Data on number of actual prosecutions and convictions. you're arguing like someone who finds a bug in a piece of software and decries the entire computer industry as a conspiracy to part him from his money. Of course the law fails on occasion, look at how many lines of code are in it.
But the idea that everyone is breaking 5 or 6 federal laws every day and is at risk of financial ruin or indefinite incarceration at the whim of an indifferent judiciary (or as jlgreco asserts below, as part of an evil plot to render us legally helpless) is utter nonsense. You could, theoretically, break numerous laws in one day and place yourself in substantial legal jeopardy...but only via a sequence of unlikely coincidences. Stop taking the linkbait for fact: the reality is that young black men or ex-felons bear a far, far higher burden of extralegal discrimination than anyone does as the result of ham-fisted federal rulemaking.
This essay is from 1964, and no less relevant today: http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-ame... I urge you to read it and consider the possibility that the federal government does not, in fact, exist for the purpose of making your life miserable.
See the book and surrounding discussion of "three felonies a day". The Congressional Research Service cannot even produce an accurate count of how many federal crimes they are. Most estimates are over 100,000 different offenses. Add in state, county, municipal, further governmental subdivision crimes, etc. and it's totally impossible to know all the laws of the land.
They say ignorance of the law is no defense, but when the government can't even supply an accurate count of the number of the laws, maybe we should re-think that. We all commit a lot of crimes.
>The Three Felonies A Day is an example of politics, not research, and has some rather motivated reasoning:
A "sceptics" link is hardly refutation. These sites attract professional "minor detail pickers" and "technically-correct" pedants, who more often than not miss the forest for the trees.
The message is not the exact number of felonies per time period, it's that people can have all kind of laws broken and given causes to be arrested without them knowing it.
Even if it's 1 felony per month or 1 per year it's still more than enough, and that's the point of "thee felonies a day".
My problem isn't with the statistics. My problem is that the law depends on fuzzy bits of information that are easy to rhetorically manipulate in order to direct a case towards (complete and total financial asset seizure, immediately) or (not). It's not logical. The seizure is not reliant on facts. It is not reliant on evidence.
This demonstrates an imbalance between ability to determine truth, and ability for the powers that be to act. It is dependent purely on abstract pattern. Other commenters have pointed out that that model can be used to accurately represent the behavior of innocents.
I'd much rather see data on the effectiveness of this law. Does it actually track suspicious activity? Does it work, and is the value of that work enough to justify the grief it creates to the few you refer to that the law affects?
It's in the low 90% range recently, and hovered between 70% and 90% for the last half century. Federal prosecutors don't pursue every case that lands on their desk, and they direct law enforcement toward the most winnable cases too.
If the conviction rate was a lot lower, I'd be more concerned that the government was bringing so many cases without sufficient evidence.
I shall largely ignore your feigned obtuseness (despite claiming not to know what things could possibly mean, you do seem to get the gist quite well) and get to the relevant section. As an aside, I note that I'll do my best to eradicate any trace of vagueness which the rhetorically inclined like yourself enjoy seizing upon—but that's most usually an unattainable goal.
> Are these data points statistically significant? I have no idea. I haven't done the math. But 1) neither have you and 2) the burden of proof is not on me.
Forgive me for not showing my work. Contrary to your claims that I offered zero data points, I did mention that there are over three quarters of a million law enforcement officers in the US. That would require a randomly selected sample in the several hundreds to determine with any degree of accuracy the character of the population.
You will likely counter that you're not arguing about the character of the population, in fact, you just wrote:
> I am only arguing that it is not unreasonable to be wary of law enforcement.
I must assume you're retracting your earlier statements, then. The ones that started with, "You assume that the police care if you are guilty or not. They don't." and continue on for several more sentences that speak to the character of the population as a whole, notably including an alleged desire to convict anyone regardless of guilt and strongarm confessions.
My point with the above is that if that were an informed opinion based upon data the holder would need to see a sampling of several hundred randomly selected officer/citizen interactions and see the majority of them end in a disregard for the rule of law, courtesy, etc. To my knowledge, that doesn't exist. Partially for difficulties I mentioned originally: nonuniformity of the population, selection bias in accounts, etc.
I shall perform an additional back of the envelope calculation. The Uniform Crime Report for 2010 shows over 13 million arrests that year. Even considering the total number of arrests appears to be declining year over year lately, I can assume relatively safely that in recent years (8-15 roughly) there have been over 100 million arrests. That is a large number of interactions between police and the citizenry.
While I don't have a number for convictions, I will assume it is also rather large. Wikipedia lists over 7 million people under correctional supervision, so that's at least a floor. Do I claim that the false conviction rate is 280/7 million? No, but still (and especially considering that 7 million is likely to be an exceptionally low estimate) my intuition tells me that a random sampling of convictions would find the vast majority to be not wrongfully convicted through law enforcement malevolence.
Your fear and anger toward the general population of law enforcement are not supported by the data. Note that that does not discredit the emotions themselves—they're worthwhile and valid. I even feel them in cases of police abuse, such as Troy Davis and, for instance, the unwarranted pepper spraying of the UC Davis students. I would only caution you against letting those emotions override your reason and thereby jumping to conclusions that the data does not support.
> If someone wants to dispute that, the burden is on them to show that law enforcement is trustworthy.
There's nothing wrong with the opinion that the burden of proof should fall on someone other than one's self. However, I might add that in practice the burden falls on the contrarian. And when one's opinion is against one of the established pillars of society—for better or worse, with no judgment implied—that person is nearly by definition the contrarian.
A description of it (http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/ronhuff.htm) describes the arrived at number of wrongful convictions to be around 0.5%. More that half of those were caused by eyewitness misidentifications, leaving less than half to be caused by police malfeasance. The authors indicate that this is probably low, but: even doubled or tripled or quintupled, it seems that the data indicates the vast majority of law enforcement are not conspiring to convict everyone and anyone for a crime.
Including dismissals, I suppose you are in the ballpark. However, are you saying that a 90-91% conviction rate, in a system that publicly claims to offer so many protections to those within its grasp, is a positive thing? Many of our federal courthouses have inscriptions of Blackstone's formulation ("better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"). That is hardly the case in practice in our courts today.
Sure, but that is indistinguishable in the numbers from an out of control law enforcement system where there is a high conviction rate against even the innocent that leads to higher incidence of innocent people making a guilty plea to avoid jail and expense. Of course, that percentage isn't broken out because everyone in here is innocent.
That's a terrible analysis. I would bet that even the innocent people convicted of a crime are more liKely to commit a crime after and this speaks more to our poorly functioning justice system than the person convicted. Besides, statistically everyone is a criminal because the number of laws are uncountable and unknowable.
Somewhere around half of American men have an arrest record. Not sure about convictions. Certainly half of the Black men, particularly those who grew up in a large city, have been arrested. Not sure about convictions. The other half seems to live in ignorance.
I don't think it's that paranoid. Our criminal justice system is far from perfect. I've heard estimates that up to 10% of people imprisoned are innocent of that particular crime. And just look at the number of people on death row who have been exonerated. Cases that get that much scrutiny should have a zero percent change of being incorrect but that's so far from the truth it's shocking.
I wasn't replying to a claim that a high conviction rate is a good thing (or better than a lower one).
I was replying to a claim that a high conviction rate somehow suggests we should dispense with the idea that, as a society, we should not presume guilt.
grumple, who I replied to, seemed to me to be suggesting that because the federal government has a high conviction rate, we should assume the accused are guilty.
I'm suggesting that because there is compelling evidence that many guilty verdicts are obtained through coercion, we should not make that assumption.
That's a generic case. Parent is describing a specific case in which prisoners determine they have a 95% chance they will be convicted. Given such a case, parent's argument follows logically. How many cases the Fed prosecutes or convicts is irrelevant to the scenario.
But the idea that everyone is breaking 5 or 6 federal laws every day and is at risk of financial ruin or indefinite incarceration at the whim of an indifferent judiciary (or as jlgreco asserts below, as part of an evil plot to render us legally helpless) is utter nonsense. You could, theoretically, break numerous laws in one day and place yourself in substantial legal jeopardy...but only via a sequence of unlikely coincidences. Stop taking the linkbait for fact: the reality is that young black men or ex-felons bear a far, far higher burden of extralegal discrimination than anyone does as the result of ham-fisted federal rulemaking.
This essay is from 1964, and no less relevant today: http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-ame... I urge you to read it and consider the possibility that the federal government does not, in fact, exist for the purpose of making your life miserable.
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