The thing is, that at the time, people thought it was a perfect method. The lesson to be learned from history here is not that the water test was imperfect but that tests are not a perfect way of determining guilt. Everyone can think that a test is perfect and be wrong. That is why we shouldn’t rely on them. Prosecutors are not always after the ‘truth’. They are after a conviction. Judges are not always impartial.
The thing that is confusing me is this. Is this a ‘sci-fi’ question? Do you realize that this would never really be? Some posters think that this is ‘not too far away’. This is crazy talk. This is never going to really happen.
Now if it is a sci-fi question, then probably the 5th amendment would be gone along with our freedom. Just because you can’t perceive a loss of freedom, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
The US Constititution says I MUST obey the laws of the land. It doesn’t however say I can’t hate and hope for the destruction of the US. Merely that I can’t act to aid in bringing that about.
Let’s say I hate everything about the US. The greatest joy in my life was seening the WTC burn and collapse, killing thousands of evil capitalists. So long as I never assisted the freedom fighters that flew those jets (say, helped finance them), I stayed within US law.
The FBI wants to force this real truth serum on me and question me. I know for 100% sure I’ll pass, as I never aided the freedom fighters. However, I want to refuse the truth serum to make it harder for the FBI to find the freedom fighters. The FBI has limited funds. If I know that I am 100% innocent, I realize a conventional investigation of me will never turn up evidence of my guilt, as I never broke any law. I’d rather see the FBI waste money investigating me, than being able to spend it and find the true freedom fighters.
The above isn’t far from my real beliefs. It is just that I tend pacifist. Thus I’d rather see both the US and al Qaeda all die without my involvement. Both are just evil, and I have no interest in helping either.
You put up some good points. I am not as eloquent as many of you all here; possibly out of my league.
Being chided for immaturity in handling some replies is a bit tough to swallow.
In these sort of threads I always deferred to the OP right to set up a scenario to their own liking. I believe the immaturity lies within those who would rather argue about the realism of the scenario than accept it as a given and answer the original question.
Well, live and learn; this is why I rarely create threads in this forum.
For me, it’s nothing much to do with the realism of the scenario, it’s that, on the one hand, you’re asking for debate, but on the other, you have predefined any such debate as irrelevant; i.e. “If there weren’t any problems, what problems would there be?”.
I do have a problem with the realism of your axioms, BwanaBob, but I didn’t mention them in the objection I made. If you want to see me complain about them, I got a million questions that nobody has yet asked.
Your axioms don’t cover the part of a police investigation between the point when the crime is known to have happened and when a suspected criminal is in custody. It is a capital mistake, in my view, to blithely assume that abolishing the Fifth Amendment wouldn’t at all affect the police investigations which culminate in having a guy in the dock to dope in the first place.
In Law & Order terms, your axioms start 30 minutes into the show when the ADA takes over. I wanna see the first part of the show.
I ran with your assumptions and accepted your realism. I believe your idea still has flaws and that my objection is worthy of a better answer than your blanket dismissal as somebody too immature to play your game.
Sorry for the double post, I just realized I forgot to answer Lemur866’s revision earlier.
Er… maybe not an MRI. You’d have to remove all magnetic objects from the room or there’s gonna be paper clips and briefcases flying toward the witness. The MRI at my place of work has been damaged twice in the past year by flying metal O[sub]2[/sub] containers. But I do so stipulate that something exists with that capacity that either actively or passively scans the witness. I’ll continue to use MRI as a basis for comparison.
Also, be aware that patients are pre-screened with conventional X-ray technology of the orbits. Those people who have metal fragments or shrapnel in their bodies (e.g., metal workers) cannot be exposed to the magnetic field of an MRI without severe harm. I will pretend this problem doesn’t exist for the sake of argument.
This rang false for me. In looking around, I see that it is widely regarded as unlawful search and seizure to compel blood draws without a warrant or without an individualized suspicion of guilt (except in some cases, particularly felons, who have a diminished expectation of privacy).
I believe bouncing a laser off somebody’s window in order to pick up sound vibrations is also unlawful, at least without a warrant, as is tapping a telephone.
I have also located cases where even passive thermal imaging scanners (used to locate houses that are unusually warm, which may be a sign of marijuana or meth production) are, at least in some jurisdictions, also considered illegal invasion of privacy without a warrant.
These are Fourth Amendment violations, if true. An MRI device actively puts people in a magnetic field and sometimes requires the injection of contrast dye to secure a proper image. (We will ignore the contrast for purposes of your idea.) Because it actively scans a person, it is much more like a phone tap or bouncing a laser off a window; it isn’t simply coincidentally happening to pick up ambient brainwaves.
Doing this to any and all witnesses without prior suspicion of guilt is more than a Fifth Amendment violation, as I read it.
Well, the OP can “set up” whatever he/she wants. I don’t see that creating a right to restrict all respondents to a highly limited range of responses on the OP’s say-so, though a respondent who used the thread as an excuse to trot out a particular hobby horse could get justly yelled at for hijacking.
Well, you’re wrong. You presented a scenario along the lines of “What would happen if humans had access to Perfect Tool X?” It’s hardly a sign of immaturity if some responses take the form of:
[ul][li]Is Perfect Tool X possible or even plausible?[/li][li]Humans being humans, how do you rule out abuse of Perfect Tool X?[/ul][/li]
What is immature is suggesting that respondents are “afraid” of the idea, or simply raising the above two questions because we have “snappy responses” (as opposed to valid thoughtful objections). Your premise is flawed, and refusing to acknowledge the flaws doesn’t remove them from existence. It’s as if you asked for opinions on a new board game you’d invented, and then accused critics of immaturity when they pointed out flaws and limitations in your proposed rules that made the game unplayable.
But let’s assume that the first issue is in fact irrelevant and the perfect truth serum exists. I still don’t understand how you plan to restrict the use of the serum to only “good” applications, or what you’d do if something that might sound good (but really isn’t) came along, like dosing every visitor to the U.S. and asking “So… got any terrorist ties?”
Lemur866 Let’s say your device works. I’m interested in how it alters the court.
Suspect takes the stand and says he’s innocent. Device says he’s telling the truth. Police expert says suspect’s dna is at scene, device says he’s telling the truth. Witnesses on both sides take the stand, some say he was with them, others swear he was at scene of crime, again device rings true.
What happens? Clearly it’s a case of mistaken identity. Is the suspect released then and there? What’s the point of continuing the trial, it the device says everyone’s telling the truth and therefor the suspect couldn’t have done the crime. Despite the eye witness (who could be mistaken) and the DNA (which only proves suspect was there).
The logical conclusion is mistaken identity, since there’s no way anyone can deliberately lie.
Don’t we have tools today that can be abused, but we still use and maybe even rely on them? I mentioned guns earlier. Imagine they were a new invention (I know this is a stretch). Would you be arguing that these dealy weapons could be abused and would never allow them in the hands of police officers (they might shoot an innocent bystander, etc). Well you might well make the argument and I would lay on the ground laughing at the insanity of the argument. Because any tool can be misused, this is a fact of life, and need not be hashed over again and again. Like police gun use has rules, my drug would have usage rules as well.
But somehow saying that isn’t good enough. I give up.
Fish’s comparison to an L&O episode is right on: I don’t give a shit about the police investigation aspect, I was more interested in the court aspect. And that’s my privilege as OP to set the debate. If I said I want to talk about the game of Monopoly you become an asshole if you want to start talking about Clue. Don’t like the subject? Don’t join in.
…is still absolutely not, no, under no conditions, at no time, now and forever, amen. If you’d actually read the Fifth Amendment…
…you’d know why repealing the whole thing is a bad, bad, bad, bad, baaaaaad idea given the limited discussion scope of your OP.
But no, you want to repeal gravity on Earth so we can all jump to the Moon, and ask what our Moon colonies will look like, without entertaining debate of whether there would be a moon, or an atmosphere on Earth to sustain humanity. Go ahead and discuss whatever OP you have the privilege to create. Your thread is no longer much of a Debate and not worth responding to, which is my privilege as a poster.
Marijuana. OK, just kidding. Still the OP specified a drug (or technique) that is for all practical purposes 100 percent effective. Let us say it is only 98 percent effective. Do you imagine that our current method of discovering guilt and innocence in courtroom is anywhere CLOSE to 98 percent effective? Need I tell you of all the convicted rapists and murderers who have been freed of late because DNA testing has shown undeniably that the man who was convicted in a court of law by a jury of his peers did NOT do it? Oh, yah, we gotta fucking PERFECT system here, couldn’t POSSIBLY be improved on. (Bring out the rolleye wheelbarrow.)
You say yes you put your penis in her. Then you are asked if she struggled and cried. You say yes, because she did. You are asked if you thought she wanted it. You say yes, because you did. YOu are asked what would have convinced you that she DIDN’T want it. You say nothing, because nothing would. And your ass is heading for jail.
It could fall considerably short of perfection and still be a huge improvement over what we have now. I will agree with you to this extent however: I recall that there was a certain hype about lie detectors when they were first introduced to law enforcement. In some quarters, they were touted as being exactly the flawless device that BwanaBob has hypothesized his truth serum to be. Of course, they are not anything LIKE that, all they do is measure GSR and a few other things more precisely than humans can, and allow the operator make assumptions about the interviewee based on that data. But they’re so far from perfect that they are a good cautionary tale for BwanaBob’s hypothesis. I wouldn’t accept any kind of truth serum or technique unless it was MUCH more thoroughly tested than the “lie detector” was.
It’s completely out of the scope of the OP, in any event.
Er, no. You say nothing because your lawyer (assuming he has a multi-digit IQ) objects to the question as being far beyond the “simple objective facts” standard postulated here, and the judge sustains the objection and warns the DA that if he keeps it up the baliff will whack his peepee.
And, unless the DA can think of questions that 1)fall within this standard and 2)force an incriminating answer under truth scan when that scan is being applied to the mind of the sort of lowlife who thinks that all women want him, but some pretend otherwise because they’re prick-teases, he walks.
And it wasn’t that long ago that a husband was deemed unable to rape his wife. Has the law changed since then or has the law just been interpreted differently?
Both. However a machine lacks the ability to determine the TRUTH, from the truth. This machine, drug whatever is nothing but a glorified spell checker. What I mean is, a spell checker is great for catching mis-spelled words, but most are useless at checking grammar. They don’t know the whether I mean to say, sleep or sheep, all they care about is whether the word matches what’s in their database. To them sleep and sheep are interchangible as long as it’s spelled correctly.
Well these “truth” machines are the same. It doesn’t matter to them whether or not I raped the woman, all that matters to it is whether **I **believe I raped her. If i don’t, then as far as the machine is concerned, I’m innocent.
Shouldn’t this be a binary question? Did you rape her? Yes or no. If I say no and the machine agrees, then I should be let loose. Why does the DA, get to “flesh in” the crime? Either I’m being truthful or I’m not.
Well, I’ll take this as a small victory because you seem to be finally acknowledging that though your “perfect” truth serum might be useful, it can be abused:
Of course, this raises the question of why we aren’t already routinely using existing (though admittedly less effective than your proposed perfect serum) drugs like sodium pentathol and whatnot in legal proceedings. So far, they have not proven themselves reliable enough; any mechanism that alters thought processes is likely to alter perceptions and memory as well, to the point where someone might testify to what they honestly wish was true, or honestly believe is true (though objectively it isn’t). Further, individual rights (under the U.S. Constitution) are designed to limit the state’s actions, not force individual actions. Are you going to force people to testify at their own trials, instead of just offering them the choice to do so? No, thanks. That’s the kind of decision (along with what religion to follow, how or if to vote, how to express oneself-self, etc.) that needs as little state involvement as possible.
It’s our privilege as respondents to analyze flaws in the set debate.
You misinterpret my analogy, while throwing in a very un-GD-ish insult (and not your first, either). This debate isn’t about an existing game with well-defined rules, but a proposal about a new game with as-yet undefined rules. As such, if someone comes along and says “well, why not use the magic spinner to move your marker into the land of marble chocolate through a shortcut in the strawberry patch? There’s no rule against it”, it is not a useful response to say “I’ve precluded it, it can’t happen, it’s immature to keep suggesting it” and try to keep playing. You’ll have to explain why shortcuts are precluded.