Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

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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?

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