StrangeSox

here is the white paper that's pulled from http://www.ctj.org/pdf/taxday2011.pdf

We've made our taxation system considerably less progressive over the past 20-30 years. Note that it is all taxes, not just Federal Income Tax that used to trot out the "half the country doesn't pay a dime!" line.

The "Ground Zero" mosque opened yesterday. No one seemed to care without NewsCorp. drumming up OUTRAGE!, like they did last fall.

What Really Caused the Eurozone Crisis?

Nor that there are serious racial disparities in the justice system.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 23, 2011 -> 07:40 AM) And people wonder why calls of "racism" fall on increasingly deaf ears. There is a big racial disparity for death penalty prosecution and conviction rates.

intentionally inflammatory picture:

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Sep 22, 2011 -> 04:43 PM) That's the whole point of juries though. They weigh the evidence and determine if it's credible. If it is, they convict. If it isn't, they acquit. Example, in a DUI trial where the officer used a breathalyzer instead of a blood draw, the defense attorney will call a witness who will tell the jury that the entire science of breathalyzer technology is flawed (and it's true that it isn't as accurate as a blood draw). It is then up to a panel of people who may or may not have a science background to determine if the State's expert is more credible than the defense's expert as to the science involved. Likewise, in a murder trial where the defendant has someone testify as to an alibi. The jury has to weigh the credibility of that person's statements. Polygraphs aren't admissible as evidence, so the jury has to become the polygraph and determine who they believe. It goes beyond determining if a witness is credible and if they are telling what they 100% believe to be the truth, that's the additional burden. Your breathalyzer example really isn't a comparable scenario. In your second scenario, remembering if your friend's alibi isn't really the same as fingering someone for a crime or remembering details of a scene or an event. The issues with eyewitness testimony comes from remembering details, people you don't know, timelines and events. Seriously, there's a decent amount of research in this area, it's not something I'm just making up here. Human memory just isn't reliable enough to be the only evidence to sentence someone to death imo.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Sep 22, 2011 -> 04:44 PM) Sorry Balta, but this is beyond bulls***. MILLIONS of dollars and THOUSANDS of hours were spent by every level of the judicial and administrative system to make sure this guy was guilty. You guys are just asking for "one more chance" despite the fact that the guy was given about 15. Is that not enough? Seriously? How is that not due process? Seriously people. READ THE OPINION. Look at the actual details of this case. We're not talking about simple facts like A sees B shoot C. A tells cops B did it. B put to death even after A says no i was wrong. There are HUNDREDS of underlying facts in this case that showed that a lot of what the people were recanting/saying was complete bulls***. They changed their story 15 years down the road. I did, and so have many others that don't agree with you. It's not as clear-cut as you're presenting it.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Sep 22, 2011 -> 04:27 PM) I am not as familiar with the banking side, but I thought there were still seperate bodies involved there, even though they may all fall in the same cabinet department. That's better than SEC and CFTC, that are in Treasury and Agriculture respectively, and the exchange and CH bodies that are independent. And then there are state bodies in the area of market regulation as well. Sorry that wasn't clear, I meant privately. At least according to the Frontline episode I recently watched, the fact that traditional, conservative boring commercial banking was no longer legally divorced from riskier investment banking was (and is) a large part of the reason our financial sector got so screwed up. If the banks aren't split up that way, why would the regulatory bodies be? What's your opinion on the CFPB?

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Sep 22, 2011 -> 04:29 PM) Then you would acquit in the vast, vast majority of cases that are not related to DUIs (where there is always physical evidence - but, but there's a statistical rate of error in breathalyzers so... unreliable!) or capital cases (where the State will pursue all manner of physical evidence). The problem I have with your stance is that you are using an idea, that eye-witness testimony is always questionable, and making it a general rule. Obviously not all eye witness testimony is accurate. But again, that doesn't make every eye witness testimony inaccurate. The problem is that this places an awfully difficult burden on juries, above and beyond simply determining if someone is credible and telling what they honestly believe is the true version of events without coercion or suggestion. Probably true. I'm not sure why frailties of human memory is in scare quotes though. It's really an interesting subject in more avenues than just criminal trials.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Sep 22, 2011 -> 04:21 PM) The standard is "reasonable doubt" though. If you told me on a jury that eyewitness id had a 10% failure rate and the case was eyewitness based, that's reasonable doubt o me. Right, the context here is a murder conviction with the possibility of a death penalty. I'd comfortably state that I don't think I'd ever convict anyone on eyewitness testimony alone for something like that.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Sep 22, 2011 -> 04:26 PM) I don't know that I would go as far as "miniscule", I am sure that it is wrong more than that. I've read some of the studies that SS is talking about indirectly or directly, and they show you how powerful emotions and built-in constructs in the psyche can be. I think prosecutors need to be very careful with such testimony. In another life, I might go into neuroscience or some sort of cognitive studies. For as much as we like to think of ourselves as having this big, powerful, logical brains, its really a big mess up there. From that Stanford article:

retail and institutional banking are no longer separate, right?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 22, 2011 -> 04:21 PM) If a defense attourney could get up and say one in a thousand cases the eyewitness is wrong, they would. It would be the easiest out ever. It's a hell of a lot higher than 1-1000. No one's memory is a perfect recollection of an event even moments after that event. Many, many studies have been done showing that false memories are relatively easy to implant with simple, subtle and even unintentional suggestions and interactions.

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Sep 22, 2011 -> 04:14 PM) What do you think the state should have to convict? If there is no physical evidence (and I just explained why, in the vast majority of cases, there is no physical evidence), isn't eye-witness testimony the best evidence available? Yes, lineups can be unreliable. Yes, eye-witness testimony can be unreliable. Neither of those statements mean that eye-witness test is ALWAYS unreliable or even that it is unreliable in a significant percentage of cases. If the best evidence available is questionable and based solely on the frailties of human memory, I'm going to have a hard time voting to convict. The courts’ reliance on witnesses is built into the common-law judicial system, a reliance that is placed in check by the opposing counsel’s right to cross-examination—an important component of the adversarial legal process—and the law’s trust of the jury’s common sense. The fixation on witnesses reflects the weight given to personal testimony. As shown by recent studies, this weight must be balanced by an awareness that it is not necessary for a witness to lie or be coaxed by prosecutorial error to inaccurately state the facts—the mere fault of being human results in distorted memory and inaccurate testimony.

PS please note my mea culpa a few posts back that I overstated my position!

I linked to a recent paper that examines the issue, its prevalence, its causes and possible solutions. Here is another article on the issue from the Stanford Journal of Legal Studies. It's hard to get an accurate estimate of the number of real-world trials with inaccurate testimony that led to convictions, but what these studies do are create controlled situations with known facts and examine how accurate a witness's memory is.

The slate article re: scalia and this case I posted earlier highlighted that last part.

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Sep 22, 2011 -> 03:39 PM) That's fine; you can believe eye witness testimony is unreliable (and you're right... it can absolutely be unreliable - I remember reading a federal prosecutor's book and him saying something along the lines of "in 90% of cases, the police officer is lying and the defendant is guilty"). But that wasn't my point. In the vast majority of criminal cases, there just isn't physical evidence. In most cases, it is cost prohibitive (if every criminal case had to have some sort of DNA evidence to get a conviction, the system would literally fall apart). Ergo, eye witness testimony is, literally, the best evidence. My question for you is if eye-witness testimony is "worthless" and hard, physical evidence just doesn't exist most of the time, how is the State supposed to try a case? Do we just assume everyone is innocent? I'm sorry victim of a crime... eye witness testimony is unreliable and I have STUDIES that back this up so unless you managed to swab some DNA off your attacker, there's nothing we can do for you. Again, the burden is on the State to prove its case, and a good defense attorney will poke holes in unreliable testimony on cross examination. Juries should be more educated on the reliability of witness testimony and that an eyewitness saying "that's the guy!" doesn't necessarily mean that that is, in fact, the guy, even if that person earnest believes it. And yeah, if the state can't compile a strong enough case on solid evidence, sorry victim of a crime, we shouldn't try to push a weak case on someone who has a good chance of being innocent.

Bachmann's coming to Homer Glen!

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Sep 22, 2011 -> 03:33 PM) You know better than to interperet the bolded in this way. The Innocence Project finds cases of specific doubt, a few out of millions, and zeroes in on those. So what that stat says is, at best, that of the cases where there IS something wrong, it is often with eyewitness testimony. It in no way at all says eyewitness testimony is unreliable, or 30% reliable, or anything of the sort. I didn't say 30% was reliable, that'd be a horrible use of statistics! But a significant number of wrongful convictions are due to witness testimony, which certainly indicates a problem.

Eh as usual I overstated my case a bit, here's one of the papers investigating the unreliability and steps that can be taken to avoid it. One of the biggest problems found in several papers IIRC is identifying someone based on a lineup. http://connecticutlawreview.org/documents/Wiseet.al.pdf

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Sep 22, 2011 -> 03:22 PM) It isn't worthless, it ranges from worthless to critical, depending on the circumstances. I am sure that it is overused and abused at times, and I am equally sure that dismissing it entirely doesn't make sense. That doesn't mean all eyewitness testimony is wrong, but that its so unreliable that it doesn't exactly present much evidence. Something like 70% of the convictions that the Innocence Project has helped to overturn were based on faulty eyewitness identification.