Usually it's not a dogs sniff but the dog handlers evidence about the behaviour of the sniffer dog. And dogs are far too good at behaving to please their handler/owner sometimes and acting out of instinct or boredom in others - how many dogs that have gone on a murderous rampage have been said to be sweet, loving creatures all their lives.
It's hard to see how a dogs sniff evidence can be treated with the same level of accuracy as fingerprints/DNA evidence unless tests had proved that it (perhaps even the individual dog) was accurate to 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10,000 or more cases.
>> Corcoran had trained Molly to sit when the dog detected the odor of human remains ... the team went to Redwine’s cabin, which was unoccupied. Molly sat down in a nearby stream and indicated at five other locations outside the home, according to Corcoran. Then she saw her dog looking up at a window. An investigator climbed into the house and opened the door for Corcoran and Molly. Inside, the dog made its indication—a sit—near a wood stove, in a bedroom, on a brown sofa, by a washing machine, and elsewhere.
insert "this is worthless" spongebob meme template here. Convicting someone of murder because a dog sat in their house is worse then fake science, it is worse than superstition, that dog handler is blatantly creating fake evidence. Has that dog ever cleared someone of an accusation their handler believes in by refusing to sit near their stuff?
Edit: to clarify, a cadaver dog is useful, if one searches for a cadaver: when the dog indicates a specific place one should dig there. But that is not how the dog is used here.
IMO, this discussion goes wrong when we involve the dog in the first place. The testimony is that of the handler; they are the party saying that they have reason to believe X, based on their interpretation of their dog's behavior... which might as well be a dowsing rod or any other scrying method for the repeatability it has.
If a dog/handler leads them to evidence, then the evidence can stand (or not) on its own just as if they were led to it by a psychic or a "hunch".
I had a security dog in an airport come and sit next to me while I was standing in line. Thought for sure my day was over, really freaked me out because of stories like this. Nothing happened, I think the dog just figured me for the dog person that I am. You are not supposed to pet working dogs while they are working but that didn't stop me.
Making no opinion one way or the other, convictions are (I suspect) routinely made on eyewitness testimony which has been show many, MANY times to be horribly unreliable.
I was going to say the same. Not to mention how people are conditioned to trust cops and how prosecutors only need to get a person to say that they saw someone do something or heard them talk about it and a cop to say, yes this person is bad based on my interactions, in order to get conviction.. regardless if there is any real evidence, or evidence to the contrary in that matter.
Techniques like this should only ever be used to direct investigations, and not be presented at court as evidence in their own right. It seems they work to an extent, but we clearly don't understand when and why they don't work.
It's sad that a bullshit system that the accused and the accuser can easily game is one of the "successes" of forensics. At least there the accused can do something.
Or even better uniformly at random imprison some possible suspect -- you avoid the cost of the trial and you are fairly certain that an honest person is in jail -- that seems to be the goal of the system: let the jurors, judge and cops sleep at night. Who cares about justice anyways...
There is a huge difference between a dog finding a body (material evidence independent of the dog's behavioral characteristics) and a dog handler "reading" his dog's behavior and making various predictions out of it. The latter should absolutely not have any value in court.
And to think that we laugh at the Romans for predicting future from the flight of birds (augury) and animal liver (haruspexy)...
Thank you for “augury”! I looked up the etymology in Italian for auguri and it derives from the flight of birds. “Tanti auguri“ means “best wishes“, on the contrary “sciagura” (same root as “auguri”) means “misfortune“.
And to be fair, if you’re a subsistance farmer the ability to predict rain and other weather events is a huge percentage of the future you care about. Augury would be able to predict a decent bit of the important future for those people.
The same dog was used in all occasions: 1) sniffing of the clothes 2) around the house 3) inside the house 4) sniffing the truck.
I would question if the dog was essentially trained to recognize the smell of the suspect, and if so, did the dog really indicate it was smelling odors from a dead body or the odors from the suspect.
Also, only clothes of the suspect from an evidence room? Only one truck?
> I would question if the dog was essentially trained to recognize the smell of the suspect, and if so, did the dog really indicate it was smelling odors from a dead body or the odors from the suspect.
And upon questioning, how would you possibly be able to verify?
You mean accept as evidence a dog's reaction which has been criticized and known to be directed by officers/handlers for illegal searches (by providing fake probable causes). A dog that you can not ask what they detected or even statistically test as we have seen in the article like you could do an ML model.
A whole field has been sprung on if and how ML inference could be used to make decisions, with lots of issues of racial profiling. And the judge and jury decided to accept a dog's reaction whose handler's new career was on the line.
I am not sure why one should trust the justice system these days.
P.S. A bunch of posts about Donziger and how UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has stated to the U.S. he detention and imprisonment is against international law. I just find the sequence of articles ironic.
Agreed. If Ring doorbell cameras were giving bogus probable cause at the rate these dogs were, the NYT would be all over it. But because it's not novel no reporters can be bothered to write about it...
"They asked 554 mock jurors to read a story about a dog detecting the odor of drugs on a suspect’s car even though a later search turned up cash but no evidence of illegal activity. Lit says the scenario was meant to sound preposterous. Nonetheless, two-thirds of jurors surveyed said they would have found the suspect guilty."
There is a real problem right there. Looks like you could get a conviction based on a fortune teller.
I sat in court once for 3 days as a potential juror. I was the last person that was not selected for the jury. There is a process like what you describe called voir dire. Both sides have an opportunity to interview jurors and can ask to eliminate some. In the case I watched there was a potential juror that had recently become a citizen and was very interested in being a juror, but she was also not a native English speaker and was clearly not following everything that was going on - both sides wanted her gone right away.
You still get a jury of citizens from the local community, which is the point.
The process is a good one but it's not like what was described. Each side gets a chance to remove some jurors, not a chance to insure all jurors in the pool meet a criteria, and removal is based on how much the attorney thinks you'll hurt their chances not based on if you'll be able to accurately interpret the case. I was also the last person struck in a case involving IT once the prosecuting side found out I worked in IT. Looking at the case results the prosecution lost the case for reasons that would be apparent to anyone that understood how IT systems worked.
To be clear I think the selection process is a good one (or at least I think it's better than other options I've heard) it's just not the same thing as the GP was proposing.
I disagree, both sides have the opportunity to ask potential jurors a lot of questions. The answers to those questions can clearly illuminate someone's comprehension and reasoning - they definitely did in my experience. Now each side does not necessarily get all of the eliminations that they want but that is part of the process.
The case I watched was a domestic violence case. Both sides were asking potential jurors about their knowledge of bruising and the way bruises change/develop over time. One of the potential jurors was an older Engineer from an aerospace company you've heard of, his answer included explaining that the most interesting problems that he deals with include how one handles the unknowns of a given project/situation. He gave a clear indication of his reasoning and thought process, the prosecution dropped him like a hot rock.
Its not a jury of your peers if its a jury of only the sharpest or most educated people.
If you ask me, neither the prosecutor nor the defense attorney should be the ones striking jurors. I don't have a full solution to that, either, but it seems like voir dire is one way attorneys try to stack the deck, often times by excluding the most qualified jurors.
But, I agree - it must first and foremost be a jury of the accused's peers - but that doesn't mean "man on the street style average joe" necessarily.
> Its not a jury of your peers if its a jury of only the sharpest or most educated people.
I think the ‘jury of your peers’ thing is meant to be in the sense of ‘all men are created equal’. They don’t, I presume, intelligence test the defendant and if they score lowly, screen the jury to admit only dumbasses.
The op was advocating for 'basic comprehension and reasoning test' which I think voir dire covers and in my experience did cover. The current process is more about eliminating bias than screening for intelligence, which seems right.
I think a jury should be representative of the community, all of the community.
If the case is engineering-heavy, I’d expect [at least] one side to bias the jury away from containing engineers/scientists. If it’s heavily reliant on medical testimony, at least one side will try to exclude doctors, etc.
I think that’s inherent in the adversarial system (where each lawyer is advocating for their client’s interests), but I also think it sucks.
I’d be interested in seeing a stats about key evidence type vs. juror preferences on each side vs. eventual case outcome. I bet you could predict guilt reasonably well by looking at what sort of jurors the defence tries to exclude.
"I think a jury should be representative of the community, all of the community."
But you are getting a random, not a balanced sample of the community - one person might get a jury of stock brokers, the other might be stuck with 13 guys that are local drunks and never finished school.
First to separate the disagreements. You open by disagreeing that the process requiring jurors to pass a certain comprehension level doesn't exist today and close by disagreeing that the current "jury of your peers" process shouldn't be such a thing. Apart from being self conflicting claims (it can't both be the process used today and be against the process used today) they are 2 separate discussions.
In regards to the first disagreement GPs proposal wasn't "a process that optionally allows an attorney to strike some jurors they find have low comprehension" it was "there really ought to be some basic comprehension and reasoning test for jurors." as in a hard requirement to have some level of comprehension regardless if the attorneys wish to strike a juror based on this fact.
In regards to the second disagreement you aren't guaranteed to a jury of your peers in the US you are guaranteed to an impartial jury. Jury of your peers was part of common law and guaranteed e.g. high class people would only have juries of other high class people and is not part of US law. A "special" or "blue ribbon" jury like the GP proposed are allowed to been used as deemed necessary by the court in many states and actually by the Supreme Court itself in it's only jury trial (they drew from a pool of merchants) they are just not mandated for every trial.
Again I do side with your opinion that special juries shouldn't be the default but that's not what is under question.
Where I live, the state/county defines eligible jurors as registered voters and/or licensed drivers over 18. So 'peers' meaning eligible voters in your community/county. And yes, the system is rightly more about eliminating bias. The process of voir dire is the opportunity for both sides to apply their own test. Also for special cases, and even not so special cases, jury questionnaires are an option[0]. These jury questionnaires can ask all kinds of questions to uncover bias and certainly involve basic comprehension.
That is likely how your state selects jurors but again it's not because you have a right to a jury of your peers (for any definition of peers). In the US the only right is to an impartial jury, which is indeed what voir dire tries to do, which has been ruled to be possible even with pre-filtering the juror pool.
Jury questionnaires are made to provide a background for the attorneys during voir dire not as an aptitude test, as such they do not have an objective pass/fail score rather subjective information to allow attorneys to try to form the most impartial jury they can out of the pool. While the attorney could try to make an assumption of comprehension level based on the responses in the questionnaire
1) The attorney still has to consider lack of comprehension a negative thing for their chances at the case
2) The attorney has to be willing to use strikes for this reason vs other uses such as removing blatantly biased jurors
3) Even when both of the prior hold true the number of perceived "fails" may be higher than the number of allowed strikes. Therefore the ability to strike some from the pool for comprehension level is not the same as the pool being pre filtered for comprehension level.
To be clear the GP proposal is the universal application an additional comprehension test one has to pass to be part of the pool prior to voir dire, not just that someone with low comprehension is allowed to be struck for that reason.
Think of the proposal being like if your state randomly chose anybody instead of pre-filtering for eligible voters and GP proposed "we should filter out children and etc from the pool" with your response being "voir dire does that". Voir dire in that case may allow for the possibility of some of those people being filtered at the cost of a less filtered qualified jury of adults but it wouldn't be a replacement for pre-filtering. The same is true of the proposal on a minimum comprehension pre-filter, whether you agree with the pre-filter or not it's not the same as having the ability to filter some people in voir dire.
> Looking at the case results the prosecution lost the case for reasons that would be apparent to anyone that understood how IT systems worked.
Can you share any details, even in a very abstract way, on what it was?
I'm curious as to how weak their case was - because if it was something as asinine as thinking that filesystem file modification dates are trustworthy or that any activity in the Windows Event log proves that a human user was physically sat at the machine then I'd like to know why the prosecution didn't have someone on their side to tell them they didn't have a case so they wouldn't waste time with a trial?
LOL. Two things here. If this is a criminal case the prosecutor will have an expert who testifies that these things are immutable, and then as a defendant you will not have enough money to have your own expert to refute it. And anyway you'll never find a lawyer that knows anything technical about computers to even come up with these sorts of technical challenges. Plus the judge hates nitpicky challenges to evidence like this, so he'll fuck you for even bringing them up.
> In the case I watched there was a potential juror that had recently become a citizen and was very interested in being a juror, but she was also not a native English speaker and was clearly not following everything that was going on
Trust the system.
Give her a few more years. The good ol’ US of A will make her a jury-duty dodging, full-blooded American out of her.
Tongue-in-cheek aside I’ve disappointed not to be selected for jury duty thus far.
In fact jury selection is notorious for discarding potential jurors with intelligence, critical thinking, legal awareness, or domain expertise. Jurors reflect the part of society least qualified to be making these decisions.
Attorneys do not want thinkers, they want predictable cogs in the court machine.
> In fact jury selection is notorious for discarding potential jurors with intelligence, critical thinking, legal awareness, or domain expertise. Jurors reflect the part of society least qualified to be making these decisions.
Jurors get dismissed based on whether or not one side feels they decide in their favor or not. That's it.
When there's no agreement I suspect the less educated are favored though.
I'd believe a juror getting dismissed for knowing statistics and being persuadable by logical arguments, before I'd believe a juror being dismissed for being in a demographic who favors police and emotional arguments.
So whoever thinks their case is weakest when viewed intelligently (i.e. ability to handle subtletly, nuance, complexity, rational over emotion, science, statistics) is going to need to get those intelligent people off the jury.
I can't find any supporting documentation-- so take this as hearsay-- but I recall a man being arrested for handing out FIJA pamphlets in front of a courthouse at the Southwestern Justice Center in Riverside, CA.
You have the right to not have a jury. There are some downsides. It's harder to win an appeal; jury nullification is off the table; plenty of judges are biased or uninformed. Your lawyer can't manipulate a judge as easily as a jury. Still, if I had to defend myself against some emotionally charged claim whose defense relied on legal technicalities, I might prefer a bench trial to a bunch of idiots who couldn't get out of jury duty. If the potential jury of "my peers" were going to be biased against me for reasons of religion or race or culture, I'd be more inclined to let a judge decide.
Agreed, although impractical due to a shortage of judges. You shouldn't have to rely on making it to an appeals panel to have your fate decided by more than the whims of a single person.
Yeah, that was too dismissive. I do think there's a problem with juries in that the pool of people is narrowed to those who both want to and are able to serve. Some jobs will pay employees who have jury duty, but many will not. Some people have backup caregivers for their dependents, but many don't. I'm not interested enough to look for statistics on it, but I would be surprised if juries aren't primarily composed of a narrow subset of social classes, like upper middle class professionals, retired people, the childless, and the unemployed, or some similar categories. It should be hard to get out of serving and jurors should be compensated in a way that eliminates the financial burden without becoming an incentive in itself.
From my experience some people just want to convict and are happy to have the power to punish. Most want to get out of there. You might get someone trying to find anything not to convict. What you end up with is some people happy to not work, others eager to close the case because they are not getting paid.
Personal feelings decide outcomes. I know this person is not guilty but this guy who loves the free lunches won't ever change his mind and I am worried about my mortgage.
But now you have to model a judge's incentives to cooperate with the justice system, given that the DA's office and the police have worked to bring a case this far.
So do you think it's completely impossible that you would be part of the 2/3rd that found the fake suspect guilty? I don't think basic comprehension or reasoning prevent you from falling for these kinds of arguments, and rather than try to limit possible jurors we should just bar unscientific evidence.
Who makes the rules for the aptitude? Who decides if it's scientific or not, and what the limit is (p .1 or .001, study design, etc)?
The people running the system makes the rules. The general attitude is to treat the law enforcement side more favorably than the defendant, to the point that they are basically assumed guilty from the start.
you’ve just failed your own test, since you don’t understand how and why a jury works. if you did, you’d comprehend that the better solution is expanding juries, not testing jurors. i’ll let you work out why that would be the case, and perhaps come up with an even better option as a result.
So I sat on a 6 week felony jury and had low expectations but was pleasantly surprised - fellow jurors took it very seriously, the judges instructions are clear and written at a layman’s level and the “presumption of innocence” dominated.
Anecdotal but it really gave me faith that juries do a pretty good job.
I was on a grand jury and we were all a very cynical bunch. They presented a bunch of cases that boiled down to "person we don't like talked back to the police" and our jury refused to indict them. In one case, it was painfully obvious that the police officers testifying were flat-out lying. Their story changed from sentence to sentence. I think even the prosecutor thought that continuing to prosecute this particular case would be a career killer.
Eventually the ADAs caught on that our group asked too many questions, and just carefully ran out the clock on our two week grand jury session. Cases we were halfway through hearing mysteriously disappeared. Apparently the other two juries that met during our two week cycle had to stay late every day, while we got dismissed early.
It's one of those things where the system is designed to be good (23 randos get to decide if the cops are full of shit before you even get indicted, and you don't have to be very smart to see that sometimes the cops are full of shit), but The System turned it into something bad for no good reason. I guess if people aren't committing felonies, we don't need assistant district attorneys, and then the people that already do that job have their career progress reset. So they are forced to play into a broken system and make up very tenuous felonies for their own personal career gain. It's sad. Someone should do something about that.
(I wonder if there should be an after-the-fact non-binding review board. Look at all the cases that were prosecuted over a given year, and just have a group of experts gut-check them. If a lot of cases seem like bullshit, dock the numbers for the DA's office so they suffer at election time.)
Probably not. It operates as an on-call sort of thing. You show up when you're summoned and sit in a room until there are details of a case to present. You hear maybe 20 minutes of testimony for a case, sit around for 2 hours, then hear 10 minutes of another case, etc. for 8 hours a day for two weeks. At some point, there is enough evidence to vote. (I actually don't remember the exact process there. I think the ADA leaves the room, and some number of people have to vote to indict, and then we fill out a piece of paper with the results. I wasn't the person that actually filled out the paper, I was just the backup if that person was absent, which they never were.)
All the grand jury members are ordinary citizens with no special education or training. The state sends you a letter, you show up at the time and place they say, and there is no "jury selection" that excludes jurors. You're truly just a pool of random people from the county.
(This is the New York State system. The federal system is different. And some states don't even have grand juries. It's kind of an unusual thing.)
To more directly answer what you're getting at; yes, I felt like something a little fishy was going on. It is all conjecture from chatting with the other members of the jury while sitting around bored for 8 hours a day. Some of them were very good at collecting information about what goes on behind the scenes. The cases should probably be randomly load-balanced between juries, without the prosecutor knowing that one of them has difficult people on it. I would venture a guess that there are rules around this, and then there are "the rules" on how it's done in real life, and people are generally fine with "the rules". So it goes.
Ultimately, the grand jury is the people's power over prosecutorial aggression. You, as one of those people, have to decide what to push for and how the jury should be run. My group had a lot of people in it that very strongly pushed back against the power of the state. Some other groups might not have that. That's the luck of the draw, I suppose.
I'll also say that we were not being difficult for the sake of being difficult. They presented some cases that were very clear-cut, and we easily agreed to indict based on the evidence that was shown.
Of course, they make it easy to indict because only the prosecutor gives the "facts" and there is noone there to rebut it. In my cases they actually failed to allege some elements of the offense in one, which would technically make it impossible to indict because you cannot say for certain if a crime was committed (but I checked and they say as long as most of the elements were alleged then it is close enough to be legal), and in both cases the police lied about which county the crime was alleged to have been committed in, so the grand jury did not know they had no legal authority to indict.
Here's a recent example. It seems as though the Kentucky prosecutor rigged the grand jury so that they wouldn't opt to charge the police with a crime. Pretty chilling. This is the same justice system that over-charges defendants so they plead guilty even if they are innocent. Our justice department is out of control and exists to serve itself. Without faith in the law, our country is lost.
Breonna Taylor grand jurors say there was an 'uproar' when they realized officers wouldn't be charged with her death
Probably not. In Illinois where I am, at least, judicial matters are excluded from the Freedom of Information Act. You do have a free speech right to some judicial documents under the 1st Amendment to the federal constitution and possibly under a State constitution.
The transcripts of the actual grand jury session are "secret" but generally available to the defendant's attorney, but not the public.
Information on when a grand jury went home might not be restricted though, and might be available, if it was recorded somewhere.
That's an interesting report because I've seen statistics [citation required] that Grand Juries vote to indict in 99.9% of cases. I was locked up for 8 years in a county jail and I only saw one instance where the grand jury did not return a "true bill", and the Constitution in that case then allows the prosecutor a second chance by then doing a prelminary hearing in front of the judge instead. At which point the judge immediately found probable cause.
The case was that someone said they had seen, from the street, the suspect walking around in his basement with a gun in his hand. They called the police. 47 officers arrived at the house, but the suspect had left earlier. They found him several blocks from the house with no firearm on him and arrested him for Unlawful Use or Possession of a Firearm by a Felon (he had a previous conviction from years prior). The judge took pity on him and offered to let him plead to Attempted Possession of a Firearm to get him to plead guilty, which he did and only had to do 6 months in prison for a crime he didn't actually commit. (It was shown that it was impossible to see into the basement from where the reporting citizen was stood.)
I think that some care should be taken on statistics like "99.9% indictment rate". If you can control the number of cases in the denominator, then you can make it match the numerator. (I'm implying that if the grand jury is looking bad, you can close the case before they indict.) In that case, anything not equal to 100% just tells you that someone doesn't know how to play the numbers game... and in 2021, EVERYONE knows how to play the numbers game.
My experience was kinda opposite. I felt they didn’t quite understand “shadow of a doubt”. Different type of case but it made me distrust juries even more than I had. I
Though I will say the lawyers did a decent job picking the jury. It was fairly diverse. But I don’t think we’re taught as a society the necessary skills to serve on a jury.
To me, it just highlights that if you've never served on a jury, your opinion is merely prejudice against those who are (presumably) less credentialed than you are.
I would really like to see a much bigger juror pool and results sorted by on zip code.
I suspect I can do an ok job predicting relative conviction rates based on well known location and demographic based stereotypes of authoritarian tendencies and attitudes toward drug use.
Yep. Our weekly long run takes us through an off leash park, never had an issue with literally dozens of dogs every run. Dogs are all socialized; running around, chasing each other, running beside us, barking happily.
All my unpleasant dog encounters have been with people who can't take their dog to the off leash park ...
That's reductive. Dogs have a surprising degree of individuality, intelligence, and personality. There are dogs with anxiety disorders, psychological disorders, attention disorders, and other issues that aren't necessarily the blame of the owner (or even might be the fault of previous owners). Trying to reduce it to that is like blaming every problem behavior on somebody's parents. Dogs aren't simple machines.
> "My dog would never bite. He just snarls and snaps like that when he's nervous."
If you ever hear this, the dog is being socialized in a bad, counterproductive way before your very eyes. The owner is ignoring manifestly severe distress, as well as generally unacceptable behavior in public.
> "My dog is a good dog at heart, but she's a rescue so you have to make allowances."
The word ‘allowances’ here is kinda strong, in that it sounds like you're not only giving up on eliminating certain negative behaviors/feelings in your dog, but also in managing them.
But it's really close to something that I think is fair to say, which is that you can't expect your dog to instantly recover from trauma, and that you will have to make gradual progress on teaching your dog that the world is safe for them and how you expect them to behave in it. At the same time, it's your job to manage those behaviors along the way, so I'm not sure that counts as ‘making allowances’ in the sense of simply permitting otherwise unacceptable behavior. So it might be fair to give that one to the GGP, too.
> "My dog is only growling because you are showing fear."
This is useless information even if it's true, and it pushes responsibility for the dog's behavior and comfort onto others (probably including random strangers, given the character of the examples). This is poor socialization in action again.
(Aside: growling is good. It is good for dogs to give warning. You probably want to address the thing they're growling about (food possessiveness, fear, anxiety, mistrust of strangers), which may not be good. But you probably don't want to suppress growling per se or treat growling as bad behavior. That's a good way to get a less predictable dog.)
> "If you got bit, you must have done something to the dog. No dog bites without good reason."
If someone says this about their own dog, they're showing a stunning level of disinterest in their own dog's behavior, comfort, and impact on others. If someone tells you your dog bit them, you need to be very interested in all of the details so you can figure out what was going on and what you need to do about it.
Yes, you're right, given the context. I hadn't properly followed the chain of comments, and every one of those statements is unreasonable. I just hear a lot of dog people who subscribe to the belief of "no bad dogs, only bad owners", which is cute, but not 100% realistic. You can do a lot to properly train and manage dog behavior, and much bad behavior is the fault of the owners, but there are special cases that really aren't that rare. I have a dog who, as far as I know, has never been abused and she has intense anxiety around new people and other dogs, despite following all the rules and doing everything right to try to socialize her properly for years. I get the ugliest stares from people when they ask if they can pet her and I say that she has anxiety problems, and that she's never bitten somebody, but I can't guarantee that she never would, because people she doesn't know stress her out quite badly. I've made a lot of progress with her, but I doubt I could ever get her to a point that she'd be perfectly comfortable around strangers.
> I get the ugliest stares from people when they ask if they can pet her and I say that she has anxiety problems, and that she's never bitten somebody, but I can't guarantee that she never would, because people she doesn't know stress her out quite badly.
A dog who doesn't like to be touched by random strangers is not a bad dog, and strangers are not entitled to touch her! I'm 100% with you on this one. Many people seem to think that all dogs should actively enjoy all kinds of invasions to their personal space (that they themselves would never tolerate), and it's ridiculous.
You're also not, in my opinion based on this description, ‘making allowances’ for any unacceptable behavior. You're just keeping your dog (and people around her) safe and comfortable, despite the misplaced sense of entitlement of some strangers.
Regarding your last paragraph, the owner is making an allowance for potential inappropriate behavior (biting) from a specific dog based on its unique personality (likely startled and very stressed by sudden petting from a stranger).
That is a reasonable thing to do. Dogs like people get allowances within reason for having unique failure modes. We all have them.
We agree on the substance of the issue. But that's not the language I'd use.
Telling people they're not welcome to pet the dog isn't an allowance, it's management.
Making allowances, to me, would mean simply permitting a behavior you otherwise wouldn't, and actually allowing the dog to practice the behavior instead of managing the environment to prevent the behavior. People who simply do nothing about a small dog who snaps, growls, bites because 'he's harmless, he couldn't hurt anyone if he wanted to', for example, I would say are 'making allowances'.
My point is the owner is not in control of whether someone suddenly pets the dog, and it bites them.
So the warning before, is also the allowance after. Depending on circumstances the owner can only partially control.
If the warning were not also a reasonable allowance after a bad incident of the kind the owner imagines is possible, then instead of a warning the owner should be avoiding any possibility of the situation.
In my particular situation, there has never been a "bad incident". When approached by strangers, she pancakes to the pavement and is visibly fearful and anxious. She'll even stray away when people she doesn't know are walking on the sidewalk within 30 feet or so. It's not just a warning, but also communication that being approached scares her (I always use the word "bite", because apparently when I say "my dog is terrified of strangers", some people think a sane response is "Oh, dogs love me! Come here, pooch, gimme a smooch!").
I don't take her to dog parks or places with lots of people. Avoiding any possibility of the situation would mean not taking her for daily walks around the neighborhood; this is just the reaction when somebody who is not familiar in the neighborhood sees her for the first time (often people just walking down their driveways toward me). I don't think that fully isolating her from ever seeing a person she doesn't know is necessarily the best choice for her either.
For somebody to suddenly pet her, there would have to be a person who is hiding behind a hedge or car waiting to jump out and pet a strange dog, which would be a bad idea regardless of the dog's disposition to strangers.
I understand your point, but I think you're making the assumption that I'm putting her into avoidable situations that are higher risk, rather than the bare minimum necessary proximity to people in order for her to get her exercise and the psychological necessity for anxious dogs to scope out their surroundings regularly.
Plus everyone, even dogs, can have a bad day. I feel I'm a pretty judge of dogs, having grown up around them all my life. I know when a dog is barking to alert an owner vs when a dog is barking and is about to bite.
But even with that in mind, I remember the one time my dog was playing with another dog, and suddenly the play turned to aggression on a dime, and I had to pull those dogs apart, and one ended up with a piece of it's ear gone. Neither dog had a history of aggression, neither has done anything like that ever again. There was no warning, it just happened.
Why? I have no clue, and I never will, because dogs aren't people. I can't even know what another human is thinking when a violent outburst happens, much less another species.
So are drug-sniffing dogs reliable? I bet they are, but just like people sometimes they can be wrong, or they can have a bad day, or they can give the answer they thought the trainer wanted. Who knows? We don't know how they experience the world enough to even make a guess.
I don’t even like dogs and I think you’re being uncharitable to what are complex living beings with histories and trauma just like humans. For bad but obvious reasons we have different levels of empathy toward different trauma responses. A child who freezes or fawns will get love and support while someone who lashes out or has emotional episodes will be called a bad kid or crazy when they need love and support too.
You don’t have to ever consider the behavior acceptable and it’s never your job in particular to deal with it or be around them but that doesn’t mean that the owner’s empathy is invalid. And it sucks when owners are unwilling or incapable of helping their dog. But they’re also right — dogs really don’t bite for no reason.
Back in Russia a neighbour's pibull would regularly attack and bite small children playing on the playground, drew blood, left scars. They refused to believe there was anything wrong with the dog's behaviour. Only when the dog attacked their own kid at home, they finally accepted the fact and, sadly, put down the dog.
Some people are crazy, some dogs are too. Indeed, nothing happens for no reason, but the reason might be screwed up chemistry in the brain. Or it might be traumatic upbringing, or something else totally unrelated to the person that suffered.
People who do this stuff might think they're trusting their dogs, but they're neglecting them.
> "My dog would never bite. He just snarls and snaps like that when he's nervous."
A dog who is snarling and snapping is doing the canine equivalent of screaming ‘GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME RIGHT NOW’. Actually trusting that dog would have to mean believing it when it tells you it is uncomfortable and feeling threatened. If you trust someone and they tell you they need to be removed from a situation, you do it.
> "If you got bit, you must have done something to the dog. No dog bites without good reason."
Honestly, this is the other side of people ‘trusting’ dogs too much. Most people who get bit by dogs are doing something extremely stupid, and most people who get bit by other people's dogs are doing something extremely presumptuous and invasive.
If what you're interested in is whether a dog is vicious (i.e., how easily it can be rehabilitated or accommodated so that it never bites anyone again for the rest of its long, happy life), the secondhand judgment of someone who got bit by the dog is generally unreliable unless it's accompanied by a detailed account. Unfortunately, being a ‘dog person’ or someone who ‘loves dogs’ or ‘has had dogs their whole life’ doesn't at all assure that a person can read basic canine body language, either.
I got bitten by a dog that looked at me from six meters away when I came out of the owner's car (with the owner driving! We were chatting amicably at the time), then with no other warning than standing very still for two seconds ran at me and bit my leg to the point of bleeding.
Then, when I met it again three years later, tried to do the same thing but by that point they'd wised up and anchored its leash to something. Although, you know, maybe there existed a more constructive solution.
And my cousin was bit three times (required stitches) by a dog she never approached, and backed away from carefully after it became obvious that it was unfriendly, running away after it bit her the first time. She did accidentally enter the owner's property, though, while jogging. The property boundary wasn't marked.
I don't think you can generalize this stuff, unless you've made a detailed survey of the conditions concerning situations where dogs have bit people.
Anyway my point is not to deny someone that they've had unpleasant or even traumatic experiences with dogs, but to point out that moderately detailed stories, like the one you just shared, are much more informative than judgments given without context.
Though that’s without the defence having a chance to tell the jury why they should disregard that fact.
But in the end, I don’t think judges are doing any better. The only reason the justice system works is because the vast majority of cases aren’t very complicated and have physical evidence. Colombo-style crime mystery is fairly rare.
That's not why attorneys interview jurors. They're trying to find jurors who are biased but not biased enough to retrospectively throw the entire trial into question.
If you’d spent the last 40 years telling jurors that fortune tellers were the gold standard for detecting drug mules then yeah. The issue is that we’ve been sold the idea that drug dogs are effective, not that jurors are gullible.
"The issue is that we’ve been sold the idea that drug dogs are effective, not that jurors are gullible."
But we know that they are gullible, they take police as a trustworthy source of information and assume police would not mislead them. Nimerous studies have shown that.
That's because society, the courts, etc believe people are guilty before it is proven. And "reasonable" doubt is basically whatever they say it is, which is often unreasonable.
On the flip side of this, which you don't hear about very often, during my eight years locked up I saw a decent number of jury trials where the jury aquitted a clearly very, very guilty defendant.
So, I would always go with a jury trial even if you are horribly guilty as you might as well just roll the dice on the jury verdict.
One example: A guy was thrown down onto the grass in front of his house by the cops during a drug arrest. When they picked him up a gun was lying on the grass under him. He told me it fell out of the waistband of his pants. At trial his lawyer argued that the gun was already randomly lying on the ground when the police threw him down. The jury acquitted him of the gun possession charge.
Not at all a similar question, the outcome of machine learning of driving a car can be judged on objective results (incidents, accidents, injuries, deaths, etc)
Given the number of imprisoned found innocent over time, some models suggest up to 25% of the incarcerated population are innocent.
Layer on those in prison for minor drug crimes and it goes up dramatically.
Everything is quantifiable. The dimwitted elders in charge prefer you don’t think like that. Just abide the story; senile elders raised in a era of worse education standards, social standards, toxic leaded gas clouds, paranoia inducing world wars and cold wars are clearly the most capable leadership
You're right there but that's not why these are not similar questions.
A ML agent driving a car is about being able to do something out of "it's own agency"(We'll pass the free will observations for now, they're really irrelevant unless that's the point one makes between a ML agent and a dog, where the latter arguably has it compared to the former), the focus here being on "doing".
A dog's sniff being considered as enough evidence to put someone in jail is not really the equivalent to "the dog has put X in jail".There's a case to resolve, and obviously the person/agent who has the evidence does not put the criminal in jail.Here the focus would be on the fact that the dog is not only observing something, but also the subjective interpretation of it's senses (assuming we would have such a thing as an "objective interpretation of one's senses at a given time", which is problematic imo)
That similar question and this entire thread reminds me of xkcd 2173. [0] We obviously already let neural networks detect drugs and drive cars, though the former gets to wear a nice fluffy fur coat.
A drug sniffing dog is a violation of the confrontation clause in the sixth amendment. It provides that " in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right…to be confronted with the witnesses against him." You can't cross-examine a dog.
Much as I think there's a lot of quackery going on here, I think it's pretty clear that the dog handler is the one giving the evidence and being subject to cross-examination. The dog is just a tool that is being used to achieve an investigative purpose, like a DNA test or radar gun.
The dog handler's "evidence" cannot be based on the dog's behavior. We can't question the dog as to why it behaved the way it did. As such, it is a violation of the confrontation clause.
No, but you can run your own test, where a neutral "handler" whom the dog has never seen runs his/her own scent tests on the dog's ability. Which should be the defendant's right if dog evidence is presented against him.
Dogs being able to identify the scent of illicit substances is not the question at hand. The issue is that it's all too easy to manipulate the dog into signalling whatever the handler wants. A neutral handler would probably show that the dog can identify presence or absence of some drug with much better than a coin flip odds.
In practice there's a terrible accuracy problem with drug sniffing dogs. In theory there's a somewhat reasonable accuracy of drug sniffing dogs. The judicial system likes to plug their ears and pretend that drug dogs are accurate and ignore the obvious fact that dogs are fallible social creatures that first and foremost are trying to do what their handlers want them to do. If the handler wants them to check for drugs, great, but when the handler doesn't care about accuracy and just wants them to "find" drugs, it should not be shocking that the dogs behavior reflects the handler's wishes.
Right, the question is not "dogs" but "this dog." Just like a good defendant in a speeding case doesn't stop when the cop says "I used my radar gun" - he asks what kind of radar gun and when was it calibrated, and how?
Even the question of "this dog" still misses the mark. We're talking about a social interaction between the dog and the handler that takes him home every night. The dog might be well trained to alert on the presence of drugs, but the person that dog is loyal to is the original handler and you'll never be able to design an adversarial test to separate the two of them accurately. You're essentially trying to measure if the handler deliberately committed fraud and perjury.
Generally if I see a dog on the loose I'll catch them and walk them back to their owner. I've probably caught around a dozen dogs that I was a complete stranger to and my go to method is to use their empathy against them. I'll get close enough for them to take notice of me and then shift my attention to some spot in the grass and occasionally look back at the dog, put my back to them, pretend to react to the imaginary thing in the grass, etc. I can get some dog that's never even seen me before to paw at the dirt, bark, sniff incessantly, etc it's not much of a stretch to assume that a dog's handler could do the same to the dog they spend more time with than most people get to see their pets. They never scold the dog after they alert on a vehicle that doesn't turn up drugs and I'd bet money on average they receive more praise after an alert than after not alerting.
This should be really easy to settle, like basic undergrad experimental design, double blind study. Hardly a thorough literature search, but I found this reference.
> On average, hidden drug samples were indicated by dogs after 64 s searching time, with 87.7% indications being correct and 5.3% being false. In 7.0% of trials dogs failed to find the drug sample within 10 min.
...
> Dogs were equally efficient at searching in well-known vs. unknown rooms with strange (i.e., non-target novelty) odors (83.2% correct indications), but they were less accurate when searching outside or inside cars (63.5% and 57.9% correct indications respectively).
So that tells me two rough indicators:
- There's a ~5% chance a sniffer dog/handler could put away an innocent person. This is a lower bound, the risk is higher with cues/confirmation bias
- There's only about ~60-80% sensitivity in unfamiliar situations, of what I presume are pretty fresh samples.
You don't have to bust out Bayes' theorem to realize that a cadaver dog accurately hitting scents in the woods months later, stretches credibility.
Dogs are amazingly good at detecting things like cancer in double blind experiments. There are good reasons to think dogs can detect lots of things.
That's not the problem:
1. No MD would order cancer treatment on the basis of a dog's sniff.
2. Analysis of all kinds of evidence, including the use of sniffer dogs, should not be managed by police departments, or even prosecutors. There have been many scandals of police evidence handling, even by supposedly professional evidence labs, have mishandled evidence and innocent people have been imprisoned. There needs to be independent analysis of evidence, incentivised to find the truth even if unfavorable to police and prosecutors.
The problem with a purely quantitative analysis of a dog’s theoretical capabilities is that they can be trained to give false positives. See for example this Reason article [1] about dogs searching for drugs:
> As a drug detection dog, Karma kept his nose down and treated every suspect the same. Public records show that from the time he arrived in Republic in January 2018 until his handler took a leave of absence to campaign for public office in 2020, Karma gave an "alert" indicating the presence of drugs 100 percent of the time during roadside sniffs outside vehicles.
> Similar patterns abound nationwide, suggesting that Karma's career was not unusual. Lex, a drug detection dog in Illinois, alerted for narcotics 93 percent of the time during roadside sniffs, but was wrong in more than 40 percent of cases. Sella, a drug detection dog in Florida, gave false alerts 53 percent of the time. Bono, a drug detection dog in Virginia, incorrectly indicated the presence of drugs 74 percent of the time.
Right, that was being generous, assuming the ideal conditions, double blinded, so that any cues from the handler will only add noise and move the needle towards chance.
In actuality, the police drug dogs are basically just an excuse to get into the vehicle, so they can justify anything they find post-hoc and ignore all other intrusions.
If I was a dog who was given a treat by my owner every time I alerted correctly, but never received a treat any other time, then you better believe I'll be alerting every time.
If you do want to pull out bayes theorem, 5% of indications being false in an experimental setting could be way worse in a situation with a lower base rate. (I couldn’t find the base rate in a quick scan of the paper)
Yeah I didn't compute the Bayes factor mostly because I'm on mobile and was heading out the door. But when the prior you are plugging in is "did this person murder their son", you need a pretty hefty likelihood ratio to push that into the territory of "lock this person up for life".
If you have p(D|H) = 0.8 (hit rate) and p(D|H') = 0.05 (false positive), that gives an LR (likelihood ratio) of 16.
But that's if you had like, a perfect detection situation. I'm not a fan, but it's probably enough to push a search into probable cause°, since if you find contraband, you now have field drug tests, which are also kinda crap°°, but it pushes your hypothesis. Then you seize the drugs and have the highly sensitive and selective lab tests of chemical analysis at your disposal. You have a chain of tests updating your prior.
We have no such chain in the cabin test. It's just "dog signaled" -> some other circumstantial evidence -> jury convicts of murder.
° - that's assuming the handler is being unbiased, vs just giving the cops an excuse to search.
°° - field drug tests basically only catch broad classes of molecules or functional groups, when performed correctly. Like drug dogs, often they too are just theater to intimidate/coerce more searching
I don't think you can really judge dogs in general based on statistics like this. We can't read a dogs mind and don't know all of their motivations. You can try and do standardized training and testing, but any particular dog might not "get" the training properly, or might decide to do something a little different one day for reasons we don't understand.
I'm thinking, it's okay to have a dog to guide you to things, but ultimately, the thing is either there, or it's not, and that's what any convictions should be based upon. If a dog guides you to an actual body, fine, do all your analysis and charges based on that. This whole business of the dog claiming that a body was there months or years ago but we have no idea where it is now seems like bullshit, and I don't think anyone should ever be convicted on that alone. Ditto drugs - search dogs may be imperfect, but ultimately the drugs are either there or they're not. If the dog guides you to actual drugs, charge away I guess. If there aren't any drugs and the dog was wrong, then no charges. It's a little bad that someone got searched based on a false indication, but not nearly as bad as an actual conviction and sentence.
Imagine a drug detecting dog going through 100 apartments.
No drugs were found in any of them but say in 5 of them the dog sat on his bottom /barked/did whatever constitutes something resembling "drug odor detected".
I hope no judge will put the people who did live in these apartments up to half a year before in jail.
Not just that, but the dog’s indication is used to do incredibly invasive searches that the government does not have to incur the costs of the damage done.
They will essentially toss a home or vehicle like a burglar, even going as far as cutting open things like seats and removing parts.
Not only will police occasionally destroy vehicles in a search without being liable for the damages, often any insurance policies also do not cover it. You can do absolutely nothing wrong and obey the law and buy comprehensive coverage and gap insurance and still have your vehicle destroyed by the cops because they managed to convince a dog to scratch your paint, and you're the one that's stuck with a totalled vehicle and a huge loan to pay off.
Well, not really. After reading about some cases I've long lost any trust I may have had in the system. It might be ok in general (do not have enough real stats) but when it comes to fucking up particular person's life without any consequences the government / their institutions shine.
Yeah the lack of consequences for those that administer justice is (I believe) the strongest reason an innocent person is convicted or punished far too harshly for the given crime. The only time I have heard of judges ever getting punished for their judgments is either when it is revealed that they have been taking bribes or their nation lost a war.
There was a news mention months ago of a dog at a police department that “detected” drugs 100% of the time ot was deployed - the running joke was that the dog was brought in whenever they wanted to detain anybody. A dog is only as good as it’s training and there is plenty of room for abuse in the system.
Mine as well just let the officer sniff. Yeah, human smell isn't up to the task and will be wildly inaccurate, but that's not a problems for dogs, so why should it be a problem for humans?
This seems analogous to using an AI. We trained it, it seems to mostly do what we want it to do, but we don't entirely understand how (or what cues and confounding factors might be in play that wouldn't like if we did know about).
Do jurors respond the same way to a black-box "expert" if it's not furry?
Unlike AI, sniff dogs are trained to bark at a sign from it's owner. So whenever police wants to search you, they make a sign to the dog, and it barks.
This is patently false, you get your information from movies and not real life. Sniff dogs sit when they detect what they're looking for, they do not bark.
And my point is, if you don't even know the first thing about their training you're just making shit up because you want to believe it. Read a little about sniffing dogs.
Except the point that dogs respond to their owners wishes, even subtlety or unintentionally displayed, was valid. You don't need to know about special sniffing dogs to know dogs want to please their owners.
The burden is on those interpreting the behavior of specific sniffing dogs in a way that demonstrates their is actual reliability in general, and in the specifics. No the other way around.
That wasn't the point being made. The person I was responding to explicitly said that sniffing dogs are secretly trained to respond to handler gestures. They're claiming that drug sniffing dogs are a charade, basically, and I used a shining example of their lack of knowledge on this topic to demonstrate a valid dismissal of their point.
Are dogs used to get warrants fraudulently? The answer is absolutely. It happens all the time. But the idea that sniffing dogs are fake is ridiculous, they are carefully trained so as to not respond to handler wishes (dog trainers are aware of this trait also BTW), deliberately signalled or otherwise, even though sometimes they might do so. And making the simple claim that they bark is enough for me to know that someone making authoritative statements on the topic hasn't a clue what they're talking about.
It's worse than AI. At least with AI, we know the inputs, can get glimpses into how it works, and was build with a specific intent. Fido just wants his treat.
Nah it's much more similar than you're implying. Fido is doing stochastic descent to get his treat. Humans are determine the loss function for both AI training and dog training.
This shows a greater dilemma: we don’t want a caste of legal experts making fundamental decisions for an individuals life, but the alternative of getting a jury consisting of the average population who lack sufficient education also doesn’t lead to an outcome one would want when on trial.
I wonder if there is a middle ground solution where the jury decides on parts of a trial independently without knowledge of other parts, e.g. only on admitting a piece of evidence.
No. I've not read tfa but being stopped under suspicion of carrying drugs at an aiport because a sniffer-dog got a bit too excited about a humous sandwich I'd just bought tells me answer to this question.
Also raising the question of whether a sniffer-dog can be manipulated by its handler.
Dogs are cuddly AI. The first time we make a Convolutional Neural Network warm, cute, and fuzzy we will have created the perfect tool of the police state.
Which naturally means that we already have created the perfect tool. It’s a dog.
Nothing wrong with police in general. They’re just like dogs in their own way. Dogs get treats when they say there’s a drug, irrespective of the actual presence. Cops get treats when they a guy gets arrested or convicted, irrespective of guilt.
We celebrate "science", but we skip the scientific method. Observational studies, unreprodcible experiments, and non-falsifiable models have taken over.
Not just taken over in pop science, but actual scientific fields.
So can we really blame judges and juries for taking a few intellectual short cuts? Yes, I suppose we can, because an individual is at risk and we should expect better.
But the scientific community should take some blame for compromising on the core of science while continuing to fly the banner of science.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadUsually it's not a dogs sniff but the dog handlers evidence about the behaviour of the sniffer dog. And dogs are far too good at behaving to please their handler/owner sometimes and acting out of instinct or boredom in others - how many dogs that have gone on a murderous rampage have been said to be sweet, loving creatures all their lives.
It's hard to see how a dogs sniff evidence can be treated with the same level of accuracy as fingerprints/DNA evidence unless tests had proved that it (perhaps even the individual dog) was accurate to 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10,000 or more cases.
insert "this is worthless" spongebob meme template here. Convicting someone of murder because a dog sat in their house is worse then fake science, it is worse than superstition, that dog handler is blatantly creating fake evidence. Has that dog ever cleared someone of an accusation their handler believes in by refusing to sit near their stuff?
Edit: to clarify, a cadaver dog is useful, if one searches for a cadaver: when the dog indicates a specific place one should dig there. But that is not how the dog is used here.
If a dog/handler leads them to evidence, then the evidence can stand (or not) on its own just as if they were led to it by a psychic or a "hunch".
And to think that we laugh at the Romans for predicting future from the flight of birds (augury) and animal liver (haruspexy)...
Well, to be fair, we can - to the extent that when I see birds fly-off from my back-garden I know it's about to rain...
I would question if the dog was essentially trained to recognize the smell of the suspect, and if so, did the dog really indicate it was smelling odors from a dead body or the odors from the suspect.
Also, only clothes of the suspect from an evidence room? Only one truck?
And upon questioning, how would you possibly be able to verify?
A whole field has been sprung on if and how ML inference could be used to make decisions, with lots of issues of racial profiling. And the judge and jury decided to accept a dog's reaction whose handler's new career was on the line.
I am not sure why one should trust the justice system these days.
P.S. A bunch of posts about Donziger and how UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has stated to the U.S. he detention and imprisonment is against international law. I just find the sequence of articles ironic.
There is a real problem right there. Looks like you could get a conviction based on a fortune teller.
You still get a jury of citizens from the local community, which is the point.
To be clear I think the selection process is a good one (or at least I think it's better than other options I've heard) it's just not the same thing as the GP was proposing.
The case I watched was a domestic violence case. Both sides were asking potential jurors about their knowledge of bruising and the way bruises change/develop over time. One of the potential jurors was an older Engineer from an aerospace company you've heard of, his answer included explaining that the most interesting problems that he deals with include how one handles the unknowns of a given project/situation. He gave a clear indication of his reasoning and thought process, the prosecution dropped him like a hot rock.
Its not a jury of your peers if its a jury of only the sharpest or most educated people.
But, I agree - it must first and foremost be a jury of the accused's peers - but that doesn't mean "man on the street style average joe" necessarily.
I think the ‘jury of your peers’ thing is meant to be in the sense of ‘all men are created equal’. They don’t, I presume, intelligence test the defendant and if they score lowly, screen the jury to admit only dumbasses.
I think a jury should be representative of the community, all of the community.
I think that’s inherent in the adversarial system (where each lawyer is advocating for their client’s interests), but I also think it sucks.
But you are getting a random, not a balanced sample of the community - one person might get a jury of stock brokers, the other might be stuck with 13 guys that are local drunks and never finished school.
In regards to the first disagreement GPs proposal wasn't "a process that optionally allows an attorney to strike some jurors they find have low comprehension" it was "there really ought to be some basic comprehension and reasoning test for jurors." as in a hard requirement to have some level of comprehension regardless if the attorneys wish to strike a juror based on this fact.
In regards to the second disagreement you aren't guaranteed to a jury of your peers in the US you are guaranteed to an impartial jury. Jury of your peers was part of common law and guaranteed e.g. high class people would only have juries of other high class people and is not part of US law. A "special" or "blue ribbon" jury like the GP proposed are allowed to been used as deemed necessary by the court in many states and actually by the Supreme Court itself in it's only jury trial (they drew from a pool of merchants) they are just not mandated for every trial.
Again I do side with your opinion that special juries shouldn't be the default but that's not what is under question.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_questionnaire
Jury questionnaires are made to provide a background for the attorneys during voir dire not as an aptitude test, as such they do not have an objective pass/fail score rather subjective information to allow attorneys to try to form the most impartial jury they can out of the pool. While the attorney could try to make an assumption of comprehension level based on the responses in the questionnaire
1) The attorney still has to consider lack of comprehension a negative thing for their chances at the case
2) The attorney has to be willing to use strikes for this reason vs other uses such as removing blatantly biased jurors
3) Even when both of the prior hold true the number of perceived "fails" may be higher than the number of allowed strikes. Therefore the ability to strike some from the pool for comprehension level is not the same as the pool being pre filtered for comprehension level.
To be clear the GP proposal is the universal application an additional comprehension test one has to pass to be part of the pool prior to voir dire, not just that someone with low comprehension is allowed to be struck for that reason.
Think of the proposal being like if your state randomly chose anybody instead of pre-filtering for eligible voters and GP proposed "we should filter out children and etc from the pool" with your response being "voir dire does that". Voir dire in that case may allow for the possibility of some of those people being filtered at the cost of a less filtered qualified jury of adults but it wouldn't be a replacement for pre-filtering. The same is true of the proposal on a minimum comprehension pre-filter, whether you agree with the pre-filter or not it's not the same as having the ability to filter some people in voir dire.
Can you share any details, even in a very abstract way, on what it was?
I'm curious as to how weak their case was - because if it was something as asinine as thinking that filesystem file modification dates are trustworthy or that any activity in the Windows Event log proves that a human user was physically sat at the machine then I'd like to know why the prosecution didn't have someone on their side to tell them they didn't have a case so they wouldn't waste time with a trial?
Trust the system.
Give her a few more years. The good ol’ US of A will make her a jury-duty dodging, full-blooded American out of her.
Tongue-in-cheek aside I’ve disappointed not to be selected for jury duty thus far.
If you only want smart people you leave it to the judge.
Attorneys do not want thinkers, they want predictable cogs in the court machine.
Jurors get dismissed based on whether or not one side feels they decide in their favor or not. That's it.
I'd believe a juror getting dismissed for knowing statistics and being persuadable by logical arguments, before I'd believe a juror being dismissed for being in a demographic who favors police and emotional arguments.
Maybe they are not idiots, just regular folks who take their civic duty seriously.
Personal feelings decide outcomes. I know this person is not guilty but this guy who loves the free lunches won't ever change his mind and I am worried about my mortgage.
The people running the system makes the rules. The general attitude is to treat the law enforcement side more favorably than the defendant, to the point that they are basically assumed guilty from the start.
Anecdotal but it really gave me faith that juries do a pretty good job.
Eventually the ADAs caught on that our group asked too many questions, and just carefully ran out the clock on our two week grand jury session. Cases we were halfway through hearing mysteriously disappeared. Apparently the other two juries that met during our two week cycle had to stay late every day, while we got dismissed early.
It's one of those things where the system is designed to be good (23 randos get to decide if the cops are full of shit before you even get indicted, and you don't have to be very smart to see that sometimes the cops are full of shit), but The System turned it into something bad for no good reason. I guess if people aren't committing felonies, we don't need assistant district attorneys, and then the people that already do that job have their career progress reset. So they are forced to play into a broken system and make up very tenuous felonies for their own personal career gain. It's sad. Someone should do something about that.
(I wonder if there should be an after-the-fact non-binding review board. Look at all the cases that were prosecuted over a given year, and just have a group of experts gut-check them. If a lot of cases seem like bullshit, dock the numbers for the DA's office so they suffer at election time.)
All the grand jury members are ordinary citizens with no special education or training. The state sends you a letter, you show up at the time and place they say, and there is no "jury selection" that excludes jurors. You're truly just a pool of random people from the county.
(This is the New York State system. The federal system is different. And some states don't even have grand juries. It's kind of an unusual thing.)
To more directly answer what you're getting at; yes, I felt like something a little fishy was going on. It is all conjecture from chatting with the other members of the jury while sitting around bored for 8 hours a day. Some of them were very good at collecting information about what goes on behind the scenes. The cases should probably be randomly load-balanced between juries, without the prosecutor knowing that one of them has difficult people on it. I would venture a guess that there are rules around this, and then there are "the rules" on how it's done in real life, and people are generally fine with "the rules". So it goes. Ultimately, the grand jury is the people's power over prosecutorial aggression. You, as one of those people, have to decide what to push for and how the jury should be run. My group had a lot of people in it that very strongly pushed back against the power of the state. Some other groups might not have that. That's the luck of the draw, I suppose.
I'll also say that we were not being difficult for the sake of being difficult. They presented some cases that were very clear-cut, and we easily agreed to indict based on the evidence that was shown.
Breonna Taylor grand jurors say there was an 'uproar' when they realized officers wouldn't be charged with her death
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/29/us/breonna-taylor-grand-juror...
The transcripts of the actual grand jury session are "secret" but generally available to the defendant's attorney, but not the public.
Information on when a grand jury went home might not be restricted though, and might be available, if it was recorded somewhere.
The case was that someone said they had seen, from the street, the suspect walking around in his basement with a gun in his hand. They called the police. 47 officers arrived at the house, but the suspect had left earlier. They found him several blocks from the house with no firearm on him and arrested him for Unlawful Use or Possession of a Firearm by a Felon (he had a previous conviction from years prior). The judge took pity on him and offered to let him plead to Attempted Possession of a Firearm to get him to plead guilty, which he did and only had to do 6 months in prison for a crime he didn't actually commit. (It was shown that it was impossible to see into the basement from where the reporting citizen was stood.)
Though I will say the lawyers did a decent job picking the jury. It was fairly diverse. But I don’t think we’re taught as a society the necessary skills to serve on a jury.
I suspect I can do an ok job predicting relative conviction rates based on well known location and demographic based stereotypes of authoritarian tendencies and attitudes toward drug use.
Dogs are friendly and make good pets and all but people need to draw a line.
"My dog is a good dog at heart, but she's a rescue so you have to make allowances."
"My dog is only growling because you are showing fear."
"If you got bit, you must have done something to the dog. No dog bites without good reason."
People "trust" dogs to a ludicrous degree, even dogs that clearly can't be trusted.
All my unpleasant dog encounters have been with people who can't take their dog to the off leash park ...
> "My dog would never bite. He just snarls and snaps like that when he's nervous."
If you ever hear this, the dog is being socialized in a bad, counterproductive way before your very eyes. The owner is ignoring manifestly severe distress, as well as generally unacceptable behavior in public.
> "My dog is a good dog at heart, but she's a rescue so you have to make allowances."
The word ‘allowances’ here is kinda strong, in that it sounds like you're not only giving up on eliminating certain negative behaviors/feelings in your dog, but also in managing them.
But it's really close to something that I think is fair to say, which is that you can't expect your dog to instantly recover from trauma, and that you will have to make gradual progress on teaching your dog that the world is safe for them and how you expect them to behave in it. At the same time, it's your job to manage those behaviors along the way, so I'm not sure that counts as ‘making allowances’ in the sense of simply permitting otherwise unacceptable behavior. So it might be fair to give that one to the GGP, too.
> "My dog is only growling because you are showing fear."
This is useless information even if it's true, and it pushes responsibility for the dog's behavior and comfort onto others (probably including random strangers, given the character of the examples). This is poor socialization in action again.
(Aside: growling is good. It is good for dogs to give warning. You probably want to address the thing they're growling about (food possessiveness, fear, anxiety, mistrust of strangers), which may not be good. But you probably don't want to suppress growling per se or treat growling as bad behavior. That's a good way to get a less predictable dog.)
> "If you got bit, you must have done something to the dog. No dog bites without good reason."
If someone says this about their own dog, they're showing a stunning level of disinterest in their own dog's behavior, comfort, and impact on others. If someone tells you your dog bit them, you need to be very interested in all of the details so you can figure out what was going on and what you need to do about it.
A dog who doesn't like to be touched by random strangers is not a bad dog, and strangers are not entitled to touch her! I'm 100% with you on this one. Many people seem to think that all dogs should actively enjoy all kinds of invasions to their personal space (that they themselves would never tolerate), and it's ridiculous.
You're also not, in my opinion based on this description, ‘making allowances’ for any unacceptable behavior. You're just keeping your dog (and people around her) safe and comfortable, despite the misplaced sense of entitlement of some strangers.
That is a reasonable thing to do. Dogs like people get allowances within reason for having unique failure modes. We all have them.
Telling people they're not welcome to pet the dog isn't an allowance, it's management.
Making allowances, to me, would mean simply permitting a behavior you otherwise wouldn't, and actually allowing the dog to practice the behavior instead of managing the environment to prevent the behavior. People who simply do nothing about a small dog who snaps, growls, bites because 'he's harmless, he couldn't hurt anyone if he wanted to', for example, I would say are 'making allowances'.
My point is the owner is not in control of whether someone suddenly pets the dog, and it bites them.
So the warning before, is also the allowance after. Depending on circumstances the owner can only partially control.
If the warning were not also a reasonable allowance after a bad incident of the kind the owner imagines is possible, then instead of a warning the owner should be avoiding any possibility of the situation.
I don't take her to dog parks or places with lots of people. Avoiding any possibility of the situation would mean not taking her for daily walks around the neighborhood; this is just the reaction when somebody who is not familiar in the neighborhood sees her for the first time (often people just walking down their driveways toward me). I don't think that fully isolating her from ever seeing a person she doesn't know is necessarily the best choice for her either.
For somebody to suddenly pet her, there would have to be a person who is hiding behind a hedge or car waiting to jump out and pet a strange dog, which would be a bad idea regardless of the dog's disposition to strangers.
I understand your point, but I think you're making the assumption that I'm putting her into avoidable situations that are higher risk, rather than the bare minimum necessary proximity to people in order for her to get her exercise and the psychological necessity for anxious dogs to scope out their surroundings regularly.
But even with that in mind, I remember the one time my dog was playing with another dog, and suddenly the play turned to aggression on a dime, and I had to pull those dogs apart, and one ended up with a piece of it's ear gone. Neither dog had a history of aggression, neither has done anything like that ever again. There was no warning, it just happened.
Why? I have no clue, and I never will, because dogs aren't people. I can't even know what another human is thinking when a violent outburst happens, much less another species.
So are drug-sniffing dogs reliable? I bet they are, but just like people sometimes they can be wrong, or they can have a bad day, or they can give the answer they thought the trainer wanted. Who knows? We don't know how they experience the world enough to even make a guess.
You don’t have to ever consider the behavior acceptable and it’s never your job in particular to deal with it or be around them but that doesn’t mean that the owner’s empathy is invalid. And it sucks when owners are unwilling or incapable of helping their dog. But they’re also right — dogs really don’t bite for no reason.
Actually it's the exact opposite. We reduce these complex living beings to a "all dogs are good, only people are bad".
> But they’re also right — dogs really don’t bite for no reason.
People don't assault and kill for no reason either, doesn't mean their victims, or the person bitten by the dog is at fault.
DDG "dog kills child" and come back to this thread.
Back in Russia a neighbour's pibull would regularly attack and bite small children playing on the playground, drew blood, left scars. They refused to believe there was anything wrong with the dog's behaviour. Only when the dog attacked their own kid at home, they finally accepted the fact and, sadly, put down the dog.
Some people are crazy, some dogs are too. Indeed, nothing happens for no reason, but the reason might be screwed up chemistry in the brain. Or it might be traumatic upbringing, or something else totally unrelated to the person that suffered.
> "My dog would never bite. He just snarls and snaps like that when he's nervous."
A dog who is snarling and snapping is doing the canine equivalent of screaming ‘GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME RIGHT NOW’. Actually trusting that dog would have to mean believing it when it tells you it is uncomfortable and feeling threatened. If you trust someone and they tell you they need to be removed from a situation, you do it.
> "If you got bit, you must have done something to the dog. No dog bites without good reason."
Honestly, this is the other side of people ‘trusting’ dogs too much. Most people who get bit by dogs are doing something extremely stupid, and most people who get bit by other people's dogs are doing something extremely presumptuous and invasive.
If what you're interested in is whether a dog is vicious (i.e., how easily it can be rehabilitated or accommodated so that it never bites anyone again for the rest of its long, happy life), the secondhand judgment of someone who got bit by the dog is generally unreliable unless it's accompanied by a detailed account. Unfortunately, being a ‘dog person’ or someone who ‘loves dogs’ or ‘has had dogs their whole life’ doesn't at all assure that a person can read basic canine body language, either.
Then, when I met it again three years later, tried to do the same thing but by that point they'd wised up and anchored its leash to something. Although, you know, maybe there existed a more constructive solution.
And my cousin was bit three times (required stitches) by a dog she never approached, and backed away from carefully after it became obvious that it was unfriendly, running away after it bit her the first time. She did accidentally enter the owner's property, though, while jogging. The property boundary wasn't marked.
I don't think you can generalize this stuff, unless you've made a detailed survey of the conditions concerning situations where dogs have bit people.
Anyway my point is not to deny someone that they've had unpleasant or even traumatic experiences with dogs, but to point out that moderately detailed stories, like the one you just shared, are much more informative than judgments given without context.
But in the end, I don’t think judges are doing any better. The only reason the justice system works is because the vast majority of cases aren’t very complicated and have physical evidence. Colombo-style crime mystery is fairly rare.
Or unbiased relative to some platonic ideal of a jury?
But we know that they are gullible, they take police as a trustworthy source of information and assume police would not mislead them. Nimerous studies have shown that.
Innocent until proven guilty is a cruel joke.
So, I would always go with a jury trial even if you are horribly guilty as you might as well just roll the dice on the jury verdict.
One example: A guy was thrown down onto the grass in front of his house by the cops during a drug arrest. When they picked him up a gun was lying on the grass under him. He told me it fell out of the waistband of his pants. At trial his lawyer argued that the gun was already randomly lying on the ground when the police threw him down. The jury acquitted him of the gun possession charge.
Blackstone's ratio is the commonly accepted benchmark: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"
It's job of the prosecution to make sure their proof is "beyond reasonable doubt", which is obviously in the eye of the beholder.
Should Machine Learning be allowed to drive a car?
Given the number of imprisoned found innocent over time, some models suggest up to 25% of the incarcerated population are innocent.
Layer on those in prison for minor drug crimes and it goes up dramatically.
Everything is quantifiable. The dimwitted elders in charge prefer you don’t think like that. Just abide the story; senile elders raised in a era of worse education standards, social standards, toxic leaded gas clouds, paranoia inducing world wars and cold wars are clearly the most capable leadership
A ML agent driving a car is about being able to do something out of "it's own agency"(We'll pass the free will observations for now, they're really irrelevant unless that's the point one makes between a ML agent and a dog, where the latter arguably has it compared to the former), the focus here being on "doing". A dog's sniff being considered as enough evidence to put someone in jail is not really the equivalent to "the dog has put X in jail".There's a case to resolve, and obviously the person/agent who has the evidence does not put the criminal in jail.Here the focus would be on the fact that the dog is not only observing something, but also the subjective interpretation of it's senses (assuming we would have such a thing as an "objective interpretation of one's senses at a given time", which is problematic imo)
[0] https://xkcd.com/2173/
Frankly I would not trust most Americans to host a bbq without lighting someone on fire these days. There’s no way I’d sincerely trust their dogs.
Those in policing are barely better educated than the dog.
It should be taken into account, but it shouldn't be considered "definitive" evidence (compared to something like a video footage).
In practice there's a terrible accuracy problem with drug sniffing dogs. In theory there's a somewhat reasonable accuracy of drug sniffing dogs. The judicial system likes to plug their ears and pretend that drug dogs are accurate and ignore the obvious fact that dogs are fallible social creatures that first and foremost are trying to do what their handlers want them to do. If the handler wants them to check for drugs, great, but when the handler doesn't care about accuracy and just wants them to "find" drugs, it should not be shocking that the dogs behavior reflects the handler's wishes.
https://reason.com/2021/05/13/the-police-dog-who-cried-drugs...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Harris
Generally if I see a dog on the loose I'll catch them and walk them back to their owner. I've probably caught around a dozen dogs that I was a complete stranger to and my go to method is to use their empathy against them. I'll get close enough for them to take notice of me and then shift my attention to some spot in the grass and occasionally look back at the dog, put my back to them, pretend to react to the imaginary thing in the grass, etc. I can get some dog that's never even seen me before to paw at the dirt, bark, sniff incessantly, etc it's not much of a stretch to assume that a dog's handler could do the same to the dog they spend more time with than most people get to see their pets. They never scold the dog after they alert on a vehicle that doesn't turn up drugs and I'd bet money on average they receive more praise after an alert than after not alerting.
> On average, hidden drug samples were indicated by dogs after 64 s searching time, with 87.7% indications being correct and 5.3% being false. In 7.0% of trials dogs failed to find the drug sample within 10 min. ... > Dogs were equally efficient at searching in well-known vs. unknown rooms with strange (i.e., non-target novelty) odors (83.2% correct indications), but they were less accurate when searching outside or inside cars (63.5% and 57.9% correct indications respectively).
So that tells me two rough indicators:
- There's a ~5% chance a sniffer dog/handler could put away an innocent person. This is a lower bound, the risk is higher with cues/confirmation bias
- There's only about ~60-80% sensitivity in unfamiliar situations, of what I presume are pretty fresh samples.
You don't have to bust out Bayes' theorem to realize that a cadaver dog accurately hitting scents in the woods months later, stretches credibility.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03790...
That's not the problem:
1. No MD would order cancer treatment on the basis of a dog's sniff.
2. Analysis of all kinds of evidence, including the use of sniffer dogs, should not be managed by police departments, or even prosecutors. There have been many scandals of police evidence handling, even by supposedly professional evidence labs, have mishandled evidence and innocent people have been imprisoned. There needs to be independent analysis of evidence, incentivised to find the truth even if unfavorable to police and prosecutors.
3. Cops lie.
> As a drug detection dog, Karma kept his nose down and treated every suspect the same. Public records show that from the time he arrived in Republic in January 2018 until his handler took a leave of absence to campaign for public office in 2020, Karma gave an "alert" indicating the presence of drugs 100 percent of the time during roadside sniffs outside vehicles.
> Similar patterns abound nationwide, suggesting that Karma's career was not unusual. Lex, a drug detection dog in Illinois, alerted for narcotics 93 percent of the time during roadside sniffs, but was wrong in more than 40 percent of cases. Sella, a drug detection dog in Florida, gave false alerts 53 percent of the time. Bono, a drug detection dog in Virginia, incorrectly indicated the presence of drugs 74 percent of the time.
[1] https://reason.com/2021/05/13/the-police-dog-who-cried-drugs...
In actuality, the police drug dogs are basically just an excuse to get into the vehicle, so they can justify anything they find post-hoc and ignore all other intrusions.
If you have p(D|H) = 0.8 (hit rate) and p(D|H') = 0.05 (false positive), that gives an LR (likelihood ratio) of 16.
But that's if you had like, a perfect detection situation. I'm not a fan, but it's probably enough to push a search into probable cause°, since if you find contraband, you now have field drug tests, which are also kinda crap°°, but it pushes your hypothesis. Then you seize the drugs and have the highly sensitive and selective lab tests of chemical analysis at your disposal. You have a chain of tests updating your prior.
We have no such chain in the cabin test. It's just "dog signaled" -> some other circumstantial evidence -> jury convicts of murder.
° - that's assuming the handler is being unbiased, vs just giving the cops an excuse to search.
°° - field drug tests basically only catch broad classes of molecules or functional groups, when performed correctly. Like drug dogs, often they too are just theater to intimidate/coerce more searching
I'm thinking, it's okay to have a dog to guide you to things, but ultimately, the thing is either there, or it's not, and that's what any convictions should be based upon. If a dog guides you to an actual body, fine, do all your analysis and charges based on that. This whole business of the dog claiming that a body was there months or years ago but we have no idea where it is now seems like bullshit, and I don't think anyone should ever be convicted on that alone. Ditto drugs - search dogs may be imperfect, but ultimately the drugs are either there or they're not. If the dog guides you to actual drugs, charge away I guess. If there aren't any drugs and the dog was wrong, then no charges. It's a little bad that someone got searched based on a false indication, but not nearly as bad as an actual conviction and sentence.
They will essentially toss a home or vehicle like a burglar, even going as far as cutting open things like seats and removing parts.
https://reason.com/2021/04/23/the-cops-trashed-her-house-she... https://jalopnik.com/new-jersey-cops-destroy-bmw-searching-f...
[0] https://theresagameinthat.blogspot.com/2011/06/stasi-scent-l...
Do jurors respond the same way to a black-box "expert" if it's not furry?
The burden is on those interpreting the behavior of specific sniffing dogs in a way that demonstrates their is actual reliability in general, and in the specifics. No the other way around.
Are dogs used to get warrants fraudulently? The answer is absolutely. It happens all the time. But the idea that sniffing dogs are fake is ridiculous, they are carefully trained so as to not respond to handler wishes (dog trainers are aware of this trait also BTW), deliberately signalled or otherwise, even though sometimes they might do so. And making the simple claim that they bark is enough for me to know that someone making authoritative statements on the topic hasn't a clue what they're talking about.
> The person I was responding to explicitly said that sniffing dogs are secretly trained to respond to handler gestures.
Yes, I did say that.
> They're claiming that drug sniffing dogs are a charade
No, I did not say that.
> Are dogs used to get warrants fraudulently? The answer is absolutely. It happens all the time.
Yep, my point.
> But the idea that sniffing dogs are fake is ridiculous.
Nowhere I claimed that sniffing dogs are fake.
So we seem to agree on everything. Thank you, resolved the confusion.
I wonder if there is a middle ground solution where the jury decides on parts of a trial independently without knowledge of other parts, e.g. only on admitting a piece of evidence.
Also raising the question of whether a sniffer-dog can be manipulated by its handler.
Questons, questions ...
Which naturally means that we already have created the perfect tool. It’s a dog.
Nothing wrong with police in general. They’re just like dogs in their own way. Dogs get treats when they say there’s a drug, irrespective of the actual presence. Cops get treats when they a guy gets arrested or convicted, irrespective of guilt.
Not just taken over in pop science, but actual scientific fields.
So can we really blame judges and juries for taking a few intellectual short cuts? Yes, I suppose we can, because an individual is at risk and we should expect better.
But the scientific community should take some blame for compromising on the core of science while continuing to fly the banner of science.