Another death row exoneration in North Carolina

You have way too much faith in the system as presently constituted. Way too much.

It has not earned that faith in any way, shape, or form.

 

I think nobody involved in the system should be elected. Too many prosecutors refuse to accept the truth because they fear dropping charges will be used against them in the next election.

 

You have absolutely no idea as to how much faith I have in the present system. Perhaps I am just as skeptical as you as regards its reliability in absolute terms. However, as regards our discussion, relative, not absolute, reliability is the issue. I have absolutely no idea how the U.S. system, to the degree that it can be characterized as such, stacks up against other systems reliability-wise. That these systems are simply "not like the U.S. system" doesn't tell me anything about whether they'd be superior, unless you can find me one with a false positive rate of 0%.

See, here's where (I think) you get off the rails. You're assessing an existing system that is in the hands of real, flesh-and-blood people responding to all sorts of incentives and confronted with all sorts of information limitations. All well and good. But you're comparing it to some theoretical ideal in which we don't have flesh-and-blood people in the same boat. It's almost like this cartoon:



To paraphrase this guy*, it seems to me that you're assuming a unicorn, a system "that has the properties, motivations, knowledge, and abilities that [you] can imagine for it" rather than the properties, motivations, knowledge and abilities that it, being fashioned and populated by humans, is likely to have.


http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/unicorn-governance

 

As an addendum: The current prosecutor in the community where this case occurred told the AP that it has made him re-examine his position on the death penalty.

http://www.wral.com/nc-prosecutor-weighs-reopening-infamous-1983-case/13970628/

 

Then I'd say Manson walks, because there's no way Judge Older does the investigating necessary to connect the dots to link Manson to the murders (complete with motive, no less!).