One of the things that scares me about the US criminal justice system is that it relies almost entirely on magical thinking and torture to secure convictions. I don’t believe anyone is guilty unless they were literally photographed holding the bloody knife while standing over the body and even then I’ll need some convincing to rule out potential mitigating circumstances.
Here’s a profile for a type of criminal: carries a gun at all times, wears blue, regularly murders minorities.
The killer also has a history of domestic violence, is a registered Republican voter and has severe entitlement issues. The tendency to just pump victims full of lead shows they’re prone to outbursts of anger due to their deep-seated insecurities and have a world view in which all people are either victims or criminals.
And meanwhile cops do fuck all with actual legitimate evidence sources like rape kits
Profiling is especially harmful. It’s like the FBI knew that vast majority of serial killers where born in disfunctional families and neighbourhoods, but instead improving the material conditions of these families, especially with healthcare, they invented this bullshit pop culture version of serial killers, where the perpetrator is the master of deceit, literally the devil, and the profiler is the tortured soul that is trying to understnd the dark side of human psyche.
My experience with the United States court system, civil and criminal, have convinced me that it operates more or less just like the education and I guess every other system. If you have money and can afford an attorney, you’re basically safe outside of something ABSURDLY egregious (if even that). If you don’t: get fucked.
This is just speculation, but reading this makes me imagine that forensics professors, and probably anyone who probably spoke to one ever, are never on juries lol. Can you imagine the jury room “So the entire case of the prosecution is basically palm reading, I know because I’m a palm reading professor”
Making sure no one in the jury stand is capable of understanding what’s going on or evaluating any of the evidence critically is the primary role of the prosecuting attorney during Jury selection. Well, I guess they also try to remove black people, anyone who has ever interacted with the cops in an adversarial setting, and in cases involving sexual violence they try to remove all women.
