Roughly Justice

There is a discussion going on in the comments at Durham in Wonderland about the quality of our justice system and the acceptable error rate. The ever ubiquitous anon. at 9:12AM had this to say:

As for rough justice? When most violent criminals are just that, violent criminals with long arrest and conviction records, records of commiting violent crimes and pleading down to lesser charges, WHO CARES???? I don't. I don't think rough justice can work for the crimnal underclass. But if it does, if it brings more pain to the families of those who bring pain to others, bring it on. I applaud it.

What does he mean by rough justice? Using the criminal justice system to harass the usual suspects.

My answer (revised and extended) was:

Rough justice is normally done by rounding up the usual suspects. The people no one cares about if a mistake is made per 9:12AM.

However, when it becomes a habit and the race and class boundaries are breeched there is hell to pay.

Here is what Graham Greene has to say about who can be given rough justice and torture in his novel of the cold war Our Man In Havana:

"The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with emigres from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal."

The Biggest Cover Up Of All

Rough justice is not real justice. It is a short cut. Short cuts have consequences.

When rough justice is the norm the innocent get no break.

The purpose of justice is to prevent the rise of a vendetta culture. It is bad for business.

Rough justice erases the line between guilt and innocence. It is an unwise policy.

Remember back to the movie Casablanca where the police chief says round up the usual suspects even though none of them were guilty. The good guy goes free. Some bad guys got punished, and yet we know in our heart of hearts justice was twisted.

So what level of error am I willing to tolerate?

I'm an aerospace kind of guy. We build the stuff so that it is safer to fly than to drive. We have a system for getting this done and correcting errors in a very timely fashion. Why not have a justice system held to similar standards?

An error is an error even if it takes a bad guy out. The quality of justice counts just as much as the quality of our airplanes. Either can take your life.

And yeah. It is going to cost more money to do things right.

The money is there. All we have to do is give up on drug prohibition and give the drug problem to those best qualified to handle it. Doctors.

We ended prohibition once. We can do it again.

===

Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can't stop what it's meant to stop.
We like it.
It's left a trail of graft and slime,
It won't prohibit worth a dime,
It's filled our land with vice and crime.
Nevertheless, we're for it.

Franklin P. Adams, 1931

===

Isn't it time that our justice system met the quality level of our air travel system? In terms of getting you to your destination alive? I will say it would be nice if your luggage arrived with you a bit more often.

Consider that the baggage system that goes with air travel makes about the same level of error as our justice system - in the range of 1% to 3%, and we are deeeply unhappy with that level of performance.

We ought to apply the same standards to justice as we do to baggage delivery.

So what is the rate of error in our justice system? In death penalty cases in Illinois there were 167 men on death row when George Ryan left office. There had been 13 exonerations. That would then be 13 / (167 + 13) = about 7%. That is for death penalty cases. Would the results be better or worse given the lesser quality control on less serious charges? One of the posters on the thread thought the error rate was under 1%. If you use the lost baggage standard it would have to be very significantly below 1% to make the customers happy.

One wag on the thread thought a miscarraige of justice was more likely in high profile cases due to community pressure. In other words the more community pressure the more corrupt the process. Not a comforting thought at all.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Crime Reporting

How do colleges and universities report crime? We have a small part of the answer due to the Guilford College case.

GREENSBORO — If students involved in the recent fight at Guilford College had not gone to the magistrate's office to file charges, chances are good that word of the event might never have left campus.

That's not uncommon.

Colleges frequently don't involve city police in on-campus incidents, law enforcement officials say.

But that isn't necessarily a problem. Not everything that technically could be a crime is best handled through the legal system, officials say.

Which is a good thing. It helps keep civil society civil. The occasional break in civility is usually not worth a civil war.

In the recent incident, Palestinian students said they were beaten by football players who used racial slurs. The father of one player has said the Palestinian students started the fight.

Bowers said that if the charges hadn't been filed, the incident would not have seen the light of day. "They probably would have kept the fight a secret," she said.

Law enforcement officials say they know all incidents that might be crimes are not reported. The key, though, is how serious those crimes are and whether decisions about what to report are consistent.

Which for the Palestinians would have been a better way to handle it. Their story is not holding up well. Now instead of it being a campus issue, it has become a world wide issue. Nice going Omar, Feris.

Police Lt. Brian James said not all incidents necessarily need to be reported to police, but those involving serious injuries or serious allegations do.

When that doesn't happen, that can cause problems, he said. It's harder to go back and investigate an incident after the fact, he said.

In the recent Guilford incident, police have said that their role in the investigation has been affected because they weren't immediately called to investigate.

Colleges aren't alone in not always involving law enforcement. The same thing happens at businesses and public schools and other places as well, Neumann said.

In fact, if everyone reported everything, "we'd be swamped," he said.

I think that points out one of the great difficulties in letting people bring charges before a magistrate. The chances of a complete investigation are slim. A trial then becomes a matter of trading accusations instead of evidence. I'll bet that is what the Palestinians were hoping for.

Those Palestinian boys are real smart. Possibly too smart by half.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Right Loses Faith

It is interesting to read the hard right's take on the justice system based on the Duke case.

When folks from Free Republic lose faith in the justice system, we are in serious trouble.

Here is a typical comment:

To: TommyDale

"Multiply that in North Carolina, where the legal system can screw innocent people and the general public would never know,"

That is everywhere in the country.

10 posted on 01/24/2007 6:14:39 AM PST by SmoothTalker

Cross Posted at Classical Values