Hacker Cinema
The Innocence Project
2006 · TV series · 60 min episodes · 1 season
Drama series which follows a group of law students as they investigate possible miscarriages of justice under the guidance of an inspirational professor.
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2 comments on Hacker News
>Do they also just arrest people based on other 'witness' reports without any effort towards corroboration?
Pretty much. They will investigate for alibis and if there are fingerprints/DNA they will do that test. But absent other physical evidence a single eyewitness is good enough. Unsurprisingly they often are wrong. Netflix's Innocence Project has an episode where this happened. A woman was raped and thought she saw her assailant some time later. He was subsequently convicted and eventually exonerated due to DNA evidence.
Practically speaking there is going to be at least something else pointing to an accused. Otherwise, they wouldn't be showing that picture to a witness. But once you're suspected the standard is the witness picking the correct photo out of a line up of 6. That's enough to be arrested and often enough to be convicted.
> myths that the most serious types of crime affecting our society are the kinds of violent crimes that police patrolling the streets supposedly fight and that entire poor communities are “high-crime areas.”
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> An intellectually rigorous system would, for example, study in great detail the connection between hundreds of billions of dollars in financial fraud and tax evasion and millions of easily preventable deaths, not dramatically reduce every year the resources devoted to fighting crime committed by the wealthy.
I'm glad when they said how over-policed some areas are that they also pointed out how we don't police other areas at all and the effect of those other areas, like white-collar crime, are HUGE.
The article stressed injustices based on race and geography. It touched less on differences of injustices based on class. I don't think it mentioned sex at all. Since I applied to volunteer with the Innocence Project -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_Project -- I've become much more aware of how what we all know, which is how much more men are targeted and jailed.
I volunteered because after seeing a documentary on the project I felt compelled to do something. The innocent people the project freed spent an average of 13.5 years in jail -- completely 100% innocent. My taxes are paying for the system this piece described.
You can do something to change the system too.
Edit: a quick search for the question below on differences in sex for the same crimes -- "Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases" http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2144002, which I found in "Men Sentenced To Longer Prison Terms Than Women For Same Crimes, Study Says" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/11/men-women-prison-sentence-length-gender-gap_n_1874742.html, which has links to other research too.