Post by Bill GrahamPost by GreegorPost by ObserverOn Sat, 16 Feb 2013 13:49:21 -0800 (PST), RGrannus
Post by RGrannusIn researching material about crime and the war on drugs, I've come
across scores of reports of cops shooting family pets who weren't
attacking them or doing anything dangerous. When they broke into
that mayor's house mistakenly thinking it was a drug drop-off, the
first thing they did was shoot and kill his two dogs. That author
from Cato noticed the same thing. Just a little research turned up
what seems like an epidemic.
If a cop feels threatened by a dog they can kill it. You can do the
same thing. Don't worry there are plenty of fidos to replace the
ones that get killed. Now if we only could do something about the
cat problem we have.
If I feel unjustly threatened by a cop, can I kill him or her? Cops
kill dogs for the same reason they kill people: As someone put it,
they have the mentality of adolescent bullies. They like to dominate
people and show how tough they are. They're the same as most of
government. That post shows how they do more harm than good. Only
about 2% of crimes are solved, and the police had no effect on the
crime rate in those studies by criminologists. I or a family member
has been the victim of a serious crime at least half a dozen times.
The police solved none of them.
Did you ever wonder about why so many TV shows give
people the false impression that Crime Scene Investigators
and Medical Examiners always get the right perp?
While it might be useful to propagandize like this,
to convince people how easily law enforcement catch
every criminal, isn't this deception a perversion of
democracy?
Wouldn't such a deception qualify as being
psychological operations against US citizens?
What amazes me is how many people are doing life in prison when
there was no forensic evidence at all that they committed the crime
they are doing it for. They just happened to be the only ones the
police had who had a motif, and the jury decided that that was
enough to satisfy their "reasonable doubt" criteria. "If you stood
to gain something, then you must be guilty beyond a reasonable
doubt," is their motus operendi. Just the other night, on the TV was
the story of some poor Army slob who was tried 4 times in civilian
court for a murder, and the judge declared a mistrail all four
times, and then the Army tried him and he is today doing life
without the possibility of parole in Leaverworth. So much for
"double jepardy"....... Makes me really want to join up and go to
Afghanistan..... Instead, I think I'll throw up and go to any other
country.....
Several studies have found that 15% to 25% of those convicted of a
crime are innocent. With new methods like DNA testing, it was
possible to determine guilt or innocence definitely in many cases.
So many innocent people are convicted probably because the police
and prosecutors want to make themselves look good by showing they
solved the case. Below are quotations from reports of the studies.
Estimating the Accuracy of Jury Verdicts”, Journal of Empirical
Legal Studies 4, 305-329, 2007.
http://www.firstscience.com/home/news/breaking-news-all-topics/new-study-shows-how-often-juries-get-it-wrong_33119.html
US juries get verdict wrong in one of six cases: study
So much for US justice: juries get the verdict wrong in one out of
six criminal cases and judges don't do much better, a new study has
found.
And when they make those mistakes, both judges and juries are far
more likely to send an innocent person to jail than to let a guilty
person go free, according to an upcoming study out of Northwestern
University.
"Those are really shocking numbers," said Jack Heinz, a law
professor at Northwestern who reviewed the research of his colleague
Bruce Spencer, a professor in the statistics department.
Recent high-profile exonerations of scores of death row inmates have
undermined faith in the infallibility of the justice system, Heinz
said.
But these cases were considered relative rarities given how many
checks and balances - like rules on the admissibility of evidence,
the presumption of innocence and the appeals process - are built
into the system.
"We assume as lawyers that the system has been created in such a way
to minimize the chance we'll convict the innocent," he said in an
interview.
"The standard of proof in a criminal case is beyond a reasonable
doubt - it's supposed to be a high one. But judging by Bruce's data
the problem is substantial."
The study, which looked at 290 non-capital criminal cases in four
major cities from 2000 to 2001, is the first to examine the accuracy
of modern juries and judges in the United States.
It found that judges were mistaken in their verdicts in 12 percent
of the cases while juries were wrong 17 percent of the time.
More troubling was that juries sent 25 percent of innocent people to
jail while the innocent had a 37 percent chance of being wrongfully
convicted by a judge.
The good news was that the guilty did not have a great chance of
getting off. There was only a 10 percent chance that a jury would
let a guilty person free while the judge wrongfully acquitted a
defendant in 13 percent of the cases.
But that could have been because so many of the cases ended in a
conviction: juries convicted 70 percent of the time while the judges
said they would have found the defendant guilty in 82 percent of the
cases.
The study did not look at enough cases to prove that these numbers
are true across the country, Spencer cautioned.
But it has provided insight into how severe the problem could be,
and has also shown that measuring the problem is possible.
"People have to have some faith in the court system. We have to know
how well our systems are working," Spencer said in his suburban
Chicago office.
"We know there are errors because someone confesses after the fact
or there's DNA evidence," he said.
"What's the optimal tradeoff given that juries ultimately will make
mistakes? ... Are those balances something society is okay with?"
Spencer's study does not examine why the mistakes were made or which
cases ought to be overturned.
Instead, he determined the probability that a mistake was made by
looking at how often judges disagreed with the jury's verdict.
"If they disagree they can't both be right," he explained.
Spencer found an agreement rate of just 77 percent, which means a
lot of mistakes were being made.
Spencer hopes to find funding for a much larger study whose results
could be representative of the overall system.
Finding a solution will be much harder to do than quantifying the
problem, Heinz warned.
"The sources of the errors are quite resilient to correction," he said.
"They have to do with all sorts of biases and the strong presumption
of guilt when someone is arrested and brought to trial."
The study will be published in the July edition of the Journal of
Empirical Legal Studies.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Innocence Project
http://www.law.washington.edu/ipnw/
Actual Innocence by Dwyer, Scheck, Neufeld, New York: Doubleday, 2000.
Dorothy Rabinowitz's book and articles of people falsely convicted:
http://www.injusticebusters.com/2003/Rabinowitz_interview.htm
No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors
of Our Times
by Dorothy Rabinowitz, Wall Street Journal book, Free Press, NY, NY,
2003
"Wall Street Journal editorialist Rabinowitz has collected her
stories on false accusations of sex crimes into one harrowing
account of failed justice. ...The Amiraults, a woman and her two
grown children ran a successful preschool in Malden, Mass., and were
all sent to jail on charges of child sex abuse. No scientific or
physical evidence linked them to the crimes; rather, the courts
relied on the testimony of children who appeared on the stand after
lengthy coaching sessions in which counselors had used anatomically
correct dolls and leading questions to encourage them to accuse
their teachers. At times the author's careful documentation begs for
interpretation. Why, for instance, did the public buy the
increasingly bizarre accusations of teachers tying naked children to
trees in the schoolyard, or of anal penetration with knives that
left no physical mark? Rabinowitz leaves such speculation to others.
But she presents her cases expertly-so well that her stories helped
reverse the convictions of five people, which in turn helped her win
the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for commentary"
http://books.google.com/books/about/No_Crueler_Tyrannies.html?id=QfH4E_WHBzIC
Many more cases like this are documented in No Crueler Tyrannies
Rabinowitz wrote exposés of the dubious sexual abuse charges filed
against the operators of day care centers and other individuals,
notably that of a family named Amirault in Malden, Massachusetts[8]
and those in Wenatchee, Washington.[9] These exposés earned her a
1996 Pulitzer nomination,[6] formed half of the articles cited for
her 2001 Pulitzer win,[5] and was the basis of her book No Crueler
Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our
Times.[10]
Rabinowitz told C-SPAN that her work on these cases began with the
Wee Care Nursery School case:
I was working as a television commentator. I was at WWOR-TV in New
Jersey, doing three times a week some sort of media criticism. And
... I saw this woman in her 20s ... accused of something like 2,800
charges of child sex abuse. Oh, I thought, well, that's very odd.
... I thought, How can one woman, one young, lone woman in an
absolutely open place like the child care center of the church in
New Jersey that she worked for -- how could she have committed these
enormous crimes against 20 children, dressed and undressed them and
sent -- you know what it is to dress and undress even one child
every day without getting their socks lost? -- 20 children in a
perfectly public place, torture them for two years, frighten and
terrorize them, and they never went home and told their parents
anything? ... This did seem strange.[11]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Rabinowitz
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2007/06/juries.html
June 26 | Research
MEDIA CONTACT: Pat Vaughan Tremmel at 847-491-4892 or
p-***@northwestern.edu
New Study Shows How Often Juries Get It Wrong
EVANSTON, Ill. --- Juries across the country make decisions every
day on the fate of defendants, ideally leading to prison sentences
that fit the crime for the guilty and release for the innocent. Yet
a new Northwestern University study shows that juries in criminal
cases many times are getting it wrong.
In a set of 271 cases from four areas, juries gave wrong verdicts in
at least one out of eight cases, according to “Estimating the
Accuracy of Jury Verdicts,” a paper by a Northwestern University
statistician that is being published in the July issue of Journal of
Empirical Legal Studies.
“Contrary to popular belief, this study strongly suggests that DNA
or other after-the-fact evidence is not the only way to know how
often jury verdicts are correct,” said Bruce Spencer, the study's
author, professor of statistics and faculty fellow at the Institute
for Policy Research at Northwestern. “Based on findings from a
limited sample, I am optimistic that larger, carefully designed
statistical studies would have much to tell us about the accuracy of
jury verdicts.”
Spencer cautions that the numerical findings should not be
generalized to broader sets of cases, for which additional study
would be needed, but the study strongly suggests that jury verdicts
can be studied statistically. If such studies were conducted on a
large scale, they might lead to better understanding of the
prevalence of incorrect verdicts -- false convictions and false
acquittals, he said.
To conduct the study, Spencer employed a replication analysis of
jury verdicts, comparing decisions of actual jurors with decisions
of judges who were hearing the cases they were deciding. In other
words, as a jury was deliberating about a particular verdict, its
judge filled out a questionnaire giving what he or she believed to
be the correct verdict.
“Consider the analogy to sample surveys, where sampling error is
estimated even though the true value may never be known,” Spencer
said. “The key is replication. To assess the accuracy of jury
verdicts, we need a second opinion of what the verdict should be.”
By comparing agreement rates of judges and juries over time and
across jurisdictions, and even across types of cases, Spencer's
statistical analysis could give insights into the comparative
accuracy of verdicts in different sets of cases.
For his analysis, Spencer utilized a study with a special set of
cases that was recently conducted in the United States by the
National Center for State Courts (NCSC). An earlier study was
conducted by Kalven and Zeisel in the 1950s.
The agreement rate was 77 percent in the NCSC study and 80 percent
for the earlier study. Allowing for chance agreement, the agreement
rates were not high. (With chance agreement, for example, if two
people tossed coins heads or tails independently to see if they
matched, one would expect agreement, heads-heads or tails-tails, 50
percent of the time.)
To obtain a numerical estimate of jury accuracy, some assumptions
were made, as is the case for virtually any statistical analysis of
social groups or programs. A key assumption of Spencer's study is
that, on average, the judge's verdict is at least as likely to be
correct as the jury's verdict.
Without assumptions, a 77 percent agreement rate could reflect 100
percent accuracy by the judge and 77 percent accuracy by the jury,
or 100 percent accuracy by the jury and 77 percent accuracy by the
judge, or 88 percent accuracy by both, or even 50 percent accuracy
by both if they often agreed on the incorrect verdict.
With the assumption of the Spencer analysis that judges are at least
as accurate as jurors after completion of all testimony, we can get
an estimate of jury accuracy that is likely to be higher than the
actual accuracy. Thus, the 77 percent agreement rate means that
juries are accurate up to 87 percent of the time or less, or reach
an incorrect verdict in at least one out of eight cases.
“Some of the errors are incorrect acquittals, where the defendant
goes free, and some are incorrect convictions,” Spencer said. “As a
society can we be satisfied if 10 percent of convictions are
incorrect? Can we be satisfied knowing that innocent people go to
jail for many years for wrongful convictions?”
Spencer envisions that statistical studies would complement
nationwide efforts to expose wrongful convictions, including the
work of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern
University School of Law. The center's work in exposing flaws in
Illinois' capital punishment system played a significant role in
former Gov. George Ryan's decision to commute Illinois death row
inmates' pending executions to sentences of life in prison.
The NCSC study is not representative of a larger set of cases,
Spencer stressed. He hopes that nationally representative studies
will be carried out in the future.
Using additional assumptions and statistical models, the extent of
wrongful convictions and wrongful acquittals also can be estimated,
according to Spencer. The methods also could be extended to estimate
accuracy of verdicts in non-jury trials.
While the studies on verdict accuracy will not tell whether the
verdict for a particular case was correct or not, they will help
assess what proportion of verdicts are correct.
“If you were on trial and not guilty, you certainly would want the
jury to do the right thing,” Spencer said. “Now, subject to these
assumptions, studies could be employed to give us an idea of how
often that happens.”
A technical report is available at
http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/publications/papers/2006/wp0605.pdf.
To conduct the study, Spencer employed a replication analysis of
jury verdicts, comparing decisions of actual jurors with decisions
of judges who were hearing the cases they were deciding. In other
words, as a jury was deliberating about a particular verdict, its
judge filled out a questionnaire giving what he or she believed to
be the correct verdict.
“Consider the analogy to sample surveys, where sampling error is
estimated even though the true value may never be known,” Spencer
said. “The key is replication. To assess the accuracy of jury
verdicts, we need a second opinion of what the verdict should be.”
By comparing agreement rates of judges and juries over time and
across jurisdictions, and even across types of cases, Spencer's
statistical analysis could give insights into the comparative
accuracy of verdicts in different sets of cases.
For his analysis, Spencer utilized a study with a special set of
cases that was recently conducted in the United States by the
National Center for State Courts (NCSC). An earlier study was
conducted by Kalven and Zeisel in the 1950s.
The agreement rate was 77 percent in the NCSC study and 80 percent
for the earlier study. Allowing for chance agreement, the agreement
rates were not high. (With chance agreement, for example, if two
people tossed coins heads or tails independently to see if they
matched, one would expect agreement, heads-heads or tails-tails, 50
percent of the time.)
To obtain a numerical estimate of jury accuracy, some assumptions
were made, as is the case for virtually any statistical analysis of
social groups or programs. A key assumption of Spencer's study is
that, on average, the judge's verdict is at least as likely to be
correct as the jury's verdict.
Without assumptions, a 77 percent agreement rate could reflect 100
percent accuracy by the judge and 77 percent accuracy by the jury,
or 100 percent accuracy by the jury and 77 percent accuracy by the
judge, or 88 percent accuracy by both, or even 50 percent accuracy
by both if they often agreed on the incorrect verdict.