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I believe the criminal law is in utter failure. It does best promoting lawyer profession rent seeking. Criminal law fails to protect the public, especially, poor, law abiding citizens.

In fairness, “beyond a reasonable doubt” refers to about an 80% certainty of correctness. This corresponds well to the roughly 20% false positive error rate found when the system is later validated by DNA testing.

Beyond any doubt whatsover, means 100% certainty, an impossibility.

The most shocking feature of this 20% false positive error rate? Among the falsely convicted innocent, 25% confessed. This shocking statistic casts doubt even on interrogation.

Well we all know where the Duke lacrosse players would be if their parents could not afford to spend $millions on better legal representation.

I do not know why Amsterdamsky and almost everybody else believe so strongly in the proposition that high priced lawyers can beat the system.

The DNA results carried the day in the DUKE case, as they should have. One wonders what would have happened in a pre DNA world.

In our system the jury is a quality control element – do the governments arguments pass logical muster? Although almost everybody believes the trial is movie review with high marque actors prevailing, not one that I ever met is appalled that results are not based on facts and law.

DNA evidence has released from prisona a sinificant number of people, but 20% seems high. There are 1.5 million in prision. 20% would be 300,000.

William: High-priced lawyers got OJ Simpson off. The DNA and all the other physical evidence was against him. All his lawyers had was a theory that cops, from the same department that hadn’t responded properly to the many domestic abuse allegations against their sports hero previously, suddenly noticed that he was black and conspired to frame him.

If the accused in the Duke case were three pizza-delivery boys from penniless families (white or black), the DNA evidence would have stayed buried, and neither the pressure on witnesses to change their stories nor the bizarre series of photo lineups would ever have been reported. Their PD’s would have advised and pressured them to plea out, and probably wouldn’t have been able to unearth the exculpatory evidence even if they went to trial. And that’s assuming the cops didn’t plant crack on the boys so the prosecutor could pressure them into pleading guilty to rape to avoid the ridiculous federal penalties as “crack dealers.”

markm,

To say that OJ’s lawyers got him off is to say that your alarm clock causes the sun to rise.

How did an extra extra large blood-stained winter glove get into OJ’s back yard in June? Too many believed that Fuhrman planted it there. Professor Dershowitz argued that point for some time. His argument was both Harvard level nuanced and Harvard level stupid Lots of people (80% of blacks at the time) believed that the LA police took advantage of the brutal murder of two people to frame a football player. Black officers in the New York State police actually claimed there was no evidence against OJ. These guys had special training in evidence at the police academy.

Just look at the reaction to the OJ verdict: It was a race thing, not a lawyering thing.

In the DUKE case, the DNA non-match was public very early. Then Mr. Nifong rolled up his sleeves to prove his case the old fashioned way. Often when stories fall apart as it did in the DUKE case, and in the day care cases, it is attributed to the trauma. Such attribution take away powerful defenses.

A point can be made that were not told of the four DNA deposits actually found, although the non-match should have carried the day. The suppression of the DNA hits was a result of the women’s movement’s elimination of the whore defense.

There are two kinds of errors in analyses. A false positive when the police actually plant crack on a subject and a false negative – “It’s not my crack, the police must have put it there”. In most cases, planting evidence would expose an officer to draconian consequences for no reason – the suspect is almost always a stranger to him, whereas a false negative is human nature.

Justice is difficult when facts and reason are overwhelmed by political fantasies.

I think the main problem is the nature of jury selection – there are FAR too many ways to get people off the jury, and lawyers (very generally speaking) WANT people on the jury who are most easily swayed by the lawyers themselves, not the evidence – a contest of lawyers, where the best LAWYER wins, and the facts are little more than a handicap to one side or the other.

OJ got off because of:
a) ridiculous jury selection
b) high-powered attorneys who pulled several dirty tricks (unethical, though no illegal)
c) a utter moron of a judge (ever hear of the musical/comedy group “The Dancing Itos”?)
d) procedural slips by the prosecution (blown way out of proportion by C, above)
e) unfortunate happenstance of who did the investigation (past racist statements, etc)

In the Duke case, the parents involved actually DIDN’T “have the money” to hire big gun attorneys – but they were well-connected enough to get help on that, and they have a lot of bills to pay… which should be repaid shortly by civil suits.

“Byond a reasonable doubt” WILL put innocents in prison from time to time (especially with perverse incentives for both the prosecutors and the public defenders)… but, as already stated, “beyond all doubt” will convict essentially no one.

I would bear two things in mind here: 1) a prisoner isn’t going to ask to have the DNA tested unless he knows he’s innocent (or at least knows that that’s not his DNA). So one would expect a very high level of exonerations among those actually tested; that percentage wouldn’t necessarily carry over to those that are not.
Second — you have to have a criminal justice system. And it has to depend on people — including witnesses who may be mistaken or lying. We rely on other people — prosecutors, jurors, judges — to weed out those cases where they are, but those people are also going to do their jobs with varying degrees of ability and commitment. i don’t know what systemic change can materially reduce the possibility of false convictions without doing away with the possibility of prosecution for most crimes entirely. And I don’t know of any other system that is less likely to result in false positives (or false negatives)