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Desrtopa comments on Amanda Knox: post mortem - Less Wrong
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I've had no interaction with you on this site at all, but I have read your posts on the previous Amanda Knox threads, and while I believe I have a far greater aversion than wedrifid to making statements so likely to antagonize others, I have to say I find your judgment in this case in conjunction with your position as a lawyer downright frightening.
Well what exactly frightens you? I'm not a judge.
Judges are mostly selected from among lawyers, so that would be a lot more comforting if I were confident that the selection process were a genuinely good filter for people of exceptional judgment. But I would have a lot more trust in our justice system if I thought that lawyers tended to be people who would not readily become convinced of and argue strongly for positions in the absence of good reasons for believing them true.
At least in the United States, judges are mostly selected from among prosecutors. Defense attorneys, including public defenders, aren't very well represented on the bench. General judgment aside, this a serious systemic bias of the system.
What mechanism makes it a problem? I can see why it would perhaps be most fair for an individual to have one of a former prosecutor and former public defender presiding over the individual's original trial and appeal. The more judges make binding rules for the system, rather than in their courtroom, the more of a problem this would be (though I am under the impression this is not the case).
But why are individual differences in judicial bias OK?
I see it as a problem in the sense that prosecutors and defenders are conditioned to view the judicial process in somewhat different ways, and I don't think that judges can simply wave away years of conditioning to see things from a prosecutorial point of view.
Individual bias isn't great either, but at least there the bias isn't necessarily going to be in the same direction at each step of the process. The fact that the trial judge and all the appeals court judges are all likely to be former prosecutors, on the other hand, cuts the same direction at every step.
I think this is a legitimate but small concern.
If half of all judges at each level were former prosecutors and half former defense attorneys, half of those who had a trial and one level of appeal would face the same bias at each step (assuming even promotion, and unless this was specifically corrected for).
A more fair system than evening out representation would be embracing a type of bias and having formal rules counteracting that, e.g. have all judges be former prosecutors and have a set of judicial ruels favoring defendants.
I think it likely you are being blinded to the gross unfairness of having an individual tried under a former defense attorney when the rules are written with no regard for bias or assuming the average judicial bias is in favor of the prosecutor, or under a former prosecutor even if half of all judges are former defense attorneys, by the legitimate point that fairness would be increased if each defendant had at most one of each type between trial and appeal.
This is especially true considering how much less important appeal is than an original trial.
Only mostly? I had assumed it was an actual legal requirement. That's interesting. Where you come from how many judges have ever not been lawyers and how on earth do they know what they are doing?
EDIT: From the looks of it some (40) states in the US allow non-lawyers to be low level judges, usually for small towns doing straightforward cases. From what I can tell in Australia (and most comparable countries) a law qualification of some sort is required.
I don't know if there are any, but given the sheer number of judges, I would suspect that there have been judges who have never served as lawyers; there is no requirement that a federal judge have ever served as an attorney, and requirements for state judgeship vary by jurisdiction.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics states that a bachelor's degree and work experience are the minimum requirements for judgeship or a magistrate position, but most workers have law degrees, so I'd take it as implied that some do not, and are thus exceedingly unlikely to have been lawyers.
It's rare now, but used to be common, for prospective lawyers to pursue an apprenticeship rather than a law degree. You can still use either as a qualification to take the bar exam.
That depends on the jurisdiction, and also on how exactly you define "lawyer." (Do you mean someone with a law degree, or a member of the local bar association or some equivalent guild? The former is usually, but not quite always, a requirement for the latter.)
If anything, in many state and local jurisdictions within the U.S., judges are elected by popular vote, and I would guess that in some of those there are no such requirements for candidates, at least in theory.
Interestingly, for a U.S. Supreme Court appointment, a law degree from a top 14 law school (and at least one academic degree from Harvard or Yale) has been a de facto requirement for decades, but as recently as the 1930s and 1940s, there have been occasional SCOTUS justices appointed without a law degree at all.
Apparently the last United States Supreme Court Justice without a law qualification was Robert H. Jackson - although he passed the bar exam without official training and was a prominent practicing lawyer. I haven't found the last time someone was appointed to that role without passing the bar but research so far does seem to suggest it is an entirely political position, without qualifications required.
They've all been lawyers, it's just not an official requirement.
Presumably for the same reason there's technically no official requirement that they be human, either.
That is, those with the power to appoint such judges would look like tools if they voted in non-lawyers or non-humans so they will not do either.
(It occurs to me there is a mutual exclusion joke in there somewhere.)
It actually isn't a requirement for Supreme Court justices -- I'm not sure about other cases.
I see your point, but I suspect the problem is more in your own judgment than in mine. Consider that I have had the experience of being wrong on these sorts of issues -- and having to face it -- many many times.
In this case, knowing that you persist in your assignment of a high likelihood of guilt for Knox and Sollecito given the data that's now available to you, I feel confident in saying that your ability to say oops is too poor.
After the advent of DNA testing, retrospective analysis of many crimes exonerated people who had previously been convicted. Had this case occurred before DNA testing was available, Knox and Sollecito would most likely have been convicted, but a DNA test should have been sufficient to exonerate them.
FWIW that assessment happens to be incorrect. I say "oops" regularly. And even in my professional life where there is a lot of money at stake, I occasionally have to withdraw a case and apologize. Or ask for leave to amend a paper.
Exactly what DNA evidence do you believe exonerates them? I am not aware of any, but I am happy to consider it in good faith. And yes, revise my probability estimates accordingly.
My understanding is that some doubt has been cast on the DNA evidence against the two. Which isn't the same thing as being exonerated. But I really would like to hear about such evidence.
The DNA evidence showing that Guede was the killer.
This is exactly the sort of thing that gets people exonerated under the Innocence Project. The only difference is, in most cases, the authorities don't usually go back to the scene desperately looking for new evidence to incriminate the original suspect.
Did you read the independent experts' report that Komponisto linked to?
(Er, not to sound vain, but my collaborator and I did a bit more than link to the report! ;-) )
No I did not. As noted above, the main new evidence I have is the fact that the convictions were thrown out.
Would you mind quoting the part of the report which talks about the exonerating DNA evidence?
Each component of the report in which they retested the samples (knife and bra clasp) for biological evidence of Knox and Sollecito returned negative results, as detailed in the conclusion. Having found specific reasons to doubt the results of the Italian crime labs' testing, the retest found no positive evidence associating Knox or Sollecito with the crime, and this is a case where absence of evidence is significant evidence of absence.
Let's make sure I understand your argument: You seem to be saying that the (apparent) lack of DNA evidence on the knife and bra clasp is convincing evidence that Knox and Sollecito were NOT involved in the murder.
Do I understand you correctly?