GlyphGryph posted:

Those with vested interests in the status quou will, of course, do everything they can to stoke the idea in their departments that the treatment is an unfair witch hunt no matter what the reality of the situation. So how do we go about getting those cops we could get on board with this sort of thing to jump aboard despite institutional pressures to not do so?

ActusRhesus posted:

Also re: acceptable rates of conviction...no. Quotas on verdicts will only encourage ends justify the means mentalities.

hobbesmaster posted:

Or you'll get the Japanese 99.97% or whatever conviction rate by a combination of ends justify the means and "well, this isn't a 100% sure thing so I'll drop it because an acquittal means I will have to kill myself"

FuriousxGeorge posted:

In this case...racism, politics, poverty, corruption...many factors. So do you have the numbers?

GlyphGryph posted:

We aren't legal policy experts - recognizing there is a problem and pushing to fix it are not bad things for members of the general public to do, because there are experts, presumably, who actually make a career of understanding the intricacies of complex systems like the justice system.

hobbesmaster posted:

Which of course is exactly what happened in Japan.

twodot posted:

How do you go about "pushing to fix" a problem without proposed mechanisms? You can't just demand that things become better without believing there's an effective way to make things better.

twodot posted:

How do you go about "pushing to fix" a problem without proposed mechanisms? You can't just demand that things become better without believing there's an effective way to make things better.

Lemming posted:

Someone needs to come up with a name for this very stupid argument. It comes up a lot.

twodot posted:

Ok, I guess it is physically possible to demand things become better without believing there's an effective way to make them better, but why bother to do it? No one disputes that police getting away with committing crimes is in general bad, the only thing in dispute is what should be done about it. If you're here just to say that police committing crimes is bad you aren't helping the conversation.

twodot posted:

This is not what that word means. The confounding variable here is that the police are a self selecting group, so it wouldn't be surprising to see that they do X at rates different from not self selecting groups (like black people). Also the police have people who aren't men. I'd expect your average police officer has more resources and a substantially better understanding of the legal system than your average black man, so you'd need a mechanism to tease apart how much of the discrepancy is caused by that. It also seems rude to ask for numbers, if you think those numbers are important, you should be finding them.

FuriousxGeorge posted:

Yes, I know what the word means. You listed additional variables but did not offer a differing definition. What I want the numbers for is so we can evaluate if those variables actually account for the differences or if maybe police really are getting preferential treatment. There are a lot of, "But other people are aquitted too..." So I thought maybe we should quantify that.

I haven't offered an opinion on that either way, but several people have so maybe we should see if it can be backed up. If I had to hypothesize, my guess would be that around 90% of black men charged with a crime are convicted and that significantly less police charged with a crime are convicted than that. There would likely be a similar disparity all the way down the chain, but once you get to the point where there is enough evidence to charge a major disparity needs a lot more explanation I think.

twodot posted:

Ok, I guess it is physically possible to demand things become better without believing there's an effective way to make them better, but why bother to do it? No one disputes that police getting away with committing crimes is in general bad, the only thing in dispute is what should be done about it. If you're here just to say that police committing crimes is bad you aren't helping the conversation.

ActusRhesus posted:

Ok. But from the flip side you have people who are experts (we have cops, prosecutors and PDs in this thread) and many, not necessarily you, often tell them to stfu or worse when they try to correct demonstrably false statements. You see where that also detracts from the convo, right?

Lemming posted:

people try to use that expertise as a bludgeon and mix their professional and personal opinions as a way to twist arguments and cause people to think that their opinions are fact.

ActusRhesus posted:

Again...source?

As an appellate attorney, a good chunk of my job is spent salvaging trial prosecutor errors. And those are just in the cases that despite the error still ended in a conviction. They really aren't as uncommon as you think.

ActusRhesus posted:

Ok. But from the flip side you have people who are experts (we have cops, prosecutors and PDs in this thread) and many, not necessarily you, often tell them to stfu or worse when they try to correct demonstrably false statements. You see where that also detracts from the convo, right?

Zeitgueist posted:

Since Obdicut did the work I didn't(thanks!) we do have some numbers and a source.

Could you cover the comparative general population numbers to the cop ones?

ActusRhesus posted:

That 90% number came right out of your rear end.

ActusRhesus posted:

That 90% number came right out of your rear end.

That's part of my issue with this thread. People throw around what they suspect as if it is proven fact. Also, you do realize that the fact two cases were charged does not per se mean that the strength of the evidence was the same, right?

quote:

A 2001 analysis of more than 77,000 cases in the federal system from 1991 to 1994 revealed that black and Hispanic male defendants were significantly less likely to receive substantial assistance departures than white male defendants. This disparity remained even when the data was controlled for the severity of the offense, prior criminal history, and the specific district court’s sentencing tendencies.When prosecutors did request substantial assistance departures for nonwhite male defendants, the average downward adjustment such defendants received was roughly six months less than that for white male defendants.Accordingly, departures from standard sentencing guidelines accounted for 56% of the total racial disparity in sentence lengths in the federal system from 1991-1994.

quote:

In Strickland and Cronic, the Court established “a strong presumption that counsel’s conduct falls within the wide range of reasonable professional assistance.”101 In order to overcome such a “highly deferential” standard, defendants must prove that their attorneys’ performance was “outside the wide range of professionally competent assistance.” Defendants must then prove that their attorneys’ incompetence prejudiced the outcome of their trials—in other words, that there is a “reasonable probability that the result would have been different” if the defendants had received effective counsel. Application of the Strickland standard by the U.S. federal judiciary has exacerbated the “state of crisis” in indigent defense. Very few defendants have been able to meet the Strickland standard to have their convictions invalidated due to ineffective indigent defense counsel; consequently, federal, state, and local governments have been permitted to underfund and understaff their public defense agencies. Courts have found that defendants failed to meet the Strickland standard when their defense counsel slept during portions of the trial, when counsel abused cocaine and heroin throughout the
course of the trial, and when counsel admitted that he was not prepared on the law or the facts of the case.104 In one case, an attorney in a capital murder trial was found competent even though he “consumed large amounts of alcohol each day of the trial, drank in the morning, during court recess, and throughout the evening, and was arrested during jury selection for driving to the courthouse with a .27 blood-alcohol content.”The attorney’s alcoholism was so severe that he died of the disease between the end of the trial and the date the California Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case.

quote:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder declared that “America’s indigent defense counsel systems exist in a state of crisis.”34 Most indigent defense agencies are grossly understaffed and underfunded. In 2012, more than 70% of public defender offices reported that obtaining adequate funding and providing adequate compensation for their attorneys were extremely or very challenging to the ability of their office to provide indigent defense services. An analysis of funding at both the state and federal levels indicates that effective indigent defense is not a priority in many jurisdictions in the United States. At the state and local level, 15,026 public defenders in 957 indigent defense offices handled 5,572,450 cases in 2007.36 On average, each office handled 5,823 new cases and each public defender handled 371 cases—more than one new case for each day of the year. The states spent a total of $2.3 billion on indigent defense in 2007, or $414.55 per case.

Furthermore, of the $5.9 billion in federal grants that agencies could have used for indigent defense, fully two thirds of agencies reported that they did not allocate any funding for that purpose.38 Indeed, only 54% of agencies reported that they were even aware that discretionary funds could be used for indigent defense.39 Of the agencies that did allocate grant money to indigent defense, the amount allocated for that purpose constituted only 4.7% of their total grant money allocations.

ActusRhesus posted:

I am not a JAG. However, I will agree that military justice is beyond hosed.

FuriousxGeorge posted:

But then sometimes I encounter lawyers who see me saying something like, "I guess that..." and then post as if it was some thunderbolt out of heaven that, "YOU GUESSED THAT!" and I realize there are some lawyers who would get me a death penalty for a traffic ticket. Jesus loving christ.

ActusRhesus posted:

What you just said makes no sense.

hobbesmaster posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80o1VQbtwPI

ActusRhesus posted:

No. Because as has been pointed out there are too many variables to make a direct comparison possible. Strength of evidence? Rate of local office? Some are better than others. Willingness of defendant to deal? Prior criminal history. You're taking an extremely simplistic approach to a pretty complex issue.

quote:

Ex-Bunnell cop John Murray’s trial on six felony charges ended this morning in a plea agreement as Murray pleaded no contest to a charge of possessing more than 20 grams of marijuana. Five other charges were dropped. Flagler County Circuit Judge Raul Zambrano sentenced Murray to 18 months’ probation and 50 community service hours and $1,000 in court costs. Murray will not serve jail time, but he can no longer be a police officer.
Immediately after John’s plea, his wife, Lisa, pleaded no contest to a theft charge in connection with the incident with a Bunnell merchant two years ago that triggered the state attorney’s investigation into the Bunnell Police Department and the Murrays’ conduct. The theft charge was new. Lisa Murray had originally been charged with official misconduct. That charge was dropped. She, too, will serve no jail time. Her plea agreement diverts her to a pre-trial intervention. She’ll be on probation for 12 months and pay $500 in court costs.
John Murray had faced two charges of tampering with evidence, charges of cocaine possession, Xanax possession (without a prescription) and marijuana possession, and official misconduct. At trial on Wednesday, he denied any wrong-doing, saying he took pills as pain medication but had never–as accused–been a provider of prescription pills or other drugs to Dawn Davis, an ex-live-in girlfriend. He also denied having possessed marijuana.
That last charge, his attorney, Michael Lambert said, became a problem for Murray when the prosecution showed him a document, which he had signed, establishing him as the supervisor on a marijuana case in Bunnell in 2009. Murray supervised other cops uprooting marijuana plants on the lot of an abandoned house on Stone Street, but the plants never made it to evidence at the police department. Lambert disputed the prosecution’s assumption that the plants were marijuana, but Murray himself, when being deposed by investigators subsequently, had referred to the plants as marijuana, making it difficult for the defense to sustain complete innocence. The plea, however, was a victory for the Murrays, considering the light consequences.
“The only thing we entered a plea to was the marijuana,” Lambert said after the plea this morning. “That was the one where he was the supervisor at the scene. So even if it was the other person’s responsibility, John is still responsible, because he was the supervisor. So there really was no way out of that. That’s why he said–you know, he’s not saying that he did it, but he’s saying no contest, because I can’t contest the fact that it is my responsibility to have checked that and make sure that Wolfle did it, and he didn’t do that.” Lambert was referring to Bunnell police officer Christopher Wolfle who, when questioned on the stand on Wednesday, said Murray had told him he’d take care of the plants, and not to write a report.
“With regard to all the other charges, he still said I’m not guilty, and the state concurred by dismissing them all,” Lambert said.

“That was the most important thing for us is that we wanted to make sure that they can never be police officers again,” Assistant State Attorney Jason Lewis said, which means they have to relinquish their certification as law enforcement officers. (John Murray’s had expired.) “We’re very pleased with the investigation that we were able to successfully get their certification to make sure that they didn’t cause any more problems or influence people or do things wrong again.”
Lewis said that the plea agreement won’t lead to future charges against other people who may have been related to the Murray cases or the state attorney’s investigation into the Bunnell Police Department and the conduct of then-Bunnell Commissioner Jimmy Flynt. Flynt had been at at the center of allegations of favoritism, with the Murrays steering business to his wrecker operation. The theft charge against Lisa Murray was the result of her taking $165 from a Bunnell merchant on behalf of Flynt, outside her prescribed duties as a police officer.
Flynt, who had sat outside the courtroom all day in the first day of trial earlier this week, was never called to the stand. A friend of the Murrays’, Flynt was not in court this morning, suggesting that he already knew that a plea agreement had been worked out. Last summer the state Ethics Commission found him in violation of ethics rules on three counts–again in connection with favoritism issues within the city–in a case brought against him by Bunnell City Commissioner Elbert Tucker.

quote:

Shoddy and inexplicable police work, a running theme through a recent investigation of the Bunnell Police Department and its aftershocks, is catching up to the department–to the benefit of two of its former police officers facing felony charges.
Last June, John and Lisa Murray, a married couple and former cops at the Bunnell Police Department, were arrested and charged with official misconduct, tampering or fabricating evidence, and cocaine possession (for John) and two counts of official misconduct (for Lisa). They’d both been suspended in April. Subsequently, John Murray also faced a grand theft charge when money was found to be missing from the evidence room. Murray was the evidence room’s custodian.

quote:

John and Lisa Murray were arrested on June 16. John, the second in command at the Bunnell Police Department, had been in that department for eight years. He was charged with four felonies–official misconduct, crack cocaine possession,tampering with evidence and grand theft related to the withholding of $1,380 confiscated from a suspect. Lisa Murray was with the department two years. She was charged with two counts of official misconduct. Their arrests were the latest in a string of scandals–including firings, rehirings and suits–that have wracked the Bunnell Police Department with little let-up for a decade.

Those charges stemmed in part from her intervention on behalf of Bunnell City Commissioner Jimmy Flynt during a confrontation between Flynt and a man whom Flynt said owed him money. A State Attorney’s investigation showed that Murray forced the man to pay Flynt or face arrest. That confrontation was the starting point of a long investigation that showed the Murrays and the Bunnell Police Department involved in a series of irregularities, intimidation tactics and favoritism that benefited Flynt and his towing service.

GlyphGryph posted:

Are you dumb? Has anyone anywhere ever in this thread said they do not believe there's an effective way to make things better? Obviously there are ways to make things better, or there wouldn't be departments that are better than others, which it very much seems like there are?

Lemming posted:

Are you kidding me? This is not true at all. There are people who think that the cop who shot Walter Scott did nothing wrong.

quote:

People who are chiming in that they think the situation is hosed up is absolutely an important part of the conversation. Plenty of people are just fine with the status quo.

quote:

And the entire point of noticing the problem is to create the push for the desire to solve it, but just because you aren't an expert in lawyering or copping or legislating doesn't mean you shouldn't get to contribute to the conversation. Saying "shut the gently caress up if you don't have a solution" is 100% a way to shut down conversation. If the person doesn't have the perfect solution, then they're either told to shut the gently caress up because they don't have an idea, or to shut the gently caress up because their idea is stupid. Not everyone is going to be an expert and able to meaningfully contribute to a useful solution, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to say they think something is bad and should be changed.

twodot posted:

I said everyone agrees that police committing crimes is bad. Whether or not shooting a particular person was a crime is a distinct issue both from that and from the discussion on how we can improve society.

ozmunkeh posted:

The police suddenly forget their training and make oopsies when collecting evidence against other cops. Like prosecutor oopsies, this is in no way an institutional problem, it's just that sometimes people make mistakes overwhelmingly when police commit crimes. Do not disparage the process, citizen.

quote:

In 2003, the Center for Public Integrity looked at more than 11,000 cases involving misconduct since 1970. Among those, the center found a little over 2,012 instances in which an appeals court found the misconduct material to the conviction and overturned it. Less than 50 cases resulted in any professional sanction for the prosecutor.

In 2010, USA Today published a six-month investigation of 201 cases involving misconduct by federal prosecutors. Of those, only one prosecutor "was barred even temporarily from practicing law for misconduct." The Justice Department wouldn't even tell the paper which case it was, citing concern for the prosecutor's privacy.

A 2006 review in the Yale Law Journal concluded that "[a] prosecutor's violation of the obligation to disclose favorable evidence accounts for more miscarriages of justice than any other type of malpractice, but is rarely sanctioned by courts, and almost never by disciplinary bodies."

An Innocence Project study of 75 DNA exonerations -- that is, cases where the defendant was later found to be unquestionably innocent -- found that prosecutorial misconduct factored into just under half of those wrongful convictions. According to a spokesman for the organization, none of the prosecutors in those cases faced any serious professional sanction.

A 2009 study (PDF) by the Northern California Innocence Project found 707 cases in which appeals courts had found prosecutor misconduct in the state between 1997 and 2009. But of the 4,741 attorneys the state bar disciplined over that period, just 10 were prosecutors. The study also found 67 prosecutors whom appeals courts had cited for multiple infractions. Only six were ever disciplined.

Most recently, in April, ProPublica published an investigation of 30 cases in New York City in which prosecutor misconduct had caused a conviction to be overturned. Only one prosecutor was significantly disciplined.

twodot posted:

Lemming posted:

The crux of your argument is that everyone agrees that the police have issues and that if you don't have a solution you should shut the gently caress up. What you fundamentally don't understand is that the first half of the situation, i.e. "the police have issues," is again, emphatically not something that everyone agrees on. Without people acknowledging that the police have issues, there can be no push for reform. It is a very important thing to talk about current problems and how people feel about them. Without that in place, even if you have the perfect solution handed down by Xenu himself it won't matter for poo poo because nobody will care enough to do it.

quote:

Talking about the current problems is important. Talking about potential solutions is important. It is not a requirement to have a solution for you to be allowed to speak.

GlyphGryph posted:

Ah. I see. You are the one who doesn't believe it's possible for things to get better (because its due to the mixing of the races), and you're projecting. You at least admit there's a serious problem though, right?

Zeitgueist posted:

Amazingly, it turns out data seems to be backing me up here despite me not giving a poo poo at all. Because gently caress the police.

twodot posted:

Quote the poster who thinks the police are free from all problems, that police officers never get away with crimes. Everyone agrees that this is happens some of the time. There seems to be a qualitative disagreement about the frequency, which must be the case since there's no numbers available to drive agreement, but that doesn't matter because as long as we agree it happens some of the time, we can talk about solutions.

Obviously I can't bend the laws of physics to stop people from talking about things, but why is it important? "Police sometimes commit crimes and are not punished for it, and that is bad." What value did that statement generate? It's obvious why solutions are useful, solutions solve problems, I've yet to see any reason why it's useful to read a bunch of people saying "X is bad, and we have no way to make it not bad".

hobbesmaster posted:

Or you'll get the Japanese 99.97% or whatever conviction rate by a combination of ends justify the means and "well, this isn't a 100% sure thing so I'll drop it because an acquittal means I will have to kill myself"