Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

It was a dark realization for me about some of the ways that America is corrupt despite branding/veneer of beautiful things like freedom, prosperity, christianity.

IMO A just nation who wanted to live out those^^ values would limit the rights of police (who are not judge or jury), and do the following:

1. Anything said before a lawyer is present is inadmissable

2. The officer's word is not considered superior to the defendent's

3. There are strictly enforced rights police must uphold until you're proven guilty. This includes basic comfort (think food, water, temperature regulation, sleep, access to daylight, contact with support people/friends/family)

4. You have a right to know exactly where you're fitting into an investigation, if you're the subject or a witness (and your role cannot change or if it does then all prior investigation is inadmissable evidence)

5. Police are not allowed to lie, or otherwise be deceptive

6. Police are liable for negative impacts they cause, including loss of work, loss of opportunity, disruptions of family etc. Acquittal should begin the process of recompense for losses.

I think in attempts to be "tough on crime" or "back the blue" America has lost it's sense of right and wrong / morality.

There are plenty of things we take for granted in American criminal justice that aren't standard in Europe. For example: you do not necessarily get exclusion of inappropriately obtained evidence, or a right not to incriminate yourself. There's an amazing article about how criminal justice works in France that followed "Anatomy of a Fall" --- just the idea that the prosecutor doesn't literally work for the judge is not a universal idea!

What's happening here is that we read more stories about criminal justice in America than stories about anywhere else. In fact, we more or less exclusively hear stories about America; we are the true crime center of the planet. That's fine, but it's also a powerful cognitive bias. Be careful about extrapolating too much from it.

In the US inappropriately obtained evidence, failure to follow chain of custody, etc is waived by the judges and allowed under 'good faith' (the court assumes good faith on the police's part even though the police failed to follow the process/rules/law/requirements and therefor the court doesn't enforce compliance requirements).

Search Lexus/Nexus for 'chain of custody' and 'good faith'. If the judge can waive away supposed rules/requirements/process violations with the blanket 'good faith' (that the court just blanket trusts that police were acting in good faith and not attribute maliciousness to their failure to comply) you don't actually have a system of rules/justice, you just have window dressing to make it appear you have a system of rules and justice.

I mean that's nice and all, but you're comparing the US to countries that literally don't enshrine that protection at all. It is not a universal principle of criminal justice that you have the right not to be confronted with evidence obtained improperly. Again: compare this to France, which doesn't even have an adversarial criminal justice system --- they run an inquisitorial system, with cooperating judges and prosecutors.

None of this is to say that the US system is better; it is better in some ways and worse in others (notably sentencing).

I'm comparing the US to a nation of laws. In a nation of laws, you can determine the outcome from the rules. In the US, you can't. In the US warrant rules don't apply. Chain of custody rules don't apply. Instead the judge extending 'good faith' to law enforcement when they fail to follow the rules applies.

A nation of laws doesn't exist when the judges discretion in favor of the Police who 'are trusted' and receive deferential accommodation over the rights of civilians to expect the laws/rules enforced on the government even if inconvenient.

Again, this assumes that the protections implied by search warrants in the United States are a universal principle of criminal justice, and they are not.

No, the assumption is that search warrant protections are part of the American law system (they are) but that the legal requirements around them are routinely ignored in America (they are) with arm waving and the term 'good faith', making the American system not a predictable system that follows it's rules, but one that is bent by judges around police 'failure' to follow the rules.

The French system can be completely different, but, if you follow the logic of the law, it's matches what happens in practice, it's a valid legal system. The USA does not have that, because while it pretends warrant are required in actuality they aren't and requirements/protections for citizens can be waived away by judges under 'good faith'.

This to me reads as an argument that no protections are better than protections applied inconsistently. Maybe on a message board, but if I was a defendant, it seems like the decision between the two would be easy to make.

Marginalised groups have argued for removal of protections because of inconsistent application. If the application is inconsistent the marginalised are the ones who suffer from that inconsistency. Those with the power to fix the underlying issues tend to be beneficiaries of that inconsistency, giving them little incentive to make changes. Frequently they don't even perceive there to be a problem because while inconsistent application is theoretically possible, their experience suggests that it just doesn't happen that often.

So many times people rail against a wealthy person who gets off lightly from some offense because their representatives have successfully argued that a punishment would be unduly harsh, or that there were particular mitigating circumstances. I usually disagree with people demanding a tougher punishment, but that is a similar principle at play. Personally I would rather have all persons charged to receive dispensation for circumstances rather than only a few elites. Similarly given the choice I'd want protections against illegal search and seizure to be for all, but when you have no power to make that happen, what is the best second option? A privileged subset, or everyone universally worse off?

Removal of protections because of inconsistent application sounds dumb.

Not if the inconsistency means the protection never really applied to you but the protection for others acted as hindrance to amending the system to providing a consistent protection.

We have by far the highest rate of police-on-civilian violence among developed countries. Our peers on this metric are nations like angola, honduras, mali, colombia. It's not a bias.

We certainly have some excellent procedural innovations in our court system. But we absolutely do have other problems that are much worse than those faced within the carceral systems of other countries at a similar level of wealth and development.

I was responding to the argument made in the parent comment, not making a general case for the US being superior or in any way rebutting anything in the article itself.

Ehh, how do our rates of civilian-on-police violence compare to other developed countries?

Well you can quit being a cop if you don't like the experience. You can't decide to quit having police if you don't like how they treat you.

I don't think that's responsive to my comment. What I'm getting at is -- it is reasonable for police to use self-defense. So I'd expect higher police-on-civilian violence rates in places with higher civilian-on-police violence rates.

I don't accept the point that it's generally acceptable for police to use violence in self defense. It is easy to imagine the point where safety to the public demands an individual cop accept personal danger. This is widely understood, it is all over the messaging about the inherent heroism of policing. If they want the credit for this danger, they have to face the risk itself.

But anyway yeah we're way off track and your original point really seemed to be something like "but maybe the civilians deserve it" so I have not taken it seriously at any point and will continue not to.

Yeah, it seems like we're going to have to agree to disagree on this.

I'd love to see a source for your claims. I know they are at least untrue or misleading for the Netherlands.

The Netherlands offers the right to remain silent. All European counties I am familiar offer something similar. On the European level, this right has recently been affirmed. [1]

In the Netherlands, improperly obtained evidence is indeed not excluded in the Netherlands. Improperly obtaining evidence is a separate crime that does not taint the case for the initial crime, and is prosecuted separately. However, improperly handled evidence (e.g. broken chain of custody) is normally excluded.

In practice, improperly obtained evidence is not a major problem, it will in itself not help convict an innocent person. Improperly handled evidence however, can easily lead to an innocent person being convicted.

[1] https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/european-court-justi...

You can verify my claims in 2 minutes on Google. I don't have the Netherlands on my list; I haven't looked. It is not my claim that every European country lacks every procedural protection in the US system, or for that matter that the US has every procedural protection from every European state.

> You can verify my claims in 2 minutes on Google.

I'm sure you're right, but presumably this means it would take you significantly less than two minutes to offer some concrete sources that would help enlighten kvdveer and anyone else who might be interested.

It's a fun conversation! I've got a little list of US criminal justice protections and where they do and don't apply in Europe. For example: the UK doesn't have strict double jeopardy protections. They used to! They recently decided they didn't like them, and rolled them back.

It would be a fun thread, and I think a little eye-opening. But nobody is reading this thread at this point so it's not worth sinking a lot of effort in here.

Well you, kvdveer, I and likely at least a few other people are reading it, and I hope we're not beneath significantly less than two minutes of effort.

Let's just wait for it to come up again organically. I think we're all on the same page now with respect to this thread.

a lot of the 'oddness' of american 'policing' gets cleared up when considering one of the main origin stories of policing in America.

Across the "american south"/the american slaveholding states, police departments were "founded" when municipalities printed metal stars ('sheriff's badges') and handed them to the _existing_ slave patrols. (plenty of other police departments beyond the american south started in the same way, but to appreciate the energy of it all, the place it started matters.)

these deputized slave patrols were given badges, presumably budgets, and the message: "keep on doing what you're doing, which is, among other things preventing slave rebellions and retaining 'human capital'.".

It's not easy for that 15% of the people, keeping the other 85% of the population from walking away or rebelling.

Oh, the book "You Have the Right to Remain Innocent" by James Duane is very short, less than 100 pages, and is worth the read. It rounds to "do not talk to the police", and 'viewing the police as adversarial agents is the only correct view, both in their own words and the words of their victims'.

This is a nice sentiment and all, but the police & prosecutors are already on the losing side of a technological and societal arms race.

The reasons police use these tactics is because in many jurisdictions, getting a guilty verdict is borderline impossible, even in the face of an overwhelming amount of direct evidence. Defense counsels have become experts in shit-slinging to ensure that juries are as confused as possible going into deliberations. "Jury of peers" means it's somewhere between possible and probable to get one or many jurors sympathetic to the defendant, especially in cities. Jurors attempting to appear "unbiased" frequently just choose the middle ground option between the prosecution and defense, without actually taking a look at the evidence.

The current system is extraordinarily flawed and leads to these outcomes where all sides are forced to use immoral tactics to get their desired outcome, because that's the only realistic shot they've got to accomplish their goals. The correct response is not to further kneecap one side of the conflict.

I wouldn't want evidence to automatically become "inadmissible" because of something the police have done: they could accidentally-on-purpose do something that makes the evidence that would have proved me innocent "inadmissible". Also, organised criminals could bribe the police to make the evidence that would have proved them guilty "inadmissible".

If there's one right I'd like to see added it's this: the right to a trial without a jury. I'll admit it may have something to do with my social class and education, and where I live, but I trust a judge to make the right decision more than I trust a jury.

Then you bring the evidence exonerating you. The prosecution is limited, not you.

Already have the problem with bribery, this literally does not impact that.

Inadmissibility of government evidence due to government violations of the accused’s constitutional rights in its collection never works against the accused.

> You have a right to know exactly where you're fitting into an investigation, if you're the subject or a witness (and your role cannot change

The end result of that would logically have to be that everyone police talk to at all times are a "subject" because it's perfectly reasonable that someone who is questioned about what they know about a crime might end up having had some part in it.

Yes. And if the police are not allowed to be deceptive about your role in the investigation, then it becomes clear what you should to in response. (STFU, essentially).

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