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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12779 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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Truly unbelievable set of court opinions from Philadelphia, providing lots of support for accusations of anarcho-tyranny:

  • A person is charged with two murders, one in January 2003 and another in December 2003. In 2004, he is convicted of the first murder, and is sentenced to life in prison. In 2005, he is convicted of the second murder, and is sentenced to death, partially because the first conviction is an aggravating factor.

  • In 2018, the person files for habeas corpus in the second sentencing (not conviction). The county prosecutor (Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, elected as a Democrat) concedes error and agrees that the death sentence should be reduced to life imprisonment. The habeas judge rejects the petition, and the state supreme court affirms (five to two), keeping the death sentence in place, because there was no actual basis for the prosecutor to concede error!

  • In 2020, the person files for habeas corpus in the first conviction (not sentencing). The prosecutor concedes error and agrees that the conviction should be overturned, and the habeas judge grants the petition and vacates the conviction. But the family of the murder victim intervenes and appeals, and the state supreme court reverses (by a bare vote of four to three), finding that the prosecutor not only had no basis to concede error, but actively lied to the habeas judge in order to get this murder conviction overturned! And this particular prosecutor has been engaging in similar shenanigans in over one hundred other murder habeas petitions! (Specifically: He has conceded error in 120 cases, including 110 murder cases and 35 death-sentence cases (75 percent of all the death-sentence cases in the county). 45 of the 120 concessions have not resulted in new trials; rather, the "exonerated" former convicts have merely been freed. 10 of the 120 concessions, including 9 in murder cases, have already been rejected as baseless by the state supreme court or by the federal appeals court.)

  • Remedy: Whenever the Philadelphia prosecutor concedes error in a habeas petition, the state prosecutor (Attorney General) must receive an opportunity to intervene against the Philadelphia prosecutor. (The three dissenters think (1 2) that this remedy goes too far beyond the limits of the case. One concurring justice thinks that it doesn't go far enough, and state law obligates the state prosecutor to intervene in county proceedings that become non-adversarial due to the county prosecutor's admission of error.)

The DAO insists its many concessions over the past eight years in mostly murder cases “simply demonstrate that the DAO has embraced its responsibility as a minister of justice”. We endorse in the strongest possible terms a prosecutor’s duty to minister justice. Lest there be any uncertainty on this score, we reiterate that a prosecutor is ethically obliged to concede relief on PCRA review when (but only when) the facts and law support it. We also emphasize that our decision is not intended to “counteract the policy choices” of the DAO. DA Krasner remains free “to exercise his discretion on behalf of the Commonwealth in Philadelphia’s criminal and PCRA cases”. But the means for achieving those ends cannot transgress the bounds of the law, and what we have seen in this case and too many others is the opposite of justice. Again and again, the DAO has made unreliable concessions unsupported by the facts and law. And when conceding relief, the DAO has repeatedly lacked candor to the court, misrepresented facts, failed to conduct adequate investigations, and inexplicably dodged necessary evidentiary hearings. This Court too has a “duty… to minister justice”. Indeed, our “principal obligations are to conscientiously guard the fairness and probity of the judicial process and the dignity, integrity, and authority of the judicial system, all for the protection of the citizens of this Commonwealth”. Our duty to safeguard justice compels us to order that in all PCRA cases in which the DAO concedes relief, the PCRA court shall afford the OAG notice and the opportunity to intervene before ruling on the concession.

Remedy: Tie conviction rates less conceded errors to personal advancement in a prosecutor's career. Prosecutors cannot be an elected position in this remedy. A prosecutor should be deincentivized from having losing cases on their professional record.

Tie conviction rates less conceded errors to personal advancement in a prosecutor's career.

Choo Choo! Here comes the train because people are going to be rail roaded under this system.

No justice system is perfect, sometimes innocent people are convicted and sometimes the criminal murderers go free.

I think people should be incentivized to do their job, and disincentivized from doing the opposite of their job. I want the tax auditor disincentivized from giving tax breaks. I want the firemen disincentivized from allowing fires to burn buildings. I want the doctor disincentivized from selling me unproven medical treatments. I want people to not do the opposite of their job description, even if there are occasional errors and mistakes.

The prosector who railroads and convicts an innocent person can have their salary cut and retirement benefits reduced, and the threat of demotion and the loss of their job if their mistake is serious enough. Like any other job, there should be consequences for serious mistakes or abuses of power.

sometimes innocent people are convicted and sometimes the criminal murderers go free

And it is a fundamental principle of English Law, that one instance of the former ought to be prevented even at the cost of allowing ten of the latter.

Absent other factors, and assuming murderous criminality has a strong genetic basis, Blackstone's ratio might result in a high level of murderous criminality in the general population as the innocent are butchered faster than they can reproduce.

From this perspective, a 1:1 ratio or even a 10:1 ratio allowing for many innocent convictions will reduce the genetic propensity for murderous violence.

Aka "kill everyone and let God sort them out".

If you hang a man at p(murderer)=0.5, you are not increasing justice at all.

Of course, the threshold on p(murderer) must be low enough that you can achieve general deterrence. If you require ten upstanding citizens giving eyewitness reports under oath to convict a murderer, this will make it very easy to commit murder without facing consequences.

I think that murders by private citizens are only a small fraction of the homicides committed in the last few hundred years or so. They happen, but the median homicide victim was probably killed in state-sponsored violence.

You would certainly cut down on private murders if you allowed cops to shoot whomever they feel are up to no good. But this will reliably lead to the "up to no good" designation being applied to political enemies, entrenching whomever is in power, which is generally a terrible idea.

I can make assumptions too! Assuming that a large portion of the population has a genetic propensity not to commit violent crime if not committing such guarantees that they will not be convicted of it, and also a genetic propensity, if they are likely to be convicted of horrifying crimes whether or not they committed them, to lash out against the system that put them in such an impossible position out of spite (defecting against those who defected against them in the previous round), rejecting Blackstone might result in more violence than a few 'orrible murderers getting away with their deeds.

Thou call'dst me dog before thou hadst a cause, But since I am a dog, beware my fangs.

--William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

[I]f you are maximally mean to innocent people, then eventually bad things will happen to you. First, because you have no room to punish people any more for actually hurting you. Second, because people will figure if they’re doomed anyway, they can at least get the consolation of feeling like they’re doing you some damage on their way down.

--Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex, August 2014

If all you were concerned about was long term genetic propensity to violence, couldn't you just introduce castration as a "lower tier" punishment that you dish out more readily?

Castration would probably be a good two-for: it would probably lower the propensity to violence directly (see steers vs bulls), and stop them from reproducing. You probably wouldn't even need to imprison most of them. I would actually argue it would be more humane than locking people up for decades, as we do in the US.

(Although, as an aside, I think murder numbers among any demographic would need to be significantly higher than they are for Blackstone's ratio to actually result in murderers killing faster than the birth rate. The United States may have higher violent crime rates than Europe, but even with Blackstone's ratio as an inherited principle of our common law legal system, we're still far from that fate.)

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