Hacker News Reader

Comment by caseysoftware | Hacker News Reader

> “Qualified immunity is a court-created doctrine that allows public officials to escape accountability after they engage in misconduct, even when their actions send an innocent person to prison.

I know this is likely impossible.. but I'd love to see prosecutors/law enforcement have to serve out the sentence or someone they convicted via misconduct. Withhold or manufacture evidence to push for a 10 year sentence? Sure but if that's ever uncovered, you get the 10 year sentence instead.

It might convince everyone to be a) more forthcoming with evidence and b) reasonable in the penalties they seek. Both could be a win for the system and the public as a whole.

View on HN

Set the sentence for prosecutorial/judicial misconduct to be the same time as the defendant has served so far. That way there is some incentive to come clean sooner.

In other words, the longer you hide your misdeeds or cover up others', the longer your sentence will be if and when the misconduct is uncovered.

well if you realize there was misconduct 25 years in to the 30 year sentence then there wouldn't be much reason to come clean, I mean you might be part of a team where X did something wrong, did you do something wrong - when you find out about it and don't come clean you did. Anyway a law should maybe take that scenario into consideration, or, in the American system the courts would have to decide the edge case.

I'd be willing to go at 25% up to 10 years.

To be honest though, disbarment (particularly if that disbarment was reciprocal) and fine is a more just punishment, because often the issues are so technical that a jury of non lawyers has trouble understanding the issues involved.

The last thing that I'd want to do is send someone to jail for up to 30 years for a good faith mistake, that's not justice either.

Generally these are crimes of intent so good faith mistakes are unlikely to yield a sentence.

When a jury is involved, all bets are off.

In that situation, a good faith mistake wouldn't be prosecuted in the first place. It's hard enough getting clear malpractice charged anyways.

I wouldn't bet on that, because it happens all the time now for various white collar crimes.

I'd rather decriminalize more things than create new classes of crimes.

You don't even need anything quite so radical. For starters, punish prosecutors who have evidence that would be beneficial to defense, and deliberately conceal it (yes, this happens all the time!).

That seems like a fun “karmic justice” ideas but it will just end up like the “3 strikes law” where some person gets life in prison for a relatively minor error.

If you make an error that ends up with someone else spending life in prison, it's not a minor error.

Depends on the available evidence and intent. Life is random and mistakes happen, in any job.

Some just have much more significant outcomes.

Also there's the risk of someone being set up as the fall person for the mistakes.

What if youre the prosecutor and you’re given false evidence by a cop who was given it by an informant?

The prosecutor and the cop didn’t know it was fake but also didn’t ask too many questions either.

Life in prison for both of them?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com