Correcting Netflix 18 Omitted The Vital Context Of 200,000 In The US Wrongly Locked Up #1
1. Series Overview
The 18 past posts can be read here. In the light of the Netflix report’s nomination for a major award we resume. Full speed ahead.
2. Italian Justice: What Netflix Left Out
In the United States outrage is, well, all the rage… A clear Netflix intent was to horrify and outrage viewers about the Italian justice system itself.
Read the numerous reviews and thousands of comments that imply the system is dangerous and corrupt. Including the very common “I would never send my kid to college there” and “I will never risk traveling there” and “we should boycott Italian goods”.
Show it as it really is - an extremely fair system from the perps’ point of view that allows ZERO wrongful convictions at the end of the day - and the whole Netflix thesis falls apart.
In Post 6 we described the almost unique carefulness of the Italian system.
How prosecutors can explain their case only in court. How the system allows perps two automatic appeals. How appeals often feature new juries - which never get to hear the full prosecution case.
How the same defense teams get to argue in court all the way up to the Supreme Court while the trial prosecution gets to present its full case just the once.
How the REAL justice system requires that many judgments should be written out at costly length. How prison time is almost never served for sentences under three years.
How most of the prisons are very nice and all perps receive mental treatment if prescribed, and taught a trade so they dont have to commit new crimes to pay their way when out.
The plea-bargain possibility does not exist in the uniquely open and transparent Italian system at all. No furtive shortcuts. No extreme pressure on suspected perps.
Judges, prosectors and especially police must go the extra mile, often over many years, to ever finally win a case.
3. American Justice: What Netflix Left Out
Netflix left out A LOT. See the numerous for-comparison posts here.
Sadly judges and lawyers in the American system can be among the eagerly gullible about both the Italian system and their own.
But there ARE American judges and lawyers who FULLY understand the Italian system and wish some of that could be applied in the US.
In the video at top Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz is quoted as saying this.
“We treat poor people and minority people much worse in the United States by our criminal justice system than they do in Italy, so we really have no standing to tell other countries that their system is unfair.
And based on [the evidence against Knox], in America, if she were not an attractive young woman “” if she were an ordinary person “” charged on the basis of this evidence, she would be convicted and would be serving life imprisonment, or even worse, the death penalty in the United States.”
In the United States pervasive plea-bargaining is making juries obsolete.
Trial by jury has become so rare in modern American criminal jurisprudence that the chance of being convicted at trial is little more than one in one hundred.
That doesn’t mean that people are not getting convicted. They are””in record number. America’s prisons are literally filled to capacity.
In today’s criminal justice system, convictions come by agreement. The tradition of being tried by one’s peers, established centuries ago and affirmed by the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has all but disappeared.
The plea bargain has made jury trials obsolete.
The GOOD aspect is that it can get convictions fast. That is the BAD aspect too.
Very few cases end in acquittal - vastly fewer than in Italy. Tough sentences and even the death penalty are often used as a threat.
“We now have an incredible concentration of power in the hands of prosecutors,” said Richard E. Myers II, a former assistant United States attorney who is now an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina. He said that so much influence now resides with prosecutors that “in the wrong hands, the criminal justice system can be held hostage.
In effect judges and juries are being sidelined and defense lawyers are faced with strong odds.
A case in Pennsylvania has suddenly put such plea-bargaining in the national news - not because the accused perp didnt do it, but actually because the threat of death penalty was said to have been too lightly used.
In so swiftly wrapping up the case, which transfixed the Philadelphia region, the district attorney of Bucks County, Matthew D. Weintraub, faced questions about whether he had made the right call in taking the most severe punishment for horrible crimes off the table.
Experts in death penalty law said the agreement was especially notable for its speed. But the father of one of the young men found dead said on Monday that family members of all of the victims supported it.
There was no judicial review. Oh and he was mentally deranged.
The American prison population is proportionally six times the Italian prison population (why did Netflix omit that?). Mental illness among that population is rife, and few inmates have above average IQs.
Election-driven prosecutors plea-bargaining with threats may have wrongly put many of them there. Maybe 10 per cent.
That is over 200,000 Americans in the wrong place. Funny how Netflix forgot to tell us about that.
This three-part series continues here.
Posted by Our Main Posters on 07/22/17 at 04:00 AM in The judical timeline, Hoaxers: media groups, The Netflix hoax
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Dershowitz thinks Knox is guilty, or most probably so. He says the evidence against her is robust and most likely does not allow for a reasonable doubt. He said she would be facing life imprisonment or death in the USA.
Dershowitz defends the Italian justice system fully.
Dershowitz decries the American PR that whitewashed Amanda’s case by leaving out the evidence.
As the above comment by TJMK Posters says, the omissions of truth so outrageous in the Netflix doc are to create outrage on her behalf, now that outrage is all the rage and gains viewers.
Truth, big deal. That is Knox’s philosophy, too. Yet she is invited to bar associations to tell them her fantasies, her truth. No outrage?
P.T. Barnum’s adage about a sucker born every minute and two to take him, seems farsighted.
Posted by Hopeful on 07/22/17 at 03:42 PM | #
Hi Hopeful
Yes a wrongful 200,000 sitting in American prisons compared to a wrongful zero sitting in Italian prisons is a pretty stark fact.
It shows the surging power of conspiracy theories, of sleazy and unethical PR, of xenophobia, of narrow-casting hate websites and TV news channels, of mafia-prompted trashing of Italian justice.
It also shows how pathetically stupid is the enterprise of Michael Heavey, Doug Preston, Bruce Fischer, Steve Moore, John Douglas, Nina Burleigh and the other crackpots listed in our right column as among the main hoaxers (and hoaxed).
They wanted KNOX as their flagship heroine? Who makes up new lies every time she speaks? What are any of them doing about those 200,000? Where is the outrage they are stirring there?
It shows how utterly ineffective the Innocence Project is. Less than 350 exonerations so far and THEY wanted Knox as their flagship heroine? Really? And how dangerously stupid Netflix has been in leaping in without any prior checking at all.
For all of their enterprises, embracing Knox is turning out to be a pervasive kiss of death. Vast damage she has done. In this series we will have some real powerhouse posts coming up which should leave her on an island all alone.
This is only phase one of our thrust, as explained. We deliberately fly under the radar for now. These posts are just trial balloons. The best bits are still to come.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 07/22/17 at 10:43 PM | #
Uh-oh. Italian politics and its economy are in the news again.
First, if you travel to eastern and southern Asia you might be astonished at the new wealth there. Slowly costs and competition are creeping up (and pollution) and there are a lot of miserable factories but overall they are still having a really good run.
Meanwhile the picture we are seeing in most of the northern countries is gloomy. Russia “makes” almost nothing but oil and gas, others are tied into webs of constraining old systems - without even seeing that as the core problem. All face a demographic time bomb.
After Trump’s election and Brexit there was a hunt for who exactly was voting in those directions who had not voted that way previously. Initially it was claimed to be “poor whites” and especially poor white men without degrees and prospects (you can certainly cruise vast areas of the US without seeing new prospects being realized).
Further study suggests much of that body of voters is a cut above “poor white” and they have more degrees among them and quite a few make $100,000 or more. But their kids’ futures prospects have largely migrated to Asia. Asia moved up a step on the ladder; they didnt.
Here you can see that said about Italy and the US - and how as those people are not seeing the (simplistic) answers they were promised we could see further political reversals.
https://www.shoutoutuk.org/2017/07/21/inside-populist-campaigns/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-italy-renzi-analysis-idUSKBN1A80FI
So uh-oh! But France and Sweden are worth watching.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 07/25/17 at 07:12 PM | #
A really surprising justice system development in Poland - a good one with (amazingly) the EU getting involved - which is getting much play in the US here with justice officials being threatened.
This is a good profile of the so-called populist government now returning Poland to “the dark ages”.
It was lurching toward heavy-handed political control of the justice system via the political appointments of all judges. Mass firing of moderate judges was anticipated. A step back toward a one-party dictatorship.
But first, the EC threatened sanctions, and second the relatively new president who had been an unknown and was considered a patsy vetoed the new law!
Well done Mr Duda. And especially good (and unusual) going by the EU.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 07/25/17 at 08:52 PM | #
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