Absolutely insane that his brother went and hired an expensive defense attorney and they somehow didn't bring up the results of the DNA test that would've exonerated him. It should've been his job to get the results or do something with it as the judge reviewing this case noted. The cops are also to blame, but that's in their nature. A person's defense is their strongest shield.
It's scary to think how this could happen to anyone.
This trial was 1990, the first case to use DNA evidence in the US was in 1987, it'd be pretty close to assume that they'd be relying on DNA tests heavily enough by then.
Anyway, this case didn't really involve DNA that could be collected. A creep flashed a girl and then sped off, she later recognized the car and followed it, it stopped at an address the accused had lived at several years ago, but cops just figured it was him. There's also a rape mentioned, which happened in 1987, so similar issue.
So basically it confirms again that the role of the police and the justice system is not to find the guilty, but to find someone to make everyone feel comfortable with the system working. A type of a sacrificial lamb for the civilized world. Of course we know who the predominantly white police force will consider for the role. Puts into perspective why there are over 2 million black Americans in prison.
Quote:
I asked Carlos who he thought bore the brunt of the blame for DNA evidence not showing up in his trial: the police, the DA, or his own attorney, Gibson. “Straight-up crooked cops,” he said. “That’s all it was. Plain and simple.”
I found one site that claimed the total population of people incarcerated is 1.7 million but still, for either number, black Americans, while possibly over represented, could never = 2 million given those numbers
The jury system was never about truth and fact finding, it was always about community justice. If the community feels safer with the accused behind bars the accused is sent to jail, evidence is only there to inform the jury in their decision. It's a terrible system that should've been relegated to the past.
In Norway we long had two systems to determine guilt. One was a jury system. A careful examination of the performance of both systems over many years concluded that the jury system was the worst. All serious miscarriages of justice we have had happened in a jury system.
A key reason identified was that juries don’t have written statements giving the reasoning for their judgment.
The jury system ended several years ago and nobody miss it. A panel of judges professional and selected among citizens akin to jury duty determines guilt.
That matches the common wisdom I've heard multiple times from those in the know here in the US that, if you have the option of a jury trial or a judge (bench) trial, which is often the case in criminal proceedings, you probably want the bench trial if you're actually innocent and the jury trial if you're actually guilty.
Has anyone ever ran a study on the effectiveness of different court styles?
Mock a murder or other crime and let the law and justice handle it as normal. At the end, reveal the true mock and see how close the law got and how close the court got.
I'm not saying it would be practical and maybe impossible but I would find the results interesting.
That’s really interesting. I do wonder if requiring jurors to write an opinion would have a similar effect, or would it just be like every group assignment in school where most jurors decide to coast off the work of the most diligent member.
Sure, but what are those systems? Are they like Japan where they don’t charge as many cases, or are they like North Korea where you are executed with a missile (and therefore aren’t innocent in jail). Is it judges or sortition? All of the other cultural context matters.
Quality over quantity, for trails of this severity you have multiple judges decide the case. I am not convinced that having a random selection of people with no experience in law results in more accurate verdicts, in fact there is plenty of evidence of the opposite.
I'm supposing then as part of this restructuring of society that will never happen there will also be a restructuring of how judges get to be judges in America which will also not be happening so that this "quality" will be achieved.
This is a pretty good argument for having criminal jurors submit their verdict in the form of vote by secret ballot and then just having the court count the ballots and see if they were unanimous.
The whole point of jury deliberations is to discuss and debate the case. It would be counterproductive to keep one’s position secret during the process. Multiple votes, including informal straw polls, are often necessary.
They can debate the case all they want. The arguments a juror makes might imply how they're planning to vote, but deliberations are over when each juror has made up their mind. You don't have to say how you've made up your mind for deliberations to end, you just declare that you have and when the last one has then everyone marks their ballot and packs up their things.
On the contrary. They can have all the deliberation they want but the votes need to be secret to avoid peer pressure, bullying, blackmail or coercion. In all these cases, the juror is not following their conscience, which is supposed to be the whole point. It has been known for centuries that public voting is ripe for abuse.
It would perhaps be useful to run some experiments to see whether having a jury of 12 discuss is more accurate than having 12 independent jurors that don't communicate. (Or only communicate in very formally prescribed ways, but never meet.)
You could run those experiments by constructing cases, or re-constructing known cases.
The problem with measuring the accuracy of juries, is what do you measure them against? Whether the person is really guilty? In the general case, you can't actually know that.
Even for people who are wrongfully convicted, we can't always say the jury made the wrong call. In many of those cases, the conviction is overturned due to new evidence being discovered, or because the police or prosecution wrongly hid exculpatory evidence from the jury, or because the defendant's lawyer was grossly incompetent – in those cases, it is entirely possible the jury made the right call given the evidence actually presented to them, even if it turned out ultimately to be the wrong one.
> The problem with measuring the accuracy of juries, is what do you measure them against? Whether the person is really guilty? In the general case, you can't actually know that.
Yes, in the general case you can't know that. That's why you need to construct artificial cases where you do know.
Very similar to getting labelled training data for your machine learning.
For this hypothetical comparison process, I imagine that real cases could be used and re-presented with actors in place of the defendants and witnesses?
Yes, I'm sure you can design an experiment which shows different jury structures will produce different decisions. But how do you know which of them makes the better decisions?
I suppose it is for discussing, but does the discussion actually promote justice? Afterall, that's why we have juries. I am not sure whether the deliberation actually increases or decreases false verdicts.
As a non American, I don't understand how juries are compatible with the entire idea of a fair justice system. I'm very very glad they don't exist where I live. The whole idea of "being judged by your peers" is lovely on paper but cases like this show how stupid this is.
> The whole idea of "being judged by your peers" is lovely on paper but cases like this show how stupid this is.
It's part of the system of checks and balances. If there isn't at least a plausible case for conviction, the case shouldn't even make it to a jury. The judge is permitted to throw it out for insufficient evidence.
In principle what's supposed to happen is that it prevents a conviction if the prosecution can't convince 12 random people that there should be one. The problem is prosecutors have the full time job of trying to convict people, and one of the ways they do it is by trying to change the system to make that easier. So then convicts get excluded from juries along with anyone else the prosecution thinks might be sympathetic to the defense -- even though having to convince someone initially sympathetic to the defense is supposed to be the point.
Yep as an American living in Europe, my experience is that most people here are shocked to learn we put the lives of accused people in the hands of non-expert random people from the street. It's not a great system, but it's still only a tradeoff between the bias of one person (a judge) and the average of the bias of many (a jury)
Think you are a bit quick to judge what people in Europe think. Juries have also been widely used in Europe. They are not unknown. It depends entirely on where you are.
Britain famously use juries. That is where the US gets it system from. In. All Nordic countries have had them. In Norway we phased it out years ago, but it isn’t one judge but several. Some are picked by citizens others are professionals. They determine guilt together.
And it's a mistake there as well, but fortunately Brits keep juries only for the worst of the worst cases, jury trials are relatively rare.
>>Juries have also been widely used in Europe.
And now they are not. I can't speak for every reason behind this in every country that decided to do so, but I'm sure if you looked into it it would be "because it isn's working out".
>>but it isn’t one judge but several.
and this is how it should be done - you still get judged by a panel of people who can vote, but they are actually trained in the law.
> and this is how it should be done - you still get judged by a panel of people who can vote, but they are actually trained in the law
Juries don't decide the law, they decide the facts.
Why would someone who spends their life in a courtroom have a better understanding of the facts of an ordinary person's life than someone who actually lives an ordinary life rather than being insulated from it by the legal system?
You can't decide the fact - if you could, it wouldn't be a fact. Or do you mean something else here?
>>Why would someone who spends their life in a courtroom have a better understanding of the facts of an ordinary person's life than someone who actually lives an ordinary life rather than being insulated from it by the legal system?
I mean, that should be really obvious in a case like this, no?
> You can't decide the fact - if you could, it wouldn't be a fact. Or do you mean something else here?
It's a distinction between facts and the law.
The judge decides what the law is, e.g. the statute says "knowingly" and someone sent a letter to the company informing them, but the person who read the letter isn't the person who performed the act, so does that mean the company acted knowingly?
The jury decides what the facts are, e.g. the company claims the letter didn't inform them but the sender claims that it did. Both admit the letter existed but neither of them kept a copy of it. The jury decides whose version of the facts is the truth.
> I mean, that should be really obvious in a case like this, no?
Kind of the opposite.
This is one of the problems with "professional" fact finders -- prosecutors get a pretty good idea of what kind of cases they can win and don't bring the ones that they can't. So then any kind of a repeat player keeps seeing people they're likely to find guilty because they're disproportionately more likely to be the ones who come before them, and start to assume guilt, and then carry that into the determination even when someone is innocent. To mitigate that you need fresh eyes.
>>but it's still only a tradeoff between the bias of one person (a judge)
In most european countries in complicated cases like the one here you'd just get a panel of judges - so you're still getting a vote and a balanced(in theory) opinion, except it's not coming from randoms citizens but people actually educated in the law who should know better than this.
I served on a jury once; it seemed to me that the jurors took the process more seriously, and did our jobs more carefully, than anyone else involved in the trial.
Sure, but you're commenting on an article about a juror who was literally bullied into voting guilty by other jurors - I'm glad it didn't happen to you, but it's not really relevant to this case.
A jury system is, in theory, a decent idea but in practice and execution we've created a system designed to punish minorities and the poor, plus enable corruption with zero recourse.
For example, jury service being unpaid will obviously skew the jury pool away from being properly evenly distributed.
Because the problem isn't actually the jury, it's the structural incentives that mold the system as a whole, including the judiciary.
People like to point out that this applies to trials for violent crimes etc. too, but it was really the war on drugs that did this, because it required the government to prosecute crimes with no victim -- the drug buyer and the drug seller have no reason to turn each other in, as opposed to the mugging victim who can be generally expected to go straight to the police.
Because convicting people when there is no cooperating victim is so much harder, they went and corrupted the system in order to make it easier, and here we are.
A jury has a very important decision to make, which could send someone innocent to prison for life. Selection of those people calls for serious gatekeeping. It's not a community college finger painting night class.
Say, would it be aristocratic/elitist to refuse to fly in an airliner staffed by people pulled off the street for pilot duty?
I didn't mean to bring focus on the randomness of jury selection. (In fact it's obvious that in this particular case, it was very biased, which was a big part of the problem.)
Rather, "juror" should be someone's job.
People pulled off the street are not going to have the critical thinking skills, and will be broadsided by pressure tactics and manipulation.
Also, some people who are inconvenienced by jury duty will be resentful and just focus on their personal exit strategy (get it over with ASAP).
Professional jurors wouldn't be an improvement. They will get cozy with, and biased towards, the people they see and interact with on a daily basis. It completely undermines the concept of being judged by a jury of your peers if there's a permanent juror class.
I went to school at the University of Virginia, which offered something like this for honor trials. (UVA Honor violations were specifically: lying, cheating, or stealing.)
For a trial, you could choose between a random student jury, a jury of Honor Society members, or a mix.
Statistics showed that non-random juries were way more likely to convict students, and I have no doubt permanent jurors would do the same over time.
I understand your criticisms for sure, but the alternatives are worse.
Your argumentation isn't very strong, because you're presenting random jury selection from the population as being the only viable alternative, due to issues in other alternatives, without considering ways in which those could be mitigated or fixed.
Elsewhere in the thread, there are comments about how some countries have eliminated random juries; so a good start would be to study how things work elsewhere.
> non-random juries were way more likely to convict students
All that matters is whether they were more or less likely to correctly convict or acquit.
If it so happens that all the accused liars, thieves or cheaters are actually guilty, then the higher the conviction rate, the more accurate it is.
Honor Society members are not professional jurors; they are just a set of people from which a jury is less randomized than from a broader set.
> All that matters is whether they were more or less likely to correctly convict or acquit.
Which you have no way of knowing, because if we had a process to determine that, we wouldn't need juries to begin with.
What you can tell, by comparing the outcomes between decisionmakers, is which way their bias leans relative to the alternative. And "biased towards convicting more innocent people" is bad.
> And "biased towards convicting more innocent people" is bad.
How can you write that following a sentence which admits we "have no way of knowing".
We can't even say that more convictions is no fewer innocent convictions, let alone more.
Say that 1% of the accused in some jurisdiction are innocent. In that situation, the ideal conviction rate is 99%. It's possible to have a 2% conviction rate where the convictions are wrong half the time (and the acquittals are all wrong), and a 1% conviction rate where the decisions are all backwards in relation to guilt.
You're assuming the full-time aristocrat will do a better job, which is the thing there is no evidence of. It could be completely the opposite -- the aristocrat makes their decisions based on political connectedness, finding everyone guilty except their cronies who are actually guilty.
In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the assumption should not be that either of them is inherently better at the job, and then a higher total conviction rate implies a higher false conviction rate.
Convictions would go down a lot without the social pressure element that's for sure. But with a sufficient number of jurors it'd become impossible to convict even if the person is clearly guilty, because you just need one to dissent.
Sounds like then there is not sufficient proof given. Or maybe that one juror doesn't agree with the law. Also reasonable reason to let people go free.
> Sounds like then there is not sufficient proof given
You can always find 1 person who will disagree about anything? If you have 1000 jurors that each vote independently I would find it hard to imagine that anyone can get convicted, even people you are basically certain are guilty. After some N, the probability of a conviction becomes indistinguishable from 0, which is not a good system either.
The number is typically 12 rather than 1000, and it's pretty unambiguous that it's possible to convince 12 random people to convict someone when the evidence is clear. And sometimes when it isn't.
If I don't do anything about this, I am the problem. Government is us. Our responsibility to design, implement, and hold accountable.
Talking about what happened isn't enough. Carlos Jaile lost his entire adult life because of systemic failures in the justice system. This needs to be fixed not only for Carlos but for everyone.
The first thing that I think needs to be changed, is your mind: the government convincing us that it represents our will is one of the biggest cons in history.
The government is just an evolution of the strongest gang winning in an anarchy. That's what we live in, an anarchy where the strongest group has already taken power. They only consider our desires and needs as much as they have to to preserve their power. The truth is that collectively we are stronger than them, but if they can convince us that they are equivalent to our collective will they can pick on us in small groups or individually, because if we identify that they are not our collective will then we might enact our true will, and they can't stand to that.
So what to do about this? Acknowledge that the machine doesn't represent you, that it's not your fault, and take legitimacy from a system that abuses you by withdrawing your faith in it.
Not really exactly the plot, as [spoiler alert] in 12 Angry Men it goes the other way, and the initial holdout therefore doesn't feel guilt for decades.
For one, I just don't think we are very rational. And I am including myself in that.
And, like this case, the personalities reflect exactly what happens when you gether a dozen individuals. One or two are loud-mouth bravados, a few don't speak, and some are just apathetic. It's nice to think that I would be that disagreeable person who would stand my ground, but I am not sure.
Sometimes I wonder what we would do if the courts were designed today. I am pretty sure we would not come up with a system where we gather 12 random people. I don't know what we would decide on, but almost certainly not this. But like many things, it varies on because no one has an obviously better way.
Just because you let trials be decided by judges does not mean it always has to be a single judge deciding a case. Based on the severity of the crime you can have multiple judges decide the case.
Also you can keep a right to trial by jury for the defendant. If the defendant decides they'd rather by judged by their peers they can choose a trial by jury. It's their constitutional right in the US after all.
I can't help but feel for the victims who believed they were getting justice who now have to deal with the reality they they weren't safe all these years. that their attacker was still out there the whole time. Finding this out is almost another attack. If they do find the real culprit what reason do they have to believe this time.
This is horrifying. Ignoring evidence and ruining someone’s life just to make a point in a political race or for the self gratification of hurting someone is reckless at best, and should be criminal.
Considering how the system works, I don’t think it is acceptable for people to have to prove their innocence in that context. The state harmed them, it is the state that should make its case. And ideally impeach or sue officials for gross misconduct and breach of ethics.
I understand that the state does not want to pay $2M, yet I wonder why it is so difficult to prove the person innocent of the crime they were convicted for. The mismatch of the DNA evidence from the rape scene is bullet proof as far as arguments go. All the other supporting evidence, including the strong alibi help for sure, but DNA is a detailed signature and there is no way to get an accidental mismatch?!
"Although estimates vary, forensic DNA analysis is roughly 95% accurate."
I remember however an article I can't find now from about 20 years ago so probably things have improved since then that found only about 2/3rds accuracy - and that accuracy could be affected by stating the result you wanted. It was in Time, or New Republic or some major news magazine.
My thoughts could be colored by this, but given history of forensic abuse in the U.S I would tend to undervalue evidence that found someone guilty. I am however a cynic.
I would also think that this 95% accurate claim seems weird, since it is effected by all sorts of things, basically if DNA evidence gets admitted it is treated as bulletproof but it may still have a lower than 95% chance of being correct at that point - but when admitted the battle is pretty much lost.
I don’t think that a clearly mismatching DNA has anywhere above a one in a billion chance of belonging to the same person. So either the sample is wrong, which is near impossible with a rape case nowadays, or some technical mishandling (switch of samples?) that can of course happen but this is not likely leading to a 5% error rate. Maybe in the early days people used erratic methods for reading pieces of the DNA but it’s hard to imagine a 5% error rate even then. I guess the other way around could work, ie a match may be a twin sibling or something.
You can't have one without the other. If he overturns his conviction and proves his innocence he would be entitled to compensation for damages inflicted.
Well, 11 others did all the wrong things and didn't do the one right thing. In general, I think people like to reward this thing to allow people to know that if they fucked up, forgiveness is forthcoming if they try to right the wrong. Overall, that's my view.
I try to reward what I want to see more of. And there's sufficient suffering and shame from knowing you put someone innocent away that I think I'm fine with promoting anyone who fights that.
It really sucks that she fucked it up the first time, going along with other more strident people. But good on her for what she did.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m not admonishing her for eventually doing the right thing. I’m glad her conscience took hold and that poor man could live out his twilight years in peace.
It’s the author of the article I’m more bothered by. I’ve seen less heaped on praise and weepiness for people who died stopping mass shooters.
> But as soon as she walked into the jury room, she realized she was in the minority. It was easy for her to write “not guilty” on a piece of paper but much harder to discuss the case confidently as the two white men aggressively advocated for guilt.
Each to their own, but she was under no obligation to vote guilty. I'm not sure why the article purports that "two white men" (I'm not white) were the "problem" here, and not that the problem was her inability to stand by her convictions.
I often disagree with what I consider dramatised recounts of history, as if it's always some good vs bad, David vs Goliath tale.
This was the 1970's in America, if she knew something that others didn't she should have had held her ground. As most people would have given that you are holding someones life in your hands. You can blame external factors all you want, but it is your still your reckoning.
And great, that this person eventually helped them rectify this injustice.
It really is a very weirdly framed article, it makes it out as if everyone else was wrong and forceful and she was simply being brave and good by speaking up nearly 30 years later, even though while it was wrong of the cops to not investigate properly, as a juror she had the duty to speak up.
It's nice she eventually did, but it doesn't make her an admirable person for only doing it after the victim lost a third of his life.
But why are you most angry at the juror who stuck with her conviction the longest? There were 11 other jurors who convicted the man without a second thought.
Don’t get me wrong, they weren’t great either. Some of them probably racist bullies, others just wanted to convict the guy who the cops said did the really bad things because “Police and state guy say you did it” is enough for some people.
But “I sat with the knowledge I had given the wrong verdict while a man rotted in jail for 30 years” doesn’t come across as the heroic or even mildly positive story the journalist seemed to be going for in the article either. It’s good she did something about it eventually but it’s good in a “So I finally stopped punching my dog in the face” kinda way. Poor fucking guy had his life stolen and she’s part of the reason why.
Is she worse than the other actors in this shameful play? No of course not. But I’m not sure there are any heroes here.
Was wondering the same. This wasn't like the Jim Crow south or something similar, El Paso has been Hispanic majority for a long time. 69% in 1990, according to Wikipedia.
Maybe they existed as outlined, but the focus on it felt like a way of alleviating her(and others) of their wrongdoing.
It is a psychological thing. Some people find it really hard to assert themselves when faced with dominant personalities. Differences in culture, gender, etc, can be a factor. The article mentions that at the time her English skills were still developing, and that may have also played a role.
That's not to say any of this entirely excuses what she did, but it helps put it in perspective. It was also the fault of other members of the jury, who were more concerned with obtaining superficial agreement than convinced agreement.
I've been to "the south" as recently as 2018 and the way some white guests in a taco restaurant conducted themselves towards the hispanic waiters was appalling. The entitlement..
I'm not at all surprised by this recount and wouldn't even be surprised if this happened today.
Ultimately it was her responsibility, yes. But I've seen loud, big and aggressive people get their say too many times to not think that they are part of the problem. At least ethically.
> I'm not sure why the article purports that "two white men" (I'm not white) were the "problem" here, and not that the problem was her inability to stand by her convictions.
She didn’t stand by her convictions because she had a history of being told to defer to white men.
There was a whole section about her background to go into why she felt this way.
The story is more about the woman, her situation and her desire for justice after decades so I can see why they left her reasoning in.
Otherwise we would be clueless as to why she decided to vote guilty after feeling the guy wasn’t guilty then immediately change her mind again once the trial was over.
The short version is after many years of regret, she made several phone calls and was surprisingly taken seriously when she was persistent.
> She knew how hard it was to take a stand. She knew how hard it was to do the right thing. And now she was going to do it.
> She called the El Paso Police Department and told the woman on the line that she had been a juror on a 1990 case, and that even after all these years she didn’t think the guy was guilty. The woman told her it was too late to do anything and hung up.
> Estella called back and talked to someone else. She explained everything again, recalling details from the trial. This time the person told her to dial the office of Jaime Esparza, the district attorney. Estella called and explained again what was on her mind. She was transferred to Tom Darnold, the head of the appellate division.
> DA’s offices get unusual calls all the time, including from jurors having doubts about cases, but usually these come immediately after a trial. Estella was calling about a case from when Bill Clements was governor. She told Darnold what she’d told the others: she didn’t feel right about the verdict. Something she said convinced Darnold to take her seriously, and he promised her he’d look into it. He read the appellate opinion and didn’t see any obvious red flags. He told his boss Esparza about the unusual call from the juror and about his research, and Esparza told him to keep digging. Darnold read the trial transcripts and saw that the case wasn’t the strongest the office had ever prosecuted. He noted the discrepancies with the car and clothes, and also that Carlos had a strong alibi. He went back to Esparza, who decided it was time to take the whole thing to the next level. “We decided,” said Darnold, “just to be on the safe side: let’s look further.”
The article made it sound like she didn't have many years of regret. She cleaned a drawer and was filled with guilt and regret by what she found. Then she does what she needs to do to get rid of the feeling.
What's actually ridiculous is the short attention span of kids these days who can't keep it together for longer than a tiktok clip.
That writer didn't just sit in a room dream this all up. Unbelievably many hours went into the making of this piece, including flying back and forth across the country to dig up information, speak to people, connect the dots, finding all the background information, staying persistent.
That's hard work. You may not like the style, but it's quite offensive to just brush it off as "nah, paid by the word, ridiculous"
This is like saying a movie can be condensed into a several-sentence summary of its plot.
The author of the article was deliberate with their words. A lot of what you might see as "useless filler" served to humanize all the characters, and give us much greater insight than we would get from a summary.
I teared up when I read about Jaile's situation: how his wife left him during his proceedings, and then died of cancer before his name was cleared.
And I was inspired by his optimistic attitude in the face of so much injustice.
If you want a summary, you're free to copy-paste and ask ChatGPT for one. ChatGPT can't expand a summary into a moving work of investigative journalism while maintaining authenticity.
At least 11 jurors, a little girls parents, the police force, the judge, the prosecutions office and the defendants own spouse all believed that he was guilty despite having a solod alibi of three unconnected perfect strangers saying he was elsewhere at the time.
It's scary to think how this could happen to anyone.