The way death row inmates are treated is arguably a reason to be against death row. There was also a case where a person on death row couldn’t present exculpatory evidence to prove his innocence because his last appeals lawyer didn’t do it. The Supreme Court literally decided you can prove you have evidence that proves your innocence, that you were done dirty by an incompetent lawyer, it doesn’t matter, you should still be killed.
One of the other death row inmates mentioned in the article as having failed the junk science law, Kosoul Chanthakoummane, was partly convicted for hypnosis induced testimony. The appeal response on calling it junk science was, paraphrased, "hypnosis induced testimony was known to be bogus in ~2005, when your trial was. You should have argued it then."
That alone is terrible. But to make that bullshit even worse, Texas continued to use hypnosis induced testimony until 2021.
It makes me wonder when the last death penalty sentence for "shaken baby syndrome" was in Texas.
>you can prove you have evidence that proves your innocence,
No. This isn't a case of OJ finding the Real Killers(tm). It wasn't even "new" evidence.
>Ramirez appealed to federal court where his federal public defenders uncovered evidence of intellectual disability and extensive childhood abuse that hadn't been presented at his initial trial.
The ruling only overturned (the 9th circuit precedent) whether the 'default' position of the appeals court should be to accept/consider new arguments not made at trial.
It was not suddenly discovered that the convicted might be intellectually disabled.
Which is itself is still quite the leap from suddenly discovering 'exonerating evidence'.
That's because the purpose of the death penalty is to function as a sort of secular human sacrifice, to ward off evil-doers possibly doing bad things, due to a belief that deep down bad guys are rational actors and will choose not to do commit capital murder based on punishment.
To quote a post I recently found resonating with me:
"Look, we don’t necessarily hang murderers to deter other people from committing the same offence. We kill them simply because the punishment has to carry the same weight as the offence. The family of the murderer must go through the same anguish and pain that the murder victim’s family went through. The killer has to be stopped from enjoying all the things that come with being alive. When you kill another person, you deprive them of worldly enjoyments like food, sex, conversations, bathing, laughing, crying and therefore it is only befitting that you too get deprived of same and the only way to do so is through the death sentence. If we are going to shy away from punishing wrong-doers on the basis that the punishment won’t stop other people from committing the same offence then we might as well not send anyone to jail because sending people to jail has never stopped other people from committing the same offences."
The purpose of the justice system is many-fold: One is reform (serve your penance and be better). One is retribution: you did a bad thing, so bad things are going to happen to you. One is deterrence: knowing that you'll get caught, you won't want to spend time in jail, a flip side of retribution. The last is removal: it's hard to commit crimes against innocent people if you're not around innocent people. The death penalty is the ultimate in removal. But it's final. So, you can't fix it if you screwed up in applying it. And that's why I'm against it, generally speaking. Our justice system is not reliable enough to avoid innocents getting ground by the wheels of justice, even at the level of scrutiny of capital punishment. So, excepting things like killed a guy in prison, I can't support it.
It's so frustrating because in the twisted universe where Thomas lives the ruling makes sense. To him justice is an algorithm that produces an outcome and only needs some minimum threshold of "overall the justice system locks up roughly the people we think it ought to" and all the appeals and after-the-fact proving your innocence gets in the way of the efficiency and to him, the effectiveness, of that algorithm.
And the thing is in a different context we celebrate this logic. When we do elections we don't really care about choosing the best candidate. We just go through the process, fight to protect the sanctity of the process because what's actually important is that people accept the outcome even if it makes so sense. Peaceful transfer of power and finality.
It's called "just"ice, not "systemish". Getting the right outcome is meant to be a core goal of the system. Besides, there are many legal reasonings that would allow the process to give the right answer - that innocent people should not be killed. Thomas chose to find a different reasoning instead.
We make the law "algorithmic" because the alternative is a lawless society. Laws have been written down and procedurally followed all over the world for thousands of years. Societies that fail to follow the rules are prone to instability and decay.
I'm not saying it was okay to kill the person. I'm saying we can't throw away laws but your comment continues to advocate for a less "algorithmic" (unambiguous) law. These types of comments are part of why people get radicalized on the internet.
But those two are not the same right ? In elections everyone involved (candidates and voters) have agreed to the system. If they feel the system is not working as such they could always check the results. Sometimes something may pop up and we update the results. This is not the case in the justice system you mentioned above where it's not possible to correct any mistakes after the fact
scotus doctrine on capital appeals rapidly converging to 'the sign says abandon hope all ye who enter here and it would violate due process if we didn't tap the sign'
This is the kind of bullshit that makes me against government death penality. If the supreme court can't throw out "administrative procedure" in favor of a "correct ruling", then where does one go next?
Is the only way to get the "correct outcome" a BLM george floyd type protest? It seems like the court system is becoming like getting support from tech companies these days where the only way to get a "normal" level of service/outcome is to start a shitstorm on twitter as the normal support systems doesn't have the approval to make a profit affecting decision.
But following proper administrative procedure is a key component of a fair justice system. It's not all that's necessary, but it is necessary, otherwise you have rules being bent on whims of justices, prosecutors, or public sentiment.
Yes, it's often very, very, very hard to introduce new evidence of your innocence after trial. Trial is the point that you show all available evidence to the jury.
In Illinois you can attempt to present your evidence only after you have exhausted all of your regular appeal routes (appellate court, state supreme court, SCOTUS, state habeas corpus, fed habeas -- there are 11 levels here first) which can take a decade. Then you have to petition the court. But you have to do it yourself, you don't get a lawyer to help you at the first stage. So if you have no idea what you're doing (and certainly a prison is going to do whatever they can to impede you in this by restricting your access to any instructions or legal materials), then you just have to suck it up and take the needle.
In fact, I don't think enough emphasis is put on the fact that these people are generally fighting their cases from prison and it is 1000X harder to do from inside than outside. They have no access to a phone directory to try to call anyone. They might not have any money to make calls. The prison might only give them one free letter a week. And then you need an address to write to - where do you get that? A phone call is probably limited to 20 mins, and if you call and the other person misses it, you can't call back to a prison.
And don't get me started on legal materials in prison. If you are lucky enough where you can actually get to a library (all prison law libraries shut during COVID and many have never reopened) you'll rarely see a computer. Often it is just piles of moldy books. And of course the previous person didn't want to risk the chance they would ever get back to the library, so at the very least they have torn out all the pages they need from the book you wanted to read, or worse, have straight up stolen the book.
And we're not taking into account how much energy is required to fight the system and how exhausting it is for an inmate. It is mentally unbelievable to do all this work locked up. You have to do everything on paper with a pencil too at most places. Copying out huge citations and writing huge motions. Then you have to perhaps write them out another 19 times because that's how many copies the court requires by law and you don't have access to a photocopier. Plus everyone around you at the prison is just running buck wild, screaming, shouting, fighting, gambling. It's no fun.
And these lawyers fighting for death row inmates are awesome, amazing, unbelievable people, but there are very, very few of them. And only death row cases get any real traction. The innocent people who are convicted and get life without parole don't get noticed. The innocent people who get 80 years without parole are way down the list, even though it is a de facto life sentence.
I'm helping a guy now who is inside on a life-without-parole case. No lawyer has stepped up to help him out. I'm trying to help him find a lawyer. I've just been helping a guy reconnect to modern life after getting out from a 40 year sentence for a crime he didn't do.
I'm completely shocked that the "defund the police" movement was where the progressive activists chose to dedicate their attention.
Whereas issues like you mention above, and trial reform in general, and prison system reform in general, would have wide bipartisan support.
It really makes me suspicious why activists and the media are not advocating for the things 90% of people would agree with. Is the other stuff just an intentional distraction so nothing gets fixed?
Powerful article. What strikes me as a layman (non-lawyer, non-law enforcement), is how prevalent these methods of forensic science have become, without any solid scientific basis backing them up - such as peer reviewed studies with quantifiable evidence. You'd think that in order for the state to take the life of a human being, you'd need to prove it using means that are more thoroughly vetted than "[one doctor] who in 1971 suggested the cause might be violent shaking" (emphasis mine).
Reminds me of the case of when a man was wrongfully convicted by expert testimony placing them at the scene by hair microscopy. He spent 30 years in prison:
> In Tribble’s case, the FBI agent testified at trial that the hair from the stocking matched Tribble’s “in all microscopic characteristics.”
> In closing arguments, federal prosecutor David Stanley went further: “There is one chance, perhaps for all we know, in 10 million that it could [be] someone else’s hair.”
I’m sure the dozens of TV shows don’t help this either. Law and Order is never wrong and their science and methods are flawless. Obviously I’m being sarcastic, but I think it clouds the jury’s thought process
The original Law and Order was good, not perfect, but quite good. They tried to follow the procedures and most of the proof were real. Each story was original. (IIRC. IANAL. And perhaps a few more disclaimers.)
The spin-offs are bad. The suspects are interrogated until they confess, and nobody cares if they have no lawyer or they use dubios evidence.
I'm afraid the whole field of medicine moves forward by screw ups and fixes, and as such forensics are just another place.
In "Factfulness" the late Hans Rosling mentions how he spent years telling people to not keep babies sleeping on their back, based on science were people believed babies might suffocate more easily.
This turned out to be the opposite of truth, babies are more likely to die when sleeping on their belly. For years, doctors , him included, may have indirectly killed babies trying to save them.
OTOH, the unreliability of our tools makes a strong case against the death penalty, IMO.
The closed source DNA testing code used daily just raises so many red flags. It's honestly concerning how basically no one in the legal community understands why this is an issue. This stuff is way too important to be proprietary.
Wanting to weaken or abolish any kind of property right - even the non-naturally-derived government-granted monopoly bargains that form copyright, patent, and trade secrecy - makes you extremely fringe in the legal profession. If you want to be a competent and successful lawyer while holding those opinions you have to firewall half your brain off from the other half. Partially because fringe people who want to change the law make terrible legal arguments[0], and partially because nobody wants to hire a lawyer that's arguing that forensic software should be decopyrighted and its source code forcibly expropriated by the state for the sake of avoiding a miscarriage of justice.
[0] Like me, right now, who thinks we should demand copyright term maximums
IMHO our system of law cares more about precedent than almost anything else. The first case addressing a situation sets the bar, which is backwards. The most important decisions are made when we, collectively, know least about the topic at hand.
Common law is only one basis of law and it's almost exclusively an English thing. In England, alternative bases of law were associated with horrific abuses of power. In response the Anglosphere has adopted a sort of extreme legal conservatism: anything other than inviolable natural rights decided on the basis of "we've always done it this way" is not freedom, but privilege[0]. Every acquittal binds the law, ideally forever. This is the same form of law that gives us things like "human rights are what you afford your worst enemy", which is contradictory[1], but sounds like a really strong bulwark against tyranny.
Outside of the Anglosphere judges are free to ignore precedent, which they call "jurisprudence". This is a tradeoff: you get justice "in the moment" in exchange for less future surety about how the legal system will react. The legal system might just decide that you doing the exact same thing someone else did and got away with is now illegal.
My personal opinion is that any basis of law can be used for tyranny, and that common law and inviolable rights are less protective than we have been propagandized to think. Even common law legal systems occasionally overturn precedent if they feel like it - remember when anti-abortion laws were a violation of the 4th Amendment until they weren't?
[0] This even extends to the word "franchise", which means "French-ize", as in to be given freedoms by being turned into a Frenchman
[1] What if your enemy seeks to take away your rights?
I think that may have been true in the past but recent cases in front of the SCOTUS is setting precedent that stare decisis (and other forms of precedence) doesn't matter much any longer in the US court system.
While I was at a coffee shop recently I overheard a young lady telling her friend that she was switching her major from nursing (I think) to psychology, "because the nursing major is hard", and instead she wants to become a forensic or criminal psychologist, which she believes will be easier. I am concerned about the quality of evidence such a person might present if they ever were called as an expert witness at someone's trial...
> You'd think that in order for the state to take the life of a human being, you'd need to prove it using means that are more thoroughly vetted
Unfortunately, for the state, taking innocent lives is just an Oopsie.
I’m not saying this from a cynical political perspective. IMHO, the problem is more about the psychology of people in power. They usually believe that the thing they do is the most important thing in the world and sometimes they may screw up(huge material losses or tragic life losses) but that’s not a big deal. Even there endless desire for destroying privacy in the name of security is rooted in this. You can’t let a murderer go free and if you have to you can kill a few innocent people in the process and that’s not a big deal == you can’t let criminals commit crimes and if the privacy is the casualty that’s not a big deal.
On the series Succession, there was a scene where one of the billionaires skit kills a waiter and the father covers up evidence, and says “no real people involved” to justify his actions. I think this very accurately is straight, the thinking of people in power.
You sometimes get the stereotypical esoteric forensics experts, who tour the country saying they have some special ability to identify bites or toeprints or whatever. I pretty much agree with you there; their methods are unproven, there's very little reason to think they can actually do what they claim, judges simply shouldn't let them testify.
This case is harder. Medical questions about what happened to a victim are often highly relevant, and doctors are legitimate, credentialed experts qualified to speak on that topic. If they believe based on their training and experience that suchandsuch symptoms mean blunt force trauma, how could a random judge evaluate whether they have enough scientific backing to say that?
A judge can and should seek confirmation from additional experts, and if some then reasonably cast doubt on the certainty of others' testimony, that ought to be considered.
This man was not committed to death row because of one doctor. He was found guilty because multiple people in his life testified he had a history of violently shaking and screaming at a child for crying.
I don't even think it matters if he shook this infant or not.
The doctors failed to diagnose the infant with severe pneumonia and prescribed it medications that are no longer considered safe for children. This seems like plenty of doubt to not convict him.
> He was found guilty because multiple people in his life testified he had a history of violently shaking and screaming at a child for crying.
IANAL, but wouldn't that be against the rule that character evidence cannot be used by the prosecution (unless in countering character evidence from the defence)?
> (1) Prohibited Uses. Evidence of a person’s character or character trait is not admissible to prove that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character or trait.
> [...]
> b) Other Crimes, Wrongs, or Acts.
> (1) Prohibited Uses. Evidence of any other crime, wrong, or act is not admissible to prove a person’s character in order to show that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character.
> (2) Permitted Uses. This evidence may be admissible for another purpose, such as proving motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake, or lack of accident.
Not any longer, pediatric scientists/doctors are the last hold outs (most likely because they will have to eat some crow over it), others have considered it as debunked as junk science, making it highly questionable.
I'm always bothered by how doctor's word is always taken as gospel. Anyone who's gone through the medical merry-go-round knows that doctors opinions on the same set of symptoms can be all over the place, some even outright idiotic.
Folks identified the dad as weird and in over his head, so untrustworthy and guilty. This isn't isolated, it's the norm. So, for 30 years or so the medical community had this voodoo DX to justify locking up social outcasts. And they seem completely OK with having done so. The DX sort of is not accepted anymore. But, the article describes a list of other voodoo sciences that demonstrate something remains very broken in the process for establishing facts, and we see time and time again that systems you'd think are driven by analytical rigor are really just a school popularity contests all grown up.
Society has made a God out of science. Don't get me wrong, science is a fantastic invention and should be taken seriously. Anyone who dismisses science without thought or reason is crazy. But as you saw during the pandemic and through this, we've lost some sense of reason when a flawed human in a white coat says something. We need to take what they say seriously but with a grain of salt that they get things wrong.
“Science” is just the process of continuously evaluating and re-evaluating what you know using data and experiments, and changing what you “know” (or your mental model) to align with the new data.
What people deify is certain conclusions, for myriad reasons.
With conventional religion somewhat on the wane, science has become the new religion: a unquestioning belief in the experts, just like the way people rarely question the word of the priest/preacher in a traditional religion. There's something innately human which predisposes people to beliefs. One of them being just low IQ, An IQ of hundred does not go very far, for the complex lives that we need lead.
The key term here is confidence. It was bad enough when it turned out that many people who really should understand p-values didnt. But this claiming overwhelming confidence to better manage patients is just despicable, how ever well meant it is. Its incredibly short sighted and ruins trust.
From my experience doctors do a lot of guessing. I spent two years, going through multiple doctors, for serious groin and abdominal pain that I knew had to be a hernia. But the doctors consistently tested and theorized about it being just about anything else. Ten thousand dollars worth of out of pocket tests later a urologist told me it was obviously a hernia and he could feel it.
You realize a lot of abused kids are taken to the hospital by their abuser?
Kids got a broken arm or a broken nose from being slapped around, abuser can't hide it forever. Eventually kids gotta go to school or cops are going to do a welfare check. Same thing if kid disappears off the radar.
Shaken baby syndrome is very unlikely to be the result of malicious abuse though. It’s almost always a deeply frustrated parent or caregiver who is desperate, trying to assert control over a screaming infant, and does not understand that this could kill them, or at least thinks they will not. It is child abuse, but hardly of the same nature as most people assume with the term.
Death sentence strikes me as an idiotic punishment.
So it seems the death penalty cannot be enforced if it cannot be investigated or adjudicated with a necessary and sufficient degree of rigor. It also doesn't serve a purpose as a deterrent (criminals aren't smart enough to anticipate outcomes). Furthermore, it makes the society that dispenses it appear governed by a 3rd-world authoritarian regime. Finally, it's an expensive process and a bloodlust spectacle. Better off keeping cretins alive behind bars for the remote possibility of rehabilitation and let them live with themselves rather than giving them an easy out.
There is absolutely no justification for the death penalty no matter how you look at it. None.
From a purely economic POV, it makes no sense. Compare the average annual cost per state prison inmate [1] ($22,000 for Texas) to the annual cost of a death row inmate. For example, $90,000 per inmate per year for Nevada [2].
In addition capital cases are significantly more expensive to try. Each Federal execution cost an estimated $1 million [3].
Since 1973, at least 190 people sentenced to death have been exonerated [4]. People exonerated of crimes tend to skew heavily towards minorities, particularly African-American [5][6], which shows it's not really about the severity and certainty of a conviction but instead emotional retribution disproportionately targeted at black people.
The American carceral state is an abject failure and a blight on humanity. We have 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's priosners. If locking people up worked, this would be the safest country on Earth.
Readit News
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinn_v._Ramirez
That alone is terrible. But to make that bullshit even worse, Texas continued to use hypnosis induced testimony until 2021.
It makes me wonder when the last death penalty sentence for "shaken baby syndrome" was in Texas.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/shaken-baby-s...
[UPDATE] To those of you downvoting me, would you kindly explain why? It seems like a reasonable question to me.
No. This isn't a case of OJ finding the Real Killers(tm). It wasn't even "new" evidence.
>Ramirez appealed to federal court where his federal public defenders uncovered evidence of intellectual disability and extensive childhood abuse that hadn't been presented at his initial trial.
The ruling only overturned (the 9th circuit precedent) whether the 'default' position of the appeals court should be to accept/consider new arguments not made at trial.
It was not suddenly discovered that the convicted might be intellectually disabled.
Which is itself is still quite the leap from suddenly discovering 'exonerating evidence'.
>"Jones also appealed to federal court, where federal investigators found evidence suggesting he was innocent. In both cases, ..."
To quote a post I recently found resonating with me:
"Look, we don’t necessarily hang murderers to deter other people from committing the same offence. We kill them simply because the punishment has to carry the same weight as the offence. The family of the murderer must go through the same anguish and pain that the murder victim’s family went through. The killer has to be stopped from enjoying all the things that come with being alive. When you kill another person, you deprive them of worldly enjoyments like food, sex, conversations, bathing, laughing, crying and therefore it is only befitting that you too get deprived of same and the only way to do so is through the death sentence. If we are going to shy away from punishing wrong-doers on the basis that the punishment won’t stop other people from committing the same offence then we might as well not send anyone to jail because sending people to jail has never stopped other people from committing the same offences."
https://www.sundaystandard.info/iocom-a-retributionist-i-sup...
It’s to achieve vengeance. This doesn’t seem that complicated.
Deleted Comment
And the thing is in a different context we celebrate this logic. When we do elections we don't really care about choosing the best candidate. We just go through the process, fight to protect the sanctity of the process because what's actually important is that people accept the outcome even if it makes so sense. Peaceful transfer of power and finality.
I'm not saying it was okay to kill the person. I'm saying we can't throw away laws but your comment continues to advocate for a less "algorithmic" (unambiguous) law. These types of comments are part of why people get radicalized on the internet.
Is the only way to get the "correct outcome" a BLM george floyd type protest? It seems like the court system is becoming like getting support from tech companies these days where the only way to get a "normal" level of service/outcome is to start a shitstorm on twitter as the normal support systems doesn't have the approval to make a profit affecting decision.
In Illinois you can attempt to present your evidence only after you have exhausted all of your regular appeal routes (appellate court, state supreme court, SCOTUS, state habeas corpus, fed habeas -- there are 11 levels here first) which can take a decade. Then you have to petition the court. But you have to do it yourself, you don't get a lawyer to help you at the first stage. So if you have no idea what you're doing (and certainly a prison is going to do whatever they can to impede you in this by restricting your access to any instructions or legal materials), then you just have to suck it up and take the needle.
In fact, I don't think enough emphasis is put on the fact that these people are generally fighting their cases from prison and it is 1000X harder to do from inside than outside. They have no access to a phone directory to try to call anyone. They might not have any money to make calls. The prison might only give them one free letter a week. And then you need an address to write to - where do you get that? A phone call is probably limited to 20 mins, and if you call and the other person misses it, you can't call back to a prison.
And don't get me started on legal materials in prison. If you are lucky enough where you can actually get to a library (all prison law libraries shut during COVID and many have never reopened) you'll rarely see a computer. Often it is just piles of moldy books. And of course the previous person didn't want to risk the chance they would ever get back to the library, so at the very least they have torn out all the pages they need from the book you wanted to read, or worse, have straight up stolen the book.
And we're not taking into account how much energy is required to fight the system and how exhausting it is for an inmate. It is mentally unbelievable to do all this work locked up. You have to do everything on paper with a pencil too at most places. Copying out huge citations and writing huge motions. Then you have to perhaps write them out another 19 times because that's how many copies the court requires by law and you don't have access to a photocopier. Plus everyone around you at the prison is just running buck wild, screaming, shouting, fighting, gambling. It's no fun.
And these lawyers fighting for death row inmates are awesome, amazing, unbelievable people, but there are very, very few of them. And only death row cases get any real traction. The innocent people who are convicted and get life without parole don't get noticed. The innocent people who get 80 years without parole are way down the list, even though it is a de facto life sentence.
I'm helping a guy now who is inside on a life-without-parole case. No lawyer has stepped up to help him out. I'm trying to help him find a lawyer. I've just been helping a guy reconnect to modern life after getting out from a 40 year sentence for a crime he didn't do.
Whereas issues like you mention above, and trial reform in general, and prison system reform in general, would have wide bipartisan support.
It really makes me suspicious why activists and the media are not advocating for the things 90% of people would agree with. Is the other stuff just an intentional distraction so nothing gets fixed?
That’s really a sad state of affairs.
> In Tribble’s case, the FBI agent testified at trial that the hair from the stocking matched Tribble’s “in all microscopic characteristics.”
> In closing arguments, federal prosecutor David Stanley went further: “There is one chance, perhaps for all we know, in 10 million that it could [be] someone else’s hair.”
It was dog hair.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/dc-judge-exonerat...
This has to be wildly illegal. "perhaps for all we know", followed by a concrete number.
The spin-offs are bad. The suspects are interrogated until they confess, and nobody cares if they have no lawyer or they use dubios evidence.
In "Factfulness" the late Hans Rosling mentions how he spent years telling people to not keep babies sleeping on their back, based on science were people believed babies might suffocate more easily.
This turned out to be the opposite of truth, babies are more likely to die when sleeping on their belly. For years, doctors , him included, may have indirectly killed babies trying to save them.
OTOH, the unreliability of our tools makes a strong case against the death penalty, IMO.
[0] Like me, right now, who thinks we should demand copyright term maximums
Outside of the Anglosphere judges are free to ignore precedent, which they call "jurisprudence". This is a tradeoff: you get justice "in the moment" in exchange for less future surety about how the legal system will react. The legal system might just decide that you doing the exact same thing someone else did and got away with is now illegal.
My personal opinion is that any basis of law can be used for tyranny, and that common law and inviolable rights are less protective than we have been propagandized to think. Even common law legal systems occasionally overturn precedent if they feel like it - remember when anti-abortion laws were a violation of the 4th Amendment until they weren't?
[0] This even extends to the word "franchise", which means "French-ize", as in to be given freedoms by being turned into a Frenchman
[1] What if your enemy seeks to take away your rights?
So long as you follow arcane procedure and precedent, the deeper facts don’t matter and don’t get much respect from the system.
Unfortunately, for the state, taking innocent lives is just an Oopsie.
I’m not saying this from a cynical political perspective. IMHO, the problem is more about the psychology of people in power. They usually believe that the thing they do is the most important thing in the world and sometimes they may screw up(huge material losses or tragic life losses) but that’s not a big deal. Even there endless desire for destroying privacy in the name of security is rooted in this. You can’t let a murderer go free and if you have to you can kill a few innocent people in the process and that’s not a big deal == you can’t let criminals commit crimes and if the privacy is the casualty that’s not a big deal.
On the series Succession, there was a scene where one of the billionaires skit kills a waiter and the father covers up evidence, and says “no real people involved” to justify his actions. I think this very accurately is straight, the thinking of people in power.
This case is harder. Medical questions about what happened to a victim are often highly relevant, and doctors are legitimate, credentialed experts qualified to speak on that topic. If they believe based on their training and experience that suchandsuch symptoms mean blunt force trauma, how could a random judge evaluate whether they have enough scientific backing to say that?
This man was not committed to death row because of one doctor. He was found guilty because multiple people in his life testified he had a history of violently shaking and screaming at a child for crying.
The doctors failed to diagnose the infant with severe pneumonia and prescribed it medications that are no longer considered safe for children. This seems like plenty of doubt to not convict him.
IANAL, but wouldn't that be against the rule that character evidence cannot be used by the prosecution (unless in countering character evidence from the defence)?
Specifically, I believe what you describe would be in contravention of the following: https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_404
> (a) Character Evidence.
> (1) Prohibited Uses. Evidence of a person’s character or character trait is not admissible to prove that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character or trait.
> [...]
> b) Other Crimes, Wrongs, or Acts.
> (1) Prohibited Uses. Evidence of any other crime, wrong, or act is not admissible to prove a person’s character in order to show that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character.
> (2) Permitted Uses. This evidence may be admissible for another purpose, such as proving motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake, or lack of accident.
Source?
You can be against junk science, but entertain the likely possibility he also did it.
What people deify is certain conclusions, for myriad reasons.
With conventional religion somewhat on the wane, science has become the new religion: a unquestioning belief in the experts, just like the way people rarely question the word of the priest/preacher in a traditional religion. There's something innately human which predisposes people to beliefs. One of them being just low IQ, An IQ of hundred does not go very far, for the complex lives that we need lead.
Stuff is just complicated.
Deleted Comment
What do you call a med school graduate who had a straight-A average? "Doctor".
What do you call a med school graduate who had a C-minus average? "Doctor".
I've had to weed through a couple dunce doctors in my time.
Kids got a broken arm or a broken nose from being slapped around, abuser can't hide it forever. Eventually kids gotta go to school or cops are going to do a welfare check. Same thing if kid disappears off the radar.
There may be no clear, bright line making it super obvious who is merely a dumb schmuck without parenting skills and who is a murderer.
We should do a better job of putting out quality parenting info for free and also provide appropriate legal consequences.
WTF do people imagine when they say “murderer”?
Death sentence strikes me as an idiotic punishment.
The news side also had a piece on this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-debate-over-shaken-baby-syn...
Texas has a history of executing the disabled and presenting "expert" junk science as evidence. https://www.propublica.org/article/is-texas-still-executing-...
https://www.texastribune.org/2011/04/15/texas-psychologist-p...
Illinois had similar problems with the death penalty, including likely executing innocent people.
Arkansas executed an innocent but convicted person in 2017 who was subsequently cleared by DNA evidence. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/making-sense-chaos/2...
So it seems the death penalty cannot be enforced if it cannot be investigated or adjudicated with a necessary and sufficient degree of rigor. It also doesn't serve a purpose as a deterrent (criminals aren't smart enough to anticipate outcomes). Furthermore, it makes the society that dispenses it appear governed by a 3rd-world authoritarian regime. Finally, it's an expensive process and a bloodlust spectacle. Better off keeping cretins alive behind bars for the remote possibility of rehabilitation and let them live with themselves rather than giving them an easy out.
From a purely economic POV, it makes no sense. Compare the average annual cost per state prison inmate [1] ($22,000 for Texas) to the annual cost of a death row inmate. For example, $90,000 per inmate per year for Nevada [2].
In addition capital cases are significantly more expensive to try. Each Federal execution cost an estimated $1 million [3].
Since 1973, at least 190 people sentenced to death have been exonerated [4]. People exonerated of crimes tend to skew heavily towards minorities, particularly African-American [5][6], which shows it's not really about the severity and certainty of a conviction but instead emotional retribution disproportionately targeted at black people.
The American carceral state is an abject failure and a blight on humanity. We have 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's priosners. If locking people up worked, this would be the safest country on Earth.
[1]: https://www.vera.org/publications/price-of-prisons-2015-stat...
[2]: https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/76th2011/ExhibitDo...
[3]:https://interrogatingjustice.org/death-sentences/the-cost-of...
[4]: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence
[5]: https://innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-...
[6]: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence