Not (directly) a murder case, but Mark Duggan and Steven Levitt's 2002 paper on match fixing in Japanese sumo is also interesting.[1]
While the suspicion had lingered for a decade or two that sumo matches were rigged, the analysis of the paper precipitated a scandal years later that led to the cancellation of a sumo tournament in 2011, and the expelling of 23 wrestlers.[2]
The original article is about statistics indicating a crime turned out to be wrong. Are you suggesting the Duggan/Levitt paper was also bad statistics?
Hopefully both "believe in science" folks and "I do my own research on substack" folks are paying attention. Science is really hard and, while government agencies can do a better job than amateur substack research, they still screw up on regular basis. For example, CDC carb heavy food pyramid turned out to be a total hogwash and ruined health of countless people. You should probably still follow mainstream recommendation, because one must follow something and alternatives are less reliable on average. But you have no right to force everyone into it or shush them up when they discuss other opinions.
Specifically to the article: the section titled “A murderous nurse at work—or just coincidence?” Correlates the shifts during which a particular nurse works and suspicious deaths occurring.
If anyone has any know-how to interpret the following diagram, I’m open to some help here. Sorry if it annoys you to hear a devil’s advocate defending a potential murderer, but what if said nurse was just incompetent and people took advantage of her? (Or she was the primary person willing/forced to work shifts known to be ripe with gang activity.)
> For example, CDC carb heavy food pyramid turned out to be a total hogwash and ruined health of countless people.
I would guess that reality is closer to "the carb heavy food pyramid turned out to be total hogwash and had negligible impact because almost nobody cares what the government wants them to eat".
I disagree with this heavily, because the food pyramid is also the basis of government provided school lunches, other meal provisions, hospital nutrition for the very sick (diabetic/kidney failing/heart failing), meals for soldiers, and a wide variety of other nutritional programs.
It’s not about what happens when you have a choice on what to eat but what information official sources use when you are reliant on another authority for meals.
Edited to add that: it’s important to know why the food pyramid was created and the context of them. Government provided nutrition guidelines were used for meal provision during the Great Depression, food rationing during war, etc. and are still largely created by the USDA which answers to agribusiness and not medicine. (There are several news articles of the USDA actively withdrawing and editing nutritional guidelines due to agribusiness outcry!)
That's not true. Just lookup when the low fat diet was introduced and look at the obesity trend. Or here is a page which spells it out [0]. People did listen. Before the 1980s, everyone made deep fat fried food at home. Now, deep fat fryers are very rare in homes. And even if you didn't listen, every institution from hospitals to prisons, schools and universities adopted the diet. Every major food maker and fast food chain adapted to the recommendations, and replaced high cholesterol fats for what they thought where healthier low-cholesterol oils. Now we know better, but there is still a determined element in our society pushing the old narrative, using increasingly shoddy epidemiology.
I'm fairly confident the majority of people didn't have a dedicated deep fat fryer at home at any point in history. Unless you're actually referring to the sort of deep pot used on the stove for frying. In that case, then absolutely. A deep fat fryer in my mind is a standalone appliance.
They definitely fried food in oil and lard rather than delicately avoiding fats. No sense wasting good bacon grease when you can toss some eggs in there. And some bread too. Nothing like toast all sopped up in bacon grease.
For anyone saying citizens didn't listen to these experts, they've apparently never seen the magazine rack in the grocery store checkout. Or any of the millions of lifestyle articles and weight loss blogs informing desperate folks to run from anything with butter in it. I don't think my parents had a real stick of butter in the house until after I graduated high school. Low fat everything in that fridge until they saw me lose weight and gain so much more energy by eating low carb and high fat.
When you've got teachers in the classroom teaching the food pyramid to elementary kids, you're going to have some kind of impact on the way people eat.
"Before the 1980s, everyone made deep fat fried food at home. Now, deep fat fryers are very rare in homes."
In 1980, I was twenty-five, and had never lived in a household with a deep fat fryer. Occasionally I guess we had fried chicken from my grandmother's kitchen.
You have to include the fact that the pyramid, while being hogwash, was still better than the average American diet of fast food and candy. So it may have been a net positive overall despite being existing somewhere on the scale from heavily flawed to total nonsense.
It was alarmingly high and had been noted since the mid 1950s. That is why Ancel Keys, inventor of the lipid hypothesis and low fat diet, began researching the problem. They where responding to a heart disease and obesity epidemic. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19623/figure/chartbook...
There is a tendency by some to take a story like this one and insinuate that all prosecutions are wrongful ones and all prosecutors guilty of malpractice etc. Kudos to this article's authors or editors for acknowledging the reality that not all cases are "witch hunts" and that sometimes there are "real witches" (or real monsters I'd prefer to call them).
The currently ongoing UK trial of Nurse Lucy Letby has made a number of such statistical claims plus other allegations. Is this article submitted because of this or is it (also) co-incidence?
Yes, that seems to be a consideration. From the article:
In a report peer reviewed and distributed by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) in September 2022, Gill and colleagues detailed the statistical missteps in past medical murder trials and made recommendations for how legal systems can do better. Gill hopes the report will help with the case of another British nurse, Lucy Letby, who is now on trial for the alleged murder of seven babies and attempted murder of 10 more in a neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
How tragic would it be if someone’s deep empathic nature made them feel personally responsible for a death beyond their control – to the point of suicidal ideation - and was then imprisoned for it?
The Australian case mentioned in the article had a similar theme. Kathleen Folbigg wrote diary entries blaming herself for her kids' deaths, and these were interpreted as admissions of guilt (in fairness they could definitely be read that way). She had four of her own children die of undetermined causes and was basically convicted on the diary entries and the improbability of them all dying. Has been a long and ongoing public debate here (she's still in jail).
Good investigators withhold details about a crime from the public mostly to filter out false confessions. This speaks to the fact that false confessions are common enough to make filtering techniques common practice.
That's not the only goal. This also reduces the effectiveness of copycat crimes, and differentiates any would-be copycats from the original. Also, it enhances the ability of authorities to receive and authenticate tips from the general public. In fact, in a high-profile case, it's common practice to deliberately plant misinformation in the form of slight immaterial errors, for many of the same purposes.
I think you're talking about Lucia de B. The first sentence of the article :
When a Dutch nurse named Lucia de Berk...
In fact, she never confessed. As per her Wikipedia page:
Important evidence at the appeal was to be the statement of a detainee in the Pieter Baan Center, a criminal psychological observation unit, where de Berk had said during outdoor exercise, "I released these 13 people from their suffering". However, during the appeal, the man withdrew his statement and stated that he had made it up.
> How tragic would it be if someone’s deep empathic nature made them feel personally responsible for a death beyond their control – to the point of suicidal ideation - and was then imprisoned for it?
I haven't, but I think, outside of fiction, history is littered with examples of these kinds of witch hunts happening. What bothers me is that now, more than ever, we know about these outcomes – and as you point out there's even neo-folklore about them – and yet we haven't progressed enough as a species to stop them happening.
That sounds like a troubled, mentally unwell person?
Let’s say someone who’s mentally unwell wrote notes to confess to crimes, is it enough to convict them based on that evidence alone? And if so, should it be?
In the US, at least, a confession is always considered sufficient evidence. It probably shouldn't be, since interrogators have managed to get people to confess to crimes that evidence was later found to exonerate.
This is not true. Many states have what is called a corpus delicti rule, which requires that a confession be corroborated by other evidence in order to sustain a conviction. I am inclined to assert that this is actually the law in most US states, but I haven't researched it.
IANAL, but I thought corpus delicti only means there needs to be evidence that the crime has been committed, not that the crime has been committed by the person confessing to it.
So if they find a body with multiple stab wounds and I go in and say I stabbed the person, I can be convicted. If I say I murdered Audrey Farber, and the police can't even find a record of an Audrey Farber gone missing, then I can't be convicted because there's no evidence than an Audrey Farber was murdered at all.
> That sounds like a troubled, mentally unwell person?
You mean you don't know for sure? Do you want the investigators to stop investigating if a suspect "sounds" mentally unwell? Should prosecutors refuse to prosecute if the suspect "sounds" mentally unwell?
What I'm saying is ... why, in this particular case, should that make any difference to the prosecution or investigation? We already find mentally troubled people guilty, we just sentence them differently.
So, yeah, the sanity/insanity of an individual makes no difference to whether they are guilty or not, it only changes the specific nature of the charge (i.e. premeditated vs culpable) and the sentencing (asylum or prison).
Someone is is genuinely mentally unwell in a way that results in them harming other people must still be kept away from society!
IOW, people who are dangerous to others need to be locked up. Whether they are insane or not is not relevant to keeping them locked up, it is only relevant to where they are locked up, and how they may be rehabilitated.
> Let’s say someone who’s mentally unwell wrote notes to confess to crimes, is it enough to convict them based on that evidence alone?
No one is currently convicted on the basis of a confession alone[1]. Normally a confession just means that the investigation into the confessor is more thorough than it would ordinarily be.
Is it perfect? No, but it is a lot better than you appear to believe.
I think if you thought about it for more than a few seconds, you'd realise the questions you are asking have obvious answers.
[1] Have you any idea how many people claimed to be famous serial killers? it happens more often than you think. It's also why specifics of a crime may not make it to the news, because the police use those specific details to identify those confessors who are not the perpetrator.
I think that point is it should be taken into account.
> Someone is is genuinely mentally unwell in a way that results in them harming other people must still be kept away from society!
That is extremely poor and dangerous argument for putting them in jail in bad evidence. But yeah, when innocent people get into jail, it is fairly often on arguments like this.
> No one is currently convicted on the basis of a confession alone[1]. Normally a confession just means that the investigation into the confessor is more thorough than it would ordinarily be
Bases in innocence project, people who were provably not guilty were sentenced to death on confessions. And there is literally zero reason to think it is stopped happening.
>> Someone is is genuinely mentally unwell in a way that results in them harming other people must still be kept away from society!
> That is extremely poor and dangerous argument for putting them in jail in bad evidence.
Who made that argument?
Here's what I said:
>> the sanity/insanity of an individual makes no difference to whether they are guilty or not, it only changes the specific nature of the charge (i.e. premeditated vs culpable) and the sentencing (asylum or prison). Someone is is genuinely mentally unwell in a way that results in them harming other people must still be kept away from society!
Why on earth would you snip away my text about ASYLUM, and instead warble on about putting those people in JAIL?
I'm genuinely curious about the motivation to pretend that my argument is different to what I said, and then argue against your pretend version of my argument.
I feel for the many different types of forensic labs.
These forensic labs have their own brand of "Never the twain shall meet" while they do blind analysis especially when the lead crime investigator has to clue them in ("fentanyl", in one case).
When doing network-based forensic, just because a "ping" happened, doesn't mean that "causation equal correlation".
Worse is the misuse of end-users' search history; a lone query made 7 years ago being used as a lead-in (but lone) evidence to a suspect's alleged behavior. Really?
Or an innocuous Google Scholar watch doing a trapping of some suspected but heavily watched URL?
One simple lab exercise of such forensic analysis is a reconstruction on the chaining of events given a set of evidence; it gets hilarious at times to see such "conspiratorial-like" theories.
Now the world witness the continuing saga of misusage of statistics from the US FDA VARS database being flooding with death by COVID inoculants.
Here ya go, analysis by Ken Regan ( also a statistician obsessed with quantum mechanics, like the researcher in the article )….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DDRLZTkd30c
It's possible, but most of the evidence in that case comes from circumstantial evidence, specifically the fact that he can't really explain the game he just played.
He confessed to cheating online, not over the board. People have used shoddy statistics to allege that he cheated over the board, but none of them have held up under scrutiny.
I'm not saying the guy is a saint, but low-effort cheating in low-stakes online games by looking at an engine in the background seems substantially different than what would be required to cheat completely undetectably in major tournaments with many people watching.
That seems like a "lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas" situation. If someone doesn't want to be accused of cheating in a high-stakes game then they shouldn't cheat in a low-stakes game.
> That seems like a "lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas" situation. If someone doesn't want to be accused of cheating in a high-stakes game then they shouldn't cheat in a low-stakes game.
On the one hand, I'm inclined to agree with the assertion that dishonesty damages one's credibility.
On the other hand, there's degrees of dishonesty - should someone who (intentionally lied, and) denied going over the speed limit be automatically considered lying when he also denies premeditated murder?
It feels like a leap to compare the claim "This guy cheated in some low stakes chess games and shouldn't really be trusted in high stakes chess games" to the claim "This person committed a minor misdemeanour so they shouldn't be trusted when they claim they didn't kill someone"
but in the same sense those two things seem substantially different, the trajectory of his late blooming career success is also substantially different from that of just about everybody else playing and also calls out for explanation.
Anecdotally, in the past year I happened to be in the vicinity of Hans and noticed some behaviors.
The guy is absolutely obsessed about chess, and is good at it. The simple fact that he can hang with the best in OTB bullet ( and shorter time controls ) proved to me he was legit, no question, he just really freaking loves chess!
The abuse of statistics aside, it's weird that the charges/convictions (at least as described in the article) jump straight to outright murder. Did prosecutors in these cases present any evidence demonstrating intent? If not, then do these legal systems not have concepts of negligence? Unintentional homicide/manslaughter? Incompetence?
In any case, do these legal systems not presume innocence until actually proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? If not, then these cases seem like perfect case studies as to why said presumption of innocence is mandatory for a society to be considered free and just - and if they do presume innocence, then I'm baffled by how these cases not only resulted in convictions but upheld convictions given the abundance of reasonable doubt.
Ad 1: That's a huge chance. Just imagine how many nurses there are in the closest hospital, and that each of them had a 2% chance for some unvaforable pattern.
They don't give enough detail in the article (Wikipedia has some more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_de_Berk), but based on the chart I suspect it's something like this:
Imagine someone goes to a casino, and play a game where you flip a coin 20 times in a row, and win if they're all heads. There's about a 1 in 1 million chance of flipping 20 heads - so people are suspicious that the person cheated.
However, imagine that during that same time period, 10 million people played that game. Looking at that, you'd expect there to be 10 winners of the game. Suddenly it's not suspicious at all.
So I think the argument is that this is the chance a nurse experienced this many deaths is 1 in 45 - so with 45 nurses, you'd expect one to experience it.
Should have "(2022)" in the title. After reading the first three paragraphs, I realized I had read this a year ago. It's from the January 2022 issue of Science, despite the byline saying February 2023.
> People aren’t willing to acknowledge the high probability that someone just had a string of bad partners
Nonsense. Choosing a partner is not a random event, like drawing a card from a deck, or spinning a roulette wheel.
The odds are very much against "poor guy/gal had 10 boyfriends/girlfriends in the last 10 years, all of whom turned out to be meth-heads" being a random event.
In relationships, what is true most of the time (the odds on) is that a string of bad relationships for a man/woman has one common factor - that man/woman.
> yeah sure but two or three in a row occupying a half a decade or more of time is very plausible
Over 5 years?
Two is not "a string of bad partners".
Three meth-heads in a row is almost certainly NOT "very plausible" (probability approaching 1). The subject is almost certainly selecting for meth-heads.
Three alcoholics in a row over 5 years is also not "very plausible", but it is at least somewhat plausible - alcohol addiction can be hidden very well from someone you don't live with.
Three cheaters in a row (over 5 years) is maybe what I would consider to be approaching "very plausible". Even then, at around 20 months per relationship (the most optimistic way to have each relationship be long), you gotta wonder why the subject is choosing only players to date. Still looks like a selection bias on the subjects side.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that your original assertion could not be any more wrong than it already is.
Someone with a string of bad relationships most probably has a selection bias for certain traits in a partner which make them unsuitable as a partner.
Man, every time a prosecutor gets a case overturned, they themselves need to be put on trial. Was was their motive? Did they ignore evidence? Dig deep into why they tried so hard to get an innocent person behind bars.
The rabbit hole of wrongful convictions goes deep but long story short there are a number of reasons, most of which is "tunnel vision", that is when a prosecutor or detective gets a lead, they will often ignore other evidence in favor of that lead. It's less about dirty prosecutors and more about how psychology and our brains work. I would highly suggest listening to a couple of episodes of Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom[1] and check out the Innocence Project[2], both are fantastic for getting into the world of wrongful convictions.
The well-known version that seems susceptible is "Well, when a girlfriend gets murdered, it's the boyfriend x% of the time, so we should focus on the boyfriend." That's a great way to increase the value of x over time.
That's ignoring a lot of evidence we have of police officers planting fake evidence. See for example https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/melissasegura/josh-tepf... where about 300 people in Chicago alone have been exonerated due to cops faking evidence.
Malfeasance is one thing, but I don't think you want this kind of general liability for prosecutors: they're executing legal motions based on the evidence and information presented to them. Unless there's some evidence that they're actually ignoring or hiding evidence, punishing them for playing their role in the justice system is likely to do more harm than good.
(This is distinct from the problem of qualified immunity for the police, who (1) regularly kill people under dubious at best circumstances, and (2) regularly launder falsified or coerced evidence into the legal system. It makes sense, in my opinion, to introduce personal liability there.)
One would imagine that a significant portion of the time they tried to put the person behind bars because they believed the person to be guilty.
I’m curious what your “Blackstone number” is. The Blackstone principle is that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent one to be imprisoned. It seems you might go higher than ten—but how high? Should we be so concerned about wrongful convictions that we allow 1000 guilty men to go free for each one? 10,000?
Then, turn that around. Given how often prosecutors have good motives and adequate grounds for moving forward with a conviction, how many innocent prosecutors would you put through the wringer just to catch one guilty one?
There's plenty to criticize urban development systems that make people getting killed by drunk drivers more likely, but there's no aspect of intentionality in chance accidents. If we build a system that's supposed to dole out punishment, it should at least be able to prevent that happening, or at least re-evaluate every so often to ensure all previous and active decisions still make sense or whether someone deserves a lot of compensation.
But we won't get there, not even close, maybe not even in a panopticon dystopia. Anyway, your baseline should be total accusations (not prosecutions, you're already a fair bit into the pipeline at that point and imposing significant costs), which is significantly higher than total people.
> I’m curious what your “Blackstone number” is. The Blackstone principle is that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent one to be imprisoned.
The problem is that we are not achieving the blackstone number more than 1/10th of people in prison are innocent.
That means the criminals responsible for those crimes are still out there
> I’m curious what your “Blackstone number” is. The Blackstone principle is that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent one to be imprisoned.
This is incoherent; it is obvious that you'd want to set this differently for different crimes.
What kind of certainty? All else equal, (1) when the punishment for the crime is severe, you'd want to be more certain that the convicted criminal is actually guilty ("It's bad when innocent men are punished."); (2) when the crime is not very serious, you don't really care whether the convict is guilty or not (because we assume the punishment is not very severe). So we want more certainty-of-guilt in case 1 and less certainty-of-guilt in case 2.
We can also ask for certainty that people who are guilty in fact get convicted. ("It's bad when guilty men go free.") This is the opposite of the other kind of certainty. Here, we'd want a lot of that type of certainty for crimes with severe punishments (we assume that such crimes are very serious), and we don't really care about this for crimes with no particular impact on victims. So we want more certainty-of-conviction in case 1 and less certainty-of-conviction in case 2.
Certainty-of-conviction and certainty-of-guilt are, in the general case, directly in conflict with each other. We don't want either (in a relative sense) for trivial crimes, so it doesn't really matter what happens. We want lots of both for serious crimes, so what happens matters, but we can't actually achieve both goals.
In conclusion, when setting your policy, you need to look at other aspects of the crime than the one(s) you mention here, which are not informative as to this question. (Though they are informative as to the question you literally asked; we want more certainty of every type on serious crimes.) Perhaps the punishment for a particular crime is out of proportion to how serious that crime is. If the punishment is too heavy, we'd want more certainty-of-guilt; if it's too light, we'd want more certainty-of-conviction. Perhaps it's much easier than usual to reliably determine guilt-in-fact for a particular crime. Then we'd want more certainty-of-conviction.
> whether the convict is guilty or not (because we assume the punishment is not very severe)
There is nonsuch thing. Even short conviction destroys people's ability to hold jobs, find housing and to find partners. People inyour life stop trusting you and that is super big one too. And it may cause divorce with law abiding lartner and factor into custody dispute.
In the face of all this complexity, I think it is not "obvious that you'd want to set this differently for different crimes." It is clear the perfect certainty would be ideal, if possible. It is not clear to me that variable standards are desirable from a practical standpoint.
The relevance of a Blackstone number is it basically sets all this aside and looks at an ideal circumstance, and you can adjust from there, if you want to take peculiarites into account.
On these sort of cases I'm a little less inclined to blame the justice system. Often there were statisticians or other experts who should have known better advising or testifying to the likelihood of guilt. People shouldn't be convicted of improbability alone, but statistics is hard even for statisticians.
Of course they should have tried to correct the mistake once pointed out, but the justice seems doesn't seem to like doing that.
Woah there. Neither a "not guilty" verdict nor a case overturned on appeal means that the person was actually innocent. It means that there is not enough evidence that was judged admissible to convict. (This is a consequence of "innocent if not proven guilty" - or at least, not jailed if not proven guilty.)
Putting prosecutors on trial for something less than clear prosecutorial over-reach is, in my view, a major mistake. Perhaps the bar should be lower than it is, but there's no way it should be as low as "didn't get a conviction" or "overturned on appeal".
Yep, for example, lots of cases with coerced confessions or just confessions obtained from individuals with developmental disabilities. The investigator would be the one who overdid it, not the prosecutor, who is often obliged to pursue the case if someone says they did the crime. Whether the confession is any good is up to the justice system. This applies to many semisciences or pseudoscience or expert witnesses or shoddy statistics. The prosecutor should look at the case in good faith [not tunnel vision] and rely on the courts to be fair arbiters. Then you have technical boondoggles like Bill Cosby where the prosecutors view the matters of law one way and eventually the appeals courts view it differently--whether he committed some crimes wasn't really the first order matter.
If the prosecutor is obliged to pursue the case couldn't they still say in court "this confession was coerced, please do not find them guilty"? If they don't, then it seems to me that the prosecutor is just as guilty.
I don't think it would even have to come to that. Don't prosecutors have some discretion? Couldn't they just say that they do not think the case merits prosecution, and walk away?
(And I see the strain between this comment and my previous one. If the prosecutor has discretion, then they have responsibility for how they use it. But the bar for coming after the prosecutor needs to be considerably higher than just a "not guilty" verdict. The prosecutor probably should be more responsible for abusing their discretion than they are. But when the pendulum moves, it often moves too far.)
Not (directly) a murder case, but Mark Duggan and Steven Levitt's 2002 paper on match fixing in Japanese sumo is also interesting.[1]
While the suspicion had lingered for a decade or two that sumo matches were rigged, the analysis of the paper precipitated a scandal years later that led to the cancellation of a sumo tournament in 2011, and the expelling of 23 wrestlers.[2]
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/~mgduggan/Research/MD_Levitt_2002.p...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match-fixing_in_professional_s...
The original article is about statistics indicating a crime turned out to be wrong. Are you suggesting the Duggan/Levitt paper was also bad statistics?
I am not.
Hopefully both "believe in science" folks and "I do my own research on substack" folks are paying attention. Science is really hard and, while government agencies can do a better job than amateur substack research, they still screw up on regular basis. For example, CDC carb heavy food pyramid turned out to be a total hogwash and ruined health of countless people. You should probably still follow mainstream recommendation, because one must follow something and alternatives are less reliable on average. But you have no right to force everyone into it or shush them up when they discuss other opinions.
Specifically to the article: the section titled “A murderous nurse at work—or just coincidence?” Correlates the shifts during which a particular nurse works and suspicious deaths occurring.
If anyone has any know-how to interpret the following diagram, I’m open to some help here. Sorry if it annoys you to hear a devil’s advocate defending a potential murderer, but what if said nurse was just incompetent and people took advantage of her? (Or she was the primary person willing/forced to work shifts known to be ripe with gang activity.)
> For example, CDC carb heavy food pyramid turned out to be a total hogwash and ruined health of countless people.
I would guess that reality is closer to "the carb heavy food pyramid turned out to be total hogwash and had negligible impact because almost nobody cares what the government wants them to eat".
I disagree with this heavily, because the food pyramid is also the basis of government provided school lunches, other meal provisions, hospital nutrition for the very sick (diabetic/kidney failing/heart failing), meals for soldiers, and a wide variety of other nutritional programs.
It’s not about what happens when you have a choice on what to eat but what information official sources use when you are reliant on another authority for meals.
Edited to add that: it’s important to know why the food pyramid was created and the context of them. Government provided nutrition guidelines were used for meal provision during the Great Depression, food rationing during war, etc. and are still largely created by the USDA which answers to agribusiness and not medicine. (There are several news articles of the USDA actively withdrawing and editing nutritional guidelines due to agribusiness outcry!)
That's not true. Just lookup when the low fat diet was introduced and look at the obesity trend. Or here is a page which spells it out [0]. People did listen. Before the 1980s, everyone made deep fat fried food at home. Now, deep fat fryers are very rare in homes. And even if you didn't listen, every institution from hospitals to prisons, schools and universities adopted the diet. Every major food maker and fast food chain adapted to the recommendations, and replaced high cholesterol fats for what they thought where healthier low-cholesterol oils. Now we know better, but there is still a determined element in our society pushing the old narrative, using increasingly shoddy epidemiology.
https://www.awlr.org/blog/low-fat-challenge
I'm fairly confident the majority of people didn't have a dedicated deep fat fryer at home at any point in history. Unless you're actually referring to the sort of deep pot used on the stove for frying. In that case, then absolutely. A deep fat fryer in my mind is a standalone appliance.
They definitely fried food in oil and lard rather than delicately avoiding fats. No sense wasting good bacon grease when you can toss some eggs in there. And some bread too. Nothing like toast all sopped up in bacon grease.
For anyone saying citizens didn't listen to these experts, they've apparently never seen the magazine rack in the grocery store checkout. Or any of the millions of lifestyle articles and weight loss blogs informing desperate folks to run from anything with butter in it. I don't think my parents had a real stick of butter in the house until after I graduated high school. Low fat everything in that fridge until they saw me lose weight and gain so much more energy by eating low carb and high fat.
When you've got teachers in the classroom teaching the food pyramid to elementary kids, you're going to have some kind of impact on the way people eat.
"Before the 1980s, everyone made deep fat fried food at home. Now, deep fat fryers are very rare in homes."
In 1980, I was twenty-five, and had never lived in a household with a deep fat fryer. Occasionally I guess we had fried chicken from my grandmother's kitchen.
You have to include the fact that the pyramid, while being hogwash, was still better than the average American diet of fast food and candy. So it may have been a net positive overall despite being existing somewhere on the scale from heavily flawed to total nonsense.
It really wasn't. Just lookup a graph of obesity over time and see if you can spot when the low fat diet was implemented by the U.S. government.
Spoiler: https://cms-static.wehaacdn.com/hoards-com/images/Obesity-19...
They're close. But the pyramid is not significant enough to account for that much change. Other things happened in 1980 too.
(Also, your graph doesn't show obesity, and the pre-pyramid 45% rate would already be alarmingly high if it was obesity, which it isn't.)
It was alarmingly high and had been noted since the mid 1950s. That is why Ancel Keys, inventor of the lipid hypothesis and low fat diet, began researching the problem. They where responding to a heart disease and obesity epidemic. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19623/figure/chartbook...
There is a tendency by some to take a story like this one and insinuate that all prosecutions are wrongful ones and all prosecutors guilty of malpractice etc. Kudos to this article's authors or editors for acknowledging the reality that not all cases are "witch hunts" and that sometimes there are "real witches" (or real monsters I'd prefer to call them).
For the sake of balance (in these comments), sadly some similar incidents have been very real and the wheels of justice very slow: https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/how-san-antonio-baby...
Very good point. I also dislike the presupposition that since there was malpractice in one instance, one must assume the same in all others.
The currently ongoing UK trial of Nurse Lucy Letby has made a number of such statistical claims plus other allegations. Is this article submitted because of this or is it (also) co-incidence?
Yes, that seems to be a consideration. From the article:
In a report peer reviewed and distributed by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) in September 2022, Gill and colleagues detailed the statistical missteps in past medical murder trials and made recommendations for how legal systems can do better. Gill hopes the report will help with the case of another British nurse, Lucy Letby, who is now on trial for the alleged murder of seven babies and attempted murder of 10 more in a neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
I thought Lucy letby literally had a confession note at her house? [0]
It seems this was in fact the case.
I agree with your broader point however.
0. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/lucy-letby-nurse...
I don't know anything about her, but that suicide note also says "I haven't done anything wrong", which indicates at best confusion on her part.
How tragic would it be if someone’s deep empathic nature made them feel personally responsible for a death beyond their control – to the point of suicidal ideation - and was then imprisoned for it?
The Australian case mentioned in the article had a similar theme. Kathleen Folbigg wrote diary entries blaming herself for her kids' deaths, and these were interpreted as admissions of guilt (in fairness they could definitely be read that way). She had four of her own children die of undetermined causes and was basically convicted on the diary entries and the improbability of them all dying. Has been a long and ongoing public debate here (she's still in jail).
Apparently there's new evidence that a gene mutation may have been to blame, and she could be released soon: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/13/australian-m...
The evidence in her case does seem too circumstantial to convict, a real injustice.
There was a case in the Netherlands in which they got a nurse to confess to a killing spree.
Unfortunately it is impossible to explain to people that a confession is meaningless.
Good investigators withhold details about a crime from the public mostly to filter out false confessions. This speaks to the fact that false confessions are common enough to make filtering techniques common practice.
That's not the only goal. This also reduces the effectiveness of copycat crimes, and differentiates any would-be copycats from the original. Also, it enhances the ability of authorities to receive and authenticate tips from the general public. In fact, in a high-profile case, it's common practice to deliberately plant misinformation in the form of slight immaterial errors, for many of the same purposes.
Can you stop writing these garbage GPT comments, please? No one wants to waste time reading this shit.
I think you're talking about Lucia de B. The first sentence of the article :
In fact, she never confessed. As per her Wikipedia page:> How tragic would it be if someone’s deep empathic nature made them feel personally responsible for a death beyond their control – to the point of suicidal ideation - and was then imprisoned for it?
Haven't you ever read The Green Mile?
I haven't, but I think, outside of fiction, history is littered with examples of these kinds of witch hunts happening. What bothers me is that now, more than ever, we know about these outcomes – and as you point out there's even neo-folklore about them – and yet we haven't progressed enough as a species to stop them happening.
Too common and too tragic.
That sounds like a troubled, mentally unwell person?
Let’s say someone who’s mentally unwell wrote notes to confess to crimes, is it enough to convict them based on that evidence alone? And if so, should it be?
In the US, at least, a confession is always considered sufficient evidence. It probably shouldn't be, since interrogators have managed to get people to confess to crimes that evidence was later found to exonerate.
This is not true. Many states have what is called a corpus delicti rule, which requires that a confession be corroborated by other evidence in order to sustain a conviction. I am inclined to assert that this is actually the law in most US states, but I haven't researched it.
IANAL, but I thought corpus delicti only means there needs to be evidence that the crime has been committed, not that the crime has been committed by the person confessing to it.
So if they find a body with multiple stab wounds and I go in and say I stabbed the person, I can be convicted. If I say I murdered Audrey Farber, and the police can't even find a record of an Audrey Farber gone missing, then I can't be convicted because there's no evidence than an Audrey Farber was murdered at all.
The other evidence can be quite weak. And fairly often it is pseudoscience.
Of course I agree with that. It's not an argument for relying more heavily on confession "evidence."
> That sounds like a troubled, mentally unwell person?
You mean you don't know for sure? Do you want the investigators to stop investigating if a suspect "sounds" mentally unwell? Should prosecutors refuse to prosecute if the suspect "sounds" mentally unwell?
What I'm saying is ... why, in this particular case, should that make any difference to the prosecution or investigation? We already find mentally troubled people guilty, we just sentence them differently.
So, yeah, the sanity/insanity of an individual makes no difference to whether they are guilty or not, it only changes the specific nature of the charge (i.e. premeditated vs culpable) and the sentencing (asylum or prison).
Someone is is genuinely mentally unwell in a way that results in them harming other people must still be kept away from society!
IOW, people who are dangerous to others need to be locked up. Whether they are insane or not is not relevant to keeping them locked up, it is only relevant to where they are locked up, and how they may be rehabilitated.
> Let’s say someone who’s mentally unwell wrote notes to confess to crimes, is it enough to convict them based on that evidence alone?
No one is currently convicted on the basis of a confession alone[1]. Normally a confession just means that the investigation into the confessor is more thorough than it would ordinarily be.
Is it perfect? No, but it is a lot better than you appear to believe.
I think if you thought about it for more than a few seconds, you'd realise the questions you are asking have obvious answers.
[1] Have you any idea how many people claimed to be famous serial killers? it happens more often than you think. It's also why specifics of a crime may not make it to the news, because the police use those specific details to identify those confessors who are not the perpetrator.
I think that point is it should be taken into account.
> Someone is is genuinely mentally unwell in a way that results in them harming other people must still be kept away from society!
That is extremely poor and dangerous argument for putting them in jail in bad evidence. But yeah, when innocent people get into jail, it is fairly often on arguments like this.
> No one is currently convicted on the basis of a confession alone[1]. Normally a confession just means that the investigation into the confessor is more thorough than it would ordinarily be
Bases in innocence project, people who were provably not guilty were sentenced to death on confessions. And there is literally zero reason to think it is stopped happening.
>> Someone is is genuinely mentally unwell in a way that results in them harming other people must still be kept away from society!
> That is extremely poor and dangerous argument for putting them in jail in bad evidence.
Who made that argument?
Here's what I said:
>> the sanity/insanity of an individual makes no difference to whether they are guilty or not, it only changes the specific nature of the charge (i.e. premeditated vs culpable) and the sentencing (asylum or prison). Someone is is genuinely mentally unwell in a way that results in them harming other people must still be kept away from society!
Why on earth would you snip away my text about ASYLUM, and instead warble on about putting those people in JAIL?
I'm genuinely curious about the motivation to pretend that my argument is different to what I said, and then argue against your pretend version of my argument.
Genuinely curious.
Assuming those kids did die in her care the notes do sound like anguish rather than guilt.
>> Is this article submitted because of this or is it (also) co-incidence?
The submission on HN is coincidence. I don't know about the publication of the article.
I feel for the many different types of forensic labs.
These forensic labs have their own brand of "Never the twain shall meet" while they do blind analysis especially when the lead crime investigator has to clue them in ("fentanyl", in one case).
When doing network-based forensic, just because a "ping" happened, doesn't mean that "causation equal correlation".
Worse is the misuse of end-users' search history; a lone query made 7 years ago being used as a lead-in (but lone) evidence to a suspect's alleged behavior. Really?
Or an innocuous Google Scholar watch doing a trapping of some suspected but heavily watched URL?
One simple lab exercise of such forensic analysis is a reconstruction on the chaining of events given a set of evidence; it gets hilarious at times to see such "conspiratorial-like" theories.
Now the world witness the continuing saga of misusage of statistics from the US FDA VARS database being flooding with death by COVID inoculants.
I want to see a serious statistician look at the Hans Niemann chess cheating case.
There could very well be similar bias and shoddy statistics at play there
Here ya go, analysis by Ken Regan ( also a statistician obsessed with quantum mechanics, like the researcher in the article )…. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DDRLZTkd30c
It's possible, but most of the evidence in that case comes from circumstantial evidence, specifically the fact that he can't really explain the game he just played.
Which case? The multiple instances of cheating he has confessed to? Or the one that he denies?
He confessed to cheating online, not over the board. People have used shoddy statistics to allege that he cheated over the board, but none of them have held up under scrutiny.
I'm not saying the guy is a saint, but low-effort cheating in low-stakes online games by looking at an engine in the background seems substantially different than what would be required to cheat completely undetectably in major tournaments with many people watching.
That seems like a "lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas" situation. If someone doesn't want to be accused of cheating in a high-stakes game then they shouldn't cheat in a low-stakes game.
> That seems like a "lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas" situation. If someone doesn't want to be accused of cheating in a high-stakes game then they shouldn't cheat in a low-stakes game.
On the one hand, I'm inclined to agree with the assertion that dishonesty damages one's credibility.
On the other hand, there's degrees of dishonesty - should someone who (intentionally lied, and) denied going over the speed limit be automatically considered lying when he also denies premeditated murder?
It feels like a leap to compare the claim "This guy cheated in some low stakes chess games and shouldn't really be trusted in high stakes chess games" to the claim "This person committed a minor misdemeanour so they shouldn't be trusted when they claim they didn't kill someone"
How about:
This person cheated in an exam in middle school so shouldn't be trusted with exams in med school.
Because, yeah, when he cheated he was a kid. Kids frequently do stupid things.
but in the same sense those two things seem substantially different, the trajectory of his late blooming career success is also substantially different from that of just about everybody else playing and also calls out for explanation.
This idea has spread far, but isn’t true. Even the chess.com report shows that his trajectory was not much different than other juniors.
Anecdotally, in the past year I happened to be in the vicinity of Hans and noticed some behaviors. The guy is absolutely obsessed about chess, and is good at it. The simple fact that he can hang with the best in OTB bullet ( and shorter time controls ) proved to me he was legit, no question, he just really freaking loves chess!
Does he love it so much that he's willing to risk cheating to win?
Didnt chess.com publish a report that found no evidence of wrong doing in that specific tournament?
They absolutely did, 72 pages.
The abuse of statistics aside, it's weird that the charges/convictions (at least as described in the article) jump straight to outright murder. Did prosecutors in these cases present any evidence demonstrating intent? If not, then do these legal systems not have concepts of negligence? Unintentional homicide/manslaughter? Incompetence?
In any case, do these legal systems not presume innocence until actually proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? If not, then these cases seem like perfect case studies as to why said presumption of innocence is mandatory for a society to be considered free and just - and if they do presume innocence, then I'm baffled by how these cases not only resulted in convictions but upheld convictions given the abundance of reasonable doubt.
Very interesting, but I do wonder some things:
1. Isn't 1 in 49 still hugely statistically significant and therefore suspicious? The probability of this happening by chance is still only 2%
2. What were De Berk's the "great secrets" and "secret compulsion"? Was there any other evidence presented against her besides the raw statistics?
3. In the case of Folbigg I just wonder: Why would she have so many kids if all she does in her diary is complain about their existence ... ??
Ad 1: That's a huge chance. Just imagine how many nurses there are in the closest hospital, and that each of them had a 2% chance for some unvaforable pattern.
They don't give enough detail in the article (Wikipedia has some more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_de_Berk), but based on the chart I suspect it's something like this:
Imagine someone goes to a casino, and play a game where you flip a coin 20 times in a row, and win if they're all heads. There's about a 1 in 1 million chance of flipping 20 heads - so people are suspicious that the person cheated.
However, imagine that during that same time period, 10 million people played that game. Looking at that, you'd expect there to be 10 winners of the game. Suddenly it's not suspicious at all.
So I think the argument is that this is the chance a nurse experienced this many deaths is 1 in 45 - so with 45 nurses, you'd expect one to experience it.
To add: there are over 4 million nurses in the US.
>Isn't 1 in 49 still hugely statistically significant and therefore suspicious? The probability of this happening by chance is still only 2%
2% means a false positive for every 50 nurses.
Should have "(2022)" in the title. After reading the first three paragraphs, I realized I had read this a year ago. It's from the January 2022 issue of Science, despite the byline saying February 2023.
I find something similar with relationships
People aren’t willing to acknowledge the high probability that someone just had a string of bad partners
> People aren’t willing to acknowledge the high probability that someone just had a string of bad partners
Nonsense. Choosing a partner is not a random event, like drawing a card from a deck, or spinning a roulette wheel.
The odds are very much against "poor guy/gal had 10 boyfriends/girlfriends in the last 10 years, all of whom turned out to be meth-heads" being a random event.
In relationships, what is true most of the time (the odds on) is that a string of bad relationships for a man/woman has one common factor - that man/woman.
yeah sure but two or three in a row occupying a half a decade or more of time is very plausible
> yeah sure but two or three in a row occupying a half a decade or more of time is very plausible
Over 5 years?
Two is not "a string of bad partners".
Three meth-heads in a row is almost certainly NOT "very plausible" (probability approaching 1). The subject is almost certainly selecting for meth-heads.
Three alcoholics in a row over 5 years is also not "very plausible", but it is at least somewhat plausible - alcohol addiction can be hidden very well from someone you don't live with.
Three cheaters in a row (over 5 years) is maybe what I would consider to be approaching "very plausible". Even then, at around 20 months per relationship (the most optimistic way to have each relationship be long), you gotta wonder why the subject is choosing only players to date. Still looks like a selection bias on the subjects side.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that your original assertion could not be any more wrong than it already is.
Someone with a string of bad relationships most probably has a selection bias for certain traits in a partner which make them unsuitable as a partner.
Romantic partners are usually not usually randomly assigned.
So at the least the person with a string of bad partners is very, very bad and choosing romantic partners.
Man, every time a prosecutor gets a case overturned, they themselves need to be put on trial. Was was their motive? Did they ignore evidence? Dig deep into why they tried so hard to get an innocent person behind bars.
The rabbit hole of wrongful convictions goes deep but long story short there are a number of reasons, most of which is "tunnel vision", that is when a prosecutor or detective gets a lead, they will often ignore other evidence in favor of that lead. It's less about dirty prosecutors and more about how psychology and our brains work. I would highly suggest listening to a couple of episodes of Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom[1] and check out the Innocence Project[2], both are fantastic for getting into the world of wrongful convictions.
[1]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wrongful-conviction/id...
[2]: https://innocenceproject.org
The well-known version that seems susceptible is "Well, when a girlfriend gets murdered, it's the boyfriend x% of the time, so we should focus on the boyfriend." That's a great way to increase the value of x over time.
That's ignoring a lot of evidence we have of police officers planting fake evidence. See for example https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/melissasegura/josh-tepf... where about 300 people in Chicago alone have been exonerated due to cops faking evidence.
Do those intrinsically include dirty prosecutors though?
Police are not prosecutors.
Malfeasance is one thing, but I don't think you want this kind of general liability for prosecutors: they're executing legal motions based on the evidence and information presented to them. Unless there's some evidence that they're actually ignoring or hiding evidence, punishing them for playing their role in the justice system is likely to do more harm than good.
(This is distinct from the problem of qualified immunity for the police, who (1) regularly kill people under dubious at best circumstances, and (2) regularly launder falsified or coerced evidence into the legal system. It makes sense, in my opinion, to introduce personal liability there.)
One would imagine that a significant portion of the time they tried to put the person behind bars because they believed the person to be guilty.
I’m curious what your “Blackstone number” is. The Blackstone principle is that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent one to be imprisoned. It seems you might go higher than ten—but how high? Should we be so concerned about wrongful convictions that we allow 1000 guilty men to go free for each one? 10,000?
Then, turn that around. Given how often prosecutors have good motives and adequate grounds for moving forward with a conviction, how many innocent prosecutors would you put through the wringer just to catch one guilty one?
Honestly it seems absurd that innocent people can actually end up being robbed of their life and thrown in prison at all.
Does it seem more absurd than the fact that innocent people can be killed by drunk drivers? Or that they can be dismembered in industrial accidents?
It seems like you have an expectation that human systems could be perfect, and I’m curious where that comes from or what sustains it.
There's plenty to criticize urban development systems that make people getting killed by drunk drivers more likely, but there's no aspect of intentionality in chance accidents. If we build a system that's supposed to dole out punishment, it should at least be able to prevent that happening, or at least re-evaluate every so often to ensure all previous and active decisions still make sense or whether someone deserves a lot of compensation.
In aggregate, it's all a question of numbers. Alas.
If you want 0% chance for innocent people to get convicted, you have to let many guilty people go.
If you want literally 0% innocent people punished, you have to let all guilty people go, i.e. don't attempt justice.
Well, we only have about 8 billion people on the planet.
If you can drive down the rate of innocent people punished below, say, 1 in a trillion, that's probably close enough to zero in practice?
But we won't get there, not even close, maybe not even in a panopticon dystopia. Anyway, your baseline should be total accusations (not prosecutions, you're already a fair bit into the pipeline at that point and imposing significant costs), which is significantly higher than total people.
> I’m curious what your “Blackstone number” is. The Blackstone principle is that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent one to be imprisoned.
The problem is that we are not achieving the blackstone number more than 1/10th of people in prison are innocent.
That means the criminals responsible for those crimes are still out there
> The problem is that we are not achieving the blackstone number more than 1/10th of people in prison are innocent.
> That means the criminals responsible for those crimes are still out there
That's more than a little concerning. Link?
> I’m curious what your “Blackstone number” is. The Blackstone principle is that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent one to be imprisoned.
This is incoherent; it is obvious that you'd want to set this differently for different crimes.
Which do you think would require more certainty: crimes with severe punishments, or crimes with low impact of the victims?
What kind of certainty? All else equal, (1) when the punishment for the crime is severe, you'd want to be more certain that the convicted criminal is actually guilty ("It's bad when innocent men are punished."); (2) when the crime is not very serious, you don't really care whether the convict is guilty or not (because we assume the punishment is not very severe). So we want more certainty-of-guilt in case 1 and less certainty-of-guilt in case 2.
We can also ask for certainty that people who are guilty in fact get convicted. ("It's bad when guilty men go free.") This is the opposite of the other kind of certainty. Here, we'd want a lot of that type of certainty for crimes with severe punishments (we assume that such crimes are very serious), and we don't really care about this for crimes with no particular impact on victims. So we want more certainty-of-conviction in case 1 and less certainty-of-conviction in case 2.
Certainty-of-conviction and certainty-of-guilt are, in the general case, directly in conflict with each other. We don't want either (in a relative sense) for trivial crimes, so it doesn't really matter what happens. We want lots of both for serious crimes, so what happens matters, but we can't actually achieve both goals.
In conclusion, when setting your policy, you need to look at other aspects of the crime than the one(s) you mention here, which are not informative as to this question. (Though they are informative as to the question you literally asked; we want more certainty of every type on serious crimes.) Perhaps the punishment for a particular crime is out of proportion to how serious that crime is. If the punishment is too heavy, we'd want more certainty-of-guilt; if it's too light, we'd want more certainty-of-conviction. Perhaps it's much easier than usual to reliably determine guilt-in-fact for a particular crime. Then we'd want more certainty-of-conviction.
> whether the convict is guilty or not (because we assume the punishment is not very severe)
There is nonsuch thing. Even short conviction destroys people's ability to hold jobs, find housing and to find partners. People inyour life stop trusting you and that is super big one too. And it may cause divorce with law abiding lartner and factor into custody dispute.
Any Criminal conviction has huge ramifications.
In the face of all this complexity, I think it is not "obvious that you'd want to set this differently for different crimes." It is clear the perfect certainty would be ideal, if possible. It is not clear to me that variable standards are desirable from a practical standpoint.
The relevance of a Blackstone number is it basically sets all this aside and looks at an ideal circumstance, and you can adjust from there, if you want to take peculiarites into account.
On these sort of cases I'm a little less inclined to blame the justice system. Often there were statisticians or other experts who should have known better advising or testifying to the likelihood of guilt. People shouldn't be convicted of improbability alone, but statistics is hard even for statisticians.
Of course they should have tried to correct the mistake once pointed out, but the justice seems doesn't seem to like doing that.
Woah there. Neither a "not guilty" verdict nor a case overturned on appeal means that the person was actually innocent. It means that there is not enough evidence that was judged admissible to convict. (This is a consequence of "innocent if not proven guilty" - or at least, not jailed if not proven guilty.)
Putting prosecutors on trial for something less than clear prosecutorial over-reach is, in my view, a major mistake. Perhaps the bar should be lower than it is, but there's no way it should be as low as "didn't get a conviction" or "overturned on appeal".
There are multiple instances where someone has been exonerated, which is certainly a high enough bar to require a serious investigation.
Yep, for example, lots of cases with coerced confessions or just confessions obtained from individuals with developmental disabilities. The investigator would be the one who overdid it, not the prosecutor, who is often obliged to pursue the case if someone says they did the crime. Whether the confession is any good is up to the justice system. This applies to many semisciences or pseudoscience or expert witnesses or shoddy statistics. The prosecutor should look at the case in good faith [not tunnel vision] and rely on the courts to be fair arbiters. Then you have technical boondoggles like Bill Cosby where the prosecutors view the matters of law one way and eventually the appeals courts view it differently--whether he committed some crimes wasn't really the first order matter.
If the prosecutor is obliged to pursue the case couldn't they still say in court "this confession was coerced, please do not find them guilty"? If they don't, then it seems to me that the prosecutor is just as guilty.
I don't think it would even have to come to that. Don't prosecutors have some discretion? Couldn't they just say that they do not think the case merits prosecution, and walk away?
(And I see the strain between this comment and my previous one. If the prosecutor has discretion, then they have responsibility for how they use it. But the bar for coming after the prosecutor needs to be considerably higher than just a "not guilty" verdict. The prosecutor probably should be more responsible for abusing their discretion than they are. But when the pendulum moves, it often moves too far.)
It is literally their job
Just following orders?
> It is literally their job
A job which also includes prosecutorial discretion.
IOW, it's also literally their job to decide which cases to pursue and which to drop.
Choosing to not press a case is also part of their job.
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