Legal reasoning for Knox case released

[Simon_Jester]

Flagg- basically, my argument is that it is just not worth it to make a rare exception and allow the prosecution to appeal because a video of the defendant doing it emerges. Because for every such case, there are likely to be other cases where the evidence is less compelling and where a mistake may be made in the retrial.

Plus, it is very bad practice to modify your legal system so make exceptions for unlikely hypothetical cases, or for high-profile celebrity cases. That kind of logic is how

It is much better to try and create a consistent system that seeks to punish almost all the guilty defendants, while protecting literally all the innocent defendants

Also, you are entirely correct about how full of flaws and crap the US judiciary is and I am totally not disagreeing with you on any part of that. The US judiciary has a few good features that are mostly inherited from Britain (or that were proposed by British legal philosophers and implemented on a "hey that sounds pretty sweet" basis in the early days of the US courts). There are a few homegrown good ideas like judicial review of laws and executive orders, too.

But none of that negates the flaws and crap and biases and obsolete 18th century ideas that we never got around to discarding. It's like saying "I gotta say, you used some good mustard on this broken-glass sandwich." You can praise the mustard without praising the sandwich, and you can say that the mustard would go well on a good sandwich, without praising the broken glass sandwich.

The problem with the American method is that it does allow the occasional guilty person to escape via a mistrial, locked jury, or simply being found innocent by virtue of either an competent lawyer, an easily swayed jury, or a lack of evidence. This is patently visible in cases such as OJ Simpson and Casey Anthony. They're rare, but they do happen, and there's no easy legal way to penalize them for the crime when either it's obvious they were guilty and they just managed to get lucky (Casey Anthony) or the evidence proving their guilt doesn't emerge until later. Or in OJ's case, he wrote a book that more or less told it all from a 'fiction' perspective...

While this can happen, if your court system is full of people who know what the hell they're doing, it will be comparatively rare. Most of the time, if someone actually did commit a crime and you have reason to think they did, you should be able to prove it using evidence that the resources of the state can gather in a timely manner.

Basically, the way I see it, either your courts are good or they're bad.

If the courts are bad, then all the more reason to increase the probability of the innocent going free, because failure to convict of one crime is a less serious error than putting random wrongfully accused innocent people in jail.

If the courts are good, then the very fact that the first court (or the second) found the defendant not-guilty casts grave doubt on the validity of the accusations against them.* In which case you can never really eliminate the reasonable doubt of "well, what if the court that exonerated the defendant was right all along and evaluated the evidence correctly?"

Either way, the main effect of allowing the prosecution to appeal is that an innocent verdict is not final, that people who have been found innocent are more likely to go to jail anyway, and that there is considerably less security and speed to be had in the trial process for people seeking to clear their name in court.
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*Yes, you can come up with a hypothetical example of the validity of the accusations being greatly strengthened after the trial is over. Or even an occasional real example of this, with high-profile evidence coming to light well after the trial. However, such things are rare.

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It is part of a systematic bias that in common law courts is built into the system- the presumption of innocence.

I get the feeling that I am talking to a particularly dumb brick wall here. Because this is word for word your argument from last time, where you were corrected on the Continental system having this as well. If in doubt, the tie goes to the accused.

In this thread, I did not say "the continental system does not have this." I said "the common law system DOES have this."

The only court systems I am saying anything whatsoever about here is the Italian system (which has a specific feature I criticize), and the US system (which, among others, has this feature).

The feature in question being, of course, the ability of the prosecution to appeal a finding of innocence.

My counter is that it is inherently impossible for this to be truly the case. The defendant will always have more at stake than the prosecution- at most the prosecution risks their reputation, while the defendant risks their freedom. The defendant can lose resources as a result of being involved in criminal proceedings- opportunity costs, if nothing else. The prosecution loses little save the time they explicitly get paid to use for this very purpose.

Brick wall again. You have yet to make an argument why not sacrificing opportunity costs is worth more than the best and most thorough pursuit of truth a system can have.

It remains my position that when we decide how courts are to operate, we should be concerned with both the pursuit of truth and the consequences to society of the way the judiciary operates.

In some circumstances, continuing to pursue a small chance that a guilty person was wrongfully set free would run counter to the interests of society at large, or would undermine a right that it is desirable to have in place for all people.

BTW, I still await your proof that the US system produces less wrongful convictions.

As outlined below, the US system may well produce more wrongful convictions because of other flaws that have literally nothing to do with this issue. In fact I would expect that result.

And you are skilled enough in logic to understand that saying "X is a good feature" does not automatically equate to "A, which has feature X, is superior in overall performance to B, which does not."

Which serves to protect the innocent from either accidentally being found guilty, or from being subjected to an unreasonable burden of time and stress associated with the uncertainties of a prolonged trial.

Can you actually prove that the US system results in less costs and less time lost for the average defendant? Because I have a hard time believing that, what with the absurd numbers US lawyers can and do charge. And that this protects against being accidentally found guilty is a bit rich without any numbers to prove that this is indeed the case.

This single isolated feature cannot help but reduce the risk of an innocent person being unjustly found guilty- because it means that if you are found innocent once, you do not have to worry about the prosecution appealing, finding an inept or confused appellate judge, and getting you convicted.

Innocent is innocent, reasonable doubt is reasonable doubt, and you only have to establish that there is doubt of your guilt once.

There is literally no way for this to do anything other than decrease the risks faced by innocent defendants. As a side effect it also decreases the risks faced by guilty defendants, which is unfortunate, but I already addressed this above.

Now, if you take this one good feature, and implant it into a swamp of injustice and incompetence (like the US trial system), then it may not be enough to fix the swamp all by itself. I have pointed this out, and pointed out similar things, repeatedly in multiple threads.

And frankly, Thanas, I am completely baffled at how you translate "no appealing a finding of innocence" into "don't trust judges." Quite the contrary, I am deciding that there is an entire category of case (where the defendant is found not guilty) where the judges are to be trusted, and any applicable juries are as well, on the assumption that if they find the defendant not guilty they must have had sufficient reason to do so- that is, sufficient reason to doubt the defendant's guilt.

So if you trust the judges, then why not trust that their judgement will hold up? Because that is literally what you are saying here - "One cannot trust that another set of more experienced judges will see it the same way".

For one, there is always some element of uncertainty, some X-factor, in having another round of trials. There is always some chance of error.

For a second and unrelated point, this is exactly the kind of asymmetry created when you build the presumption of innocence into your judiciary- that yes, there are cases where we apply extra scrutiny to a 'guilty' finding that we do not apply to a 'not guilty' finding. Because the consequences of being wrong in a 'guilty' finding are more significant, we may well put it to a more scrupulous and careful test that is not deemed necessary in case of a 'not guilty' finding.

Once such reasons are found to the satisfaction of one court, I am prepared to consider that final and have no interest in finding another court that thinks there is no such room for doubt.

Are you deliberately making this sound like the prosecution can just appeal whatever they like? If so, you are one dishonest twat, considering this has been pointed out to you multiple times that this is not the case.

No, I am not "deliberately making this sound like" such a thing.

I apologize for the trouble if you are missing the nuances of what I say in my native language, and will do my best to rephrase in a way that does not allow such a misunderstanding.

To make it as explicit as I can:

If one court finds that there is reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the defendant, I am satisfied. I do not need to convince myself that this court really was being reasonable. I do not need to convince myself that its doubts were valid.

Because my standard for conviction is "certainty of guilt," while my standard for exoneration is "possibility of innocence."

If a court at any level finds a defendant innocent, I am not normally justified in saying "you are wrong, there is NOT a possibility of innocence." I would only be justified in doing this in cases of grotesque corruption or total insanity on the part of the court that passed down the 'not guilty' verdict. In which case it would be more appropriate to start going after court personnel for abuse of office, and less appropriate to go after the defendant in the original case... unless there is a corruption issue, in which case I have grounds to file new, entirely different charges.

You would have to control for other variables- for instance, many parts of the US have elected prosecutors, which is an incredibly stupid thing to do and will obviously tend to increase the frequency of wrongful prosecutions due to reduced professionalism and a greater incentive for the prosecutor to make themselves look like a strong crime-fighter by wrongfully going after innocent people.

Or maybe the system of not allowing a judgement to be challenged is just bad.

If refusing to allow prosecutors to appeal a finding of 'not guilty' is bad, it is NOT going to be bad because it doesn't let enough innocent people go free. It might be bad for other reasons, but it cannot be bad for that reason, because it literally never results in any person going to jail who would not have gone to jail anyway.

This rule can never wrongfully convict anyone, so it is silly for you to claim that it might somehow be a cause for the US's (presumed) high rate of wrongful convictions.

But it's as if I and Grumman are arguing that buildings should have fire sprinklers installed, and we argue that sprinklers are a good thing because they reduce the risk of major damaging fires.

I am disappointed that your lack of logic has gotten so bad that you now equate a 100% safety-enhancing and near-failsafe mechanical safety device with a legal procedure, when the value of said procedure is the core of what this argument is about. I mean, I might just as well go "you are saying that a bug-fixing procedure damages software quality" and it would be the same argument.

Except that this is literally a mechanism that always results in people not going to jail, who might otherwise have gone to jail. It may have other negative consequences, but it can never have the consequence of "innocent person goes to jail."

This is why I am so confused and exasperated that you seem to be arguing that the procedure "don't allow prosecutors to appeal a not-guilty verdict" can in fact result in a higher rate of wrongful convictions. It is literally exactly like claiming that fire sprinklers cause fires, you are proposing that Cause A has Effect B when Cause A can literally only ever have Effect Not-B.

You might want to argue that Cause A has effects C, D, and E, which are undesirable and outweigh Effect B. Sure, fine, you have the right to argue that.

But you cannot argue that Cause A has Effect B when it is literally unable to have that effect and can only have the opposite effect.

Clearly, the reasonable doubt standard is doing good work. Go ahead and claim that again with a straight face. I need more comedy in my life.

The biggest problem with the US courts is not that there is a flaw in the idea of "prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt."

It is with the US courts not applying this principle thoroughly enough.

The principle is valid, regardless of other flaws in the US courts.

In which case a later court cannot reasonably come back and say "there is no realistic way this person could have been innocent." That standard of evidence for guilt simply cannot survive a case where the defendant has already been acquitted by a competent judge and/or jury.

This is quite clearly bullshit. If a case is strong enough to convict somebody, then it should be able to stand up to multiple examinations of that guilt.

I agree- but multiple examinations will always reduce the probability of all the examiners agreeing. This is basic statistics.

If you allow defendants to appeal a guilty verdict, this results in some of them being found 'not guilty.'

If you allow prosecutors to appeal a 'not guilty' verdict, this results in some of the defendants being found 'guilty after all.'

These outcomes are inevitable, they are matters of basic math unless courts are 100% predictable- either predictably infallible, or predictably going to rule a certain way regardless of the truth. In either case we wouldn't even need an appeals system in the first place.

And the entire point of not allowing prosecutors to appeal is that no truly innocent person should have to risk being found 'guilty after all,' even if the probability of this taking place is very small.

[Darth Yan]

I thought it was determined that Rudy Guede was the one who killed Meredith Kircher.

[Simon_Jester]

...Yes. That's sort of the point here, that after a protracted legal battle, the Italian Supreme Court ruled that yes, the original appeals court was correct, Sollecito and Knox were not involved in the murder of Meredith Kircher. Which leaves Guede as the only one involved- he was convicted a long time ago.

The argument was over whether Sollecito and Knox were somehow accomplices in the murder- a claim which the Italian Supreme Court has now identified to be based on grossly flawed reasoning and which they have attributed to international media pressure, assuming that various news agencies in Europe and the US aren't grossly misquoting the Court's ruling.

[Flagg]

I think the adversarial and inquisitorial systems both have their benefits and drawbacks, and quite frankly they could probably benefit a lot by borrowing ideas from the other. There may be a system in Europe that blends the best of inquisitorial and adversarial systems, but its not in Italy.

The main issues I have with the Italian system are that there doesn't seem to be any check against outside information influencing the jurors. You've got a major media circus surrounding a case with half truths and misinformation, and jurors are allowed to read and talk about it outside of the trial? I think that's an aspect they should take from the American system wherein you do not allow jurors to discuss the case, or seek information about the case outside of trial. The notion that they can divorce themselves from what they heard outside of trial and not have it influence the outcome is not logical. No matter how "professional they may be" they are not robots.

The idea of having educated professional jurors in and of itself does sound like a better instrument of justice than "12 angry men". In this specific case, Italian Jury in the first and third trials showed themselves to be as dimwitted as the worst of American juries. Was that due to the media or other influence? I suspect its very possible. Because there is no fucking way a logical human being returns a guilty verdict based solely on the evidence presented at trial.

Yeah, awhile ago (years) I proposed the idea (I'm sure it's been thought of before if not put into actual use) of a sort of "13-15th man" on a jury who are essentially professional jurors with law degrees and who have passed the bar and who essentially have veto power to either unanimously aquit based on actual legal reasonable doubt as long as a certain number of "regular" jurors agreed, or if there was disagreement between the pro jurors or between all the pro's and all the shrubs off the street, you get a mistrial. That way you avoid prayer sessions and fucking coin flips.

[Simon_Jester]

I like the idea of hybridizing our existing jury system with professional jurors who have actual law degrees.