Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisjj | Hacker News Reader

> they love to cite their tough-on-crime statistics.

Where can we see their tough-on-innocence statistics?

You can get a rough idea of innocence by exoneration rates + years served. Above-link is just for that one project, which is one of the largest in this arena.

It would also be wise to assume that all exonerations only reflect a small minority of actually innocent people especially when you start factoring in 'crimes' like possession charges or debt (https://www.aclu.org/publications/pound-flesh-criminalizatio...)

A corollary of the “innocent until proven guilty” standard is that there’s just no way to compute such statistics. It’s impossible by design to distinguish between a clearly innocent person and a very suspicious person whose guilt couldn’t quite be proven without looking into the details of their case.

I've never understood that. There's a claim you are guilty of robbery. You get charged and go to court. You plead not guilty. The da insists and you go to trial. During trial, you manage to provide cctv showing that you were 1000 miles away. The jury says "not guilty".

Is there any reasonable way to say "we don't know, he might be guilty, we just didn't reach 'beyond reasonable doubt '"?

The closest thing is probably a mistrial due to a hung jury. That allows a retrial.

CCTV shows you were in the general area of the crime, but your shady friend says you were hanging out with him at the exact time the robbery happened, and the guy who says he saw you do the robbery is also kinda shady. I think it’d be reasonable for a juror to think you probably did it (because your friend is untrustworthy and has obvious incentives to lie) but didn’t do it beyond a reasonable doubt (because the witness just isn’t credible enough).

Yes that's the obvious case for the "we can't be sure". It's the classic example really. It's not what I asked.

A jury I was on came to that exact conclusion. Some crimes require state of mind to be proven. In my case, a guy was at a bar and got kicked out. He went to his car and grabbed a gun and fired two shots. Ultimately the decision hanged on "did he fear for his life" when two bouncers rushed him in the parking lot.

He was probably guilty of the two counts of aggravated assault, but the prosecution never showed that it wasn't self defense, which is what Arizona required.

If he was able to get to his car and retrieve his gun and shoot at them, it seems very unlikely that the “two bouncers rushed him in the parking lot”. He could have just driven away. Much more likely he was angry about being kicked out and went back with his gun and then the “two bouncers rushed him”.

Well the point of the trial is to make a binary decision, so it has to be guilty or not guilty to a certain standard of evidence.

Think of it as "should you bring an umbrella to go outside today?" – the weather forecast has a probability, but your job is to turn that probability into a decision based on your risk tolerance. You can't bring a 30% umbrella for a 30% chance of rain.

Not in the US. In Scotland, until this year, there was a "not proven" verdict, which was more or less what you just said.

The effect was the same as "not guilty", but there was an idea that allowing the jury to express doubt allowed them to avoid erring on the side of guilt. But it also confused people so they finally got rid of it.

"It’s impossible by design to distinguish between a clearly innocent person and a very suspicious person whose guilt couldn’t quite be proven"

Oh, you mean another innocent person? (Emphais mine)

They are innocent under the law, not necessarily innocent.

There's no functional difference in this context - the legal system determines legal issues.

There’s a functional difference if you’re trying to compute “tough-on-innocence statistics”, because it means that the target for the only possible metric is much higher than zero. A healthy criminal justice system should routinely rule people innocent; if nearly everyone who’s prosecuted is found guilty, that doesn’t mean prosecutors are being really picky about filing charges, it means the system doesn’t treat innocence as an acceptable outcome.

You'd be better off assessing that via analysis of laws and policies. That would show what could be abused and to what degree, even if it's abused by the people in power now. That's really the whole point of the analysis - to create laws and policies with better protections, so we should measure what we're looking to change.

Yes, I agree. Rather than talking about "tough-on-innocence statistics", we should discuss what concrete procedural reforms would help people like Ms. Smith avoid being mistreated by the justice system.

One reason we're not doing that, I suspect, is that it's hard to figure out what such a reform would look like. What specific additional step could the police have taken to determine that she didn't operate this account, without access to her private knowledge that she's never been to Arkansas and doesn't have the type of phone that was used to create it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com