Comment by UnoriginalGuy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by UnoriginalGuy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is exactly why in many other Western countries pleas are essentially non-existent in criminal prosecutions. The whole plea system creates an environment where miscarriages of justice can easily occur (e.g. innocent pleading guilty due to the cost of a trial/time they would spend in jail awaiting trial, or other prisoners false testifying in exchange for a lighter sentence in their own crime).

But Wikipedia covers why the plea system is horrifying is pretty great detail:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargain

The American justice system from a foreigner's perspective just seems like a revolving door punishment system with almost no reform, and one where money plays a MASSIVE part. If you're rich you won't spend any time in jail, and you likely won't be convicted even if guilty. If you're poor you can be innocent and still have to plead guilty because you lack the $100K you'd need to mount a real defence (and you'd still lose).

I genuinely believe there are some good individuals in the US justice system, but most of the people at the top and the politicised prosecutors, politicians, and judges just ruin it. You could easily improve American justice tomorrow by scraping most pleas, re-introducing the right to a speedy trial (e.g. 12 months in jail to be found innocent is immoral/unjust), and increasing public defender funding significantly (at least 20x).

A few other points:

- Common law vs Civil law... reliance more on legal precedent than on codified laws makes the legal field unnecessarily complex. If common-law defenses or other considerations are not included in the plain text of codified laws, the codified laws need to be fixed.

- Adversarial system vs inquisitional system. These need not be disjoint. Some sort of hybrid where the judge (and jury) can ask pointed questions of witnesses, or ask for elaboration on some point a lawyer is making, seems prudent. That's not to say the adversarial system is entirely bad. The notion, at least in civil cases, and for the defense in criminal cases, that the parties need their own dedicated advocate, is certainly valuable.

- Too many laws. The externalities of creating more and more laws seem lost on legislators (figuratively speaking; not truly lost, but ignored, since it ensures job security for lawyers).

- Reform of the incentives for prosecutors. The objective should not be to win cases, but to serve the public interest. Criminal prosecutions should not really have dedicated advocates intent on trying to convict the defendant, but that's what prosecutors in the United States usually are. Rating prosecutors by conviction rates is absurd unless you've already decided that every defendant is guilty.

> Rating prosecutors by conviction rates is absurd unless you've already decided that every defendant is guilty.

Untrue. Its also reasonable if you assume that the legal system outside of the prosecutor works perfectly, and therefore, independent of the prosecutors actions, no innocent defendant will be convicted. With that assumption, a high conviction rate means that the prosecutor is serving the public interest by not charging the innocent.

Of course, reality deviates from this in a number of ways, most critically in the high rate of plea bargains and the lack of evidence testing in the case of plea bargains.

In other words...you've already decided that every defendant is guilty.

"A defendant is a person or entity accused of a crime in criminal prosecution or a person or entity against whom some type of civil relief is being sought in a civil case." [0]

I wouldn't say what he said is untrue, you're just refuting his statement based on the definition of a defendant (whether a defendant is someone charged with a crime vs being prosecuted against). Sounds like you have different definitions that lead to slightly different relations of the same situation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defendant

I think there's an important distinction the parent was making that isn't just down to definitions.

A prosecutor has two roles. One is to select people to make into defendants, and the other is to try and get those defendants convicted. If we imagine that a prosecutor cannot get an innocent person convicted, then judging them by conviction rate is first judging them by their ability to choose the guilty to prosecute. You've not decided that every defendant is guilty - you've decided that every defendant should be guilty.

Imagine a sieve, designed to collect pebbles larger than 30mm. If you've already decided that every pebble collected is larger than 30mm, you have no need to examine the performance of the sieve. If you're wondering whether the sieve is catching smaller things, then you look at the collected pebbles, and it is quite reasonable to count smaller pebbles against the performance of the sieve.

Of course, our assumption there certainly doesn't hold perfectly, and may very well hold poorly enough that we significantly reward "ability to get the innocent convicted". But dragonwriter basically said as much.

> In other words...you've already decided that every defendant is guilty.

No, pretty much the opposite -- instead, you are assuming that not all defendants are guilty, but that all non-guilty defendants (and only non-guilty defendants) will be exonerated, such that the the rate of non-conviction represents the rate at which the prosecutor attempts to prosecute innocent victims.

> I wouldn't say what he said is untrue, you're just refuting his statement based on the definition of a defendant (whether a defendant is someone charged with a crime vs being prosecuted against).

Those aren't different definitions, they are alternative phrasing of the same definitions. Filing charges is initiating prosecution.

If a prosecutor thinks they will lose a case and the defendant rejects all plea deals, the prosecutor will sometimes dismiss the case citing lack of evidence. Preventing an accused person the ability to be found not guilty.

Offering a plea, then dismissing the case when it's rejected, strikes me as admission of bad faith. Has anyone tracked those stats?

Sadly, we don't need good ideas for how the system should function – lots of people have lots of those – we need good strategies for affecting change in the current system toward those ideas.

Just to illustrate using your ideas (which I'm absolutely all for), all three of them cost public money. We would have more trials requiring more time in front of judges, but they would need to be speedier, so we would simply need to pay more judges salaries. A similar calculation suggests we would need to pay more public defenders, and if I'm interpreting your last point correctly, we would also want to pay them 20% more than we do currently. So we need a strategy for selling the tax increases at least at the state level – because the districts most affected by these cost increases are probably the least wealthy – and perhaps the federal level. Not many people will care enough that we aren't treating criminals (which is what people who have been arrested are, to most people) well enough to pay extra taxes.

So I guess, what's the strategy to push us onto a path outside this spiral?

Paying for more judges, prosecutors, and defenders might be one solution. But consider that a huge fraction of our criminal justice system is occupied by drug-related offenses. Another large fraction is occupied by violent crimes related to drug trafficking. It would be an interesting experiment to unload that from the courts and then see how speedily the remaining cases could be tried.

Fewer prosecutions.

Only pursue cases that are slam dunk prioritized by cases that have highest social benefits.

More community service based punishment. None resulting in rap sheet.

Drastically reduce jury system.

Pay Clawback and impose penalty on judge and prosecutors for wrongful convictions. Hit their collective pay pool.

Or we could just stop prosecuting so many people. The US has far more people incarcerated than any other country. Clearly we could function perfectly well without having so many trials that we need to have plea bargaining.

> I genuinely believe there are some good individuals in the US justice system, but most of the people at the top and the politicised prosecutors, politicians, and judges just ruin it.

I disagree with this conclusion: It's too easy to blame someone else, a way of maintaining our own sense of innocence. Things happen in a democracy when voters insist on it. I'm willing to bet that nobody reading this will do anything about this problem. The great majority will not even vote for their local politicians and can't even name them besides governor and mayor (try it: name your state legislators and judges). EDIT: How many reading this would serve if called for jury or grand jury duty?

Finally, the political elite behave the same all over the country. That's either a massive coincidence of bad apples or it's a systematic problem. Most people reading this would (and some probably do) behave the same in those situations.

"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo (Walt Kelly)

I've always found this argument from voter apathy to be unpersuasive and arrogant.

The voting system in the United States is rather uniquely damaged with its first-past-the-post (majoritarian) elections, over a century's worth of gerrymandering that goes on strong as ever, stringent ballot access laws, public debate restrictions (which I take became stronger after Ross Perot) and so on.

It has all been meticulously crafted so that the odds are against any form of profound change, but rather to enforce the party dichotomy and have representatives maintain a comfortable status quo. The aforementioned gerrymandering strongly encourages vehement and almost parade-like, but ultimately empty and financially wasteful political campaigns, along with focusing one's efforts on leaving an impression only in certain key states and districts that are really decisive to one's performance.

Yet even people who are well versed in statistics and probability often seem to grant an exception for the insanity of voting in the United States, out of a perverse democratic ideal that ultimately isn't really there. Without some truly disruptive changes to how elections are structured (hardly a trivial matter, what with the rather fundamental chilling effect they'd have on how people have been doing things for so long), I personally find voting to be not worth one's time.

To be quite honest, with attitudes like that, I'm glad you stay home on voting day.

I'm no rah-rah booster of American politics by any means--I think they're corrupted almost beyond recognition, especially at the federal level--but I still don't see any better way to enact a government by and for the people than to cast a vote for how we feel every so often.

And from where I sit, it's working, in fits and starts, to make a better world:

* In my state, and the neighboring state, cannabis is now legal, and you can go buy yourself some pot at a retail store with nothing but cash and an ID to verify age

* Across the country, freelancers like me can now buy health insurance, where before it was so ridiculously expensive, it felt like throwing away thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars every year

* At the local level, a nearby jurisdiction is working to ban criminal background checks on job applications, to reduce the barriers for ex-cons to re-enter the workforce

* Minimum wage laws in municipalities along the west coast are helping lift up the always-hard-working, always-underpaid lowest class of workers

This is all stuff that comes either from direct citizen participation, or for voting for someone who had that as a part of their policy platform.

Can I vote to end American meddling in the middle east? No, and that's frustrating. Can I vote to get some national recognition on the science of climate change? No, though I can vote for people who acknowledge it (and I do).

But can voting change the world you live in? Oh yes.

I'm not opposed to voting, but to plurality rule.

It seems like you totally misunderstand my point because to you "voting" is synonymous with majoritarian elections.

I didn't mean to misunderstand your point, but I think it is not that clearly made in the original post, and now that you've said it clearly, I think it's a little irrelevant to the bigger question of governance and social change.

You're raising legitimate complaints about the brokenness of our voting system, and I agree. I'd like to see other voting systems put into place at local/state levels, with an eye toward implementing them nationally; something like range voting, or one of the other "pick your favorites" voting schemes.

Where I get the biggest sense of frustration in your post, it's the sense that we can't do much with our votes, e.g. when you said "the odds are against any form of profound change" and "I personally find voting to be not worth one's time".

Well, yeah, a vote on its own isn't enough to make the change you want to see. You do have to get involved, if people aren't already organized at getting your ideas out there, to get it to the level of being voted on.

My pot legalization example, I voted on that, but I know people who were involved in the GOTV efforts, the initiative process, the whole nine yards. But the whole years-long campaign culminated in a vote, the final test of "does the public buy our argument?"

Tell them about how it isn't even worth bothering to vote.

I agree that our voting system is very imperfect, but you can't argue with the results: The most prosperous, safest, healthiest, most free society in the history of humanity.

> the odds are against any form of profound change

Yet profound change happens over and over again. Segregation is now gone (and the black middle class has exploded in size) and women are now educated and work in greater numbers than men. Recently extreme conservative policies have been imposed on the nation. Or just look closely at a photo of the current President of the United States and see if you notice something surprising.

I agree there are many serious problems, but it's hardly hopeless.

EDIT: I realize my post said that the U.S. is the best at all those things. I didn't meant to be taken that literally; my fault. To be more precise, relative to most of humanity through most of history (i.e., not relative to goals and principles of freedom, prosperity, justice, etc.), the U.S. does exceptionally well. Regardless, the argument I was making doesn't rely on the U.S. being at the very top in everything.

The United States may be the most prosperous depending on how you define that, but it's not any of the other three. To call it those is to blatantly ignore other countries doing certain things better than the United States. Furthermore, I'd argue that since the prosperity is concentrated to a greater extent in the United States than in other countries, that that prosperity is mostly illusory for the majority of the population.

Not the freest (press, 46th): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index#Rankings_a...

Not the healthiest (5th): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index#2014_r...

Not the safest: (108th lowest intentional homicide rate, 2nd most incarcerated nation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

Its also not the most prosperous, except in aggregate (where mere size is a significant factor.)

The most prosperous, safest, healthiest, most free society in the history of humanity.

Now you're just being jingoistic.

Prosperity I can give you, but safety (which does not trump liberty, I'm afraid) and health are areas where the USA lags behind. What categories would you use to determine safety anyway - crime rates in general, murder rates, the level of security theater?

Freedom is a quality which evades measurement. There's plenty of countries which have greater social mobility, personal autonomy and social acceptance of historically deviant behaviors than the USA.

Segregation is now gone (and the black middle class has exploded in size)

How is this relevant to voting or mending deeply flawed mechanics of how the government is run? The civil rights movement got rid of heinous barriers, it didn't make any changes to fundamental technical workings.

women are now educated and work in greater numbers than men

The Western world sort of convened on this at around the same time period.

Or just look closely at a photo of the current President of the United States and see if you notice something surprising.

Highly skilled communicator, policies no different from the norm over the past few decades. Oh, and black. Right.

It's just one post on the Internet so I don't want to make too big a deal about it, but FWIW the name-calling really stops the discussion. It signals to me that what follows will have the same tone and thoughtfulness, and it's also just an unpleasant way to spend my time.

vezzy-fnord didn't call you any names.

> The most prosperous, safest, healthiest, most free society in the history of humanity.

Maybe 40-50 years ago (if you were white). Maybe. Absolutely not today.

>The most prosperous, safest, healthiest, most free society in the history of humanity.

The USA? That's a laughable claim.

Those claims seem dubious when compared to New Zealand, Iceland, or the Scandanavian countries.

Massachusetts is larger and fares better that those countries. Europe would be a better comparison size wise but does not fare so well against the US.

Yet another opportunity taken to bash Europe! Try harder next time:

Income inequality (Gini coefficient, CIA Gini): EU: 30.4 US: 45

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

Life expectancy at birth: EU: 80.02 US: 79.56

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world...

Infant mortality (per 1000 live births): EU: 4.33 US: 6.17

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world...

Homicide rate: Europe (as a whole): 3.0 US: 4.7

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

Freedom of the press index (lower is better): EU (weighted by population): 17.32 US: 18.22

https://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2013,1054.html

Don't forget the tightly-held media pumping out propaganda to remind The People that the status quo in America is the best in the world, is perfectly democratic and is exactly in line with how it was conceived by 18th-century philosopher-gods.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com