You Have the Right To Remain Innocent is a book I would recommend everyone to read. The premise is very simple. You don't say any word except to ask for the lawyer. While that is a seemingly obvious and well-understood definition, Duane hammers you over and over with its importance. And I know, why he is doing it. In a stressful situation, where you are interrogated by the police for hours, all ordinary priorior knowledge goes away. As it is what a good lawyer would do, his writing was very persuasive full of illustrative and horrifying case studies of false accusations.
I also appreciate the fact he made the language jargon free at the same time keeping the book short. It is easily accessible to anyone. And it cant be any clearer with the takeaway. Good job.
Court Operates on Bias
2020 made the mark of black lives matter and police brutality. This was the biggest scandal related to police force in my life time. But certainly it cant be the first. The equality movement of 60s certainly makes one the remark in our parents' generation.
So police and bias have been the contending issue from the beginning of time. I have never been active in political sphere. And looking at the occurances, I always imagined it was a matter of statistical facts and bias spiralling outward on its positive feedback loop. Statistics applied on individuals are always true and wrong. It is true when you have little information about those persons. Wrong if you conclude the truth based on the statistics alone.
Before reading the book, I had more belief in evidence base legal system we had. You're innocent unless proven otherwise, they say. If there is no enough evidence, people walk home. The end of story.
What I had been missing all along was police as an institution was to prosecute you. Technically speaking it is about anyone. When there is a homocide case, the police is under the pressure to find the suspect. That is their sole purpose. They go to find sufficient concrete evidence, convict the suspect, send the bad guys to jail. However, in reality, the world is never perfect information. It is never the case the police has everything on their hands. They need to operate under whatever they can to get their hands on. One of them is your confession no matter how much they lie or pressure you or twist your words against you. That's what James Duane tries to teach us.
After reading this, I was left with an insane impression of bias and legal system are two of the same coin. The whole business of prosecuters as well as lawyers try ot put narrative to jury's heads. There's nothing evidential or factual on that base. And the best way to make up the narrative? Approach on our bias. If the bias is a man who is dangerous and aggressive it's obvious to go after man as a suspect. If the suspect is poor, you'll sell the story of thief whose mind was taken by the difficulty of every day life. No bias, no story.
What can we do?
This is my punch line. What can we do about it?
James Duane does more than enough job of terrifying us of the possibility of false conviction. The last thing I want to do is to have decades of my life wasted because of the false conviction. The amount of distrust and resentment you can carry is unimaginable.
At the same time, we as a society are suffering from racial bias problem judicially. The obvious thing we can do is to increase the proof or alibi. I'm much more willing to give up my privacy to prove my innocence in the case of.
We have no choice but to rely on more monitoring technology. It is already happening in the car webcam. People want to prove how their cars had been damaged in the case of accidents. In the past 5 years, it has become a mainstream more than ever for ordinary citizen.
This line of thinking is the monitoring comes not in the form of big brother, but in the line of self-protection. I am perfectly opened to record everything I see in the form of smart glasses.
Of course even in that bottom up approach, there will be a bad actor who can access the data. Does the cloud provider safe enough? Can the government access the data and if so in what situation? This technological transition needs to happen under civil control and transparency. We cannot shy away with the discourse.