hit with the asshole stick to not serve. The jury is the very last line of defense from bad law, bad cops, bad lawyers, and bad judges.
People who think rationally, and who have a healthy distrust of the system, get kicked off the jury during voir dire. I would know =/
Re: (Score:3)
You could have stopped after "People who think rationally". The rest isn't needed. I never expect to actually serve on a jury (though I did once, to my surprise), because as soon as the lawyers notice that you're paying attention to what they say they find some cause to exclude you.
P.S.: Don't assume it's for your political beliefs. The cases I've observed don't confirm that. The conservatives were as readily kicked off the jury as the liberals if they showed any awareness of rationality rather than em
Re: (Score:2)
yes, you have to be hit with the stupid stick to get on a jury
Or maybe a lawyer does.
I was selected for a jury when my employer of 35 years was one of the defendants. I just assumed I'd be kicked by the plaintiff at once, but the lawyer in the lung cancer case (asbestos) said I was fine. I'd like to think I'd be unbiased, but...
The judge had more sense and met in chambers with the attorneys after which another juror and I were sent home. (The other juror had a close business relationship with a different defendant.)
Re: (Score:2)
That meeting isn't just about the judge. The lawyers can have you dismissed for cause in there, quietly and without fanfare.
Re: (Score:2)
Okay, and what "horrendously fucked-up" thing is it that "ruined the lives of tens of thousands" the non-violent incarcerated victims of drug charges have done?
Please elaborate. I'm sure we'd all love to learn WTF you are talking about.
Re: (Score:2)
I hope so. Perhaps the poster will let us know.
Re:Witness (Score:5, Insightful)
Due to CSI and similar shows, forensic evidence is sacrosanct. If you want to go to court today, you better have some DNA test available (even if it makes no sense at all) or the jury will simply not believe you. But having something out of a lab seals the deal.
Don't get me wrong, it's a GOOD thing that people now give more credibility to material evidence than witnesses, but as usual we're overdoing it.
Re:Witness (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, witnesses should have zero credibility.
Start here: Intro to Eyewitness Identification [lawcomic.net], still ongoing. Then go back to the beginning, it's a good read.
Re: (Score:2)
I was in the jury on an assault case. The incident happened about 6 months prior. Not only didn't the witnessss agree with each other but they disagreed with the police reports about what they said.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Police reports about what witnesses said are generally written up, by the police officers, from memory, filtered through the officer's biases and perceptions, hours or days after the incident. Why this stuff isn't being recorded, nearly 50 years after portable tape recorders became available, I have no idea.
Re: (Score:3)
Thanks to CSI I was found not guilty of a murdering ten people in a public place because an enhanced eye reflection showed I was having vacation in Europe at the time.
Re: (Score:3)
That can't be! I was in Europe the whole time and I can't remember seeing you!
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Witness (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong, you turn every single person free.
When the evidence is tainted, the case gets thrown out.
Thats how we ensure the innocent are not put in jail, and we do so at the cost of letting some criminals free when we would have preferred not to.
But then we consider every person involved in those cases as having failed, specifically the prosecution. And we turn the arrest into a bad arrest and count that against the police.
When this shit happens, you punish the ever living shit out of everyone involved in the chain that fucked up because they put innocent people behind bars and ruined other peoples lives in their overzealousness to get a collar and conviction.
Make false convictions essentially a career ender for everyone in the chain and watch how quick things shape up. Make the population so pissed off at any lawyer or cop who allows this shit to happen that they are afraid of being lynched when they fuck up in the future.
They have no reason to fear mistakes they make, someone else suffers, it has no bearing on their life. Change that and you'll fix the problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong, you turn every single person free.
When the evidence is tainted, the case gets thrown out.
I think that's throwing the baby out with the bath water. Perhaps a more reasonable approach would be to see if the conviction would stand without the fake evidence. For a sample group as large as this there are bound to be many *seriously bad* criminals that it would be a very bad idea to release. Of course, if you're willing to put your money where your mouth is how about we release these people but make you liable for crimes they commit. Kind of like co-signing. Mayhem is all fun and games until it
The shape being - 0 convictions. Just executions. (Score:2)
Make false convictions essentially a career ender for everyone in the chain and watch how quick things shape up.
False positives replaced by wall to wall false negatives out of fear of MAYBE convicting a wrong person, so better safe than sorry... so everyone walks.
Now watch how quick THAT shapes up into an "unexplainable crime wave" AND a Wild West situation where everyone caters to their own "justice" WHILE cops start shooting people "just in case" cause it was "the only way to be sure".
Hey... everyone's gonna walk anyway cause everyone in the chain is now afraid that SOMEONE in the chain already made that career end
Re:Witness (Score:4, Insightful)
fiigure out how to repair the damage she wrought almost single-handedly." ? just put a colt 45 on her temple and shirly temple the trigger so that there is no tampering of evidence when it comes to "whose brains are these"
There's a big difference between revenge/punishment for the responsible person and making things right for all of the people that may have been convicted who were innocent. It's not like you can give them their time back. Nor can you repair the emotional and psychological damage done. Prison isn't summer camp. Spending any significant time there is going to change most people, and not for the best. Most convicted criminals come out as better criminals. I can't imagine what being in that environment would do to someone who knows they shouldn't be there to begin with.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
no Gen Pop and make sure EVERYBODY knows who she is.
oh and use the assets forfeiture to pay the lost income of the persons jailed in error
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Witness (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's what you get if you measure the success of a state attorney by the numbers of convictions and guilty pleas he gets from the defendants. And that's what you get when ignoring the rights of defendants during the investigation and before court is hailed as "being tough on crime". Somewhere, people are getting sloppy and start cheating just to get higher scores. And instead of justice, you just get high costs for running an extensive prison system to keep all those people, whose convictions and guilty pleas are mostly about their prosecuter's career and not so much about crimes they really committed (if any).
Re: (Score:2)
Obviously you're one of those people who doesn't recognize sarcasm...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)