N guilty men (1997)

https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm

by emmelaich • 3 years ago

121 82 3 years ago

www2.law.ucla.edu

bandrami2• 3 years ago

When I'm teaching comp sci to lawyers (long story) I use this as an example of Bayesian weighting and Type I/Type II errors because I know they'll be familiar with it.

shanusmagnus• 3 years ago

Talk about burying the lede! What's the long story?

bandrami2• 3 years ago

It's actually not that long. I got a job at a law school teaching "Concepts of Computer Science" to 2nd-year law students.

jasonlotito• 3 years ago

When considering things that won't likely affect me personally, I wonder if I'd be willing to suffer the consequences to pay for the reasoning. I imagine myself in the shoes of those that will be affected. This tends to be complicated.

Would I be willing to put my sons in that position: being innocent? That's easy, no.

Would I be willing to have someone guilty of harming my son go free? That's harder.

Would I be willing to go to prison for an innocent man? And I don't mean with the hope of going free. The understanding is, would I be willing to give up my life so that another would stay in prison?

I do this for a lot of stuff that has a moral complexity. Would I be willing to suffer for this outcome? Sometimes the answer comes easily: yes, I would. It forces me to think through the ramifications of what I'm asking others to do. It's not easy, because it forces me to come to terms with my moral desires and my practical desires. And all of this is really a mind game anyways, it's not real. It's speculative. I don't know how I would react if I was really put into a position.

Apologies, this wasn't directly related to the topic itself, but the post made me think of this.

rayiner3• 3 years ago

But you could just as easily try to put yourself in the shoes of the crime victim that doesn’t get justice because the perpetrator is one of the 10 guilty men that go free.

ta757579• 3 years ago

They did, re-read paragraph 3.

dkarl• 3 years ago

John Rawls suggests imagining that you don't know which person in society you will be. You might be a victim, a defendant, a juror, a family member of a victim or defendant, somebody poor or rich, somebody who lives in a rural or urban area, somebody who lives in a high-crime or low-crime neighborhood. You might be any age, any race, with any sexual orientation or gender identity. If you were about to be dropped into a society and did not know what situation you would find yourself in, what rules and norms would you want society to have?

darkclouds• 3 years ago

The story is told of a Chinese law professor, who was listening to a British lawyer explain that Britons were so enlightened, they believed it was better that ninety-nine guilty men go free than that one innocent man be executed. The Chinese professor thought for a second and asked, "Better for whom?"

This article detracts from the questions like are the laws fit for purpose, has everyone been notified of said legal changes, and if one is not living in a legal dictatorship, has everyone been consulted on the law before hand?

Perhaps the reason law is not taught to everyone is because everyone would be in fear of falling foul of the law, which then begs the question, what is the real intended purpose of law? A case of better to have died doing nothing than fall foul of the law and be branded a criminal for life, in order to avoid that constant up hill battle from those around you?

On the point of criminals serving their sentence and debt to society, whilst the authorities may act like this is the case, society never acts like this, with nuanced comments or actions, again by falling foul of the law, a person is for ever consigned to purgatory, even if the comments are innocently made, that trigger in psychological terms exists for ever, until dementia or death occurs.

So when looking at the wider events, does the law actually do more harm than good by simply not informing or educating the public in a clear, unambiguous, not open to interpretation manner, rendering the n Guilty men philosophy a side show to deflect from its own poor implementation?

Times are different today, instant global communication, the days of hiding in plain sight by simply moving around the planet are long gone, and yet the law doesnt recognise these technological changes. With an increasingly educated or more informed public, mere suspicions are enough to render an avalanche of inquiry that is perhaps best described as a witch hunt of extreme magnitude. And here in lies the problem, the witch hunt, a criminal activity that even the law fails to address and all because it failed to educate the public in the first place, thus creating a situation where yin becomes yang, and the law is incapable of punishing these situations.

In IT terms, the compiler, the OS, CPU/GPU and peripherals are the law, if you make a mistake in your code, you'll get a compiler error, a runtime error or a system crash, so you change and try again, but in life, law is but a small part of the wider part of life, every unsolved murder, every disappearance, shows that Law is ineffective, that Darwinism is real and that in real life, the more informed you become the more inactive you become, rendering the question, what is the point of life?

We are not some infant life form, oblivious to the dangers around us, blindly going where no man has gone before, but relying on those around us to guide us, but as we become more informed, those dangers become more apparent, more nuanced, where it becomes obvious to keep our mouth shut and do nothing, hoping for a quiet peaceful life, and yet the legal system still does not let people euthanise themselves at will in a peaceful non traumatic manner to escape the prison of doing nothing for fear of falling foul of the law.

Perhaps demonstrating the real intent of the law and its nefarious divisive ways, whilst eschewing its own foibles and fallacies, with criminal side show deceit like n Guilty Men philosophy?

renewiltord• 3 years ago

King Alfred hanging a judge for having had a man hanged about whom there were doubts really does take this to quite the limit!

Massive occupational hazard in judgery at the time. One must imagine that that society shortly thereafter ended in chaos as judges everywhere biased towards innocence.

bArray6• 3 years ago

The story is told of a Chinese law professor, who was listening to a British lawyer explain that Britons were so enlightened, they believed it was better that ninety-nine guilty men go free than that one innocent man be executed. The Chinese professor thought for a second and asked, "Better for whom?"

Specially referring to the British legal system (although others will apply), the system itself is part of the punishment, and is often used maliciously as so. You can be accused of X, have your details leaked to the press (by the police!), have social judgement cast upon you, only to be quietly found innocent later.

From personal experience: Better yet, you can have the police abuse their power to seize property and raid your home during the early hours of the morning, only to have all charges dropped, in which case you have to go through a lengthy process to get your (now damaged) items back. There is zero recourse, all of the oversight bodies are filled with ex-police and look after their own.

Meanwhile the real guilty people are 'let off' (non-pursued) because they flee the jurisdiction of the local police, or are part of a community the police are scared of. They only care for easy quick wins.

To address the article directly, the current system is to let 10 guilty men escape justice, whilst harassing 10 innocent men, and occasionally prosecuting them too.

TimPC2• 3 years ago

This reflects the disparity in the east vs west and the focus on society vs the individual. It's better from an individual rights perspective that an innocent man isn't imprisoned but in societies that put far less weight on individual rights, you wouldn't be willing to have ten guilty men reoffending to prevent that one innocent man being jailed.

AnimalMuppet2• 3 years ago

I'm not sure it's just "weight on individual rights". Those ten guilty men reoffending are going to cause damage to other people (assuming it's not something like jaywalking). So for me as a person who just wants to live my life, not subject to being a victim of false arrest, and also not being a crime victim, there's a trade-off. The higher the rate of false positives, the more likely I am to be arrested, tried, jailed, and perhaps even executed for something that I didn't do. But the higher the rate of false negatives, the more likely I am to be robbed, beaten, or killed by someone who was let go rather than jailed.

The "send one innocent to jail" can and will be abused by people in power. The "free 10 guilty" can and will be abused by professional criminals.

You can't make it perfect with imperfect people to implement the system. The best you can do is set the trade-off to minimize the damage to society. Unfortunately, this means some people being damaged each direction - some innocent people jailed, and some people being harmed by guilty people who were let off.

dfxm12• 3 years ago

Why is it better one way or the other depending on the focus of society? I don't see the connection. I'd equally lose faith in the system either way. Maybe moreso if I see my neighbor going to jail unjustly rather than some random individual.

As for the other way around, seeing a guilty man go free, the standard for imprisoning someone being evidence beyond reasonable doubt seems reasonable.

Granted, there is a two tier justice system and if you are unreasonably wealthy, you have more leeway, but I think that's a different discussion.

dooglius• 3 years ago

Not necessarily, if comparing against e.g. an approach of jailing the first suspect against whom one finds evidence, the net number of free guilty men may still go up, particularly in crimes where innocent men can be framed.

giantg29• 3 years ago

"you wouldn't be willing to have ten guilty men reoffending to prevent that one innocent man being jailed."

You want accuracy. We can just ignore this false dichotomy about letting guilty people go to protect the innocent. If you are jailing the innocent, then you still have guilty parties going free anyways since the wrong person is convicted.

goodbyesf• 3 years ago

This reflects the disparity in the east vs west and the focus on society vs the individual.

More of this 'east vs west' nonsense. The court system exists not for the individual but for the society. This is true in the US, in china, in russia, in europe, everywhere.

It's better from an individual rights perspective

What individual rights? All rights are given to collectives. Ask the african slaves who got 'special rights' because they belonged to different collectives. Civil rights, women's rights, etc are collective rights.

but in societies that put far less weight on individual rights,

You mean societies that believe in collateral damage? Where if you think some bad guy is attending a wedding, you kill everyone at the wedding?

If there is a society that values individuals or individual rights, the society wouldn't exist.

onetimeusename3• 3 years ago

I don't know how true this is. My friend moved from the West to Japan and was explaining how policing works there. He said there is more crime in Japan than the statistics show. One part of favoring society over the individual is downplaying crime. He described it like how there is a perception that if no one sees the crime, then the crime did not happen so there is pressure from police not to report crimes and they prefer not to deal it. He said he once dealt with them where they increasingly became hostile towards him and bureaucratic demanding more documentation on his immigration status and banking records to the point where he dropped it. Don't get me wrong, I think Japan is still a low crime country.

I've seen it also, being thrown out of a club by police over a false report by someone else as the police ignored things going on around them. My point is that it's not extremely helpful to society to behave like that.

didntcheck• 3 years ago

Sorry to hear that happened to you (if I'm understanding correctly). There really is so little concern or compensation given to innocent people who get hit by the system. How long did it take you to get your items back? What sort of damage did they do?

or are part of a community the police are scared of

Also curious about this if you have any more info to share. What sorts of communities did you see that with?

bArray6• 3 years ago

There really is so little concern or compensation given to innocent people who get hit by the system.

No, there is none. You can report directly to the police force which will throw your complaint out. The next step is the IOPC [1] which is made of ex-police, and it's not independent. They just clear themselves of wrong-doing, when they are evidently in the wrong.

How long did it take you to get your items back? What sort of damage did they do?

Over a year in one case, several months in another case (car keys, phone, wallet, work clothes). If it wasn't for having another bank account, a spare car and phone (all of which they didn't know about), I would have been without an income.

To add insult, they lost the car keys and damaged the phone. When I complained, they told me to claim on the house insurance - which would have sent the premiums through the roof.

Also curious about this if you have any more info to share. What sorts of communities did you see that with?

Tight-knit groups, such as travellers or gangs. They have no way to enter the group and they all share the same name when asked.

[1] https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/

CalRobert2• 3 years ago

My neighbours in Ireland had two mobile homes, 17 kids, several dogs (Akitas and German Shepherds mostly) hundreds of cousins, and they would all come out to scream at anyone who gave them trouble or asked them to perhaps keep their dogs on their land. They had an ongoing feud with the neighbour who had shot one of their dogs for killing too many sheep. They shot fireworks over my (thatched) roof and would make rude remarks any time they saw me outside.

The planning department hassled me for the heritage characteristics of my windows. They were happy to ignore the completely illegal mobile homes next door. The police do nothing but occasionally talk to them very sheepishly.

This is in a country where the police usually do not carry firearms, which I don't think makes a lot of sense, personally.

Of course, if you do something truly horrible, like smoke cannabis or not pay taxes on onion imports, you'll go to jail.

rayiner3• 3 years ago

Your premise just isn’t true. I worked at a court, have friends who are public defenders, and know people involved in Northwestern Law’s “innocence project.” Most criminal appeals we got were from people who were clearly guilty from the mountain of evidence presented at trial. Most public defenders will admit that most of their clients are guilty, and their job is mainly making sure the clients get a fair process and are prosecuted for the correct crimes. And most innocence projects acknowledge they have to filter through hundreds of cases to identify the relative handful where it’s clear that the justice system has failed.

In the debate regarding the percentage of imprisoned people who are wrongfully convicted, the estimates in the literature are 1-4%, with some scholars arguing it’s well under 1%: https://dc.law.utah.edu/scholarship/138/. The criminal justice system is extremely accurate for a human institution.

woooooo• 3 years ago

Your experience doesn't contradict theirs at all -- they're not talking about being imprisoned, found guilty, or even brought to trial.

They exit the pipeline, with hardship, before your statistics pick up.

giantg29• 3 years ago

Generally agree, although I've seen figures more like 2-10%. 1% seems low to me - that's the conseravtive estimate just based on DNA exhonerations. 10% seems high just based on my opinion, but given that 2-4% of death row inmates are estimated as being innocent, it might be realistic given how much extra attention/appeals death sentences get.

The other part, is how cavalier the system can be about non-custodial crimes. If they aren't putting you in jail/prison, they really don't care about following thr procedures very strictly. All the numbers previously discussed deal with the incarcerated. Even convictions that don't result in incarceration can ruin people's lives. I assume the false positive rates on these approach or exceed 10% (my opinion and personal experience) especially given the use of plea deals that result in things like community service, or fine and parole and wouldn't be captured in the stats/estimates above.

Overall, 2-4% wrongful conviction would be fairly low and accurate for an adversarial human system (still concerning if ruining the lives of 2k-4k people every year in the US). I'm more concerned about the issues not caught in those numbers that still ruins peoples lives - like a lack of attention or due diligence for non-serious or "unimportant" crimes but the conviction of which still ruins chances at employment etc. Or the expanse of civil laws that also remove freedoms and possibly hurt job prospects without the protections found in the criminal side (no right to be present, no right to an attorney, lower standards of conviction/judgement, etc).

qingcharles7• 3 years ago

Having spent a decade locked up, you're not wrong. Most criminals are guilty of something.

The biggest problem is that most arrestees never get a fair process, which is the primary duty of the justice system.

Firstly they never get to use their right to trial because typically there is overcharging in the case and so the potential sentence is astronomical and no-one with any sense would gamble going to trial even if innocent because a guilty verdict would end their life -- so they plead out.

Secondly, the police and prosecutors that I know are all dirty as fuck and will do anything and everything to get a guilty verdict. Once you are arrested you are assumed guilty and the judges will do almost nothing to reign in misconduct by sanctioning these parties or dismissing cases.

Most of the time the appeals courts are the only way to get some vague sense of justice. They usually have less skin in the game and will give a case a bit of a longer look than a trial court judge.

gsatic• 3 years ago

Its pretty much how any org/institution that deals with a little too much day to day unpredictability and randomness functions.

They learn quickly that lot of the problems they have to solve dont have solutions and are above their resource/skill level. So the goals turn defensive. Dont get blamed. Avoid the hard/unpredictable and complex. Survive long enough to collect pension and become a netflix advisor.

No one with a choice wants these jobs.

makk• 3 years ago

No one with a choice wants these jobs.

Disagree, because many people want to:

collect pension and become a Netflix advisor.

throw0101a• 3 years ago

Meanwhile the real guilty people are 'let off' (non-pursued) […]

On how modern autocracies work:

Day in and day out, the [Orbán] regime works more through inducements than through intimidation. The courts are packed, and forgiving of the regime’s allies. Friends of the government win state contracts at high prices and borrow on easy terms from the central bank. Those on the inside grow rich by favoritism; those on the outside suffer from the general deterioration of the economy. As one shrewd observer told me on a recent visit, “The benefit of controlling a modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the guilty.”

* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-...

* https://archive.li/ZIzCm

onetimeusename3• 3 years ago

or are part of a community the police are scared of.

That was my suspicion about things. I wondered why the police bothered to pursue someone like Mark Meechan, the one arrested for teaching a pug to do a nazi salute as a joke, when there must be more serious crimes they could devote resources to.

I think there obviously are more serious crimes but would require a lot more effort and trouble to make any arrests. Going after people for frivolous things is much easier for them achieve. They can kind of give off the appearance of doing something useful this way.

pc86• 3 years ago

I have some experience with LE from various angles, and while there may be exceptions, from what I've seen an arrest is an arrest is an arrest. With the exception of major kingpin-type criminals, which your average detective is never going to get anywhere near investigating, you don't get any more juice in the department because you arrest some big drug dealer compared to arresting the comedian with the well-trained dog - you certainly don't get promoted any faster or get any raises or bonuses. And what's more, the big drug dealer is likely to have an attorney and dangerous friends while the comedian likely won't. Every aspect of harassing the person who may have subjectively broken some ridiculous law to nobody's harm is going to be 10x easier than going after the person objectively ruining lives and acquiring boat loads of treasure in the process.

bArray6• 3 years ago

I wondered why the police bothered to pursue someone like Mark Meechan, the one arrested for teaching a pug to do a nazi salute as a joke, when there must be more serious crimes they could devote resources to.

About that case particularly:

1. The media somehow turned up on the doorstep of the arrest of a previously private person. They directly doxxed him and prevented a fair trial.

2. The police were not allowed to complain about the incident directly, so they pulled in a person to complain on their behalf that they have worked with on many cases.

3. The judge assumed his malicious intent for the joke made, despite the evidence suggesting otherwise.

The irony is, he made a joke a the expense of Nazis, and now the UK government actively funds groups within the Ukrainian army who are self-confessed Nazis. (That's not an argument for or against Ukraine, simply to add perspective.)

I think there obviously are more serious crimes but would require a lot more effort and trouble to make any arrests. Going after people for frivolous things is much easier for them achieve. They can kind of give off the appearance of doing something useful this way.

The police will sometimes pursue cases that excite them - ones that are active or high profile. Small or unexciting cases are dropped. A local cash machine got stolen, cut open, robbed and dumped in our garden - and they didn't even want to swab it for prints or collect it.

And it's far worse. The police get pressure from above to make X group less represented in their criminal statistics irrespective of any reality-based bias, so the only option left is simply not to pursue them.

This will just continue to get worse. They are fuelled by ideology and hindered by ongoing cuts (relative to inflation). They will soon stop responding to all mental health incidents (i.e. suicide attempts), and there is no other funding or service to pick up the slack.

mock-possum• 3 years ago

Mark Meechan, the one arrested for teaching a pug to do a nazi salute as a joke

Wait, that’s real? Some dude got in trouble with the police just for teaching his dog to do the nazi salute??

In April 2016, Meechan posted a video on YouTube of his girlfriend's pet pug Buddha titled "M8 Yer Dugs A Nazi". At the start of the video, he says: "My girlfriend is always ranting and raving about how cute and adorable her wee dog is so I thought I would turn him into the least cute thing I could think of, which is a Nazi."
In the video, the dog, prompted by the command "Sieg Heil", raises his right paw in the manner of a Nazi salute, watches a speech by Adolf Hitler (footage shown from the Triumph of the Will), and responds immediately when Meechan asks if he wants to "gas the Jews". It ends with images of Hitler and Buddha the dog depicted with a toothbrush moustache similar to Hitler's.

Ahhhh.

qingcharles7• 3 years ago

From personal experience: Better yet, you can have the police abuse their power to seize property and raid your home during the early hours of the morning, only to have all charges dropped, in which case you have to go through a lengthy process to get your (now damaged) items back. There is zero recourse, all of the oversight bodies are filled with ex-police and look after their own.

Amen. I've had this happen multiple times. I antagonize the police though by doing work in the justice field and trying to publicize police misconduct. I was arrested last year simply for Retweeting a newspaper article that I'd interviewed for. The irony is that it was the government themselves that had Tweeted the article to bring light to the police misconduct. When I was in jail I was laughing with my lawyer as it was so ridiculous and of course the judge would throw it out. Ah, I'm so naïve sometimes. And I'd only just got out after doing 10 years in detention waiting for trial before the prosecutor came to me and said they wanted to throw all the charges out.

bArray6• 3 years ago

Massive respect to you. I would suggest that in the future you somewhat hide your identity so that you can have a larger impact.

And I'd only just got out after doing 10 years in detention waiting for trial before the prosecutor came to me and said they wanted to throw all the charges out.

Surely that can't be legal? They've taken 10 years away from you, that must be the system being used maliciously?

throwaway713• 3 years ago

Related to this problem is the interesting tradeoff between fairness and harm minimization. The idea of fairness is that no individual should have a higher probability of a guilty verdict or punishment than any other individual due to factors that are outside of their control. But there is an inherent conflict between fairness and our ability to reduce harm that results from crime.

For example, consider two hypothetical but identical individuals: one born into a low-income neighborhood and one born into a high-income neighborhood. If you develop a model to predict what we currently categorize as "crime" (the definition of which is its own separate issue), you will find that the income of a neighborhood is inversely correlated with the density of crime. If this is the only factor in your predictive model, then you will more effectively reduce crime by directing attention toward the low-income neighborhood. But now there is an inherent unfairness, because the additional scrutiny toward the low-income neighborhood means that individual 1 is more likely to be caught for a crime than individual 2, despite both individuals having an equal likelihood of committing a crime. This also creates a self-reinforcing situation where having more statistics on the low-income subset of the population now allows you to improve your predictive model even further by using additional variables that are only relevant to that subset of the population, meanwhile neglecting other variables that would be relevant to predicting crime in high-income neighborhoods. Repeat this process a few times and soon you have a massive amount of unfairness in society.

It's probably impossible to eliminate all unfairness while still maintaining any sort of ability to control crime, but what is the appropriate threshold for this tradeoff?

rossdavidh2• 3 years ago

To find the proper N, we should also know the ratio x of serious crimes which result in the criminal being caught. In other words, if we let this guilty man go free, how many other innocents will he kill/rob/rape/whatever before he is caught again? If x = 0.01, then 100 innocents will suffer (on average) for each guilty man you fail to convict, which is problematic. On the other hand, if x = 1, then the situation is much different.

Also, each innocent who is wrongly convicted, will erode public support for the criminal justice system, and now we have a non-linear system and it gets very complex. But probably we could break out some calculus and find the optimal N given x and y (erosion of criminal justice system power due to loss of public support, for each innocent convicted, that results in fewer tips to law enforcement), and maybe z (erosion of criminal justice system power due to loss of public support for each criminal set free, that results in greater likelihood people take the law into their own hands).

I suppose, working backwards, you could for each N work out what that person thinks the values of x, y, and/or z are. If you think we rarely catch criminals, then letting one go is a bigger problem than if you think we normally catch the perpetrator of any given crime.

watwut• 3 years ago

Innocent person in jail means that guilty person walked free. If it is easy to lock Innocent people, justice system has no incentive to try to figure out who really did it.

Result is easily that then you have both more innocent people in prison and more guilty people being free.

bee_rider2• 3 years ago

Exactly.

The expression sets up a relationship: more strict and more effective vs less strict and less effective, and asks us how much effectiveness we’re willing to give up in exchange for safety. This just misses the point, a legal system that locks up innocent people instead of guilty ones is just not doing a good job.

I think it is well intended (at least for values of n much greater than 1) but harmful.

rossdavidh2• 3 years ago

I'm realizing there should also be something in there about the number of crimes which an unconvicted criminal is likely to commit. Maybe their close call (being put on trial but not convicted) causes them to walk the straight and narrow, at least for a while. I am starting to think that a Bayesian model of this is what is called for. We do have some data (from DNA exoneration of the convicted, and also from clearly guilty who are not convicted because evidence was obtained improperly) as to how often we fail to convict the guilty, or convict the innocent, which we could plug into this.

Which brings up a larger point: what is N, really? Like, now, in the real world in my country or state or city, what is N? It would be interesting to try to estimate it.

hirundo• 3 years ago

In the fantasies of legal academics, jurors think about Blackstone routinely.

I was on a jury that completed service yesterday, a domestic violence case, and I brought up the Blackstone ratio early in the deliberations. I am not sure that my argument swayed votes, but there were several members who were in favor of convicting on the more serious charge, and they relented in the face of this argument and others that the prosecution had not proved it. We found not guilty on this charge and guilty on a lesser charge that was clearly proven.

I and I think all of the others would have convicted on a preponderance of evidence standard. So it looks to me like the "n Guilty Men" logic is still an important part of garden variety jury deliberations.

qingcharles7• 3 years ago

A lot of these cases are overcharged, with a more serious but unsustainable charge added on, to try to make sure the defendant enters a plea deal rather than attempt trial. This defendant got lucky by going to trial and having a jury that did the right thing.

Although I assume they were still pissed they got convicted on the lesser lol

giantg29• 3 years ago

Here's an example from today that says there was never any evidence to support the more serious charge they charged this guy with. He did take a plea as well (looking at the story and the reckless conduct statute, I'm not sure why he would even plead to that)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/prosecutors-drop-felony-charges-a...

hn_throwaway_993• 3 years ago

I've noticed that how people feel about this changes depending on how it is asked. If you take, for example, "better to let 5 guilty men go free than convict 1 innocent man", I think the "average" person is somewhat on the fence about that. And while this is just 1 example, this isn't total conjecture on my part. I was actually asked that exact question, with that exact ratio, by a defense attorney during jury selection. The majority of other potential jurors (honestly a bit to my horror) disagreed with that statement - they didn't think it was OK to let the 5 guilty go free even if it meant wrongly convicting an innocent person.

But if you instead ask people, "do you think it would be OK of nearly 17% of people in jail were actually innocent", the vast majority of people (or, at least all of the few people I asked that question to after my jury selection experience) think "no, that would mean there is a big problem with the criminal justice system".

People are bad at statistics.

ddq• 3 years ago

Our legal structures are due for an update to account for our improved understanding of the impact of cognitive biases. They are easily, and thus frequently, exploited. Irrationality is in our chemistry. I don’t want the human element taken out of the legal system, but better accounted for.

kevinmchugh2• 3 years ago

Positive feelings about the justice system don't seem to survive jury duty. A friend of mine got selected for a jury in an armed robbery case when he was 18, the summer street graduating. He was one of two votes to acquit, there were six votes to convict, and the remaining 4 people were just trying to find the quickest way to go back to work.

hn_throwaway_993• 3 years ago

Positive feelings about the justice system don't seem to survive jury duty

That's one anecdote, but I've often heard the opposite: even in charged cases where jurors were obviously interpreting the evidence differently, people took the job seriously and were respectful to one another. Not saying normal cognitive biases don't occur, but even though my only experience was with jury selection (and I wasn't selected), and even though we didn't really want to be there, from the conversations I felt that everyone took the duty seriously.

pdonis• 3 years ago

People are bad at statistics.

While I don't disagree with this as a general statement, it's not what your example shows. The two ratios you describe are different things. A 5 to 1 ratio of guilty people in jail to innocent people in jail (which is what your second question asks about) is not the same thing as a 5 to 1 ratio of guilty people going free to innocent people in jail (which is what your first question asks about).

hn_throwaway_993• 3 years ago

True. I guess I'm the one that's bad at statistics :/

r95506842• 3 years ago

for the attentive readers, I found an error in the translation of the Gogol quote, asked Eugene about it, and he said that he also just noticed that the HTML version posted here has "considerable differences" from the original PDF[0]

[0] https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

emmelaich• 3 years ago

That's interesting, I chose the html because I dislike pdf.

Now I'll have to go and diff them!

r95506842• 3 years ago

compare footnote 87 in pdf and 79 in html, the html version of the translation is invalid and reverses the meaning, uses transliteration instead of Cyrillic, but also where did the other 8 footnotes go? I have a feeling the html was transcribed by hand after the fact

danielovichdk• 3 years ago

Reminds me...

One of my personal top 10 movies: 12 angry men.

9/10 imdb score.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0050083/

playday• 3 years ago

Most criminals offend multiple times. So if it’s better to let n guilty people go free than punish 1 innocent, how many times (x) would criminals need to reoffend for half of them to end up in prison? Been too long since I studied stats so I’m not sure what type of distribution to use, Poisson?

qingcharles7• 3 years ago

That is absolutely true, but there is a reason for it. When society releases someone from prison they generally have so little support to get them back to being a productive member of society that they end up in situations where they reoffend.

Source: working with dozens of parolees.

dang• 3 years ago

N Guilty Men (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10860765 - Jan 2016 (23 comments)

petsfed• 3 years ago

Did anyone else notice this weird typographical sequence?

and innocent "perfons," warning that "prefumptive evidences fhould be warily preffed." 77 What exactly a perfon is may be a fruitful fubject for further refearch.

I expect its because of a steady evolution of the way English is written, but it is so jarring I had to go back and reread the rest of the article to confirm that it was just very specific uses of the letter 's' that justified being turned into 'f'

svat• 3 years ago

The author is making fun of the long s in the quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s (rules: https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2006/06/rules-for-long-s.h... ), by reading it as "f". (As in Flanders and Swann "Greenfleeves")

1letterunixname• 3 years ago

In 2011, Illinois abolished the death penalty because of its track record of executing innocent people (somewhere between 20 and 75 over its history, posthumously exonerated obviously). In 2018, the then governor called for its reintroduction but it foundered.

Oddly enough, the first execution (before it was a state) was a man burned at the stake for witchcraft in 1779 when it was under the jurisdiction of Virginia (during the Revolutionary War).

N guilty men (1997)

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