"Um, no. That jury system would be called "never sentence anyone". This system aspires to spare the innocent, but there is never a guarantee."
I didn't say there is such a guarantee...just that our system is supposed to protect the innocent from conviction even if it means the guilty occasionally go free (at least many of our founding fathers felt that this was the purpose of our jury system). If you don't believe that is the correct way for our legal system to operate, we'll have to agree to disagree. I think it is more important for the courts to first do no evil than to always get vengeance for crimes committed (even if it's sometimes taken against an innocent party).
Anyway, I'm not saying I believe Hans is innocent, and I've also stated above that the circumstantial evidence is pretty overwhelming. But, I am saying that one should be cautious with purely circumstantial evidence, and that I would find it hard to convict someone if I were on a jury in a trial with only circumstantial evidence.
"Literally thousands of innocent-but-convicted Americans would be free today if they had even half of the legal resources that Reiser hired and then apparently chose to ignore."
That's a completely different discussion, and I agree with your statement entirely, though I'm getting the impression that you consider it far less of a problem than I do.
I would find it hard to convict someone if I were on a jury in a trial with only circumstantial evidence.
And so would I. But neither you nor I are on the jury, and so we don't know the full extent of the evidence.
I'm getting the impression that you consider it far less of a problem than I do.
Well, that impression is probably mistaken, unless what you're saying is that there's no amount of circumstantial evidence that should send a guy to prison. If all we're arguing about is the degree of the evidence... that's why we have juries.
I will say that my opinion would be closer to yours if Reiser were in danger of being sentenced to death. I disbelieve in the death penalty for precisely the reasons you describe. As it is, if Reiser isn't a murderer, there's a very good chance that he won't spend 25 years in prison -- Nina could turn up alive, or turn up dead in circumstances that exonerate Reiser. This isn't his last chance. Unless he's guilty.
We actually know several things the jury does not know. For instance, the DA sought to have admitted emails from Nina to Hans that referred directly to overt threats Hans had made. They weren't allowed due to hearsay rules.
The "friend/lover" was not a serial killer. No professional who interviewed Sturgeon believes him. If they had, he would have been called to testify. The defense had the option of calling him; they chose not to, because they did not think he would help their case.
I find it ridiculous that the DA would have chosen to pursue a case against a lonely computer programmer instead of locking up a serial killer. You have to believe something pretty incredible to argue that Sturgeon was a real factor in this case.
If all we're arguing about is the degree of the evidence... that's why we have juries.
The problem is that a judge must interpret a guilty verdict as an immutable fact, rather than as a decision made by emotional and fundamentally random human beings:
if conviction == guilty
decide a sentence based on the type of crime
Instead, a person's prison sentence should reflect how confident we are in the guilty verdict.
The jury was asked how confident they were. They had the option of returning not guilty, or even guilty of a lesser crime, such as manslaughter --- murder without intent.
You are obviously not as confident as the jury was. But you were not on the jury. The jury, given the facts of the case, appears to have been maximally confident about Reiser's culpability: they returned a verdict of premeditated malicious intentional murder, where they instead could have found that Reiser had accidentally killed Nina in the heat of a terrible argument.
At a certain point, you just have to let go of the fact that you disagree with the jury. Clearly, we cannot simply poll every person on the country as to what they thought of the case from afar.
> a person's prison sentence should reflect how confident we are in the guilty verdict.
That's a bad idea: if we accuse someone of some awful crime, and decide there's only 1/10 confidence in a guilty verdict, they should still serve a small fraction of the time? Someone's either guilty or not. If they are, there are sentencing guidelines that take various other factors into account.
I agree that, in general, a sentence shouldn't reflect confidence in the verdict. However, given that the US justice system has so many shades of each crime, it's actually not clear either that someone's either guilty or not... they might well be guilty of a lesser crime, which would approximate sentencing guidelines as preferred by grandparent.
I didn't say there is such a guarantee...just that our system is supposed to protect the innocent from conviction even if it means the guilty occasionally go free (at least many of our founding fathers felt that this was the purpose of our jury system). If you don't believe that is the correct way for our legal system to operate, we'll have to agree to disagree. I think it is more important for the courts to first do no evil than to always get vengeance for crimes committed (even if it's sometimes taken against an innocent party).
Anyway, I'm not saying I believe Hans is innocent, and I've also stated above that the circumstantial evidence is pretty overwhelming. But, I am saying that one should be cautious with purely circumstantial evidence, and that I would find it hard to convict someone if I were on a jury in a trial with only circumstantial evidence.
"Literally thousands of innocent-but-convicted Americans would be free today if they had even half of the legal resources that Reiser hired and then apparently chose to ignore."
That's a completely different discussion, and I agree with your statement entirely, though I'm getting the impression that you consider it far less of a problem than I do.