As he writes further on, Nancy Grace is but the ugly personification of a viewpoint that has permeated and taken over large swathes of the American consciousness: if you are arrested, you are guilty and if you are guilty, you are, by definition evil and thus deserving of the most severe of punishments and you lose your humanity.
ā Yes, presumption of innocence matters. Deeply. (over at A Public Defender).
Can due process produce a result that is, in some sense, unjust? Yes. People can kill and defraud and rape and abuse but leave insufficient evidence of their crimes to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The fact that the victim suffered is unjust. The fact that the perpetrator was not punished is unjust. The fact that skin color drives outcomes is unjust. It is unjust that moral wrongs go unredressed: such as, perhaps, the moral wrong that Trayvon Martin would be alive if George Zimmerman didnāt think he had a right and duty to confront people of the wrong color in his neighborhood. But thereās a central question some people ignore about such injustice: compared to what?
People assail results like the acquittal of George Zimmerman. But critics donāt tell us what the alternative should be. Shall guilt or innocence be determined by societyās reaction to the vapid summaries of prosecutions on cable news? Clearly not. Should verdicts necessarily reflect social consensus of the time about the crime and the accused? Tell that to the Scottsboro boys ā theirs did. Should we make it easier to convict people of crimes in order to reduce injustice against the weak? How foolish. The weak already suffer because it is too easy to convict ā because we love to pass criminal laws, but hate to pay for an adequate defense. Thanks to ālaw and orderā and the War on Drugs and our puerile willingness to be terrified by politicians and the media, one-sixth of African-American men like Trayvon Martin have been in prison, trending towards one-third. The notion that we can improve their status in America by making it easier to convict people and by undermining the concept of a vigorous defense is criminally stupid. The assertion that an acquittal is wrong and unjust might, in some cases, be true, in the sense that some juries will vote their ignorance or racism or indifference. But the assertion that an acquittal is by its nature unjust because of how we feel about the case serves the state ā the state that incarcerates 25% of the worldās prisoners.
ā Ken White on the Zimmerman trial. He later concludes by noting that he is more afraid of the state than of the George Zimmermans of the world. The whole article is very much worth your time.
John Riedl, my Ph.D adviser, mentor, and friend, passed away this evening after a 3-year battle with cancer. If you didnāt know already, thatās what this post was about.
The world knows John as one of the inventors of collaborative filtering (go watch the re-presentation of the original GroupLens paper he wrote with Paul Resnick and others) and a leader in the field of recommender systems, as well as an influential researcher in social computing systems broadly.
For me, he is the one who taught me how to stay sane in the oft-insane world of academia.
I met John when I was assigned to be his TA for CS2 my first semester as a Ph.D student. Two things quickly stood out about him: 1, that he knew how to run an efficient meeting, and 2, that his family was a high priority. Throughout the semester I also saw him to be an excellent and thoughtful teacher.
Even after they realized they had just mistakenly raided the mayorās house, the officers didnāt apologize to Calvo or Porter. Instead, they told Calvo that they were both āparties of interestā and that they should consider themselves lucky they werenāt arrested. Calvo in particular, they said, was still under suspicion because when armed men blew open his door, killed his dogs, and pointed their guns at him and his-mother-in-law, he hadnāt responded āin a typical manner.
ā From an excerpt of Radley Balkoās book Warrior Cop. The county police departmentās continued defense of itself and refusal to even apologize is mind-boggling.
I open my chat roster and see him. His name, his smile, his year-old status message. The presence indicator, an emblem fixed for days in unaltered yellow. Away. I donāt think XMPP has a code for āand unlikely to returnā.
I check my dayās agenda and see his shared Google calendar, filled with meetings that will be missed. Parties that will carry on, short an honored guest.
Google Drive shows me a list of documents. Some have his name under āLast Modifiedā. Or āOwnerā. Unfinished projects that will either languish or be carried on in his absence. In his memory.
Is this what grief, what remembrance, what loss looks like today? Pain, alloyed with memory of joy and fruitful collaboration, delivered via Google? The eighth layer, weeping, prodded and salted by the rest of the stack?