Seven How to Fix the Justice System - More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics by Steven E. Landsburg - #sentenzesbagliateegrandine #verdettocoincidente #perbayescontatutto #giudiciecalcoloprobabilistico #affittareitribunali #controlannullamentoformale #ridurrestandardepene #lapenadimortefapaurasoprattuttoaicriminali #le3lezionidiehrlich #condannecolbudget
Seven How to Fix the Justice SystemRead more at location 988
Note: rendere i giudici responsabili x le loro sentanze rinunciare a districare fortuna e merito regola: lo sforzo è inosservabile quindi puniamo i risultati giudici e giornali: immergersi nella realtà fa bene ability to test evidence... bayes: le apparenze contano... l abito... la scelta dell avvocato... il passato regola processuale: tutto è ammesso... con afgitto delle corti a carico di pm e avvocati tesi antigarantista: i criminali sono propensi al rischio e prefrriscono basse probabilità x alte pene che viceversa la pena di morte funziona: Ehrlich pm e spazi detentivi: diamo un bodget Edit
In 1991, during a riot in New York City, a man named Lemrick Nelson, Jr., stabbed a man named Yankel Rosenbaum to death. We know this because Mr. Nelson admitted it twelve years later—longRead more at location 989
Three years later, two other men were convicted of the same crimes on the basis of DNA evidence and a confession.Read more at location 992
We don’t know why they blew it. Maybe they carefully assessed the evidence and made honest mistakes. Maybe the evidence was not fully presented to them.Read more at location 994
votes for acquittal should be required to house the defendant in his living roomRead more at location 997
If you really believe the defendant is harmless, you can earn big profits by having him as a houseguest;Read more at location 998
For jurors, we could start with an objective written test on the trial proceedings (“True or False: the victim’s neighbor said she heard a dog bark at midnight”), and reward the high scorers with cash. That would at least get them to pay attention.Read more at location 1002
we can split the jury into two panels of six and reward them if their verdicts coincide.Read more at location 1004
Or we could use the occasional Lemrick Nelson or Richard Alexander case to send jurors a message, by hitting them with a hefty fine for getting the verdict wrong.Read more at location 1006
Every assembly-line worker in America, every cabdriver, every doctor and lawyer and economist, reaps financial rewards and punishments that depend on his performance. Only jurors are excepted. You can justify that exception only if you believe getting court verdicts right is the least important job in America.Read more at location 1022
Is it fair to punish diligent jurors who make honest mistakes? Of course not. Nor is it fair to punish diligent farmers whose crops fail or diligent authors whose books don’t sell or diligent bakers who misread the market and make too many bagels.Read more at location 1028
Businesses fail every day, but the prospective rewards still attract plenty of new entrepreneurs.Read more at location 1037
stop treating jurors like children. Nowadays, we forbid them to read newspapersRead more at location 1042
The standard response, of course, is that we want to shield jurors from bad reasoning. But why? IfRead more at location 1045
Outside the courtroom, everyone recognizes that information is a good thing.Read more at location 1057
Historically, one of the main arguments in favor of free speech has been that people (on average) make better decisions when they’re exposed to all the information anybody wants to throw at them.Read more at location 1068
At election time, nobody tells us to avoid the media so we can remain unbiasedRead more at location 1076
Here’s a test of your ability to assess evidence: You’ve just had an HIV test. The bad news is that according to the test, you’re infected. The good news is that the test is wrong 5 percent of the time. So there’s a 5 percent chance you’re okay, right? Wrong. There’s more like an 84 percent chance you’re okay. Here’s why: most people—say 99 percent of your demographic group—are uninfected. So you’re probably uninfected too. Even though the test is wrong only 5 percent of the time, odds are that this is one of those times.Read more at location 1092
when judges disallow background knowledge like prior convictions, they make it more difficult for jurors to do their jobs.Read more at location 1103
Bayes’s Law: everything that can be relevant is relevant. Does the defendant have a prior conviction on a similar charge? That’s relevant.Read more at location 1114
letting the defense attorney and the prosecutor take turns dressing the defendant.Read more at location 1123
Appearance is relevant, says Bayes’s Law. So is everything else about the defendant, including, for example, his choice of attorney.Read more at location 1124
accepting only those clients he genuinely believes to be innocent,Read more at location 1132
So not only should the defendant’s entire past be admissible in the courtroom, so should his attorney’s entire pastRead more at location 1133
There are only two good reasons to conceal information from a jury. First, it seems like a good idea to discourage the police from randomly breaking into people’s homes looking for evidence, so we adjust their incentives by ignoring evidence that’s collected without a proper warrant.Read more at location 1143
Likewise, if your politics or your religion or the cobra tattooed on your chest makes you statistically more likely to beat up old women and steal their purses, and if prosecutors are allowed to use those statistics against you in a courtroom, then you might choose to avoid politics, religion, and tattoo parlors—just in case you’re ever falsely accused of purse snatching.Read more at location 1152
There’s a third argument for suppressing evidence, but I think we can safely dismiss it. Some evidence is embarrassing, and it’s argued that we should sometimes suppress that evidence because it’s not nice to embarrass people. That’s why we don’t force rape victims—or alleged rape victims—to testify about their sex lives. But it seems to me that rather than exclude such testimony entirely, we could let the jury hear it in secret,Read more at location 1162
Bayes’s Law tells us that the accuser’s sex life really is relevant evidence,Read more at location 1168
Another alternative, if you don’t trust the juries we have now, is to use professional juries, as in some European countries.Read more at location 1184
Economic theory predicts that special interest groups will try to manipulate the rules of the workplace to make themselves indispensable.Read more at location 1193
everybody knows about complex legislation—written by lawyers—which only lawyers can interpret.Read more at location 1195
You might think that without judges to control the flow of evidence, jurors would drown in a sea of irrelevant information—and trials would go on forever. But that problem can be solved most efficiently by having lawyers pay (in cash) for excessive use of courtroom time.Read more at location 1196
For judges, it means breaking the judicial monopoly on deciding what’s relevant.Read more at location 1201
Criminals, by and large, must be risk lovers; otherwise they’d be car-wash attendants instead of criminals. Lottery players, by and large, must be risk lovers; otherwise they’d buy Treasury bonds instead of lottery tickets.Read more at location 1204
Still, if you want to understand what attracts people to crime, it pays to understand what attracts people to risky activities more generally,Read more at location 1208
Lotteries are attractive when they offer either big prizes or (relatively) good odds.Read more at location 1210
For the most part, lottery players prefer a small chance of a big payout to a bigger chance of a smaller payout.Read more at location 1212
For the most part, criminals prefer a small chance of a big punishment to a big chance of a small punishment. That’s because the people who prefer a big chance of a small punishment go into punishing careers like construction work or coal mining instead of crime. So if you want to make crime less attractive to criminals, it’s better to double the odds of conviction than to double the severity of the punishment.Read more at location 1222
Fortunately, deterrence works. Take capital punishment, for example. I am astonished by how often I hear politicians repeat the untruth that there is no evidence for the deterrent effect of capital punishment. It’s true that there’s no evidence for the deterrent effect of enacting a death penalty. But enforcing a death penalty is a different matter entirely. For thirty years, the economics journals have been publishing evidence for large deterrent effects—on the order of anywhere from eight to twenty-four murders prevented by each execution—when death penalties are actually enforced.Read more at location 1227
Here the pioneer is Professor Isaac Ehrlich, who, in the mid-1970s, initiated the use of sophisticated statistical techniques to measureRead more at location 1232
Increase the number of convictions by 1 percent and (to a very rough approximation) the murder rate falls by about 1 percent. Increase the number of executions by 1 percent (which amounts to increasing the severity of the average punishment) and (again to a very rough approximation) the murder rate falls by about half a percent.† As the theory predicts, the severity of punishment matters but the conviction rate matters more.Read more at location 1235
First, incentives matter, even to murderers. Second, economic theory predicts—and data confirm—that some incentives matter more than others. And finally, if you want to give policy advice, it’s not enough to know your numbers; you’ve also got to know your values. Isaac Ehrlich, the man who convinced most of the economics profession that capital punishment works, is a passionate opponent of capital punishment.Read more at location 1239
we have to face a fundamental economic reality: many criminals are underpunished because other criminals are overpunished.Read more at location 1243
district attorney does not bear the costs of his own decisions. His incentive is to waste prison spaceRead more at location 1247
The solution, in almost every case, is to give each manager a budget,Read more at location 1250
Give each prosecutor a budget of, say, 350 jail-years per month.Read more at location 1254
We can add some flexibility by allowing prosecutors to “borrow” jail-years from each other and pay them back in future months.Read more at location 1255
The problem is to make the prosecutor aware of that cost
