True, jury nullification is also a part of the system, but that doesn’t make the verdict “false”, it means that the law is considered so egregiously wrong that the public can’t support it.
So, either the evidence doesn’t support a guilty verdict or all twelve of the jurors, a supposedly representative sample of the public, believe that laws preventing cops murdering people are so wrong that they’re prepared to ignore the judge’s instructions and nullify. I’m betting on the former.
You keep looking for evidence to prove lack of guilt. That’s not going to happen. Evidence needs to exist to prove guilt, and according to the people who have seen the evidence and have the responsibility to decide, it doesn’t. You can’t ask for evidence to create reasonable doubt, that doubt automatically exists, and the prosecution must overcome it. They failed. Your claim that the video and other evidence you’ve seen overcomes it is factually wrong.
Well, “The verdict was appropriate” is my null hypothesis. To overturn it, someone would have to present sufficiently convincing evidence.
I’d say if the video was shown, and no evidence offered to the jury to counter it, then, yeah, the cops would have been found guilty. Look at the SDMB jury!
“What do you think would be sufficient evidence to reach a not guilty verdict?” The fact that the jury did reach a not guilty verdict implies, to me, that exactly that standard was met: sufficient evidence was submitted.
I can think of lots of hypothetical stuff: the victim’s prior history, eyewitness testimony, physical evidence from the scene, the police officers’ own testimony on the stand, their service records, character testimony from other policemen, etc. There’s tons of stuff a defense attorney can introduce that will increase a jury’s level of doubt.
(And, of course, tons of stuff a prosecutor can introduce to increase it.)
Some of this kind of manipulation is legal…but immoral. I’ve watched trials in which one attorney stretched wildly to “create” doubt. I thought it should have been halted by the judge, but it wasn’t. I once watched a medical malpractice case where the defense attorney engaged in mathematical shenanigans (I was a maths student, not a law student, at the time!) in order to arrive at the “magical” number of “one in a million odds.” It was hokum; he was just making up numbers, solely with the goal of making the events seem to be “one in a million.” But nobody stopped him, and the jury ate it up like ice cream.
^^^ This. IIRC, from my memory of CNN’s coverage of the Rodney King case, in California the prosecutor has to specifically charge the defendant with the ‘lesser included offenses’ for the jury to be able to convict on a lesser charge. If the prosecutor overcharged, it may be because of overconfidence, or it may be because s/he wanted an acquittal. Can any lawyer types familiar with CA law comment on this possibility?
OK, it seems that there’s a disconnect here that I can’t seem to overcome. All the legal minutiae that have been brought forward are, to me at least, completely beside the point. From all I’ve seen about the case, it looks like a murderer walked free. This isn’t clad in any legal context, it’s not in and of itself a statement invoking any laws, statutes, or procedures, it’s a simple claim that may either be true or not.
Again, this is prior to all considerations regarding reasonable doubt, due process, etc. These things come afterwards, to ensure, as well as possible, that if somebody is a murderer, they are brought to justice; this is a system that may either work or fail. The question is, in this instance, did it work?
This isn’t answered by telling me anything about the particulars of the system; if a murder was committed, and guilt could not be proven beyond reasonable doubt, then everything functioned perfectly well within the system, but the system itself failed. Justice wasn’t served, because a crime was committed and nobody has to face consequences for it.
What I want to know is, did the system work, or not—not whether everything happened in accordance with the system. That’s an entirely separate question.
When I ask, “What do you think would be sufficient evidence to reach a not guilty verdict?”, then I want to know under what circumstances was the police conduct we see in the video appropriate, permitted, use your favourite deontic terminology. Telling me that there must have been some such evidence because a not guilty verdict was, in fact, reached, misses the point, since it assumes a priori that the system worked—and worked in determining whether anything wrong was done, not just worked within its own confines.
Likewise, when I say that the jury’s verdict may be wrong, I’m not talking about jury nullification, but rather, just stating that it may be the case that a crime has been committed, without the jury issuing a guilty verdict, for whatever reason.
If it’s true that the officers were morally responsible for Thomas’ death, yet the jury ruled to acquit, then quite simply, the system has failed. It doesn’t matter that there is a good within-system reason for their judgment. Only if there is no moral blame, and the verdict is coherent with that, is it appropriate; and this is what I can’t see so far.
Yes, assigning moral blame is difficult, and perhaps impossible to always do perfectly; and yes, that is exactly the reason the system is in place, and works the way it does. But again, that’s just beside the point. I’m not sure what I can do to make myself any more clear.
You are assuming that all killings are murder, and that all killings require that the killers be punished. That’s not the case.
Someone going free when there is reasonable doubt as to their guilt is the system working, not failing, even if it extremely likely they are guilty, and even if they are morally responsible for the killing. The civil courts can judge responsibility and restitution, that’s not the point of a criminal court.
You won’t get acceptable answers to your questions, because they are based on an incorrect understanding of what the system is. There actions may have been morally wrong, against police procedure, intentionally harmful, the cause of Thomas’s death, and not provably murder. You keep asking what could justify their actions. Quite possibly nothing could, but that doesn’t make it murder.
You want my opinion? It was probably murder. So a not guilty verdict was the only acceptable one. Probably is nowhere near sufficient for a criminal conviction.
As Steophan notes, you’re asking too much from the system.
The system isn’t designed to produce “truth.” It can’t. The demand exceeds our human ability to meet. I know you are very well educated in the sciences, because of your excellent and in-depth answers in the General Questions forum. So I might make a scientific analogy: no one has yet discovered gravitons. Does that mean the Scientific Method has failed?
No: it works pretty darn well. And so does the legal system.
Was the result “true” or “real justice” or “moral?” I’m damned if I know, and I don’t think anyone else knows either…or even conceivable can know.
Did the system work? Yes. Exactly as designed.
Has anyone said that the police conduct on the video was appropriate, permitted, accepted, okay, or good? Of course it wasn’t! It was pretty damn awful, and someone died from it.
No one here is saying that the police were good, or did right, or should be applauded, or even excused. We’re just saying they weren’t convicted, and that’s because there was enough doubt in the minds of twelve reasonable people as to whether the evidence was sufficient.
This is entirely possible. Do you think there is enough evidence to justify an appeal, or a new trial on separate charges, or an in-depth FBI investigation, or any other further escalation of process? I honestly do not, but that’s just one opinion.
No. Because this isn’t a moral system, it’s a legal system. It doesn’t produce truth, only verdicts. Again, you’re just asking too much. We might as well reject the Scientific Method because quantum uncertainty is philosophically untenable. It might even be, but science doesn’t make those kinds of judgements.
Maybe no one in this thread said that, but at trial I believe at least person did say that the officers actions were appropriate, permitted, accepted, okay and/or good.
For instance, the training officer for the Fullerton PD, Cpl. Stephen A Rubio, said of Officer Ramos’ glove-donning and threat: “The profanity might be a little off-color, maybe a slight policy violation there. But the conditional threat in my mind was given to prevent, hopefully, a use of force in the first place. … On the video, all things considered, I don’t see anything out of policy there.”
Okay, that’s a bummer, but that’s the way advocate-based evidence goes. You can put the worst murder/rapist in the world on trial, and you’ll find someone to testify, “He was a nice, polite neighbor and was always polite to everyone.”
The other side has the opportunity to introduce testimony that says, “He was a rotten stinking little creep.”
We, here, in this discussion thread, ought to be above advocacy. We’re trying to live up to Half Man Half Wit’s higher standard. We’re trying to work out the truth. None of us is on the side of either the prosecution or the defense.
I’m on the side of the guy who was beaten to death for no good reason by the cops, and against the cops who did it. I’m also against people who think them getting off scot-free is a good or even acceptable thing. It’s a travesty of justice.
No, I’m very much not. I think there are killings that are perfectly justifiable, and asking whether this was one.
How exactly isn’t it murder if the actions leading to Thomas’ death can’t be justified?
That’s not really a good analogy; I don’t see how the scientific method is questioned by the nondiscovery of gravitons.
Rather, think about it this way: the scientific method (to the extent that it exists) is designed to approximate the underlying reality as well as possible. This is based on the assumption that there is an underlying reality, that is, that the pronouncements we make on what exists, and what doesn’t, may be objectively either true or false. Science may then be judged by how well it can discover this.
Likewise, we may assume that there are actions that are morally wrong or right. The legal system is set up to approximate this as well as is humanly possible. But again, in this, it may fail: it may not be the best system for this purpose, and thus, allow immoral actions to go unpunished, for instance. In fact, every legal system so far has been scrapped because people thought it was systematically unable to best approximate moral reality.
Maybe (I don’t know, to be honest), but as I’m at pains to point out, that’s beside the point. The system may work, but the verdict it reaches may nevertheless be false, just like a faulty scientific method may work, but fail to discover the underlying reality.
But the verdicts the legal system reaches are not independent of our moral values; in fact, they are designed to embody them. Your argumentation is circular in that you assume that reaching a verdict in accordance with the legal system is sufficient for the correct working of the system; but this of course assumes the correct working of the system as a means of approximating moral reality. Your thinking divorces the workings of the legal system completely from the underlying moral values. In this way, any system can be said to ‘work’, even if it routinely leads to the killing of innocents, as long as this killing of innocents is mandated by the system.
I mean, you presumably have reasons to prefer the current system to, I don’t know, that in place in feudal Europe. But what are those if not its presumably higher ability to reach verdicts in accordance with moral reality?
No, but we must. It’s true that a legal system can’t judge its own applicability—that’s outside its own purview; and consequently, dogmatically thinking within the system can’t perceive its failures. But legal systems do fail, and they do get replaced. Likewise, the scientific method: when the inapplicability of verificationist criteria of truth became clear, it was changed to incorporate Popperian falsificationism, and has since undergone further revision (though of course the scientific method is a much less prescriptive kind of thing than a legal system and incorporates a large measure of descriptivism, simply attempting to capture the procedures of successful working scientists).
Because the definition of murder is not “unjustified killing”. Seriously, unless the very specific set of criteria that make it murder all occur, and provably so, it’s not murder, at least according to a court. A quick Google of California murder law suggests that if the attack was sufficiently provoked, if there was not malice or criminal intent, or if it was in self defence or the defence of others, it’s nor murder.
Most of those don’t apply to manslaughter, and to be honest I find the question of why they weren’t convicted of that more interesting. Even then, if the jury believed that there was a genuine threat to the police officers, and they were legitimately trying to subdue him and went too far, it would be a struggle to prove manslaughter.
That, though, is not how a court works. It is always biased heavily towards the defendant. That’s not a flaw, that’s a feature of the system.
Or do you not agree with the idea that it’s better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent one to be convicted? The travesty only happens when someone is convicted despite there not being sufficient evidence.
Also, they’ve not got of scot-free as yet. They’ve been sacked from their jobs and are facing civil penalties.
I’m sorry, but did you read anything I wrote above? I’m trying my best here to make clear that the legal definitions, court proceedings, etc., are simply beside the point. The question is, was there an unjustified killing, moral blame, a guilty party that walked free, a bad guy not getting punished? (I’m somewhat at a loss for words here, since it seems that you are intent to interpret them all using a legal context.) And if so, why did the system fail to establish guilt?
Let’s use a simple example. Say that some legal system defines murder as ‘unjustified killing, except if it occurred on a Friday’. Somebody kills someone else in an unjustified manner on a Friday. Accordingly, he is acquitted of any eventual murder charge, and walks free.
What I’m trying to say is that he’s still guilty, he’s still a bad guy, even though under the legal definition, he’s not a murderer. It’s an instance of the system failing to punish the bad guy appropriately, because it’s got a shitty definition of murder. The legal system and the moral reality are incongrous, and the system doesn’t accomplish what it’s intended to do. You keep answering this with ‘but it wasn’t murder—it was on a Friday, and it’s not murder if it happens on a Friday’.
Or take Trinopus example regarding the scientific method. It’s designed to approximately and asymptotically approach a true description of the underlying reality. Say there was a principle: ‘theories are only scientific if they are falsifiable, and don’t contain Koalas’. Now some enterprising scientist discovers Koalas, and tries to get his paper published. Of course, it’ll get rejected: theories involving Koalas are unscientific. But this doesn’t mean Koalas don’t exist; it means that the method’s shit. I’m questioning the journal’s decision, based on that fact; but you, the editor, just keep replying that theories containing Koalas aren’t scientific. It’s honestly beginning to seem a bit Kafkaesque.
I’ll simplify it. If you can’t explain the jury’s verdict then there is the distinct possibility that they were wrong. And given the defense’s ability to weed out anybody with reasoning skills that leaves the gullible.
We know what they saw. We don’t know what was presented as a defense beyond the obvious attempt at saying this was trained SOP and darn if the crazy guy who attacked the police didn’t die. They thought he was on angle dust. Tragedy, insert tears here.
Or, the prosecutor screwed up the charges and they walked underneath them.
Because our legal system isn’t designed to discover “truth.” It’s designed to render verdicts, in accordance with rules that, as Steophan noted, are biased to protect the accused.
I think we’re in a loop here: you want something that the legal system, as currently constituted, doesn’t provide. I explain that…and you say, “Then the system failed.”
No, it didn’t. It did exactly what it was supposed to do.
At most, you could say that the prosecutor failed. He took a case to a jury that wasn’t sufficiently bolstered by evidence.
I’m afraid you and I are talking across each other here. As far as I can tell, you’d like a different kind of legal system than we have today. Well, okay… I’m not unsympathetic. But you can’t say “the system failed” just because it didn’t deliver a result that we may feel is right. Again, that isn’t its job.
To attempt another science analogy, some people conduct a trial on a new medicine. The medicine improves patients’ conditions…but not enough to be statistically significant. They get a little better, but not so much that the null hypothesis is rejected. A naive observer might say, “But it made people get better!” The scientist can only say, “Yes…but not enough to be conclusive.” The guy walks away mumbling that the Scientific Method clearly failed. But, no, it didn’t.
That’s roughly what happened in this trial. Guilt was not established to the level required by the burden-of-proof rules.
I don’t remember claiming it is. But it is designed, broadly at least, to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. So, whenever the innocent aren’t protected, and the guilty aren’t punished, the system has failed to accomplish its purpose.
But they’re not arbitrary rules. Again, don’t you think there’s a difference between the legal system in a totalitarian dictatorship, and the one in the US? I think there is, and it’s a matter of fact that the latter is much, much better. But then, there must be some underlying standard that one conforms to better than the other; there must be something the latter is better at. Otherwise, the rules it accords to would just be arbitrary, and we enter a dangerously relativistic territory.
You could still be saying, in the totalitarian system, that the system worked, when a group of dissidents were executed. But I doubt you would. You probably wouldn’t consider what happened just. Likewise, it’s entirely possible that what happens in any other system, including the one currently in place in the US, isn’t just. And if that’s the case, then the system did, indeed, fail—not fail to work according to its own rules, that it may or may not have done, which is a completely separate question. But it failed to fulfil its intended purpose, which is indeed to deliver justice.
As I said before, I’m really not overly concerned with the system as such, but with the case at hand. There’s a question of whether somebody morally to blame for another person’s death wrongly went unpunished. That’s really what I’m concerned with.
What, in your opinion, is its job? To me, it’s not simply to work according to its own rules—these rules, and the system itself, are in place for a reason, which is to deliver justice; again, basically to punish bad guys and protect good guys. When it fails to do that, it fails at what it’s supposed to do, whether or not it functioned according to its own rules. That’s what I’m saying—it may fail, even though it functions. The two notions of working according to its rules, and working towards the purpose it is intended to fulfill, aren’t necessarily equivalent—but to you, this seems to be the case definitionally. But again, ask yourself how you would feel in a totalitarian, or otherwise manifestly unjust, system.
But it may have. If the standard of evidence is such that even though the medication would be able to help people, the method is incapable of establishing this, then there’s a problem with the method. This is a question that must be asked—and of course, it is asked, in connection with things like the increasing placebo effect, or the lack of replicability of studies, etc. These are very concrete examples where the methodology may have to be re-thought.
At least in the opinion of the jury, yes, this is exactly what happened, we’re in agreement here. But if you think that this is relevant to my question, then I’m sorry, but you’re missing the point.
The rules have evolved over centuries, usually in response to something going wrong. That’s why it’s so hard to execute someone in the U.S. We have mandatory appeals, and waiting periods, and so on. That’s because, in the past, we’ve executed innocent people. The rules are to make it harder for that to happen.
I simply must disagree. The system produced the closest approximation to justice that can be attained. If you want perfection, don’t hold your breath.
Okay: how do you know? What rules of procedure do you use in arriving at your conclusion? You think the cops were morally to blame? Prove it to me. Convince me. Show me the evidence.
We could have a new mini-trial right here, where you could demonstrate your point.
But do you see the problem? You’re asking for a whole new system. Again, I’m not unsympathetic. The O.J. Simpson trial ended with the “wrong” verdict.
But who the fuck am I to say such a thing? Do you really want to empower every internet jackass (me!) to overturn the verdicts of our juries? This would be to tyrannize the justice system (or to democratize it…same thing.) This leads to Sally Jessy Raphael and madness!
And how do you know it failed? What system are you using to come to your conclusions? Should every trial be repeated five times, to improve the quality of the results? Should every verdict be appealed?
No! Absolutely not! You’re completely misunderstanding me if you think that! I’m saying the system we have now constitutes a wonderful balance between all the contradictory demands upon it, and that to make any serious changes would be extremely harmful to one or another major segment of society.
I think it’d suck! I also think what we have now is not in any way totalitarian, and so the question doesn’t arise.
Let’s say, instead, that neither of us is succeeding in making our points clear to the other.
No, they didn’t go wrongly unpunished. It is not the job of the legal system - or anyone else - to punish people that you, or anyone else, declare as “bad guys”. Furthermore, it should not be it’s job to do that, and all the protections that defendants enjoy are to prevent that sort of arbitrary decision.
The system did not fail to punish these bad guys because that’s not, ultimately, it’s purpose. It’s purpose is to punish those found guilty, beyond reasonable doubt, of a crime. No more, no less.
If you want to abolish those protections you are opening the door to the very totalitarian rule you claim to be against. There are far more important things that whether any particular killer goes free, and the protections that you enjoy from false accusations and punishment are one of them.
Do you really want to live in a society where people can be convicted and punished based on a public outcry even when those who have seen the whole of the evidence consider it doesn’t prove them guilty? I don’t.
Yeah, I think the O.J. Simpson verdict was wrong…but who the hell cares what I think? I would fear a system that gave undue credit – hell, any credit at all! – to the opinions of uninvolved people on the internet.
A system that made fewer “Type I errors” would, almost inevitably, make more “Type II errors.”
Letting actually-guilty people go free is the price we pay for having a fairly high level of security against imprisoning actually-innocent people. The latter is considered so horrifying that we bend over backwards to avoid it, even to the degree of accepting the acquittal of bad people.
A “perfect” system, which makes no errors at all, would be nice… So would an antigravity space drive…
So if you say that innocent people have been executed, you’re saying that there’s a notion of innocence beyond the guilty/not guilty verdict of the system; otherwise, those found guilty then would be, quite simply, guilty. That’s really all I want to point out.
But how can you say that, and simultaneously fault me for saying the same thing in the Kelly Thomas case? That seems blatantly contradictory.
No, but I want the system to be accountable to each and every of its subjects, which is kinda the whole ‘democracy’ thought. That’s not to say every verdict should be reached by public vote (though the jury trial does incorporate a portion of that), but ultimately, if ‘we the people’ are no longer satisfied with the system, it must be changed—and of course, that’s exactly what happens, historically.
I don’t know it, and haven’t claimed to; but I believe that’s what happened, as you seem to do with OJ.
But again, it’s not my issue to change the system, but merely to evaluate its performance in this case, which I think was poor.
But then, you do believe that there’s a standard against which to judge the system. So, is it automatic that your present system is exempted from failure (which you also don’t seem to believe, but which seems to be your argument against me)?
No, but surely, it’s its purpose to punish those that are bad guys. If not, then what is it good for?
But that’s blatantly circular. The same kind of reasoning can be applied to (say) Nazi Germany, and find that ‘the system works’, because it sets the standards of who is guilty beyond reasonable doubt itself. I’m merely arguing that those standards must be anchored somehow, rather than just be arbitrary.
‘Public outcry’ is ultimately what our form of government, and its legal system, is based on—if the system is no longer supported by its subjects, then they can, and will, change it, either staying within the possibilities to do so afforded to them by the system itself, or by simply overthrowing it. The system is not the primary value-giving entity, the people that install and uphold it are.
But that’s just the system we have, because it’s just those uninvolved people that vote the policymakers into office, and by exercizing their right to vote, thus influence the policies that are followed! Typically, people think that’s a good thing, too.
That’s not true: the vast majority of all possible systems make too many of either.