Quotulatiousness

July 13, 2019

Piling on the charges to encourage plea bargaining – modern policing at work

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A recent local crime story included the following laundry list of charges for one of the accused:

Shaquille Lovell, 21, of Ritson Road South in Oshawa is charged with careless carry of a prohibited firearm, contravention of storage regulations, unauthorized possession of a firearm, possession of a firearm knowing its possession is unauthorized, possession of a loaded prohibited firearm, and possession of a controlled substance for the purpose of trafficking (cocaine).

He was found to be carrying a prohibited weapon (a handgun) and a controlled substance (cocaine). Those two offences should be more than enough to prosecute with strong chance of conviction. All the rest of the bafflegab charges appear to be piled on to encourage plea bargaining, because they’re literally peripheral to the main criminal activity the accused has been charged with.

Lawyers, especially legal aid lawyers, will encourage the accused to “bargain down” the charges — one of the reasons for so many separate charges being applied — to avoid the cost and delay of a full trial … and the risk of facing the full potential sentence. Even relatively well-to-do middle class people will be more likely to want to avoid a long, drawn-out legal battle because it might well cost them everything they own. Poor people don’t even have that much of an option.

Canadian law enforcement is continuing to follow down the path of the United States, where a 90% conviction rate is considered low. According to Statistics Canada, “In 2013/2014, 63% of all cases completed in adult criminal court resulted in a finding of guilt”, but also “The extent to which plea negotiations are utilized in Canada currently remains unknown.”

July 12, 2019

Mark Steyn urges caution when considering the Epstein case

Filed under: Government, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It may make sense to avoid a rush to judgement, as the way the federal justice system works these days does not encourage a belief in its impartiality or, for that matter, its dedication to the concept of “justice”:

I am wary of saying anything too definitive re the Jeffrey Epstein case, because so much of the reporting is way too trusting of the federal prosecutors’ official narrative. Don’t get me wrong: I take it as read that he’s an industrial-scale pedophile, if only because it seems to be the only thing anybody knows about him – including how he made his billion dollars. He apparently requires three “massages” a day by underage girls. So, upon being informed that Mr Epstein was flying his “Lolita Express” around Africa with Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey and a softcore porn actress called Chauntae Davies on board, I’m disinclined to accept the official explanation that this was an Aids-relief “humanitarian” mission.

Mug shot of Jeffrey Epstein made available by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, taken following his indictment for soliciting a prostitute in 2006.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

That said, as longtime readers know, I regard federal justice as appallingly corrupt, and so the sudden revival of Epstein’s prosecution is somewhat more than intriguing. First, and as often with prominent American cases, the details make no sense:

    In a memo filed to the court, prosecutors outlined the scope of Epstein’s vast wealth to argue that he has the means to flee the country and escape prosecution, noting that he not only has homes in Manhattan, Palm Beach, New Mexico and Paris — with his Upper East Side townhouse, of which prosecutors are seeking the forfeiture, alone worth $77 million — but also owns a private island in the US Virgin Islands.

    He also has three US passports, owns at least 15 vehicles and has access to two private jets, according to the memo.

I can understand how a rich man comes to have fifteen cars, but how pray, does one individual citizen acquire three US passports? And from a government supposedly on “orange alert” these last eighteen years.

Second, Epstein was the beneficiary of a ludicrously lenient federal plea deal a decade ago for exactly the same charges. So this would appear to be “double jeopardy”. Not so fast, say the feds:

    It is well-settled in the Second Circuit [appellate court] that a plea agreement in one US Attorney’s office does not bind another unless otherwise stated.

Is that so? Thanks to that litigious loser Cary Katz, I’m more familiar with Second Circuit jurisprudence than I might otherwise wish. But I had no idea of the above. So apparently, when you enter into a plea deal with “the United States” that says things like “the United States, in consultation with and subject to the good faith and approval of Epstein’s counsel, shall select an attorney representative for…” and “if Epstein successfully fulfills all of the terms and conditions of this agreement, the United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against…”, the words “the United States” only apply to the United States that resides at 27 Ocean View Parkway, Miami Beach and not the United States that resides at 32b Rotting Wharf Lane, The Bronx. So forget double jeopardy; you could have demicentuple jeopardy. Who knew?

One more thing: it seems fairly obvious that Epstein is also a procurer for those whose appetites likewise run to schoolgirls. This is where the manifests of his airplane are at least somewhat inferential. Yet the new indictment is concerned only with “the New York Residence” and “the Palm Beach Residence” — and not the Lolita Express jetting well-heeled buddies to Paedo Island. Is this some cozy arrangement to ensure that Bill Clinton et al are excluded from the case?

June 13, 2019

QotD: Justice and Social Justice

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It bears repeating: actual justice holds you responsible for the actions you take. “Social justice” holds you responsible for actions taken, without your knowledge or consent, by people you do not know and have never met. It’s guilt by association, and a perversion of true justice.

Sam Duncan, in a comment posted to “Elsewhere (234)”, DavidThompson, 2017-06-01.

May 23, 2019

The Supreme Court of Canada goes on a roadtrip

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Carpay explains why the Supreme Court’s junket in September isn’t a good idea:

While hearing two cases in Winnipeg rather than Ottawa is a friendly gesture, the Court’s choice of which groups to meet with – and not meet with – in Winnipeg is necessarily a political choice. If you thought the Court would meet with Ukrainians and Germans (Manitoba’s two largest non-English ethnic communities), prisoners, seniors, taxpayer groups and English language rights activists opposed to official bilingualism, you would be wrong.

In fact, the Court has announced that it will meet with “indigenous communities, the francophone community, the legal community, and students.” What message does this send to the Canadian public, which wants an impartial court deciding on aboriginal claims? What does meeting with the francophone community in Winnipeg say in relation to the Court hearing a case about minority language educational rights? And what if university tuition payments were at the heart of a case that came before the SCC, with its Justices having met only with students, but not with taxpayers?

As Canadians, the Supreme Court judges already interact with the public in their private lives, in Ottawa and elsewhere. One could reasonably assume that the nine lawyers appointed to this Court each meet individually with various people regularly, on the basis of friendship, shared interests, or family obligations. The people with whom any one judge meets over the course of a year would likely not form a perfect microcosm of Canadian society, in terms of race, religion, political views, income, and level of education. This is to be expected, and there is nothing wrong with it, because the personal connections formed by any one judge are not publicly endorsed by the Court. Not so for these meetings of “the Court” as a whole in Winnipeg, which is what makes the Court’s exclusion of many groups worrisome.

Chief Justice Wagner would no doubt respond to the above by saying that he and his colleagues will do their very best to decide all cases impartially, regardless of which groups they chose to meet with (and not meet with) in Winnipeg. And he would be right.

But that doesn’t solve the problem. The Court has made a political decision to meet with francophones, not English language rights activists; lawyers not prisoners; students not seniors; aboriginals not Germans or Ukrainians. In view of the ancient and centrally important legal maxim, “Not only must justice be done; justice must be seen to be done,” the Court should not be making these political decisions in the first place, in order to avoid even the appearance of possible bias.

It’s bad enough that the Prime Minister is seen to be putting a thumb on the scales of justice, but much worse if the highest court in the land is perceived to be doing the same thing.

May 9, 2019

MV Asterix delivers for the Royal Canadian Navy and breach of trust charge is dropped

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Amid rumours that the Trudeau government is contemplating dropping the charge against Admiral Mark Norman, Matthew Fisher retweeted a link to his article from last year, praising the ship and suggesting that it should be renamed in honour of the man who did everything he could to get the RCN’s only current replenishment ship to sea:

MV Asterix
Photo via Canadian Defence Review

Aboard MV Asterix and HMCS Charlottetown – The Trudeau government would have fits, but the Royal Canadian Navy should consider renaming the MV Asterix the HMCS Admiral Mark Norman.

The controversial new replenishment ship, which entered service on time and on budget this past January, has been performing brilliantly for the navy during sea trials. That was the unanimous opinion of sailors on HMCS Charlottetown and on MV Asterix after a series of refuelling exercises with the Canadian frigate and American destroyers during a hunt for three U.S. nuclear subs that I witnessed recently in the Caribbean.

The only hiccup during the five-day war game was on the American side. The crew on one of the destroyers was unable to establish a good seal on the fuel probe Asterix sent over as the vessels sailed at 15 knots in a two-metre sea with about 30 metres of water between them. However, it only took about 10 minutes to fix the problem.

Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, who ran the RCN before becoming the military’s second-in-command, strongly supported leasing or buying Asterix. The admiral was suspended early last year and subsequently charged with breach of trust for allegedly violating cabinet confidences. He is accused of passing on information pertaining to doubts that the Trudeau government was believed to have had about leasing the vessel. Although there were strong signals that it wanted out of the deal, the government eventually decided to honour a contract that Davie had with the Harper government to lease Asterix for five years at will be a cost of $677 million,according to the Globe and Mail.

“I think the Asterix is fantastic,” said Chief Petty Officer 2nd Class Mark Parsons, the Charlottetown’s chief bosun’s mate, who oversaw two approximately hour-long, problem-free fuel transfers from the tanker to his warship. “We have missed that capability since (HMCS) Preserver was retired in 2014” because of electrical problems and corrosion.

Parsons’ opposite number on Asterix, CPO2 Steve Turgeon, served on the 48-year old Preserver until 2013. Since January he has been training four deck crews of 11 navy sailors each to handle refuellings. This has allowed Canada to once again be an independent blue-water navy after several years in which it depended on NATO allies and leased Chilean and Spanish navy tankers for fuel at sea. A fresh group of navy sailors has just begun training on the Asterix, which is participating with two Canadian frigates in the vast U.S.-led, 25-nation Rim of the Pacific naval exercise off Hawaii this month.

And on the legal front:

Later in the day, the news was finally made official: the government has dropped the charge and Vice-Admiral Mark Norman wants his job back:

The newly exonerated Vice-Admiral Mark Norman says he was alarmed by the persistent belief among senior government officials that he was guilty, and that their false assumptions took a significant financial and emotional toll on him and on his family.

On Wednesday, prosecutors stayed the single criminal charge of breach of trust laid against Norman, a major victory for the senior naval officer who has always maintained his innocence in the face of allegations he leaked confidential information about a project to procure a supply ship for the Royal Canadian Navy. In announcing the decision, Crown prosecutor Barbara Mercier told the court it was necessary in part due to new evidence the defence produced in March.

“This new information definitely provided greater context to the conduct of Vice-Admiral Norman, and it revealed a number of complexities in the process that we were not aware of,” Mercier said. “Based on the new information, we have come to the conclusion that given the particular situation involving Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, there is no reasonable prospect of conviction in this case.”

She did not provide any details on what exactly that information was.

The announcement ends the two-year legal battle against the officer and heads off what would have been a politically explosive trial for the Liberal government in the middle of a federal election campaign.

A fascinating little detail is also reported:

[Admiral Norman only] learned from a reporter’s question that Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan had announced the government would pay for his legal fees. “Wow,” was all he could muster in response. In 2017, the Department of National Defence had denied Norman’s request for financial assistance, concluding he was likely guilty.

So even though they’re finally making the right gestures, they still manage to be as ungracious as humanly possible while doing so. It’s not the kind of reputation you’d want to encourage.

QotD: Respect for the law

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in “the law” as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like “They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong”, or “They can’t do that; it’s against the law”, are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney’s Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan’s Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take place at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a “miscarriage of British justice”. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

George Orwell, “England Your England”, 1941-02-19.

May 3, 2019

The rarely used US Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA)

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ron Paul wonders why Russian national Maria Butina got a harsher sentence under the Foreign Agent Registration Act than an actual foreign agent who was paid millions of dollars by the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein:

Russian gun rights activist and graduate exchange student Maria Butina was sentenced to 18 months in prison last week for “conspiracy to act as a foreign agent without registering.” Her “crime” was to work to make connections among American gun rights activists in hopes of building up her organization, the Right to Bear Arms, when she returned to Russia.

She was not employed by the Russian government nor was she a lobbyist on Putin’s behalf. In fact the Putin Administration is hostile to Russian gun rights groups. Nevertheless the US mainstream media and Trump’s Justice Department are treating her as public enemy number one in a case that will no doubt set the dangerous precedent of criminalizing person-to-person diplomacy in the United States.

The Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) was passed in 1938 under pressure from the FDR Administration partly to silence opposition to the US entry into World War II. While a handful of cases were prosecuted during the war, between 1966 and 2015 the Justice Department only brought seven FARA cases for prosecution.

Though very few cases have been brought on FARA violations, one of them was against Samir Vincent, who was paid millions of dollars by Saddam Hussein to lobby for sanctions relief without registering. He got off with a fine and “community service.”

Millions of dollars in unregistered payments from Saddam Hussein gets no jail time, while Butina gets 18 months in prison for privately promoting a cause most Americans support! How is this justice?

The US Justice Department is not even as tough on illegals who commit capital crimes in the US!

Unfortunately Maria Butina was in the wrong place at the wrong time. With the rise of the “Russiagate” hysteria, Butina’s case was seen as a useful tool by Democrats to push the idea that President Trump was put into office by the Russians. Plus, many of them are also hostile to our Second Amendment and to the National Rifle Association. So it was a perfect storm for Butina.

April 7, 2019

Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and the murders at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey

Filed under: History, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I was too young to know anything about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter except what I “learned” from listening to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” long after the events. In Quillette, Lona Manning recounts the story, which doesn’t agree with Dylan’s interpretation (but Dylan was far from the only journalist or celebrity to be fooled):

How many people who followed the BBC Radio 4 podcast series about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter were startled — or even outraged — when Carter was not triumphantly vindicated in the final episode?

In the small hours of June 17, 1966, two black men walked into a late-night Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey and opened fire on the occupants. They left bartender James Oliver and patron Fred Nauyoks dead at the scene and mortally wounded a woman named Hazel Tanis, who would succumb to her injuries a month later. Another customer named Willie Marins lost an eye in the shooting but survived. Neighbors Patty Valentine and Ronald Ruggiero told police that they had seen two black males flee the scene in a white vehicle. This testimony was corroborated by petty thief Alfred Bello who walked past the dead and the dying to empty the cash register after the shooters had fled.

Half an hour later, Paterson police stopped middleweight boxer Rubin Carter and his companion John Artis in a car bearing out-of-state plates that matched the eyewitnesses’ description. A search of the car yielded a .32 and a 12 gauge shotgun, the weapons police later determined had been used in the shooting. Carter and Artis were eventually indicted by a grand jury and convicted of the Lafayette murders in 1967. Carter vehemently protested his innocence and his case became a cause célèbre after his 1975 autobiography found its way into the hands of Bob Dylan. Carter was retried in 1976, after the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the first conviction had been unsafe. Despite support from Dylan, Muhammad Ali and the New York Times, the two were convicted again. John Artis was paroled in 1981, and Carter was finally released in 1985 after the second conviction was overturned and prosecutors declined to try him a third time.

Sports reporters Joel Hammer and Steve Crossman spent 18 months researching and reinvestigating the case and promised listeners of the BBC’s podcast that they would provide the “full” and “true” story. Their in-depth look at the crime provides far more detail about the murders than can be gleaned from Bob Dylan’s 1975 protest song or the hagiographic 1999 Norman Jewison film starring Denzel Washington. Dylan accused the prosecution team of framing Carter for the slayings and called them “criminals in their coats and their ties” who were “free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.” Crossman and Hammer are likewise very critical of the prosecution; for example, they think that Alfred Bello should never have been allowed to testify. How could the life of such a man, be in the palm of some fool’s hand? And they argue that the prosecution ignored — or perhaps even suppressed — an investigation into a very plausible suspect, Eddie Rawls (who is now deceased). But they stop short of calling it a frame-up and an attempt at judicial murder.

On the other hand, Crossman and Hammer think the “racial revenge motive” was a reasonable one. The very first newspaper accounts of the slaughter at the Lafayette Grill included the speculation that the murders were committed in revenge for the slaying, earlier that night, of black bartender Roy Holloway and this would also be the prosecution’s contention. That Crossman and Hammer now accept the plausibility of this theory is a significant concession to the prosecution’s version of events, not least because it was Judge Lee Sarokin’s rejection of this motive which led him to overturn the second conviction—the prosecution’s case, he ruled, had been based on “racism rather than reason.”

Coincidentally, on the front page of the East Bergen Record, under the murder story, there was a wire service article about Stokely Carmichael proclaiming “Black Power” at a rally in Mississippi, an event which marked the transition from the peaceful civil rights tactics of Dr. Martin Luther King to the radical activism of the Black Panthers. These two articles encapsulated all the elements of the Lafayette Grill case that continue to be debated over 50 years later. Why did someone walk into a working-class bar and slaughter the occupants? Was the black community in Paterson in a ferment that night because a white man blew off Holloway’s head with a shotgun? And what, if anything, did this have to do with the state of race relations in America at the time?

March 10, 2019

There’s something bigger at stake in the SNC-Lavalin affair than Trudeau’s career

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley explains why SNC-Lavalin is an example of Canada’s less-than-stellar record of holding corporations to account:

… University of Michigan law professor David Uhlmann argues in a 2016 paper, “criminal prosecution of corporations upholds the rule of law, validates the choices of law-abiding companies, and promotes accountability. … When corporations face no consequences for their criminal behavior, we minimize their lawlessness, and increase cynicism about the outsized influence of corporations.”

No kidding. And in a country like Canada, not to say a province like Quebec, it’s safe to say these lines of accountability and trust get severely tangled. Once a government deems any company “too big to fail,” whether it’s because of political donations or connections, or because its pension plan is heavily invested, or because it has acquired a creepy semi-sacred status among otherwise normal people — or indeed, because of an alleged 9,000 jobs — all these nice theories about the rule of law break down. That’s what we’ve been witnessing.

But there’s an even bigger breakdown going on that’s received far less attention. Employees allegedly behind Lavalin’s Libyan capers were criminally charged as well. Between them, former vice-president Sami Bebawi and former controller Stéphane Roy faced charges including defrauding the Libyan state, money laundering, violating UN sanctions, bribing Saadi Gadhafi — Moammar’s soccer-playing, Montreal-enjoying third son — and trying to extract him from Libya once it all kicked off in 2011.

Those charges were laid in February 2014. Last month, some against Bebawi and all against Roy were dismissed because the Crown didn’t manage to bring them to trial in five blessed years. In a scathing decision, judge Patricia Compagnone characterized the Crown’s behaviour as a perfect illustration of the “culture of complacency” and the “culture of delays” the Supreme Court had assailed in its landmark 2016 Jordan decision, which established empirical standards for the Charter right “to be tried within a reasonable time.”

It is an ever-more-curious mystery that Canada’s comprehensively screwed-up justice system never rises to the level of political crisis. In the first year after the Jordan decision alone, some 200 cases were thrown out on grounds of excessive delays. Some of the accused make the Friends of Moammar look like saints. They include alleged murderers, child molesters and drunk drivers.

The charges against SNC-Lavalin were laid in February 2015. More than four years later, we’re still fighting over whether to pursue them — and not, it must be said, in a way that makes us look like a terribly serious country. How nauseatingly fitting it would be if a court threw the case out before the feds even got a chance to decide what to do with it.

October 2, 2018

QotD: Legal plunder

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve … But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn’t belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay — No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic.

Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1850.

September 4, 2018

QotD: Law and morality

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the first place, it would efface from everybody’s conscience the distinction between justice and injustice. No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree, but the safest way to make them respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law — two evils of equal magnitude, between which it would be difficult to choose.

Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1850.

July 16, 2018

QotD: The Great Enrichment

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Look at the astonishing improvements in China since 1978 and in India since 1991. Between them, the countries are home to about four out of every 10 humans. Even in the United States, real wages have continued to grow — if slowly — in recent decades, contrary to what you might have heard. Donald Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University, and others who have looked beyond the superficial have shown that real wages are continuing to rise, thanks largely to major improvements in the quality of goods and services, and to nonwage benefits. Real purchasing power is double what it was in the fondly remembered 1950s — when many American children went to bed hungry.

What, then, caused this Great Enrichment?

Not exploitation of the poor, not investment, not existing institutions, but a mere idea, which the philosopher and economist Adam Smith called “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” In a word, it was liberalism, in the free-market European sense. Give masses of ordinary people equality before the law and equality of social dignity, and leave them alone, and it turns out that they become extraordinarily creative and energetic.

The liberal idea was spawned by some happy accidents in northwestern Europe from 1517 to 1789 — namely, the four R’s: the Reformation, the Dutch Revolt, the revolutions of England and France, and the proliferation of reading. The four R’s liberated ordinary people, among them the venturing bourgeoisie. The Bourgeois Deal is, briefly, this: In the first act, let me try this or that improvement. I’ll keep the profit, thank you very much, though in the second act those pesky competitors will erode it by entering and disrupting (as Uber has done to the taxi industry). By the third act, after my betterments have spread, they will make you rich.

And they did.

Dierdre N. McCloskey, “The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice”, New York Times, 2016-09-02.

July 4, 2018

QotD: “The world is rich and will become still richer. Quit worrying”

Filed under: Economics, Food, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Not all of us are rich yet, of course. A billion or so people on the planet drag along on the equivalent of $3 a day or less. But as recently as 1800, almost everybody did.

The Great Enrichment began in 17th-century Holland. By the 18th century, it had moved to England, Scotland and the American colonies, and now it has spread to much of the rest of the world.

Economists and historians agree on its startling magnitude: By 2010, the average daily income in a wide range of countries, including Japan, the United States, Botswana and Brazil, had soared 1,000 to 3,000 percent over the levels of 1800. People moved from tents and mud huts to split-levels and city condominiums, from waterborne diseases to 80-year life spans, from ignorance to literacy.

You might think the rich have become richer and the poor even poorer. But by the standard of basic comfort in essentials, the poorest people on the planet have gained the most. In places like Ireland, Singapore, Finland and Italy, even people who are relatively poor have adequate food, education, lodging and medical care — none of which their ancestors had. Not remotely.

Inequality of financial wealth goes up and down, but over the long term it has been reduced. Financial inequality was greater in 1800 and 1900 than it is now, as even the French economist Thomas Piketty has acknowledged. By the more important standard of basic comfort in consumption, inequality within and between countries has fallen nearly continuously.

Dierdre N. McCloskey, “The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice”, New York Times, 2016-09-02.

February 13, 2018

Forensic (junk) science

Filed under: Law, Science, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Nation, Meehan Crist and Tim Requarth report on a solved-by-forensic-science case that opens a lot of valid questions about the “science” part of forensic science:

Today, Genrich is 55 years old and has been in prison for nearly 25 years for crimes he says he didn’t commit. His latest appeal has been taken up by the Innocence Project, in the hopes of not only freeing Genrich, but getting the courts to recognize recent scientific challenges to forensic pattern-matching techniques that affect hundreds of thousands of people at all levels of the criminal-justice system. In our investigation, we comprehensively reviewed the literature on handheld toolmarks published in forensic trade journals, dug through past legal rulings, pored over nearly 7,000 pages of trial transcripts, and conducted dozens of interviews with prosecutors, defense attorneys, forensic practitioners, judges, academics, and scientists, from Grand Junction to the Department of Justice. What we found was a startling lack of scientific support for forensic pattern-matching techniques such as toolmark analysis; a legal system that has failed to separate nonsense from science even in capital cases; and a consensus among prosecutors all the way up to the attorney general’s office that scientifically dubious forensic techniques should be not only protected, but expanded. With Donald Trump in the White House and Jeff Sessions at the helm of the DOJ, the nominal momentum for forensic-science reform spurred by the two major reports is slowing. Genrich’s case reveals a system that makes it nearly impossible to throw unproven forensic science out of courts and may be keeping thousands of innocent people behind bars.

[…]

Firearm and toolmark analysis emerged out of a national push in the early 20th century to professionalize police investigative techniques at a moment when Americans were particularly enamored with science. Law enforcement borrowed terms from science, establishing crime “laboratories” staffed by forensic “scientists” who announced “theories” cloaked in their own specialized jargon. But forensic “science” focused on inventing clever ways to solve cases and win convictions; it was never about forming theories and testing them according to basic scientific standards. By adopting the trappings of science, the forensic disciplines co-opted its authority while abandoning its methods.

Amid the swirl of new forensic techniques, the courts realized there had to be a gatekeeping mechanism to filter out quackery. In 1923, the DC Court of Appeals provided that mechanism in Frye v. United States. The judges rejected a doctor’s dubious claim that he could use a polygraph to detect when a person was lying from a rise in their blood pressure. In the ruling, the court said that in order for scientific evidence or expert testimony to be admitted, it must be offered by an experienced practitioner making inferences from a “well-recognized scientific principle” that has “general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs.” In Frye, the judges deemed the scientists in the “particular field” relevant to polygraph use to include psychologists and physiologists—not just polygraph practitioners who would, presumably, be biased toward preserving the technique’s reputation. The effectiveness of Frye in keeping dubious science out of the courts depends on whom judges include in their definition of the “relevant scientific community.” But as the decades wore on, and the forensic disciplines gained influence, judges tended to restrict their definition of the “relevant scientific community” to the forensic examiners themselves. Judges began taking advice on what counted as good forensics from the very people who invented the techniques and made a living off of them.

In the American criminal-justice system, where prosecutors regularly battle defense attorneys over what constitutes valid evidence, judges’ rulings on admissibility are the final word. Once a technique has made it into court and survived appeals, subsequent judges, most of whom have no scientific training and little ability to assess the scientific validity of a technique, will continue to allow it by citing precedent. Forensic examiners, in turn, cite precedent in order to claim that their techniques are reliable science. Prosecutors point to guilty verdicts as evidence that the science brought to court was sound. In this circular way, legal rulings — which never really vetted the science to begin with — substitute for scientific proof. This is Frye’s fatal flaw: Nowhere in this process is anyone required to provide empirical evidence that the techniques work as advertised. Frye aimed to keep pseudoscience out of the courts, but instead has helped create the perfect conditions to keep it in.

[…]

No human endeavor is perfect, yet many forensic examiners claim “zero” or near-zero error rates. In a widely cited 1984 paper in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, bite-mark examiners claimed a coincidental match would occur less than one in 10 quadrillion times. But when actually tested, even the most experienced examiners were wrong about one in six times, and in one study they struggled to distinguish a child’s bite mark from an adult’s. In 2009, the chief of the FBI Firearms-Toolmarks Unit wrote that a qualified examiner will “rarely if ever commit a false positive error (misidentification).” In practice, error rates for matching bullets to firearms can be dramatically higher: In 2008, the Detroit Police Department’s crime lab was shuttered when auditors found that its examiners made one error in every 10 cases. The head of the FBI’s fingerprint laboratory testified that its error rate was one in 11 million—because he knew of only one error in the FBI’s 11 million comparisons—but subsequent tests of fingerprint examiners show error rates ranging from one in 680 to one in 24.

February 1, 2018

QotD: In Britain, crime does pay

Filed under: Britain, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Here it is instructive to look at the statistics for house burglary in England and Wales. 750-800,000 such burglaries were known to the police in 2006; the police found the burglars in about 66,000 cases. (The figures for the number of burglaries are underestimated, while those for the numbers of burglaries solved are overestimated, both for technical reasons not necessary to go into, and that we can for the sake of argument ignore.) In that year, just over 6000 burglars received prison sentences. In other words, even if caught, a burglar in England and Wales is not likely to go to prison; but he is even less likely to be caught in the first place. In this sense, then, criminals do indeed have nothing to lose, and possibly much to gain by criminality.

Theodore Dalrymple, “It’s a riot”, New English Review, 2012-04.

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