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Comment by fjcp | Hacker News Reader

>Prosecutors had omitted to reveal to Mr Dixon's defence attorney that a gunpowder test on his client's clothes had come back negative.

>Perhaps even more egregiously, another man, Lamarr Scott, admitted to local media only days after the murder that he shot Torriano Jackson. According to the Buffalo News, prosecutors conceded that Scott had been admitting his guilt in the case for a long time.

What kind of person sends an innocent man to prison just to score a win in a case? They should face some kind of repercussion, a good start would be an audit of all their cases looking for similar behavior. Of course that isn't practical, maybe a "strike" system where you would be suspended after x cases of unethical behavior.

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> ...maybe a "strike" system where you would be suspended after x cases of unethical behavior.

-If by 'suspended' you mean 'being sentenced to X years in prison', I'm all for it.

In my book, wilfully torpedoing someone's life to further one's own career is a much more cold-blooded and premeditated crime than most crimes people are convicted of.

And if x = 1

If we have a problem that too many people are getting sent to prison on too little evidence, I don't think we should try to solve it by sending even more people to prison.

Lets assume each of those prosecutors sends >1 person to prison. Then imprisoning said prosecutors would likely result in fewer prisoners.

-I guess the key here is "too little evidence". The courts would need to establish that the prosecutor either withheld evidence, knowing it would strengthen his case or at the very least through gross negligence caused evidence to not be presented to the court.

Considering the at times terrible information flow in my office (engineering Co.), I do not think it neither feasible nor fair to lock up prosecutors for any mishap - though I expect the possibility of prison time would work wonders to improve information flow!

What kind of person sends an innocent man to prison just to score a win in a case?

Someone ground down and dehumanized by a corrupt bureaucracy. The modern judicial systems largely use adversarial processes as a proxy or as an approximation of truth. There are no oracles of truth. No one is your friend. There are only people trying to win, and this will inevitably include gaming the system. The DA is no one's friend, even if you are the victim. The cops aren't your friend. Everyone just wants to win. This is why there is the presumption of innocence and the 5th amendment.

EDIT: This sort of adversarial judicial system is akin to Democracy, in that it's the worst system of its type, except for every other system we've tried.

>This sort of adversarial judicial system is akin to Democracy, in that it's the worst system of its type, except for every other system we've tried.

Except that's not really true. Democracies are split between highly adversarial common law systems, and civil law systems where judges take a stronger role in the process. People living under civil law, with less adversarial systems and more inquisitorial judges, don't seem notably more or less happy with their justice systems than those with adversarial systems.

I take it there are studies about this.

I figured, before I looked at the article, that Mr. Dixon was black. I guessed that while reading the article, he was going to be accused of being involved with drugs. The DA in the article did so without proof. The statement is alarming, as it is suggesting that although he didn't do the crime that they convicted him of, he was certainly guilty of something, regardless of the lack of evidence presented. Based on statistics of people in prison by race, the differences in prison sentencing by race, and the amount of actual crime committed by race, I'm assuming that this is not an uncommon occurrence in the United States.

"The New Jim Crow" should probably just be required reading at this point.

They did so without proof in the article, but not necessarily without proof in the trial. They obviously can’t fit the full testimonies and arguments made during trial.

”What kind of person sends an innocent man to prison just to score a win in a case?”

Most of them likely think of it as ”taking a criminal of the street, even though the evidence doesn’t add up or even makes sense at all”.

If your boss was elected on being tough on crime, there’s the added benefit that it’s better for your career, as long as the ‘criminals’ you pick aren’t from the same social circles as your boss.

I would think that he has a strong civil case against the DA from a government perspective and from a personal perspective. Maybe if the DA could lose his house and job in the future they wouldn't cheat like this. To be fair, all sides cheat in lots of other ways too.

What kind of person sends an innocent man to prison just to score a win in a case?

Someone with no skin in the game.

District attorneys in New York state are elected, so prosecutors' KPIs are likely weighted towards convictions, especially if the AG ran on the ever-reliable "I'm tough on crime" platform. Voters will hear about the numbers of people jailed. Whether they were actually guilty of the crime is less important.

It's also why the death penalty is wrong.

I’ve gotta agree. I’m morally OK with the death penalty for certain crimes, not so much for punishment or deterrence but for the same reasons you’d put down a rabid dog. But when prosecutorial misbehavior comes out in the news so often, I couldn’t abide sentencing someone today unless there was overwhelming objective proof that it was actually them.

Pretty much where I’m at too. The risk of a dodgy prosecution resulting in an innocent person being executed is way too high.

Yep, and it has happened in the past, and as long as we have it, it will in the future.

Same here. I'm not opposed to the death penalty in principle, but it's impossible to put enough protections in place to prevent executing innocent people. Plus, there really isn't a safety issue when someone could be put into supermax. Of course, there's the issue that supermax borders (at least) on cruel and unusual punishment, but that's another issue that needs to addressed separately.

It's not the only reason, in my opinion. My philosophy is that no human has the right to take the life of another, for any reason (outside of direct self-defense). It's basically an expansion on Blackstone's formulation - "it is better to let 10 guilty persons live than that one innocent be murdered"

This sort of discussion always puts me in mind of what J.R.R. Tolkien said (via Gandalf),

"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement."

> What kind of person sends an innocent man to prison just to score a win in a case?

Someone with higher political ambitions that wants to look like they're serious about fighting crime.

It's been working for kamala harris.

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