Things like this are the main reason I am opposed to the death penalty. Imagine being actually killed because of a clerical error, or as in this case, clerical malfeasance.
I mean, it's one more reason why I am generally opposed to the entire retributive "justice" system in the US.
The death penalty is a horror show, but prison on any level is brutal, and the idea that there are folks incarcerated at all for things that they did not do is a crime that should make us all worry.
Imagine losing even a year of your life to that brutal system due to "clerical malfeasance".
Things like this are the main reason I’m against the US criminal justice system and everyone who willingly participates in it (such as police and prosecutors and judges and wardens and guards), where the presumption of innocence simply doesn’t exist in practice and has no checks or balances to ensure that so-called law enforcement doesn’t engage in all manner of well-documented commonplace illegal practices such as manufacturing evidence, bullshit expert testimony, and parallel construction.
Voluntary participation in such a system that is so well-documented as chronically and permanently unjust is affirmative approval of injustice. In my view, it is a criminal act to participate in such an irredeemable criminal conspiracy to carry out injustice.
If you’re ever forced to be on a jury, ignore everything you are told or shown and simply return a not guilty verdict in all circumstances. Jury nullification is the last and only check on this power and it is almost never used by jurors, and is unknown to most.
Separately, you should be philosophically opposed to the death penalty for the same reason you should be opposed to torturing people in prison: the most basic of human rights is the right to life. You shouldn’t oppose the death penalty simply because the government sometimes gets the verdict wrong. You should oppose the death penalty even if the government could be proven to get the exact correct answer 100% of the time without exception, because nobody should violate the human rights of others, even in the case where the person in question is legitimately guilty.
America seems to generally agree that convicted criminals forfeit their human rights and that it’s okay to allow them to die of covid (prison guards were prioritized for covid vaccines ahead of inmates, for example) or be raped or beaten or killed once they are in prison. It’s degenerate and appalling.
The classic law enforcement “we know this person did it so any amount of fraud and crime to get them in jail is worth it” … “oh what do you mean the actual criminal has been free for decades while our victim was in prison?”
The best part is that despite police and often DA's demonstrably abusing their power to put SOMEONE behind bars for whatever crime was committed, they still have absurdly low clearance rates!
Look, the detectives on Law & Order regularly get the perp to confess to their crime with just a little unorthodox investigation or roughing them up in the interview room, if that's what it takes that's what it takes!
They have also manipulated drug test results. Turns out the lab tech was snorting up all the "standards", which are used to calibrate the machines. Then the tech faked the calibration of the machines.
I wonder what her motivations could have been. Racism? Sexism? Was she paid off by the prosecution? Why intentionally frame a bunch of people for crimes when she knew they didn't commit them? You'd think that just knowing that by framing an innocent person the real criminal is left free would be enough to make doing something like this seem beyond stupid.
Like the QA person who was faking test results for specialty steel being used in US submarines because they couldn't be assed to actually test the sample at extremely low temperatures because "surely the sub won't actually get to -100 degrees, the water would freeze".
Of course, those tests were being done to build reliable models for how that steel would react to actually very cold North Atlantic temperatures that non-trivially increase the brittleness of steel and has had demonstrable negative impact on warship survivability.
> When science becomes an unquestionable religion, lies by its priest end up causing great harms.
Is that a joke? The entire point of science is that it is constantly questioned and our old understanding is revised or even replaced when new evidence is discovered. Even in this case, her "science" was not "unquestionable" it was literally questioned and found to be incorrect triggering a scramble to fix everything, which is kind of the whole premise of the article.
You could be right, but there are enough legitimate issues with how science is done today that it seems strange to pick such a plainly absurd take as the propaganda to spread around. Plus it would make the comparison to religion even more bizarre since I imagine the anti-science crowd includes a lot of people who have zero problems with dogmatism and even an unfortunately high tolerance for misbehaving priests.
> ... make the comparison to religion even more bizarre ...
Oh, I disagree. I've met quite a few religious folk who will attempt to convert an atheist's distrust of religion into a distrust of science by drawing parallels between science and religion. After all, there is no internal conflict when a religious person attacks a religion that is not their own.
