Ok if you become “known” to police in the area you live, you need to move very far away at the nearest opportunity.
Look at any case involving witness misidentification, most involve someone who was on police radar so they had a pic which they then presented to the victim or witness who identified the person and things just spiraled from there.
The most uncomfortable lesson is probably that some false convictions are inevitable in the criminal justice system, and that many of them will never be discovered and corrected. DNA exoneration isn’t always possible. The only way to ensure that no one is falsely convicted is to set such a high evidentiary standard that it becomes virtually impossible to convict anyone.
Justice, therefore, requires injustice. We must decide how much injustice we are willing to do.
If we can’t do justice right, we shouldn’t do it at all. I agree with Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote" It is better to let 100 guilty men go free than imprison one innocent"
In violent crimes, less than 10% of the time.
Well, we’ve also learned that some kinds of evidence are better than others. Eyewitness testimony is horrible (assuming the witness did not know the perpetrator prior to the crime) and no conviction should be based on that alone.
And snitches are terrible (I don’t know why anybody is surprised about that, but apparently lots of prosecutors think they’re just fine).
Video evidence is good, and becoming more common.
We can also be more comfortable committing some *small *number of false convictions if we take the death penalty off the table.
Blackstone’s Formula.
“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”
And OK, Franklin copied this, but according to that article, a number of persons prior to Blackstone said much the same thing; including The God of the Bible, Mohammed, Maimonides, Sir John Fortescue, John Adams, and Increase Mather.
None of whom would I trust as far as I could throw them.
That is what really shocked and depressed me, a random case on the site the guy had tons of witnesses for his alibi including store clerks and his family, the jury still convicted him on a victim picking him out of a photo lineup and her testimony.
A weeping emotional victim insisting you are the guy beats even the best airtight alibi.
Remember a prosecuting attorney’s job is to convict somebody for a crime and it doesnt always have to be the right person, as long as someone is punished.
I happened to select that random profile too.
And did you notice the last line of that account? After being released from prison, and the real culprit identified, the released man and his nephew murdered a woman, and he is back in prison. Which opens up a whole tangle of “what ifs”. Would he have murdered her if he hadn’t spent all those years in prison? Was his return to lawlessness a result of his unfair incarceration, or a continuation of his personal predilection?
Thats not that unusual, what dismayed me was a conviction reached with no physical evidence and plenty of counter evidence because that could happen to anyone really.
Any prosecuting attorney who doesn’t think they have the right guy (and it’s almost always a guy) is supposed to move for dismissal. An attorney who knowingly prosecutes a case that s/he doesn’t believe targets the right person should be disbarred.
At least in theory… :rolleyes:
[Nobody in the history of politics ever ran a campaign that consisted of “VOTE FOR ME-I’M CAREFUL ON CRIME!”
It probably says something damning about me but I’ve seen enough human monsters that I’d be willing to live with some innocent collateral damage to slay the monsters.
Admittedly, I wouldn’t want to be the innocent. The horrible reality is that terrible things happen to good people a lot. That is NOT to say we shouldn’t try to be perfect.
I was representing a man accused of child rape. As we got close to trial, it became clear to me and pretty obvious to anyone that he didn’t do it. Facing a long sentence, we approached the prosecutor for a “deal.” To her great credit, she didn’t try to get a plea to a lessor charge. She said, “if we don’t think he did it, we don’t want a plea. We’ll dismiss the case.” And she did. So, having good people in positions of authority is sure nice.
Did some googling, and discovered the wiki page for his case, and this Radiolab segment about it. It seems that many of the alibi statements came from friends and relatives, and they all sounded remarkably similar and rehearsed, so they were not given as much weight as the victim identification. Both men were known to police, and the actual rapist was being actively monitored. What confuses me is why HE wasn’t pulled into the lineup, since even as recently as the morning of the attack they had been checking on him.
Another thing are confessions. I’ve heard of people manipulated into giving a confession even though they were innocent.
The best advice I think is, shut up and dont say anything until they have formal charges and you have a lawyer present. Also demand they videotape everything.
Sounds like emotion trumps logic and facts. Depressing.
Ken White of Popehat has blogged on this topic repeatedly, with numerous horror stories of prosecutors (especially Federal prosecutors) who have manipulated people into making false statements, which in a Federal investigation, is a crime in itself. His consistent and oft-repeated advice: Just Shut The Fuck Up!
Thing is those interrogators are damn good. They can for example, act as the persons best friend and really manipulate them with “advice” to get them to say something.
Remember many suspects do not have the highest IQ or are lonely so this cool person wanting to be their best friend or messing with their head is very powerful.
Another issue is the manner in which photo lineups are presented for crime victims to review. Showing the victim a sheet with six or eight photos and asking if they see the perpetrator is more likely to elicit a false positive than other methods. Victims seem to think that one of the people in the photos *must *be the perpetrator.
A more reliable method is to show one photo at a time and telling the victim to stop when they see the perpetrator. Not perfect but a it gives a lower false id rate.
Police Lineups: Making Eyewitness Identification More Reliable
ha ha ha ha ha! love this!!!