My theory is that many police investigations start by identifying a suspect and then work backwards to make the available evidence fit whomever they identified.

Indeed: "Hurricane" Syndrome. But what does Fred Thompson say about all this?

I can relate to that. In 1974 I witnessed a man shooting a woman in the face, point blank, no more than 8 feet away from me. My view was clear and unobstructed. The spent shell rolled right up against my shoe and I looked at that as he ran off.

This was in a post office (really) and I spent the next 3 or 4 hours being grilled by postal inspectors who wanted to know what I saw. I could tell them the man's race and repeat the last words from the woman before she was shot, but that was it. I simply couldn't remember anything in the way of details, and had they forced me to look at pictures or a line-up I could have picked out anyone.

When they finally let me leave I went home to my apartment and played Gimme Shelter about a hundred times or so.

What does Fred Thompson say about all this?

Is this SOB guilty?
Jack: Yes.

Can you prove it?
Jack: I think so.

Then my advice -- get a new suit and enjoy.

I testified as a secondary witness once in an armed robbery trial. (Saw three black youths rifling through a backpack and one had a gun) I could "identify" the guy who flashed the gun but the other two could have been just about any medium complexion, medium build 16-24 year old black guy with a fade. They were thrity feet away standing under a lightpole.

Congress should pass a Bring Home the Troops appropriation bill, not an Iraq War appropriation bill

Instead of sending Bush any form of Iraq War appropriation bill, Congress should send him a nice fat "Bring Home the Troops" appropriation bill. Give him no money at all for the war, and as much money as is needed to protect the troops and get them out of there.

The "abandoning our troops on the battlefield" accusation is lying bullshit, and appropriating money to get them off the battlefield would show that

Would have to agree with "dr sardonicus" and also add that when such a crime is committed the prevailing mode in the community is that someone (or anyone) must pay for the crime.

It would be interesting to see interviews with the victims of these crimes to see what they think about these men being release. Do they worry that the wrong man was convicted, do they want the real criminal arrested, or have they "moved on" in their lives.

Hate to keep going on this but what happens to the prosecutors who convict these men. Are they denigrated the same way as Nifong was with the Duke arrests? A lot of them fight fight DNA requests when they come up.

We lived next door to an assistant county prosecutor who put petty criminals away every day. She was mugged at an ATM and gained a whole new appreciation for the victims she had previously been impatient with for not remembering details of something so monumental. Turns out, as she realized, it does "happen so fast..."

Anybody who pays attention to human behavior at all knows eyewitness testimony is next to useless, and not just for identifying strangers. People just don't remember things as well as they think they do. Of course, when I made the mistake of mentioning this in one of the Terry Schivao threads here, in regards to the value of testimony pertaining to conversations which had taken place years previously, I was met with the usual good cheer.

Any judge or jury who would convict or largely base his or her decision based upon this type of evidence is deluded.

Yeah, you're right that Arthur Branch AKA Fred Thompson has never wrongfully persecuted a person accused of attacking a victim of a different color. That's what makes him such a strong candidate for President of the United States.

Here's how to fix this problem. Thompson should be elected President, and he should run with a vice president that understand the importance of alternative transportation and energy. Monorail Cat obviously fits the bill. Jack McCoy would be a perfect fit for Attorney General. Jack McCoy would NEVER prosecute the wrong person. Just look at his case record. He could really turn around DOJ. Tired of Goodling? Jack could bring back in Clair Kincaid! Think about it. It makes sense. And if it doesn't work we can always go for a mid-season replacement during the summer.

The fallibilty of eyewitness testimony is nothing new. It's a point that was made over and over by Erle Stanley Gardner, writer of the Perry Mason mysteries. Bad eye-witness testimony came up in many of his myteries.

Gardner organized a group called the Court of Last Resort, which did investigations and got a number of innocent prisoners released. With DNA evidence, that group could have done a lot more.

I saw Tenet argue in an interview it was worth rounding up (and imprisoning forever) one wrong (innocent) suspect in sweeps for terrorists in Afghanistan if nine actual guilty people were caught in the same roundup. Citizens don't realize law enforcement stateside uses the same approach.

If the idiotic War on Drugs could be ended there would be a helluva lot more money to spend on public defender's offices, and running prisons as lawful environments.

Not quite like Law & Order.

Do you watch the show? They portray eyewitness misidentification all the time.

Kevin,

Thanks for posting about this topic. I've been following the case of Jimmy Dennis for a while, he's on death row in PA. His conviction was largely based on eyewitness identification by three people who also happen to give wildly different estimates for the perpetrator's height, weight, and skin color than Mr. Dennis. The defense failed to call other eyewitnesses who said it definitely wasn't him or who picked someone else from the lineup. All the jury heard was the eyewitnesses who picked him.
www.jimmydennis.net
www.jimmydennis.org

Kevin, this is a good news story. DNA is being used to exonerate blacks who are wrongly convicted. Why are you trying to spin it negatively?

If the idiotic War on Drugs could be ended there would be a helluva lot more money to spend on public defender's offices, and running prisons as lawful environments.

Totally agree with you on that point, Will Allen.

Right Al. Blacks should be grateful to only spent 20 years in prison before being exonerated.

Hate to keep going on this but what happens to the prosecutors who convict these men. Are they denigrated the same way as Nifong was with the Duke arrests? A lot of them fight fight DNA requests when they come up.

I know of one prosecutor who is taking great pains to right the wrongs of the past, committed by her predecessor(s): St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce. She reopened the case against Larry Griffin who was executed in 1995, and saw that he was cleared of the murder charge he was executed for. She has opened other cases for reinvestigations as well.

Why the negative spin?

Cause they should not have been in the G-d-mn prison in the first place. Years of their life in jail, gone. And hmm... it just happens to happen to black guys more... is is co-incidence, or is there some racial subtext going on?

Kevin, since when are you an evil misogynistic fuck?

Amanda, Sheelzebub, and Ilyka assure me on a daily basis that false accusations are almost non-existence in rape.

Wendy Murphy, says: "I never, ever met a false rape claim, by the way. My own statistics speak to the truth."

So stop with the evil misogyny Kevin, or else we'll have to bend your cute little blog over a table and get all patriarchal rapist on it.

If you're interested in learning more about this topic and the many ways in which the use of eyewitness identification evidence could be reformed, check out Eyewitness Identification Reform Blog at http://eyeid.blogspot.com/

Via Glenn Sacks

Two Louisiana Men in Angola Prison in Louisiana Have Spent 35 Years in Solitary Confinement

In Life in Solitary Confinement: 12,775 Days Alone (AlterNet, 4/17/07), Brooke Shelby Biggs details the cases of two Louisiana men who have spent the past 35 years in solitary confinement at Angola prison, perhaps on false, politically-motivated charges. Biggs writes:

"Around midday today, Central Time, two men in Angola Prison in Louisiana will quietly mark the moment, 35 years ago exactly, when the bars of solitary confinement cells closed behind them. They will likely spend the moment in their 6 by 9 concrete cells reading, or writing letters to their hundreds of supporters around the world. And most of America and the rest of the world will still have never heard of them, or that in the United States of America, it is still possible to spend a life sentence in solitary confinement without interruption and without any real means of appeal. Americans shamefully imagine such things happen offshore in places like Guantanamo, or in totalitarian countries half a world away. Not here, though. Certainly not here."

1. To feed the obnoxious troll immediately upthread, the argument feminists make is that the overwhelming majority of rape victims who report their crimes are, in fact, reporting a crime. They were raped. That's not the same thing as correctly identifying their attacker, which they very well may get wrong, especially in the unusual case where the attacker was a complete stranger.

2. One thing we need to repeat over and over and over: if you lock up the wrong guy, the right one of necessity skates. There is more to this than fuzzy-headed sympathy for criminals. Punishment doesn't work if it's routinely applied to not-guilty people. If we want to punish the bad guys, we need to make sure we catch 'em. Can't be tough on people who haven't been convicted, can you?

Years ago they would try people by dunking them in water to see if they'd float. I'm not convinced that it'd be a worse system than the way we do it now.

when I made the mistake of mentioning this in one of the Terry Schivao threads here, in regards to the value of testimony pertaining to conversations which had taken place years previously, I was met with the usual good cheer.

I remember those threads. That was the topic that prompted me to comment the first time.

A small quibble - while both memories are suspect, they are suspect for different reasons. Memories of conversations with a friend or loved one are not formed in the presence of stress hormones or the fight-or-flight autonomic response. Memory was a long time ago in my academic career, but I am pretty sure the two types of memories form using differing mechanisms.

i was a bit puzzled by the description of the innocence project as a "liberal" organization. perhaps its members are liberal, but i would think its goal of finding justice through the use of dna should be a universal one. as karen noted earlier, putting the wrong guy/girl behind bars doesn't do anyone any good..

`

Ah, Kevin.

Typical Drum. Knee-jerk assumption that those of different ethnic backgrounds MUST be innocent.

Yep, can't trust that old eyecite, eh, Kevy ol chum? Law has worked for over two hundred years without DNA, know all of a sudden we need to pull scientists into the courtrooms for validation.

Just one more example of liberals trying to foist their secularist world vie on the rest of us.

Another good book on this subject from Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen is called "Surviving Justice," and is based on interviews with a wide variety of inmates who were unjustly accused, convicted, and sent away to prison, some for decades. It's mostly black men, but it can happen to anyone. One big reason: an interrogation method based on "The Reid Manual" that empowers police to extract "confessions" with tactics that intimidate most people, especially innocent people unaccustomed to dealing with the police.

Posted by: Karen
One thing we need to repeat over and over and over: if you lock up the wrong guy, the right one of necessity skates. There is more to this than fuzzy-headed sympathy for criminals. Punishment doesn't work if it's routinely applied to not-guilty people.

The assumption here is that the purpose of the justice system is only to punish the guilty, which isn't my take on the justice system. It's partly that, true, but it's also a device society uses for purposes wholly unrelated to justice. The Geronimo Pratt case, which Kevin referred to above, is a perfect example of that. Where I grew up (the "ghetto," at a time shortly after the Black Power movement) people understood exactly why police cars were always cruising around, and they knew it was only partially related to crime control.

Another role the justice system plays is as a cathartic outlet for sadists and the chronically angry -- the kind of people who hold vigils during executions carrying signs saying "Burn, burn, burn" and so on. These people don't care about guilt or innocence; they just want a target for their darker selves, an excuse to let their ugliness out and not look too much like what they are. The criminal justice system is about a lot more than justice and guilt and innocence.

1. To feed the obnoxious troll immediately upthread, the argument feminists make is that the overwhelming majority of rape victims who report their crimes are, in fact, reporting a crime. They were raped.

Wendy Murphy, says: "I never, ever met a false rape claim, by the way. My own statistics speak to the truth."

One of these things is not like the other.

Let me just add:

Sometimes the figure is attributed to a particular source ? but that's still no guarantee the numbers can't be challenged. Marcia L. Roth, the author of the 1996 op-ed article in the Louisville Courier-Journal, attributed the 2 percent rate to the 1993 book Rape, the Misunderstood Crime, by Julie Allison and Lawrence Wrightsman. But Allison and Wrightsman weren't so unequivocal. Noting that the frequency of false rape reports is difficult to assess, they didn't do their own study; instead they looked at a synthesis of research findings from a 1979 book, Understanding the Rape Victim, by Sedelle Katz and Mary Ann Mazur. Katz and Mazur, it turns out, had reviewed studies dating back to 1956 that showed the frequency of unfounded and false rape reports ranging from a low of 1 percent to a high of 25 percent. Allison and Wrightsman simply chose the study that showed 2 percent.

But the FBI has been saying since 1991 that the annual rate for the false reporting of forcible sexual assault across the country has been a consistent 8 percent (through 1995, the most recent year available). That's four times higher than the average of the false-reporting rates of the other crimes tracked by the FBI in its Uniform Crime Report. The agency's guidelines define a report as false when an investigation determines that no offense occurred. A complainant's failure or refusal to cooperate in the investigation does not, by itself, lead to a finding of false report.

If you look to academe for such studies about false reports, you'll come across the unusually high percentage found by the Purdue University sociologist Eugene J. Kanin, now retired. In an examination of rape reports from 1978 to 1987 in an unnamed midwestern city of 70,000, he found that of the 109 rapes reported to the police, 45, or 41 percent, were subsequently classified as false. Kanin also got the police records of two unnamed large state universities and found that in three years, 50 percent of the 64 rapes reported to campus police were determined to be false.

Blur Girl, Red State (aka G.C.): "Turns out, as she realized, it does 'happen so fast...'"

Not only yhat, but in those instances where there are multiple witnesses to the same suuden occurence, you can count on most everyone to have seen it differently than the rest -- the "Rashomon" effect, one attorney friend calls it.

When I was back in Pasadena visiting my mother about five years ago, I was one of about five witnesses to the same violent car accident at a busy intersection, which left one victim with crushed legs and brain injury. It turns out not one of us could agree or even say with any certainty if he was going straight or changing lanes to pass a car making a left turn when he entered that intersection and was broadsided.

"Blur Girl" - You don't know it, but your typo is soooo appropriate right now. I have been fighting a migrainse since three a.m. and took a couple of fioricet about thirty minutes ago.

On a serious note - What you said is so true. I have been one of the first on the scene and witnessed the cacophony and surreal, disconnected nature of the aftermath of a trauma first hand.

Actually there are plenty of studies that show that false rape accusations happen any where from 8% to 20% to 40% to even 60%. There are lots of PROSECUTORS or former prosecutors who say their guess is that false accusations are around 40-60%.

Feminists bloggers don't make the argument that they are rare and that the majority of women that report rape had a crime occur to them. An argument takes the form of two parties.

Feminists state as fact their demand that occurrence is so low that they do not need to worry about the falsely accused, then they say that what the falsely accused go through is in no way as bad as a real rape is (in fact Pandagon's Official Position (ala Sheelze and Amanda) is that the false accusations for the Duke Students were a positive learning experience for them and they should thank women for providing them with that.)

Then the feminists cry victim and badger anyone that speaks up to defend the falsely accused. They say that people that do that are trolls or misogynists or rapists or racists or wife beaters.

On their own blogs they delete comments and alter comments and misrepresent comments and misrepresent facts and ban commenters and call people that disagree with them evil and all of the above and mock them. I usually see that sort of bullshit at the right wing blogs. Apart from feminist blogs I can't think of a single other left wing blogger that has such a crappy commenting policy. But the feminists do this because they need to create a safe environment for women. (Feminist blog "Alas a blog" run by Pornographer Barry Deutsch even goes so far as to have comment threads where you have to check to affirm you are a feminist!)

It's pretty neat really. And then they complain that no one links to them.

Oh, actually it's Samhita at feministing that says it was a positive learning experience for the duke students.

http://feministing.com/archives/006859.html

Sheelze at Pandagon says only that online harassment of women is WORSE than what the Duke students went through.

http://www.advicegoddess.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=3915

(ht Amy Alkon)

Kevin, instead of blogging non-reality based Samhita and Sheelze and Amanda, why not blogroll Amy Alkon, (syndicated advice columnist, journalist and blogger), or Cathy Young, journalist, columnist, blogger at Reason?

I not only don't link to them, I don't read them. I have a minor in Women's Studies (I honest-to-Pete ended up with it by accident. Hand on an original first edition vinyl of Zappa's Joes Garage). But I also have a son.

eyewitness testimony is close to useless.

You know what else is useless? Judging the quality of a presidential candidate by whether you'd like to have a beer with him.

Studies of human perception show that while we think we are 100 percent aware of what is going on around us, at best its only 10 to 15 percent. The rest is just wall paper the brain generates to fill up the rest of the display. The logical consequence is that of course a lot eyewitness testimony is seriously compromised.

Of course the Innocence Project is liberal – the conservative Justice Scalia argued that whether you are innocent or not is irrelevant, as long as you received what he regarded as a fair trial.

Blurred Girl: " have been fighting a migrainse since three a.m. and took a couple of fioricet about thirty minutes ago."

Ouch. Hope you feel better. Doesn't sitting in front of a computer screen aggravate your headache? I can't stand looking at a monitor when I feel like that.

I used to get migraines when I was younger, and I'd be nauseous. I very rarely get one anymore -- about one every two years. I then have to lay still in a darkened room in order to feel relief.

I have no choice - I'm in the online classroom.

I have a nice flatscreen - I just enlarge the font and turn the contrast way down.

Of course the Innocence Project is liberal – the conservative Justice Scalia argued that whether you are innocent or not is irrelevant, as long as you received what he regarded as a fair trial.

For better or worse (I think worse) Isn't that actually the position of our entire justice system? You aren't guaranteed truth or fairness, but only "due process." It's why appeals are about mistakes and only rarely if ever about new facts, and one reason why precedent and "stare decisis" are given such high weights.

IANAL of course, so wtf do I know? Probably not much.

The last really horrible one I had was three years ago, and it lasted five days. It was mothers day weekend and i didn't take meds at the first sign, because my kids were all home and I didn't want to be a chemistry experiment.

I will never make that mistake again. I medicate early and medicate often when it starts. I have no qualms about enjoying the buzz, either.

Blur Gal, I've been getting migraines for about several years now. I visited an optometrist for the first time ever about four months ago, and he gave me better information about migraines than my primary MD.

He says that if you can sense one coming on (to me I see the aura and if I don't eat something and medicate by the time the aura goes away, I am in deep deep shit) that if you don't have medication nearby, you can drink a highly caffeinated energy drink. He says the caffeine has the same effect of widening the blood vessels in ur head as the meds do.

I hate migraines, apart from the pain of it all, it completely lays me out for 24-72 hours before I can begin to function again.

But when I have one, there is no way I can look at a computer screen. It's the dark room flat on my back thing for me too.

Biology and MDs are weird things.

According to wikipedia, Fioricet contains caffeine a vasodilator, because constricting blood vessels are thought to cause a lot of pain.

What I take is Amidrine which contains Isometheptene is a vasoconstrictor, a drug that causes constriction (narrowing) of cerebral blood vessels.

The pathophysiology of vascular headaches, especially migraine, is thought to be related to dilation of these cerebral blood vessels, so drugs that act to constrict them are used in the treatment of these problems. (according to wikiality)

You say vasoconstrictor, I say vasodilator, you take fioricet, I take amidrine, constrictor, dilator, fioricet, amidrine, let's call the whole thing off.

Migraines suck.

I saw Tenet argue in an interview it was worth rounding up (and imprisoning forever) one wrong (innocent) suspect in sweeps for terrorists in Afghanistan if nine actual guilty people were caught in the same roundup. Citizens don't realize law enforcement stateside uses the same approach.

Good god, I'd be fricking ecstatic if our civilian justice system -- not to mention Gitmo -- had a failure rate of only 10%.

The follow-up question should have been does he think it is worth it if 9 innocents are kept in a box indefinitely for every 1 actual guilty person.

Jerry - That one three years ago, I went through five meds, amidrine was one of them. Fioricet was a Hail Mary before I went in for a compazine drip, and it worked. I keep four of them and two maxalt sublinguals - and a couple of granola bars - in my backpack at all times. I am not getting caught flat-footed and ending up miserable again.

I caught this one in time that I am not really miserable, I'm more buzzed and fuzzy than in pain. Mishearing thing that my husband says and giggling uncontrollably. He is telling me that this is more fun for me than for him...

Everyone Knows It's Mandy: "Actually there are plenty of studies that show that false rape accusations happen any where from 8% to 20% to 40% to even 60%. There are lots of PROSECUTORS or former prosecutors who say their guess is that false accusations are around 40-60%."

Those sound like really reputable studies there, Mandy. Care to cite your sources, or are those anecdotes just on your part, and you decided to pass them on?

As for your latter claim that prosecutors guess that false accusations constitute 40-60% of rape cases, I would also ask you for your source. I worked as Chief Clerk for the State Senate Judiciary Committee, and we never ran across such statistics. Rather, it would be my contention that it's just the opposite, that rape is one of the most under-reported crimes.

That's not to say deliberately false accusations don't happen on occasion, when they most certinly do. As a matter of coincidence, we currently have one high-profile case in Honolulu. HPD and prosecutors are now contemplating charging the woman with filing a false report.

Frankly, one false report is one too many, as far as I'm concerned, and the authorities should rightly throw the book at this woman if she did that merely to avenge herself on an ex-boyfriend.

But getting back to your contentions, please cite your sources when offering these kind of specific statistics with such veracity, if for no other reason than to preclude natural skeptics like me from dismissing you as merely another egbert or Al, i.e., an angry crackpot to whom facts mean nothing. You're probably far too nice a person to be lumped together with those two fools.

Aloha.

Buzzed Girl, Red-Eyed State, I hope you feel better. Any kind of headache is a drag, but migraines are truly a special place in Hell for those afflicted.

And jerry, thanks for the info about the gratuitous use of caffeine to counteract such occurences. Next time, I'll have to remember to break out the Red Bull -- perhaps that's why the stuff tastes vaguely like Robitussin?

'night, all.

http://www.mediaradar.org/research_on_false_rape_allegations.php

Prosecutors:

* Linda Fairstein, former head of the New York County District Attorney's Sex Crimes Unit, noted, “There are about 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about half simply did not happen. ... It's my job to bring justice to the man who has been falsely accused by a woman who has a grudge against him, just as it's my job to prosecute the real thing.�1
* Former Colorado prosecutor Craig Silverman revealed, “For 16 years, I was a kick-ass prosecutor who made most of my reputation vigorously prosecuting rapists. ... I was amazed to see all the false rape allegations that were made to the Denver Police Department. ... A command officer in the Denver Police sex assaults unit recently told me he placed the false rape numbers at approximately 45%.�2

I am curious Donald why you would say right off the bat that the studies are probably not reliable.

Who knows. I can cite the sources, but unless you're really a scientist that has read the actual study and understands the context, who is to know if any of these studies are valid, including the one often used by feminists to claim the rate is just 2%?

However, googling false allegations prosecutors gets you to the link above, and that page also says:

* A review of 556 rape accusations filed against Air Force personnel found that 27% of women later recanted. Then 25 criteria were developed based on the profile of those women, and then submitted to three independent reviewers to review the remaining cases. If all three reviewers deemed the allegation was false, it was categorized as false. As a result, 60% of all allegations were found to be false.3 Of those women who later recanted, many didn't admit the allegation was false until just before taking a polygraph test. Others admitted it was false only after having failed a polygraph test.4
* In a nine-year study of 109 rapes reported to the police in a Midwestern city, Purdue sociologist Eugene J. Kanin reported that in 41% of the cases the complainants eventually admitted that no rape had occurred.5
* In a follow-up study of rape claims filed over a three-year period at two large Midwestern universities, Kanin found that of 64 rape cases, 50% turned out to be false.6 Among the false charges, 53% of the women admitted they filed the false claim as an alibi.7
* According to a 1996 Department of Justice report, “in about 25% of the sexual assault cases referred to the FBI, ... the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing.8 It should be noted that rape involves a forcible and non-consensual act, and a DNA match alone does not prove that rape occurred. So the 25% figure substantially underestimates the true extent of false allegations.

I think a lot of these studies first came to light in various Warren Farrell books. Warren Farrell served in the early 70s on the board of the "New York chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Within a few years, he left NOW, frustrated with what he saw as their female exclusiveness and disregard for men's issues."

The page linked above includes footnotes for each of these points.

Please, I encourage you to examine the originals and tell me if the studies and quotations are reliable or not.

I encourage EVERYONE to look into this issue. Feminist bloggers and various feminists keep saying that the rate is so low as to be ignorable. Other people say the rate is alarmingly high.

I encourage EVERYONE to discuss this and blog about it, and encourage research and discussion on the issue.

"...it was worth rounding up (and imprisoning forever) one wrong (innocent) suspect in sweeps for terrorists in Afghanistan if nine actual guilty people were caught.."

And of course, we'll be lucky if get one bad guy for every nine innocents we are turning into terrorists.

Thos whole experience may have taught Americans one hard fact: Republicans can't do math. They do emotions masquerading as order. All very Old Testament, I'm afraid. And they want me afraid. No thanks, assholes.

Yeah, I'm taking to you, egbert, you pea-brained jackass.

It is perfectly possible that rape is more underreported than other crimes, while rape accusations contain a higher rate of false accusation than other crimes.

On the innocent falsely accused topic, The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris (music by Phillip Glass) is an excellent depiction. Randall Dale Adams was convicted of the murder of a police officer in Tx. by on the testimony of another criminal with a grudge, a very petty grudge.
The Tx. Supreme Court refused to overturn the conviction, but the US Supreme Court ordered a new trial. Adams was released; without the film, he would have served more than the 14 years he did.

It's fascinating to see conservatrolls claiming that receiving a fair trial based on the best possible evidence is somehow a "liberal" ideal. This vivdly demonstrates just how deeply "conservativism" in this country (scare quotes because I don't consider "Rovism" to be true conservatism at all) has fallen into a moral and intellectual cesspool.

* According to a 1996 Department of Justice report, “in about 25% of the sexual assault cases referred to the FBI, ... the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing.8 It should be noted that rape involves a forcible and non-consensual act, and a DNA match alone does not prove that rape occurred. So the 25% figure substantially underestimates the true extent of false allegations.

Uh, the 1996 report above doesn't say that rape didn't occur, it says merely that the primary suspect didn't commit the rape, i.e. that someone else may actually have been responsible.

I blame the District Attorneys for prosecuting innocent people. Often times the DA's know the evidence is circumspect but use it anyway because they know they will obtain conviction, which is all they care about in order to advance their political careers. DA's care not about justice, they only care about being perceived as tough on crime and criminials.

It's fascinating to see conservatrolls claiming that receiving a fair trial based on the best possible evidence is somehow a "liberal" ideal.

From the Court of Star Chamber to Guatanamo Bay, conservatives have been demonstrating for centuries their opposition to such an ideal, so I don't find it really "fascinating", so much as a bare minimum contact with reality.

I believe that using conviction rates as general measure of effectiveness of DAs leads to things like these.

What I would like to see measure that looks at other things like acquittal rates, cases prosecuted and not prosecuted, appeals lost etc.

The tendency to focus on just conivtion and not rewarding DAas for refusing to prosecute dodgy cases should be discouraged.

I wish to god that the idiots out there could understand that there's a difference between a false accusation and a mistaken identification. Those are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.

What our pseudonymous little pal is saying is that Jennifer Thompson not only misidentified her attacker, but is a liar who was never raped at all. I'm surprised he's not trying to claim that Deanna Ogg isn't really dead. After all, if Roy Criner wasn't the one who raped and murdered her, then she didn't die at all, right?

mhr is my favorite insane codger.

Food for thought. what if every newborn had a DNA run on the umbilical blood and the result stored on a data bank. ( relax ACLU, it is not about to happen.) imagine what that would do to our criminal justice system.

In my experience, cops and prosecutors use eyewitnesses to find verifiable facts, rather than for a necessarily subjective narrative. I've witnessed a couple crimes, so I'm acutely aware of how unreliable eyewitnesses can be.

But I've also seen investigators get a detail from a witness, e.g., that after the confrontation the guy went this way, and the woman chased him, which adds to a narrative that the witness couldn't possibly know.

DNA evidence is like that. If a woman testifies that she was raped by one man, and the DNA evidence says it was NOT the guy convicted, that's a misidentification, not a false charge that a crime was committed.

It also means SOMEBODY got away with it. I'm sympathetic to cops, especially detectives who work cases routinely that are just heartbreakingly brutal, and messy -- the vast majority of folks who are even accused of violent crimes are very bad people, even when the evidence that cops have to work is contradictory and sparse. No sensible person wants the COPS to start with a presumption of innocence, or they'd never arrest anybody.

The purpose of the criminal justice system is TO PROTECT US. There is nothing 'sadistic' about that, and anybody who says there is, as some knucklehead did upthread, has obviously never seen real sadism up close enough to smell it.

A lighter note, though -- true eyewitness crime story: I pulled up to a stop sign once, and saw a man on a woman's back at the far corner, a real arm waving struggle, obviously NOT in fun, very serious stuff. I had this sudden shock of a moment -- what do I do? Do I get out of the car, run over? It really did take just a second -- a LOONG second -- and then the guy was off of her back, and stepping away warily, his hands in front of him, while she whirled and glared at him, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. While I watched, still not sure what to do, he seemed to make a decision, and started to move away from her quickly -- while she went after him.

I realized that I knew where I could find a cop within a block, so I stepped on the gas and zoomed over, told 'em where this had happened and the direction it was going. I parked my car -- and then thought, hell, now I want to KNOW what was going on. I could see, a few blocks away, where several police cars had converged.

I went to the local police station on what was not entirely a pretext that I might be a useful witness who should make a statement. I was working in politics at the time, but I had only recently been a reporter, so I was gabbing with the cops there and being VERY careful about saying only precisely what I had seen: which was an assault by a man on a woman, after which he fled and she pursued.

During the time the actual investigators were doing their work, I shot the breeze with a couple cops, one of whom told me he was very familiar with the area where all this happened -- because he had once been a hostage there.

So we had this great little story in the interval, which had started in the same block: this cop had literally walked in on an armed robbery. The thief held a gun on him, demanded his weapon, and said: "You're coming with me, you're my hostage."

Handing over his weapon, which had to be unsnapped, the cop showed me how he simply turned on the radio on his belt to send, but not receive sound. So off he went with the thief, 'escaping on foot', with the guy behind him hiding the gun, as if they were walking a few feet apart.

But since the cop was ahead of the thief holding him hostage, he had to keep asking directions: "Okay, you want me to take a left on First? Cross this bridge, go down the embankment to the railroad tracks? Okay..."

Great story.

Then the captain came in, and of course he immediately realized that what interested me more than making a factual statement as the witness to a crime, was finding out what the hell had happened. So he asked me, let's see how accurate you can be, as an observer: what did you see?

I told him.

He said, okay, I was the first investigator on the scene, after the call from the beauty shop. This is what I saw: about 20 feet in front of the door, there were a series of long-stem roses, some scattered in ones and twos, a few clumped together, and broken in the middle. Just outside the door, there was the box they had come in, and it was crushed in the middle, with a jagged hole in it. Just INSIDE the door, there was a red heart-shaped box of candy, with several jagged holes in it and one really big tear in the cardboard. The box was unopened, but it was not flat, it had several indentations, as if it had been crushed and twisted.

We asked who had called 911, the captain told me. After we talked to the owner, we arrested one of her employees - we already had the man you saw in custody.

Then he looked at me, with understudied and belligerent amusement. So I said, okay, okay, I give: what?

He smiled -- terribly unprofessional, I know: evidently the guy had been living with the girl, and she worked days while he worked nights, sleeping in her apartment. They were lovers, and when she'd had a slow day, she left work early -- and found him in her bed with another woman. So she threw him out.

He had returned that morning to beg forgiveness, carrying flowers and candy, but evidently forgetting that she worked in a beauty shop -- so when he walked in, she had a pair of scissors in her hand.

She ATTACKED him on sight, trying to stab him in the eyes with the scissors. He defended himself with the box of candy until she tore that away with the scissors, he got out the door waving the long box, then the flowers themselves, and she chased him two blocks... which is where I saw 'em, cuz he finally turned on her, twisted her around and jumped on her back. He got the scissors away (that's what I had seen), and fled some more (wouldn't you?). The cops caught him after I alerted them, even as the captain was responding to the 911 call.

They didn't need my statement. They found the scissors right where he'd said he'd thrown 'em -- he had a dozen little stab wounds on his face, too.

God bless the police, say I.

DNA evidence is like that. If a woman testifies that she was raped by one man, and the DNA evidence says it was NOT the guy convicted, that's a misidentification, not a false charge that a crime was committed.

Its at least a misidentification, and may also be a false charge that a crime was committed. Semen, even with the wrong DNA, is certainly prima facie, though not dispositive, evidence of sex, but not so of rape.

What our pseudonymous little pal is saying is that Jennifer Thompson not only misidentified her attacker, but is a liar who was never raped at all. I'm surprised he's not trying to claim that Deanna Ogg isn't really dead. After all, if Roy Criner wasn't the one who raped and murdered her, then she didn't die at all, right?

WTF? Mnemosyne is your REAL NAME?

And Mnemo dearie, weren't you just yesterday insisting that Crystail Gail Mangum WAS raped in the frat house, just not by the three students charged?

Not only was there no sexual assault in the Duke case …

Whoa, there, Sparky.

The rape kit showed that there was a sexual assault. That’s how they were able to determine that the three accused weren’t the ones who did it: they had the DNA from the rape kit, and it didn’t belong to any of the three. Problem is, the victim is an unreliable witness who identified the wrong guys, and will probably never be able to properly identify her attacker, so the case is dead in the water. The best they can hope for now is that they put the DNA in the database and it shows up as a match when the perpetrator rapes again.

You just ain't so reality based yourself....

Stupid MT thinks it knows more about HTML than I do AND more about what is a quote and what isn't.

Not only was there no sexual assault in the Duke case …

Whoa, there, Sparky.

The rape kit showed that there was a sexual assault. That’s how they were able to determine that the three accused weren’t the ones who did it: they had the DNA from the rape kit, and it didn’t belong to any of the three. Problem is, the victim is an unreliable witness who identified the wrong guys, and will probably never be able to properly identify her attacker, so the case is dead in the water. The best they can hope for now is that they put the DNA in the database and it shows up as a match when the perpetrator rapes again.

Anyway mnemo, this ain't pandagon, when you rejoin the reality based community, let us know and we'll take your maunderings more seriously.

As an American, I believe it is better than 100 citizens go free than one innocent citizen be jailed.

If I believe the Feminist claim that false allegations are only 2%, then I still say to Mnemo,

YOUR rate of false allegations is way too high. I don't care about how many victims do not get justice. Justice is not what our system is about. Due process is. I care far more that innocents are not thrown in jail than I am in seeing that the guilty are.

You may consider that crass and disgusting and misogynistic, but that is what YOU reap when YOU and YOURS can so blithely state that you don't give a shit about false allegations because a) they were guilty of something (testicles), b) it was a learning experience, c) it wasn't as bad as online harassment, and d) the rate of false allegations is so low as to be ignorable.

Mnemo, if you want justice, work for peace. If you want peace, work for justice.

Don't be the sexist pig that you are encouraged to become at Pandagon.

Pseudo doesn't seem to get it's own opinion right: "As an American, I believe it is better than 100 citizens go free than one innocent citizen be jailed."

Methinks Pseudo meant "it's better that 100 criminals go free than that one innocent be jailed".... and that is simply wrong.

Likewise, Dice (no surprise) gets it wrong, also, by seeing an error where there was none: DNA evidence can convict somebody, or exonerate 'em, but in the case of the exoneration it doesn't mean there was no crime, only that this guy didn't do it.

In the case of a conviction that's backed up by DNA evidence, you're left arguing that the guy did it, but it wasn't a crime: a subtle point lost on Dice.

Focus ain't this clown's long suit.

The purpose of the criminal justice system is NOT punishment nor rehabilitation, it isn't even primarily about 'the rule of law', much less 'justice', nor even really about due process: the purpose of the criminal justice system is TO PROTECT US.

We, the People generally feel that the "us" is the critical word to the purpose. We're not fascists, where "to protect" would be the key. Sophomores like to observe provocatively that if you simply locked up young men from 15-25, you'd radically reduce violent crime. But men from 15-25 are part of the "us" to be protected.

So are folks who get accused of crimes they didn't commit. Hell, even folks who are accused of crimes they DID commit are part of "us". Even more significantly, folks who hang around people who commit crimes are part of us -- and there is a limit to how much folks who are close to criminals can be protected, particularly if convicted, even of something they didn't DO.

The fact is, if 100 people who do very bad things are left loose to plague us, to avoid even one very unlucky innocent person being jailed, the whole system system is FAILING to protect US. (Who the hell would dispute this?) It's obviously not protecting us from the 100 folks doing bad things, and the poor bastard who gets sent up for something he didn't do is far more likely to come out considerably less innocent than he went in.

It matters a lot that rape is an under-reported crime, but this reflects a failure to protect us; it's obviously not a bad thing that fewer innocents are convicted of rapes they didn't do. The worst effect is that a rapist who isn't charged with his crime got away with it, and is thus more likely to commit another crime: we're not protected from criminals who are never even charged.

The worst effects of a real rape charge made against a guy who didn't do it are 1) the poor bastard who is falsely accused (even with other evidence, as in the Duke case: these guys were no guilty, but I dunno as "innocent" is the right word), and 2) the REAL rapist got away.

It matters a lot that a significant number of rape charges are falsely made, and then withdrawn or dropped from lack of evidence, but that's not because the guy isn't convicted. Either he didn't do it, or what he did wasn't a crime. That he wasnt convicted is a good thing.

What DOES matter most is that every time a false charge is made, that makes it all the tougher to go after a real one.

If the criminal justice system was batting .995, convicting 100 felons, missing none, for every one innocent person convicted: it'd be doing a helluva lot better than it IS.

Anybody wanna hazard a guess what the batting average really is? How many violent criminals get away, per crime, per good conviction, per innocents convicted?

Methinks Pseudo meant "it's better that 100 criminals go free than that one innocent be jailed".... and that is simply wrong.

Yes, you're right, thanks about that, but why is that wrong? That is the Benjamin Franklin ratio. http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm

theAmericanist,

The system is pretty clear on what it expects in the court room: innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Do you agree with this? If you do then all we have to talk about is, what is reasonable doubt? If after all the evidence is in, there is still a 10 percent chance someone is innocent, I say that is reasonable doubt. If it's 1%... that's more debatable. And if its 2%, I think we should be concerned.

If the police are good at their job, we can avoid convicting innocent people while still putting a lot of criminals away. But if the police ignore the fact that some of their methods are unreliable, they're not doing their job.

That's in court, where cops do not rule.

Mp, have you ever participated in a police investigation in any way? As an observer (say, a reporter), or as a witness, as a victim -- or, I suppose, as a suspect?

EVERYTHING a cop investigates, every theory of a case, is subject to considerably more than "reasonable doubt". Dayum, haven't you been paying attention? That's the whole point of the utter unreliability of eyewitnesses.

That's why I gave my example, which didn't involve selective memory or changing my story to fit a narrative learned later: what I SAW, was a man assaulting a woman. There were a couple details (she chased him) that didn't fit, but if I had been the only witness, that's what happened -- right?

Except -- that isn't what happened.

I had a guy show up at my door one night about two years ago, looking for the neighbor across the street. I remembered his eyes -- he was polite, and his eyes were kind of soft. His posture at my door was slightly odd -- he leaned forward a little.

About an hour later, all hell broke loose: cops with long guns running around. Turns out the guy and several associates kidnapped the boy who lived there, and held his sister and a cousin hostage, looking for money: a home invasion robbery. When the cops showed up, they abandoned a Mac-10 in a yard on my side of the street.

I mis-identified the guy twice, once in a picture lineup at the police station, and once with the same pictures in court. (That is, I picked two different pictures, and the latter time I had the accused sitting 10 feet away.)

The guy was sent up for 20 years, on the POSITIVE, with physical evidence, proof of the hostages.

When you guys understand police investigations and reasonable doubt, let us know.

Pseudo tests the theory that there is no such thing as a stupid question: "'it's better that 100 criminals go free than that one innocent be jailed'.... why is that wrong?"

Because the purpose of the criminal justice system is not "justice", nor even strictly speaking due process, but TO PROTECT US.

Read that again, since you didn't get it the first three times.

For one thing, Ben Franklin was fond of saying stoooopid stuff for effect, just to see if the rubes caught on. (He advised people to imitate Socrates and Jesus, two folks more dissimilar to Ben it would be nearly impossible to find.) The famous ratio was said for effect -- it is precisely the sorta thing a rebel would say to object to the legitimacy of authority.

And it's still stooopid, both on its merits (such as they are), and even more so politically. Progressives shouldn't be stooopid even by accident, much less out of a sense of misguided purpose (like Dice).

It's a qualititative thing, but just consider this ratio as if you measure it: say a community of 1 million has 100 criminals. Say each commits 10 crimes a year, evenly divided against persons and property. Say each crime against property (theft) affects 5 people, say each against a person (robbery, rape, murder) affects 10, with victim, family, neighbors, etc. So 100 criminals means 1,000 crimes and 7,500 victims a year.

How many folks are affected by a wrongful conviction? A hundred? A thousand? (And kindly spare us the bullshit "if an innocent person is jailed, we're all guilty" crap.) It's still MUCH fewer, by many orders of magnitude, than those affected by criminals in this stooopid ratio.

To say (especially in such an unexamined way) that it's better that 100 criminals should go free rather than that one innocent should be convicted, means that it's better for 7,500 people to be victims of crime than that what, 100? folks should be victims of injustice. Try that on real victims of crime, see how much they appreciate it.

In America, crime is QUANTITATIVELY worse than injustice.

Consider the other effects, predictable as daylight, from applying this dumbass ratio: every year, 100 criminals commit 1,000 crimes affecting 7,500 people in this hypothetical community of 1 million. In order to protect ONE innocent person, all 100 criminals get away with it. So very quickly people who wish to be protected from crime become criminals themselves, participating in extortion, intimidation, and alienation -- this is the origin of every organized crime syndicate, after all.

The 'better that 100 than 1 Notion' is simply poisonous. It establishes an impossibly high standard for law enforcement (perfection rather than protection), AND paradoxically, it lowers the level of confidence We, the People ought to have in our cops and prosecutors and judges. A cop who brings in sufficient evidence to charge a guy who turns out to be innocent is blamed because... well, because he had sufficient evidence? Isn't that what we PAY him for?

Remember, it wasn't the cops who fucked up the Duke rape case. That was the prosecutor. The standard cops follow is much more probable cause than reasonable doubt, or else their job would become literally impossible.

If instead, in the same community of 1 million, 50 or 75 of the criminals were convicted of their crimes for (let's say) every one innocent convicted, crime would be lower: AND there would be a higher tolerance for Ben Franklin's point, which was due process.

Stooopidly reflexive arguments to hold cops to an impossible standard do nothing to defend civil liberties, much less US.

So, why are conservatives so supportive of the law enforcement arm of government, when they are supposed to be so skeptical of government power etc? The government can apparently perform social welfare functions, with all the problems, better than correctly ID perps.

Why would you say that? I realize it's generally a mistake to take a rhetorical question seriously, but it's a sign, I think, of how little folks think about 'em: they're REVEALING.

Neil sez: "The government can apparently perform social welfare functions, with all the problems, better than correctly ID perps."

How do you figure? Got some evidence?

The Innocence Project illustrates something more or less obvious -- 85% of the 200 they have exonerated were black guys convicted of raping white women, while only about a third of all such rape CHARGES are black guys on white women. That sounds ominous and alarming -- until you think it through.

Translated into common sense, that means that most mis-identifications of rapists are... well, the sort of mis-identification described above by a fairly long series of candid posters.

So, Neil, tell us: where did you get the dumb-ass inference that this means "the government" does social welfare BETTER than it identifies criminals?

Just to unpack it more: how many of those convicted of crimes actually DID 'em? (I mean, imagine that: a real fact in the argument.) 200 exonerated after conviction -- of HOW MANY convictions? If you don't know or won't estimate, you're just useless.

Social programs are to 'promote the general welfare', and progressives generally regard even a substantial rate of failures and fraud as worth the overall investment and rate of return.To apply Ben Franklin's ratio, we don't care if one crook gets a check, so long as 100 needy folks get 'em, too. But you reject that logic.

In fact, Neil, you're essentially buying into the CONSERVATIVE approach to attacking social programs -- that they are typified by the 'welfare queen' rather than making sure poor kids get milk; when you claim (without evidence) that even a couple hundred examples of guys exonerated after conviction is typical of the criminal justice system. And you think you made a sly slam on what conservatives think, by showing that you... don't.

Grow up, already.

I suppose I should have added ballpark figures, cuz lord knows folks like Dice and Neil are allergic to facts: RAINN says there are roughly 200,000 rapes a year, the FBI stats say roughly 100,000 are arrested. About 80% go to trial, of that, about half are convicted.

So in ballpark figures, since 1989 there have been maybe 3.5 million rapes in America, and maybe 1.5- 2 million arrests, of which something like a million went to trail. Call it a half million convictions -- if that's too high for you, cut in half: 250,000 convictions for rape.

And we know that TWO HUNDRED were wrong. Out of more than a quarter million.

That's a damned slim chunk of data on which to hang all this stuff.

The Innocence Project (which walks on water) points out that the 200 guys who have been exonerated after conviction are a high percentage of the cases they test, but that just sorta proves the point: they generally test ONLY cases where 1) the guy is either innocent or thinks it's worth a shot, and 2) there is intact DNA evidence.

They aren't rechecking the vast majority of cases, cuz they're beyond reasonable doubt. (Which surely explains why the likes of Dice and Neil doubt 'em.)

For the reasons cited above, NOBODY wants innocent people convicted, if only because it means the guilty go free.

But -- the idea that the cops and the courts fail mostly by false convictions?

The evidence doesn't say so.

The evidence DOES say that the perpretrators of several MILLION rapes got away with it: the criminal justice system fails in its primary mission TO PROTECT US.

Anything you want to add to that, Neil? Dice?

Or are your heads still so far up there you can't hear?