On 3/24/2009 1:55 PM, andrel wrote:
> Good question. We tend to have people trained to evaluate the evidence.
> I think that works here, but I know it fails in a lot of other places.

What, you mean professional jurors?  One of the basic tenets of our 
judicial system is a review by a jury of your peers, rather than 
professional jurors.

< re: innocent people getting convicted >
> Sure. But in the opinion in this country in the case of the US it is
> built into the system. If it happens here it generally is investigated
> to see how it did happen and how to prevent it.

At this point, however, you're leaving it to the courts to ensure that 
innocent people do not get convicted.  Here, we leave it to the public, 
in the form of a public jury.

> The suggestion in the video is that the police does not need real
> evidence but can get convictions by twisting someones words into
> "evidence".

Do you think personal testimony is not evidence?

You can blame the British for the one... our tradition of "hearing" 
evidence comes from the English legal system :)

> I think you are probably right as long as you are middle class white. I
> have heard some stories that not everybody is that lucky.

Now you're conflating the issue with racial prejudices.  The two issues 
are separate; if you're the victim of racism, you could be screwed no 
matter what the "main" subject is, be it lending practices, police 
investigations, or just getting a good meal at a restaurant.

Let's get back to the judicial system.


Anyway, as I said before, the main issue here is that we leave such 
determinations to a public jury.  They need to be convinced that there 
is no "reasonable" doubt of guilt.  The problem with leaving such 
determinations to the courts (or professional jurors, which amounts to 
the same thing because they become a part of the system) is that the 
courts themselves may be corrupted.

Our current system was put in place largely as a reaction to the abuse 
that the public suffered from the judicial system at the time.  Innocent 
people were being arrested but never charged with crimes, or convicted 
with little or no evidence.  In many cases, the authorities flat out 
lied about evidence in order to convict the men they were after.

So we threw them out, and started our own system that was controlled by 
public review.

-- 
...Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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