Reducing Wrongful Convictions: Better Juries

The most critical means of reducing wrongful convictions is to have better juries. When you consider being summoned for jury duty, what is your reaction? Dread? Annoyance?

If so, you're part of the problem.

Now, I suspect you consider yourself to be of above average intelligence. (And if you have good enough taste to be reading this blog, it's probably true!) So look at it this way: someone is going to be on that jury. Wouldn't you rather it to be someone with half a clue? Think of all the really horribly stupid people that could be sitting in that seat instead of you.

Now look at it another way: you're the one on trial for your life. Do you really want all the intelligent, reasonable people like you to be the ones avoiding jury duty? Leaving you at the mercy of imbeciles? Probably not. Do unto others...

(Quoting Jesus, not maxim 13. Just so we're clear.)

So if you really don't think you'd do a good job, or can't afford the time, fine. But don't try to avoid jury duty just for the personal unpleasantness of it. It's just not cool.

And I'm not going to lie. Jury duty for me wasn't that fun. It wasn't the worst experience of my life, by any means, and I'm glad I did it. But dealing with the kinds of evidence involved in some crimes is not easy. If you can't handle a particular kind of case, they'll probably dismiss you. This is definitely a job, not playtime.

Now there are, of course, other factors besides personal preference that might keep you from serving on a jury. In the United States, your employer has no legal obligation to pay you while you're serving on a jury. That makes it functionally impossible for many people to serve. Spending a week on jury duty at $40 a day is a huge hit to someone who would otherwise have been working a full-time job at $15/hour. For a lot of people, that may be the difference between making rent and not. Juror pay should be at least the usual hourly rate of the juror, with some maximum cap at or above the average wage of the United States. If determining that is too complex, just pay everyone the maximum.

How much money are we talking about spending? There are something like 154,000 jury trials in the US each year. Figure 14 jurors per trial, and that the average trial lasts five days. Add in a little for all the jurors that are summoned but not selected. That means compensating juries costs the US something north of half a billion dollars a year.

I'm suggesting we increase the daily pay by a factor of, say, four, to roughly $20/hour. So we're talking about spending an extra two billion dollars a year, divided among the fifty states and the federal government. We're definitely in the realm of fiscal possibility; that's less than the cost of invading and occupying Iraq for one day. And we actually get something for this!

Other costs need to be accounted for. Jurors may have other non-job obligations, like child or elder care. Assistance should be provided for that as well.

In theory your employer can't fire you for jury duty, either, but that only matters if you can prove that was the reason in a court of law. Good luck proving that! Unfortunately I don't have a good idea for correcting that without throwing out the entire concept of at-will employment. That would have huge ramifications beyond the jury system, so we're just not going to talk about that right now.

We also need to spend some resources educating people as to what jury duty actually involves. (Maybe a blog post...) A lot of people dread it for no defined reason at all. Many have never been summoned. Schools should focus some time on this. One interesting thought might be to show informational videos on the subject at the DMV. After all, you're going to be in that line for three hours. Captive audience!

Reducing Wrongful Convictions: Better Public Defense

The Bill of Rights guarantees you a right to a lawyer when you're on trial, even if you can't afford one. Unfortunately, the lawyers provided by the state are often less than effective. Most public defenders have more work than they canhandle, and are underpaid on top of it. I'm sure many do a fine job even so, but you can't reasonably expect first-class work in those circumstances. The public defender system should be improved, with more pay, more attorneys, and reduced workloads.

Worried about cost? Most states already provide specialized appeal attorneys to death row inmates, and those attorneys often find errors in the original defense lawyer's work. The state ends up with a worst-case scenario: all the cost of a death penalty trial, and no execution (assuming the execution itself to be of value, which we've shown it's not).

Why not save all those man-years of prison resources, not to mention possible lawsuits for false imprisonment, not to mention the moral cost of stealing years of someone's life? States should provide better defense attorneys during the trial phase! Yes, it will cost more on the front end, but we get a better, more trustworthy system of justice out of it.

Also, we need to update the requirements for being provided with a public defender. Even the very poor are in many cases still considered to be able to afford their own defense lawyer. That's both absurd and unamerican. Nobody should have to throw their lives and livelihoods away just to prove their own innocence!

Per the above Mother Jones article, we would need 6,900 more public defenders to get the current workload down to acceptable levels. Say we added 20,000 instead, to account for the additional cases that will be covered by allowing more people to be covered. Median salary for a public defender is around $50,000. So we're talking about spending a billion dollars a year, divided among all the states and the federal government. That's not trivial, but it's doable! For comparison, we spent that during the invasion and occupation of Iraq every eighteen hours.

If you don't have functional courts, you may as well stop pretending to be civilization. We have to stop trying to do justice on the cheap.

Patriotism

I found myself listening to cable news today. I appreciated the music, and people telling what they loved about America. I appreciated that there were many tributes to the armed forces, as there should be. But it's important to remember that ISIS and Iran and North Korea are not threats to our freedom. Al Qaeda and Iraq and Afghanistan were never threats to our freedom. Vietnam and Panama and Germany and Japan were never threats to our freedom. We've been attacked by outside forces, and Americans have been killed. American soldiers have died by the hundreds of thousands to bring freedom to others. But not since 1814 has American freedom been threatened from outside.

Our freedom is threatened from within, by those that divide us, and try to use fear and anger and lies to manipulate us.

Our freedom is threatened by a government that operates in the shadows, ignoring the will of the people and the rule of law and the rights of man.

Our freedom is threatened by those who deny the rights and humanity and American-ness of their neighbors, and who try to use force of law to punish those who do not share their personal beliefs.

Our freedom is threatened every time someone tries to shout down a dissenting opinion, instead of discussing it, and every time someone rejects a fact that doesn't fit their partisan narrative.

Our freedom is threatened by government dysfunction, by elected representatives more committed to beating the other side than to finding solutions that work, and by elections whose outcomes do not reflect the will of the people.

Our freedom is threatened by a false definition of patriotism, one that says it's unpatriotic to recognize problems and try to fix them.

Our freedom is contingent on the idea that we are, as individuals and as a country, imperfect. The framers created a more perfect union, leaving to us the job of making it more perfect still. If we reject that charge, if we decide we are good enough and that no further improvement is possible, then we surrender our freedom to those in power. Because why should we strive to be better if we're good enough already?

If you call yourself a patriot, then you must ask yourself: how can America be better for all Americans, not just the ones I happen to agree with? And how can I help make that happen?

Happy Independence Day!

Reducing Wrongful Convictions: False Guilty Pleas

Why would someone plead guilty if they're not? Plea bargaining. In a plea bargain, the state tells an accused person "You are going to jail. Just say you did it, even if that's a lie, and you won't go for as long."

A plea bargain is great if the state is dealing with a guilty person. But what if they're dealing with an innocent? Regardless of how good a job the police and district attorneys may do, they will make mistakes occasionally, and accuse the wrong person. That's why we have courts and trials in the first place! Nobody but courts should be determining guilt or innocence.

It's just a matter of incentives. If a truly innocent accused is convinced they're going to jail, they will accept a deal and plead guilty, even if they did nothing. By offering plea bargains, the state is literally threatening innocent people into putting themselves in jail.

There is no justice in this. If we want to reduce the rate of false convictions, we first have to eliminate incentives for innocent people to convict themselves. Plea bargains may save the state time and resources, but only at the cost of the integrity of the entire system. We shouldn't be pushing innocent people to convict themselves. Plea bargains should be illegal.

(Now, I admit, we're not talking about the death penalty any more. Plea bargains contribute to wrongful convictions, but not to wrongful executions. You don't get the death penalty after accepting a plea bargain! What could you have pleaded down from?)

Of course, plea bargains exist to save the state money. So we get back to the same question we asked about the death penalty: what is the dollar value of not incarcerating an innocent person? Compare that against the dollars saved by not going to trial at all. I don't have numbers in this case, but I'm betting it doesn't work out in the plea bargain's favor.

At least, once any value at all is placed on the innocent.