For better or worse, sometimes to change the system you need to avoid vengeance. This is why many terrible dictators are allowed to live in peace in exile.
You're probably right that he believes his own lies. The type of people to exclaim "I've never done anything wrong in my entire life" (as Scarcella does in the article) are usually the biggest buyers of their own bullshit.
It takes serious cognitive dissonance to be able to say something like that with a straight face.
> The type of people to exclaim "I've never done anything wrong in my entire life"
If anyone ever said those words to me, I would do my best to never, ever, interact with them. It's prime facia a false statement, and anyone who can say it with conviction (assuming they are an adult) must necessarily be a liar.
I've done plenty of things wrong, I've broken the law countless times (which, really is nothing special, literally everyone has, but I've done it knowingly and willfully), I've inadvertently burned bridges (figuratively, of course) and offended people deeply that I never meant to.
No one is perfect, anyone who says (and appears to believe) that they are is a menace to society.
What can you do?
1. If you are on a jury, remember that it is FAR FAR FAR worse to imprison an innocent person than to let a guilty person free, regardless of the crime. Listen to evidence and make a personal decision about the defendant's guilt with that in mind and don't let any other jurors push you around.
2. Donate to your local chapter of the Innocence Project.
3. Encourage your local DA office to form or expand a version of the Conviction Review Unit mentioned in the article.
If I were on a jury in the US, I'd vote the defendant not guilty no matter what the evidence. Prison here (and almost everywhere) is a human rights catastrophe and no person deserves it.
Don't worry, plenty of folks already do that in cities which are overflowing with uncontrollable violent crime and have neighborhoods so neglected they look like they've been bombed (eg where I lived for 12 years, Baltimore).
So basically, you believe dangerous people should remain in society? Habitual criminals should continue to terrorize innocents such as yourself and your family, and you wouldn't even call the police?
In my state the moment one of those people enter your home uninvited you have a right to execute said criminal. I won't call the police on them, but I'm not going to let those sorts of people back out into society either. That said I'd vote not guilty for any victimless crime.
>So basically, you believe dangerous people should remain in society?
>Habitual criminals should continue to terrorize innocents such as yourself and your family, and you wouldn't even call the police?
One of these sentences is a reasonable, if a bit reductive, summary of the GP's point. The other is wild hyperbole.
Fully half of the comment I'm replying to is total nonsense, putting words in another's mouth, disingenuously representing another's opinion in the hope of making that person seem monstrous.
To what end, gwkoehler? Is your position so tenuous that you feel you must misrepresent your opponent's? If your comments weren't an attempt at a counterargument, is it really so important to tell kiliantics that you disagree with his opinion and wish to paint it as unwise?
I was trying to spark discussion, because I honestly do not understand this point of view. If you believe criminals shouldn't go to jail, it stands to reason that you're ok with coexisting with some very violent people next door. Someone has to.
A great way to understand another's point of view is to strawman it!! If you're actually interested in GGGP's position, look at his second sentence -- it's not that he's some insane opponent of Law and Order, it's that he seems to believe that the US penal system is so monstrous a punishment that he'd rather not visit it on anyone. Regardless, asking open-ended questions, rather than hoisting Cunningham's Law and charging, is probably a better way to 'spark discussion'.
> If you are on a jury, remember that it is FAR FAR FAR worse to imprison an innocent person than to let a guilty person free, regardless of the crime
This is one of the best examples of what the stats folks call a type I vs type II error. To understand why this point is correct, simply consider where the actual criminal is in each of the two cases - they're free. When imprisoning an innocent person, it truly is a double error (type I): the innocent person went to jail, and the guilty person STILL went free.
It honestly isn't too much more complex than that. The conventional framework for the test of hypotheses (via the neyman-pearson lemma or some slight twist on it) effectively says you should put a hard limit on the dangerous type I errors (alpha), while numerically trying to minimize the less dangerous type II errors.
It's certainly not the only way to do this empirically (which is why stats can seem like such a hodgepodge of competing perspectives), but it's the core framework that the hard sciences seemed to settle on in the 20th century.
High level math-stats is a cool subject, I think that in some ways machine learning can be seen as picking up at the boundary of these 'traditional' methods. For example, if I don't care to really distinguish between false-positives and false-negatives, then you end up with something that will look more like an SVM than a test of hypotheses.
I wish jurors would understand their role is to protect the innocent from prosecutorial overreach, not rubber-stamp the prosecution's assertion that a law has been broken. They have more power than the judge (who is really just supposed to enforce procedural rules and maintain order) because they can vote against the law! Imagine, a jury filled with jurors who know that:
A) They can't be punished for their verdict
B) They can, and should, consider the rule of law, and not just the veracity of the evidence as is often directed by the judge
C) They have the authority to say "okay, the evidence shows the defendant is guilty, but we don't think the law is a just one, so we're going to acquit."
Sometimes, that power is used for good (not convicting those who helped runaway slaves, for example, or not convicting minor drug offenses, keeping our disgustingly overcrowded county jails from adding to their rolls) and sometimes not (the officers acquitted despite video evidence of their beating Rodney King).
It is, however, an exemplar of the checks-and-balances meant to constrain a government that may otherwise overstep its boundaries to violate a citizen's rights. While the rights afforded to a jury are in danger of changing, they haven't changed yet, and potential jurors everywhere in the US should read up more on their rights and responsibilities as a juror.
I don't think it's correct to say jury nullification is part of the designed system of checks and balances. It's really an unintended side effect of the jury system, since jurors have to be immune from any punishment or the system wouldn't work. The intended checks on judicial overreach are the legislative branch repealing laws and impeaching judges, and the executive branch issuing pardons.
I would call jury nullification a form of civil disobedience. That doesn't mean it's wrong, it's just not really operating inside the judicial framework. There's a reason the Supreme Court has consistently held that the defense does not have the right to inform the jury of their right to nullify.
I think I remember reading somewhere that if you demonstrate knowledge about jury nullification during the screening process when you are called for jury duty, you will be screened out as a juror. Which is frickin' ridiculous!
You can be screened out for literally ANYTHING during voire dire. It really is up to the lawyers and their prejudices and based entirely on your superficial appearance.
But if you just don't want to serve, don't waste everyone's time-- just say you can't be objective, or better, give a hardship excuse before the court date.
To me this all speaks "zeitgeist", the mindset of an era.
This was New York in the 80s and 90s, the Rudy Giuliani era, "no broken windows", tough on crime mentality. The town was traumatized by more than a thousand murders every year. Everyone was desperate for convicts, from the voters to the attorneys, the politicians and jurors. No one had patience to "due process". It was a war.
That era has been praised as a victory for law enforcement. Black Lives Matter and others are now showing the real cost of it. No wonder Giuliani freaks out about BLM.
"tough on crime" is not the same as "abandon due process".
I challenge your view that jurors and voters would approve of abandoning due process. Sure they wanted convictions of criminals. But not at the cost of faked confessions, lying under oauth, false testimony by law enforcement. It's easy to see that leads to chaos. No one signed up for that, except the watchmen.
> Scarcella has never been prosecuted for his alleged malfeasance; the statute of limitations for perjury is five years.
There's the problem. There shouldn't be a statute of limitations on police malfeasance any more than there is one on murder. Police officers who perjure themselves to obtain convictions should be executed.
Happily, I found this article more positive than the comments here make it sound. The system is changing. People are being exonerated. These injustices are getting press.
Obviously, it would be nice if injustice never occurred. But injustices do occur and it is far worse when we would rather pretend it doesn't happen than to own up and do what we can to redress them.
33 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 82.4 ms ] threadIt takes serious cognitive dissonance to be able to say something like that with a straight face.
If anyone ever said those words to me, I would do my best to never, ever, interact with them. It's prime facia a false statement, and anyone who can say it with conviction (assuming they are an adult) must necessarily be a liar.
I've done plenty of things wrong, I've broken the law countless times (which, really is nothing special, literally everyone has, but I've done it knowingly and willfully), I've inadvertently burned bridges (figuratively, of course) and offended people deeply that I never meant to.
No one is perfect, anyone who says (and appears to believe) that they are is a menace to society.
>Habitual criminals should continue to terrorize innocents such as yourself and your family, and you wouldn't even call the police?
One of these sentences is a reasonable, if a bit reductive, summary of the GP's point. The other is wild hyperbole.
Fully half of the comment I'm replying to is total nonsense, putting words in another's mouth, disingenuously representing another's opinion in the hope of making that person seem monstrous.
To what end, gwkoehler? Is your position so tenuous that you feel you must misrepresent your opponent's? If your comments weren't an attempt at a counterargument, is it really so important to tell kiliantics that you disagree with his opinion and wish to paint it as unwise?
This is one of the best examples of what the stats folks call a type I vs type II error. To understand why this point is correct, simply consider where the actual criminal is in each of the two cases - they're free. When imprisoning an innocent person, it truly is a double error (type I): the innocent person went to jail, and the guilty person STILL went free.
It's certainly not the only way to do this empirically (which is why stats can seem like such a hodgepodge of competing perspectives), but it's the core framework that the hard sciences seemed to settle on in the 20th century.
High level math-stats is a cool subject, I think that in some ways machine learning can be seen as picking up at the boundary of these 'traditional' methods. For example, if I don't care to really distinguish between false-positives and false-negatives, then you end up with something that will look more like an SVM than a test of hypotheses.
A) They can't be punished for their verdict B) They can, and should, consider the rule of law, and not just the veracity of the evidence as is often directed by the judge C) They have the authority to say "okay, the evidence shows the defendant is guilty, but we don't think the law is a just one, so we're going to acquit."
Sometimes, that power is used for good (not convicting those who helped runaway slaves, for example, or not convicting minor drug offenses, keeping our disgustingly overcrowded county jails from adding to their rolls) and sometimes not (the officers acquitted despite video evidence of their beating Rodney King).
It is, however, an exemplar of the checks-and-balances meant to constrain a government that may otherwise overstep its boundaries to violate a citizen's rights. While the rights afforded to a jury are in danger of changing, they haven't changed yet, and potential jurors everywhere in the US should read up more on their rights and responsibilities as a juror.
I would call jury nullification a form of civil disobedience. That doesn't mean it's wrong, it's just not really operating inside the judicial framework. There's a reason the Supreme Court has consistently held that the defense does not have the right to inform the jury of their right to nullify.
or in other words, an intended side-effect.
But if you just don't want to serve, don't waste everyone's time-- just say you can't be objective, or better, give a hardship excuse before the court date.
This was New York in the 80s and 90s, the Rudy Giuliani era, "no broken windows", tough on crime mentality. The town was traumatized by more than a thousand murders every year. Everyone was desperate for convicts, from the voters to the attorneys, the politicians and jurors. No one had patience to "due process". It was a war.
That era has been praised as a victory for law enforcement. Black Lives Matter and others are now showing the real cost of it. No wonder Giuliani freaks out about BLM.
I challenge your view that jurors and voters would approve of abandoning due process. Sure they wanted convictions of criminals. But not at the cost of faked confessions, lying under oauth, false testimony by law enforcement. It's easy to see that leads to chaos. No one signed up for that, except the watchmen.
There's the problem. There shouldn't be a statute of limitations on police malfeasance any more than there is one on murder. Police officers who perjure themselves to obtain convictions should be executed.
Obviously, it would be nice if injustice never occurred. But injustices do occur and it is far worse when we would rather pretend it doesn't happen than to own up and do what we can to redress them.