andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2011-11-18 11:00 am
andrewducker) wrote2011-11-18 11:00 am
Entry tags:
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Interesting Links for 18-11-2011
- Some interesting changes being recommended for the Scottish justice system
- The Gamburtsevs - Earth's most extraordinary mountains
- Intel shows off its Knights Corner one teraflops chip - Larrabee finally pays off!
- Is slow TV taking over the airwaves? (No. But it's nice to see some)
- Ex-MI5 boss to call for cannabis to be decriminalised
- Young jobseekers told to work without pay or lose unemployment benefits.
Surely this violates minimum wage laws?
- 5 Skills You Need To Thrive In Modernity (That Nobody Bothered To Teach You)
- Have taxpayers got a decent deal on the Northern Rock sale?
- Comedy foreign accents: Are they ever a good idea?
- Boffins build bigger, better battery.
- National Geographic Photo Contest 2011. Wow. These are _amazing_
- When a coyote climbs into your fridge.
- How the Plummeting Price of Cocaine Fueled the Nationwide Drop in Violent Crime - Jobs & Economy - The Atlantic Cities
- Mozilla deploying BrowserID on its own sites
- Boys’ brains, girls’ brains: How to think about sex differences in psychology.
- France needs to upgrade all nuclear reactors
- Training in concrete thinking can be self-help treatment for depression
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The “real” bit of discomfort comes from this. Where there is a choice between making things easier or harder for the state to convict people of a crime I tend to prefer that it is more difficult. I think there is a reduced risk of abuse of the criminal system where some corroboration is required. By abuse I mean the (very rare in our country) systematic use of the criminal justice system to quash political dissent and the (more common) circumvention of the system by the police or witnesses.
I’m sceptical of any desire on the part of the state to make it easier to lock people up. If there are problems convicting guilty people of crimes (and I accept that there are problems for a number of classes of crime) I’d like to see the state’s first response to be improving the gathering, storage, interrogation and presentation of evidence rather than reducing the evidential bar.
I accept that there are guilty people who will not be convicted as a result of the rules on corroboration and that some of these people will have committed very bad crimes. I think the situation where we have no rules on corroboration is that slightly more innocent people will be fitted up. On balance I’d rather the guilty went free rather than the innocent went to prison and we had a system that was marginally less able to be used for state (or corporate) oppression.
Corroboration takes a situation where it is one person’s word against another and gives an extra piece of data which the jury can use to validate one of two contradictory statements.
Without corroboration one can be convicted purely on the grounds of a confession or purely on the grounds of a single eye witness – both of these methods have significant known flaws.
The standard for corroboration is pretty low. IIRC it can be something as someone looking a little shaky after an alleged assault.
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There are bound to be cases where one piece of evidence is in fact going to be sufficient but even CCTV with a clear view of someone’s face can be faked. The standard for corroboration is pretty low but I’d like some second piece of evidence so that there isn’t a single point of failure in the system.
The point of corroboration is to make it harder for the state or for a conspiracy of witnesses to gain a conviction by presenting false evidence.
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Minimum wage laws?
Re: Minimum wage laws?
I'd have much less problem with it if it was something that was offered with no compulsion, no consequences of not doing it.