This definitely reinforces my belief that having humans in the loop is not only desirable but necessary. For the majority of human history minus a few years you could only be accused of a crime by another human being. I'd like to see the trend of automated "enforcement" reversed and codify into law that you MUST be accused by a human being.
If everyone is breaking so many laws that the police and courts can't keep up it doesn't mean that humanity is broken. It means that the law has gotten so far out of sync with humanity that the law is broken. People make the laws, not the other way around.
> If everyone is breaking so many laws that the police and courts can't keep up it doesn't mean that humanity is broken. It means that the law has gotten so far out of sync with humanity that the law is broken. People make the laws, not the other way around.
The world would be a much better place if more people realized this.
This always frustrates me when discussions of plea bargaining and the right to trial come up, and the argument is given that plea bargaining is a necessity because the courts would be horribly overloaded if every case went to trial.
If the system doesn't have the resources to give every accused criminal a fair trial, then either you're making too many criminals, the system doesn't have enough resources, or both. Bypassing trials is just a way to cover your ears and shout "la la la" to ignore the problem.
You're right; there is tremendous pressure from both district attorneys and judges to cop a plea. Trials piss everyone off because they are "such a waste of time." Criminal defense attorneys have to contend not just with the facts of the case and legal precedents, but also the extent to which demanding a jury trial turns the court against your client -- and your other clients, by association.
The other issue is police overcharging crimes. For example, suppose you, in a fit of pique, cut your roommate's arm with a knife. Not cool; that's aggravated assault. But the police then charges you with attempted second degree murder -- or even first degree (eg, premeditated). Now your defense attorney has to work hard just to get your charges down to a reasonable level; the agg assault you should have been charged with in the first place. This is what a huge majority of plea bargaining is about; not getting away with it, but getting the charge down to something that describes your actual offense.
While I largely agree with you, it strikes me that you've missed an option --
It might be that there's something inefficient in the trial process that holds no weight on "fairness". I'm not a legal expert by any means, so it may not be the case, but it seems as though it's a possibility.
You certainly could be right. The way trials are run does not seem very efficient at all, and maybe a lot of the fat could be cut out without impacting outcomes.
On the other hand, if you can get the number of accused criminals down to a reasonable level, it wouldn't matter too much if there was waste in the smaller number of trials.
No doubt the problem can be attacked from many directions.
The inefficiency stems from the complexity of the law. We have built up over many years an unfathomably large codex and an equally staggering infrastructure devoted to training legions of people (lawyers) in how to read, interpret and apply it.
How do we address this?
One emerging solution employs advanced AIs to pore over the reams of evidence in order to better inform lawyers of the legal situation. I can imagine extrapolating this particular methodology far enough into the future such that the entire process subsequent to arrest (processing, pre-trial hearing, trial and sentencing) might be automated to the degree that it could be accomplished within minutes instead of months.
What would society look like if we had such an "efficient" judicial system?
That's a potentially terrifying possibility. It may be that we'd end up incarcerating orders of magnitude more people; a dystopian reality. How would we then rein in such a powerful system? I have no idea.
> The inefficiency stems from the complexity of the law.
Not just that, though -- it also comes from the inherent inefficiencies in trying to recover exactly what happened from any given situation in which the question of whether a crime was committed.
We could start recording everything that happens, but... that's also a potentially terrifying possibility.
> We could start recording everything that happens
You're in luck! Facebook, Google, and many of the wonderful, selfless people who post on HN are already working on that... or at least defending others' "right" to do so if they aren't doing it themselves.
Various entities are tracking who you know, who you sleep with (http://www.whosdrivingyou.org/blog/ubers-deleted-rides-of-gl...), what your face looks like, what your friends' faces look like (thanks, photo tagging enthusiasts!), who you talk to, what you say to them, when you say it, where you go (thanks to various wonderful sources, including ALPR companies like Vigilant), how long you stay there, what you eat, what you wear, what you watch, what you listen to, where you move your mouse while viewing websites, who your doctor is, what medications you take, what the symptoms of that last rash you had were, what your political views are, what you read, where you work, how many steps you took today, what websites you visit, and about 30,000 other bits of data... just to keep you safe!
The future is so amazing! I don't know what I would do without a customized advertising experience(tm). Such a drastic improvement over life in the past where people were so bored of advertisements that they chose to avoid watching them! What none of us knew at the time was that we really just wanted to see more relevant advertisements more often, while giving up our privacy for the corporations' greater good! I sleep much more soundly after a solid day of being bombarded with advertisements that teach me to be a better consumer!
This is a big issue in the US and it actually goes back to the Warren court. They issued a long series of rulings making it difficult to prosecute cases, without worrying about the consequences.
By the 70s crime had skyrocketed and it was clear that they had gone too far. But instead of issuing a mea culpa and reexamining past rulings, the various courts started allowing prosecutors to claim broad new powers and take extremely aggressive tactics.
By this point there's no real way to fix it. The legal system is based strongly on precedent. It can't just undo major rulings of the past and replace the with something sane.
>By this point there's no real way to fix it. The legal system is based strongly on precedent. It can't just undo major rulings of the past and replace the with something sane.
sounds exactly like the point where a major fix must be done. Life changes faster and faster. The precedent system was great in 15th century when things look pretty much the same like in the 14th or 13th century.
By the 70s crime had skyrocketed and it was clear that they had gone too far.
Any claim that court ruler enabled crime is highly debatable. Factors causing increases and decreases in crime rates are difficult to pin-point.
One argument is returning Vietnam veterans lead to the increase in violent crime - post-war eras have a history of being associated with crime-increases from the return of veterans habituated to violence.
The crime wave you refer to tracks pretty well with the demographic bulge from the baby boom; one of the strongest predictors of crime rates has consistently been the proportion of the population that is males in the 16-24 age range.
> The legal system is based strongly on precedent. It can't just undo major rulings of the past and replace the with something sane.
Sure it can; major court rulings have been overturned by later courts, and, even if courts won't do that, the law which they were interpreting when they made the rulings (including the Constitution) can be changed, rendering the old rulings moot.
The problem is that there's no way for anyone else to determine a priori if your accusation is false or true. That's what the whole presumed innocent until proven guilty thing is about.
In reality, if you are accused AT ALL, you want your day in court and you want it to be fair. Even if you had committed a crime, if the police did something they're not supposed to that needs to get sussed out in court and you should go free.
Half the point of a trial is to make sure that nothing unfair is done by the investigators (police, prosecutor, etc). This is to keep their power in check so that they'll follow the rules. Otherwise it could get mighty tempting to fudge something a little bit "because we KNOW this is the guy!" and "we need to do the right thing."
Why should every crime go to trial? If the offender says "Fair cop, guv, you've got me bang to rights", why waste everyone's time proving that (s)he did it?
It's basically the same as setting up your conditions to take advantage of short-circuit evaluation. You don't put the time-consuming and resource-hungry part first.
Were there even the slimmest chance of acquittal, few defendants would utter that phrase without there being either a benefit to owning up, or an extra penalty for not doing so. This is what plea bargaining and TICs are for.
If there's a suspicion of false confession, meaning that the suspect may not be the offender, that should normally be sorted out before court, so that the correct offender is tried for the correct offence (e.g. wasting police time if voluntary, or some kind of intimidation/coercion offence if not)?
By all means, we should allow defendants to simply confess and plead guilty if they wish.
But we should not reward them for doing so. Never should a person be presented with a choice between a certain lesser punishment, or a fair trail and a potential greater punishment. That's the "bargain" in "plea bargain," and it's completely reprehensible.
You say, "few defendants would utter that phrase without there being either a benefit to owning up, or an extra penalty for not doing so." That's exactly how it is! A plea bargain isn't just, "we both know you did it, so just confess and let's skip all the lawyers and stuff." It's always, "We both know you did it, so confess and we'll let you out early. If you insist on taking this to trial then we will throw the book at you." A lot of innocent people will take the plea when faced with that choice.
Not every crime needs to go to trial, but every accused criminal needs to have the right to a trial without being punished for exercising that right. If you remove the punishment then you'll no longer have plea bargains, just pleas.
In my view a vital aspect of the trial is to provide necessary public oversight of the police and courts.
I think that a partial measure towards reforming plea bargains would be to require the police to present their evidence for the court to review before entry of a plea. This creates a public record that somebody could investigate in the future. There could also be a provision that if exculptatory evidence is revealed in the future, the plea can be rescinded.
>>Were there even the slimmest chance of acquittal, few defendants would utter that phrase without there being either a benefit to owning up, or an extra penalty for not doing so
Oh man, that's so wrong. Even where there is a LARGE change of acquittal, many choose a plea bargain because they cannot afford a good attorney or because the prosecutor is threatening them with something crazy like 40 years for downloading a movie. Would you take the risk of 40 years, knowing you're innocent? Do you have enough faith in a jury to put the rest of your life in their hands? I doubt it.
I believe his point isn't that every crime necessarily needs to go to trial, it's that we should have enough resources to be able to put every accused criminal to trial. The fact that it's not the case shows the significant disconnect in our legal system.
That said, I don't believe it's very difficult to make an ethical and legal case against the concept of plea bargaining in the first place. I would argue it's very important to a free society to waste everyone's time proving that an accused person is guilty, and that not doing so violates the sixth amendment and fundamental human rights.
The issue isn't whether every case should go to trial. A plea bargain is an exchange of (forgoing) a trial for a reduced charge or sentence. The undesirable outcome (for pretty much everyone but the prosecutor) is that an innocent person accepts a plea bargain to avoid the worst outcome, and we should do more to prevent this from happening.
> If there's a suspicion of false confession, meaning that the suspect may not be the offender
Are you assuming that this represents a minority of cases? Who has to suspect that the accused is not really guilty, a jury of his peers?
The problem is that you can't get very far into the discussion before all the available options involve overhauling the entire system. And there's no way, realistically, to do that.
In support of your position, how did we ever let people convince us that victimless "crimes" were crimes? The definition of crime rests on the concept of harm, which requires a victim.
So-called "victimless crimes" are crimes where the harm perceived is a diffuse harm rather than a focused harm on a particular individual.
There's really no reason why diffuse harms should not be criminal while focused ones should (arguably, diffuse harms are less able to be addressed by individual action through the civil justice system, so outside of focused harms where the victim is unable to pursue action after the crime, like murder, diffuse harms are the most important for government to address directly.)
OTOH, there's often a lot more disagreement over whether what some people perceive as a diffuse harm actually is a harm.
I've never seen "victimless crime" defined as diffuse versus focused harm, and I would strongly disagree with describing it as such.
For example, dumping mercury into a major river causes extremely diffuse harm, but I'd never describe it as a "victimless crime."
In the other direction, smoking weed in private harms nobody except the smoker. The harm is so focused it doesn't even touch anyone besides the offender. Yet this is almost the canonical example of "victimless crime."
It's not about diffuse harm, it's about whether anyone was harmed at all besides the accused.
> In the other direction, smoking weed in private harms nobody except the smoker.
This is precisely the point that is contention. The entire argument for prohibiting marijuana is that this is, in fact, not the case, and that, through a number of indirect channels, people "smoking weed in private" harms others throughout society in a variety of ways.
Obviously, as I said, there is considerable disagreement about whether this is, in fact, the case, (and, also, as to whether, even if it is, prohibition mitigates or exacerbates these harms, and as to whether, in any case, prohibition is an ethically-acceptable response even if the harms exist and prohibition mitigates them.)
But it certainly is not the case that those who support prohibition generally agree that the crimes are "victimless" that those opposed to prohibition describe that way.
Lots of what I would call "victimless crimes" are outlawed because of what the proponents of criminalization see as focused harm. Prostitution, for example, is seen as either harming the prostitute, or harming the patron's family. For drugs, it's often considered that the harm is focused on the user, not diffuse.
And again, lots of crimes with diffuse harm are generally agreed on to not fall into the "victimless" category, like dumping toxic materials.
The theory goes that the drugs impact the user and since the user becomes a brain damaged criminal afterwards, society will eventually need to deal with the user's shit.
There is some truth to this for some drugs, but not even close to most.
Sure, some people hold to that diffuse harm theory. Others hold to a theory of specific harm. Others hold to a theory of no harm.
My point is just that there is no connection, as far as I can see, between crimes which some people as presenting diffuse harm, and crimes which other people see as being victimless. All combinations are not only present but common.
I think the "diffuse harm" in the case of smoking weed in private is not talking about the act of smoking and who is or is not affected by the chemicals involved, etc.
It is rather looking at the overall picture of "What are the consequences of allowing weed to be bought/sold/grown. Is there harm in it?" The whole infrastructure, not just the end user.
Sure, some people look at it that way, some people look at it other ways. I just see no link between people thinking that a crime causes diffuse harm, and people thinking that a crime is victimless.
Maybe second-order effects is a better way to describe it than 'diffuse'. Take the following:
>In the other direction, smoking weed in private harms nobody except the smoker. The harm is so focused it doesn't even touch anyone besides the offender. Yet this is almost the canonical example of "victimless crime."
It's true that this doesn't directly harm anyone. However, if the smoker is doing this 'illegally' (without a medical license, not in WA or CO, etc) and didn't grow it, he/she is participating in and supporting an illegal drug market via increased demand. If the smoker weren't participating, it would reduce the demand that drives smugglers and the horrific things in Mexico.
As far as I understand this comment, you're saying that smoking weed causes harm because it's illegal, and it's illegal because it causes harm. That's a bit... odd.
None of what you just said is an argument against "And there's no way, realistically, to do that." which many people (myself included) believe when you're talking about a systematic overhaul of the entire criminal justice system. Saying "oh well it must be done" doesn't negate the fact that practically speaking, it's impossible.
Significantly reducing the number of criminals is fairly easy without overhauling the system. Decriminalize drug use and possession. That'll cut the number of trials (or pleas) substantially all by itself, and even more so if you assume that knock-on effects will reduce crime overall, as many drug legalization proponents think it would. Other nonviolent offenses could be cut back as well. Stop putting people in prison because one of them paid the other one for sex, for example. Here in Virginia, you can potentially go to jail for a year (and, obviously, have a trial if you want it) for driving at 80MPH in a zone marked for 70MPH!
Increasing resources for holding trials is also not terribly difficult and doesn't require any sort of overhaul. It's just a problem of money, and not a big one. Just for a random example, it looks like the courts account for about 0.3% of my local county budget and about 1% of my local state budget. We could literally increase court resources by a factor of 10 with only a modest increase in taxes to fund it.
Perhaps this is another way out of our problem? We could encourage police to "solve" property crimes rather than drug crimes? In analogy to their awful drug-war asset seizures, perhaps they could get a cut of items recovered/reimbursed? I'm sure they would eventually twist such an incentive structure into something else that's awful and unconscionable, but at least in the meantime they might stop with the SWAT raids?
It's difficult (not impossible!) to directly oppose politically well-connected factions on their bread-and-butter issues. We might have more luck saying to police departments "here is another way you can have lots of money to spend" rather than "we're taking away federal support for the Drug War, which for some time has been the only way you can hire more cops and procure more equipment". The trick would be to make sure that the existing force is redirected into more benign directions, rather than simply growing to handle new activities while perpetuating the Drug War.
Unions have no necessary connection to the process.
The elected official's opponent in the following election simply runs a "JOHN SMITH IS SOFT ON CRIME, JOHN SMITH IS BAD FOR US AND OUR FAMILIES" campaign, and people who think public-sector unions are the devil will still vote for the opponent, because now you're pressing their bias (which is in favor of "tough on crime, lock 'em all up and throw away the key").
> To help close the state’s $283 million budget shortfall this year, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) plans to skip a $108 million debt payment scheduled for May.
> By missing the May payment, Walker will incur about $1.1 million in additional interest fees between 2015 and 2017. The $108 million debt will continue to live on the books; Walker’s budget proposal for 2015-2017 will pay down no more than about $18 million of the principal.
> In March last year, Walker signed a $541 million tax cut for both families and businesses. At that point, Wisconsin was facing a $1 billion budget surplus through June 2015, the Journal Sentinel reported.
So you're advocating some sort of violent overthrow? We can't just snap our fingers and remake the political system into something completely different than it is, no matter how much Lawrence Lessig wishes we could. Grim fanatical purity is good for fundraising, but it won't get any laws passed.
No, I'm advocating for politicians to make decisions that are better for society, but will cause them to not be re-elected (similar to what happened in Australia when they outlawed firearms).
So you want the whole system to be based on the assumption that human beings are good? That is every bit as realistic as the assumption that USA is identical to Australia. b^)
I agree with you, but the Port Arthur massacre happened 8 weeks into Howard's term as PM of Australia. The Howard government was in power for 10 years after that, they won four straight elections.
Their solution would probably be to conduct SWAT raids and roadblocks to find stolen property, continuing the trend of constitutionally questionable practices.
"Unsolved" is very different from "unprosecuted". The question here is why the courts are overloaded, not why there isn't additional load due to the 80% of property crimes you mention.
>> It reminds me of the CV dazzle anti-facial-recognition makeup
I had a similar thought. An app which takes the image of a target - Julian Assange say - and overlays it onto your facial image as thousands of virtual stickers. Gradually the evolutionary algorithm morphs this overlay towards your real facial image; its fitness function being fewer, more unobtrusive stickers. All the while maintaining compatibility with target facial recognition.
One day, J.A. escapes from his embassy lair. Thousands of people simultaneously appear on the streets wearing physical stickers on their faces, addressing the London panopticon: "I am SpartAssange".
Someone talking about the kinect said that most all facial recognition algorithms require the face to be level horizontally; if the face is tilted at an angle then it doesn't work. not sure if true but interesting observation.
That's really not that interesting. I work as a research scientist at a face recognition company. If you want, you can detect faces at any angle, but sometimes for speed you will only check upright faces.
it might not be interesting to you as a researcher, but to me as a participant in in a world increasingly filled with face recognition products it's worth knowing that different products will have different capabilities based on their "speed" requirements.
I am not a researcher, but I would suggest that perhaps you would find that in the case where a crowd was being parsed in realtime (looking out for somebody so we can catch them before they leave the station for example), the "speed" dial would be turned up as high as necessary, but that the video stream would be stored and the data set reprocessed at a later time with it at a better setting (so you can still say "yes she was here at x time, though we missed her")
in other words, the bandwidth of the image recognition product is not the same as the bandwidth of the video storage.
yes, highlighting what is possible is always needs to be taken into account. But again, what is possible is not the same as what happens in reality. Just because we can't rule something out, does not make it certain either.
> the "speed" dial would be turned up as high as necessary
It's possible, and probable given the situation (i.e. government, terror acts), but are there situations where this wouldn't happen in a different circumstance? Would mall security, or a marketing company operating an advertising product, have the ability, authorization, know-how, or financial incentive to do so if this wasn't a life/death situation?
Not every application of facial recognition technology will be targeted to terror suspects/bombings.
It's not just the recognition front end that is problematic. In context of the issue of mis-recognition, Aphyr's tear down of various backends [1] -- which for all we know are in use by the lettered agencies -- gives me the willies.
Humanity isn't some static thing. Cultures become dysfunctional just like familes. Sometimes they have to be changed or they will collapse. Its disingenuous to suggest 'everybody would be happy if only the cops would quit hassling me'. That's sophomoric.
It's not excellent research. All they did is create a naive NN without any feature recognition and noted that it has a high rate of false positives when presented with random imagery. Duh.
Does your criticism extend to the whole enterprise of facial recognition, or did this research somehow fail to include the secret sauce that makes it work?
It reminds me of the CV dazzle anti-facial-recognition makeup that made the rounds a while ago: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/07/makeup/3...
This definitely reinforces my belief that having humans in the loop is not only desirable but necessary. For the majority of human history minus a few years you could only be accused of a crime by another human being. I'd like to see the trend of automated "enforcement" reversed and codify into law that you MUST be accused by a human being.
If everyone is breaking so many laws that the police and courts can't keep up it doesn't mean that humanity is broken. It means that the law has gotten so far out of sync with humanity that the law is broken. People make the laws, not the other way around.