> The story is told of a Chinese law professor, who was listening to a British lawyer explain that Britons were so enlightened, they believed it was better that ninety-nine guilty men go free than that one innocent man be executed. The Chinese professor thought for a second and asked, "Better for whom?"
Specially referring to the British legal system (although others will apply), the system itself is part of the punishment, and is often used maliciously as so. You can be accused of X, have your details leaked to the press (by the police!), have social judgement cast upon you, only to be quietly found innocent later.
From personal experience: Better yet, you can have the police abuse their power to seize property and raid your home during the early hours of the morning, only to have all charges dropped, in which case you have to go through a lengthy process to get your (now damaged) items back. There is zero recourse, all of the oversight bodies are filled with ex-police and look after their own.
Meanwhile the real guilty people are 'let off' (non-pursued) because they flee the jurisdiction of the local police, or are part of a community the police are scared of. They only care for easy quick wins.
To address the article directly, the current system is to let 10 guilty men escape justice, whilst harassing 10 innocent men, and occasionally prosecuting them too.
> Meanwhile the real guilty people are 'let off' (non-pursued) […]
On how modern autocracies work:
> Day in and day out, the [Orbán] regime works more through inducements than through intimidation. The courts are packed, and forgiving of the regime’s allies. Friends of the government win state contracts at high prices and borrow on easy terms from the central bank. Those on the inside grow rich by favoritism; those on the outside suffer from the general deterioration of the economy. As one shrewd observer told me on a recent visit, “The benefit of controlling a modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the guilty.”
> or are part of a community the police are scared of.
That was my suspicion about things. I wondered why the police bothered to pursue someone like Mark Meechan, the one arrested for teaching a pug to do a nazi salute as a joke, when there must be more serious crimes they could devote resources to.
I think there obviously are more serious crimes but would require a lot more effort and trouble to make any arrests. Going after people for frivolous things is much easier for them achieve. They can kind of give off the appearance of doing something useful this way.
I have some experience with LE from various angles, and while there may be exceptions, from what I've seen an arrest is an arrest is an arrest. With the exception of major kingpin-type criminals, which your average detective is never going to get anywhere near investigating, you don't get any more juice in the department because you arrest some big drug dealer compared to arresting the comedian with the well-trained dog - you certainly don't get promoted any faster or get any raises or bonuses. And what's more, the big drug dealer is likely to have an attorney and dangerous friends while the comedian likely won't. Every aspect of harassing the person who may have subjectively broken some ridiculous law to nobody's harm is going to be 10x easier than going after the person objectively ruining lives and acquiring boat loads of treasure in the process.
> Mark Meechan, the one arrested for teaching a pug to do a nazi salute as a joke
Wait, that’s real? Some dude got in trouble with the police just for teaching his dog to do the nazi salute??
> In April 2016, Meechan posted a video on YouTube of his girlfriend's pet pug Buddha titled "M8 Yer Dugs A Nazi". At the start of the video, he says: "My girlfriend is always ranting and raving about how cute and adorable her wee dog is so I thought I would turn him into the least cute thing I could think of, which is a Nazi."
> In the video, the dog, prompted by the command "Sieg Heil", raises his right paw in the manner of a Nazi salute, watches a speech by Adolf Hitler (footage shown from the Triumph of the Will), and responds immediately when Meechan asks if he wants to "gas the Jews". It ends with images of Hitler and Buddha the dog depicted with a toothbrush moustache similar to Hitler's.
> I wondered why the police bothered to pursue someone like Mark Meechan, the one arrested for teaching a pug to do a nazi salute as a joke, when there must be more serious crimes they could devote resources to.
About that case particularly:
1. The media somehow turned up on the doorstep of the arrest of a previously private person. They directly doxxed him and prevented a fair trial.
2. The police were not allowed to complain about the incident directly, so they pulled in a person to complain on their behalf that they have worked with on many cases.
3. The judge assumed his malicious intent for the joke made, despite the evidence suggesting otherwise.
The irony is, he made a joke a the expense of Nazis, and now the UK government actively funds groups within the Ukrainian army who are self-confessed Nazis. (That's not an argument for or against Ukraine, simply to add perspective.)
> I think there obviously are more serious crimes but would require a lot more effort and trouble to make any arrests. Going after people for frivolous things is much easier for them achieve. They can kind of give off the appearance of doing something useful this way.
The police will sometimes pursue cases that excite them - ones that are active or high profile. Small or unexciting cases are dropped. A local cash machine got stolen, cut open, robbed and dumped in our garden - and they didn't even want to swab it for prints or collect it.
And it's far worse. The police get pressure from above to make X group less represented in their criminal statistics irrespective of any reality-based bias, so the only option left is simply not to pursue them.
This will just continue to get worse. They are fuelled by ideology and hindered by ongoing cuts (relative to inflation). They will soon stop responding to all mental health incidents (i.e. suicide attempts), and there is no other funding or service to pick up the slack.
Its pretty much how any org/institution that deals with a little too much day to day unpredictability and randomness functions.
They learn quickly that lot of the problems they have to solve dont have solutions and are above their resource/skill level. So the goals turn defensive. Dont get blamed. Avoid the hard/unpredictable and complex. Survive long enough to collect pension and become a netflix advisor.
Yes, many may, but very few are willing to endure the 30+ years of playing defensive to get there, and are actually capable of doing so without washing out inbetween.
This reflects the disparity in the east vs west and the focus on society vs the individual. It's better from an individual rights perspective that an innocent man isn't imprisoned but in societies that put far less weight on individual rights, you wouldn't be willing to have ten guilty men reoffending to prevent that one innocent man being jailed.
"you wouldn't be willing to have ten guilty men reoffending to prevent that one innocent man being jailed."
You want accuracy. We can just ignore this false dichotomy about letting guilty people go to protect the innocent. If you are jailing the innocent, then you still have guilty parties going free anyways since the wrong person is convicted.
It's not about individual cases, it's about the aggregate effect of the rules governing the process. Making it easier to convict people (by lowering or shifting the burden of proof, weakening procedural protections for the accused etc) will result in more guilty people being convicted, but it will also result in more innocent people being convicted. And making it more difficult to convict has the opposite effect.
It's not like the only two possible outcomes of a criminal investigation are that a guilty person gets convicted or an innocent person gets convicted. You can also convict both (eg, if there is evidence that multiple people were involved), or neither.
Those same effects can almost always for practical purposes be increasing resources and accountability. If evidentiary rules force you to exclude evidence you obtained illegally learn to break the law less and beat the pavement more.
Loosening rules is in fact likely to result in MORE guilty parties running around not less because it makes it easier to stick SOMEONE with the crime whereas accountability makes it more likely that you stick the right guy with the crime.
I'm mot sure why you're replying this to me. Did you mean to respond to someone else? It seems to be formed argumentatively but follows what I was already saying.
How exactly is that a non sequitur? It should be evident that if you jail the innocent party, the guilty party would still be at large, case closed, authorities would no longer be looking for them.
The whole premise of this one or the other thing is flawed. You can increase conviction of the guilty while also protecting the innocent depending on the procedures taken. The "how" matters at lot. So when you ask people stuff like how many guilty men should go free, it's a complete farce that is easily manipulated based on how you pose the question, methods, and outcomes in the fictional scenario. It takes away focus from the actual policies/solutions.
Sure but if you are accidentally jailing an innocent person it's quite likely that out of all people you could convict you had the most evidence for convicting that person. I don't think the model that lets more guilty people go free in order to avoid convicting the innocent is somehow able to convict the second or third most likely suspect for this crime when that's the person who's actually guilty.
I don't think it's a false dichotomy. I think roughly speaking you calibrate the standard of evidence for a conviction and a good approximation to how that is calibrated is the ratio of guilty man set free to innocent men jailed. This is calibrating the ratio of false negatives to false positives. To avoid false positives you want fewer convictions which is generally going to result in more false negatives. Yes every time you get a false positive, you also have a guilty person go free, but chances are that person was always going free, since they were never the most likely suspect and were unlikely to ever be tried in court.
I don't know how true this is. My friend moved from the West to Japan and was explaining how policing works there. He said there is more crime in Japan than the statistics show. One part of favoring society over the individual is downplaying crime. He described it like how there is a perception that if no one sees the crime, then the crime did not happen so there is pressure from police not to report crimes and they prefer not to deal it. He said he once dealt with them where they increasingly became hostile towards him and bureaucratic demanding more documentation on his immigration status and banking records to the point where he dropped it. Don't get me wrong, I think Japan is still a low crime country.
I've seen it also, being thrown out of a club by police over a false report by someone else as the police ignored things going on around them. My point is that it's not extremely helpful to society to behave like that.
This doesn't seem likely if your referring to serious crimes. Why would Japanese people somehow care less about reporting something they see right in front of them?
For example, even experts usually assume homicide statistics to be accurate reflections of the ground truth, to within a few percentage points, across all developed countries.
I'm not sure it's just "weight on individual rights". Those ten guilty men reoffending are going to cause damage to other people (assuming it's not something like jaywalking). So for me as a person who just wants to live my life, not subject to being a victim of false arrest, and also not being a crime victim, there's a trade-off. The higher the rate of false positives, the more likely I am to be arrested, tried, jailed, and perhaps even executed for something that I didn't do. But the higher the rate of false negatives, the more likely I am to be robbed, beaten, or killed by someone who was let go rather than jailed.
The "send one innocent to jail" can and will be abused by people in power. The "free 10 guilty" can and will be abused by professional criminals.
You can't make it perfect with imperfect people to implement the system. The best you can do is set the trade-off to minimize the damage to society. Unfortunately, this means some people being damaged each direction - some innocent people jailed, and some people being harmed by guilty people who were let off.
There are also plenty of non-trade-offs, for example.
1) Generally wasting resources locking up innocent people means you have fewer resources to spend locking up the guilty ones.
2) If you have poor investigation that nabs an innocent person as the culprit, you might stop investigating prematurely and not catch the real perpetrator.
3) A culture that locks up innocent people makes every interaction with the cops potentially life-ruining, which will make people less likely to come forward as witnesses, etc.
On the other hand, a culture that doesn't lock up repeat offender guilty people makes every interaction with everyone potentially life-ruining. So even in that area there is a trade-off.
Not necessarily, if comparing against e.g. an approach of jailing the first suspect against whom one finds evidence, the net number of free guilty men may still go up, particularly in crimes where innocent men can be framed.
> This reflects the disparity in the east vs west and the focus on society vs the individual.
More of this 'east vs west' nonsense. The court system exists not for the individual but for the society. This is true in the US, in china, in russia, in europe, everywhere.
> It's better from an individual rights perspective
What individual rights? All rights are given to collectives. Ask the african slaves who got 'special rights' because they belonged to different collectives. Civil rights, women's rights, etc are collective rights.
> but in societies that put far less weight on individual rights,
You mean societies that believe in collateral damage? Where if you think some bad guy is attending a wedding, you kill everyone at the wedding?
If there is a society that values individuals or individual rights, the society wouldn't exist.
Why is it better one way or the other depending on the focus of society? I don't see the connection. I'd equally lose faith in the system either way. Maybe moreso if I see my neighbor going to jail unjustly rather than some random individual.
As for the other way around, seeing a guilty man go free, the standard for imprisoning someone being evidence beyond reasonable doubt seems reasonable.
Granted, there is a two tier justice system and if you are unreasonably wealthy, you have more leeway, but I think that's a different discussion.
> From personal experience: Better yet, you can have the police abuse their power to seize property and raid your home during the early hours of the morning, only to have all charges dropped, in which case you have to go through a lengthy process to get your (now damaged) items back. There is zero recourse, all of the oversight bodies are filled with ex-police and look after their own.
Amen. I've had this happen multiple times. I antagonize the police though by doing work in the justice field and trying to publicize police misconduct. I was arrested last year simply for Retweeting a newspaper article that I'd interviewed for. The irony is that it was the government themselves that had Tweeted the article to bring light to the police misconduct. When I was in jail I was laughing with my lawyer as it was so ridiculous and of course the judge would throw it out. Ah, I'm so naïve sometimes. And I'd only just got out after doing 10 years in detention waiting for trial before the prosecutor came to me and said they wanted to throw all the charges out.
Massive respect to you. I would suggest that in the future you somewhat hide your identity so that you can have a larger impact.
> And I'd only just got out after doing 10 years in detention waiting for trial before the prosecutor came to me and said they wanted to throw all the charges out.
Surely that can't be legal? They've taken 10 years away from you, that must be the system being used maliciously?
Sadly it is. I spent that time locked up simply because I didn't have the tiny bit of money needed to bail out. If I had been wealthy I would not have spent a day locked up. That's why some jurisdictions are now trying to do away with what is called "cash bonds" to prevent this difference between rich and poor people's justice.
Your premise just isn’t true. I worked at a court, have friends who are public defenders, and know people involved in Northwestern Law’s “innocence project.” Most criminal appeals we got were from people who were clearly guilty from the mountain of evidence presented at trial. Most public defenders will admit that most of their clients are guilty, and their job is mainly making sure the clients get a fair process and are prosecuted for the correct crimes. And most innocence projects acknowledge they have to filter through hundreds of cases to identify the relative handful where it’s clear that the justice system has failed.
In the debate regarding the percentage of imprisoned people who are wrongfully convicted, the estimates in the literature are 1-4%, with some scholars arguing it’s well under 1%: https://dc.law.utah.edu/scholarship/138/. The criminal justice system is extremely accurate for a human institution.
It reminds me of the 99.8% Japanese conviction rate [1]. It's not because the police are the best in the world or that their legal system is superior, it's because only 8% make it to court.
Or, they take a plea deal that doesn't result in incarceration (or the crime/sentencing didnt assign imprisonment), but all the other negatives. Still in the pipeline, but they just aren't in those stats since they aren't incarcerated.
The majority of cases end in a plea deal. Yes, the judge has to sign off, but usually they just accept whatever deal was made (of course the lawyers present it "graciously" and answer any questions so the judges feel involved, but in my limited experience they accept any reasonable ones).
The Biden deal is unusual. It's highly political. The other interesting part is that they still have an active investigation, so it's not like the deal was conclusive (prosecution and defense were arguing on protection from future prosecution in the deal).
Generally agree, although I've seen figures more like 2-10%. 1% seems low to me - that's the conseravtive estimate just based on DNA exhonerations. 10% seems high just based on my opinion, but given that 2-4% of death row inmates are estimated as being innocent, it might be realistic given how much extra attention/appeals death sentences get.
The other part, is how cavalier the system can be about non-custodial crimes. If they aren't putting you in jail/prison, they really don't care about following thr procedures very strictly. All the numbers previously discussed deal with the incarcerated. Even convictions that don't result in incarceration can ruin people's lives. I assume the false positive rates on these approach or exceed 10% (my opinion and personal experience) especially given the use of plea deals that result in things like community service, or fine and parole and wouldn't be captured in the stats/estimates above.
Overall, 2-4% wrongful conviction would be fairly low and accurate for an adversarial human system (still concerning if ruining the lives of 2k-4k people every year in the US). I'm more concerned about the issues not caught in those numbers that still ruins peoples lives - like a lack of attention or due diligence for non-serious or "unimportant" crimes but the conviction of which still ruins chances at employment etc. Or the expanse of civil laws that also remove freedoms and possibly hurt job prospects without the protections found in the criminal side (no right to be present, no right to an attorney, lower standards of conviction/judgement, etc).
Having spent a decade locked up, you're not wrong. Most criminals are guilty of something.
The biggest problem is that most arrestees never get a fair process, which is the primary duty of the justice system.
Firstly they never get to use their right to trial because typically there is overcharging in the case and so the potential sentence is astronomical and no-one with any sense would gamble going to trial even if innocent because a guilty verdict would end their life -- so they plead out.
Secondly, the police and prosecutors that I know are all dirty as fuck and will do anything and everything to get a guilty verdict. Once you are arrested you are assumed guilty and the judges will do almost nothing to reign in misconduct by sanctioning these parties or dismissing cases.
Most of the time the appeals courts are the only way to get some vague sense of justice. They usually have less skin in the game and will give a case a bit of a longer look than a trial court judge.
Sorry to hear that happened to you (if I'm understanding correctly). There really is so little concern or compensation given to innocent people who get hit by the system. How long did it take you to get your items back? What sort of damage did they do?
> or are part of a community the police are scared of
Also curious about this if you have any more info to share. What sorts of communities did you see that with?
> There really is so little concern or compensation given to innocent people who get hit by the system.
No, there is none. You can report directly to the police force which will throw your complaint out. The next step is the IOPC [1] which is made of ex-police, and it's not independent. They just clear themselves of wrong-doing, when they are evidently in the wrong.
> How long did it take you to get your items back? What sort of damage did they do?
Over a year in one case, several months in another case (car keys, phone, wallet, work clothes). If it wasn't for having another bank account, a spare car and phone (all of which they didn't know about), I would have been without an income.
To add insult, they lost the car keys and damaged the phone. When I complained, they told me to claim on the house insurance - which would have sent the premiums through the roof.
> Also curious about this if you have any more info to share. What sorts of communities did you see that with?
Tight-knit groups, such as travellers or gangs. They have no way to enter the group and they all share the same name when asked.
My neighbours in Ireland had two mobile homes, 17 kids, several dogs (Akitas and German Shepherds mostly) hundreds of cousins, and they would all come out to scream at anyone who gave them trouble or asked them to perhaps keep their dogs on their land. They had an ongoing feud with the neighbour who had shot one of their dogs for killing too many sheep. They shot fireworks over my (thatched) roof and would make rude remarks any time they saw me outside.
The planning department hassled me for the heritage characteristics of my windows. They were happy to ignore the completely illegal mobile homes next door. The police do nothing but occasionally talk to them very sheepishly.
This is in a country where the police usually do not carry firearms, which I don't think makes a lot of sense, personally.
Of course, if you do something truly horrible, like smoke cannabis or not pay taxes on onion imports, you'll go to jail.
I've seen extremely similar throughout the UK. Possibly the worse thing about the UK (or Ireland) is that it punishes those who abide by the rules the most.
Unfortunately you will not got any support from the government or police. The only way out of your situation is to gather multiple allies and make the area unviable. In one local place the farmers shot bird scarers over the tops of their caravans for several nights and they left.
Specially referring to the British legal system (although others will apply), the system itself is part of the punishment, and is often used maliciously as so. You can be accused of X, have your details leaked to the press (by the police!), have social judgement cast upon you, only to be quietly found innocent later.
From personal experience: Better yet, you can have the police abuse their power to seize property and raid your home during the early hours of the morning, only to have all charges dropped, in which case you have to go through a lengthy process to get your (now damaged) items back. There is zero recourse, all of the oversight bodies are filled with ex-police and look after their own.
Meanwhile the real guilty people are 'let off' (non-pursued) because they flee the jurisdiction of the local police, or are part of a community the police are scared of. They only care for easy quick wins.
To address the article directly, the current system is to let 10 guilty men escape justice, whilst harassing 10 innocent men, and occasionally prosecuting them too.