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BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Mon Jun 15, 2020 2:57 pm
And what's worse is that that .003% is Wilson Fisk.
Really though, Daredevil season 3 is the only exposure I have to the idea of a grand jury. Heard the term plenty, but was never familiar with it.
It seems like a rather truncated version of a trial lol. I'm pressed to wonder how it doesn't undercut everything we know about innocence until proven guilty.
The original purpose was VERY useful. They were essentially a "citizen's commission." Any citizen could bring a matter before the court, large or small. In early America there wasn't really a police force of any sort, so the grand jury could do investigations and often did a lot of what we'd consider police work. Citizens could bring bills of indictment, and if the Grand Jury agreed there was a reason to indict, they could indict (creating a trial). When people talk about scrapping the police entirely, they're usually talking about returning to something like the original American Grand Jury - a citizens group that can investigate, empower and charge governments to do tasks, and start off trials.
They were so useful that they were enshrined in the constitution. They were exactly the sort of citizen government the founding fathers envisioned.
The earliest "police forces" were groups of slave catchers in the south. Dealing with the underground railroad and the "problem" of escaped slaves required rather more effort than a part-time citizen's commission could put in, and slave owners didn't love the idea of bringing the issue of "recapturing my slave" in front of a citizens court. After all, the slaves were their property, and they saw no need to convince 23 people of the rightness of this, or the need to shoot slaves and ordinary citizens who ran the underground railroad. After all, a grand jury might balk at authorizing them to shoot to kill when dealing with a white man who was helping slave families escape to the north. They might ask pesky "excessive force" questions. They might even start to develop a distaste for slavery, who knows what citizens might do if you give them power.
Eventually the needs of major cities evolved beyond the capacities of the grand jury, and the slave catchers of the south became their own forces after the civil war (now police - and definitely tasked with keeping the ex-slaves in their place). And grand juries slowly devolved into jokes, as the idea of ordinary citizens telling the government what to do was lost.
So yeah, there's some depressing history for you.
As far as grand juries, I thought that perhaps they were circumventing the actual trial. What you're saying makes a lot more sense.
Like I thought it was more absorbed into the executive process. Like if you're caught by a cop doing something bad it's more of an open and shut case (though yeah a trial still exists), but I thought a grand jury was like meant to merge the DA prosecuting and marshalling/detectiving that police do, and all through a more robust or robustly qualified jury.
From Wikipedia (look there for their sources): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice
Various studies estimate that in the United States, between 2.3 and 5% of all prisoners are innocent. One study estimated that up to 10,000 people may be wrongfully convicted of serious crimes each year.
A 2014 study estimated that 4.1% of inmates awaiting execution on death row in the United States are innocent, and that at least 340 innocent people may have been executed since 1973.
....
According to Professor Boaz Sangero of the College of Law and Business in Ramat Gan in Israel, most wrongful convictions are for crimes less serious than major felonies such as rape and murder, as judicial systems are less careful in dealing with those cases.
...
The Innocence Project has estimated that between 2.3 percent and 5 percent of all US prisoners are innocent. With the number of incarcerated Americans being approximately 2.4 million, by that estimate as many as 120,000 people may be incarcerated as a result of wrongful conviction. However, other researchers have suggested that the wrongful conviction rate is much lower, between 0.125% and 0.5%.
I think to compare their courts and ours is being disingenuous. Theirs is a farce, and despite biased judges and wrongful sentences and the imprisonment of innocent people and mass jailing, we still never go into this with the accused having to prove their innocence, to be assumed guilty, where no one ever wins a case, and it's blatantly a case of showmanship, and not the facts. You could argue the facts don't matter so much as the performance, which I'd agree with, but as with all things in our system, the idea is good. Even if in practice, it's not always like that.
Captain Crimson wrote: ↑Fri Jun 19, 2020 2:58 pm
I think to compare their courts and ours is being disingenuous. Theirs is a farce, and despite biased judges and wrongful sentences and the imprisonment of innocent people and mass jailing, we still never go into this with the accused having to prove their innocence, to be assumed guilty, where no one ever wins a case, and it's blatantly a case of showmanship, and not the facts. You could argue the facts don't matter so much as the performance, which I'd agree with, but as with all things in our system, the idea is good. Even if in practice, it's not always like that.
And how does it look to Cardassian society? To the Cardassian people? They see a system with fair and merciful courts, where the defendant admits their guilt and throws themselves on the mercy of the court, and sometimes the court is even merciful! To the people of Cardassia, they see what you see - a system where justice is served, the courts show mercy when it is warranted, and everyone benefits. They'd probably admit that a few innocent people get tossed into the system, but they'd say that the system largely works.
Look at the statistics Darth posted. 5%. If we look at that, we have to consider that the percentage of people going to trial - 2-2.5% - is lower than the percentage of people who are innocent and in prison. There are innocent people pleading guilty and throwing themselves on the mercy of the court. While the vastly overworked public defenders (10,000 case hours a year? I invite you to count how many hours are in a year) encourage them to do exactly that.
Isn't an innocent person pleading guilty and throwing themselves on the mercy of the court because it's their best chance at not spending their life in prison exactly the sham of the Cardassain trial system?
Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs
One could make something of a fair case that our justice system, allegedly, is not about justice at all, but law and order, to keep civilization from becoming unorganized, and all that that implies. Yet that's been happening for millennia, and it'd be foolish to deny there is overlap, and that many cops, judges, and attorneys within the system care for the truth or the classic "good guy wins" viewpoint. Within any flawed hierarchy, there's still those dreamers and idealists who make all the difference. Not speaking about the legal system of the US, specifically, so much as humanity figuratively.
Captain Crimson wrote: ↑Fri Jun 19, 2020 10:16 pm
One could make something of a fair case that our justice system, allegedly, is not about justice at all, but law and order, to keep civilization from becoming unorganized, and all that that implies. Yet that's been happening for millennia, and it'd be foolish to deny there is overlap, and that many cops, judges, and attorneys within the system care for the truth or the classic "good guy wins" viewpoint. Within any flawed hierarchy, there's still those dreamers and idealists who make all the difference. Not speaking about the legal system of the US, specifically, so much as humanity figuratively.
That describes all aspiring societal systems and general challenges people face running a decent civilization.
Every society only has law in order to sustain order. Order isn't synonymous with justice.
That 5% was an upper estimate. 0.125% is a lower estimate. Honesty still counts for people trying to look at the real world.
You could say that if the Cardassian legal system has an equally low rate of false convictions then the Cardassian legal system is effectively as good as ours. If 95% to 99.875% of the convicted are guilty, despite not allowing for any defense, despite the only verdict apparently being guilty, then I think they've achieved a pretty good system for selecting who goes to trial.
