As much as I'm not sure I want to add to this, and while I recognize that this is not the USA, do recall that in my own country of the USA, where the right to justice is explicit in the constitution, it is routinely ignored by judges who say that they run courts of law, not of justice. I'll also remind you of people who were railroaded because politicians wanted to prove a point -- and there's the recent publicity over a group of 5 that were interrogated without lawyers at the age of 15, forced to confess, and then spent 25 years in jail, partially because their appointed lawyers were horrible.
We've learned that if the people in power want to make an example of you, nothing matters except being so rich that you can afford the best lawyers. O.J. Simpson's lawyers were skilled enough -- and could afford everything involved -- to demonstrate that police procedures were iffy at best, and down-right rotten -- and these were the procedures that were "standard" behavior at worst, and "best case, high profile case" at best. Out of that whole thing came a federal government report that "forensic science" had little to no science in it, was full of holes, and a long list of cases where an "expert" had testified to stuff that was impossible -- including at least one case where a bitemark could not have been a match -- the person investigated was missing two teeth, the bite mark was only missing one, and on the basis of the testimony of an "expert" that "He could have twisted his mouth while biting to make that mark", an innocent person was sentenced. We've learned that "Fingerprints", that absolute match that can send you away as an absolute conviction, are so unreliable that the report all but said that they are completely unreliable with the current technology. Do we have lots of people sentenced improperly? Yes. We can prove it. We are doing nothing to fix this. Heck, do you remember a few years ago where it was discovered that we had a juvenile judge routinely sending juveniles to what was basically a work camp that he was profiting from? Even when innocent? Now it turns out that we are putting adult prisoners to work, at a cost of around $4 per hour, and outsourcing that to any company in the country that wants cheap labor (previously outsourced to federal agencies, as it turns out, for years -- and in some cases, those federal agencies were required to use this labor source). That's right -- we were putting innocent people to forced labor in prison while taking jobs away from ordinary people out of prison. And you're expecting that "If he's not charged, he doesn't have to worry. If he's innocent, he's safe"? I used to think that. I don't any more. _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
