Charles L. Cotton wrote:
If you want to hear something really scary, just ask an attorney that does family law how many times a spouse (usually the wife, but not always) throws in a bogus allegation of child abuse or sexual abuse of a child in a petition for divorce.
Scary, but not surprising. I truly believe the court system is biased against men in divorce proceedings. I've seen perfectly good guys slapped with court orders ordering them to stay away from the wife, forbidding any attempt to contact or find her (e.g. if she ran off with all the tax returns)...but also forbidding him to change the locks on the house, so she can come in while he is at work at take out more appliances, furniture, etc. One of my military buddies temporarily lost his security clearance because his soon-to-be ex-wife and her mother called the AFOSI and told them he was a religious nut. So the USAF had to investigate that, and he had to go to a military psychiatrist for an evaluation. He was rightly cleared, but the lying women of course did not suffer for that. Adding bogus sex- and wife-abuse charges seems to be part of the law, not an exception (a certain pastor's wife who shotgunned her sleeping husband comes to mind....)
Charles L. Cotton wrote: ... The study even called fingerprints into question! ...
Yes, I have read about this several times, that even after all these years, no one has undertaken to establish a true, scientific underpinning for fingerprint identification. The standards, e.g. number of matching points of comparison, seem to be whatever fingerprint "experts" have convinced legislatures/courts/police agencies is correct based on the expert's experience, rather than any repeatable study of the matter.
Charles L. Cotton wrote: Lest anyone think I'm a bleeding-heart liberal (don't get mad at me Nitrogen ), I'm a lifelong conservative, law and order, death penalty supporting, Republican. But I am a little picky, I'd like to know we are convicting and/or executing a guilty person.
Yes, me too, on all those points. Our government and legal system seems to have the principle (I guess you call it) that it's better to let 10 guilty men go free than apply a government sanction against one innocent man (unless of course the one worked in or voted for the Bush administration! Then it's war crimes for everybody!) But there are two problems with that. One is you can keep extending that principle until why bother putting anyone in jail or under the needle -- let them all run free, then you never get it wrong. That leads to the second problem -- those 10 or 15 or 100 guilty men we let go don't all suddenly get religion and sin no more -- they go out and rob and rape and murder some more. Even if only 80% offend again, and do it only once each, we have now sacrificed 8 or 12 or 80 more innocent people in order to save one innocent person from the government, and we have eliminated any deterrence effect. This is not a good bargain in my opinion.
To get at least mildly back on track with the thread -- I am not thrilled with how the sex offender laws are used for minor league stuff (like prosecuting people who have slight age differences, etc) -- that is in a similar vein to kicking kids out of school because they have evil drugs like asprin or tylenol, or have mock rifles for the drill team in their car. A big part of the problem idiocy in implementing it. Certainly the prosecutorial world needs a close eye on it (e.g. Nifong, Sen Ted Stevens prosecutors, a certain ex-prosecutor of a certain south Texas big city)...
/rant off