I see your point but it's hard to explain a "human body decompose" Google search, when years later a [family member] disappears and the cops suspect family (as is normal.) But I was watching a CSI episode and ....might not fly. Especially if you searched for large bags a few months later.
Search engines are much worst given that you search for information and ask questions about everything.
You have to remember that jurors are normal people who have no vested interest in the case either way. As a juror you feel a heavy weight of responsibility, because you know that people's futures are in your hands.
If a person is convicted, it is because 12 random people unanimously agreed beyond a reasonable doubt that the alleged crimes happened. Your lawyer would have a chance to stand in front of the jury and say "of course my client was trying to learn about what happens when a human body decomposes; his family member was dead and he wanted to learn the truth." Jurors are normal people who understand normal arguments.
True but:
- You have to have money for lawyerS, and lots of it. Most people are already deep in debt and if they don't work for a few months they are out of their apartments. Now imagine having to come up with, say $50K cash, within a week, while in jail. And $50k is nothing. If the court appoints you one, he'll probably push to make a deal so you serve 12 instead of the gazillion years all the charges end up to. The deal of the century. He has another 11 defendants to defend this month.
- You are in the defendant's chair, and for every juror that takes the oath and presumption of innocence seriously there is another one that assumes you did something ("Why else would they pick on him?")
- Prosecutors, police, detectives and jurors are people, full of human faults. To go home in time for Easter one might be persuaded to vote guilty instead of holding up. It's not unheard for the cops and prosecutors to want 'someone' in jail for X crime, keeps the public reassured and helps their career.
- Unless you're mega-wealthy you're outmatched. The state uses virtually unlimited amount of your tax dollars to hire the best DNA experts and pathologists and you, John Q, can't match them. On the stand detectives have perfected how to testify and use anything to fit their agenda: "he cried /he didn't cry /he cried too little /he cried hysterically (sounded fake) or his cries were too perfect, as if calculated to deceive..." That huge fight with your wife will be told as a possible motive but no one is there to tell about the hugs and kisses 15 minutes after. Oh, you've been "poking" your high school sweetheart of FB and been talking about the "good old times"?
So yes, our justice system is relatively fair but if you get screwed the stats mean nothing, you're toast.
The government doesn't have the "virtually unlimited" prosecution budget you're claiming. Many prosecutors are overworked and given almost zero time to prep a case. High-profile cases get more time and money, of course, but these are statistically very rare.
Also, a person probably won't be convicted on a Google search alone. The burden of proof falls on the prosecution, meaning that they have to present more than just a few shreds of suggestive evidence.
Simply exercising one's right to remain silent, demanding a lawyer (even a public defender), and pleading not guilty vastly improves one's chances. The vast majority of convicts in the US sealed their fates by talking to the police, pleading guilty, or both. We'd have a much lower conviction rate across the board if everyone shut up, lawyered up, and pled not guilty--which could be seen as good or bad, depending on your perspective.
As an aside, public defenders are better than most people believe. They often do just as well statistically as private defense attorneys.
If you write, read, bookmark, share or search for something like this [0], does your conditional probability of killing someone go up? Probably not - chances are you just happen to be morbidly curious. The real killer, being smart enough, would never let his or her identity be coupled with such an obvious clue.
That's the rational answer. What's the more probably answer?
A lawyer with an excerpt of your most mischievous writes, reads, shares and bookmarks could paint quite a despicable portrait of you, the villain. Remember that time when a friend showed you a link which you stupidly clicked on? Yeah, that too.
And that "no real criminal would leave a trail like that" line won't work either - because we all know how criminals are stupid.
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My point is that I agree with you. Psychological profiles will probably become more commonplace as data mining et al. goes mainstream. These can be manipulated. Badly.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. (Cardinal Richelieu)
How about six million lines? All written with the naive understanding that they would stay private.
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For us, all of this privacy issue thing is far from news. We know about it. But as a society, we are still very far from developing the new values that are necessary given this overflow of intimate knowledge.
EDIT: Maybe I am being overly cynical about how the justice system can be manipulated. As the above two comments suggests, it is indeed designed to be a robust system. However, looking at cases in the US of people wrongfully executed, it doesn't seem like an unreasonable stance to be a bit distrusting of the manipulation possibilities.
> If you write, read, bookmark, share or search for something like this [0], does your conditional probability of killing someone go up?
I would guess yes - it seems likely that the fraction of killers who look up things like that is greater than the fraction of not-killers. Even taking into account that some killers will look up stuff like that and hide their tracks.
(Remember that killers, too, may be morbidly curious. Assume they're just as likely as anyone else to be. Then we're really comparing "how many killers looked stuff up specifically to learn to hide their crimes?" versus "how many people who subsequently became killers refrained from looking stuff up out of morbid curiousity, because they didn't want it used as evidence against them in future?")
But not so much higher that it's strong evidence, so your point stands.
In fact, it is still so low that it is likely not useful evidence at all.
Let's say there are 50 serial killers in operation in the US. And the MeFi thread cited had 100,000 uniques. Even if all 50 killers read the thread you would still get a huge false positive rate if you are counting on that thread in the browser history alone telling you anything.
Sorry, are you aware of someone who can be proved to have been executed in the US within the past few decades for a crime they did not commit?
I'm aware of instances where "key witnesses" recant decades later (under what kind of pressure from defense attorneys or their own conscience I have no idea...) But I'm unaware of any instances where innocence was clearly established after an execution was carried out.
The Innocence Project reports that they've exonerated (via DNA evidence) 17 people who had already been sentenced to death and were awaiting execution:
This strongly suggests that many other innocent people are still on death row or have already been executed, since the Innocence Project doesn't have the resources to investigate all cases of claimed innocence, and has to limit its efforts to saving people who are still alive.
The Wikipedia article on wrongful execution claims that "at least 39 executions are claimed to have been carried out in the U.S. in the face of evidence of innocence or serious doubt about guilt."
So pick the most convincing one that was actually executed. For such a charged issue, it's hard to take passive voice claims on Wikipedia too seriously.
Felker and Garrett are the only "specific examples" in that article from the US in the past few decades. Garrett sounds plausibly innocent, but there's certainly no posthumous proof. Similarly, Felker's alibi depends on autopsy results from a body found in a creek. Not really a slam dunk either.
Many anti-death penalty advocates believe (wrongly, I think) that it would be a huge boon to their cause if they could identify someone who was clearly innocent of the crime for which they were executed. oskarth apparently believes instances have already been found. I'm just looking for the current exemplar.
None of those people were actually executed, which was my question and oskarth's claim: That people in the US had been wrongfully executed. Not wrongfully sentenced to die.
Are you too lazy to read before posting a knee jerk Wikipedia page?
How about just posting one name of an executed prisoner?
I would be surprised if that passed federal rule of evidence 404(a), which is a part of U.S. law which says "Evidence of a person’s character or character trait is not admissible to prove that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character or trait."
I mean, this is assuming that we're talking about "years later" -- in other words you really are trying to say "this person was of a very morbid character and was interested in researching facts about human body decomposition." Heck, I made searches like that when I was writing the first draft of a NaNoWriMo novel.
Search engines are much worst given that you search for information and ask questions about everything.