Category: Rights, Justice, & Judgement

Source: The Crisis of American Forensics | The Nation, by Meehan Crist and Tim Requarth

Jimmy Genrich, and thousands of others, have been imprisoned for decades because of untested “science.” … By adopting the trappings of science, the forensic disciplines co-opted science’s authority while abandoning its methods.

“The legal concept of newly discovered evidence including a change in science,” says Chris Fabricant of the Innocence Project, who is litigating Genrich’s case, “is in my view a no-brainer. It was presented to a jury as infallible, and today we know it’s not. There is an obligation—an ethical, a legal, and a moral obligation—to go back and correct the record where exaggerated claims may have led to a miscarriage of justice.”

“We were really focused on ‘this isn’t a science.’ I can tell you from doing triple-digit jury trials, the jurors really want concrete evidence. Because it’s a very hard decision to make. And that’s why scientific evidence is so dangerous when it’s not a real science, because it is persuasive.”

Source: DRM’s Dead Canary: How We Just Lost the Web, What We Learned from It, and What We Need to Do Next | Electronic Frontier Foundation, by Cory Doctorow

DRM has nothing to do with copyright. DRM law … affords corporations the power to control the use of their products after sale, the power to decide who can compete with them and under what circumstances, and even who gets to warn people about defective products

Web standards are about “permissionless interoperability.” … A web in which every publisher gets to pick and choose which browsers you can use to visit their sites is a very different one from the historical web.

Until EME, W3C standards were designed to give the users of the web (e.g. you) more control over what your computer did while you were accessing other peoples’ websites. With EME — and for the first time ever — the W3C is designing technology that takes away your control. EME is designed to allow Netflix — and other big companies — to decide what your browser does, even (especially) when you disagree about what that should be.
…
Since the earliest days of computing, there’s been a simmering debate about whether computers exist to control their users, or vice versa … Every W3C standard until 2017 was on the side of people controlling computers. EME breaks with that. It is a subtle, but profound shift.

There is no shortage of businesses that want to be able to control what their customers and competitors do with their products. … Companies have discovered that adding DRM to their products is the most robust way to control the marketplace, a cheap and reliable way to convert commercial preferences about who can repair, improve, and supply their products into legally enforceable rights.

Source: comment on Tumblr, by kontextmaschine

RE: Code of Silence | The Intercept

So that sets up a problem for today’s movement against police abuses, which is if you build political pressure to show results – as measured by police officers convicted or subjected to discipline, how do you prevent this from empowering police corruption to clean house of dissidents, to support and approval from the very media and nonprofit watchdogs who take it as their duty to fight corruption? (God knows pressuring the police to show numbers has yielded less than stellar outcomes before.)

Because honestly, that strikes me as the path of least resistance. Crackdowns can be and are co-opted. … So how do you prevent that?

As far as I can tell the cop answer to both these questions is “Unions.” Which, that’s a point! The things cop unions do that reformers don’t like – reflexively defend all officers in all situations, fund legal defenses and media campaigns more full-throated and perp-smearing than a body subject to official pressure and using public funds might? Appeal to notions of solidarity to get other officers to use their positions and expertise to support the defense even in the face of management directives? Negotiate contracts that include high baseline pay and benefits, and provisions that make it difficult to establish cases against officers? Those are all felt, by cops, as safeguards against police corruption, and as much as that’s used as a convenient stalking horse there is something there. So what do you do about that?

RE: [embeds]
Continue reading Kontextmaschine – dagwolf: chicanochamberofcommerce: …

Source: Will Congress Reform Criminal Intent? – The Atlantic

Mens rea captures a simple principle: that a person’s intent when committing a crime should determine the punishment he or she faces for it.

“We shouldn’t have people going to prison for things they wouldn’t necessarily know were illegal and had no knowledge or way to find out that they were.”
— Mark Holden, Koch Industries’ general counsel and prominent conservative advocate for reform

“The fundamental anchor of our criminal law, the moral anchor of our criminal law, is that people shouldn’t be punished unless they know they’re doing something wrong.”
— Norman Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers

some Democrats worry that by establishing a default intent standard, Congress would be making it harder for federal prosecutors to bring charges for regulatory offenses that currently lack an intent standard.

Source: In Which My Identity Is Sought By Federal Grand Jury Subpoena | Popehat, by Ken White

It’s disturbing that the government would seek to strip Twitter users of anonymity just because a defendant sent them a smiley face unsolicited.

 

RE: DOJ Subpoenas Twitter About Popehat, Dissent Doe And Others Over A Smiley Emoji Tweet | Techdirt, by Mike Masnick