Software Designer Reports Error in Anthony Trial(nytimes.com) |
Software Designer Reports Error in Anthony Trial(nytimes.com) |
a) It's cheaper to incarcerate people than it is to kill them: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29552692/ns/us_news-crime_and_co...
b) Sometimes, our judicial system gets it wrong. Wikipedia counts about 140 exonerated death row inmates over the past forty years in the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exonerated_death_row_in...
EDIT: that is not to say that blindly relying on open source software is any better. From my point of view the ideal would be both the use of peer-reviewed software AND requirements to manually double- and triple check the results produced by said software.
When we lock someone away for the rest of their life, we don't devote much effort to getting things right. When we decide to execute someone, we are very careful about making sure we got the right guy. It's likely that at least some of your 140 exonerated death row inmates would still be in jail today if they were sentenced to life in prison.
If the criminal justice system is broken, we need to fix it. Eliminating the death penalty won't fix it, it will just make the media talk about something else.
How does that work? I mean, how do you examine what must basically be a log file (though perhaps in some binary format), come up with 84 hits but then realize it was only 1 hit and blame the problem on file complexity? Seems like such an issue would only result in underreporting, not overreporting. Where did the 84 number even come from?
If that is truly what happened, the fix is to simply re-initialize the visitedcount to 1 between rows in case there isn't a visitedcount listed.
However (from your link):
"It is a plain text format which is not easily human readable and is not efficient in its storage structures. For example, a single Unicode character can take many bytes to store."
My faith in the competency of "digital detectives" is not fully restored...
Hopefully this is just another case of someone simplifying things to increase readability to a mainstream audience, but every time I read something like that related to CS/programming/IT I cringe in horror at all of the things I must have a horribly half-assed understanding of by not being an expert in that field and building what little knowledge I have on the subject from articles like these.
$ grep 12.34.56.78 logfile | wc -l
84
Because it was presented to the jury during the trial.
The jury was told that the number of visits to that site was transposed with the number of visits to myspace. A prosecution witness cleared the record in open trial.
In fact, defense attorney Jose Baez even brought up the fact during closing arguments and used it as a reason to have reasonable doubt of the entire case.
http://www.siquest.ca/jbradley.asp
He seems heavy on law enforcement credentials, but rather light on Computer Science. Not sure that is the right combo here.
My point was, why hammer on the '84 times'? Isn't just the one time just as much a 'smoking gun'?
It's sad that our system has become more about winning and less about finding the truth and laying down justice. Here's a horrifying case where police and the prosecutor worked lied to convict a man who ended up in prison for 10 years before being release:
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_18385647
There was another story (not surprising in Denver again) where over 10% of the police force has been reprimanded for lying while on duty. This includes falsifying evidence, police reports and even lying on the stand. Most were still employed for some reason.
That, and the fact that you've got to seriously worry when a report from a piece of software that can confuse the numbers 1 and 84 is being used as evidence in court.
Good on him for having the moral fortitude to correct his error.
One time - I searched for something out of curiosity.
Eighty-four times - I searched for the term on several occasions because I was using it as part of some process or had an ongoing need for the information. Or possibly I was going to use it in some process, but decided not to, then revisited it later when I considered it again.
Inference is an important part of human cognition. We're pretty good at it. The subtle differences in the details influence the inferred outcome, and they should.
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Note that I am not suggesting this inference should be the basis for a conviction in trial by jury. The standard by which we judge evidence in a trial is not the same standard by which we develop opinions.
Similarly: buyers and sellers in a market needn't individually be aiming to arrive at an efficient or socially beneficial outcome; voters in a democracy needn't individually be aiming to elect someone who will be best for everyone's interests; employees of a company needn't all be concerned solely with the company's success. The trick is to design the system so that even when individual people are motivated by self-interest the aggregate effect is a good one.
Of course, none of these systems works perfectly in practice, and sometimes that's because some individual's self-interest ends up having too much influence on the outcome. Some or all of the systems might want changing to encourage participants to act less self-interested somehow. But I think it's just an error to say "Ugh, those people are acting in their own interests and not pursuing the top-level goal of the system" when the system is designed to get individuals' pursuit of their own interests to work towards that top-level goal.
It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, “whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever. -John Adams
Yet we have regulation because we've seen sellers destroy the environment and take advantage of buyers left and right.
voters in a democracy needn't individually be aiming to elect someone who will be best for everyone's interests
Yet Congress has shone time and again that corruption and cronyism are at it's heart, even if it sacrifices what is good for the people, the economy, or the government. (I don't think the system is even working right now, but that doesn't mean it won't in the future; the US has gone through times lime this before.)
employees of a company needn't all be concerned solely with the company's success
But what happens when employees only focus on their own reward? Companies like that become intolerable places to work at that are hugely inefficient, generally surviving only by cannibalizing itself or by simply leveraging its mass in a pseudo-illegal way). The corporate system is designed for everybody to be doing what is best for the company (which might not always be profits), but that breaks down, too, when everybody starts pursuing their own agenda to the exclusion of anything else.
Systems can take a certain amount of perturbation and survive, but, just like Stuxnet and the centrifuges, if you introduce too much disorder in a system, it will break down. In human society, it seems selfishness, that drive to take care of myself regardless of what it means to anybody else, is often the root cause of that (it certainly is in all the above cases).
It's too bad we can't be a little more communally-oriented (without needing to live in the forest in a VW and not take baths ;). Who wants to do a sun-dance with me to find some extra pollen for the hive?
I wasn't saying "there's never anything wrong with selfishness" or "systems that try to make selfishness produce results that benefit everyone never get exploited" or anything of the kind. Just pointing out that "look, people are being self-interested rather than aiming to serve the greater good" isn't on its own a good objection.
I also wasn't arguing that there should (in any of these domains) be no regulation. There should be, and as it happens there is. Perhaps there should be more. That's an entirely separate question from whether a basically-adversarial system in which all the lawyers are out to win is a good thing.
So far as I know, it's an open question whether justice is best served by a purely adversarial system in which everyone argues for a particular outcome, or a purely investigative system in which no one is supposed to be on one side rather than another, or a basically adversarial system with a bunch of rules that aim to take some of the edge off (which is what we have now), or some other intermediate thing. It's not the sort of question you can resolve by saying "You can't do that -- it means everyone just cares about winning!" or "You can't do that -- it relies on people ignoring their own interests!".
Sometimes notsomuch...
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_...
http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Injustice_in_Texas_T...
I think life imprisonment is a really bad thing to have happen to you, only marginally better than death. I'm honestly not sure I'd prefer life imprisonment to death at all, in fact. I also don't object to either one as punishment for the worst criminals.
That's my moral stance.
On to practicalities: lots of people hate the death penalty and will devote effort to making certain the wrong person is not executed. These people will not devote the same effort to preventing wrongful life imprisonment. Similarly, a wrongful execution is an outrage, whereas wrongful life imprisonment barely makes the news.
Thus, I see the choice as the following: some number of wrongful executions, or some larger number of wrongful life imprisonments. I prefer the smaller number of people who wrongfully lose their life.
That is less and less the case, given the collapse of local/regional investigative journalism, and also spectacularly unequal. The press or non-profit organizations should not be put in the position where it is responsible for providing a robust defense for people accused of capital crimes.
The fact that there is such inequity in the manner defense is provided against prosecution makes me completely against the general practice of the death penalty, given the possible injustices it may render when weighed against the possible justice it may mete out against truly heinous crimes.
There are too many instances of prosecutorial malfeasance or justice denied to continue with the death penalty, even in cases where the guilty parties certainly deserve to die (Bernardo and probably Homolka, in Canada).
Holding their children hostage would provide a really good incentive. Would you then recommend that as well?
I understand where you come from. But providing incentive does not justify murder. Even state-sponsored murder.
This makes no sense. My moral claim is that the death penalty is morally equivalent to life imprisonment. Since the issue here is differentiating between two acts I believe to be morally equivalent, I prefer the action with the lower probability of harming innocents.
When faced with a choice between harming innocent children and not harming innocent people, I obviously recommend not harming innocent children.
If, however, the choice were between holding the children hostage until they die, or merely killing them, I can't say I'd express much preference. If I were the potential victim, I'd probably prefer getting killed.
And if my odds were 80% get killed, 20% exoneration, I'd strongly prefer that to 90% stay in jail for 60 years, 10% exoneration.
Just curious - could you explain why you believe locking a person in a cell until they die is better than killing them?
There may be some moral equivalence between a person who dies in prison and one who is executed (I would argue otherwise) but there is absolutely no moral equivalence between an innocent person executed and an innocent person who spends some time in prison and is freed.
"Just curious - could you explain why you believe locking a person in a cell until they die is better than killing them?"
Because they might be innocent? Or because killing them is used disproportionately against the disadvantaged?
Agreed - the justice system should be doing this. They aren't. Until they do, I feel the sunlight that the death penalty attracts is highly valuable.
...inequity in the manner defense is provided against prosecution makes me completely against the general practice of the death penalty...
Is the inequity greater for the death penalty than for life imprisonment? If not, then do you also oppose life imprisonment?
Now you are moving from moral questions to empirical ones.
Consider two hypothetical options - one is a 10% chance of being wrongfully convicted and being executed. The other is a a 20% chance of being wrongfully convicted and locked in jail with a 25% chance of being later exonerated, resulting in a 15% chance of being wrongfully locked in jail until one dies.
I'd suggest that morally, a 10% chance of wrongful execution is better than a 15% chance of being locked in jail until death + 5% chance of being locked in jail for years until exoneration.
In any case, this probabilistic example invalidates your absolute claim that imprisonment is better because someone might later be exonerated.
Because they might be innocent?
Apriori, I'm asking you to distinguish between:
a) imprisoning until death a guilty person or executing them.
b) imprisoning until death an innocent person or executing them.
As far as putting people into the wrong categories, that's a probabilistic matter rather than a moral one.